Acts 17:30. “God commandeth all men everywhere to repent.” Often cited to prove that Spiritual Repentance is a natural duty. This assumption is founded in error. Most of St. Paul’s hearers were heathen philosophers, who had no just conception of the true God, the knowledge of whom had been hitherto restricted to the divinely chosen nation, and the few isolated Gentiles, like Ruth and others who came into contact with them. The days of their ignorance God had not sanctioned, but “winked at,” that is, overlooked, or suffered to pass without protest. But that state of things had come to an end, and He now commanded all men everywhere to repent. The time had arrived for God’s servants, in His name, to denounce and forbid the false and degrading religions of the Grecian and Roman nations, with which in the former dispensation the Jews were never authorized to interfere. The Repentance here meant is, therefore, the abandonment of idolatry.
