Acts 3:1

Acts 3:1

(with Acts 4:4)

St. Peter's Second Apology

If the latter portion of this speech of St. Peter's be examined, it will be found that its central point, on which is thrown the chief weight of exhortation, is precisely the same as in Luke's abridged version of the former speech. "Repent and be converted, that your sins may be blotted out," he says here. "Repent and be baptized for the remission of sins," he said then. As though God were beseeching his countrymen through his lips, Peter here prayed them in Christ's stead to be reconciled to God; and he used such motives as, in the mouth of a Jew speaking to Jews, were most fit and likely to persuade.

I. In the first place he suggested, as an extenuation of their guilt, that it had been contracted in ignorance. It may not have been quite true of all, but it certainly was true of the vast mass of the people, who wheeled so readily from applauding Jesus to execrating Him, that neither when they did the one nor the other had they real knowledge on solid grounds who He was. Such ignorance as this does not excuse a crime, but it palliates it. It makes it more pardonable.

II. Further to open his hearers' hearts to penitence, he reminded them, as he had done at Pentecost, how their very crime had been the fulfilment, all unknown to themselves, of those predicted sufferings which it had been God's will to inflict upon Messiah. Through their slaying of the Christ, God had ordained that the Christ should become their Saviour.

III. But the most singular motive by which Peter here pressed his countrymen to repent, is that, upon their doing so, had been made to hinge the return of Christ in glory, and that predicted era of blessedness which is to enter when His personal presence is restored to the earth. The object of our Lord's retirement into the heavens he took to be the conversion of Israel to faith in Himself. So long as He was here they had denied Him; now, in His absence, they were to return and call with tears upon Him whom they had pierced. The faster Israel turned to Jesus, the sooner would Jesus return to Israel; for as Peter wrote a great many years later, "The Lord is not slack concerning his promise" to return, He is only "longsuffering, not willing that any should perish." With urgency, therefore, did the preacher that day press upon his brethren, as Israelites, to turn every one from his iniquities, so that there might come the sooner those times of national reviving and restoration, which had so often been predicted to their fathers.

J. Oswald Dykes, From Jerusalem to Antioch,p. 123.