REPENT!

The Gospel Message No One Wants To Hear

Jesus came into Galilee, proclaiming the gospel of God, and saying, “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent and believe in the gospel.”

Mark 1:14-15

The men of Nineveh will rise up at the judgment with this generation and condemn it, for they repented at the preaching of Jonah, and behold, something greater than Jonah is here.

Luke 11:31-33

The message of the Gospel is one of the common threads that runs throughout the Judeo-Christian Bible, from Genesis to Revelation. To fully comprehend what the Gospel of Christ is all about, it is helpful to understand the meaning of the word. The word “gospel” means, good news. The next question should be; why is The Gospel considered good news?

Anytime there is good proclaimed, it is set in contrast to a backdrop of an equal yet opposite idea of something that is undesirable or evil. The Gospel is good news because without the message that the Christ represents, we would all be doomed for eternal damnation, according to the Bible. The Old Testament is the story of how God chose a small tribe of people in the Mesopotamian region of the world and through a man named Abram (Gen.12:1-3) he built an entire nation of people whose whole purpose would be to act as God’s ambassadors here on earth.

Much of the world was vastly corrupt at its core by the time that we are introduced to Abram (Abraham) and it was time for the Creator of the Universe to get people back on a path to human dignity and abundant living. Through Abraham came Moses who Ya’ used as a vessel to lead his chosen out of bondage. They had not only been in bondage as slaves in the land of Egypt for about four hundred years, but they had also lost their sense of who the God of their ancestors was and is.

They had taken on the customs and religions of the pagan nation of Egypt. They were existing, but under the thumb of a Pagan ruler whose people practiced all sorts of cultic rituals that included the worship the Egyptian god of the dead, Osiris. Once the God of Israel freed his people from enslavement, the struggle for understanding and trust began.

The Judeo-Christian belief system does recognize the Fall of mankind as when doubt entered the garden and Eve allowed herself to question the word of the Creator without conferring with him. She was guilty of trusting the voice of a deceiver over the voice of God (Gen 3). When Eve took action on her doubt and defied the Creator’s one boundary that He set forth for His image bearers her deed consequently effected the entire human race that would come after Adam and Eve. The whole human race was essentially now given over to the world of light versus dark and good versus evil. Many scholars call this reality the “seed war” (Gen. 3:15).

Because of this act of defiance, humankind would now be wired to make decisions based off their conscience of what was godly and what was destructive. The human conscience can be easily swayed if not grounded in truth, by clever manipulative ideas that target the amygdala and human emotions. Satan was now given access to everyone and many would follow after his deceptions (Prov. 14:7-9; 2 Tim. 3:13; James 1:22).

Leave the presence of a fool,    for there you do not meet words of knowledge.8 The wisdom of the prudent is to discern his way,    but the folly of fools is deceiving.9 Fools mock at the guilt offering,    but the upright enjoy acceptance.

Prov. 14:7-9

Woven into the fabric of the Old Testament is the raise of awareness of the people to their proclivity toward their fleshly desires that end up in destruction and many times causing anguish and unfruitfulness. Through the writings of the Pentateuch, God gave the people the guidelines for abundant and holy living. Their journey through the wilderness was a time of learning who their God truly was and is.

They were being called out of the mundane Pagan realm into an understanding of the holy and a life of exceptionalism. In order to begin their journey of understanding, however, the people were required to recognize that their ways of living were far off the mark. There was a propensity to selfishness, sexual perversions, dishonesty, debauchery, and many more destructive behaviors (Lev. 18).

 Ya’ was raising up a nation that would eventually lead the world to him (Exod. 19:5-7). Therefore, it was imperative that they understood that the ways of the world were not the ways of the God of all creation.

Now therefore, if you will indeed obey my voice and keep my covenant, you shall be my treasured possession among all peoples, for all the earth is mine; 6 and you shall be to me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.’ These are the words that you shall speak to the people of Israel.”

7 So Moses came and called the elders of the people and set before them all these words that the Lord had commanded him. Exodus 19:5-7, ESV

Once the people were confronted with their wicked ways, the natural course of events would warrant a repentant heart. This required mental ascent and a change in lifestyle as a result. True repentance would produce an abundant life granted by God as a blessing.

The Hebrew term for “repent” is shub which means to return or to turn around 180 degrees. In essence God is telling people that when they are living in opposition to his requirements, they are turning their backs on him. To repent is to stop doing what is wrong according to the Creator and to come back to Him. This is required for salvation.

Why is this required for salvation? Salvation from the grips of the devil is necessary for the Creator’s image bearers because it is a decision to accept God’s ways over and above the ways of Satan. There is much tied into this voluntary choice because when we choose to live outside of the boundaries that the Creator sets for his creation, we literally begin to change our DNA.

Living outside of God’s will is to blatantly tell him that we can be our own god. Perverse lifestyles and thought patterns will inevitably create chemical makers on our DNA that will pass through to the following generations creating generational sin and agony. James warns about our thought life that will eventually lead to death (James 1:14-16).

We know that our enemy wants us to be destroyed and to ruin our lives (Gen. 4:7; Job 1:6-8; Matt. 6:12-14; 1 Pet. 5:8), so he works overtime to lead us down the road to destruction and away from our only hope of eternal life. God meant for us to live for all of eternity with him, but the Fall began a chain reaction of death and decay that required a Savior to redeem humanity back to their intended positions amidst the created order (Rom. 8:21-23).

True repentance is not easy and that is why no one wants to hear that salvation requires a real desire to change one’s lifestyle. We are all captivated by a secular world that offers the trappings of luxury, indulgences, and selfishness. If we are not careful, we can get carried away with the deceptiveness of the enemy when he changes the meaning of the Scriptures to accept sinful lifestyles that include sexual perversions of all sorts. I have personally witnessed professing Christians who cave under the pressure of the secular’s claims that the Creator got it wrong and people are frequently born in the wrong body or that people should do what feels good.

All sin leads to death and that is what Ya’ wants to keep us from (Rev. 21:8). A truly repentant heart will desire God’s goodness and will find sinful behaviors as repulsive (Zech. 1:2-4). The promises of the Gospel are for those who desire to please the Creator and to live on his terms, not the compromises of the secular realm (John 14:6, 14-16).

Check out my Substack for more commentaries:

SUBSTACK