St. Peter's Warning of Impending Doom to 1st-century Israel

St. Peter's Warning of Impending Doom to 1st-century Israel

Below is the 19th of multiple excerpts from The Parousia, the late 19th-century masterpiece on the Second Coming by James Stuart Russell. "THE COMING DOOM OF THAT GENERATION. Acts ii. 40 [Acts 2:40]---'And with many other words did he [St. Peter] testify and exhort them, saying, Save yourselves from this untoward [perverse] generation.' "This verse fixes the reference of the apostle's address [delivered in A.D. 30]. It was the existing generation [of 1st-century Israel] whose coming doom he foresaw, and it was from participation in its fate [which occurred in A.D. 70, when Jerusalem and the Temple were destroyed by the Romans] that he urged his hearers to escape. It was but the echo of [John] the Baptist's cry, 'Flee from the coming wrath' [Matt. 3:7, Luke 3:7]. Here, again, there can be no question about the meaning of genea [Greek for 'generation'],--it is that 'wicked generation' which was filling up the measure of its predecessor [Matt. 23:32, 1 Thess. 2:16]; the perverse and incorrigible nation over which judgment was impending [Matt. 23:36, 24:34; Mark 13:30; Luke 21:32]. "Before leaving this address of St. Peter we may point out another example of a universal proposition which must be taken in a restricted sense. 'I will pour out of my Spirit upon all flesh' [Acts 2:17, Joel 2:28]. The effusion of the Holy Spirit on the day of Pentecost was not literally universal, but it was indiscriminate and general in comparison of former times. The necessarily qualified use of so large a phrase shows how a similar limitation may be justifiable in such expressions as 'all the nations,' [Matt. 25:32, Matt. 28:19; see previous Parousia blog posts on the separation of the sheep and the goats and the apostles' original understanding of the Great Commission] 'every creature,' [Colossians 1:23], and 'the whole world' [Col. 1:6].

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