Now the historical/grammatical approach to Scripture rightly requires us to seek to understand words as the first readers or listeners understood them. And how would Peter’s listeners have heard him? Given his choice of words, what did Peter want them to think? Unlike many modern believers, they knew their Old Testaments. If anyone at that time had seriously maintained this meant the children of believers were now to be excluded unless they came into the covenant on their own as a separate individual, this would have been, in the first century, an incomprehensible doctrine.
