God Leads Us To Repentance

Issues3 – November 2023 – Grace & Truth Magazine

God Leads Us To Repentance

The goodness of God leads you to repentance. —Romans 2:4 NKJV

Guilt rested on the heads of Jacob’s sons. They had despised and hated their brother. They had considered killing Joseph, but instead they sold him as a slave into Egypt. Then they lied to their father about the whole matter. Their hardened hearts seemed to care nothing about the anguish of their brother or the sorrow of their father – until God worked in His own time to bring them to repentance.

Such is the marvelous goodness of God that it would ever lead men to repentance. Note carefully the touching account of this goodness in the case of Jacob’s sons (Gen. 42–45). Through an amazing series of events, they found themselves in the presence of their brother Joseph in Egypt. And he was no longer a slave, but the administrator of food distribution for the famine-stricken lands of the Middle East. No wonder they did not recognize him!

Now we see the process of repentance. The brothers began by saying, “We are honest men” (42:10), but harsh treatment and difficult demands soon changed their tune. “We are truly guilty” (v.21) became the confession of their lips as they rightly linked their present distress with their earlier evil treatment of their brother. Then they began to see the hand of God in the unfolding drama and cried, “What is this that God has done to us?” (v.28).

The climax of their repentance appears in Judah’s moving appeal to Joseph, although still unknown to him (Gen. 44). The hatred and selfishness which marked Judah’s former life had given way to love and concern for others. He proposed to become a lifelong slave in Egypt that his falsely-accused brother Benjamin might go free, and that his aged father might not grieve.

This is true repentance. Our attitudes and actions change radically as God works in us both to will and to do of His good pleasure. Without it, God can never be glorified in our lives.

By Grant Steidl