PAUL in his interview with the elders of the church of Miletus, Acts 20:17–38, told them that he had kept back nothing that was profitable, “testifying both to the Jews and also to the Greeks, repentance toward God, and faith toward our Lord Jesus Christ.” Verse 21.
These here termed Greeks were Gentiles. There can be no doubt about that; and Paul, whose mission was especially to the Gentiles, went about urging upon them, with all the energy of one commissioned of Heaven to do the work, repentance toward God.
Repentance signifies sorrow for sin as morally wrong. It is the renouncing of the love and practice of sin. “Repent, . . . that your sins may be blotted out,” is the order laid down and the direction given by an inspired apostle. Acts 3:19.
As repentance is thus seen to be the putting away of sin, the New-Testament definition of sin naturally deserves a place right here. John testifies that sin is the transgression of the law, 1 John 3:4; and Paul tells us that by the law is the knowledge of sin, and that sin is not imputed when there is no law. Rom. 3:20; 5:13. So that we know not what sin is, nor when it is, nor where it is, and indeed there is no such thing as sin, unless there is law to reveal, define, and condemn it.
We thus have the matter quite definitely before us. Paul charged the Gentiles, as the very first step toward securing the favor of God, to repent. Repentance is putting away sin. Sin is law transgressed; and to put away sin is to cease from such transgression. Of what law were the Gentiles at this time living in violation?
Paul was at this time on his last journey to Jerusalem. The chronology of this visit is set down as A. D. 59. It was only twenty-five years before this that Paul was converted to the Christian religion. In the first chapter of Galatians he tells us the course he pursued after his conversion. He did not go immediately up to Jerusalem, and labor among the Jews, his countrymen; but with the gospel he had just received from God, he went immediately into Arabia. Returning to Damascus, he spent three years more in those parts, and then went to Jerusalem, and enjoyed the society of Peter and James for fifteen days. Thence, without even visiting the churches in Judea, he went into the regions of Syria and Cilicia, the Christians of Judea knowing only this about him, that he now preached the faith which he once destroyed. Fourteen years after, he went up again to Jerusalem, and he went up by revelation, and communicated unto them, he says, that gospel which he preached among the Gentiles. This brings us down to within at least eight years of the time when he testified to the elders of the church of Miletus that his business had been to preach to the Gentiles repentance toward God, and faith toward our Lord Jesus Christ. But we find not an intimation in all this, that he went forth to promulgate a new system of morality from that which had been binding on the world up to that time. If, as some hold, the previously-existing law had been abolished, and a new one was promulgated with the introduction of the new dispensation, the first work would have been to acquaint the world with that fact. They must first have a knowledge of their obligations, before they could be charged with blame for violating them, and held to repentance for such violation. But Paul’s course was first of all to preach repentance: showing that the law they had violated was one of long-standing obligation and well-understood principles. When Paul said, Repent, they knew what he meant, and on what authority he pronounced them guilty.
Again, he testified to Jew and Greek alike. But when he spoke to a Jew about repentance, what would the Jew understand by it? All well know that his mind would go at once to that great moral code, the ten commandments, which God had deposited with them as a nation for safe keeping and for transmission, when the fullness of the time should come, to the followers of Christ. Acts 7:38. But Paul made no difference between Jew and Greek. He testified to both alike, showing that both were under the same moral obligations, amenable to God in exactly the same particulars.
How men can suppose that God has different requirements, in a moral point of view, for men in different quarters of the globe, or in different ages of the world, is past our comprehension. How they can suppose that he will judge one class by one rule and another by another, when he had one rule of righteousness for Noah and all the antediluvians, when the inhabitants of Canaan were cast out for violating the same principles the Israelites were required to keep, and when Paul, this side the cross, testified repentance to Jews and Greeks alike, is an anomaly not easily explained.