The Fear of God and True Repentance
Jay Wegter
The raising and answering ultimate questions is a powerful revealer of the core assumptions of unbelievers. Unbelievers have taken their worldview on faith, but it is an un-validated faith. Everyone must operate from a set of beliefs about the world. These presuppositions supply the basis for their ethical decisions, their goals, and their means of interpreting reality. Their worldview (with its core assumptions) functions as their fixed point of reference, their default god (their functional god). Ultimate questions bring a person’s worldview or core assumptions to the surface so that they may be discussed.
The Christian apologist seeks to set up a contrast; an antithesis between the unbeliever’s assumptions and the truth claims of Scripture. God’s revelation accurately explains reality; our life experience in God’s world. The natural man is hostile to God’s revelation—as Christ’s ambassadors, we want to expose this hostility. The unbeliever is an enemy of God in his mind (Col 1:19-21). His worldview is opposed to God’s revelation and he cannot successfully live his worldview because it does not cohere with reality.
It is essential in our Christian apologetics that we stress that the Word of God is utterly realistic about evil, death, suffering, victimization, and injustice. The Bible answers why history is filled with wars which caused unspeakable horror. This theological topic of evil and suffering is known as theodicy. Atheists have their own anti-God theodicy. They suggest that the very existence of a world full of evil argues against an all-wise, good, powerful Creator. They think that they have cornered God when they say that the existence of evil proves at least one of the following statements: 1.) God is the source of evil and thus He is not good or holy;
- God does not care about evil and suffering or else He would have stepped in to eliminate it; 3.) God is too weak to prevent the spread of evil, He is unable to remove evil and suffering.
We appreciate the apologetics ministry of Tim Keller. He gives the unbeliever back his objections, but with added intensity. “Ever wondered why the world is filled with so much suffering and evil? I mean if you were able to read every newspaper in the world, you’d weep 12 hours a day?” The rising generation is really bothered by the question of evil in terms of reconciling that question with God’s existence as revealed in Scripture. So as we consider the 4ᵗʰ option in explaining theodicy (not considered by atheists), we must affirm that God decreed to permit evil but is no partner with it; He hates it.
God will ultimately make an example of evil, revealing its wretched nature; He will eventually round it up confine and punish it eternally. He will redeem a remnant from sin/evil. God does not create evil. When God made Adam and Eve, He created free moral agents who in their innocence were able to not sin but also able to sin (they had the power to obey or not obey). He could have stopped evil but He did not.
We thus ask the question, is suffering so awful that it has no purpose? Is suffering and its elimination and prevention more important than divine revelation? Those who argue that man should have been created without the possibility of sinning are actually pressing for a world of inescapably tight determination. That is a world of robotics, not of free moral agents. We are born into this world with original sin; we have wills in bondage to our depravity—enslaved to our sin natures; BUT; this does not remove responsibility/culpability. It does not eliminate moral free agency.
This doctrine of theodicy and free moral agency is vital to our systematic theology. Though we sinned away our ability in Adam, our responsibility remains. This is not double speak; it may be a paradox, but it is not a contradiction. Our culpability is proven in the fact that we see moral cause and effect happening around us every day. The consequences of our ethical choices visit us and sometimes with a vengeance.
Fallen man is culpable; he has a conscience upon which is written the moral law of God (Rom 2:14-15). Man has a mind which can inform the conscience and the will. God has filled this cosmos with light (a metaphor for the truth about His eternal power, nature, character, goodness, and holiness—Romans 1:18-23). God has flooded creation with divine truth; unbelievers cannot escape this general revelation of God (Ps 19). But, having sinned away our ability, we do not desire God’s truth in our inner most being. We want to live with our backs to God. We cherish the idolatrous notion of personal autonomy from God.
What about the question of the outwardly moral person doing outwardly moral deeds on his own even though unregenerate? But the biblical testimony that no one is righteous is stated from the perspective that God’s own righteousness as revealed in the Person of Christ is the standard of righteousness (Rom 3:9-19; 10:1-4). Therefore, no man can extend his acts of human goodness in a way that will obligate God or win His acceptance.
Ephesians chapter two describes the fact that it is not merely our deeds that are sinful; but our whole being and orientation. Sin has defiled and corrupted every part of our being. Our natural state is one of hostility to God. We do not wish to live for God by living for His glory and honor. By nature we demand to live a self-directed life; we refuse to be subject to Christ.
You need to be able to explain to your young men the gravity of these things; the human dilemma/predicament/condition as God sees it. OR, they will never take responsibility for their sin, and they are not ready for conversion. Taking responsibility for personal sin is a means of grace. God’s grace comes bringing repentance. Repentance begins with the willingness and ability to say the same thing about your sin that God does and then repudiate that sin and forsake it.
But this posture, attitude and sentiment is not manufactured by the dead sinner. The Holy Spirit is sent to convict; to win this guilty verdict. He bankrupts the sinner morally—bringing a man to the end of himself. He takes away what the sinner thinks he has: a pretty good shot at heaven. The Holy Spirit is sent to evaporate apathy and presumption. He moves the convicted sinner to the point of desperation which is the opposite of apathy.
If anyone ever tells you that they don’t want to presume concerning their eternal state; they will let God tell them where they are going after they die. You are talking to an unsaved person. Their presumption and apathy reveals that they are hostile to God and His purposes. For God is glorifying His grace by hiding sinners in Christ (Eph 1:7, 12; 2:7). These steps of conviction: devastation, destitution, and desperation are the result of the sinner being confronted with who God is. He has created the universe as a stage for His moral majesty. He has made the cosmos a backdrop for His burning holiness. He is determined to put it on display. And the creatures made in His image are the essential players in this drama of redemption and wrath.
For God has announced that He is to be feared; He is absolutely utterly dangerous (Ps 33:8; 90:11). He is determined to consume as a furnace all that is not like Him in holiness (Heb 10:27; 12:29). Nothing could be more sobering than this: God is a furnace; we in ourselves in our natural state are flammable. But even more, this is a grand demonstration. God has determined that He will display His burning holiness as a consuming fire in a public manner. On Judgment Day, His holy law, His verdict of eternal hell, and the sinner’s conscience and bad record in heaven shall all unite into a flammable conscience-crushing heap into which God shall introduce a spark of eternal wrath. Young adults today upon hearing this cry: “unfair, unfair!!” But this is who God is. He is a consuming fire who has made hell for the devil and his angels (Mt 25:41). We have inherited Adam’s failed probation. We proved that by our defection from God—that we did not want God’s loving rightful rule over us. We defected to Lucifer and as a consequence of following him, shall follow him into hell itself.
We switched loyalties and formalized that rebellion by eating the forbidden fruit—spiting God Himself. The radical change in allegiance placed us under the devil’s dominion—we became subject to a malicious creature having rejected the rightful rule of our Creator. Now we bear a tragic relation to God’s holy character. We are unrighteous and in ourselves can never be right with His righteousness. In spite of our alienation from God and the danger of hell fire awaiting us; we are blithe, apathetic—treating our eternal soul like dirt.
We will not wake up unless the Holy Spirit brings deep conviction of sin. God’s absolute comprehensive justice means He must be true to Himself in the condemnation and punishment of those who commit sin. In Isaiah six, the prophet trembles and pronounces himself ruined, undone because he has had a glimpse of God’s moral majesty (holiness). This is who He is. How tragic that our churches today are systematically concealing the holiness of God from their congregations.
To be confronted with who God is changes everything. Devastation was Isaiah’s immediate response. All compromise and apathy are gone. Then a sense of crushing destitution; the righteousness we need to stand before God is missing altogether! Instead of holiness we have legal guilt awaiting eternal punishment. There is nothing stopping our descent into the pit of hell. We are a defiled cumberer of the earth who brings dishonor to God. We deserve to be swept away from the creation as some unclean thing.
But God in His great mercy sends the Spirit to convict sinners (Jn 16:8-11). Then, when He convicts, the Holy Spirit produces desperation. When that takes place, our wait n’ see attitude has been replaced by urgency pressing upon us. “Unless God reveal His mercy, I am gone.” “Apart from sovereign pity, I am certainly lost.” No one has his heart wide open to the blessed offices of Christ until this devastating conviction by the Spirit passes upon his soul.
This all goes back to who God is. For our sin has worked overtime to raise-up fortresses against the knowledge of God (2 Cor 10:3-5). The guys you minister to have never been devastated by who God is. They view their sin NOT from the vantage point of the infallible omniscient perspective of God. No, they view their sin as that which beats them up, shoots holes in their self-esteem, and makes their conscience a place of not infrequent misery.
Therefore, because they have never been devastated by who God is, when they contemplate God, they are quick to charge Him with unfairness. And then in doing so, imagine with a wave of the hand they have held God hostage by impugning His character, and therefore no longer have to view Him as dangerous. Thus, they do not see themselves as immersed in this battle between truth and error, between good and evil—between destinies of glory or damnation. They think and speak and live as if they are not a player in this drama of redemption and damnation. They have put their consciences to sleep so that they imagine they stand outside the battle—beyond the reach of ultimate eternal wrath because they have found a way to criticize God. As if their sinful minds project reality instead of God Almighty Himself.
No, you are in the battle. Your loyalties are being lived out right now. Your servitude to one master or the other is being demonstrated this very moment. There is no neutral territory in this war. There are no sidelines, no single square inch of neutrality. God’s plan makes every creature made in His image a player in this battle of the ages.
The drama will consummate when Christ re-invades human history in wrath and flaming fire (2 Thess 1:7-9). Then, there will be perfect discrimination; He will separate the sheep from the goats. God will publicly punish sin and He will publicly own those who belong to Him in an outpouring of public grace and glory (Mt 10:32-33).
Now all of this highlights the urgency of salvation. For if God leaves you as you are—just being you, just being yourself, you will get you damned forever. God’s great tool to reveal our inability and habitual sinning is the moral law of God. The law pressed upon the conscience ‘killing-ly’ by the Spirit produces the necessary desperation. In that state the sinner has given up all hope of contributing to his salvation. He tries to believe and repent; but he cannot. Tears won’t do it. Self-reformation cannot avail—turning over a new leaf won’t do it.
Under the Spirit’s conviction, and not before, the sinner realizes that he has nothing with which to trade with God for even the most humble blessing (much less the sparing of his eternal soul). The good news of the mercy of God is that grace comes bringing the ability to believe and repent. But, it is always repentance toward God. It is always about repentance bestowed by grace rather than legal repentance (Acts 5:31; 2 Tim 2:25).
Before this Spirit granted repentance, the sinner, by instinct, falls back on his meager resources, his impotence. He reasons: “if I stop doing this and this and that, surely that will please God.” But he cannot muster up true repentance toward God; he keeps bumping up against his own spiritual impotence and inability. But when calling the elect of God, the Spirit uses the gospel to bring faith and repentance.
The wonderful news is that God was in Christ reconciling the world by not counting their trespasses against them (2 Cor 5:18-20). But this was because He was counting those trespasses (of all who would ever believe) against Christ, the sinner’s suffering Substitute (2 Cor 5:21). Now sinners who believe place their faith in Christ who was the object of this massive guilt transfer. For this massive guilt exchange contains the terms of peace with God. We have offended a holy God by our transgressions. But in His redeeming mercy, God has allowed the penalty of our law-breaking to fall upon Christ. Now this is the basis of peace with God. This massive guilt transfer planned by God is the foundation of fellowship with Him and for restoration from your ruin and alienation. Right-standing by the gospel focuses upon the urgency of repentance now.
Now in our Evangelical circles, there is a mild form of hyper-Calvinism which actually bears a closer resemblance to Hindu-istic pantheism. In that view, the sovereignty of God is redefined as fatalism. As is some will be lost and some will be saved no matter what they do or how they live. Nothing could be further from the truth. What the rising generation of church-goers does not understand is how sovereign grace obligates utterly. Because they see grace as divine leniency, they do not understand its relation to holiness and the vindication of God at Calvary.
They do not understand that God’s grace produces comprehensive absolute claims on your life. This means that we are to ‘lean into’ the gap that separates what we are now in our mortal sinfulness from what we will be in glory. As those united to Christ, we have incredible resources for holiness and service (2 Pet 1:3ff.). The doctrines of grace comprise our motivation and enablement to run with endurance, striving according to His power that works within us as we live upon Christ (Col 1:28-29).
This direction is of course the very opposite of hyper-Calvinism which is quiet-tistic, passive, and fatalistically resigned—and precisely where much of Evangelicalism lies moored today in ineffectiveness. This fatalistic resignation is a disservice to the knowledge and glory of God; for He never intended that grace should sow feather pillow armrests for us (Titus 2:11-14). The doctrines of grace give us all of the reasons to put sin to death. Not the least of which is because the outcome is guaranteed for those in union with Christ—God has predestined that they should be presented before Him holy and blameless without spot or wrinkle (Eph 1:4; Rom 8:29; Eph 5:27; 2 Thess 2:14).
Thus grace is a formula for the energetic pursuit of holiness. But the young men you are ministering to tend to push grace toward softness, toward lethargy—and even fatalism. Actually grace calls us to step fully into the sonship script now that God has restored our ability and desire to love and obey Him. This sheds light on the battle between flesh and Spirit. The flesh is always ready to break out in new acts of truancy and defiance against the will of the Spirit. But the Spirit wants our lives to be completely in tune with God’s glory story in Christ.
Now success in this endeavor is all traceable the cross. For the cross cancels the penalty of sin for us that we might experience the cancellation of the power of sin in our lives. This is so that ultimately the entire presence of sin in our lives might be cancelled upon glorification. So God is saving you from hell by saving you from your sin. This means that these three deliverances (penalty, power, and presence) must stay joined in our thinking, for in terms of the goal and purpose of grace—they are inseparable.
You live between the cross and the resurrection. The use of your members now (in serving Christ instead of sin) is a declaration that the cross has made you a child of God (Rom 6:11-13ff.). These three deliverances (penalty, power, presence of sin) must control your life now. For is God is revealed by how He delivers believers from their sin; then a clear mark of knowing God is how you deal with your sin (is it by the massive guilt transfer accomplished at Calvary?).
Sadly, hyper-Calvinist resignation winds up being a half gospel because it slices the second part of deliverance from the first (it separates the remedy for sin: penalty cancelled, from the design of grace: holiness). Grace as the remedy for sin (penalty cancelled) is separated from grace as driving the very goal of holiness. It is a false notion that grace has removed the great danger of committing sin. The design of grace is to move us relentlessly, ineffably toward this goal of standing before God in Christ blameless in holiness.
We always go back to the starting point: who is God? There are things about God that are scandalous to the minds of 21ˢᵗ Century men. They chafe at the thought that we were created to worship. They have not thought through the Creator creature distinction—God’s absolute ownership of what He has created out of nothing. You are the thought of God, He wanted a creature like you to know Him and find your all in Him. I love the Edwards’ sermon, “The End for which all Creation Exists.” In that remarkable message, Edwards stresses that nothing men or angels can do will thwart God’s purpose that the creation shall bring Him glory, for even the wrath of man shall praise Him (when He pours out His wrath on their wrath) (Ps 76). How this troubles us, that God is glorious in judgment as well as in grace. He will hang sin on the gallows forever— displaying it as pernicious, as folly, as destruction to the image of God—as that which disintegrates the soul.
Edwards’ sermon reminds us that the entrance of sin does not thwart God’s purpose that the entire creation brings glory to God. His wrath against sin is part of what is known as the ‘grand demonstration’ described in Romans chapter nine. Professing Christians who have little fear of God tend to push the doctrine of God through a grid of consumerism—as if God exists for our needs and cravings, and as if God requires a public relations lift from us (so that a ‘PR upgrade’ will cause our view of God to conform to 21ˢᵗ Century sensibilities).
God’s present toleration of vessels of wrath is a part of His grace being shown to vessels of mercy (something atheists cannot envision for a moment) (Rom 9:22-24). Human history when viewed from eternity is but a blink—a brief drama between the two bookends of eternity past and eternity future. But the consummation of history will redound to the glory of God. The infinite wisdom of the divine decree (though revealed only in part to our finite minds) shall shout the divine perfections forever—in all of God’s works of creation and providence and in both His judgments and mercies, He will be exalted.
This present grand demonstration is a drama witnessed by angels now. How puny is man —as we consider that as creatures of dust and ashes both sin and redemption shall (in God’s actions) put God’s excellence and perfections on display. God’s administration of grace is educating angels as the manifold wisdom of God (Eph 3:10).
Our man-centered religious expressions eschew the trauma of true conviction of sin; of devastation, destitution and desperation because sinful man does not wish to face who God really is. Some of what we are studying here is very appropriate to our Christian apologetics. God upholds all reality—it is His world, not the illusory world of the sinner’s imagination. Can you envision what the Day of the Lord will be like? Millions of individuals who have fabricated a false reality will be hit with God’s reality like a sledgehammer to the temple. The cry in Revelation six is, “Who is able to stand?” Oh then those individuals will wish that they had been willing to be devastated by the knowledge of God in this life, for it will be too late to repent.
How (in our apologetic answer) do we respond to the objection: “How can we be totally responsible and God totally holy if He uses sin for His purposes?” First, God upholds the universe every moment, yet He lives outside of the time, space, mass continuum. God lives outside of time, and He is sovereignly in control of all things—even over the evil acts of men. We cannot understand this because we imagine His sovereignty is causing things to happen (including sin) rather than ruling over the free acts of men.
One way to better understand this is to picture a toxic polluted river being directed by its river banks to a particular holding pond. The engineers did not produce the toxins, but are directing and restraining the flow until it can be contained and eliminated. Though we come into this world totally depraved and bearing original sin, we are free moral agents who are not compelled from the outside; but are responsible for all of our ethical choices. In our thinking we are darkened (loving darkness) but our consciences are given the light of God’s law written there (Rom 2:14-16).
The whole course of human history is not God making people do depraved things. No, history is primarily made up of what theologians call ‘secondary causes’. In other words, the flow of human history is made up of the free acts of men. God’s providence (His sovereignty) rules over all. The heart of the king is as channels of water in the hand of the Lord; He turns it whichever way He pleases (Prov 21:1). This is amazing —a paradox. God accomplishes His purposes but does not violate the freedom of our acts. This is a cause to marvel that God’s sovereignty makes your choices to be significant in time and eternity. From the tower of Babel to the wonders of Greece and the Roman Empire, to the final campaign of the Antichrist, the free acts of men (secondary causes) propel history forward—though God claims sovereign rule over the deeds of His creatures. His sovereignty over evil is a major part of understanding His omnipotence. For history will prove to be the record of the honoring and the dishonoring of God (and what happened to each individual as a result).
Countless events in history are instructive for the world and for angels. What a sobering thought designed to instill deeper fear of God that every life will prove to be an eternal object lesson in the grand demonstration. Oh how this should make us do violence to enter heaven. How this should deepen our understanding that the holy character of God is revealed in sowing and reaping—that His unbending righteousness energizes the sowing and reaping principle.
The Governor of the universe cannot be mocked (Gal 6:7). His moral universe exhibits moral cause and effect—sowing and reaping. This law is unbreakable: we will reap far more than we sowed and will reap far longer than we sowed. Our harvest will be an eternal object lesson to the rational universe. If we have sown thorns, we awake to a field of thorns stretching to all horizons—and we will lie down in thorns forever. God has said that those who sow to the flesh shall from the flesh reap corruption (Gal 6:8).
God is not mocked; every man’s harvest will be a public event. The consequences of sowing to sin or righteousness shall become evident to all. If men only let this sink in, they would drop everything and run to Christ. God’s mercy in Christ is so vast. Think of it; in this massive guilt transfer at Calvary, there is sowing and reaping. Christ reaps the consequent eternal penalty His people have sown by their sinning, and His people reap the righteousness He has sown. This is incredible news, but people would rather have a latte than life in Christ—how great is the darkness!
God is saying to all sinners worldwide, “I am willing to make peace with you now by having my only begotten Son reap the hell and wrath and death that you have sown that you may reap the righteousness He has sown on behalf of sinners. What God has done in Christ are the terms of peace with God. The gospel of the cross of Christ invades our self-worship and ruin—the cross puts a stop to our self-destructive course of habitual sin. Today is the day of salvation, flee into Christ the refuge. If you don’t you are keeping your enmity against Me; you don’t fear or revere Me, you spite Me and slight my grace.
For believers, here is the startling part, what you have just heard and read is all about the fear of God and why it leads to repentance. But, we do not tend to look to the fear of God as a source of joy, but we should. Here is the reason why: the fear of God is the source of matchless joy because it is by fearing God that we enter into the greatest exultation for Christ’s work of propitiation. You see, deep joy will evade you until you can celebrate God’s just character.
Isn’t it sad that the seeker, hipster, church movement is robbing their members of joy. By sanding off the sharp corners and points of the doctrine of the holiness of God, there is nothing left to poke and pierce the sinner’s conscience. But this removal of the offense of the cross is done in order to make Him acceptable to consumers, but congregants are left with a half gospel. As a consequence, at the least they are robbed of true joy, and at the worst, robbed of a genuine gospel.
We reiterate: the fear of God brings joy. The must be smitten with deep wounds by the justice and wrath of God before the ‘oil’ of the gospel can be poured into those wounds. Otherwise, there is but shallow conviction and shallow conversion because the conscience was never devastated by a sight sin in the presence of who God is. We can join this central blessed doctrine to our apologetics by emphasizing that this whole life is a grand demonstration, for history is a stage upon which God’s moral majesty is to be revealed.
Humans exist as players on this stage. They play the part decreed for them; yet their choices are free and are their own. Pharaoh was raised up by God so that God would make His own glorious Name known through the king’s obstinate actions (Rom 9:17). Yet, this Egyptian king had the power and ability and freedom to release the Jews at any time. But every instance in which he thought about fully releasing them, he stuffed that feeling down inside, forgot about Yahweh, and imperiously demanded that he keep his Jewish slave force for himself. Yes, the wrath of man shall praise Thee. But for believers; we live because of Christ and will enjoy endless glory with our Lord because God is glorifying His grace forever (Eph 2:7ff.).