ESOCS Devotional 22 June 2025 – God Can Use Even People’s Ignorance
MEMORY VERSE: [Peter continued,] “Friends, I realize that what you and your leaders did to Jesus was done in ignorance. But God was fulfilling what all the prophets had foretold about the Messiah — that he must suffer these things. Now repent of your sins and turn to God, so that your sins may be wiped away.” Acts 3:17 NLT
TEXT: ACTS 3:17-26
“Yet now, brethren, I know that you did it in ignorance, as did also your rulers. 18 But those things which God foretold by the mouth of all His prophets, that the Christ would suffer, He has thus fulfilled. 19 Repent therefore and be converted, that your sins may be blotted out, so that times of refreshing may come from the presence of the Lord, 20 and that He may send Jesus Christ, who was preached to you before, 21 whom heaven must receive until the times of restoration of all things, which God has spoken by the mouth of all His holy prophets since the world began. 22 For Moses truly said to the fathers, ‘The Lord your God will raise up for you a Prophet like me from your brethren. Him you shall hear in all things, whatever He says to you. 23 And it shall be that every soul who will not hear that Prophet shall be utterly destroyed from among the people.’ 24 Yes, and all the prophets, from Samuel and those who follow, as many as have spoken, have also foretold these days. 25 You are sons of the prophets, and of the covenant which God made with our fathers, saying to Abraham, ‘And in your seed all the families of the earth shall be blessed.’ 26 To you first, God, having raised up His Servant Jesus, sent Him to bless you, in turning away every one of you from your iniquities.”
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Jesus had prepared the way for Peter’s words of grace in these verses when He asked the Father to forgive His murderers: “Father, forgive them, for they don’t know what they are doing” (Lk 23:34). Their jealousy and hatred, based on their failure to recognize who Jesus really was when He was among them, had stirred them to crucify Him. Despite acting in ignorance, God used the actions of the hostile crowd to fulfill what the prophets had foretold about the Messiah suffering and giving His life as a sin offering (Isaiah 52:13-53:12; Hebrews 9:28; 10:12).
While those who crucified Jesus were culpable for their actions, Jesus and His early followers recognized that they had acted in ignorance. Rather than hating them, the early disciples wanted them to come to Jesus and be forgiven. In the early Jewish disciples’ minds, Jesus’ opponents were, in fact, still their “friends” (literally, “brethren”). Like his Lord, Peter wanted those who murdered the Christ to be forgiven, not killed. Peter’s hope, and the heart of his message, was for the people responsible for Jesus’ death to turn their hearts away from their evil deeds and choose to follow Jesus as their Saviour, Lord, and Messiah, so their sins could be “wiped away.”
Think about the implications of this forgiveness for you and me. If God forgave those who crucified His Son and then turned their hearts to Jesus, how much more will he also forgive, cleanse, and bless us! What an open invitation to start a new day afresh. He has forgiven all you did wrong even that of yesterday. His intention for you today is that you start afresh with a clean slate. If a man be in Christ, he is a new creature.
Today is a new day to begin again; don’t waste this opportunity with frivolities, make it count. Truly, the times of ignorance God overlooked, but now commands all men everywhere to repent.
CHALLENGES
- Renew your mind every day, so that you may relate well with your God.
PRAYER POINT
- Lord Jesus, abolish my days of ignorance and help me to remain at the finished work of the cross, in Jesus mighty name. Amen.
FURTHER READING: Ezekiel 17:13-End
ESOCS Devotional 22 June 2025
