“But the Jews stirred up the devout and honourable women, and the chief men of the city, and raised persecution against Paul and Barnabas, and expelled them out of their coasts.”
King James Version (KJV)
13:48 As many as were ordained to eternal life - St. Luke does not say fore - ordained. He is not speaking of what was done from eternity, but of what was then done, through the preaching of the Gospel. He is describing that ordination, and that only, which was at the very time of hearing it. During this sermon those believed, says the apostle, to whom God then gave power to believe. It is as if he had said, They believed, whose hearts the Lord opened; as he expresses it in a clearly parallel place, speaking of the same kind of ordination, #Acts 16:14|, &c. It is observable, the original word is not once used in Scripture to express eternal predestination of any kind. The sum is, all those and those only, who were now ordained, now believed. Not that God rejected the rest: it was his will that they also should have been saved: but they thrust salvation from them. Nor were they who then believed constrained to believe. But grace was then first copiously offered them. And they did not thrust it away, so that a great multitude even of Gentiles were converted. In a word, the expression properly implies, a present operation of Divine grace working faith in the hearers.
Ac 13:50 The Jews stirred up the devout and honourable women. Gentile women of high rank ("devout women of honourable estate", Revised Version), who had learned to revere the One God (see PNT "Ac 10:2"). Strabo, a Roman writer, declares that the women in this part of Asia exerted a powerful influence. And the chief men. Probably the husbands of these women. Raised persecution. There was probably no appeal to the magistrates, who were Romans (Antioch of Pisidia was a Roman colony), but they excited tumultuous opposition. The missionaries retired for the time, because their work was interrupted. They were not exiled, for they returned afterward (Ac 14:21).