If It Had Worked They Would Have Stopped Offering

He has repented of the same thing about four hundred times.

Not four hundred different things. One thing, four hundred times, over about eleven years, and the repenting is completely genuine every time. He is not going through a motion. He means it in his chest.

And there is never a morning after it where the thing is settled.

There is a good hour afterward. Sometimes a good day. And then the account reopens on its own, without provocation, and he does it again, and each time some part of him hopes that this will be the one that finally takes.

He does not think anything is wrong with his repentance. He thinks something is wrong with him, and specifically that he must be doing it insincerely somehow, because if it were sincere it would have worked by now.

Hebrews makes an argument about exactly this, and it makes it from a piece of evidence that nobody thinks to look at.

The argument is from the repetition itself

The writer looks at the old sacrificial system and points at one feature of it.

For the law having a shadow of good things to come, and not the very image of the things, can never with those sacrifices which they offered year by year continually make the comers thereunto perfect. For then would they not have ceased to be offered? because that the worshippers once purged should have had no more conscience of sins. (Hebrews 10:1-2, King James Version)

For then would they not have ceased to be offered?

That is the argument, and it is a piece of reasoning rather than an assertion. If the yearly sacrifice had actually finished the matter, the yearly sacrifice would have stopped happening. The fact that it kept happening is itself the evidence that it was not finishing anything.

Now turn that around and point it at a man on his four hundredth repentance. The repeating is not evidence that his repentance is insincere. It is evidence that repeating was never the mechanism.

You are not failing at a method, and the repetition is the proof rather than the accusation. Hebrews 10:2 makes the ceasing the test of whether something worked, and it is by the eternal Spirit named in Hebrews 9:14 as His Spirit, that the offering which did work was made.

What it was actually doing all those years

Then verse 3, and it is the sentence that names what the old cycle produced.

But in those sacrifices there is a remembrance again made of sins every year. (Hebrews 10:3)

A remembrance again made. Every cycle was a reminder rather than a removal. The system was designed to keep the problem in view, not to clear it, and it did that job perfectly.

That is a precise description of what a four hundred times repeated repentance produces in a person. Not relief. A very detailed, very accurate, annually refreshed memory of the thing.

And that is why the good hour afterward always ends. The mechanism being used is a remembrance mechanism, and a remembrance mechanism will always eventually remind.

You have been running a remembrance where you were reaching for a removal. Hebrews 10:3 names the old cycle as a remembrance again made, and it is the Holy Ghost who is called as witness in verse 15 to what replaced it.

The word conscience is in the passage twice

Notice what the writer says the goal of the whole thing was, because he uses one word and it is not the word people expect.

The worshippers once purged should have had no more conscience of sins. (Hebrews 10:2)

Conscience. Not: record. Not: standing. He is measuring the success of a sacrifice by what it did to the inside of a person, which is exactly where the problem in this article lives.

And in the previous chapter he says which offering did reach that far.

How much more shall the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered himself without spot to God, purge your conscience from dead works to serve the living God? (Hebrews 9:14)

Purge your conscience. Same word. And the phrase from dead works is worth sitting on: the conscience is not only purged from sins, it is purged from dead works, which is to say from the whole exhausting apparatus a person has built to deal with them.

You have a conscience that Scripture says was reached, and it was named as the target. Hebrews 9:14 says purge your conscience from dead works, and the Holy Ghost is called to witness about the same work four verses into Hebrews 10:15.

And then the tense

Here is the verse that ends the arithmetic, and everything is in the tense.

For by one offering he hath perfected for ever them that are sanctified. (Hebrews 10:14)

One offering. Against year by year continually. Hath perfected. Completed. For ever. And then the writer immediately calls a witness.

Whereof the Holy Ghost also is a witness to us: for after that he had said before, This is the covenant that I will make with them... their sins and iniquities will I remember no more. (Hebrews 10:15-17)

Will I remember no more. Put that next to verse 3. The old system produced a remembrance every year. The new covenant is quoted, in the same chapter, promising the exact opposite, and God is the one doing the not remembering.

So the four hundredth repentance and the first one are aimed at something that was described as finished, and the reason it never takes is not that the man is insincere. It is that a finished thing cannot be finished again.

You are perfected for ever by one offering, and God says He remembers the rest no more. Hebrews 10:14 states the tense and Hebrews 10:15 calls the Holy Ghost as the witness to it.

What repentance is actually for

I need to say this carefully, because everything above could be misheard as an argument against repenting, and it is not one and I would never make it.

Repentance is real, it is commanded, and it is a turning. What it is not is a payment, and it is not a mechanism for producing a clean conscience by accumulation.

Turning is a thing that happens once per direction. A man who turns around does not need to turn around again about the same thing; if he finds himself facing the wrong way again he turns again, and that is a new event and not a repeat installment on an old debt.

The four hundred are not four hundred payments toward one debt. They are, at most, a man turning around repeatedly, and the debt was never the thing being addressed by any of them.

As far as the east is from the west, so far hath he removed our transgressions from us. (Psalm 103:12)

Hath removed. Past tense, and it is His verb, and the distance named is one that cannot be measured because east and west never meet.

You are turning rather than paying, and the paying was done by Somebody else. Psalm 103:12 uses a completed verb with God as its subject, and it is by His Spirit, Romans 8:15, that a person comes to Him as a child rather than as a debtor.