Readers of the New Testament may recall that both John the Baptist and Jesus Christ began their public ministry with a call to repent – "for the kingdom of heaven is at hand" (Matt. 3:1-2; Matt. 4:17). Along with John’s prophetic announcement that he had come to “Prepare the way of the Lord,” these identical declarations suggest to me that repentance somehow "clears the way" for God’s kingdom to arrive, to become accessible. They also offer a clue as to where human beings really stand with respect to freedom and morality.
As countless philosophers and theologians have argued over the centuries, the reality of good and evil in the world cannot be rightly understood apart from moral responsibility, which implies moral freedom. But the problem actually runs much deeper than that. Libertarian freedom, the unrestricted ability to choose between options, was lost, or at least severely curtailed, in the Garden of Eden when Adam and Eve freely decided to transgress the commandment of God. That catastrophically fateful decision triggered a spiritual chain reaction that left humanity disconnected from God, under a curse of pain and frustration, in bondage to sin, and most importantly, banned from paradise, i.e., strictly unable to return to their original free and happy state.
The way I read both Scripture and experience, we humans are now beset with an innate sinful bias that continually skews our desires and decisions toward sin and selfishness, even against our strongest determinations to be unselfish and good. For this reason, I believe, Jesus did not preach for men to simply choose to do good. Rather, he urged people to repent, which implies that humans are in a sort of spiritual default state of moral corruption. The difference between repentance and merely choosing good over evil is subtle but critical. A personal determination to be good is doomed to failure because the sinful nature or bias mentioned earlier will always find its expression – and as most of us have discovered in the course of life, it doesn’t take much evil to completely ruin a good situation (one act of adultery has been known to destroy a marriage, for example).
Repentance, on the other hand, involves some decidedly non-humanistic dynamics: First, repentance is a response to the call of God. In other words it is initiated by the Spirit of God. This explains why Paul described repentance as a gift: it simply cannot take place apart from God’s gracious initiative to call and convict men of their sins (2 Tim. 2:25; cf. John 6:44; Rom. 2:4). Second, repentance is miraculous. Only by the power of God’s Spirit can a person burdened by long-standing sinful bondages turn to Christ and find deliverance (John 8:34-36; Rom. 6:17-18). Finally, repentance reconnects us with God – the source of “every good gift” as James put it – and therefore refreshes the heart with a sense of liberty and grace. “Repent therefore and be converted,” proclaimed the apostle Peter, “that your sins may be blotted out, so that times of refreshing may come from the presence of the Lord” (Acts 3:19-20).
The good news is that as many as will hear the gospel may repent. Here is one of many places where I part ways with my Calvinist friends. Because God is no respecter of persons he calls upon all of us, in love and grace, to call upon him, in repentance. And whoever calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved. The past has no hold on us; the call of God is heard only in the present. As Paul declared to the philosophers in Athens: “Truly these times of ignorance God overlooked, but now commands all men everywhere to repent” (Acts 17:30).
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