Acts 17:30
Acts 17:3030Although God overlooked the ignorance of earlier times, He now commands all people everywhere to repent.
JWs use — "God has overlooked the times of such ignorance, but now he is declaring to all people everywhere that they should repent" — to support the urgency of the preaching work. The Watchtower frames repentance as including obedience to the organisation: acquiring accurate knowledge, getting baptised, and associating with Jehovah's earthly channel. Without these steps, repentance is incomplete and salvation remains conditional.
Paul's call to repentance at Athens is universal ("all people everywhere") and points to Christ's resurrection as the ground of judgment (v. 31). In the NT, "obey the gospel" and "believe the gospel" describe the same act — the trusting surrender of faith. says Christ "became responsible for everlasting salvation to all those obeying him." The "obedience" here is Paul's own vocabulary of "obedience of faith" (, 16:26) — the act of surrendering to the gospel, not a lifetime of institutional compliance. Second Timothy 3:5 tells Timothy to "turn away from these" in the present tense — the instruction only makes sense if the people described already existed. calls for repentance toward God and faith in the risen Christ — the apostolic pattern of — not enrolment in an organisation.