Acts 3:2 → Judges 16:17

Luke introduces the sign at the temple gate with a detail that measures the miracle’s magnitude: the beggar had been “lame from his mother’s womb” (Acts 3:2), carried daily to beg at the gate called Beautiful. The phrase “from the womb” recurs across Scripture to mark a lifelong, God-appointed condition — Samson set apart “from the womb” (Judges 16:17), the Servant called “from the womb” (Isaiah 49:1). Here it underscores that no human remedy had ever touched this man’s forty-year helplessness (cf. 4:22). His healing “in the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth” (3:6) is therefore a sign of the messianic age, when the lame leap like a deer (Isaiah 35:6). The man born unable to enter the temple courts freely now enters them “walking and leaping and praising God” (3:8) — a living parable of what the risen Christ does for those helpless from birth in sin: He gives what no one else can, access to God and a heart that leaps in praise.