How to read this page

An Intertextuality Pair — one connection between two passages, shown as linked verse cards: the Later text and the Earlier text it quotes, alludes to or echoes. The Significance essay explains why the link matters and where it points in Christ.

Reference Type— how explicit the link is: Quotation, Allusion, or Echo
Connection Method(s)— how it carries meaning: e.g. Typology, Promise-Fulfillment, Analogy, Longitudinal Theme
Found via— where the connection was identified, e.g. the Treasury of Scripture Knowledge or an Anchor-Text Network

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Intertextuality Pair

Acts 11:21 → Exodus 9:3

Echo

Later text

Acts 11:21BSB

The hand of the Lord was with them, and a great number of people believed and turned to the Lord.

Earlier text

Exodus 9:3BSB

then the hand of the LORD will bring a severe plague on your livestock in the field—on your horses, donkeys, camels, herds, and flocks.

+ 2 more earlier texts

Earlier text

1 Samuel 3:12BSB

On that day I will carry out against Eli everything I have spoken about his family, from beginning to end.

Earlier text

1 Chronicles 4:10BSB

And Jabez called out to the God of Israel, “If only You would bless me and enlarge my territory! May Your hand be with me and keep me from harm, so that I will be free from pain.” And God granted the request of Jabez.

Walk the Square · a single-voice walk of this pair around the Clowney square13:41

Significance

"The hand of the Lord was with them, and a great number of people believed and turned to the Lord" (Acts 11:21). The idiom "the hand of the LORD" runs throughout the Old Testament as a figure of God's active power — a power that fell in judgment on Egypt, where "the hand of the LORD" would bring a severe plague on Pharaoh's livestock (Exodus 9:3), yet also worked salvation and blessing (cf. 1 Chronicles 4:10). Here the same hand is bent wholly to grace: it is the divine power at work in the preaching at Antioch that turns Gentiles to the Lord in great numbers. The connection is analogical — the ancient language of God's mighty hand applied to the advance of the gospel — and it locates the church's growth not in human strategy but in the sovereign power of God, the same hand once stretched out in Egypt now stretched out to save the nations in Christ.

Found via: G.K. Beale and D.A. Carson, Commentary on the New Testament Use of the Old Testament
Reference Type: Echo
Connection Method(s): Analogy