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“Is it possible for fallen angels to repent?”
In C.S. Lewis’s Narnia stories, Aslan never tells anyone any story but their own. When he walks with Edmund after his restoration, Lewis comments, “There is no need to tell you (and no one ever heard) what Aslan was saying.”
I’ve always thought those lines insightful. Scripture is silent about many things that inspire our curiosity, the status of spirit beings who “left their proper dwelling” among them.
In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.
In Islam, the word tawbah refers to the process of asking Allah for forgiveness. The ritual is comprised of three stages:
Western culture, on the other hand, has largely dispensed with the practice of seeking forgiveness, not least because a public confession of wrongdoing may create liability issues. So you get bafflegab like, “I regret if anyone was offended by ...” instead of a sincere apology.
Tom: Immanuel Can, can you recall the last time someone unsaved asked you to forgive them?
Some people live in active denial of the trends around them, oblivious to the spirit of the age and to all intimations of God’s coming wrath. They are dull by choice.
For example, the Lord Jesus criticized the Pharisees and Sadducees for failing to correctly interpret the “signs of the times”. They were skilled at predicting the weather and ordering their workdays accordingly, but blind to the fulfillment of Old Testament prophecy all around them. More evidence would not be given to them because they willfully ignored the signs they had already seen.
This is not that.
“He found no chance to repent, though he sought it with tears.”
Esau couldn’t turn back the clock and undo losing his birthright and blessing to Jacob. That’s really what the writer to Hebrews is talking about here. Genuine repentance for sin and reconciliation with God are always options unless your heart is so hard you would never do it or your mind so dull you don’t realize it’s necessary or desirable.
But a do-over that gives you back the thing you lost? That’s rarely possible, and it wasn’t for Esau. Blessing and birthright were gone forever. So Esau experienced all kinds of regret but no real repentance.
What we’re seeing in the mainstream American media for the last week or two is the tears of Esau. In some cases, they are the tears of a crocodile. But the clock will not roll back regardless.
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In April of this year, the US House of Representatives passed a bill called The Antisemitism Awareness Act. If signed into law, the act would make it illegal to say the Jews killed Christ, as the Bible plainly and repeatedly states. The bill gives examples of online statements that would now be classified as hate speech and violations of the law, including “using the symbols and images associated with classic anti-Semitism (e.g. claims of Jews killing Jesus or blood libel) to characterize Israel or Israelis”.
If it’s anti-Semitic to say the Jews killed Christ, then the apostle Peter, a Jew himself, was a flaming anti-Semite.
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Sin has consequences. The vast majority of these are no fun. The usual result of experiencing the consequences of sin is sorrow, and sorrow is an emotional mechanism designed by God to produce better things in the long run. Sadly, some people never get beyond their sin-induced misery to the state of mind God intended it to bring about, like prodigals in the pigsty to whom it never occurs to return to the father’s house.
Biblical repentance is not merely feeling bad about the consequences of your sin, but recognizing its offensiveness to God and doing something about it. That’s what this second message in Zechariah 7 is all about.
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Two months before Zechariah began to receive messages from the Lord for the people of Judah, the prophet Haggai received his first recorded revelation, a message to the two men who represented civic and religious authority among the returned exiles, the governor Zerubbabel and the high priest Joshua. The Lord instructed these two to lead the people in rebuilding the temple, a project they had abandoned almost two decades prior.
Twenty-four days later, work began at the new temple site. Slightly less than a month after that, the Lord sent a word of encouragement to them through Haggai. Ten days later, Zechariah received his first message.
The people of Judah had shown their willingness to obey God when they realized obedience was the only alternative to unrelenting economic misery and personal frustration, but their hearts still needed serious spiritual work.
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Joel chapter 2’s appeal to return to the Lord has a timeless quality.
Unusually for prophetic scripture, Joel has left undescribed the specific sins of Judah for which God is calling her to account. We can only guess the “when” and the “what” he feels compelled to address. The prophet could be calling any generation of Israelites to return to behavior suited to a covenant relationship with their God — any generation, that is, that still understands the meaning of fasting and mourning, of grain and drink offerings, of the trumpet blown to call together the solemn assembly.
Israelite worship came with a lot of baggage.
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“Should Christians experience regret?”
“Regret” is not a word that appears very often in scripture, though the concept is certainly there. Matthew writes about the regrets Judas had when he saw that Jesus had been condemned to death. Perhaps he saw his betrayal as an opportunity to cash in, but never imagined the Jews would be so successful in pressuring Pilate to carry out their wishes. Upon seeing that his betrayal had sent the Lord Jesus to the cross, he suddenly wished to dissociate himself from his previous actions.
I was sixteen, I think, watching a young man in his twenties give his testimony.
It was one of those beauties so full of clichés you might have been forgiven for mistaking it for the creative output of a team of Hollywood screenwriters or perhaps the lyrics to a Bryan Adams song. He had even been a sailor, if you can imagine. I mean, who goes to sea to act out these days? He’d tried the “broken cisterns”, as the old hymn goes, and “Ah, the waters failed.”
Except it seems they tasted pretty good to him at the time.
“Are there people who will never change?”
A friend of a friend served as an elder in his local church for many years. From all reports he was good at it. When he chose to step away from his responsibilities in his fifties, people wondered why, and a mutual acquaintance was nosy enough to inquire.
Here is the essence of his reply. Excuse the paraphrase.
It’s easy to do the right thing for the wrong reason.
In our previous post, God anticipates Israel’s response to its discovery that its false gods cannot deliver it from the invading Assyrian army. Like an adulterous wife whose new relationship goes sour, the nation compares its current situation with better days in the past, and concludes, “I will go and return to my first husband, for it was better for me then than now.”
Israel is finally prepared to do the right thing, but she has not actually repented of her idolatry. She is simply looking for the best deal she can swing for herself, a God who will take her back on her own terms.
Mining the Minors and Immanuel Can’s usual Thursday post have swapped spots this week. I’m sure you can guess why.
As I noted in the fifth instalment in this series, the latter verses of Hosea 2 — in my English translation at least — divide nicely into three sections, each of which conveniently begins with the word “therefore”. These divisions are not completely arbitrary. They reflect three movements in God’s program for idolatrous Israel, a program to which Israel must respond either positively or negatively. I also noted that the English translators of the ESV signal the intentionality of these movements with the words “I will”.
The first movement in verses 6-8 gives us two of God’s “I wills” and one of Israel’s.
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| By the oddest of coincidences, the standard of the Nineveh Protection Units looks like ... a compass. |