September 23
September 23
In his infinite patience, God holds back his judgment and gives us room to confess and repent once again.
When our children were young, I sometimes withheld meting out discipline, giving God room to work confession and repentance in their hearts. I did this because I wanted my parenting to be shaped not only by God’s law but also by his grace. I was aware that God’s law was a wonderful gift to my children, defining for them the kind of world they had been born into, a world ruled by a perfectly holy God who had the wisdom and authority to tell them how to live. God’s law gave our children moral tracks to run on, a guide for how they were designed to live. But I also was aware of the limits of God’s law. I knew that God’s law on its own didn’t have the power to transform their hearts. I knew that they would never gain acceptance with God by keeping his commands, because they would never keep them perfectly. The law was essential for my kids, but it had no saving power whatsoever.
So, there were many moments when I would come to my children not as a disciplinarian, to mete out some consequence, but as a messenger of mercy, pleading with them to confess and repent. I told them that confession was humbly admitting to the wrong that they had done, that repentance was a change of heart that resulted in a change in how they lived, and that they needed God’s empowering grace to do both.
My parenting days come to mind as I read Zechariah. The book of Zechariah is near the very end of the Old Testament. Zechariah writes to the remnant who are now living back in the promised land, calling them to repentance. With tenderhearted mercy, God pleads with this generation not to do what their mothers and fathers did: resist God’s warnings, rebel against God’s commands, and face his judgment as a result.
Here’s how Zechariah begins:
In the eighth month, in the second year of Darius, the word of the Lord came to the prophet Zechariah, the son of Berechiah, son of Iddo, saying, “The Lord was very angry with your fathers. Therefore say to them, Thus declares the Lord of hosts: Return to me, says the Lord of hosts, and I will return to you, says the Lord of hosts. Do not be like your fathers, to whom the former prophets cried out, ‘Thus says the Lord of hosts, Return from your evil ways and from your evil deeds.’ But they did not hear or pay attention to me, declares the Lord. Your fathers, where are they? And the prophets, do they live forever? But my words and my statutes, which I commanded my servants the prophets, did they not overtake your fathers? So they repented and said, ‘As the Lord of hosts purposed to deal with us for our ways and deeds, so has he dealt with us.’” (Zech. 1:1–6)
I will forever be blown away that our holy God withholds his judgment and, in mercy, stoops to plead with his children to return in repentance to him. And you should be too.