Acts 2:31

Acts 2:31, in plain English

Understanding that promise, David was describing the resurrection of the Messiah in that psalm—someone who wouldn't stay dead or decay because God would vindicate Him.

Why it's here

Peter is connecting the dots for his listeners. He's saying David wasn't just writing about himself or some distant future—he was prophetically describing what would happen to the Messiah, and that Messiah is Jesus, whom they just killed.

Who's speaking

Peter

Where it sits in the story

The genius of Peter's argument is that he's showing the Old Testament wasn't confused or wrong—it was pointing forward. David understood that his promise would be fulfilled through someone greater than himself.

The scholarly reading

Peter explicitly identifies Jesus as the subject David was prophesying about: the one whom God would not abandon to Hades and whose body would not decay—in other words, the resurrected Christ.

Language and setting

This verse contains the exegetical pivot—Peter's hermeneutical move from implicit to explicit identification. The phrase 'foreseeing this' (προϊδών)—'having seen beforehand'—employs the prophetic perfect tense common in Scripture: David, though temporally prior, participated in eschatological vision. Peter's interpretation assumes that prophetic consciousness transcends chronological sequence; the prophet speaks from within God's temporal vantage point. The assertion that Christ 'was not abandoned to Hades, nor did His body see decay' (οὐκ ἐγκατελείφθη εἰς ἅδην, οὐδὲ ἡ σὰρξ αὐτοῦ ἴδεν διαφθοράν) reverses what happened to every other human corpse: the normal trajectory of decomposition was interrupted. This is not metaphorical but forensically extraordinary—the body remained incorruptible. The medieval theologian Thomas Aquinas would later emphasize that the resurrection body, though transformed, maintained its material reality.

Voice

Peter, addressing the Pentecost crowd

Significance

This is the interpretive conclusion toward which the entire psalm exposition has aimed. Old Testament prophecy, properly understood through christological hermeneutics, announces in advance the resurrection of Christ. The Old Testament becomes not merely historical record but eschatological testimony.

29Brothers, I can tell you with confidence that the patriarch David died and was buried, and his tomb is with us to this day.

30But he was a prophet and knew that God had promised him on oath that He would place one of his descendants on his throne.

31Foreseeing this, David spoke about the resurrection of the Christ, that He was not abandoned to Hades, nor did His body see decay.

32God has raised this Jesus to life, to which we are all witnesses.

33Exalted, then, to the right hand of God, He has received from the Father the promised Holy Spirit and has poured out what you now see and hear.

Read all of Acts 2 — The Spirit arrives like wind and fire. The church is born in a single day. A movement that will never stop starts in one room.