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True Repentance Involves Remorse for Sin and Forsaking It,
December 12
For godly sorrow produces repentance leading to salvation, not to be
regretted; but the sorrow of the world produces death.
2 Corinthians 7:10
,
NKJV.
The love of God will never lead to the belittling of sin; it will never cover
or excuse an unconfessed wrong. Achan learned too late that God’s law, like its
Author, is unchanging. It has to do with all our acts and thoughts and feelings. It
follows us, and reaches every secret spring of action. By indulgence in sin, men and
women are led to lightly regard the law of God. Many conceal their transgressions
from other people, and flatter themselves that God will not be strict to mark iniquity.
But His law is the great standard of right, and with it every act of life must be
compared in that day when God shall bring every work into judgment, with every
secret thing, whether it be good or evil. Purity of heart will lead to purity of life.
All excuses for sin are vain. Who can plead for sinners when God testifies against
them?—
The Signs of the Times, April 21, 1881
.
There are many professed Christians whose confessions of sin are similar to
that of Achan. They will, in a general way, acknowledge their unworthiness, but
they refuse to confess the sins whose guilt rests upon their conscience, and which
have brought the frown of God upon His people....
Genuine repentance springs from a sense of the offensive character of sin. These
general confessions are not the fruit of true humiliation of soul before God. They
leave sinners with a self-complacent spirit to go on as before, until the conscience
becomes hardened, and warnings that once aroused them produce hardly a feeling
of danger, and after a time their sinful course appears right. All too late their sins
will find them out, in that day when they shall not be purged with sacrifice nor
offering forever. There is a vast difference between admitting facts after they are
proved, and confessing sins known only to ourselves and God.—
The Signs of the
Times, May 5, 1881
.
Achan, the guilty party, did not feel the burden. He took it very coolly. We find
nothing in the account to signify that he felt distressed. There is no evidence that
he felt remorse, or reasoned from cause to effect, saying. “It is my sin that has
brought the displeasure of the Lord upon the people.” ... He had no idea of making
his wrong right by confession of sin and humiliation of soul.—
The Seventh-day
Adventist Bible Commentary, Ellen G. White Comments, vol. 2, p. 997
.
The confession of Achan, although too late to be available in bringing to him
any saving virtue, yet vindicated the character of God in His manner of dealing with
him, and closed the door to the temptation that so continually beset the children of
Israel, to charge upon the servants of God the work that God Himself had ordered
to be done.—
Ibid
.
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