Expositor's Bible Commentary Commentary Acts 2:23

"him, being delivered up by the determinate counsel and foreknowledge of God, ye by the hand of lawless men did crucify and slay:" — Acts 2:23 (ASV)

The death of Jesus is presented as resulting from the interplay of divine necessity and human freedom. Nowhere in the NT is the paradox of a Christian understanding of history put more sharply than in this earliest proclamation of the death of Jesus the Messiah: God’s purpose and foreknowledge stand as the necessary factors behind whatever happens; yet whatever happens occurs through the instrumentality of wicked people expressing their own human freedom. It is a paradox without ready solution. To deny it, however, is to go counter to the plain teaching of Scripture in both the OT and NT and to ignore the testimony of personal experience. “With the help of wicked men” points to the Roman authorities in Palestine, who carried out what had been instigated by the Jewish authorities.