“And a servant of the Lord must not quarrel but be gentle to all, able to teach, patient, in humility correcting those who are in opposition, if God perhaps will grant them repentance, so that they may know the truth, and that they may come to their senses and escape the snare of the devil, having been taken captive by him to do his will.”
~2 Timothy 2:24-26
Last week, I spoke about the mindset of those caught in error according to Paul in this passage. Let me remind you: 1) They don’t know the truth. 2) They are not thinking straight. 3) They were ensnared by the devil. 4) They are recruited to doing the devil’s will. To break this, Paul gives instructions for the apologist to be gentle, able to teach, patient, and to correct in humility. When we do this, God may grant the person repentance so they can know the truth, come to their senses, and be freed from the devil. I want to emphasize on repentance here and what this looks like. This is the phrase that leapt out to me in this passage, and it is the key to the whole thing: “if God perhaps will grant them repentance.”
There is often a debate about repentance in the church. Is repentance a work or a fruit? This verse actually offers a third option: a gift. I will argue that it’s all three. It is something we do; repentance is a choice we make that we will cease doing that which is sinful, abandoning it, and then start doing the right thing in its stead. But there is more to it than that. Repentance is also a fruit. A person who is saved and born again will bear repentance as a lifestyle. But above all, repentance is a gift. It is something that God gives us. It still must be appropriated by us. There still must be action on our part to do it, but it all starts with God giving it to us.
That said, there is a subtle warning here: “if God perhaps…” There is no promise that if we are gentle, if we teach, if we are patient, and if we are humble, the person is going to be saved. Look at Samuel. He was all these things before King Saul, and Saul never repented. God had rejected him. This is a humbling reminder that we cannot and will not “argue” anyone into the kingdom. We must present the truth, but it is ultimately God who chooses whom He will save or not. That said, salvation comes from believing, and how can they believe if they do not hear, and how will they hear unless there is a preacher, and who will preach unless sent? God will save despite our shortcomings and our failures, but we are still commanded to go. But this means that if the person doesn’t receive our message, that failure isn’t on our part. The person is still responsible for listening to the truth and responding to it.
So, what should repentance look like? I’m not going to talk about individual repentance from specific sins here. For most of my audience, that’s “common knowledge.” In dealing with apologetics and this passage, repentance is talking about a “returning to your senses,” “to think clearly,” or in other words “to have your worldview filters changed out and fixed.” I am going to showcase what repentance does NOT look like, then I will show you what it DOES look like.
When we repent of false thinking, it does NOT look like adding the truth to your previously established worldview. When it comes to origins, this seems to be the first thing people do. They start out as atheists or pure Evolutionists, then they discover God is indeed real, whether they are authentically saved or not. But instead of abandoning the worldview of Evolution that for all practical purposes is atheistic in nature, they just add “God” to their models, and that’s how the Old Earth models were developed. Many people go through “Old Earth Creation” models in their path to sanctification, but as God grants them more repentance, they realize they can’t stay there any longer and completely abandon their former way of thinking.
Todd White is a guy I’m going to bring up again later on, but in July 2020, he preached a sermon that caught a lot of attention, when he discovered that you can’t go about witnessing to people by saying they are blessed without ever addressing their sin problem. He had been doing this for 16 years and admitted he had been doing it wrong this whole time after he “discovered” Charles Spurgeon and Ray Comfort. White proclaimed he repented several times in that sermon. But then some people called out to him to showcase true repentance by abandoning what he was repenting from and leaving that former lifestyle and way of thinking. The next week, he preached the most narcissistic message I have ever heard from a pulpit and doubled down on staying his course. All he was going to do was add the truth he learned from Spurgeon and Comfort to his agenda. That is not repentance. It actually makes him a far more dangerous false teacher because he’s closer to the truth, without having it.
Repentance doesn’t merely abandon the former way of thinking. It also abandons all the children of the former way of thinking. I picked up this notion from Don Richardson in Eternity in Their Hearts in his chapter on “Strange Ideas,” namely Evolutionary thinking. He noted that many scientists today no longer believe specifically what Darwin taught, but they did not by any means abandon the line of thinking he got rolling. In my observations, the modern geologic paradigm is that all geology must follow the lens of uniformitarianism as made popular by Hutton and Lyell. This was strictly taught until 1980 when Mt. St. Helens erupted. Canyons were carved in days, and landscapes were changed in an instant. The uniformitarians lost their fundamental and foundational claim in an instant. But that didn’t stop them. Still adamant to deny Noah’s Flood, they just tweaked the models and say they now understand that local catastrophes can occur. They really didn’t depart from Lyell’s models, all the while claiming they no longer teach what he taught. They just tweaked Lyell’s models. And in practice, local catastrophes are only invoked when the uniformitarian principles don’t work, and again, Noah’s Flood being the primary catastrophe is still out of the picture prior to analysis. That’s not repentance from error.
True repentance completely abandons the former way of thinking. Now, this may take place over time. Sometimes you have to draw poison from a would as opposed to completely neutralizing it. Very often this kind of repentance requires multiple steps. And to be honest, it never will be fully realized on this side of the veil. There will always be a tendency to go back to it because of sinful old habits. On a rare occasion, God will instantly deliver someone, but most of the time it takes time. We must give grace and look for when God is working on such a person. That doesn’t mean we let error slide, but we recognize that they are a work in progress just like we are. We who have the truth need to show what living in the truth looks like. And one of the problems we have is when we have found truth, we can it, sit on the can, and then poison the rest from getting to it. Instead, we need to open up the truth and share it around, including to those who reject it.
Next week, we’ll look at how truth will set a mind free in detail and how that leads to someone coming to their senses.
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