And shalt return unto the Lord thy God.
The proper signs of repentance
Moses is here dealing with the signs of “repentance,” which begin in the humiliation of the heart, and end in the reformation of the life. In the New Testament there two words translated by our English word “repentance”: one of them conveys specially the notion of changing one’s mind as to things--seeing things in a different light, and then shaping one’s conduct accordingly. But it is necessary for us to distinguish even between sorrow for sin and repentance. Sorrow has two results; it may end in spiritual life or in spiritual death; and, in themselves, one of these is as natural as the other. Sorrow may produce two kinds of reformation--a transient or a permanent one. Sorrow is in itself, therefore, a thing neither good nor bad; its value depends on the spirit of the person on whom it falls. Fire will inflame straw, soften iron, or harden clay; its effects are determined by the object with which it comes in contact. Warmth develops the energies of life, or helps the progress of decay. It is a great power in the hothouse, a great power also in the coffin; it expands the leaf, matures the fruit, adds precocious vigour to vegetable life; and warmth, too, develops with tenfold rapidity the weltering process of dissolution. So too with sorrow. There are spirits in which it develops the seminal principle of life; there are others in which it prematurely hastens the consummation of irreparable decay. Repentance is a state of mind and heart, but it may be merely a cherished sentiment, in which, as a mere sentiment, the man hopes to find his satisfaction. Such repentance is, and it always must be, ineffective. It is self-centred; it is disguised pride. By its fruits you must know it. The repentance that does nothing is nothing. This is our constant difficulty--men are perpetually trying to sever sentiment from con-duet. They want to keep the two spheres separate, and hope to be right towards God in heart, and to do what they like in their life. This self-delusion God’s Word persistently resists. Religion cannot keep only in the heart sphere. It must come out and show itself in the life. It will be white and frail as a plant growing in a dungeon if it be kept wholly within. Every element of the religious life must act, must speak. Shut it up and it will fade away. And now let us see if we can trace the stages of the Divine dealing still, with individuals, in Moses’ foreshadowings of God’s dealings with His people Israel.
1. God’s will, as He has been pleased to reveal it, controls heart and conduct; and enables each man to judge and appraise himself. When Job came into the full sense of God, what could he do but exclaim, “I abhor myself, and repent in dust and ashes.”
2. Man’s self-will, resisting the Divine will, brings man into sin. Pollok pictures, in his poem, the misery of lost souls as this, that they see the words wherever they turn, “Ye knew your duty, and ye did it not.” That is sin.
3. Sinful man comes under Divine discipline, which may take the ordinary forms of the natural consequences of transgression, or which may be special afflictive Divine dispensations. The prodigal son only came into the sufferings and humiliations that always follow a life of vice.
4. The aim sought to be reached by Divine discipline is the conviction of sin, self-humiliation on account of sin, and the earnest desire to recover from sin. The sufferings following sin may bring remorse, but that is no holy feeling. God would work the godly sorrow of repentance. Remorse keeps a man away from God, hugging to himself his bitterness. Repentance leads a man to God, dissolves him in the tears of confession, and yet kindles a new hope in the soul. And now--
5. We come to the point of our text. When a penitent comes back to God, He looks for the signs of the penitence. He finds them partly in that very return to seek His forgiveness; but He looks for it also in the steadfast endeavour of the penitent henceforth to obey. (The Weekly Pulpit.)
Repentance necessary
We have heard much of the Gospel containing comfort for the mere sinner, and if by the mere sinner be meant one that has nothing to plead but the mercy of God, through the atonement, like the publican in the parable, it is for such, and only such, that the Gospel contains consolation. But if by the mere sinner be meant the impenitent, though distressed sinner, it has no comfort for such in their present state. Repentance is necessary to forgiveness, in the same sense as faith is necessary to justification; for it is not possible for a sinner either to embrace the Saviour, or prize the consolations of the Gospel, while insensible to the evil of sin. There is no grace in the Gospel, but upon the supposition that God is in the right, and that sin is exceedingly sinful, and, consequently, none to be perceived or prized. (Andrew Fuller.)
Thoroughness in repentance
In the War Cry there was a picture of a man kneeling at a table and praying, “Lord, make a good job of me.” The words are rough enough, but the meaning is, in many respects, admirable. The poor man feels that he is a failure, and that he needs new making. His feeling is that none but the Lord can accomplish the necessary renewal. His fear is lest he should not have the full work wrought upon him, and that his conversion should not be thorough and complete. He has no need to fear that the Lord would not operate effectively, for the great Worker never leaves His work half done. Still, the very fear of being but partly sanctified shows his earnestness and his desire to be truly and fully converted from the error of his ways. Lifeless, questionable religion is poor stuff. Oh, that the Lord would make a good job of us. (C. H. Spurgeon.)
Repentance
Repentance is neither base nor bitter, it is good rising up out of evil. It is the turning of the soul from the way of midnight to the point of the coming sun. Darkness drops from the face, and silver light dawns upon it. True regret for wrong never weakens, but always strengthens the heart. As some plants of the bitterest root have the whitest and sweetest blossoms, so the bitterest wrong has the sweetest repentance, which, indeed, is only the soul blossoming back to its better nature.
Whole-heartedness in religion
A dealer in pictures who makes it his business to find as many new painters as possible, both in this country and abroad, was asked recently in regard to his methods of selecting pictures to buy. He was very frank in his talk, and one thing which he said is shrewd enough to be worth quoting. “Of course,” he said, “with my experience I am able to judge whether there is promise in a painter’s work, but I never buy with any idea of putting the painter on my list until I have seen the man and talked with him myself. I always watch him closely, and I never buy his pictures unless his eye lights up when I talk to him about his work and about his profession.” The artist whose heart was really in his work could not discuss it without kindling, and the man who did not paint from the heart was not the one whose pictures the dealer wanted. And so God desires whole-hearted obedience to His commands.