Godly sorrow involves a hatred of sin, includes a fear of God, a longing for holiness, a zeal for the truth, and a willingness to receive appropriate punishment…Such confession and repentance could never be compelled. As Charles Spurgeon famously said when commenting on David’s confession in Psalm 51, “Honest penitents…come to the point, call a spade a spade, and make a clean breast of all.”

Coaxing a Confession
The desire is good. We all want to see people confess and repent and walk in newness of obedience before the Lord. But the execution can often be forced. We are so used to walking with people, coming alongside of counselees, and shepherding them in blessed directions, that we may fail to realize when we “do the work for them.” Never is this more problematic than when coaxing a confession and subsequent repentance out of someone.
The Scriptures are clear that repentance is the Holy Spirit’s business, as Acts 11:18 and 2 Timothy 2:25 reveal. To compel an admission of guilt very well may be the jurisdiction of police detectives, but it is certainly unbecoming of biblical counselors. Far worse than mere admission of wrongdoing, however, would be coaching someone on what repentance would look like in a given situation, so much so that we find ourselves functionally “repenting for them,” as it were.
Forcing the Matter
A coerced confession is not repentance. Yet all one has to do is stop for a moment to consider how such a situation naturally happens. The counselee is having a hard time seeing his sin, though he can concede to some elements as the counselor points them out or asks good questions. So the counselor offers some additional coaching. There is resistance and vague concessions along the way. With a little more coaching and direction, the counselor has massaged the “confession” to a point where the counselor feels satisfied. It passes muster as far as the outward biblical forms are concerned. The counselor then coaches the person on how to go about repenting for such sins, and before long, the counselor is relieved. Repentance has been achieved. The only problem is that this is not biblical confession or biblical repentance. It is mere concession and a parroting back of the counselor’s understanding of the situation.
Read More
Related Posts:

Augustine wrote in his Confessions, “It is a disease of the mind, which does not wholly rise to the heights where it is lifted by the truth, because it is weighed down by habit.” In other words, it doesn’t matter how much we believe the truth if we don’t get the truth into our bodies through our daily habits. We shouldn’t be surprised we feel crazy when we simply allow ourselves to go along with the current of the crazy world we live in. We don’t have to resign or rage; we can resist.

As you begin to bear more responsibility in life, you realize how deficient human nature is to thrive in our cultural machine of hustle, distraction, isolation, and self-defined identities. Before I had kids, I didn’t see anything wrong with how my life was structured and the digital age that shapes our day-to-day lives. I wasn’t conscious of my daily habits and how they were forming me because they didn’t seem consequential.
Staying on my phone in bed instead of sleeping?Waking up minutes before the start of my soonest responsibility?Watching more Netflix than reading?Scrolling social media with no prayer life?Posting every highlight of every day on Instagram?
None of this seemed like it had any material impact on my life because, by and large, I had very little weight to carry. And having no weight to carry required little in terms of character. Every day was relatively low stakes compared to the life, health, and future of another human resting almost entirely on who I am as a person. Small responsibilities led to a small vision of life, which led to little attention to who I was becoming day by day through the little things I did.
But once there was real weight to carry—once every move I made was monitored by another person who would see me as his example of what it means to exist in our world as a healthy adult—everything that was previously invisible to me became as glaringly bright as the noon sun on a Texas summer day. It was like being in middle school all over again when you suddenly become self-aware of all of the things that make you different from everyone else and how everyone perceives you. It felt like a magnifying glass was placed over all of my faults and flaws and the ways that my son would see me be distracted or angry, impatient or selfish, aloof or insecure. These flaws couldn’t simply be written off as aberrations of my “true self” who obviously isn’t any of those things. Our character is the sum total of our actions over time, not who we imagine ourselves to be in our finest moments. If I never faced my flaws—my sin—and dealt honestly with them before God, then I would be the kind of father, the kind of person, who is those things.
In hindsight, it’s obvious that contrary to what my former deconstructed self would have admitted, “The World” is conspiring against us.
What else do you call it when the dominant narrative of the good life is to leave behind your obligations and constraints so you can define yourself however you like while advising us that we should cut off anyone who doesn’t make us feel good about ourselves, distracting us with the most insane and outrageous takes on an infinitely scrolling feed that we carry in our pockets and sleep with by our beds, and promising us that working harder is the key to unlock all of our dreams and if we don’t have what we want, it’s because we’re not hustling as hard as we should?
The world has lost its mind, and it’s all too easy to lose yours with it.
Read More
Related Posts:

Why is it that God is so patient with the hard-heartedness of mankind after the flood? In short: the Noahic covenant! Yahweh is clear that post-flood mankind still has the same heart problem that has wreaked havoc on the earth since the original transgression in the Garden. So, the fear and dread he puts in the animals towards humanity, combined with the death penalty for murder,[9] as well as the command to be fruitful and multiply, are all concrete expressions of God’s common grace, whereby he promises to not wipe out humanity again in his wrath, and he curbs the effects of sin so that humanity does not destroy itself (see Gen. 9:1–7).

In last month’s theme on Genesis 1–11, I dealt with the Noahic covenant in some detail by engaging David VanDrunen’s teaching on it in relation to the covenant of creation/works/human nature/law. I made the case there that I found his interpretation and application of the Noahic covenant to be far too modest, insofar as he teaches that it holds out no hope of attaining the new creation and is merely a stopgap for sin which preserves the first creation. In essence, he singles the Noahic covenant out so that it alone accounts for how God rules over creation universally post-fall until new creation, and in so doing he is guilty of counting the limited word count of the Noahic covenant, without weighing its role within the larger narrative of Scripture.
In this essay, I aim to briefly highlight the Noahic covenant’s placement and role within the larger metanarrative of Scripture from a Progressive Covenantalist perspective. I believe VanDrunen would largely agree with the first three points to be introduced in this article, but would have significant reservations on points four and five, which I will unpack in part two. This is because he sharply demarcates common and redemptive grace and sees the Noahic covenant as non-redemptive. I however believe it brims with the promise and hope of the protoevangelium (“first gospel” promise) from Genesis 3:15.
As I stated in the previous essay, we must read each biblical covenant on its own terms and in keeping with its placement within the biblical storyline. In the words of Stephen Wellum, “By tracing out the covenants in this fashion, we are able to see how the entire plan of God is organically related and how it reaches its culmination and fulfillment in Christ . . . we will rightly see how the parts of God’s plan fit with the whole.”[1] To that end, I contend a proper understanding of the Noahic covenant is that it: (1) reaffirms the creation covenant, (2) reminds God and man of Yahweh’s promise to never destroy the earth in judgment again, (3) remains in force until Christ’s return, (4) renders two kingdoms, the kingdom of God and the kingdom of man, and (5) reveals Yahweh’s covenant faithfulness while anticipating the greater glory of the new covenant. Again, in today’s essay I will discuss the first three points, and in tomorrow’s followup essay I will unpack points four and five.
The Noahic Covenant…
…Reaffirms the Covenant of Creation
The word covenant does not appear in the opening chapters of Genesis until Noah enters the scene (Gen. 6:18; 9:9). Peter Gentry has highlighted the important difference between “creating a covenant” (karat berit) and “renewing/establishing a covenant previously created” (heqim berit). He also rightly observes that only the latter phrase heqim berit is used for the Noahic covenant (Gen. 6:18; 9:9, 11, 17) as opposed to the normal expression for the creation of a covenant (karat berit). For example, karat berit is invoked when Yahweh initiates the Abrahamic covenant, but by using the language of heqim berit in the Noahic covenant God’s means “to affirm (verbally) the continued validity of a prior commitment—that is, to affirm that one is still committed to the covenant relationship as established or initiated previously.”[2]
This logic raises the question: if the first time(s) the word “covenant” is used in Scripture is Genesis 6 and 9, how can God speak of reaffirming a previous covenant? It is here that the Reformed tradition has rightly affirmed an original covenant of works/Adamic covenant, or what we Progressive Covenantalists would rather call the Creation covenant. A crucial prooftext for understanding the Noahic covenant to be a reaffirmation of a creation covenant is Hosea 6:7, which reads: “But like Adam [Israel and Judah] transgressed the covenant; there they dealt faithlessly with me.” Passages like this one give sound biblical and theological grounds to conclude God made a covenant with Adam as the vice-regent of creation, one that Adam failed to keep.[3]
Read More
Related Posts: