17:30a–b
Although God overlooked the ignorance of earlier times, He now commands all people everywhere to repent: The Greek words are literally “so then, having overlooked the times of ignorance, God now commands all men/people everywhere to repent.” When God sent Jesus he decided to overlook the past times of people’s ignorance and now calls on everyone to repent. For example:
Therefore having overlooked the times of ignorance, God is now declaring to men that all people everywhere should repent (New American Standard Bible)
-or-
Therefore, although God has overlooked such times of ignorance, he now commands all people everywhere to repent (NET Bible)
17:30a
God overlooked the ignorance of earlier times: The clause here indicates that God saw the wrong things that people did and believed. He decided not to punish them. Other ways to translate this clause are:
people did not understand God, and he ignored this (New Century Version)
-or-
God tolerated the bad things that people were doing because they did not know him
the ignorance of earlier times: This phrase in Greek is literally “times of ignorance.” This phrase refers to most of the past history of mankind not knowing anything about God. Instead they made up their own gods and made statues of them. These statues looked like people. They also thought that the gods acted like people. Other ways to translate this phrase are:
long periods of time of them/their not knowing who he is
-or-
the centuries of people not knowing him
17:30b
repent: This word means for a person “to change his mind, heart, or will.” In the Bible, it refers specifically to a person changing his mind and heart about sin and about God. When a person repents, he is sorry for his past sins. He decides to stop sinning and obey God.
Some ways to translate repent here are:
change their thinking/mind/heart
-or-
reject their sins
In some languages, you may have an idiom for this type of change. For example:
turn from sin to God
-or-
leave your sinning behind
See how you translated this word in 2:38 or 8:22.
© 2001, 2021 by SIL International®
Made available under the terms of a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License (CC BY-SA) creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0.
All Scripture quotations in this publication, unless otherwise indicated, are from The Holy Bible, Berean Standard Bible.
BSB is produced in cooperation with Bible Hub, Discovery Bible, OpenBible.com, and the Berean Bible Translation Committee.