Acts 3:4

4. Peter The junior apostle is reverently silent, (John, indeed, never speaks in the book of Acts,) while his senior alone speaks and performs. How graceful is reverence for honored age even in most honored youth!

Fastening his eyes As if conscious of being prompted, perhaps even impelled, by the Spirit, with a power to perform a miracle upon this perfectly hopeless lame-born.

Look on us Requiring, at least, a slight conditional response from the lame-born. And this whole solemn process served to mark and demonstrate the proceeding of cause and effect, showing that there was no mere accident, but the intended result of an intentional putting forth of power. (See note on Mark 8:22.) This gaze may, however, be but the glance of the spirit of discerning whether or not the man had faith to be healed. Every scientific physician knows that faith predisposes the patient’s system toward health. “It is,” says the celebrated physiologist, Dr. Carpenter, “to a state of fixed expectation with implicit confidence that we may fairly attribute most, if not all, the cures which have been worked through what has been popularly termed the ‘imagination.’ A couple of bread pills will produce copious purgation, and a dose of red poppy syrup will serve as a powerful narcotic, if the patient have entertained a sufficiently confident expectation of such a result.” This fact, no doubt, accounts completely for a large amount of the miracles of healing in the later Christian Church, especially in nervous cases. The preternatural is the avenue through which the supernatural may reach us. And we may even say that our Lord and his apostles often used the preternatural receptivity of the patient, arising from faith, to pour in upon the patient the supernatural force that worked the miracle. And thus was shadowed the healing of the soul through a similar, yet higher, willing, and expecting spiritual faith.

Paul, at Lystra, selected the cripple for a miracle, “beholding him and perceiving he had faith to be healed,” and, reciprocally, that he himself possessed the miraculous power. So with the elders of the Church, “the prayer of faith,” faith both of the elders and the patient, “shall save the sick.” This gift was a preternaturalism, but hardly, perhaps, a miracle. (See note on Acts 8:24.) That power, we doubt not, still exists in the Church, were it faithfully exerted. The profoundly pious physician often possesses, perhaps, a means of health-giving of which he is unaware. Yet nothing less than true, full miracle could be supposed to restore sight to the blind-born, as did Jesus, or walking to the lame-born, as Peter here, or the cripple-born as Paul at Lystra. It is for this reason that the congenital character of the ailment is carefully stated.