Would the Apostle Peter Have Flunked Hermeneutics 101?

In his Pentecost sermon Peter says that "the Holy Spirit spoke beforehand by the mouth of David concerning Judas," and then he quotes Psalm 65:25:


May his camp become desolate,

and let there be no one to dwell in it.


A reader wrote to the Gospel Coalition and essentially asked three questions:



Doesn't Psalm 69 sound anti-gospel, with its rhetoric of retaliation?
Doesn't Acts 1:20 rip Psalm 69:25 out of its context, since the psalm makes no mention of Judas Iscariot, and the writer does not appear to have him in view?
Does Peter have a bad hermeneutic? Is his reading of the Old Testament simply crazy?

D. A. Carson gives very helpful answers to these questions.


One snippet from his answer to the third question:


I have spent much of my adult life working through the way the New Testament quotes the Old, and the longer I ponder these texts, the more I begin to see how they "work," how rich and beautiful are the ways in which God ordained that his great plan of redemption would be prefigured in an extraordinarily rich, complex, and intertwined array of promises, types, trajectories, histories, institutions and persons, working together to point forward to Jesus and his gospel (see Luke 24:26-27, 45-48; John 5:46).

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Published on July 10, 2011 21:10
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