What should arouse us to repent.
What should arouse us to repent.
§ 141. Finally, what more effective “stimulus” and “incentive” [ὁρμητήριον ac incentivum] (as they say) can there be for repenting than the manifold usefulness of true conversion? But there are other reasons of no little importance and weight, such as the following. (I) The majesty of God, who commands: “Return to Me, rebellious Israel, said the Lord. Be converted, O rebellious sons, said the Lord” (Jer. 3:12, 14). “Be converted to Me with all your heart” (Joel 2:12). Such commands exist throughout Scripture in both the Old and New Testaments; in fact, the sum of all the messages delivered by the patriarchs, the prophets, Christ Himself, John the Baptist, and the apostles is this: “Repent and believe the Gospel” [Mark 1:15]. “God commands all people everywhere to repent, because He has fixed a day on which He will judge the world in righteousness” (Acts 17:30–31). This command of God bears witness of His goodwill, that He is pleased by the repentance of the sinner. “As I live, says the Lord, I do not want the death of the sinner, but that he be converted and live” (Ezek. 33:11). Tertullian (De poenit., p. 554):
I believe it is audacity to argue about the goodness of a command of God. We should take heed to it not because it is good but because God has commanded it. The majesty of God’s power is prior to the showing of obedience. The authority of the person commanding is prior to the usefulness of the one who serves. Is repentance good or not? Why do you turn this over in your mind? God commands it. But He does not merely command it, He also urges it. He invites salvation with a reward, swearing and also saying to the living person that He wants him to believe in Him. How blessed are we in whose case God swears! How wretched we are if we do not believe the Lord when He swears! Therefore what God recommends so strongly, what He testifies under oath in human fashion, we surely ought to approach and keep with the utmost seriousness.
Those are the words of Tertullian. Just as God holds sin in the greatest hatred, so also He takes His greatest delight in man’s repentance. Just as he who attacks and destroys a man’s deadly foe pleases him very much, so also he who attacks and drives out his sin through repentance very much pleases God. Sin is the greatest shamefulness, the greatest deformity and wickedness, worthy of extreme hatred. God is the greatest good, the greatest blessedness, the greatest beauty, to be loved and honored above all things. From this one may gather how pleasing and acceptable to God is man’s repentance, through which he is turned from the greatest evil to the greatest good.
(II) The kindness of God, who promises. The most kind Lord not only stirs us to repentance with His commands but also invites us to use it with His promises. “Be converted from your evil ways; why will you die, O house of Israel?” (Ezek. 33:11). “Return to Me, and I will return to you, says the Lord of Sabaoth” (Mal. 3:7). “Come to Me, all you who labor and are heavy laden, and I will refresh you” (Matt. 11:28). Tertullian (De poenit., p. 553): “He who has appointed punishment through judgment has also promised pardon when He said to the people: ‘Repent, and I will save you.’ And again: ‘I live, says the Lord; and I want repentance rather than death’ [Ezek. 33:11]. Therefore repentance is life when it is placed ahead of death.” Cyprian (Sermon de coena): “He does not allow the sacrifice of a contrite heart to be rejected. As often as I see you sighing before the Lord’s face, I do not doubt the inbreathing of the Holy Spirit. When I see you weeping, I sense Him pardoning.”
The long-suffering [μακροθυμία] of God must be assigned here, too, by which He awaits the conversion of a person and receives him with joy when he returns to Him (Rom. 2:4; Luke 15:20). Ambrose (De poenit., 1, ch. 4, p. 155): “God is waiting for our groans, but only our temporal ones, that He may remit our eternal ones. He awaits our tears that He may pour out His pity. He awaits our conversion that we may turn back to Him for grace.” Tauler often repeats: “God is after us so vehemently, as if His divine essence were going to flow away.” Raymundus de Sabunde (Theolog. natural., ch. 301, p. 359):
God sees how a person behaves in his own house, that is, in his own heart: that he is a better and nobler member of mankind but still a deadly foe of God. He not only holds on to that which God hates the most and which displeases God the most, but he also defends it, nourishes it, conceals, increases, and intentionally brings it into his house—indeed, not only into his own house but even into God’s house. For on the basis of true righteousness he is the dwelling place of God and belongs to God. What is worse, man makes Him the enemy which He was not before and always plans how he will be able to multiply this. But God sees all these things, etc. Thus it is strange and beyond all miracles how God so patiently sustains His mortal enemies. God’s limitless clemency and goodness thus appear to sustain and feed the receivers and concealers of His enemy
(sin).
He could not have planned greater goodness. From this it is clear that God does not want people to perish but waits for them to repent. Because of God’s great goodness and waiting, man should run to repent and immediately drive out from himself the enemy of himself and of God, etc.
In the explanation of Song of Songs (ch. 5[:2], “Open to me, my sister”), it is read that Rabbi Issa said: “The holy and blessed God says: ‘My children, open to Me the one entryway of repentance. It is as large as the eye of a needle. Then I will open for you the entries to My mercy through which chariots have been able to pass.’ ” The apostle’s sweet statement belongs here: “We are ambassadors for Christ, as though God were exhorting through us. We beseech you for Christ, be reconciled to God” (2 Cor. 5:20). You hear that God not only offers us reconciliation but also asks us with a sort of overflowing goodness that we return to grace with Him.
(III) The delight and the joy of the angels. Christ says (Luke 15:10): “I say to you, there will be joy before the angels of God over one sinner who repents.” The reason for this joy is stated in the German postil for the Third Sunday after Trinity. God takes pleasure in a man’s conversion, so why not also an angel, whose will is completely in harmony with the divine will? The love of the angels is sincere and perfect. What is so strange about their rejoicing over a man’s conversion? They rejoice over the restoration to their fellowship of those whom they had seen placed in the darkness of hell and in Satan’s power. Tertullian (De poenit., p. 558): “The heavens and the angels present there rejoice over a man’s repentance. Also you who sin intentionally, you see where the rejoicing will be over you,” etc. Hence the ancients constantly repeat: “The tears of the repentant are the wine of the angels. While we wholeheartedly weep over what we have committed, the angels appoint a feast day in the court of heaven. As often as we do good, the angels rejoice and the devils weep. As often as we leave the path of good, we make the devil happy and cheat our angels out of their joy.”
(IV) The frail and fleeting character of our life. “Jehovah, make me to know my end and the measure of my days, what it is. Behold, You have made my days a few handbreadths, and my lifetime is as nothing before You” (Ps. 39:[4–5]). “Teach us to know the number of our days, that we may walk with a wise heart” (Ps. 90:12). “What is our life? It is a mist that appears for a short time and then vanishes” (James 4:14). It is not within a man’s power to add the space of even one hour to his life. Therefore since nothing is more certain to us than death and since nothing is more uncertain than the hour of our death, how will anyone knowingly and willingly dare to remain in such great peril, through which he can incur eternal punishment and endless sadness? Let us not increase our sins by despairing. The gate of repentance has been set before us. Let us not increase our sins by hoping; the uncertain day of death has been appointed. “He who has promised forgiveness to the penitent has not promised a tomorrow to him who continues securely in sins,” as Prosper says (Sentent. August.). Cyprian’s statement (Contra Demetr., tract. 1, p. 105) pertains here: “When a man has died, there is no longer an opportunity for repentance, no effect of satisfaction. Here, life is either lost or kept. Here, the worship of God and the fruit of faith provide eternal salvation.”
Therefore let us not put off our return to God until death throws us into the coffin, lest God turn the raven toward us tomorrow. As it stands in Sarc.: “. . . so that life does not turn into vapor and the body turn into a corpse.” Just as the raven left the ark of Noah and did not return again but rested on dead bodies, so also he who puts off his repentance does not return to the church but defiles himself with the offal of worldly lusts. Augustine (on Psalm 102): “God is not looking for delay in the raven’s croak but confession in the dove’s cooing.”
(V) The harm and ugliness of the life of the impenitent. “Do you despise the riches of divine goodness and patience and long-suffering? Do you not know that God’s kindness is leading you to repentance? But according to your hardness and impenitent heart you are storing up wrath in the day of wrath and of the revelation of God’s just judgment” (Rom. 2:4–5). (Θησαυρίζειν [“to store up”] indicates piling up God’s wrath little by little so that at last it is all stored up like a treasury. “Is not this laid up in store with Me, sealed in My treasuries? Vengeance is Mine; I will repay,” Deut. 32:34–35. “The Lord has opened His treasuries and brought out the weapons of His wrath,” Jer. 50:25.) What else is the way of the impenitent but a perilous alienation from God, an offense to the angels, and slavery to Satan? Basil (Orat. exhortat. ad bapt.): “Satan attempts to commit sin today and persuades righteousness for tomorrow, saying, ‘Today belongs to me; tomorrow belongs to God.’ ”
** [Basil again] (vol. 1, p. 448): “The serpent is cunning in his deception, for he understands how we people freely accept the present time. All human action hurries into the present and watches. Therefore he steals today’s time from us cleverly and makes the hope of a tomorrow. After tomorrow comes, the wicked divider again asks that we give him today and give God tomorrow.” **
Christ’s blood was shed for the sins of the whole world. Therefore He cries out to all sinners that they should come to repentance and accept the fruit of this precious blood, namely, cleansing from sins. Therefore anyone who continues in impenitence treads, so to speak, upon Christ’s blood.
** Christ teaches in Luke 24 that there is no place for the forgiveness of sins without repentance. He connects “the preaching of repentance and of the remission of sins” [Luke 24:47]. “I said I will confess against myself my unrighteousness to the Lord, and You forgave the impiety of my sin” [Ps. 32:5]. A very beautiful type of this is set forth in Leviticus 16, where on one and the same day the Israelites afflict their souls on the Day of Atonement and a goat carries off their iniquities into the wilderness. **
As the balsam tree does not put forth its powers if it is planted on a hard rock, so Christ’s blood does not wash a hard and impenitent heart of its sins. Just as repentance glorifies God (in fact, through it we give testimony of God’s righteousness and mercy), so also the impenitent life brings disgrace to God since it does not acknowledge that God is the just judge and severe avenger of sinners. “They did not repent, that they might give glory to God” (Rev. 16:9). Furthermore, a bad conscience is always connected with the impenitent heart. What is more wretched and bitter than that? “God dwells in the contrite and humbled heart” (Isa. 57:15), but “our sins” which are not removed through repentance “separate God and us” (Isa. 59:2). Ephraem (De compunct. cordis, bk. 1, ch. 2): “Tell me: if someone throws you into the mud and filth and forces you to stay there always, will you bear that freely? If, when you are worm and ashes, you cannot bear this, how is it that you want the unstained God, who usually remains with and in His saints, to dwell in you, who are all befouled and filled with muddy horror?”
(VI) The enormity of the offense given to others. He who loves iniquity kills his own soul; he kills not only his own soul with guilt but also his neighbor’s soul with his wrongful example. “Woe to the man by whom scandal is given!” (Matt. 18:7).