June 4

The Repentance of God

Judges 3:18

God is more than once described in Scripture as repenting of something that he had done. In the text before us, it is said, when his people had been allowed to fall under the oppression of their enemies, to punish them for their sins, and they at length turned to him—the Lord repented because of their groanings, and raised them up a deliverer. An equally strong case is that of the antediluvians—whose crimes were such that it is said the Lord repented that he had made man upon the earth. Note: Genesis 6:6. So he “repents” of having made Saul king; Note: 1 Samuel 15:35. repents of the evil he had said he would bring upon the Ninevites; Note: Jonah 3:10. and in various places is described as “repenting” Note: 2 Samuel 24:16. 1 Chronicles 21:15. Jeremiah 26:19. of the evil he had thought to do, on certain occasions, and did it not. In fact, that God should thus “repent for his servants,” seems to have been promised to the Israelites by Moses in Deuteronomy 32:36. Yet it is very remarkable that in one of the strongest of these instances—that of Saul—the very same chapter which contains one of the most signal instances of repentance ascribed to God—contains also the strongest declaration that he never repents. In 1 Samuel 15:11, the Lord says, “It repenteth me that I have made Saul to be a king, for he is turned back from following me.” In 1 Samuel 15:29 we read, “the Strength of Israel will not lie nor repent; for he is not a man that he should repent.” Even the Pentateuch, which contains some of the strongest instances of this mode of expression, declares “God is not a man that he should he, nor the son of man that he should repent.” Numbers 23:19.

How are we to understand these things? Is there anomaly or contradiction here? By no means. Whatever the Scriptures positively assert of the character of God is to be taken plainly as it stands—it is part of the Scripture doctrine of his being and his attributes; but when, in the description of God’s part in human history, certain sentiments are ascribed to him, seemingly inconsistent with those more general and abstract characters of the Divine Being, we are to understand that these expressions are used for the purpose of man’s clearer apprehension. Man cannot well grasp anything beyond the range of his own intellectual or sentient experience—the utmost stretch of his mind cannot grasp the vast idea of God’s nature and infinite perfections; and it is in the knowledge of this, that He, in his great condescension, and for the sake of his conduct being made intelligible to man’s understanding, has allowed Himself to be set before him as moved by the feelings and passions which man himself experiences. In so far as we are enabled to realize by the later light of the Gospel, some faint notions of the perfections of the Divine nature, the more we are struck by the unutterable love, the tender consideration, the infinite condescension, which, for man’s good, allowed, in ages of unrefined intellect, these humanized representations of himself to be set before men. The height of this condescension was reached, when, in the depths of the Divine wisdom, a plan was devised, perfect for man’s salvation, but which required Him to assume the very nature of man, and as a man to live and suffer.

Still, then, what does the “repenting” of God really mean? It is clear that we are not to ascribe to God’s immutable mind the fickleness of human purposes, or to suppose that he on any of the occasions specified really repented, or was grieved or disappointed. This is not possible to God—with whom there is no variableness nor shadow of turning. Note: James 1:17. These and similar expressions are taken from what passes among men when they undergo change of purpose, or are disappointed in their expectations and endeavors. As a potter, on finding that a vessel on which he has spent his utmost care, does not answer his purpose, regrets his labor, and casts the worthless object out of sight—so, at the deluge for instance, God is represented, in accommodation to our feeble apprehensions, as repenting and being grieved at heart that he had bestowed upon man so much labor in vain. So also as a man, when he repents, changes his course of procedure—God, when he changes his procedure, is said to repent, seeing that such change would be in man the result of repentance. Yet there is here a change, not as in man, of the will or purpose—but of the work of procedure only. Repentance in man is the changing of his will as well as of his work; repentance in God is the change of the work only, and not of the will, which in Him is incapable of change. Seeing that there is no mistake in his councils, no disappointment of his purposes, no frustration of his expectations—God can never change his will, though he may will to change his work. The decrees and purposes of God stand like mountains of brass. Note: Zechariah 6:1. Always immutable, God is incapable of the frailty or fickleness which belongs to man’s nature and experience. So also in that singular phrase where, on account of the wickedness that brought on the deluge, God is said not only to repent, but to be “grieved at his heart”—the very phrase, emphatic as it sounds to our human experience, indicates the real sense in which such expressions are to be understood. In strict propriety of speech God has neither heart nor grief. He is a most pure Spirit—an uncompounded Being, far above the influence of human passion, He is impassible—and it is wholly impossible that anything should grieve or work repentance in him. The cause is, in all these cases, put, by metonymy, for the effect.

It has often occurred to us that all these expressions, whereby God is presented to the mind as invested with human parts and passions, involve a sort of looking forward to that period in which they would all become proper and appropriate, by our being permitted to view God in Christ, who has carried the real experiences of our nature into the very heavens, where he sits, not as one who cannot be touched with the feeling of our infirmities, but as one who has been tempted like as we are, yet remained without sin. Had God been, in the Old Testament, set before our mind wholly in the abstract qualities of his being—there would have been a lack of unity in the mode in which he is presented to the apprehension of the heart (we say not of the mind)under the two dispensations. But the Lord, knowing from the beginning the aspect in which he would be eventually presented to the church in Christ, permitted beforehand these humanized indications of himself, that there might be under both dispensations that oneness of feeling in regard to him, which enables the most enlightened servant of Christ to make the language of ancient David his own when he thinks and speaks of God.