Later text
Acts 14:17BSB
Yet He has not left Himself without testimony to His goodness: He gives you rain from heaven and fruitful seasons, filling your hearts with food and gladness.”
Intertextuality Pair
Allusion
Later text
Acts 14:17BSB
Yet He has not left Himself without testimony to His goodness: He gives you rain from heaven and fruitful seasons, filling your hearts with food and gladness.”
Earlier text
Genesis 8:22BSB
As long as the earth endures, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night shall never cease."
Earlier text
I will give you rains in their season, and the land will yield its produce, and the trees of the field will bear their fruit.
Earlier text
They have not said in their hearts, ‘Let us fear the LORD our God, who gives the rains, both autumn and spring, in season, who keeps for us the appointed weeks of harvest.’
Earlier text
The eyes of all look to You, and You give them their food in season. You open Your hand and satisfy the desire of every living thing.
Paul grounds his appeal to the Lystrans in God's providential goodness: he "has not left Himself without testimony," giving "rain from heaven and fruitful seasons, filling your hearts with food and gladness" (Acts 14:17). This common-grace witness rests on the creation-order promise God swore after the Flood: "As long as the earth endures, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night shall never cease" (Genesis 8:22). The regularity of the seasons is not impersonal nature but the sustained fidelity of the Creator, a standing testimony to his kindness that leaves the nations without excuse (Romans 1:20). Yet this witness is only a beginning, for the goodness that feeds the body is meant to lead to repentance (Romans 2:4) — that the harvest-giving Creator might at last be known and savored as the Father of Jesus Christ, in whom his goodness is fully unveiled.