Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to Acts · About this commentary
You acted in ignorance: times of refreshing
Acts 3:17-26
17 “Now, brothers, I know that you did this in ignorance, as did also your rulers. · WEB
The crime is real and the ignorance is real, and the offer that follows runs from present forgiveness to a restoration of all things still to come.
Now, brothers, I know that you did this in ignorance, as did also your rulers. The sentence does not withdraw the charge. It classifies it. In the law, sins committed in ignorance had a remedy and sins committed with a high hand did not Numbers 15:27–31, and Peter's opening concession puts the crucifixion, for these hearers, on the side where a remedy exists.
He then places the whole event inside something larger. What God announced by the mouth of all the prophets — that the Christ should suffer — he has fulfilled. This is the second time in two sermons that human guilt and divine purpose are stated in the same breath without either being dissolved into the other. The suffering was foretold; the men who inflicted it are still told to repent.
The call itself is doubled: repent, and turn again. The first word is about the mind and the second about direction, and the outcome promised is that their sins may be blotted out — an image of a written record erased rather than a debt deferred.
What follows the blotting out is the part most easily hurried past. Two future things are named and they are not the same. Times of refreshing come from the presence of the Lord, and then he sends the Christ who was ordained for them — whom heaven must receive until the times of restoration of all things. The plain sense is a real absence with a real terminus. Christ is in heaven now, heaven holds him for a stated period, and the period ends when everything the prophets spoke about is restored. The second coming is not a metaphor for an inward change in this sentence; it is the event the sentence is waiting for.
Moses is then brought in as the first witness. A prophet like Moses will be raised up from among their brothers, and every soul that will not listen to that prophet will be utterly destroyed from among the people. The warning is as strong as anything in the chapter, and its form is worth noting: the penalty named is destruction from among the people, not a permanent alternative existence. Where Scripture states the wages of refusing God, it repeatedly states them as death and perishing Romans 6:23 John 3:16, and Peter quotes the warning here in exactly those terms.
The sermon closes by reminding them who they are. They are children of the prophets and of the covenant, heirs of the promise that through Abraham's offspring all the families of the earth will be blessed. And God sent his servant to you first — a word that concedes priority and, in conceding it, discloses that there is a second. The blessing promised to Abraham was never for one family alone, and the man preaching has not yet grasped how far his own sentence reaches. It will take a rooftop vision and a Roman centurion to teach him.
held with reason What this mark means