Category: Repentance

J. Thomas Johnson

Is it for lack of a God in Israel that we pray to human rulers?

It is not from Egypt that the Lord wishes to rescue us, but from the tyranny of sin.  For our wickedness has risen to the heavens.  No one is righteous; not one.  The Lord has heard of the wickedness of the earth, and His Spirit is grieved, not only by the world, but also by the Church.

God has sent us from our buildings and our rituals, for they were not pleasing in His sight.  And He is not anxious for our worship services to return.

Our wound is mortal, and still we pray to idols of our own making.  We seek God with prayers, but not prayers for our holiness or for righteousness to rain down from the heavens.  We pray for the restoration of the things we have built.  God’s people are consumed with love for our own offerings, but not for love of God.

Woe to the earth and all that are in it, for God will no longer accept the offerings of our lips.  We must seek a new heart and a new spirit, and God will hear our prayers.  But we must not seek a kingdom of God on the earth, for God will never heal our land.

We who are the people of God, we who are called by His Name, must lay aside the idols we have made.  This nation that we have built and the constitution that we have written are mere idols to the greatness of our ancestors.  God gave a law—Torah—to Israel.  No other Law has been given on which to found a nation.  God gave a law—Torah—in Jesus.  No other Law has been given to the Church.

We worship the works of our own hands in God’s Name, while wickedness reigns in our hearts.  We fight and pray and wrangle over our own glory and achievements, so proud of what we have built, and God’s Law is trampled in the streets of our cities.

Now God has turned His face from us.  He gives us over to the idols we have made.  God will now let our laws and our constitution save us, for in these things we have placed our hope.  Instead of pleading with God for freedom from sin, for the water of life and the bread that never spoils, we send our prayers to human rulers as we fast and wail in the streets and in our prayer closets.  To whom do we plead when we protest?  Do we call upon humans for our salvation?  Our ancestors called to God, and in His time He delivered them.

Is it for want of a God in Israel that we put our hope in doctors and scholars and politicians?  Can they rescue us?  They have made themselves gods to us, and we have worshipped them.

We have said in our hearts, “Look at what our genius has produced!  We are safe and prosperous!  Nothing can harm us.  We have settled the world; we have unlocked the mysteries; we have become gods.  Nothing in creation can oppose us.  We need only time, and we will stand atop the chaos.”

But, we are fools.  Where were we when God tamed the ancient waters?  Where were we when God called all that we are from the void?  Where were we when God called forth life from death and light from darkness?

It is the hand of God that stirs the universe.  It is the breath of God that fuels the stars.  And it has been under the protection of God’s wings that humanity has lived and moved and had our being.

We have given God’s glory to the gods of nature and mathematics.  We have said, “The world has made us, and new we will make the world.”  But we have deceived ourselves.  For God has made us, and God has protected us.

We were to be beings made in God’s image, but we have chosen created things as our makers.  We have fashioned ourselves after animals, and we have worshipped our creators in books and articles and awarded each other for penning folly.

We have mistaken God’s largesse for absence and God’s mercy for non-existence.  In every generation God has sent prophets to warn us.  In every generation God has called out to us.  But we would hear only what our hands had made.

The lies spoken of Jesus have been spoken of God.  Though we have brought destruction into the world, we have accused God of authoring our suffering.  We have called God a criminal.  We have put God on trial.  And we have condemned God to death.

Was God the one who brought such violence into the world that creation had to be set against us for its own protection?  Was it God who taught us to enslave one another for profit?  When in God’s Law did He ever command such a thing?

We have blamed God for our inventions, and we have judged God for not forcing us to forsake them.  But, God covenanted with humanity in the beginning that the earth would belong to humans.  God made the world very good, but we have remade it in our image.  God’s Law was righteous, but it was steeped in the sins we have invented.  God pointed us to righteousness, but we redirected His Law to wickedness.

And then God came to us Himself, and He spoke again the words He had spoken to Moses.  And again He taught us that all humans were descended from one man, and that all were created to be His children.

But, we refused even His Son.  And we strained out the Law, finding only the sin in which it was rooted.  Like a dog returns to its vomit, so God’s people return to their filth, and always in God’s Name.

Is God responsible for our interpretations?  Is God responsible for our hard-hearts?  Yet, God stands accused before human judges for actions that were not His and for words that He did not speak.

Pilate asked God if He was a king, but Jesus despised the word.  King is our word.  We invented kings.  God is no human king.  God’s kingdom is not of this world.  This world is ash and dust and wind.  God is Spirit and life, and His kingdom does not end.

So, Jesus answered Pilate, “You say I am a king.”  God is the Truth.  But Pilate responded that there is no Truth.  He meant there is no God.  There are only created things and what they see and what they say and what they hear and what they do.  What foolishness!  And Pilate knew it was foolishness, which is why he feared to execute Jesus.  But Pilate stuck to his foolishness because his life was built upon it.

And so we heralded Jesus as king as we tortured His flesh, and we sang His praises while we put Him to death.  We praised human leaders, while we executed God.  And then we slept in darkness, where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth.

But God is no human.  God allowed humanity the only power given to the darkness—the power to kill.  But, God is light, and God lives.  His Name is I Am.

Many years have passed from that day to this, but humanity has only retraced its steps.  As it was in the days of Noah, as it was in the days of Sodom and Gomorrah, as it was in the days of Jesus, so it is again.  There is nothing new under the sun.

We still worship the work of our own hands and blame God for the consequences of what we have made.  We cry out to our false gods and false leaders and then proclaim that the heavens are deaf and mute.

Seek a new heart and a new spirit, and God will hear you.  Cry out to Jesus, and call on Him to assume the leadership of the earth, and God will hear from heaven.  Forsake your idols and your sensual indulgences, and God will make you new.  Stop hiding behind your reasonable rebellions, and God will restore to you what has been defiled.

The locust storm that has begun has been held back by God’s mercy for these long years.  But we have begged and pleaded to be free of God and free to stand on our own.  God has heard our prayers, and He has agreed.  What is coming comes by our request, and God will not relent or change His mind.

But for those who revere God’s Name, for those who will turn from their wickedness and their rebellions, those who will fight for nothing but holiness and will walk in the footsteps of Jesus, for those who will sacrifice the pleasures of Egypt and pursue God’s peace with all their hearts and souls and strength, for those Who hear God’s word and obey, for those who believe in God and in the words of Jesus, God will not forsake you.  God will be a light for you in the darkness.  God will be safety for you in the storm.  Though you now sit in the valley of the shadow of death, you will fear no evil.  Though evil accosts you, your faith will prevail.

But for those who look back with longing on what is perishing as Lot’s wife looked back on Sodom and Gomorrah, God will withdraw His Spirit from them.

Again, God is on trial.  As in the days of Noah and of Jesus, God stands accused by the wicked of their own wickedness.  Again the world cries for God’s death.  And again God will grant their request.  Only those who call on the Name of the Lord will be saved.  The rest will receive that for which they have prayed.

Do not perish, people of the earth.  For God desires the death of no one.  There is only one road that leads to life.  He has come to you, and therefore you have found Him.  For those who deny themselves, take up their crosses, and follow Jesus, you will find life, and life abundant.  But to those who will not repent, your prayers are about to be answered.

Do not lose faith, people of God.  God has not forsaken us.  We can return to Him because He has returned to us.  Love your enemies, pray for those who persecute you, care for the widow and the orphan and the stranger.  Be filled with the Spirit and do not indulge the flesh.  What God has called sin is sin.  What God has called righteous is righteous.  All the rest are idols.  Follow Jesus.  We are very near the end, but there are miles to go before we meet our Lord’s coming.

Rev. J. Thomas Johnson, B.A., M.Div.

When we have chosen to betray the most sacred and solemn of our commitments may we hope for restoration?  When we have lived into patterns and paths that have done violence to those for whom we have covenanted to care, may we pursue reconciliation?  Are some choices too dastardly, some patterns too devastating, some rebellions too grotesque for us to be redeemed?  Perhaps some reading this have stood in this space, a space of utter desperation, a space in which the way before us seems to lead only into increasing darkness and distance from both God and our neighbors.

In the tradition of the Hebrew people, this is the moment out of which Psalm 51 has arisen.  What might the fallen say?  How might God and our human community respond?  Is there hope before us, or is hope now forever lost?  Much depends on our theology—that is, our understanding of God.

From the earliest days of the Christian Church, it has not been uncommon for the so-called “God of the Old Testament” to be depicted pejoratively as a harsh, sometimes tyrannical ruler—a head-of-household patriarchal dictator who is easily disappointed and anxious to discipline His wayward children.  From Marcion to Jonathan Edwards to contemporary ‘hell-fire’ expositors, the wrath of the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob has been emphasized and variously interpreted. And it must be confessed that the Christian Scriptures do reveal the seriousness with which God treats sin, as well as the willingness and the capability of God to act to forestall its pervasiveness.

But, of course, there is more to say.  After all, if this is all there is to say of God, then the hope of those who transgress seems fleeting.  And, indeed, the First Testament does have other things to contribute to the conversation.  As willing and capable as God is to act in judgment, the Torah and the prophets and the writings of the First Testament insist repeatedly that the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob is gracious and compassionate, slow to anger, and abounding in hesed (steadfast love).

This is where the psalmist, standing on a road of deepening darkness, moving toward increasing isolation from God and neighbor, begins his turning away, his repentance, his cry to God.  He cries out not to a just God or a wrathful God or a disappointed patriarch, but to a merciful and compassionate parent.

¹     Have mercy on me, O God,

according to your steadfast love;

according to your abundant mercy

blot out my transgressions.

²     Wash me thoroughly from my iniquity,

and cleanse me from my sin.

Psalm 51:1-2, NIV

The word translated ‘abundant mercy’ is the Hebrew rachămim, which refers to the innards of the lower abdomen.  In the plural, as it appears in psalm 51, it is often translated as ‘intestines’ or ‘loins’.  In the singular it can refer to a uterus or womb.  Among the Hebrew people this is the anatomical area associated with compassion, hence the translation above.

The psalmist does not appeal to God’s justice or even God’s holiness, but to God’s womb, to God’s intestines, to God’s compassion.  Samuel Terrien in his commentary on the Psalms has written:

The compassions of Yahweh are those of his femininity, for the words “tender mercies” are the plural of majesty for the singular “uterus” or “womb,” which never forgets the child it has conceived, nourished, and brought forth (Terrien, The Psalms, 404).

Hope in the darkness of the deepest human failure is to be sought in the compassion of God.  This is humanity’s primal and only lasting hope, and it is toward this that the cry of the repentant is directed.  There is no hope of forgiveness, none of reconciliation, none of cleansing or redemption or reconciliation or transformation if the God who draws near when we pray is not gracious and compassionate, slow to anger, and abounding in hesed.

This is, of course, only the beginning of psalm 51.  The psalmist proceeds to confess his rebellion against the fundamental shape of the Kingdom of God (vs. 3-5), and implores God to cleanse him, create a clean heart within him and breathe a fresh breath into him which might animate him in the ways of the Kingdom (vs. 6-12).  And he covenants again with God that these acts of compassion on the part of God will result in his own grateful response.  He will live into God’s Kingdom, confessing with his heart, soul, mind, and strength the goodness and orderliness of God’s good creation (vs. 13-17).

There is much to explore in verse three and following.  However, I want to pause and reflect on the appeal to God’s compassion with which the psalmist has begun.  It is sometimes presumed that those who have fallen short must begin their journey toward God and neighbor with contrition—that is, with a confessed and perhaps ideally emotional realization of the wickedness of their actions.  Of course, these features of repentance are necessary in proper time.

However, restoration and redemption of the fallen is not rooted in the individual.  Restoration and redemption is rooted in the compassion of God.  We do not hope in our earnestness or our contriteness, believing that somehow by our pitifulness or our authenticity or our earnestness that God might be manipulated.  It is the compassion of God that is the source of our hope for deliverance.  To say it another way, because God is gracious and compassionate, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love, we can repent; we can imagine restoration and reconciliation; we can hope.

We will not be restored by contrition or sincerity, by intention or conviction, by sacrifice or by ritual.  These may be describe the road that we must walk out of the darkness, but they are not the source of our deliverance, nor can we simply trust them to save and to restore us.  We will be saved by the compassion of God.  And so repentance begins, not with us, but with God’s compassion.  And redemption proceeds in faith along the road that God’s compassion carves out of the darkness.

That road, no doubt, will include confession and contrition and forgiveness and reconciliation, and the rest of the journey revealed through the prophets of Israel, the Gospel of Jesus, and the interpretations of the Apostles.  But, repentance is rooted in the compassion of God, and this is no idle observation.  Bound up in this confession is the realization that our restoration does not depend on human effort or capability, but on God’s compassion.  If we hope in repentance as a process or ritual, our hope lies in our capacity to complete what we’ve started.  If we hope in God’s compassion then our hope rests in the capacity of God to bring to completion what has begun in Him.  May it be so.