Escolar Documentos
Profissional Documentos
Cultura Documentos
REPENTANCE
A TREATISE
Between the late autumn of 2006 to the summer of 2010, I found myself
engrossed in the study of faith and repentance (or, more biblically, repentance
and faith, in that order). I never intended to write anything of length on the
subject, but this treatise has coming into being because (a) few Christians know
the importance of repentance, and (b) misinformation on the subject abounds.
Though I am not a biblical scholar, nonetheless I feel compelled to share what
I’ve learned because I find, again and again, that there are many who profess
Christ but who have not repented. They are Christians in name only, not in deed,
self-deceived and self-deluded, and this troubles me deeply. Within evangelical
Christianity, the necessity for repentance has come under attack, and in my
studies I’ve found all too often Christians vehemently denying the necessity of
repentance to the point of condemning those who even mention it to their
congregations. Those who do preach repentance often preach an anemic
repentance. There are some who will claim that since faith is enough, repentance
is optional, something reserved for the super-Christian. Repentance has often
been seen as faith’s little brother, but throughout the Bible (in both the Old and
New Testaments) repentance comes before faith. As my Old Testament
professor liked to say, “Repentance is the first half of faith.”
works is outdated. Much should be said to this logic, not least that (a) the Old
Testament’s conviction regarding the nature of repentance not only influences
but informs the New Testament’s understanding of repentance, and (b) the Old
Covenant was not a covenant of works but a covenant of grace; Martin Luther
painted ancient Judaism as a religion of works to equate it with the Roman
Catholic Church, and his straw-man caricature of Judaism has continued in large
segments of Christendom to this very day.
This section of the treatise will look at some of the major texts on repentance
in the Gospels, the Book of Acts, the writings of St. Paul, the later New
Testament, and the Apostolic Fathers.
The gospels are the narrative stories that speak of Jesus’ coming, his career, and
finally his death and resurrection. Within the gospels there are 24 explicit
references to repentance. Interestingly, the Gospel of St. John doesn’t explicitly
mention repentance even once1. What we find in those 24 explicit references
throughout the synoptic gospels makes it clear that repentance is one of the
hallmarks (if not the cornerstone!) of the proclamation that the kingdom of God
is here and at hand.
The New Testament opens with John the Baptist proclaiming the coming of
the Messiah with a call to repentance: “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at
hand”.2 The “kingdom of God” (or “kingdom of heaven”) refers to the rule of
God on earth, which the Jewish people anticipated would break into their world
and usher in a new era of righteousness, justice, and peace. John preached the
coming of God’s kingdom and baptized people “for repentance.” The religious
leaders of the day came to see what he was doing along the banks of the Jordan
1 Because the Gospel of John doesn’t explicitly reference repentance with any of the contemporary Greek
words, this has led some Christians to vault it above the other gospels in their attacks against repentance.
They will often say, “Because repentance is absent in John’s gospel, repentance doesn’t deserve such an
esteemed place in Christian theology!” While we’re at it, let’s also eliminate grace from its esteemed place
in our theology, since the Greek constructs for grace never appear in Jesus’ speech in any of the gospel
traditions. We shouldn’t assume that because something isn’t explicitly mentioned, its substance is not
there at all. Certainly we would not deny the activity of grace in Jesus’ speech and actions; so why should
we deny the importance of repentance? Although the Greek words for repentance do not appear in the
Gospel of John, the nature of faith seen in his gospel (as a commitment to Jesus, and thus to God), as well
as the calling for people to turn to faith, are in league with the orthodox Christian understanding of
repentance.
2 Matthew 3.1
River, and he called them out for their flowery pretense of religion absent any
real repentance, declaring, “Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come?”3
The Baptist was convinced that Messiah’s coming would also be a coming of
wrath, specifically judgment upon wicked pagans and upon disobedient Jews.
The Baptist places the religious leaders of his day into the latter category (many
devout Jews believed disobedient Israelites were worse sinners than the most
heinous pagans). The Baptist called them out for wearing robes adorned with
religious lace while living disobedient lives. He commanded them to “bear fruit
in keeping with repentance.”4 He added, “Every tree that does not produce good
fruit [i.e. does not show the fruit of repentance] will be cut down and thrown into
the fire.”5 John the Baptist understood that failure to repent would result in
destruction (“fire” was a common motif referring to the experience of being
subjected to judgment). Based on this simple text in the Gospel of Matthew, we
can deduce at least three things regarding repentance:
3 Matthew 3.7
4 Matthew 3.8
5 Matthew 3.10
making false accusations for profit, and not practicing extortion; Luke
3.10-14), and these serve as signposts to what the fruit of repentance looks
like.
John the Baptist preached that the kingdom of God was coming to birth in
the world. The appropriate response, for both pagans and Israelites, was to
repent. The time was coming when every valley would be filled in, every
mountain and hill made low; the time was near when the crooked roads would be
made straight and the rough ways smooth; in short, the time was at hand when
all mankind would see God’s salvation. The logical response to such a
declaration wasn’t just feeling good, or praying more, or writing a new song; it
was repentance and all that repentance entails. When Jesus began his public
career, his main message was, like John’s, the coming (and, in a strange sense,
the arrival) of God’s kingdom, and he made it very clear that people were being
called to submit to God and repent.
From the onset of his public career, Jesus stole John the Baptist’s refrain:
“Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is near!”6 Jesus understood himself to be the
Messiah, the Son of God promised to David in 2 Samuel 7 and the Son of Man
spoken of in Daniel 7, the one who would bring the reign of God to bear fully and
finally on the world. The appropriate human response to the in-breaking of
God’s kingdom was repentance. That repentance wasn’t a side-note to, but
rather a characteristic of, Jesus’ ministry is seen throughout the gospels. In Mark
6 Jesus sends out his disciples two-by-two to go village to village proclaiming the
nearness and arrival of God’s kingdom; the underlying theme of their preaching
(if not the defining theme) was repentance. In one of Jesus’ discourses with
sinners and the religious elite, he says he came not to cater to the self-righteous
but to call sinners to repentance.7 In the parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus in
Luke 16, Jesus says that the Rich Man in hell begged Father Abraham to send
6 Matthew 4.11
7 Luke 5.32
Lazarus to his wicked family for the purpose of calling them to repentance, in
order that they could escape the sufferings of hell. In one of the twists on the
Great Commission of Matthew 28, we find Jesus linking repentance with
forgiveness of sins in the advancement of the gospel throughout the nations. 8
It’s apparent that Jesus saw repentance as an integral piece of the Kingdom
Proclamation, something intimately connected to forgiveness of sins, and thus a
hefty component of salvation. There are certainly more texts in the gospel
narratives that show the importance of repentance in Jesus’ thought, but those
texts presented here reveal several things. First, it was a cornerstone of Jesus’
preaching; second, repentance was and continues to be the appropriate response
to the declaration of the arrival of the kingdom of God; third, repentance is an
integral part of the Christian message, linked to forgiveness of sins both in Luke
24.47 and (outside the gospels) Acts 2.38; and fourth, one’s repentance (or lack
thereof) has a significant if not dominating effect on one’s eternal condition.
Interestingly, some of Jesus’ calls to repentance in the gospels don’t carry the
implicit overtones of what one might call a “religious” repentance, such as
turning to God. The Greek words for repentance speak of changing the
disposition of one’s mind, and in some texts this “changing of the mind” has less
to do with one’s disposition towards God than it does with one’s conviction
regarding Jewish eschatology and how that eschatology is to be implemented.
Within the Judaism of Jesus’ day, there were various groups of Jews who were
devoted to God and to His cause, and they longed for the day when God would
return to Zion, when the wicked pagans and disobedient Israelites would be
judged, when the Son of God would reign in Mount Zion, and when the Son of
Man would execute judgment on the world. These zealots, in their longing for
these things, made a name for themselves, and they carved their name out in
blood. They took up sword and shield and led rebellions against the Romans.
There were many Jewish revolts in the decades before and after Jesus, the most
famous of them all being that which culminated in the destruction of Jerusalem
in A.D. 70 by the Romans. The Romans didn’t decide to destroy Jerusalem out of
spite; rather, there was a vast Jewish revolt and the Romans sent massive armies
into Palestine to put it down. The bloodshed between the Roman and Jewish
armies lasted several years, and in A.D. 70, the Romans did what Romans do:
they destroyed the Jewish capital city. But what does this have to do with Jesus
and repentance?
Jesus invited the Jewish people to embrace a new way of living, a new way of
being Israel. God called Israel to be a light to the nations and a guide for the
8 Luke 24.24
blind. The Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 5-6 centers upon a retelling of the
Jewish story in which the vocation of Israel is fleshed-out: turning the other
cheek, going the second mile, forgiving your brother, etc. That is what it means
to be the light of the world, to be guides to the blind, to be the salt of the earth.
The teachings of Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount were preached throughout
his ministry in different contexts, and these were counter-revolutionary to their
core. Jesus called for the Jewish people to abandon their flawed perception of
what it meant to be Jewish and to return to their original Jewish vocation. The
Jewish revolutionaries would have found the Sermon on the Mount foolish at best
and heretical at worst, since they believed that in order for Israel to be the salt of
the earth and the light of the world, Israel had to first of all become world rulers;
and since empires were built and torn down by the edge of the sword or the end
of the spear, the most logical “Next Step” wasn’t to love one’s pagan overlords
but to take up arms and go to war against them. Jesus taught that this way of
living didn’t solve anything; when violence fights violence, violence is the
ultimate winner, no matter the victor nor the death toll on either side. Thus we
find Jesus “calling out” those who embraced violent ideals to accomplish their
eschatological hopes.
This takes us to a popular gospel text regarding repentance:, none other than
Luke 13.1-5: “Now there were some present at that time who told Jesus about the
Galileans whose blood Pilate had mixed with their sacrifices. Jesus answered,
‘Do you think that these Galileans were worse sinners than all the other Galileans
because they suffered this way? I tell you, no! But unless you repent, you too will
all perish. Or those eighteen who died when the tower in Siloam fell on them—
do you think they were more guilty than all the others living in Jerusalem? I tell
you, no! But unless you repent, you too will all perish.’” This text has generally
been read to mean that everyone dies and everyone perishes, but those who
repent will not perish. An eschatological theme is invoked, but the paradox
remains: “If the Israelites who died under Pilate’s sword and those who died
under the collapse of the tower in Siloam had repented, does that mean they
would have escaped death?” A more logical reading finds its home within the
niche explained in the paragraphs above. Jesus isn’t saying that those who repent
will never die; he’s pointing at the actual events—the slaughter of several Jews in
the Temple by the Roman magistrate over Judea (the victims were most likely
revolutionaries who had a tendency to meet in the Temple to plan various
militant uprisings, for there they could avoid being overheard by Roman
soldiers) and the deaths of eighteen people when the tower in Siloam toppled—
and with these events in the background, he’s saying, “This will happen to you,
too, unless you repent!” If the people refused to repent of their revolutionary
ways, if they refused to embrace Jesus’ way of being Israel, they would perish in a
likewise manner under Roman swords and falling masonry. The parable in Luke
13.6-8 is about how the time for repentance is limited; a day is coming when
there will no longer be any opportunity to repent. When that day comes, the
peoples’ fate will have been sealed. The Jewish revolutionaries had their time and
refused to repent, and thus they came under divine judgment and experienced
the weaponry of Roman soldiers and the toppling buildings of a war-ravaged
city.
This line of interpretation no doubt seems foreign to many who are even avid
students of the Bible; yet this theme of the coming judgment on Jerusalem and
the need for repentance isn’t foreign to the gospels, and Luke 13 is but one
example. The entire concept of a prophet calling for repentance in lieu of a
coming national tragedy is nothing new, either: nearly all the pre-exilic prophets,
not least Isaiah and Jeremiah, did this very thing. The Jewish people who saw
Jesus’ miracles and heard his teachings tended to think he was a prophet in the
same vein of Isaiah and Jeremiah, and this isn’t surprising. Jesus’ sorrow at his
last entrance into Jerusalem in Luke 19.41-44 is focused on the future of
Jerusalem’s destruction; the little apocalypses of Mark 13, Matthew 24, and Luke
21 (one might even add John’s Revelation as an expanded apocalypse in the same
vein) aren’t about what will happen at the end of time but what would happen
quite soon, within the life-spans of Jesus’ followers: the destruction of Jerusalem.
Jesus’ cryptic words on his way to the cross in Luke 23 are focused on the
fate of Jerusalem, as well: “‘Daughters of Jerusalem, do not weep for me, but
weep for yourselves and for your children. For behold, the days are coming when
they will say, “Blessed are the barren and the wombs that never bore and the
breasts that never nursed!” Then they will begin to say to the mountains, “Fall
on us,” and to the hills, “Cover us.” For if they do these things when the wood is
green, what will happen when it is dry?’” In one sense, to be sure, Jesus’ death is
a symbolic action, a final prophecy regarding what will happen to the people of
Jerusalem in their refusal to repent. Jesus was the green tree, the innocent tree,
and look what the Romans did to him! If this is what the Romans do to innocent
trees, how much worse would it be for those trees that were guilty (i.e. dry)?
Jesus’ death served as a signpost to what was in store for the nation that had
rejected him and “the things that make for peace.” Any discussion regarding
what Jesus has to say about repentance must take these passages into account.
While there are some that speak quite obviously of a repentance to God in light
of the coming kingdom, there was also a repentance of a more political nature in
light of the coming destruction of Jerusalem. Yet for the purposes of this treatise,
Acts serves as a sequel to the Gospel of Luke; both were written by Luke, a
physician who had been a traveling companion and friend of St. Paul. At the end
of the first volume of his two-part work, Luke quotes Jesus, saying that
“repentance and forgiveness of sins should be proclaimed in [Jesus’] name to all
nations, beginning from Jerusalem.” The Acts narrative picks up with the
Ascension of Jesus and, by the end, shows how Jesus’ commission is being
fulfilled. The first Christian “sermon” in Acts ends with a call to repentance; St.
Peter declared to all of those gathered, “‘Repent and be baptized every one of
you in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins, and you will
receive the gift of the Holy Spirit.’”9 Peter links both repentance and baptism
with forgiveness of sins and the receiving of the Holy Spirit. In another sermon,
Peter commands his hearers to “‘Repent therefore, and turn again, that your sins
may be blotted out.”10 Peter tells the Jews to “turn again” because they had
previously turned from their devotion to Jesus11 and now had to return to
devotion to Jesus (a lesson Peter had to learn following his denial of Jesus three
times). This idea of “turning” linked with repentance is picked up throughout
the Acts narrative12. Acts 5.31 says that “God exalted [Jesus] at his right hand as
Leader and Savior, to give repentance to Israel and forgiveness of sins.” Acts
11.18 states that God has granted repentance to the Gentiles and that this
repentance leads to life. Acts 17.30 declares that God demands everyone to repent
of their idolatry. The Apostle Paul in Acts 20.21 sums up his ministry in Ephesus
as a call to people to turn to God in repentance by putting their faith in Jesus.
Paul, in his speech before King Agrippa in Acts 26, spoke of his work with the
Gentiles as a message that “they should repent and turn to God, performing
deeds in keeping with repentance.” (26.20)
This brief overview of the explicit occasions of repentance in the Acts
narrative reveals that repentance continued to be a major cornerstone of the
gospel proclamation following Jesus’ death, resurrection, and ascension; and that
it was, as Jesus made clear at the end of the Gospel of Luke, linked to both the
forgiveness of sins and receiving the Holy Spirit.
9 Acts 2.38
10 Acts 3.19
11 Acts 3.13-14
12 cf. Acts 9.35, 11.21, 14.15, 26.18, and 26.20
It may come as a shock that Paul explicitly mentions repentance only five times
in his letters. Since the majority of the New Testament is attributed to this
Apostle, one would expect to find more on the subject, unless, of course, he really
didn’t have much to say about it. Such is the argument of those who proclaim
repentance to be “no big deal,” though this tactic takes a blind eye to everything
we’ve seen in the gospels and Acts and what we will see in the later New
Testament. How, then, can we deal with the scarcity of repentance in Paul’s
letters? Two points must be made to help clarify the issue.
First, over against many preconceived notions of the Apostle Paul being a
wizened theologian hammering out doctrinal treatises, Paul was less a
theologian and more a theologizer. The distinction is crucial. A theologian is one
who thinks, speaks, or writes about God (and thus everyone, even atheists, are
theologians). There’s such a thing as a good theologian and a bad theologian,
good theology and bad theology. Paul was a theologian, but he was a theologian
who didn’t simply wrestle with theology but who wrestled, rather, with his
theology in practice. As a theologizer, he dealt with real, concrete issues born out
of his theology, and he used theology as a tool (albeit, at times, as a manipulative
tool) to deal with practical issues. Thus the letters we have, from Romans to
Philemon, aren’t doctrinal treatises but a way in which Paul in absentee can
exercise leadership over churches, often using theology as a tool to get them to
change their ways of thinking and living. If we see his letters as doctrinal
treatises, and acknowledge the scarcity of explicit references to repentance, then
we do indeed have a problem! But when we tear ourselves from such ill-
conceived, albeit prominent, assumptions, not only do the letters come to bear
more fully on us in the present (being “born again”, so-to-speak), but the
question of repentance becomes less damning.
Look at it this way: when we read Romans, Philippians, and Galatians, we
see the concept of faith looming off every page. If we approach the text as a
doctrinal treatise, then we will be led to believe that faith (at the exclusion of
repentance) is all that matters. We may even think Paul has a weird sort of
obsession with faith. But Paul doesn’t write so extensively about faith in these
letters because he loves it so much; rather, he writes about faith to such an extent
because there were those within and without the church who were saying that
faith wasn’t enough. These people, called Judaizers, essentially taught that while
a person entered God’s covenant by faith in Jesus, that person had to adopt
Jewish customs (if Gentile) or retain Jewish customs (if Jewish) to show their
covenant membership. Paul’s emphasis upon faith is to make the point that what
identifies a person as a member of God’s covenant is faith in Christ, and any
other supplements are essentially rebuilding the socio-economic barriers that
Jesus tore down. Thus Galatians, for example, is more about ecclesiology (the
doctrine of the church) than soteriology (the doctrine of salvation). Paul’s lack of
reference to repentance can be due, in many cases, to the fact that the doctrine of
repentance never really came under fire by false teachers (except by antinomians,
whom Paul argued against in Romans 6-8, where repentance is implied and
inferred throughout). In addition to all this, in the midst of Paul’s demands that
Christians change their behaviors and thoughts, there’s the underlying current of
repentance.
The second point to be made is that just because something isn’t explicitly
stated doesn’t mean that it isn’t assumed or implied. In Romans 6-8, neither the
Greek word for repentance nor any of its variances are found in the text, but the
idea of repentance—a change of mind resulting in behavioral change—is laden
throughout the text. Paul’s assumptions regarding repentance shine forth in his
letters, and this shouldn’t surprise us: in Acts 20.21, Paul sums up his Ephesian
ministry as a call to people to turn to God in repentance by putting their faith in
Jesus; and in Acts 26 we find Paul defending himself before King Agrippa and
making the importance of repentance quite clear. Paul first testifies of his
experience with the risen and ascended Jesus on the “Damascus Road”: “‘[The]
Lord said, “I am Jesus whom you are persecuting. But rise and stand upon your
feet, for I have appeared to you for this purpose, to appoint you as a servant and
witness to the things in which you have seen in me and to those in which I will
appear to you, delivering you from your people and from the Gentiles—to whom
I am sending you to open their eyes, so that they may turn from darkness to light
and from the power of Satan to God, that they may receive forgiveness of sins
and a place among those who are sanctified by faith in me.’”13Paul’s concise
statement of his mission is followed by verses 19-21: “‘Therefore, O King
Agrippa, I was not disobedient to the heavenly vision, but declared first to those
in Damascus, then in Jerusalem and throughout all the region of Judea, and also
to the Gentiles, that they should REPENT and TURN TO GOD, performing
deeds in keeping with REPENTANCE.’” (all caps mine) Thus we see that Paul
went about his mission of proclaiming the gospel throughout the Greco-Roman
world, and he identified the outworking of his mission as a call to repentance.
Whatever may be said about the scarcity of repentance in Paul’s letters, it is
evident that repentance was crucial in Paul’s own thought and praxis.
13 Acts 26.15-18,
With these two points in mind, we can now look at places in Paul’s letters
where he explicitly mentions repentance. There are only five verses, and these
passages don’t really bring anything new to the table in light of Jewish
convictions about repentance (which isn’t surprising, since Paul was Jewish).
Only one of these texts (perhaps two) speaks of a general type of repentance:
Romans 2.4 and 2 Timothy 2.5. The former states that God’s kindness is meant
to lead people to repentance, and in the latter we find Paul instructing the young
Timothy to instruct false teachers in the faith in the hope that they will come to
their senses and repent, escaping “the trap of the devil” 14. The three other
references all come from 2 Corinthians.15 These Corinthian texts deal with a
specific situation in the Corinthian church: many of the Christians (exact
numbers are unknown) had gotten involved in all sorts of sinful modes of living,
and Paul wrote a letter scolding them for this. His letter had caused them grief,
and that grief had, in turn, brought about their repentance. These explicit
references to repentance in Romans, 2 Corinthians, and 2 Timothy don’t form
any backbone to a Pauline theology regarding repentance, but they solidify the
Jewish conviction that repentance involves turning from sin to God, and it is the
appropriate response to God’s kindness towards His rebellious creatures.
In a famous passage from 1 Thessalonians, Paul describes the conversion of
the Thessalonian church without explicitly mentioning repentance; however, he
does use the language of “turning,” which implies repentance. “For we know,
brothers loved by God, that he has chosen you, because our gospel came to you
not only in word, but also in power and in the Holy Spirit and with full
conviction… And you became imitators of us and of the Lord, for you received
the word in much affliction, with the joy of the Holy Spirit… [You] turned to
God from idols to serve the living and true God, and to await for his Son from
heaven, whom he raised from the dead, Jesus who delivers us from the wrath to
come.”16 In the opening remarks of his first letter to the Christians in
Thessalonica, Paul talks about how the gospel progressed. The gospel was
preached with power, and the Holy Spirit wasn’t just present but active,
convicting the hearers of the truthfulness of the message proclaimed. The
hearers responded by turning from idols to serve the living and true God. As
Christians saved in Christ, they awaited the “second coming” of Jesus. Faith is
mentioned once in verse 8, where Paul writes about the knowledge of the
Thessalonians’ faith spreading through the various regions of the ancient
14 1 Timothy 2.26
15 2 Corinthians 7.9, 10; 12.21
16 1 Thessalonians 1.4-5b, 6, 9-10
Mediterranean world; and in verse 9, the news of their faith is explained in lieu of
their repentance. It’s apparent that for Paul, repentance is not an arbitrary nor
optional part of the Christian life but an integral part of the Christian
proclamation and the appropriate response to that proclamation. There’s a
strong nexus between faith and repentance, a bond so strong that Paul can speak
of them as the same thing in the very same breath.
17 Hebrews 6.4-6
18 2 Peter 3.9
19 Rev 2.5, 15-17, 22; 3.3, 19; 9.20, 21; 16.9, & 11
While the Apostolic Fathers don’t hold the same clout as the New Testament,
their writings give us an enlightening insight into the makeup of the early
church’s function, behaviors, and beliefs. Repentance is a steady theme
throughout the Apostolic Fathers. Because a complete survey of repentance in
these early Christian works would take far too many pages, I’ve focused on one
of the most popular: Clement of Rome. In his first epistle to the Corinthians, he
exhorts them to embrace repentance: “So let us be done with these barren and
vapid fancies, and turn instead to the honourable, holy Rule of our tradition, so
that we can find out what is good and pleasing and acceptable in the sight of
Him who made us.” Later in the letter, Clement makes known what this
“turning” looks like in practice: “We must bid farewell to all slandering, lewd
and unclean coupling, drinking and rioting, vile lusting, odious fornicating, and
the pride which is an abomination.” Repentance is the first half of faith, and
Clement exhorts the Corinthians on the manner in which faith is to be put into
practice; it is by “fixing our minds trustfully on God; by finding out what is
pleasing and acceptable to Him; by doing whatever agrees with His perfect will;
by following the paths of truth. Wickedness and wrongdoing of every kind must
be utterly renounced; all greed, quarreling, malice and fraud, scandal-mongering
and back-biting, enmity towards God, glorification of self, presumption, conceit,
and want of hospitality; for men who do these things—and not only men who do
them, but men who consent to them—are held in detestation by God. Clement
gives a dire warning: Scripture says, ‘But unto the wicked God says, Why do you
recite my statutes and take my covenant upon your lips? You hated instruction;
you flung my words behind you; when you saw a thief you went along with him,
and you chose the company of adulterers. Your mouth abounded with evil, and
your tongue wove a web of trickery. You sat there vilifying your brother and
planning the downfall of your mother’s son. While you were doing all this I
remained silent, and so you thought, you wicked man, that I was no better than
yourself; but I will rebuke you, and make you see yourself as you are. Think of
this, all you who forget God, or he will pounce on you like a lion, and there will
be nobody to save you.’” Failing to repent, failing to put faith in God, has at its
conclusion God pouncing like a lion upon the rebellious.
In Summation
(2) God desires our repentance. As 2 Peter 3.9 makes clear, God is not slow in
“fulfilling His promise” (that is, finishing what He started on Easter) but
is “taking His time”, so-to-speak, in order to give human beings more
time to come to repentance.
(3) Repentance is aligned with forgiveness of sins and the receiving of the
Holy Spirit. The Jewish people yearned for the age to come when God’s
Spirit would be on all His people, when forgiveness of sins would be made
readily available, when the covenant would be renewed. In Jesus’ death
and resurrection, the covenant renewal for which the Jewish peoples’
hearts yearned came to pass, and repentance was and remains key to
participation in that covenant renewal. Christians are those who are
members of this renewed covenant, experiencing forgiveness of sins and
the presence of the Holy Spirit.
Repentance isn’t feeling sorry for yours sins; nor is it the “godly sorrow” Paul
mentions in 2 Corinthians 7.10, though within most systematic theologies,
“feeling sorry/guilty for sin” is viewed as the first step towards repentance, if not
that which constitutes repentance itself. 2 Corinthians 7.9-10 reads, “Now I
rejoice, not because you were grieved, but because your grief led to repentance;
for you felt a godly grief, so that you were not harmed in any way by us. For
godly grief produces a repentance that leads to salvation and brings no regret,
but worldly grief produces death.” (NRSV) Paul had written the Corinthians a
stinging letter calling them out for some pretty foul things afoot within their
churches, and his letter stirred within them some sort of sorrow, and that sorrow
led to a change in their manner of thinking, which resulted in changed behavior.
Paul’s intention wasn’t to cause them grief but to bring them to repentance; the
grief his letter caused produced in them repentance. To equate the grief with the
repentance is to misread what Paul is saying; and to equate the repentance
produced with a repentance unto salvation is to miss the point that the people to
whom he’s writing are already Christians. To build an understanding of
“conversion repentance” out of these verses is nothing less than a poor reading
of scripture. While the Sinner’s Prayer invites us to pray, “Jesus, we’re sorry for
our sins…”, that’s not repentance.
You can feel sorry for your sins all you want.
You can fret to and fro over the dirty deeds of your past.
You can be consumed with feelings of guilt.
But that doesn’t mean you’ve repented.
It means, at the most, that you’re aware of your sins; and it means, at the
least, that you’ve got some psychological baggage you need to work through.
One of the reasons “feeling sorry for sin” or “apologizing for sin” has been
substituted for repentance is because it makes repentance easier. If we are the
sort of people who “polish off” each sin with an apology to God absent any intent
to change, then we are no better off than the antinomians who fall under the
weight of Paul’s pen in Romans 6-8. Repentance acknowledges grace while
simultaneously acknowledging that grace demands repentance.
The Hebrew language has no single word that explicitly refers to repentance. A
variety of Hebrew words are translated as “repentance” in our English Old
Testaments; nahahm can mean “to repent, comfort, or regret”, and sar can mean
to avoid the evil that you’ve done in the past. By far the most common word
translated as “repent” is shub, and at the elemental level, it literally means “to
turn.” Shub involves two dynamics: both turning from something and turning to
something. In its religious contexts, shub always speaks of a “turning” of some
sort, and this gives root to repentance as an act (or disposition) of turning.
“Repentance” in the English language has been suffocated with religious
connotations, but in the era of ancient Israel, shub was a commonplace word
used in everyday speech to refer to all sorts of things, not only things of a
religious nature; of its 1,056 uses in the Old Testament, only 203 have a religious
context. In these 203 instances, shub can refer both to God as the one doing the
turning or to Israel doing the turning.
The idea that God has “repented” doesn’t sit well in our stomachs, since we
have come to associate repentance as “ceasing to sin”. To imply that God has
“quit sin” is blasphemous, since He cannot and thus will not sin. But “to
repent,” as we’ve seen, doesn’t necessarily mean to quit sinning, and when the
Bible speaks of God repenting, it absolutely does not carry that meaning. The
acts of God’s repentance in the Old Testament refer to His “turning” in relation
to His people, the Israelites. His repentance is the direct result of His covenant
contracts with them in Leviticus 26 and Deuteronomy 27-30. In these contracts
God made clear what He demanded of His people (note that He didn’t demand
these things so that they could become His people; rather, He demanded them
because they already were His people). If His people were obedient to the
covenant contracts, they would receive blessings from His hand; if they were
disobedient, He would judge them (or discipline them) with curses and
calamities. God’s disposition towards them was always characterized by love, but
love itself can be manifested in either blessing or discipline; the manifestation of
His love was dependent upon Israel’s disposition towards Him, be it a
disposition of obedience or disobedience.
All this talk of “disposition” can easily give rise to the idea that God’s love
towards His people changes based upon whether or not they’re obedient. This is
certainly not the case. God’s “disposition” refers not to His emotional state
towards His people (i.e. love versus loathing) but to how His devotion to His
plans through Israel, and His care for Israel and the world, manifested itself. It
was an act of sheer grace and love that drew God to choose Abraham and his
descendents; it was an act of love that drew Him to create a covenant with the
people of Abraham’s lineage. God’s love for His people doesn’t waver, and even
in the most dire of disciplines He sent upon the disobedient Israelites, we see,
especially in the latter chapters of Hosea, God’s own burden at disciplining His
wayward people. God’s discipline isn’t capricious; God disciplined the Israelites
to get them back on track when they strayed too far from their vocation. It was
His love for them, and His commitment to the covenant He made with them, as
well as the vocation He granted them, that drew Him to discipline them. The
repenting of God is seen in the act(s) of God turning from a disposition of
When the prophets called the people of Israel to repent, most often the
emphasis was upon (a) turning from sin (purging evil) and (b) turning to God
(devoting oneself wholeheartedly to Him). This involved forsaking the worship
of false gods and worshipping the Living God. The call to repentance was a call
for Israel to return to her devotion to God; it was chiefly a matter both of the
mind and of the heart. When the Israelites turned to God in heart and mind, the
result was a restructuring of the entire life in order to make good on this turning;
it involved purging sin and living obediently before God. After all, those two
things go hand-in-glove. The prophets coaxed their calls to repentance in terms
of the behavioral changes genuine repentance would produce; these calls to
repentance, focusing upon the outworking of that repentance, take on a variety of
forms according to one’s situation in life. Nevertheless, the issue was and
remains the heart, the person’s internal disposition towards God which manifests
itself in how life is lived. The prophets demanded behavioral change as the
produce (or “fruit”) of repentance, so that mere outward change wasn’t enough.
As the prophet Joel says in Joel 2.12: “The Lord declares: Even now, turn back
your heart and rededicate yourselves to Me; show Me your repentance by fasting,
weeping, and mourning. Rip the wickedness out of your hearts; don’t just tear
your clothing.”
When the prophets called the people of Israel to repentance, they did so not
merely so that the Israelites could “get into heaven” but so that they could
escape the just consequences of their sins in this present life. The Jewish religion
of the days of the prophets, unlike modern Christianity, had no concrete and
established “afterlife” theology of Heaven and Hell. Not until the latter days of
ancient Israelite history did Jewish afterlife theologies begin to develop in a
concrete form. By the days of Jesus and St. Paul and the writings of the New
Testament, a Jewish afterlife theology was cemented into Jewish thought (or,
rather, several afterlife theologies were in currency; there was no solid one-line
track regarding what the afterlife really was, and the most conservative Jews
refused to believe in an afterlife).
Readers of the Old Testament often assume (incorrectly) that an afterlife is
in view in many Old Testament passages, and they interpret these texts from that
perspective. As time progressed, Jewish interpreters began reading afterlife
theologies into these texts just as Christians do, but we will do well to remember
that these texts, in their historical grounding, weren’t written to dispel such
information. An example of this form of eisegesis is Ezekiel 18. A few of the
scattered verses read: “The soul who sins is the one who will die. The son will
not share the guilt of his father, nor will the father share the guilt of his son. The
righteousness of the righteous man will be credited to him, and the wickedness
of the wicked man will be charged against him. But if a wicked man turns away
from all the sins he has committed and keeps [God’s] decrees and does what is
just and right, he will surely live; he will not die… If a righteous man turns from
his righteousness and commits sin, he will die for it; because of the sin he has
committed he will die… I take no pleasure in the death of anyone, declares the
sovereign LORD. Repent and live!” (vv. 20-21, 26, 32) When we assume a Jewish
afterlife theology inherent in this text, it would appear that repentance was seen
as necessary for eternal salvation and that lack of repentance produces eternal
damnation. However, because (a) the Israelites of Ezekiel’s day didn’t think in
such terms, and (b) the covenant contracts, which serve as a panoramic
backdrop for the Jewish convictions regarding repentance, deal not with the
afterlife but the here-and-now, this text must be read as speaking of temporal
(that is, “during life” or “before-death”) life and death: death through judgments
enacted by God in this life, and life through blessings and rewards enacted by
God in this life.
Repentance, for the ancient Jew, wasn’t about one’s eternal destiny.
It was about the quality of life in the present.
Repentance to God produced blessings in the present, and repentance away
from Him produced judgments in the present. This clear-cut understanding,
born out of the covenant contracts and labeled “Torah-Obedience” by many
scholars, was the common Jewish perspective. Many Old Testament texts, such
as Job, many of the psalms, Ecclesiastes, and Habakkuk (among others) deal
with the apparent disconnect between “Torah-Obedience” and real life
situations. Those who repented to God (the righteous) often suffered cruelly at
the hands of the wicked, and sometimes blessings and rewards seemed more like
fleeting, illusory hopes rather than a divine promise. The wicked prospered and
the righteous suffered, and this made many Jews scratch their beards and wonder
how it would all work out.
Although the ancient Jews didn’t see an explicit connection between
repentance and one’s state in the “afterlife,” they did see an eschatological
element in repentance. When the Assyrians wiped out northern Israel in 722 B.C.,
and when the Babylonians wiped out Judah in 586 B.C., the picture looked bleak
for the Israelites. They had turned from God and hadn’t turned back, and they
received in full measure the due penalty for their refusal to repent: a brutal and
bloody judgment. Prior to these judgments, the prophets, not least Isaiah,
Jeremiah, and Ezekiel, understood that judgment was coming and would not be
avoided, since the people would refuse to repent, putting their hopes in false
gods and in the empty promises of pagan allies even as the enemy armies burnt
their homes, ravaged their women, bashed their infants’ heads against rocks,
slaughtered their men, and encircled their city gates. The prophets
simultaneously wept over the unavoidable future for northern Israel and Judah
and looked forward to a future nation-wide repentance towards God that would
take place after judgment.
This optimism is fleshed out in texts such as Isaiah 6.10, 10.21, and 19.22.
These read: “Make the heart of this people dull, and their ears heavy, and blind
their eyes; lest they see with their eyes, and hear with their ears, and understand
with their hearts, and turn and be healed.” (6.10) “A remnant will return, the
remnant of Jacob, to the mighty God.” (10.21) “And the LORD will strike Egypt,
striking and healing, and they will return to the LORD, and he will listen to their
pleas for mercy and heal them.” (19.22) The pessimistic outlook of 6.10 takes a
turn in 10.21 with a remnant of the nation of Judah repenting. Then we see in
19.22 that not only a remnant of Judah will return to God, but Egypt will, too,
after being stricken by God in a manner that brings healing. Egypt epitomized
the pagan, unclean, and wicked world with all its evil, just as Babylon epitomized
this in the New Testament; cf. Revelation. The prophets looked forward to the
day when God would strike the pagan world, judging them for their evil; and yet
a strange echo is heard in Isaiah, an echo hinting that God would indeed strike
the awful pagans, but His striking would bring about healing, and the Egyptians
(of all people!) would turn to Him. Such a declaration felt like salt in the wounds
of many Israelites who failed to understand that God had chosen them not
simply to be a chosen people but to be lights to the world and the salt of the
earth. The Israelite vocation wasn’t to be proud in their possession of Torah or of
their chosenness, as if those had anything to do with any merit on their part. The
Israelite vocation, in being chosen by the Living God and having been given the
Torah, was to bring light to the Gentiles and hope to the pagans. While the Jews
seemed to have forgotten this critical aspect of their vocation, God didn’t forget,
and texts like these in Isaiah reorient Jewish hopes away from national pride and
towards worldwide blessing, as God intended all along (see Genesis 15, where
God’s goal in choosing Abraham and his descendants is blessing the world).
In summation of the meaning of repentance in the Old Testament:
(1) “To repent” means “to turn.” Repentance in its most fundamental form
involves turning. Within the Judeo-Christian context, this turning is either
towards God or away from Him.
(2) God can and has repented. He has repented in dispelling blessings and
judgments upon Israel, and this is always dependent upon her repentance
either to or away from Him, respectively.
(3) Israel consistently repented both to and from God: to Him in obedience
and away from Him in disobedience (by worshipping false gods,
transgressing the covenant contracts, and so on).
(4) Repentance as turning was always a matter of the heart, which manifested
itself in the life lived. When the Israelites genuinely repented to God, they
turned their hearts towards Him, which manifested itself in obedience.
When the Israelites repented from God, they turned their hearts away from
Him, which manifested itself in disobedience. The calls to repentance,
though underscored by the need for behavioral change (since behavioral
changes were dependent upon the circumstances and the nature of
disobedience), operated within the framework of the heart being the
central issue. Indeed, when the Israelites turned to God only in action and
not with their hearts, God was not merely displeased, He found their
“pretense” abominable.
(5) The blessings and curses associated with repentance focused on the life in
the here-and-now rather than on the afterlife. In Old Testament thought,
repentance to God brought about blessings and rewards in the here-and-
now while repentance away from Him brought about curses and ruin in
the same.
When King Cyrus of Persia allowed the Jews to return home following his
blitzkrieg takeover of Babylon, the homecoming Jews rebuilt the Temple into a
pale echo of what it had been prior to the Babylonian demolition crews.
Following the prophet Malachi, Israel underwent a series of pagan overlords.
The Persians lost their foothold to the Greeks, and the Greek rulers were pretty
barbaric, even by Babylonian standards. The Greeks lost tenancy to the Romans
who were also quite brutal. During this “Intertestamental Period” (the time
period between Malachi and Matthew), repentance in Jewish thought underwent
no significant change regarding what it meant (turning to or away from God);
however, the benefits of repentance were reworked during this time period in lieu
of developing Jewish afterlife, as well as what can be called after-afterlife,
theologies. Repentance in the here-and-now became the crucial factor in
The adoption of a Jewish afterlife theology picked up speed during the Jewish
exile in Babylon; the exiles experimented with afterlife concepts from Eastern
religions such as Zoroastrianism. Syncretism took place: the Jews began
adopting pagan beliefs and coming up with their own afterlife theologies from a
“melting-pot” of foreign religious theologies. The Jewish scholars compared and
contrasted these Eastern theologies with fresh readings of their sacred scriptures,
and where they found similarities between the two, they performed imaginative
leaps to bridge the gaps. As the period progressed, the Jewish people more
readily adopted afterlife concepts. Thus the Jewish people took bits and pieces of
what they encountered in foreign religions, wrestled with them from their stock
Jewish worldview, and remodeled pagan afterlife theologies to incorporate them
into the Jewish grid while remaining true to their monotheistic, covenant-creator
roots.
Some speculate they embraced this syncretism because the afterlife beliefs
were appetizing; the Jews didn’t have them in their own religion, so they simply
adopted them, using their scriptures as a grid through which to determine which
beliefs were valid and which were not. Other scholars surmise that they
embraced syncretism because the concept of an afterlife offered hope: stranded
in exile, encircled by their captors, heaven and hell (which the Jews came to
understand quite differently than western Christianity does today) ensured their
own eternal prosperity despite their temporary exile. Likewise it promised
righteous judgment on those who abused them.
Sometime during the Intertestamental Period, afterlife concepts in Jewish
thought won a major victory when the Pharisees officially adopted them. The
Pharisees showed up on the scene after the Babylonian exiles returned to Israel.
The Jews never got to rule themselves afterwards: the world superpowers
continuously changed, and Israel was caught in the middle, thrown about like a
ragdoll, her oppressors changing faces and names as fierce battles were waged
within and without the Jewish homeland. The ultimate Jewish hope was that one
day Israel would be the world superpower, ruling over the pagan nations. The
Pharisees saw that this was not presently the case, and they charged the chaotic
mess of things to disobedience within Israel. The reason that Israel had not yet
been delivered from her oppressors and raised to her rightful place as the world
ruler, the Pharisees speculated, was that (to put it in terms we can understand)
there were too many sinners in the land. The solution to the problem was (and
how original a thought!) to get rid of the sinners. The Pharisees devised two
main ways of doing this:
(1) The pharisaical zealots had their own cherished approach: simply take
care of the problem with a well-placed blade against the enemy’s throat.
Zealots were just as focused on “spring cleaning” as they were on
trimming the hedges outside the house; they were just as comfortable
slitting the throats of whom they perceived to be disobedient Israelites as
they were thrusting a blade into the flesh of marauding pagans. Paul, a
zealous Pharisee, was bent on eradicating Christians because, at the least,
he saw the burgeoning Christian sect as an obstacle to the fulfillment of
Jewish hopes. Some Pharisees (such as Paul) did go the “Way of the
Zealot,” but it’s reasonable to assume that most did not.
(2) A second tactic was bringing sinners to repentance. If you can’t beat them,
don’t join them—just change them. Certainly killing them would be easier,
but not everyone can stomach blood on their hands, and Pharisees were
still humans trying their best to serve their God (never mind for a moment
their misconceptions regarding what that entailed). The Pharisees
preached repentance, but a problem arose: sinners had no real reason to
repent! Despite Israel being ruled by foreign nations, the Jews had things
pretty easy at times. Sure, there were moments of terror and death
(Antiochus IV Epiphanes, for example), but most of the time things were
rather comfortable for your run-of-the-mill Jew. Why would a person give
up his or her self-serving and self-indulgent lifestyle when obedience is
difficult and the only reward is a life of blessings (which they already
enjoyed) and deliverance from judgment (when the current judgment of
exile didn’t seem that bad after all)? Some theorize that the Pharisees
cleverly adopted the concept of the afterlife in an attempt to woo sinners to
repentance. The introduction of Hell suddenly made judgment a scary
concept. The conservative Sadducees rejected the foreign concepts of hell,
heaven, and the resurrection. “Heresy!” the Sadducees shrieked, but the
Pharisees embraced them hook, line, and sinker.
he was, that he did what the Bible says he did, and I’m not shy in making those
assumptions. Jesus didn’t embrace many things his contemporary Jews did, and
I believe that if he found any problem with the general conceptions of heaven or
hell, he’d have made that clear. As it stands, the realities of heaven and hell were
acknowledged by Jesus. He embraces the prominent Jewish afterlife theology,
albeit not without tweaking it a bit: his embrace of the afterlife was radical even
to the Pharisees. Jesus serves as a revelatory guide: as the one from heaven, who
is God incarnate, he reveals to us truth about the afterlife. The writers of the New
Testament, indebted to the Jewish conviction about these things, further
reworked the afterlife in various ways in light of Jesus.
Another point to be made in regards to the question posed above is that just
because God didn’t blatantly reveal these things to the Jews before the
completion of the Old Testament doesn’t mean that these concepts aren’t true .
The theological idea of “progressive revelation” speaks of the nature by which
God doesn’t disclose everything but reveals more and more regarding what He
wants to reveal when He wants to reveal it. It must be emphasized that the
evolution of Jewish afterlife theologies wasn’t just something snagged from
Zoroastrianism or other pagan religions of the day; the Jewish people were
devoted to God and to their sacred scriptures, and they meticulously studied
their scriptures and didn’t let the adoption of afterlife theologies violate the core
tenets of their belief systems. The result was that the Jewish afterlife theologies
remained markedly distinct from those of neighboring Eastern religions. The
Jews wrestled with these concepts until they came to an amorphous conclusion
that meshed well with what they knew of God, the world, and themselves as the
Israelite nation as a whole. The Hebrew scriptures weren’t discarded, ignored, or
sidelined; rather, in a sense, they came to a fuller and more vibrant life.
As a Jewish doctrine of the afterlife theology emerged, repentance took on an
elevated repentance. It became important not simply because it kept God’s
disciplines at bay and brought temporal blessings, but it also secured one’s
eternal location with God in heaven and assured eventual bodily resurrection.
The Rabbis, teachers of Mosaic Law who taught in the synagogue, and whose
teachings are recorded in the ancient Mishnah and Talmud, taught that,
concerning eternal salvation, obedience was necessary (cf. Aboth 2.7). They
didn’t disregard grace; grace remained at the forefront of their minds, and
repentance was never perfect. In the Old Testament non-canonical apocrypha,
this eternal importance of repentance becomes clearly evident in Jewish thought.
2 Baruch 5.13 reads, “Also [as for] the glory of those who have now been
justified in My law, who have had understanding in their life, who have planted
in their heart the root of wisdom, then their splendor shall be glorified in
changes, and the form of their face shall be turned into the light of their beauty,
that they may be able to acquire and receive the world which does not die, which
is then promised to them.” In verses 7-8 we find, “But those who have been
saved by their works, and to whom the law has been now a hope, and
understanding an expectation, and wisdom a confidence, shall wonders appear
in their time. For they shall behold the world which is now invisible to them, and
they shall behold the time which is now hidden from them; and time shall no
longer age them.” Repentance isn’t explicitly mentioned here, but we do find
fully-developed Jewish afterlife themes: (1) there is being in heaven with God
(“beholding the world now invisible to them”) and (2) bodily resurrection (the
changing of their faces, their selves never aging).
Now to another book. 4 Ezra 7.19-21 reads, “...[There] is no judge above
God, and none that hath understanding above the Highest. For there be many
that perish in this life, because they despise the law of God that is set before
them. For God hath given straight commandment to such as came, what they
should do to live, even as they came, and what they should observe to avoid
punishment.” On first glance it seems that one’s disposition towards God is only
focused on life in the here-and-now. But a few verses later we find, “And the
most High shall appear upon the seat of judgment, and misery shall pass away,
and the long suffering shall have an end. But judgment only shall remain, truth
shall stand, and faith shall wax strong.” The eschatological language shows that
repentance had an eschatological impact rather than an impact solely prior to the
Great Victory of God.
These two snapshots of Jewish thought in the Intertestamental Period
illuminate that repentance became necessary not only to experience temporal
blessings and to avoid temporal punishments but also to secure one’s destiny in
the afterlife. Thus we find in this period that while the nature of repentance
(what it means) remained the same, the necessity of repentance extended beyond
the temporal and into the eternal. When we come to the New Testament, its
pages spill out of this Jewish paradigm. John the Baptist, St. Paul, St. Peter, and
Jesus embraced this eschatological mindset.
Two Greek words are used in the New Testament to speak of repentance. The
primary word is metanoia, which is compounded from the Greek preposition
meta (meaning “after”) and the verb noeo (meaning “to perceive, to think, the
God from idols to serve the living and true God…” This language of turning isn’t
coming from a vacuum but from the lips and quills of men drenched in Jewish
thought. The positive element of turning (turning to God) and the negative
element of turning (turning from idols) are both captured in 1 Thessalonians 1.9.
Thus any claim that the New Testament discards the Old Testament’s
understanding of repentance as turning is discredited.
What are we to make of the Old Testament’s emphasis upon the heart and
the New Testament’s emphasis upon the mind? The text from Joel 2 which we’ve
looked at multiple times finds an echo in the New Testament letter of James:
“Submit yourselves therefore to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you.
Draw near to God, and he will draw near to you. Cleanse your hands, you sinners,
and purify your hearts, you double-minded. Be wretched and mourn and weep.
Let your laughter be turned to mourning and your joy to gloom… Humble
yourselves before the Lord, and he will exalt you.” (James 4.7-9, 10) The
importance of the heart isn’t forgotten (cf. James 5.8, “Establish your hearts, for
the coming of the Lord is at hand”; and Rom 10.10, “For with the heart one
believes and is justified, and with the mouth one confesses and is saved”); Jesus
was adamant that the greatest vocation of man is to love God with all your heart
(and everything else, too, in Luke 10.27).
The “Mind” is where our thoughts (and feelings; but primarily, for our
concerns, the emphasis is upon the thoughts) happen. The mind cannot be
separated from the heart; while the two are different, they work together, and one
doesn’t always dominate the other. Our thoughts (and feelings) affect our hearts;
and the converse is true. The interconnectedness of the heart and mind is
attested to in the New Testament. In Ephesians 4.18, Paul writes of the futility of
pagan minds (see v. 17): “They are darkened in their understanding, alienated
from the life of God because of their ignorance and hardness of heart.” The
problem doesn’t just reside in the heart; it resides in the mind, too! Hebrews 8.10
and 16 speak of the Old Testament promises of the New Covenant involving both
hearts and minds: “This is the covenant I will make with the house of Israel after
that time, declares the Lord. I will put my laws in their minds and write them on
their hearts. I will be their God, and they will be my people… This is the
covenant I will make with them after that time, says the Lord. I will put my laws
in their hearts, and I will write them on their minds.” In 8.10 the law is put in the
mind; in 8.16 it is put in the heart. In 8.10 the law is written on the heart; in 8.16 it
is written on the mind. The same promise, different angles, both with the
correlation between the mind and heart. The two are not the same thing, but the
author of Hebrews doesn’t see a big gap between them. The two are intrinsically
important.
How are we to define the mind against the heart when the two are so closely
tied together? The heart is the core of the person, and sometimes the bible also
calls it the “spirit” of man (John 4.23). It’s from the heart that a man makes
decisions; it’s from the heart that a man devotes himself to something. One’s
purpose in life, the object of one’s devotion and dedication, is born out of the
heart. The mind is where thoughts and feelings take place, and it is where
choices are made.
See the apparent paradox?
Choices are made from the heart; choices are made from the mind.
The two are not the same, but they fit hand-in-glove.
There’s a danger in trying to define the two so starkly that when we read
scripture, we miss the whole point in our semantic games. The choices made in
the mind are affected by the heart, and the choices made in the heart are affected
by the mind. Though the mind and heart aren’t the same thing, it is within the
mind and heart of a man that he makes his decisions, inaugurates his choices,
and places his devotions. The call of the gospel is a call to turn to God in the
heart and mind; this doesn’t mean that we are to have warm and fuzzy feelings or
to simply think differently about God, but that we are to turn our devotions from
ourselves and place them instead on God. The call to repentance is the call to
make a decision, to make a choice, that we will no longer be devoted to ourselves
or to false gods, but that we will instead be devoted to the true and living God
revealed in Jesus the Messiah. When we look at repentance in this light, the
pieces come together:
(1) The element of turning isn’t discarded or sidelined; rather, it’s sharpened.
The positive element is turning to God: putting your devotion upon God,
putting your love upon God. The negative element is turning from idols
(anything we worship as God, whether or not we’d call them idols
ourselves): turning from devotion to Self, turning from love of Self, turning
from anything to which we are devoted that is other than God. Repentance
is turning from Love of Self/Idols and Devotion to Self/Idols to Love of
God/Devotion to God.
(2) The element of the heart isn’t lost. The heart is the core of the person, and
it’s from the heart (in conjunction with the mind) that decisions are made.
Repentance is the act of turning, which is the direct result of a decision
made in the heart but not unaffected by the mind. When I speak of
repentance as an act, I don’t mean it’s something we physically do; rather,
it is the turning of our devotions upon God following the decision made in
the heart to do precisely that.
(3) The element of the mind isn’t lost. The mind is where we think and feel.
While one can repent with simply one’s “feelings” as a motivation, feelings
in and of themselves are fleeting and generally dependent upon
circumstances. Such repentance may not be genuine after all. The
emphasis on the mind is upon the thoughts. When confronted with the
gospel declaration, the desired result is a rethinking, a recalculating, an
evolution of the way we perceive ourselves, our world, and, above all, God.
This rethinking isn’t repentance itself, for one can believe the gospel
message but still refuse to repent. This rethinking is the stepping-stone to
the decision, the choice, to repent. “Change of Mind” speaks of a change
in one’s disposition towards God, a change from a disposition of
indifference at best and hostility at worst to a disposition marked by
increasing devotion and love.
Repentance is turning to God from idols, and it’s the implemented choice to
no longer be devoted to idols but to be devoted to God. The “fruit of repentance”
is everything that flows from this: if we have truly turned to God from idols, if we
have genuinely turned our devotions upon God from their former place with false
gods, then the result will consequently be a restructuring and reorientation of our
lives in tune and in alignment with this decision.
answered his critics properly. His response has been popularized in the western
church where a fascination with Love vs. Law has triumphed. Many western
churches have as their mission statement, “Loving God and Loving People.” But
despite its overwhelming popularity, Jesus’ response to the question posed by the
Pharisees has been greatly misunderstood.
Western society’s conception of love is rooted in feelings, but defining love like
that is foreign to the Old and New Testaments of the Bible. This association of
love with feelings has its genesis in the Middle Ages, seen most prominently in
the tales of heroic knights rescuing damsels in distress. Love in western society
has been pigeonholed into the foundation of positive and euphoric feelings.
“Love for God” has become synonymous with “positive, warm feelings towards
God.” Thus one’s status before God, as one who does or does not love Him,
becomes dependent upon the way the person “feels” towards Him. This is bad
for at least two reasons:
(1) It can prompt a devoted Christian to question his or her love for God when
there is, in reality, nothing to question. One can experience
disappointment, frustration, and even anger towards God and still love
Him in the truest sense. If society’s caricature of what loving God means
is used as the litmus test for faith, then the one suffering less-than-positive
feelings towards Him is driven to ask, “Do I not love God since I don’t feel
warm towards Him?” The result is a questioning of one’s salvation and
status for God when such questioning isn’t warranted.
(2) It can give a false sense of security to those who may possess positive
feelings towards God but who do not love Him in the biblical sense. There
are those who like Jesus and his teachings, those who are fond of God, but
who don’t live lives of obedience. There are those who may lead small
groups, host bible studies, carry the congregation forward in worship, and
even preach from the pulpit but who do not live a life marked by the quest
to honor and obey God. These individuals, regardless of whether or not
they christen themselves “Christian”, aren’t loving God in the biblical
sense. But because they possess positive feelings towards Him (or at least
towards their conception of Him), they’re convinced they really do love
belong to God’s covenant people. In case the point has fallen deaf on the letter’s
recipients, he says in 5.3a, “For this is the love of God, that we keep his
commandments.”
How much clearer can he be?
Loving God is intrinsically connected to obeying Him.
In his second pastoral letter, the Apostle John writes, “And this is love, that
we walk according to his commandments; this is the commandment, just as you
have heard from the beginning, so that you should walk in it.” (2 John 6)
The Apostle John’s remarks aren’t from a vacuum. He carried forth like an
Olympic runner that which had been passed down to him not merely by Judaism
but by Jesus on the eve of his crucifixion. Jesus told his disciples, “Whoever has
my commandments and keeps them, he it is who loves me. And he who loves me
will be loved by my Father, and I will love him and manifest myself to him.”
(John 14.21) A few verses later: “If anyone loves me, he will keep my word, and
my Father will love him… Whoever does not love me does not keep my words…”
(14.23-24) Later on in the evening, Jesus said, “If you keep my commandments,
you will abide in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commandments and
abide in his love.” (15.10) He added in 15.14, “You are my friends if you do what I
command you.” You can’t claim to be a “friend of Jesus” if you disregard his
teachings.
Loving God is connected to obeying Him, but that doesn’t mean the two are
the same thing. Obedience to God flows from a heart that is devoted to God.
When a person is devoted to God, that person will seek to obey Him. Obedience
is what it looks like to love God on the pragmatic level. In the realm of the heart,
one’s love for God is synonymous with his or her devotion to Him. Obedience
flows from a heart that is devoted, dedicated, and committed to God; if a person
is devoted, this devotion is manifested in his or her obedience.
To say that loving God is the same thing as obeying Him is to say that no one
could every truly love God, because no one obeys Him perfectly. Even those who
seek after wholehearted obedience stumble and fall. Loving God produces a
desire to obey God that, if genuine, will show itself in obedience.
A shrill note of warning: it may be the case that one obeys God but doesn’t
truly love Him. This is seen most often in strict, legalistic circles. While the
Pharisees weren’t as legalistic as we like to make them out to be, there are seeds
of legalism within their praxis and thought. While there were certainly those
Pharisees who were truly devoted to God (such as Nicodemus of John 4), many
of them professed love of God and were strict in their public obedience, but their
hearts simply weren’t in it. Their love and devotion fell upon themselves, their
public image, and the ethnic nation of Israel. Jesus called them out on this
hypocrisy in Matthew 23, labeling them “blind guides,” “blind fools,” and
“whitewashed tombs.” Obedience is to flow from a heart devoted to God; but it
can also flow from a heart proud in its religious affiliations or personal piety. The
obedience that matters isn’t a proud obedience but a humble obedience, an
obedience coming from a heart that is submissive, loyal, and devoted to God.
We must ask ourselves, “What is my heart’s disposition, its posture, towards
God?” Devotion to God—which is love for God, and what can also be defined as
loyalty or allegiance to God—is the appropriate and necessary disposition for a
heart that loves God. One’s devotion to God isn’t tied to one’s feelings towards
Him; indeed, many characters of the Old Testament were fully committed to
God in the midst of less-than-positive feelings towards Him. King David suffered
disappointment with God, and he was called “a man after God’s own heart.”
Jeremiah experienced great anger (even rage!) towards God and remained
devoted (even if his devotion was as thin as a thread at times). Job remained
steadfast in his devotion to God despite the confusion, the pain, and the fury.
Just as a husband can be dedicated while his wife while feeling frustrated, angry,
and upset with her, so a person can be devoted to God while experiencing
negative emotions towards Him. The key is that we do not sin against Him in
the midst of negative feelings.
Devotion to god is a matter of the heart; so what does it mean to be devoted
to God from the heart? A man’s actions and desires stem from his heart. Jesus
makes this clear in Mark 7.20-21 when he says, “What comes out of a person is
what defiles him. For from within, out of the heart of man, come evil thoughts,
sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, coveting, wickedness, deceit,
sensuality, envy, slander, pride, foolishness.” A person’s actions are reflective of
the condition of his heart.
Contrary to popular belief, actions don’t change who we are but reveal who
we are. It’s absolute foolishness when a person says, “I was just being stupid
when I did this or that, I’m not really that kind of person.” It’s a popular excuse
to shy away from guilt. When you do something you regret, labeling it a fluke
makes the event easier to stomach. Yet all our actions stem from the conditions
of our hearts. Our actions reveal what’s going on in the deepest parts of who we
are. It’s the heart, the core of who we are, that God looks at. When Samuel went
out to anoint the future King of Israel, God told him, “Do not look on his
appearance or on the height of his stature… For the LORD sees not as a man
sees: man looks on the outward appearance, but the LORD looks on the heart.”
The heart is like the Oval Office of the human person: it’s where decisions
are made, it’s the home of the will of man. To say that devotion to God (or loving
Him) is a matter of the heart is to say that devotion to God, or love for God, is a
matter of the will. True devotion flows from a heart that is genuinely and willfully
committed and loyal to God. The question—“What does it mean to love God
from the heart?”—is thus answered: “It means to be wholeheartedly committed
to God.”
is the man or woman of God in the suburbs? Does he or she have no place there?
Devotion to God can and does take on multiple forms. God may lead us to
foreign countries or to the inner cities; and He may lead us into the suburbs or to
the pastureland.
Another myth is the belief that those who are truly devoted to God will live
lives of poverty. If this is true, then what are we to make of Gaius in Corinth, a
rich man who hosted the entire Corinthian church on his hillside estate? Are we
to believe that devotion to God manifests itself in an ever-shrinking bank
account? Is bankruptcy, then, a sign of godliness? Are savings accounts
testaments to an inability to trust God?
Another myth is that those who are most devoted to God will enter
vocational ministry, serving as preachers, or teachers, or worship leaders. If this
is the case, then does that mean that the Average Joe sitting in the church pew
isn’t as devoted as he ought to be?
Some say that devotion to God means forsaking a spouse. Then what are we
to make of St. Peter, who was probably married? What do we make of Priscilla
and Aquila, Paul’s tent-making friends and fellow workers for the gospel? What
do we make of Andronicus and Junia, who were quite likely a married couple
designated as apostles in Romans 16?
The Bible describes the person devoted to God as a person characterized by
the pursuit of Christ-likeness, regardless of who they are and wherever they are.
It must be clarified that devotion to God isn’t seen chiefly in one’s social portrait
but by one’s character and choices in life, regardless of their occupation,
financial situation, or anything else.
Devotion to God is dedication to Him and His cause.
It’s making God and His kingdom the first and foremost priority in our lives.
It involves rearranging our lives—everything from the internal (our hearts,
minds, and souls) to the external (our bodies, daily affairs, social interactions,
etc.)—in such a way that glorifying God and advancing His kingdom is our chief
life goal and aim. When a person is genuinely devoted to God, this will be seen in
his or her character: the person will be transformed by working alongside God’s
Spirit to possess and cultivate the attitudes, thoughts, and character of Jesus.
Devotion to God is also seen in the decisions we make, making choices born not
out of selfishness and greed but out of a concern for God’s desires and His plans
for humanity.
The devoted person, being continuously transformed inwardly and
outwardly, will seek to live a life of obedience before God. Many people claim to
be devoted to God, but their behaviors—in effect, their disobedience—show that
such devotion is a sham. While they may have convinced themselves they’re truly
(1) Repentance is the decision of the heart/mind (i.e. the will) to “turn from
idols” (devotion to those things, including our own selves, which are not
God) and to “turn to God” (to put our devotion upon God and,
consequently, His kingdom).
(2) “Devotion to God” can be called the Christian—or even, dare we see it, all
humanity’s—vocation. Lying within the primal fault of mankind in the
Garden of Eden, and stretching out in a variety of ways throughout human
history, is the antithesis to devotion to God: devotion to idols, the least of
(5) Obedience is not the same thing as repentance, just as it is not the same
thing as loving God/being devoted to him. Repentance is the decision to
devote oneself to God. Devotion to God shows itself in obedience. Thus, it
can be said, obedience lies within the realm of “the fruit of repentance.”
So where does faith fit into all this? This section is not just about faith but,
rather, faith’s correlation or integration with repentance and, consequently,
devotion to God. The section will go as follows. First, we’ll look at modern and
inaccurate beliefs regarding the nature of biblical faith (noting that each of these
has a nugget of truth to it; each misunderstanding harps upon a facet of faith
without looking at the larger picture). Second, we will look at the New
Testament Greek words for faith and look at them not only as they are
transliterated (that is, how the Greek is rendered into English) but also how they
were used within the ancient Greco-Roman culture. Transliteration is a big step
in the right direction; but in order to understand the underlying echoes of the
actual Greek words, which may or may not be adequately translated into
English, we need to understand how they were used in the ancient world, and
this understanding influences the way we read the New Testament, which is a
compilation of ancient documents rooted within that culture, including the
nuances of its word-usage. Third, I will attempt to sketch an appropriate portrait
of what biblical faith is, being true to its use in the scriptures as well as to its use
within the world in which the New Testament was written,. Fourth, I will then
lay bare what I believe is the best integration of faith, repentance, and loving
God (i.e. being devoted to him), and bring into focus all those little details the
misunderstandings harp upon. As an epilogue to the section, I will deal with four
points of interest regarding the bible’s declaration of the nature of faith. We
begin, as usual, with the popular misconceptions.
Easy-Believism
“Decisionism” is the idea that simply “believing in” (i.e. mentally assenting to
the truth of) the gospel is the same thing as experiencing salvation. One of the
main fore-runners of this relatively new concept was an evangelical named
Charles Finney. An evangelist of the 1800s, Finney is renown for being the one
who invented the “altar call” which is used in so many churches today. Finney’s
crusades drew forth a flurry of “conversions”—people coming forward to the
altar—but, as even some of Finney’s companions found out much to their
chagrin, these conversions turned out to be nothing more than falsehoods:
returning to the places where sweeping conversions took place, Finney’s
companions found that there came about no real life change, no real repentance.
Those brought face-to-face with such disillusionment either reformed their view
of things or reformed their views on the gospel to deal with such inconsistencies.
Despite the tradition that gave birth to Finney and those like him, a tradition
which made good on repentance and discipleship, those in cahoots with “Easy-
Believism” have plummeted down the whirlpool of bad doctrine into what’s
been called “Cheap Grace,” the idea that all that God requires for salvation and
all its trimmings is, thanks to God’s grace, just belief; repentance, discipleship,
and everything else becomes unnecessary, albeit commendable. These serious
matters of the faith became supplemental, something which Finney and his
compatriots encouraged and continue to encourage, but something that, in the
end, wasn’t necessary. The term “carnal Christian” was coined (from a
corruption of various biblical passages) to describe those who were Christians by
conversion but who had not really converted in the biblical sense. “Easy-
Believism” lives on where people are asked to “pray the sinner’s prayer”, or to
“accept Jesus into your heart,” or to “accept him as your personal Savior.” These
prayers and acceptances are viewed as the moments of conversion, when a
person enters into Christ and becomes a member of God’s covenant family.
Advocates of this view will point out that the Bible “clearly teaches” that all that
is necessary is mental assent to the truth of the gospel: this is “evidenced” in
several New Testament scriptures, such as Romans 10.9, which reads “that if
you confess with your mouth, ‘Jesus is Lord,’ and believe in your heart that God
raised him from the dead, you will be saved.’” “What it takes,” the proponents of
this view say, “is believing in your heart—that is, mentally assenting to the
fact—that God raised Jesus from the dead and verbally confessing that Jesus is
Lord.” This is a radical misunderstanding of the text, and, as we will see, this
text actually goes against the grain of what these advocates are saying. Indeed,
the scriptures taken as a whole deny, in every shape and form, this
understanding of faith as simply “a mental assent to the truth of a body of facts”.
I am not questioning Finney’s own dedication to God and God’s kingdom.
The road paved with good intentions often leads to dead-ends and, in this case,
sinkholes. I am wholeheartedly convinced that Finney, despite his
misunderstanding and the blow-up of his methods into a whole spiel of heretical
doctrine, is a member of God’s covenant people and dwells in paradise with God
and the saints (albeit, I am sure, looking down with at least a bit of sadness over
what has come about). Nor am I questioning Finney’s intelligence. As we shall
see, the English renderings of the Greek words for “faith” don’t really do justice
to the Greek; and without studying in-depth the intricacies and nuances of the
Greek words for faith, one can easily come to the point of misunderstanding it
entirely while clutching to the Bible as God’s inerrant and irrefutable revelation.
Easy-Believism is obviously at odds with how I have described repentance
above: turning from self-love to God-love becomes something that is
supplementary, something for the “super-Christian,” something for the “disciple
of Jesus” rather than the “convert to Christianity” (despite the overwhelming
consensus that, within this framework, the two are separate entities, there is no
reason to suspect this from what the Bible says). If easy-believism is an accurate
portrayal of Christian faith (which it’s not), then everything I’ve written thus far
is called into question. Yet, by virtue of it not being an accurate understanding of
faith, we can move forward and abandon this line of thought. The move forward,
a one-step leap, jumps into the realm of yet another abounding misconception:
that “faith in God/Jesus” is the equivalent to “trusting in God/Jesus.”
Radical Trust
The second misconception is that biblical faith is more than just believing
something to be true; it is believing something to be true and trusting in the
content of that belief. In Christian speak, then, it means believing in the
authenticity of the gospel proclamation about Jesus and trusting in Jesus to be
your savior. Trust is an aspect of faith that Paul harps on in Romans 4.18-22: “In
hope [Abraham] believed against hope, that he should become the father of
many nations, as he had been told, “So shall your offspring be.” He did not grow
weak in faith when he considered his own body, which was as good as dead
(since he was about a hundred years old), or when he considered the barrenness
of Sarah’s womb. No distrust made him waver concerning the promise of God,
but he grew strong in his faith as he gave glory to God, fully convinced that God
was able to do what he had promised. That is why his faith was ‘counted to him
as righteousness.’” Abraham’s faith is shown to be a faith rooted in trust: trust
both in God’s promises and, more importantly, trust in God that He would be
faithful to His promises. We must note, however, that Paul’s primary reason for
bringing Abraham into the Romans discourse isn’t to give an ‘illustration’ of
faith, nor to define faith per se, but to show that all those who have faith belong
to Abraham’s family. Indeed, Paul’s emphasis upon trust may be a rhetorical
device: after all, Paul says many times throughout Romans that putting trust in
“Torah works” is fruitless when it comes to membership in God’s family, and
that what matters is faith; after all, Paul says in Romans 4, it was Abraham’s faith
that was credited to him as righteousness, not his circumcision (which came as a
sign of his faith) nor the Torah (which came hundreds of years after him). Paul’s
emphasis upon Abraham’s faith as being credited to him as righteousness (that
is, covenant membership before God) is in stark contrast to many Jews of the
day, some of whom (such as Philo of Alexandria) said that Abraham’s merit
came from obeying Torah even before Torah was delivered on Mount Sinai. All
of this is said to make the point that Paul’s aim isn’t to define faith per se but to
define Abraham’s family (and thus God’s covenant family) by faith, as opposed
to “Torah works.” Building an entire understanding of faith off of Romans 4 is
to miss the forest for the trees.
Radical Trust may be a step up from Easy-Believism, but it’s not that much
of a step. Proponents of Easy-Believism often incite non-Christians to pray the
sinner’s prayer, to “trust Jesus for the forgiveness of your sins.” There is an
inherent nature of trust involved: trust not in the self (nor in repentance,
discipleship, or obedience) but trust in Jesus Christ alone. Easy-Believism says it
is an advocate of God’s grace and that any other interpretation or “spin” on faith
is downright heresy and even legalism. Radical Trust is born from the seed of
Easy-Believism, though focusing on a different aspect of faith as the more
critical component: Easy-Believism focuses on faith as a mental assent to the
truth of something, and Radical Trust focuses on trusting in the content of that
mental assent. Practically, Easy-Believism and Radical Trust reach the same
conclusion. There’s still the division between the “Mature Christian” and the
“Carnal Christian”, except now it’s re:worked into a division between the
“Radically Trusting Christian” and the “Barely Trusting Christian.”
Nevertheless, there are many who hold to the “Radical Trust” scheme of
faith and disembark entirely from the Easy-Believism route of distinguishing
between conversion and discipleship, between becoming a Christian and living
as a Christian. Many proponents of faith as Radical Trust do well to cast off the
noose of pragmatic Easy-Believism. While not foregoing faith primarily as trust,
such people will say this trust must manifest itself in a surrender of the person to
Jesus (which is a much more biblical approach to the issue). One who trusts
Jesus is one who surrenders his life to him. Proponents of this Radical Trust are,
generally, frightened of the idea of calling out those with meager trust. Thus
there is a sort of dichotomy in their preaching—“One must have Radical Trust,
but if you don’t have it, then you might be okay—you just need to be
strengthened in your trust.” This is the approach to faith most current in
Western Christianity. Books abound about what genuine, trusting faith looks
like. They nearly always include mental assent as precursors and obedience as
forthcomings. In this way, they are coming to a more adequate understanding of
faith, even though they haven’t grappled fully with the seriousness of the thing
itself. Of the three misconceptions, Radical Trust (in at least one form) is the
closest to biblical faith. The third, which harps upon a different aspect of faith, is
just as dangerous as the first.
Legalism
As I’ve said several times, “legalism” wasn’t as big an issue in ancient Judaism
as many of us think it was. The very idea of Judaism being a law of legalism is
spawned not out of a serious study of ancient Judaism but, I propose, more from
our own inherent fears and experiences with religion. Take, for example, Martin
Luther, who characterized Judaism as a works-based religion where the devout
sought to attain salvation by climbing up the “Jacob’s Ladder” of meritorious
works. Whether you’re a historian or a psychologist, you’ll readily admit that
Luther’s own caricature of Judaism came about as his own reaction against the
legalistic tendencies of the Catholic church. He took his own disenchantment—
and, indeed, rebellion—against the Roman Catholic Church and propelled it
onto ancient Judaism, making the two one and the same when it came to the
practice of religion. And thus the Reformation was born. My point is that while
legalism may not have been the sort of issue in ancient Judaism as we imagine it
was 2000 years later, that doesn’t mean legalism—defined as the idea that one
must climb up a ladder to get into heaven through good deeds/good works—
isn’t alive and kicking today. While ancient Judaism may not have embraced it,
many churches—and many Christians—do. Legalism doesn’t just find itself
birthed in overactive guilt complexes or through psychological and societal
pressures; it is, by many, advocated as a current approach to faith (though those
who propose it wouldn’t label it as such because of the stigma attached with the
word itself).
In Romans (the same chapter where we find faith defined as mental assent
[10.9] and as trusting in God to fulfill his promises [4.18-22]), we find two
statements regarding faith—at the beginning and end of the letter, which is
quite telling—which illuminate faith’s interconnectedness with obedience.
Romans 1.5 reads that through Christ “we have received grace and apostleship to
bring about the obedience of faith for the sake of his name among all the
nations…” Paul perceives his vocation to bring about not just faith, per se, but
the obedience of faith. And in 16.26 he writes again about his commission of
bringing about the obedience of faith. At the beginning of his letter and at the
end of his letter, he defines faith in relation to obedience. One could say quite
honestly and biblically that faith results in obedience (in the same way that we
would say devotion to God brings about obedience; see where I’m going?).
Some, however, point at this and say that obedience is the same thing as faith.
Just as some make repentance to be the same thing as behavioral change, so
some make faith out to be the same thing as behavioral conformity to the
patterns of living set down by God. Legalism easily breeds a life void of all love
for God; it easily paves the road to a religious pride that is an offense to God; it
easily brings the Christian to the point of having absolutely no assurance
regarding his or her salvation because, as we all know, none of us obey perfectly.
These three views are all supported by grabbing proof-texts from Romans
(10.9; 4.18-22; 1.5 and 16.26) and using those texts as the grid upon which one
reads everything else. Easy-Believism will say that the mental assent component
is primary; trust is something that is involved, though its involvement is often
ambiguous, and the faith of obedience is the faith of being obedient to belief.
Radical Trust will say that trust is the key component of faith, which is preceded
by mental assent in 10.9 and manifested (some hope) in the obedience of 1.5 and
16.26. The legalistic portrayal of faith makes obedience the first-and-foremost
aspect, which involves, obviously, the mental assent of 10.9 and the trust of 16.26.
These three aspects of faith—mental assent, trust, and faith’s relationship with
obedience—are integral to understanding the nature of biblical faith itself; yet
instead of trying (as many theologians and Christians do) to figure out which
aspect is foundational, a better move would be to seek a synthesis of the three.
What is it that brings all three into their own glory?
Which is it that brings all these pieces of the puzzle together?
And what portrait of faith do we have once the puzzle is pulled into place?
To answer that question, we must reexamine the very words which are used
in the Greek New Testament to speak of faith and belief.
The Greek root pist) gives birth to three Greek words used to speak of
“faith” or “belief” as translated in English. From this root is derived the noun
pistis), the verb pisteuo), and the adjective pistos).
The noun pistis and the verb pisteuein are generally transliterated into English
with two words that, unlike the Greek, have different “stems”: the noun is
translated as ‘faith’ (from the Latin fides; e.g. Romans 1.5, 8, 12, 17), and the verb
is translated as ‘to believe’ (from the English bileven; e.g. Philippians 1.29 &
Romans 15.13). The adjective pistos, which describes those “with faith”, is often
translated “of faith” (e.g. Galatians 3.9) or as “the faithful” (e.g. Ephesians 1.1 &
Colossians 1.2) (regarding “the faithful,” many will equate it not with the
contemporary meaning of being “faithful” but as describing one “full of faith”;
the nature of this faith is determined by one’s presuppositions regarding the
faith itself). When one takes the English Bible in the one hand and a
dictionary—or knowledge of modern usage—in the other, what’s the result?
“Faith” becomes the belief in the truth of something without any solid evidence
of it being true, and “belief” in something becomes the acceptance of something
as being true or real. Reading these current understandings of faith/belief (and
thus of being “full of faith”) give rise to such beliefs as Easy-Believism and
Radical Trust, where it becomes a matter wholly of the mind (and sometimes the
emotions), with the will being involved in those who are more trusting and more
believing. It all seems like good, solid logic and strong biblical interpretation
until one begins a little research and discovers, much to either surprise and
delight or to surprise and horror, that these English words don’t convey the
deep-seeded meaning of the Greek pist and its outworkings.
Paul’s usage of these words doesn’t tear down the three tenets of faith
explained in the section above. Sometimes he speaks of the content of faith
(what is believed), and in texts such as Romans 10.9, he emphasizes the aspect
of mental assent. Sometimes he stresses the link between faith and obedience by
linking the Greek word for faith (pistis, for example, in Romans 1.5 and 16.26)
with obedience itself. At other times, he puts the spotlight on the element of
trust, such as in Romans 4.18-22. As I’ve said, the danger is trying to figure out
which one is the truest sense of faith, the one upon which all other senses are
built; this leads to the above misconceptions. A better way to go about the search
for an adequate and biblical understanding of faith is to figure out how the
linking of faith with its elements is given its full credit in light of what the Greek
words actually mean.
Faith is of primary importance to Paul. He uses the noun pistis (rendered
“belief” in English) 142 times in his letters, as compared to 101 times throughout
the entirety of the non-Pauline New Testament. He uses the verb pisteuo (“to
believe”) 54 times, and he uses the adjective pistos (“faithful” or “of faith”/”full
of faith”) 33 times. The meanings in quotations represent the traditional
transliterations of the words. Theologians down the centuries have been bound
by the Latin and English roots of the transliterated words, and not until recently
have scholars been asking the question, “Are our transliterations the best ones
possible?” With the above English equivalents of the Greek, the result has been
that scholars have located “faith” and “belief” on a sliding scale somewhere
between the English notions of “trust” and “assent,” the result being a
dichotomy of sorts: the Latin fides qua (the faith with which one believes) and
fides quae (the faith which one believes). However, as recent scholarship has
shown (because this is not a full-blown examination of the subject, I’ll only
provide one critical example below), these transliterations are called into
question. The adoption of new proposals for the transliteration have been shot
down by many, and on what grounds? Grounds on the illegitimacy of the revised
attempts? Not at all. Rather, it is, some have speculated, the terror invoked at the
idea of ‘works-righteousness’ being—even at the slightest—incorporated into
the meaning of these words that more appropriate transliterations—such as
genuine ‘faithfulness’ (in the strictest sense of the word, not in the ‘full of faith’
sense) and ‘loyalty’ are pushed away. The noun, verb, and adjective formed from
the root pist can have alternative meanings than those transcribed in most
English translations20:
The noun pistis can be more efficiently translated as “faithfulness.”
The verb pisteuo can be translated “to believe/to be loyal/to be faithful.”
The adjective pistos can mean “faithful/loyal/committed.”
Where do these “revisions” come from? From the clever minds of those who
wish to distort the scriptures? Not at all. Or perhaps they come from those who
are still swooned by the legalism which is so despised by most of Christianity?
Again, not at all. Rather, research not only into ancient Judaism but into the
Greco-Roman world reveals that these words, all derived from the root pist, were
common, everyday words. A quick example: when one would speak of loyalty to
the Roman Emperor, one could use the verb pisteuo (“I am loyal”). The noun
pistis could be invoked to describe what it was that the Roman Emperor
demanded of his subjects: their loyalty and devotion, their faithfulness to the
Empire. When one spoke of “a good Roman citizen,” one could employ the
adjective pistos. What we find, then, is an intensely political message within the
New Testament. Faith is what the Roman Emperor demands; faith is to be the
defining characteristic of his subjects; faith is to be the disposition of the citizens
to their Emperor or Lord. And yet Christians professed faith in Christ! Do you
see why Christianity could be easily viewed as subversive to the Roman
government? “Those Christians aren’t loyal to Lord Caesar; they’re loyal to
Jesus! They’ve put their loyalty and devotion upon their crucified Jewish leader;
the Romans should have their heads for this treason!” This is where, I think,
Romans 10.9 comes to life: the very act of “confessing Jesus as Lord” is the
equivalent of confessing Jesus as Caesar. It is saying, “Jesus is my King. Caesar
is not.” Only one who is truly “full of faith” would dare make such a
proclamation.
An example of how “faith” can be translated not simply as an element of
mental assent—or even as personal trust—is seen in the autobiography of the
20
Granted, the Greek words can mean the traditional interpretations as well as the
proposed revisions. We must be cautious in deciphering how, by looking at the context
of the Greek words, we transliterate them. For example, translating the Greek root
in the revisionist category wouldn’t make sense: “do you have loyalty?”
However, John 11.25 comes to life when one translates the Greek root in the
revisionist sense: “Jesus said to her, ‘I am the resurrection and the life. He that puts his
loyalty in me, though he were dead, yet shall live.” The blending of the two translations
is seen beautifully in the next verse: “And whoever lives and puts their loyalty in me will
never die. Do you believe this?”
ancient Jewish historian Josephus. Josephus tells about a time, around AD 66,
when he went into Galilee to confront some rebels. One of the rebel leaders, a
man named Jesus of Galilee (“Jesus” was a popular Jewish name; the Messiah
didn’t hold it as a unique title), tried to kill him. Josephus writhed his way free of
the trap and confronted Jesus of Galilee. He wrote in his memoir that he was
“not ignorant of the plot which he had contrived against me…; I would,
nevertheless, condone his actions if he would show repentance and prove his
loyalty to me.” The Greek here is ei melloi metanoesein kai pistos emoi
genesesthai. The translation is an accurate one, and there it is, right before us:
pistos. How is it translated in Josephus’ works? It is translated as “loyalty.” And
yet when we come to the New Testament, we won’t translate pistos as loyalty,
allegiance, or commitment (or any variation thereof).
And why? The answer, I think, is simple:
It doesn’t fit our presuppositions regarding the nature of faith .
Historians are content to translate the noun pistos as “loyalty” in the works
of Josephus; yet biblical scholars seem apt to translate the noun pistos as “faith.”
Why must we be so hesitant to embrace a revision, especially one that is born not
out of theological presuppositions but by looking at the historical usage of the
word? Why must we assume pistos meant “loyalty” in the AD 60s but that it
meant something entirely different just 30-odd years earlier? Words, in an age of
the internet and mobile phones, don’t change meaning that quickly, especially
ones so integral to common speech; what would be the catalyst for change in the
ancient Greco-Roman world?
The reason we are hesitant to acknowledge that our transliterations should
be updated is because, I think, (a) it calls forward a vast reconsideration of the
theological understanding of faith and (b) no one really wants to do that. It
would require reworking some of the major Christian doctrines (though, let me
be clear, I believe this reworking would be to the betterment of our
understanding of the gospel, not to its detriment). We have in our minds a
presupposition regarding faith as being no more than assent or trust so that to
broaden the scope would be, we fear, to invite dark creatures out of the abyss. It
would be to take a step towards, some would say, that ghastly demon of
legalism. However, just because we don’t want something to mean more (or
less) than we had thought doesn’t mean that we should resist the change,
especially in light of historical evidence; and, in the end, reinterpreting pist and
all its outgrowths would result not in a lessening of the gospel message but in a
strengthening of it. It would call forth to our minds the radical nature of faith; it
would bring clarity to the divisiveness between conversion and discipleship,
between the summons of Jesus to follow him and the cry to simply believe found
(1) First, it fails to take into account that the “religious” words so laden with
“religious” connotations today weren’t invented as religious words. They
were “secular” words adopted into religious communities to describe
religious things. The choice of the secular word pistos with its secular
connotations should be a clue that the adoption of it wasn’t done at
random, nor without insight (and those who might say that “faith” used
by the Jews and “faith” by the Greco-Romans were two different things—
one “faith” was Hebraic, the other Hellenistic—should look into
Intertestamental writings, such as 4 Maccabees 13.13, where the pistis of
the Jews killed by the brutal Greek tyrant Antiochus IV Epiphanes is
shown genuine in their loyalty both to God and the Torah: “Let us with all
our hearts consecrate ourselves to God, who gave us our lives, and let us
see our bodies as a bulwark for the Law.”)
(3) Third, it invokes circular reasoning: “We know that Jesus used it in the
religious sense and not in the secular sense, because we know that Jesus
used it in religious ways and not in secular ways.” The fallacy of that logic
is quite evident. Our presuppositions regarding pistos in the New
Testament, not least in the gospels, cement in our minds that pistos must
mean something different than how everyone outside Judeo-Christian
circles used it. When it comes to reading, say, Jesus’ call to repent and
believe in him (such as we find in John 7.38), we can be assured that Jesus
could’ve meant more than the secular meaning, but certainly not less.
Faith: A Revision
What happens when we take the Greek words for faith/belief and revise them
within the English translations of the scriptures? We find that Jesus doesn’t just
call humanity to believe in him, not even just to trust in him, but to commit
themselves to him in loyalty and allegiance. He is the world’s true King, and he
is summoning everyone to put their loyalty and allegiance in him. Paul’s
preaching of repentance—which, as we have seen, is the decision to turn from
idols and to turn to God; that is, the decision to turn from self-love/self-devotion
to loving God/being devoted to God—is thus a call to pistos. Loving God is
being devoted to God, and what is it that God desires of us? Our love? Yes. Our
devotion? Yes. Our pistos (loyalty/commitment)? Yes, yes, yes! The
presupposed chasm between repentance and faith is done away with. Faith
means commitment, loyalty, and devotion to God (not three entities but one).
Those who have the noun pistis are described as those who are pistos; they are
the ones who pisteuos. Those who are loyal are described as the faithful; they are
the ones who have put their loyalty/devotion in Jesus.
The call to faith is a call to put one’s loyalty, commitment, and devotion
upon Jesus the Messiah. Christians are those who are loyal to Christ Jesus. They
are the ones who have committed themselves to him. They have sworn loyalty
and allegiance to him as the world’s true king, and by making themselves his
loyal subjects (in truth, all are subjects of Christ Jesus; but not everyone bows
down before him), they are designated as the faithful, the loyal, the committed.
This commitment and loyalty, this devotion to God in devotion to Jesus, is
manifested in faithfulness and obedience. Here all the streams of thought come
together.
(1) Repentance is the decision to turn from idols and to turn to God. It is thus
the decision to turn from self-devotion to devotion to God.
(2) Loving God, the Christian vocation, is the equivalent of being devoted to
Him. Being devoted to Him is synonymous with being loyal to Him,
aligning oneself with Him in allegiance, and being committed to Him. It
is not just what God desires; it is what He demands.
(4) The old Jewish mantra of repentance being the first half of faith is brought
into fresh light. The question of, “Which comes first, repentance or faith?”
is based upon the understanding that the two operate within totally
different spheres. Repentance is the decision of faith; both are intimately
tied to the nexus of faith, that of faith being commitment and loyalty to
God/Christ. Repentance is the first half of faith, because it is the decision
to put faith in God/Christ. It is the decision to be loyal to God/Christ,
which is the heart of biblical faith.
The presupposed rift between repentance and loving God; the rift between
loving God and even faith itself; the great divide between repentance and faith,
then, is done away with. It all comes into crystal-clear, picturesque, sweeping
clarity. Jesus’ cry to repent and believe in him is a cry to turn from self-loyalty to
being loyal to him. The New Testament mantra of FAITH is the mantra of
LOYALTY. It is what the Roman Emperor demanded of his subjects, even those
who despised him; and it is what Jesus demands of his subjects, even those who
mock him. Those who refuse to acknowledge Jesus as their Lord by swearing
allegiance to him and being loyal to him will reap the due penalty of their
consistent rebellion: they will be cast out of the kingdom.
This schema for understanding faith doesn’t disregard or abandon the tenets
which false misunderstandings of faith cling to. Instead, they are brought into
sharper focus as they are viewed as various parts of the whole:
(1) The aspect of MENTAL ASSENT to the truth of the gospel is kept intact.
The gospel is not an ordo salutis, or “order of salvation,” as is often
supposed. Rather, the gospel is the proclamation of Jesus: not the
proclamation that belongs to Jesus but, rather, it is the proclamation about
Jesus, a proclamation found not in Romans 1.16-17 (which is about the
effects of the gospel) but in Romans 1.1-5: “Paul, a servant of Christ Jesus,
called to be an apostle, set apart for the gospel of God, which he promised
beforehand through his prophets in the holy Scriptures, concerning his
Son, who was descended from David according to the flesh and was
(2) The element of TRUST is not lost. Rather, it’s brought into focus. Caesar
demanded trust from his subjects. They were to trust that he would
protect them from the barbarians; they were to trust that he would be
benevolent towards them (so long as they remained loyal to him). If one
does not trust Jesus as Lord—if a person trusts, rather, in themselves, or in
the things of this world, or in the other lords and Caesars that are
plethora—then there can be no loyalty and allegiance in Christ. The trust
seen in Romans 4 is not just a trust that God will be true to his promises,
nor is it relegated just to trusting in God; rather, it is all of this and more.
It is trusting in the true King to take care of you. It is trusting in the true
King to save and deliver you. There is an eschatological trust which is at
the root of eschatological hope.
(3) The element of OBEDIENCE is not lost. When one hears the gospel
proclamation, mentally assents to its truth, trusts in God and in Christ,
and puts his loyalty (his faith) in God and in Christ (the New Testament
speaks of both “faith in God” and “faith in Christ”), then that person’s
faith in God/Christ will manifest itself in obedience to God/Christ. Thus
all the elements of faith, seen poignantly throughout Romans, are brought
into brighter vision.
the privilege of the super-Christian but the way of life of the ordinary, run-of-the-
mill Christian.
psychological mantra like the “Sinner’s Prayer” doesn’t mean we’re loyal to
Him.
When it comes to evangelism—and, indeed, to our own lives—we must
“count the cost” of what it means to be loyal to God. We must look it square in
the eyes and see that such devotion will not only be difficult at times but that it
will shake to the foundations every aspect of our lives.
It will transform, by necessity, our hearts and minds and souls and bodies
and social spheres.
It will transform the decisions we make.
It will transform everything in our lives.
Being a Christian is about being loyal to Messiah Jesus.
If one is not loyal to Jesus, then that person is not a Christian. Period.
Jesus said to those contemplating whether or not to follow him, “For which
of you, desiring to build a tower, does not first sit down and count the cost,
whether he has enough to complete it? Otherwise, when he has laid a foundation
and is not able to finish, all who see it begin to mock him, saying, ‘This man
began to build and was not able to finish.’” He continues with another way of
saying the same thing: “Or what king, going out to encounter another king in
war, will not sit down first and deliberate whether he is able with ten thousand to
meet him who comes against him with twenty thousand? And if not, while the
other is yet a great way off, he sends a delegation and asks for terms of peace. So
therefore, any one of you who does not renounce all that he has cannot be my
disciples.” (Luke 14.28-33)
Loyalty to Jesus—faith in Jesus—isn’t a half-hearted commitment, it isn’t a
blind leap, it isn’t a spur-of-the-moment decision. Jesus is saying, “Don’t
become my disciple—a ‘Christian’—without thinking things through. Think
about it. Know what it means. Know what it’ll take. Know what is required of
you. And then, if you’re up to it, make the decision to be my disciple. Follow me.
Put your faith, your loyalty, in me. Become a Christian.” When it comes to faith
in Christ, we must not plunge into it without testing the waters. We should think
about it, understand what it means, understand what it’ll take, understand that
which is and will be required of us. Jesus continues, “Salt is good, but if salt has
lost its taste, how shall its saltiness be restored? It is of no use either for the soil
or for the manure pile. It is thrown away.” (14.34-35a) Jesus told the crowds
thronged around him that they ought not commit to him unless they were really
sure they wanted to—unless they were ready to take on loyalty for what it is—
and he then said, applying the concept of salt losing its saltiness, that those who
half-heartedly follow him count for nothing and are useless and to be thrown
away.
In Revelation Jesus told the angel of the church of Laodicea to tell the
church there, “I know your works: you are neither cold nor hot. Would that you
were either cold or hot! So, because you are lukewarm, and neither hot nor cold,
I will spit you out of my mouth.” (3.15-16) The point is clear: if you’re not willing
to be truly loyal to Jesus, then you ought not even try. Devotion to God is a
matter of the will, and if the will doesn’t really desire devotion to God, any
behavioral effort to be so will falter (behaviors don’t change the heart; the heart
changes behaviors). It is better to wear no pretense of being a devotee of God
than to call oneself such and, in reality, to be disloyal.
When one has made the decision to repent—the decision to turn to faith in
Christ—does this mean that obedience will be, or even have to be, perfect? Not
at all. Having lived a life of loyalty to Self and loyalty to other gods—not least the
gods of Nietzsche, Freud, and Marx (Power, Sex, and Money)—, we will wrestle
with other allegiances and struggle in our devotion to God. But if we are truly
devoted, we will possess God’s Spirit, and his Spirit will cleanse us of those other
allegiances and transform us inwardly so that obedience becomes not a burden
and not a struggle but a joy and a delight. Assuming that devotion must be
perfect right off the bat is an ignorant assumption. It’s ludicrous. But don’t
assume, either, that devotion to God—loyalty to Christ—will leave you
unchanged. If the devotion is sincere, change will—without fault and without
exception—happen.
We must ask ourselves, “Where does our devotion lie?”
To whom or what, if not God, are we devoted?
To whom or what, if not God, do we put our allegiance?
Some are devoted to their dreams of success, their desire for wealth, or the
fulfillment of their sensuality; some are committed to the possession of a nice car
or a nice house with a white picket fence; some are devoted to having a spouse
and raising a family. Some dreams are less toxic than others. Some may even be
honorable. But even the most noble dreams and desires, the most honorable
allegiances, arise from our thirst for glory, power, and self-fulfillment; in others
words, the allegiance to our own kingdoms over and against the kingdom of
God. Such dreams, commitments, loyalties and allegiances are rooted in what St.
John calls “the desires of the flesh and the desires of the eyes, and pride in
possessions,” which come “not from [God]” (1 John 2.16) Our decisions,
choices, and preoccupations in word, thought, and deed illuminate where our
loyalties lie. All dreams not of God, no matter how honorable or noble they may
seem, are derived from the selfishness and greed of man, out of mankind turned
in on himself. Such loyalties lead to shattered and ruined lives. Devotion to God,
loyalty to Messiah, means making God and his kingdom—not our own selfish
wants and desires—the priority of our lives.
We must, then, examine our lives and ask ourselves, “Am I truly devoted to
God? Or am I devoted to myself and my own selfish wants and desires, to my
own kingdom?” The sketch of our lives, drawn by our choices and
preoccupations, will tell us whether we are devoted to God or something else. If
a person is obsessed with a romantic life, then that person is devoted to finding
romantic love more-so than he or she is devoted to God. If a person constantly
dreams of becoming a famous musician and spends his time practicing the
guitar and writing and rewriting songs, then that person is more devoted to his
fame and success than to God. A person may stand in the pulpit or be a
missionary in a foreign world; a person may go to church every Sunday and lead
Bible studies; a person may work in the inner city and suffer with the homeless;
but if that person doesn’t make God and His kingdom the priority of her life,
then she is not truly devoted to God. It’s quite possible for someone to convince
himself that he is devoted to God; but if that person’s choices, decisions, and
preoccupations are not arranged—or being rearranged—in such a manner
making God and His kingdom the priority, then that person has fooled himself
into believing he is devoted to something to which he is not devoted. Simply put,
in analyzing where our loyalties lie, we need only look at that which is most
important to us; that which is most important to us is that to which we have
sworn allegiance. Everyone is devoted to something. Most are devoted to
themselves in whatever manner that manifests; but devotion to God means
devotion to something outside ourselves, something greater than ourselves,
something more important than our own selfish wants, needs, and desires ; it is
loyalty to God and His kingdom over anything and everything else.
We must examine our hearts and, consequently, our lives to see if we truly
love God or ourselves. Our choices, decisions, and preoccupations reveal
whether we are devoted to ourselves or to God. Such an examination forces a
person to face the reality of his or her devotion, removing any blinders that
might be present and seeing clearly, perhaps for the first time, whether he or she
is truly loyal to Christ, whether he or she is truly “in the faith.” If a person
examines his life and sees that he is not really devoted to God but, rather,
devoted to his own self and his own little kingdom—that he loves himself rather
than God—then what is such a person to do? Such a person must make a
conscious, genuine decision to either love God or not love God, to be loyal to
Jesus or to be loyal to the other gods and other lords (in other words, the person
must make the decision to either repent or continue in “unbelief”). We must be
honest with ourselves and with God. There is no room for half-hearted devotion.
If the person decides, genuinely, from his heart, to devote himself to God, he
must commit himself to God, repenting of all former devotions.
The life of the person who loves God—who is loyal to him—is not a perfect
life. We must not become perfect in our loyalty in order for God to accept us.
Even St. Peter, loyal to Jesus, wavered in his loyalty, denying even to know Jesus;
but Jesus took him aside and asked if Peter loved him, and Peter replied “Yes”
three times. Peter’s devotion to Jesus wavered but it did not crumble. When we
repent, when we turn from self-allegiance to Jesus-allegiance, we will of course
wrestle against former allegiances to other persons or things, especially
allegiance to the self. There will be struggling in obedience. But God does not
demand that our faith, our loyalty, be mountainous before He accepts it. Even
the weakest devotion to God, loyalty as small as a mustard seed, will be
accepted; but this faith, albeit weak, is still faith, and it must grow. There is a
legitimate faith that can “move mountains” (produce miracles) in 1 Corinthians
13.2; and in 1 Corinthians 12.29, it is apparent that St. Paul doesn’t believe all the
faithful have this kind of faith. In Romans 14, Paul distinguishes between
Christians who are “weak in the faith” and those who are “strong in the faith.”
In 1 Thessalonians 1.8, he acknowledges that the Thessalonian Christians’
loyalty to Jesus is renown, and in 2 Corinthians 10.15 he speaks of his hope for
the Corinthian Christians’ loyalty to Jesus to increase. The question “How much
faith is necessary?” is answered “Faith as small as a mustard seed!” But this
faith must, by its very nature, grow—and this “growth” is not the result of
human laboring but of the Spirit working within the soul of a person.
A life of loyalty to the self is a life marked by despair and futility.
Pursuing a life of loving the self leads to ruined and shattered lives.
But a life of loyalty to God is the “the abundant life” in John 10.10.
In contrast to the wasteland created by self-loyalty, loyalty to God paints a
beautiful portrait of a life filled with purpose and hope. It is a life marked most
poignantly not by hopeless sorrow or suffering but with joy and peace even amid
sorrow and suffering. It is a life of interaction with God’s Spirit and
transformation through that Spirit into a creature that reflects the glory and
beauty of God; in other words, it is a return to “the glory of God.”
with Jesus is not the same kind of friendship we have, say, with our best friends.
Before you think I am being heretical, let me explain: when it comes to my best
friendships, the friendship is a friendship between equals. Not so with Jesus. Is
Jesus my friend? Absolutely. Is he my homeboy? No. He’s my King. Denigrating
friendship with Jesus into nothing more than what we find on the streets
between fellow drug dealers is a tragic misstep.
On the other side of the spectrum, we can easily lose sight of our friendship
with Jesus and perceive his kingship as one marked by the same things we see in
monarchies and dictatorships, past and present, in our world. We should not let
the corrupted, selfish, and all-too-political kings inform our understanding of the
type of king Jesus is. He is not, as some have speculated, an angry and vengeful
king, threatening to tear peoples’ worlds apart if they don’t self-flagellate in
obedience.
That Jesus is king is truly wonderful news. The world’s true king is not like
the other kings who have gone before. Jesus, and his kingship, is characterized
by self-giving love, self-sacrifice and suffering alongside his subjects. Jesus is a
compassionate and merciful king, slow to anger and eager to forgive (I have
always suspected that God is more eager to forgive us than we are eager to
receive His forgiveness). We who have put our loyalty in Jesus will, as James
says, stumble many times and in many ways. Amid these stumblings and sins,
our king doesn’t reject us. He drowns us in his love and grace, refreshing our
broken and wounded hearts, mending and healing us, lovingly guiding and
directing us. He knows his subjects are not yet glorified; he knows we are
accosted by all sorts of temptations and that we are made of dust. His
disposition towards his subjects, even sinners as awful as me, is one of love and
benevolence and favor. It is comforting that the King of the Cosmos is the one
who healed the lepers, forgave the adulterers, and embraced the unclean. He is
the one who offered himself on a cross not for the faithful but for the faithless,
and he is the one who, while doing it, begged the Father to forgive those who
put him there.
The kings of this world are self-serving, brutal, two-timing and
manipulative, caring more for their thrones than for their subjects. And even if
an unjust king can be patient and graceful, how much more a king who stepped
down from his throne to secure the rescue of his subjects, even taking his place
between the rebellious and their fate, going through that fate and carving a path
straight through to the other side? “It is a joy and a privilege to serve a king like
Jesus. May we gaze upon the cross and bow down before our gracious, loving,
and merciful king, submitting to him any part of ourselves that we have yet to
surrender.”
(1) The first answer goes all the way back to Genesis 3. God demanded the
loyalty of His image-bearers, but instead of being loyal to God, the image-
bearers were loyal to themselves. Their own inwardly-focused loyalty
resulted in the catastrophic Fall recorded in Genesis 3 and the subsequent
spread of evil into the world and the dehumanization of mankind. Instead
of trusting in God, mankind trusted in themselves. Instead of being
devoted to God, mankind was devoted to themselves. When God’s rescue
operation reaches its climax at the death and resurrection of Jesus, we find
that the call issued to fallen humanity is the call to repent, to turn back to
God, to turn from self-devotion to God-devotion. It is a call to faith, a call
to loyalty. Faith is the reversal of what happened in Genesis 3, the
antithesis to what mankind has been bathing in since conception. The
faith of Abraham seen in Romans 4.18-25 serves as a sort of model, a sign-
post, to the faith that Christians have in the crucified and risen Lord and
the God who is his Father. This faith is marked by humility before God,
trust in God (which Paul harps upon in Romans 4), and the resuscitation
of image-bearing living. Abraham turned from devotion to his self to
devotion to God and this devotion led him east to Egypt and then north
into the Promised Land. Although under the snare of what happened in
Genesis 3, Abraham—no doubt by the power of God—stuck a hand out of
the mire and grasped the hand of God. The faith that God demands of His
people, the faith that God demanded of the ancient Israelites and now
demands of the entire world, is the faith which is loyalty to God, an
alignment with one’s God-given, image-bearing vocation. It is what God
has expected from us since the dawn of creation.
(2) The second answer frames faith not simply within the grand narrative of
God-revealed history but within the context of the crucified and risen
Messiah. Jesus was crucified, rose from the grave by the power of the
Spirit, and he ascended to heaven and took his throne alongside God,
serving as King and Judge. There’s a new king in town, and what does he
demand? Loyalty. Even if the subjects refuse to acknowledge him as king,
refuse to swear allegiance to him as king, and even mock the very idea of
him being the king, this does not change: he is their king. He demands of
changed life. Theologian Wayne Grudem writes that “genuine repentance will
result in a changed life. In fact, a truly repentant person will begin at once to live
a changed life, and we can call that changed life the fruit of repentance.” John
the Baptist declares that those who profess repentance—such as the Pharisees
and Sadducees—must show the fruit of their repentance, i.e. the result of a
changed life. It isn’t that the changed life is what matters; the repentance is
always key. But if repentance—turning one’s loyalties from self and onto God—
is genuine, then it will result in a changed life: the restructuring of priorities, the
forsaking of sin, the embracing of the good.
Many people can claim to be penitent, but, as the old saying goes, “the
proof is in the pudding.” If a person claims repentance but doesn’t change, then
that repentance isn’t repentance at all. At best it’s a mockery and a sham. At
worst it’s downright self-deception (a person can believe he or she has repented
when the reality is the complete opposite; this is worse than a blatant lie,
because even with a blatant lie, the person really knows where he or she stands.
Not so with self-deception). Genuine repentance will result in a changed life,
and that changed life is evidence that the repentance is genuine. The changed
life doesn’t make repentance good anymore than good fruit makes a tree good;
but just as good fruit is a testament to the health and vitality of a tree, so a
changed life is a testament to the validity and genuineness of repentance.
A Multi-Textured Fruit
What type of life change does repentance produce? The obvious answer is that
people start doing things differently. Going to church, reading their bibles,
praying more, etc. These are all perceived as very “spiritual” things, but none of
them constitute the life-change that is demanded. All of them are very good
things (who would deny that being involved in a local church, engaging in God’s
word, and spending time in prayer are bad things?) but when it comes to the
fruit of repentance, the changed life is much more steeped in the day-to-day
affairs of life itself.
This is seen in Luke’s retelling of John the Baptist’s call to repentance; Luke
includes a passage that Matthew doesn’t, and it’s a passage where the question
of this section—“What does life change look like?”—is posed by those to whom
the Baptist was speaking: “And the crowds asked him, ‘What then shall we do?’
And he answered them, ‘Whoever has two tunics is to share with him who has
none, and whoever has food is to do likewise.’ Tax collectors also came to be
baptized and said to him, ‘Teacher, what shall we do?’ And he said to them,
‘Collect no more than you are authorized to do.’ Soldiers also asked him, ‘And
we, what shall we do?’ And he said to them, ‘Do not extort money from anyone
by threats or by false accusation, and be content with your wages.’” (Luke 3.10-
14)
The changed life isn’t one prescribed by a set list of behaviors (yes, there are
rules, but more on that anon). John the Baptist is operating within the paradigm
of the Jewish understanding of the fruit of repentance, and his operation can be
understood within the paradigm of repentance I’ve laid down thus far. It goes
like this: (a) repentance is the decision to devote oneself to God rather than to
Self; (b) the result of this change of devotions is a restructuring of every aspect of
life; (c) this restructuring involves doing many day-by-day things differently,
doing things in obedience before God rather than obedience before Self; (d) the
fruit of repentance—the changed life that results from the changing of
devotions—will be evidenced very pragmatically in one’s situation-in-life. All of
us are devoted to ourselves in various ways, and when we take that devotion and
turn it away from ourselves and put it upon God, the obvious result is a
restructuring of life, a reorientation of our thoughts and behaviors, and this
restructuring and reorientation will affect the situations and circumstances we
find ourselves in. The common peasants, the tax collectors, and the Roman
soldiers all operated within different situations and circumstances, and their
newfound devotion to God would result in a change in their day-to-day living
within those situations and circumstances. The nature of repentance manifesting
itself differently in various circumstances is seen in the repentance-cries of the
Old Testament prophets, where the exhortations to repentance are coached in
terms dependent on the situation: forsaking worshipping false gods (Jeremiah),
promoting economic justice (Amos), and taking the Jerusalem temple seriously
(Malachi), to name a few. The point is that when a person repents, the
manifestation of that repentance can take a variety of forms.
The “fruit of repentance,” a changed life, can manifest itself in a variety of
ways. It involves our former devotions, whatever they may be, being crucified as
our devotion is placed upon God and his kingdom. Crucifixion is intrinsic to
resurrection, and so the restructuring involves not just a crucifixion to the world
and its desires but a resurrection to God and his desires, which will manifest in a
restructuring where devotion to God becomes the highest priority. Obviously
this is hard work, but another section will examine that in detail. The point here
is that the fruit of repentance shouldn’t be confined to a certain list of behaviors
(“do this, don’t do that,” which is eerily similar to the “don’t taste, don’t touch”
aesthetic legalists of Colossians). Yet, at the same time, a common thread is
woven through all of this, and it is the thread picked up in Amos 5.14-15: :”Seek
good, and not evil… Hate evil, and love good…”
Amos 5.14-15 is an example of the theme running through all of the repentance-
cries found in the Old Testament. Seeking good over evil—in other words,
purging evil and doing good—is what the prophets demanded in repentance.
Those who repented—turned their devotions to YHWH rather than keeping
them fixated on the plethora of other devotions, be they wealth, success,
prosperity, fame, or the cesspool of false gods available at the time (all of which
were embraced because they gave people permission to indulge their own
fantasies)—would prove their repentance genuine by abhorring that which was
evil and doing that which was good. Translated into western thought, such an
exhortation could easily slide into a sort of legalism: don’t do this, do that,
maybe you can do this (but only in special circumstances). Legalism replaces
the laws of the Old Testament with the “laws” of the New Testament. This
understanding of the ethical exhortation to do good and forsake evil misses the
point entirely. “What does it mean to purge evil? What does it mean to embrace
the good?”
“Sin” literally means to “miss the mark” of being genuinely human. Those
things which are sin, be they internal or external, are those things that are in
discord with genuine human living. To purge evil—or to purge sin—is to forsake
those ways of living that “miss the mark” of genuine human living. This is what
Paul is talking about in Colossians and Ephesians when he speaks of “putting
off” those things that are “of the flesh” or “of the world”; he is saying that we are
to purge those things not in accordance with genuine human living. Those who
have turned to God, who have put their faith in Christ, who have partaken in the
death and resurrection of Jesus in baptism, are redeemed. They are restored, at
least in part, to their God-given identity as genuine human beings, a restoration
which will be both ratified and completed at the resurrection of the dead and the
subsequent glorification. Purging evil/sin is a matter of not just acknowledging
that death and resurrection has taken place but a matter of embracing the
participation. Those who are members of God’s family have partaken in the
death and resurrection of Jesus. They have been raised anew, and (this is Paul’s
point in Romans 6) they need to live like it. Purging evil is hard work; it involves
crucifying the flesh with its sinful desires (which is an outworking and
As disjointed as the above sections may be, how can we draw them together into
a coherent whole regarding the fruit of repentance? In other words, having
defined the fruit of repentance as a changed life that directly results from the
changing of devotions, how might the fruit of repentance be born in a person’s
life? There are three stages involved: (1) The Decision, (2) The Reorientation,
and (3) The Implementation.
The Decision
No one just slides into repentance. While it is true that many are drawn to the
faith over a long period of time, becoming more and more comfortable with the
idea of loyalty to a crucified and risen Messiah, there will come a point when the
person decides to repent, the point where the person makes the conscious
decision of the heart and mind (of the will) to devote oneself to God and his
kingdom. This decision is the repentance demanded in the New Testament, and
it is the door which swings open into the beautiful landscape of faith. Following
the decision, there generally comes about a time of re:orientation.
The Reorientation
Re:orientation is not a once-in-a-lifetime thing: it continues throughout a
person’s life. It’s a process which begins at repentance, and it is intrinsically tied
to the “renewing of the mind by the Spirit” Paul speaks of in Romans 12.
(1) Naming the Gods. Reorientation involves, on the pragmatic level, the
naming of the false gods whom we have served. The triumvirate of false
gods in the western world includes money, sex, and power; reorientation
involves the nauseating process of analyzing our hearts and lives to see
where our devotions lie. Ultimately the greatest idolatry is devotion to
the Self, but this devotion to the Self will manifest itself in plethora other
devotions. We must do the hard work of looking ourselves in the mirror,
doing a bit of honest introspection, and dredging forth those false gods
and naming them for what they are: parodies at best and posers at
worst, all futile to worship because they deceive with promises of fully-
flourishing living but deliver only ruin and dehumanization. Naming
the false gods is a necessity, but reorientation doesn’t end there.
(2) Forsaking the Gods. Having named the gods, we must forsake the gods.
We must, as Paul says in Colossians, “crucify” them. We must fight
against our ingrown tendencies to worship and serve them. We must
wage war against them, using whatever means necessary. Each time
they whisper their lies in our ears, we must rebuttal with a naming of
those lies and a defacing of those gods. This is difficult, because having
worshipped these gods for so long, we are innately inclined to abide by
them and their ways even when they’re not at the forefront of our minds.
We must walk, talk, and think in a cautious manner, perceiving them
each time they raise their ugly heads.
(3) Discover God’s Will. There’s a lot of talk about “God’s will” these days,
and the talk is often misleading. Suffice it to say that when I write, here,
of the will of God I’m operating not within the framework of the
sovereignty of God (a doctrine I uphold) but within the sense of God’s
“will” being that which God desires. The Greek word for “will” in this
sense can also be transliterated “wish, dream, desire.” Having named
the gods, and as we forsake the gods, we must discover what it is that
God desires of us. What does devotion to God entail? It involves, first of
all, loyalty to Jesus. But what does that loyalty look like fleshed-out? We
must discover that which God desires of us, publicly and privately,
corporately and individually, in our thoughts and actions and speech
and dispositions. We must seek out that which is pleasing and
honorable to God, that which is in accordance with devotion to God and
his kingdom.
This is all good and well. The problem with processes is that when we go
through them, we expect to reach an ending point, when the process is
complete. Yes, this process has an ending point: glorification. But until that
point, this process continues throughout life.
Naming the gods.
Forsaking the gods.
Discovering God’s will.
This isn’t just something that happens at the offset of a person’s renewed
relationship with God. It is to be a pattern of life that stretches to the point of
death. This process, which involves both crucifying and resurrecting, won’t be
culminated until the ultimate crucifixion of evil and the ultimate resurrection of
the dead. Nevertheless, we are to seek the “renewing of our minds” so that we
will be able to decipher that which is good, honorable, and pleasing to God. But
how do we go about this reorientation of our thoughts, worldviews, and
controlling stories? How do we go about perceiving the gods (we must perceive
them before we can name and forsake them) and discovering what it is that God
desires? Many answers are available, but here I wish to highlight what I believe
to be three fundamentals when it comes to the renewal of the mind: (a) the
scriptures, (b) the church and (c) the Holy Spirit.
First, The Scriptures. A paraphrase of 2 Timothy 3.16-17 could read, “All
scripture is God-breathed and useful for teaching, for rebuke, for correction, and
for training in righteousness, so that the person of God may be capable and
prepared for doing that which God desires.” Scripture is like a Swiss Army knife,
with all kinds of tools to help you get the job done. There’s the tool of teaching:
scripture teaches us about God, ourselves, the world, and it reveals to us the
framework of history within which God’s plans are unfolding—where history has
been, where it is, and where it’s going (in opposition to all those who say history
is cyclical, the Bible tells us that it’s going somewhere). There’s the tool of
rebuke: it shows us where we’re wrong in our thinking, in our hearts, and in our
lives. And the tool of rebuke is bolstered by the tool of correction: the Bible
doesn’t just point out wrongness in ourselves for the sake of pointing out our
flaws; it’s also a tool in itself for bringing about change where things have gone
(or stayed) awry. There is, to top it off, the tool of training in righteousness. The
Bible doesn’t just provide a new frame for thought; it doesn’t just show us where
changes need to be made and the way to make those changes (itself a tool in
bringing about change); all of this comes together so that we might learn, both
by growing in knowledge and by living it out, how to become—in our hearts,
minds, and souls—who God desires we become in our behaviors and thinking.
Understanding reality is integral to all of this; if it weren’t, then there’d be no
concern for reorienting our minds around the gospel. As Paul makes clear, here
and elsewhere, this reorientation is needed so that the people of God will be
competent, ready and prepared to do God’s work in the world, not “for him” in
the sense of us having the entire weight of the kingdom on our shoulders, but
“with him” and “for” his glory. 2 Timothy 3.16-17 shows us that while scripture
is there to reorient our thinking, this reorientation of thinking is there to reorient
our living.
These aren’t two separate functions but, rather, two sides of the same coin.
The way we live is, to a great degree, conditioned by our thinking.
The Christian vocation is to participate in the advancement of God’s
kingdom through the world, a participation fleshed-out in deed and prayer, and
scripture enables us, with all its tools, to do that. A Swiss Army knife isn’t just a
compact way to have a bunch of tools in your pocket should a situation arise. All
the tools are carefully chosen so that a soldier can do his duty efficiently, even in
the toughest of spots. The scriptures, with all its tools, enables us as God’s
people to function efficiently. It enables the people of God to do what we’re to
do, to become—as individuals and, more importantly, as the church—what God
wants us to become. Thus when it comes to the reorientation of our minds and,
consequently, the reorientation of our lives, the scriptures are a God-given
equipper to be utilized alongside—or, rather, under the supervision of—the
Spirit.
Second, God has given us the Church. The Christian life is a team sport. It’s
community-oriented. The majority of the ethical exhortations found in the New
Testament are not written to individuals but to churches, and the exhortations
directed at individuals are, for the most part, intended to enable the individual to
function efficiently within the corporate church body. When it comes to the
reorientation of the mind, private prayer and spiritual disciples are effective, but
left by themselves they pave the road to a private, spiritualized existence. It
becomes homo incurvatus en se all over again except with religious overtones.
Reorientation of the mind happens best when the private disciplines of prayer,
scripture reading, generosity, etc. are practiced corporately within communities
of God’s people. Community-practiced scripture readings, worship, prayer, and
service are foundational in the reorientation of the mind. It is telling that the
“tools” of scripture found in 2 Timothy 3.16-17—teaching, rebuke, exhortation,
correction, etc.—are also foundational elements within healthy, flourishing
churches.
The church’s mission is both inward and outward: inwardly, the church is to
exist as a community of edification; outwardly, the church is to exist as a
community that carries God’s kingdom into the world on the wings of God’s
Spirit. Many churches lose the balance between the two, becoming sequestered
communes of “holier-than-thous” or social clubs that are all about social justice
but fail to cultivate the Christian habits of faith, hope, love, and the fruit of the
Spirit. It is interesting—and telling—that churches flourish most when these
twin vocations—two sides of the same mission—work in sync. An inwardly-
healthy church will be an outwardly-fruitful church. But I digress: when it comes
to the reorientation of the mind, a community of friends and leaders is pivotal.
The community is there to show us the way when we’re not sure where to go, to
get us back on track when we go in the wrong direction, and to encourage us in
our development towards Christian maturity. Members of the Christian
community who have been partakers of the kingdom of God for longer than we
have can tell us firsthand what in our hearts and minds needs reorienting, and
they can show us the simple—though sometimes ominous—steps towards that
end.
And, greatest of all in the renewing of the mind, is the Holy Spirit. There is
much to say about the Spirit of God, but here I want to emphasize that the gift of
the Spirit, promised beforehand in scripture (not least in the prophets Jeremiah
and Ezekiel) is given, at least in one sense, so that we can be enabled to both
perceive what needs to change and to go about changing it. After all, the renewal
of the mind spoken of in Romans 12.1-2 is a renewal of the mind by the Spirit. As
we pursue reorientation, we do it by soaking in the scriptures, engaging in
Christian community, and we do it in prayer—asking God to reveal the false
gods, asking God for the strength to name them and forsake them, pleading with
The Implementation
Having made the decision to repent, and having begun the serious and lifelong
process of reorientation, the next step—one that will happen naturally if our
repentance is genuine—is an implementation of that repentance.
Implementation is what happens when we both forsake devotion to false gods
and embrace devotion to the true and living God. It is what happens when
repentance—the changing of devotions—is manifested in our lives. This
happens, as I just said, on two fronts: forsaking and embracing. This forsaking
of our old devotions and the embracing of our new devotion involves a
restructuring of our lives.
Having named the gods, forsaken the gods, and having discovered God’s
will, we must restructure our lives. Many people, turning their devotions upon
God, quickly slide back into the old ways of living. More often than not, a key
factor in this unfortunate event is that people don’t reorganize their lives in such
a manner as to make God and his kingdom the main priority. Our lives are
dictated by the gods whom we worship. If we worship sex, then we may spend
our time agonizing over our physical appearance, flirting with members of the
opposite sex, and doing our best to become the sort of person who can find a
good lay. In the same way, if we worship power, then we will organize our lives
around the pursuit of power; if money is the god we worship, then our lives will
be organized to the end of accumulating wealth. We all worship a variety of false
gods—much like the ancient pagans—but the point is that when we finally
repent, our patterns of living, our morning-afternoon-and-night habits, need to
be constructed around the worship of the true God.
This involves cutting out certain activities, habits, and even relationships,
and replacing them with different habits, activities, and relationships. We see
this in the old story of King Manasseh who repented amidst God’s judgment; he
returned to his land as king and went about both crucifying and resurrecting:
crucifying the worship of those pagan gods—tearing down the altars and
disemboweling the pagan statues—and resurrecting the worship of YHWH—
cleansing the temple and promoting revival throughout the kingdom. An entire
chapter could be dedicated to this subject, but we should be aware that the
restructuring involved—the habits cut out, the activities weaned, the
relationships gently but lovingly extinguished—will differ from person-to-person
dependant upon that person’s situation in life. Yet no matter the differences in
the restructuring, the overarching theme will be similar: the purging of evil and
the embracing of the good, the forsaking of the false gods and the embracement
of devotion to YHWH. Again, this is a lifelong process. As we grow and develop
towards Christian maturity, we will discover areas in our life where we still bow
to the false gods, and the response ought to be continual repentance: a
crucifixion of those false devotions and surrender of those devotions upon God.
It isn’t easy, it isn’t comfortable, but it’s life-giving.
The fruit of repentance talked about in Matthew 3 (and in the similar stories in
the other gospels) and in Acts 26 is the changed life resulting from repentance.
When a person makes the decision to repent, as we have seen, that person
inaugurates a reorientation of the mind by the Spirit which results in a
restructuring of the life. The restructured life is arranged in such a manner that
the crucifixion of false gods takes place and devotion to God grows. Thus the
“fruit of repentance” could be understood as the restructured life following
repentance. If repentance is genuine, then the life will be restructured.
Perfectly restructured? No.
Statically restructured, in the sense that once the restructuring takes place,
all reconfiguration is finished? No.
Nobody’s perfect, and our restructuring will continue throughout life as our
minds and hearts are continuously renewed, albeit, in some cases, in spurts and
spasms. What matters is that the fruit of repentance is there. If there is no
restructuring of life—and, mind you, the restructuring of life doesn’t mean
becoming a desert monk, and the restructuring may begin in small ways—then
the validity of the repentance is called into question.
(2) Following the initial decision to repent, our lives are to be marked by
constant repentance. None of us are perfect. We all sin in many ways,
some peoples’ sins more noticeable than others (the media doesn’t
decide who’s good and who’s bad; just because we’re not on TV for our
sins doesn’t mean that we’re better than the evangelical preacher who
had an affair). This constant attitude of repentance, of confessing our
sins and kneeling before God in submission and rededication, is a
lifestyle. As we do this, we continue to progressively move towards fuller
and more genuine human living. This isn’t something we do on our
own; God’s Spirit is intimately involved, and our progression thus isn’t
something to claim as our own. It’s all a gift of God.
(2) In addition to preparing ourselves for the future, we are also integrating
that future with the present. God’s kingdom began at Easter and will be
consummated at Jesus’ appearing; between those two cosmic events,
there is the interim period—“the present evil age”—in which God’s
kingdom is slowly but steadily spreading throughout the world,
infecting not just individual human hearts but entire families and
societies, and there is ample evidence in the scripture that God’s plan,
prior to consummation, is for the kingdom to spread in such a way that
entire civilizations will bow down before God as Creator and Jesus
Christ as Lord. As the gospel advances, and as people turn to Christ in
faith and repentance, the new life that is embraced is a signpost to the
future and also a way of bringing that future to bear in the present.
When we sacrifice for others, when we treat others with mercy and
compassion, when we announce the kingdom of God, when we do all of
this, we are not merely acting as servants of God’s kingdom but also as
agents of it: we bring the future to bear on the present, and the result is
a transformation of hearts and lives.
As we preach repentance, let’s remember that it’s not about just going to heaven
when we die. It’s about embracing our God-given identities as his image-
bearers. It’s about owning up to the fact that we’ve gone astray, that we’ve
abandoned our Maker, that we’ve been disloyal to the True King. It’s about
kneeling down in our tears to be raised to new heights in genuine human living.
It’s about experiencing Christ’s victory on the cross in our own lives, as his
sacrifice and consequential defeat of evil is celebrated in our own resurrection in
baptism and anticipated in our future resurrection from the dead. Repentance
isn’t about adhering to a different set of rules, or even embracing a “religious”
life. It’s about being led by the Spirit, transformed by the scriptures, and
sustained in community as we come to grips with what human living looks like
in the shadow of the cross. Ultimately repentance is about restoration. It’s about
finally finding the answer to the age-old philosophical question, “Why am I
here?” as well as its cousin, “How do I experience genuine human living?” It’s
about experiencing resurrection, newness of life, and participating in the Future
while living in the Present. I close this treatise not with a doxology, nor a
footnote, but with a quote from the early church father Ignatius:
From now onwards the sensible thing would be to get back to our
right minds while there is still time to repent and turn to God.
Restoration. Rescue. Renewal. It’s at the doorstep, offered before us, in greater
and greater degrees: let us repent, and continue repenting, and taste the
goodness of God and the goodness of his kingdom breaking into our lives and
into our world!