Darryl's Blog
What is repentance? Part Three
Ron Martoia on repentance:
Clearly, if we want to understand the deep, rich, and full dimensions of the word repentance (and any number of other key biblical words and concepts), we must consider all three streams flowing together: the New Testament context, the first-century secular and historical context, and the first-century religious context outside the Bible. When we do this with repentance, we find that the word has to do with the orientation, directional heading, and trajectory of an entire community, culture, or nation, not just the front end of a private, personal conversional experience that results in a guaranteed seat in heaven. So, when we hear an evangelist on the corner of Michigan Avenue and Ohio Street saying, "Repent, for the kingdom of God is at hand," he is saying something entirely different from what John the Baptist was saying.
Perhaps the best way to bring all this together is to realize that "repentance" or "reorientation," from the lips of Jesus and John the Baptist, was not a summons to a moralistic reform. It wasn't a timeless call to get your life together. It wasn't about cleaning up some personal foibles. It was a call for Israel to prepare for the end of her exile as a nation and to change agendas, specifically in the way she was not being the nation that God intended for her to be. It was a call to re-engage with God's original purpose for Israel, which was to be a blessing to the whole world. Did individual Jews have to respond to this? Of course, but the call to repent wasn't made to individuals. Jesus was calling an entire nation, not as a collection of individuals but as a collective organism. God had called Israel to be his people. He had called her and rescued her from Egypt. He had led her across the Red Sea. Now he was calling her to reorient her life as a nation back to his original purpose and agenda.
A further twist in the story helps to flesh out this idea. The reorientation that Jesus intended to bring about included offering the kingdom of heaven to lots of people who were outside the camp of ethnic Israel...When we read the New Testament narratives carefully, we see that many people reoriented their lives to a new compass heading without ever being invited to do so, without ever reciting a sinner's prayer, and without ever hearing the word repent...[There are] individual stories in the Bible where full-scale reorientation occurred but with no sense of any formal invitation, or even discussion about it.
What do you like? What's not clear? What would you change?
1)The quote makes it sound like the Scriptures are inadequate to give us a full understanding of repentance. That is both false and dangerous. I agree that knowing historical and theological contexts has great value but he is approaching saying that the Scriptures are insufficient to understand the doctrine of repentance properly and that is simply not true.
2)The doctrine of repentance in the New Testament does not end with Jesus and John the Baptist. There is plenty of talk about it in the rest of the New Testament and I hope he addresses that and gets his conclusion from a complete study of all the New Testament.
3) No biblical quotes to back up his assertions. Show us that you are being true to what the NT says by exegeting some texts.
4) The assertion that the call to repentance was not made to individuals doesn't seem to gel with Jesus' conversations with Nicodemus, the woman at the well, Zacchaeus, the woman caught in adultery, the paralytic lowered through the roof ... . Then there is the purpose statement John gives in John 20:31 - "these are written that you may believe." Then there is Jesus' address to the Laodicean church. While a whole church is in sin and the whole church is invited to repent (Rev.3:19) the final invitation and promise of fellowship with Christ is given to any ONE who will open the door (3:20).
5) Does he ever address the matter of what happens when a community repents and individuals do not? Are those individuals covered by the holiness of the community? How would he deal with Achan whose personal and family sin cause God to say "Israel has sinned"?
6) The call to repentance was "a call for Israel to prepare for the end of her exile as a nation and to change agendas, specifically in the way she was not being the nation that God intended for her to be. It was a call to re-engage with God's original purpose for Israel, which was to be a blessing to the whole world."? A nice dispensational thought but this thing of mine is already too long.
7) No one has ever reoriented their lives without an invitation from God. Does he see invitation only in the formal verbal sense? Also, the fact that there is no recording of a formal invitation to repent does not mean that one did not occur. We hardly have all that was said recorded for us. See Acts 26:20. The Scriptural invitations to repentance constitute God's current invitation to people to repent. We should not take a piece of Scripture where an invitation to repent is not included and conclude that repentance isn't necessary, when other texts say that it is.
8) If he's talking about invitations to say the sinners prayer, walk the aisle etc. then I agree that is never found in Scripture.
That's enough for now. I gotta get back to work.
See, that's why I wait for Ken to respond and then I can just say "Amen"
At the heart of the Gospel is a call to repentance. As Paul said to Timothy "15 This is a trustworthy saying, and everyone should accept it: "Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners"--and I am the worst of them all. 16 But God had mercy on me so that Christ Jesus could use me as a prime example of his great patience with even the worst sinners. Then others will realize that they, too, can believe in him and receive eternal life." (NLT)
What an amazing truth, I relate to what Paul says big time.
How does a sinner get saved? Does Mortoia answer that question? How does one get right with God? Personally, how does that happen?
It starts with believing in the Lord Jesus Christ.That He is the Savior of the world who died for the sin of the world. He offers me the free gift of salvation, he paid the penalty for my sin. But It starts with me recognizing that I am a sinner in need of a Savior.
When I see my sin in light of the holiness of God, I fall on my face. Yet he loved me so much that he offered me salvation through His Son.
When I believe in His Son, I turn from my sin and embrace the forgiveness found only in Him. He is the only way. I repent, He saves.
The problem is people want to play down the evil of sin. The church is so ineffective in our society because very few actually tell the truth when it comes to sin. I think its because so few leaders recognize their own sin or are unwilling to.
That's how they can come up with all this easy believism where you just have to "reorient" your life and its all ok. As Jim Cymbala would say "fiddle sticks"
Jesus Christ died for sin and until I recognize my own sin before a holy God nothing can happen.
Just think of all the people who sit in church every week and profess Christ but have never really been saved because they have never really been broken over their own sin and are unwilling to see it and do anything about it like repent. How tragic it will be for them when they stand before God on that Day. So many will say "but God look what we did for you" and He's gonna say "get away from me, I don't know you" Didn't Jesus say that?
But God is so merciful, so gracious, so loving, we at any time can reach out to Him through Jesus Christ and be saved. Its free.