Yes, there is. You create an acf/save_post action http://www.advancedcustomfields.com/resources/acfsave_post/
In your function you get the value of the field which is stored as an ID. You can either do it with ACF using $image = get_field('image_field', $post_id, false); which will return the ID value or you can use $image = get_post_meta($post_id, '', true);
then you do
$image = intval($image); // make sure it's an int
set_post_thumbnail($post_id, $image);
But this won’t be retroactive, you’d need to update every post.
