THE apostle refers to "the times of ignorance” before the gospel came, not only to believers personally, but is also in all the world bearing fruit and growing. It was an immense change for Gentiles as such, predicted by Simeon as he held the infant Saviour in his arms and said, "Mine eyes have seen thy salvation which thou preparedst before the face of all the peoples, a light for revelation of Gentiles [or nations], and glory of thy people Israel." Israel's glory is postponed because of their unbelief, but Christ meanwhile is a light for unveiling Gentiles till Israel's heart turns to the Lord when he shall be saved.
Thus for a season the old condition is reversed. The chosen people who had the only religious privileges enjoyed on earth lost them for their rejection of their own Messiah; and “Be it known therefore to you, that this salvation of God is sent to the Gentiles; they also will hear." Accordingly too, he wrote to the saints in Rome (the then Gentile metropolis), "By their fall [there is] salvation to the Gentiles to provoke them to jealousy. But if their fall [be the] world's wealth, and their loss Gentiles' wealth, how much more their fullness?" And so the fullness of Israel will prove under the Messiah and the new covenant. Truly it will be the glory of His people Israel when their brightest hopes are more than realized, and the earth shall yield her increase, and all the ends of the earth shall fear Him, yea, the whole earth shall be filled with His glory.
Here the apostle confines himself to the fact that God, instead of executing judgment on the times of deplorable, inexcusable, ignorance, in His goodness overlooked the past, and now calls to repentance. It was no longer the Baptist preaching in the wilderness of Judea; it was no longer the Twelve sent only to the lost sheep of Israel's house, and expressly not into a way of Gentiles nor into a city of Samaritans. Now that the rejected Christ died as propitiation and was raised up, He Himself marks the change now come: " Go therefore, make disciples of all the Gentiles;" "Go into all the world and preach the gospel to all the creation; " "Thus it is written and thus it behooved Christ to suffer, and rise again from the dead the third day; and that repentance and remission of sins should be preached in his name unto all the Gentiles, beginning with Jerusalem," the guiltiest of all on earth!
How true it is that the message of God's love in salvation to every one that believes is His own command! The apostle (himself called as apostle of Gentiles by the Lord from heaven) was then acting as His ambassador, when he proclaimed to the Athenians that "God now enjoineth men that all everywhere repent." The Gentiles who ignored the true God, and set up idols to His dishonor and their own shame, are no more ignored of God. "The true light already shineth." Coming into the world it lightens every man. It is true that the world was so blind as not to know Him. But the God of all grace does not leave them to their folly; He sends this charge to them, that they should "all everywhere repent." What compassion for and concern in "all everywhere"!
No sinner, no child of fallen man had ever turned to God in faith as all did from Abel downward without repentance. It is faith that produces it if real and Godward, though it may not be yet for many souls faith in the glad tidings. But faith in God's word invariably causes it; and its character is self-judgment before Him. Not only one's ways, but one's self, is laid naked as seen by His holy eyes with whom we have to do.
Without doubt, there is a changed and new mind about God, which is rather the effect of faith; but this in itself is never repentance. For repentance is by grace the soul's eye turned on itself and seeing only and continually its guilt, its evil. Faith which produces repentance is in no way repentance; it looks away from self to Christ for the remission of the sins which repentance condemns, and condemns one's self for without an excuse before God.
Feeble faith, like the absence of it, shrinks from this moral weighing and estimate of ourselves as God sees us; it is in a hurry to get pardon at once, content with that, or with zeal turning preacher, and thus slurring over so essential a Work in us, because of joy in Christ's work for us. But this negligent haste is as unscriptural as it is a wrong to God and a dangerous lack for our souls.
The apostle, then, having already preached Jesus and the resurrection in the market-place, speaks on the Areopagus of their life of idolatrous rebellion against the One True God, and presses on their conscience God's present injunction to men, that they all everywhere should repent. He waits on all, and graciously welcomes in Christ's name all who repent and believe the gospel.
O my reader, have you repented? Do you repent now of your thoughtless, guilty, selfish life?
You need to repent as truly as the Athenians. The door is open; and Jesus is the door to God and all His grace. The true sense of your badness is morally in you the beginning of goodness. May it be the goodness of God "leading thee to repentance." Repent and believe the gospel.