Devotional 78: Repentance and the Believer: A Lifelong Duty

The Confession Read

As there is no sin so small, but it deserves damnation; so there is no sin so great, that it can bring damnation upon those who truly repent.

— Westminster Confession of Faith, Chapter 15, Section 4

Introduction

Two men stand at opposite edges of the same abyss, and both are wrong. The first looks down into the darkness of his guilt, sees what he takes to be a shallow pit, and concludes he can climb out whenever he pleases. His sins, he tells himself, are small: the uncharitable thought, the comfortable falsehood, the neglected duty, the years of quiet indifference toward the God who made him. Nothing dramatic. Nothing scandalous. Surely such trifles cannot imperil a soul. The second man stands at the other rim of the same chasm, but his gaze is fixed on a different depth. He has seen the magnitude of his transgressions and the verdict is clear: his sins are too great, too many, too dark for any mercy to reach. He would repent if he dared to hope, but hope has abandoned him. Between these two men the Westminster Divines plant a single sentence, as a surgeon sets a bone, and the sentence is Section 4 of their chapter on repentance. The section has the symmetry of a well-made hinge. On one side, the assertion that no sin is too small to deserve damnation. On the other, the assurance that no sin is too great to be forgiven through true repentance. The two truths are parallel and complementary. The first truth guards the impenitent against presumption. The second guards the penitent against despair. And the whole rests on a conviction that runs through the Confession like a spine: sin is always damnable, and grace is always sufficient. Neither truth may be softened without losing the other. Diminish the damnableness of small sins, and you diminish the wonder of grace that pardons great ones. Diminish the reach of grace, and you begin grading sins on a scale the blood of Christ knows nothing about. In the three sections that precede this one, the Divines have defined repentance as an evangelical grace, described its inward movements of grief and turning, and insisted that while it is no satisfaction for sin, it is nevertheless necessary for pardon. Now, in Section 4, they address the sinner who has understood all of this and yet hesitates at the threshold. His hesitation takes one of two forms. Either he has not felt the weight of his sin because he has measured it against his neighbors rather than against the holiness of God, and so he thinks he has little to repent of. Or he has felt the weight so keenly, has seen the black catalog of his iniquities stretched out before the face of a holy God, and has concluded that the door of mercy must surely be shut against a wretch like him. To the first the Confession says: No sin is small. To the second it says: No sin is beyond pardon. The two words belong together, and it is the glory of Reformed pastoral theology that it speaks them both in the same breath.

Scripture Foundation

The prophet Isaiah, in the opening chapter of his great prophecy, delivers a summons that the Westminster Divines placed among the proof texts for this very section. The Lord speaks to a people whose sins have reached full measure: a people whose hands are full of blood, whose worship has become an abomination, whose very prayers God refuses to hear. And yet into that darkness the prophet speaks a word of hope: "Wash you, make you clean; put away the evil of your doings from before mine eyes; cease to do evil; learn to do well; seek judgment, relieve the oppressed, judge the fatherless, plead for the widow. Come now, and let us reason together, saith the LORD: though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they be red like crimson, they shall be as wool" (Isaiah 1:16-18). Two details in this passage bear directly on the Confession's teaching. The first is the invitation to reason. The Hebrew verb yakah carries the sense of a legal disputation in which charges are examined and settled. God is not offering a sentimental forgetfulness that waves away sin without dealing with it. He is offering a juridical resolution. The scarlet of guilt (the Hebrew shani, scarlet, is the color of blood-guilt, the deep crimson of a dye fixed so permanently into the fabric that no human washing can remove it) is to become white as snow. Not gray. Not off-white. Snow. The image is of a cleanness so complete that no trace of the stain remains. And this transformation is not accomplished by the sinner's washing ("Wash you, make you clean"), though that turning is commanded. The washing is preparatory; the cleansing is divine. What human effort cannot accomplish, divine grace freely gives. The Confession's logic is already present in seed form: the turning is required, but the cleansing is a gift. The second detail: the sins in view are not small ones. Isaiah's audience is guilty of bloodshed, oppression, judicial corruption, and the abandonment of the widow and the orphan. These are the crimes that human justice punishes with severity. If any sins were too great for pardon, these would be among them. Yet the Lord says "though your sins be as scarlet." The "though" is concessive: it grants the full reality of the guilt and then overcomes it. This is the gospel logic that the Confession will formalize two and a half millennia later: no sin is so great that it can bring damnation upon those who truly repent. The same prophet, speaking again near the end of his book, broadens the invitation to its widest scope: "Seek ye the LORD while he may be found, call ye upon him while he is near: let the wicked forsake his way, and the unrighteous man his thoughts: and let him return unto the LORD, and he will have mercy upon him; and to our God, for he will abundantly pardon" (Isaiah 55:6-7). The phrase "abundantly pardon" renders a Hebrew idiom of considerable force: yarbeh lisloach, literally "he will multiply to pardon." The verb rabah, to multiply or make many, is the same root used in the creation mandate to "be fruitful and multiply." Mercy is not measured out in droplets to the penitent; it is multiplied, expanded, poured out in a flood that corresponds not to the quantity of the sinner's repentance but to the magnitude of God's own heart. The wicked man who forsakes his way (the Hebrew rasha, wicked, denotes the guilty one, the one in the wrong, the one against whom the verdict has already been rendered). This man, precisely this man, will find pardon multiplied toward him. The greatness of the sin is no obstacle. The only obstacle is the refusal to forsake it and return to the Lord. The apostle Paul, writing to the church at Rome, gives the theological foundation: "Moreover the law entered, that the offence might abound. But where sin abounded, grace did much more abound: that as sin hath reigned unto death, even so might grace reign through righteousness unto eternal life by Jesus Christ our Lord" (Romans 5:20-21). Paul employs a verb of comparison: hypereperisseusen, grace "super-abounded." The prefix hyper- places grace beyond any possible measure of sin. Grace surpasses sin's abundance. It exceeds it, overwhelms it, drowns it. Paul's language leaves no room for a sin that outstrips grace. The proportion is fixed: where sin increases, grace hyper-increases. The sinner who looks at the greatness of his transgression and concludes mercy cannot reach him has misunderstood the mathematics of redemption. Grace is measured not against sin but against the righteousness of Christ, which is infinite, and His blood, of infinite worth. Beside that infinity, the greatest mass of human sin shrinks to nothing. No passage in Scripture illustrates this truth more vividly than the repentance of Manasseh, recorded in the thirty-third chapter of Second Chronicles. Manasseh was the son of the godly Hezekiah, yet he surpassed in wickedness the worst of the kings of Judah and even the Amorites whom the Lord had driven out before Israel. The chronicler spares no detail: he built altars to Baal, worshiped the host of heaven, practiced soothsaying and sorcery, set a carved image in the house of God, and "made his sons pass through the fire in the valley of the son of Hinnom" (2 Chronicles 33:6): child sacrifice, the horror that God had expressly forbidden and that even the pagan nations recognized as an abomination. He shed innocent blood in Jerusalem until the city was filled with it. And then the Lord brought the Assyrians against him, and he was taken with hooks, bound with fetters, and carried to Babylon. It was there, in the darkness of a foreign prison, that Manasseh did what the Confession describes as true repentance. "And when he was in affliction, he besought the LORD his God, and humbled himself greatly before the God of his fathers, and prayed unto him: and he was entreated of him, and heard his supplication, and brought him again to Jerusalem into his kingdom. Then Manasseh knew that the LORD he was God" (2 Chronicles 33:12-13). The Hebrew kana, humbled himself greatly, is intensified: he was brought very low. Not a superficial regret but a thorough prostration of the soul. And God, whose mercy multiplies to pardon, heard. The man whose sins included idolatry, sorcery, child sacrifice, and the filling of Jerusalem with innocent blood was forgiven, restored to his kingdom, and granted the knowledge that the Lord is God. If Manasseh could be pardoned, who shall say his sins are too great? The chronicler records this history not as an anomaly but as a testimony that the door of mercy is wider than the darkest guilt. The blood that covered Manasseh — Christ's blood, retroactively applied through the faith of the old covenant saint — is the same blood that covers every sinner who turns. The apostle Paul understood this personally, and he makes himself the exhibit. Writing to Timothy, he declares: "This is a faithful saying, and worthy of all acceptation, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners; of whom I am chief" (1 Timothy 1:15). The Greek protos, chief or first, places Paul at the head of the line. The man who had been a blasphemer, a persecutor, and an insolent opponent of the church, the man who had held the coats of those who stoned Stephen and had breathed out threats and slaughter against the disciples, this man became the pattern. "Howbeit for this cause I obtained mercy, that in me first Jesus Christ might shew forth all longsuffering, for a pattern to them which should hereafter believe on him to life everlasting" (1 Timothy 1:16). The word hypotyposis, pattern, means a sketch or outline, the preliminary drawing from which all subsequent copies are made. Paul's conversion and forgiveness are the prototype of every conversion and forgiveness that follows. If the worst sinner became the pattern, no sinner can be beyond the pattern's reach.

What the Divines Meant

The Westminster Divines were not the first to wrestle with the question of whether some sins are too great to be forgiven, and their formulation in Section 4 is understood against the background of errors they were determined to refute. The first error was the Roman Catholic distinction between mortal and venial sins, a distinction that encouraged a light view of sins classified as venial and introduced a taxonomy that led the penitent to measure guilt by the wrong standard. The Confession sweeps this aside with its opening clause: "no sin so small, but it deserves damnation." The question is not whether God in His mercy will actually damn a person for a single small sin; the whole context of the Confession is that grace covers all sin in those who believe. The question is what the sin deserves. And the answer is that every sin, considered in itself, merits eternal death, because every sin is an offense against an infinite majesty. As James puts it, "whosoever shall keep the whole law, and yet offend in one point, he is guilty of all" (James 2:10). The law is a seamless garment; to tear it at any point is to rend the whole. The second error, more ancient than Rome, was the Novatian heresy of the third century. Novatian taught that while lesser sins could be forgiven through the church's ministry, certain grave sins (apostasy, murder, adultery) were beyond the church's power to absolve. Such sinners might be left to the mercy of God, but the church could offer them no assurance. The Nicene Creed's confession of "one baptism for the remission of sins" was in part a repudiation of this rigor. But the tendency to draw a line beyond which grace cannot reach persists in every generation. It appears in the conscience of the despairing sinner who whispers, "Not this one. Other sins, yes, but not this." It appears in churches that welcome certain penitent sinners but quietly signal that others have crossed an invisible boundary. The Confession's response is unequivocal: no sin is so great that it can bring damnation upon those who truly repent. The qualification is essential: the promise is for those who turn. But for those who do, there is no category of sin, no degree of heinousness, no depth of depravity that places the sinner beyond the reach of pardoning grace. A third concern, more pastoral than polemical, shaped the Divines' language. They knew that the conscience, once awakened, tends toward excess. The same sinner who yesterday dismissed his sins as trifles may tomorrow be crushed by the conviction that they are unpardonable. The Confession's careful balance: no sin small, no sin beyond pardon; it is designed to steady the soul in both directions. It will not let the careless continue careless, and it will not let the contrite continue despairing. It speaks the law to the first and the gospel to the second, and it does so without confusing the two. The phrase "upon those who truly repent" also deserves attention. The Divines do not say "upon those who repent perfectly" or "upon those who repent adequately" or "upon those whose repentance meets a certain standard of depth and duration." They say "truly repent." The adverb qualifies the genuineness, not the degree, of the repentance. True repentance is distinguished from false repentance: the repentance of Judas, which was sorrow without turning; the repentance of Pharaoh, which was regret without reformation; the repentance of the superficial convert, who grieves the consequences of sin but not the sin itself. True repentance, as the earlier sections of this chapter have established, involves a genuine grief for having offended God, a hatred of the sin itself, and a turning from it to God. It does not require a perfection of performance. It requires a sincerity of heart. And where that sincerity is present, the greatness of the sin is no barrier. The blood of Christ is sufficient for the greatest sinner who truly turns, even as it is the only hope for the least.

Theological Depth

Calvin observes that Satan has two strategies for destroying souls. The first is to minimize sin before it is committed, whispering that a small transgression can do no great harm. The second is to magnify sin after it is committed, insisting that the transgression is now too great to be forgiven. Both strategies are lies, and both are refuted by the same truth: every sin is damnable, and every sin is pardonable through Christ. The sinner who has played with a small sin has played with eternal fire. The sinner who despairs over a great sin has forgotten that the mercy of God is greater still. Calvin's point is not that the greatness of sin is diminished but that the greatness of grace is magnified against the dark background of human guilt. The darker the background, the brighter the mercy shines. Watson, in his Body of Divinity, takes up the pastoral implications with characteristic warmth. He imagines a soul saying, "But my sins are scarlet sins, sins of a deep dye. Can the blood of Christ ever wash them away?" And he answers by pointing to the very image Isaiah uses. Scarlet and crimson, he observes, are the colors most difficult to remove from fabric. If you stain a garment with scarlet dye, no amount of ordinary washing will lift the stain. The dye is fixed. It has become part of the cloth. And yet God says, "Though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow." The image is deliberately chosen to emphasize the impossibility of human remedy and the completeness of divine cleansing. What no human effort can accomplish, the blood of Christ accomplishes fully. Watson then presses the point further: "The blood of Christ is both a cleansing and a bleaching blood. It doth not only wash out the spots of sin but takes away the very tincture and habit of it." The gospel does not merely cover sin; it removes it. The whiteness of snow is not a whiteness achieved by hiding the stain beneath a surface coating. It is a whiteness that means the stain is gone. Turretin addresses the question with systematic precision, asking directly whether some sins are unpardonable. He distinguishes between the sin against the Holy Spirit, which Scripture declares will not be forgiven — not because it exceeds the power of Christ's blood but because it involves a final and obstinate rejection of the only remedy — and all other sins, for which the remedy is sufficient and the promise of pardon is certain for those who repent. The sin against the Holy Spirit, Turretin argues, is unpardonable not for its magnitude but for its nature: it is the sin of one who has so hardened himself against the truth that he will never repent. The very condition of pardon, repentance, is made impossible by the sin itself. This is not a failure of Christ's blood but a self-inflicted separation from the Spirit who alone can work repentance. For every other sin, of whatever magnitude, the promise stands: "him that cometh to me I will in no wise cast out" (John 6:37). Turretin's careful distinction protects the conscience from the fear that some hidden sin, some forgotten transgression, some dark deed of the past, has placed the sinner beyond hope. If you can repent, your sin is pardonable. And if you are troubled by the question of whether your sin is too great, your very trouble is evidence that the Spirit has not abandoned you. Hodge, in his exposition, adds a reflection that strengthens the pastoral application. He notes that the Confession's language about sins "great" and "small" is accommodated to human ways of speaking. Before the bar of God's absolute holiness, there are strictly no small sins, because every sin is an offense against an infinite majesty. The distinction between great and small sins is relative, measured by their effects upon others, by the degree of deliberation involved, by the light against which they were committed. But the Confession uses the language pastorally, not metaphysically. It meets the sinner where he is. The man who thinks his sins are small needs to hear that they deserve damnation. The man who thinks his sins are too great needs to hear that grace is greater. Both hear what they need to hear, not because the Confession changes its doctrine to suit the audience, but because the single doctrine has two applications that address two distinct errors. Shaw, whose exposition served generations of Scottish Presbyterians, draws attention to the example of Manasseh with force. "What sin," he asks, "can be named, which this man did not commit? Idolatry, witchcraft, murder of his own children, persecution of the saints, filling Jerusalem with blood." And yet he was pardoned. Shaw's point is that God has deliberately preserved the record of Manasseh's sin and repentance so that no sinner in any age could say, "My sins are worse than his." The chronicler gives the full catalog of Manasseh's crimes precisely so that the full reach of mercy might be displayed. If Manasseh found pardon, what sinner dare despair? And if Manasseh's crimes deserved damnation, and they certainly did; what sinner dare presume that his own small sins are safe? Warfield, writing on the emotional dimensions of guilt, observes that the conscience has a divinely implanted function: it accuses. But the conscience, like every human faculty, is disordered by sin and needs the correction of the Word of God. The conscience that feels no guilt for small sins is a seared conscience that needs the law to awaken it. The conscience so overwhelmed by guilt that it cannot believe in pardon has lost sight of the gospel and needs the promise applied. The Westminster Divines understood this pastoral psychology with a depth modern therapeutic approaches have rarely matched. Section 4 is a theological proposition and also an instrument designed to correct the conscience in whichever direction it has strayed.

Puritan Application

First, never measure the seriousness of sin by its social consequences or its visibility to others. The Confession's opening clause, "no sin so small, but it deserves damnation," is a standing rebuke to the habit of grading sins by their public scandal. A lustful thought that no one else sees deserves damnation. A word of gossip spoken in a whisper deserves damnation. A prayerless morning, a neglected duty, a subtle pride that cloaks itself in humility, a resentment nursed in the secret chambers of the heart: all of these deserve the wrath of a holy God. We are prone to think that because a sin is quiet, it is safe; because it disturbs no one, it disturbs nothing. But the judgment of Scripture is otherwise. The God with whom we have to do is a God who sees in secret, who weighs the spirits, who tries the hearts and reins. The smallness of a sin in human eyes is no measure of its gravity before the throne of infinite holiness. Adam's single act of eating forbidden fruit brought death into the world. Moses' single act of striking the rock in anger kept him from the Promised Land. Ananias and Sapphira's single act of deception brought them to an early grave. Learn from these to tremble at every sin, however small it seems. The Christian who has lost the capacity to grieve over what the world calls trifles is a Christian whose conscience is in danger. Second, never conclude that your sins are too great for mercy. The second half of the Confession's sentence is a door thrown open as wide as the arms of Christ upon the cross. If you have truly repented, turning from your sin with grief and hatred and turning to God with trust in the blood of His Son; then the magnitude of your sin is no obstacle to your pardon. The blood of Christ is sufficient for the sins of a Manasseh, a David, a Peter, a Paul. It is sufficient for yours. The enemy of your soul will whisper that your sin is exceptional, that the general promises of mercy do not apply to a case like yours, that if others knew what you have done they would understand why you cannot be forgiven. These whispers are lies. The Word of God declares that Christ "is able also to save them to the uttermost that come unto God by him" (Hebrews 7:25). The Greek eis to panteles, "to the uttermost," means completely, perfectly, finally, without remainder. There is no sin that Christ cannot save from, no sinner that Christ cannot save, if that sinner comes. The question is not whether your sin is too great but whether you have come. If you have come, then you are within the reach of the promise, and the promise cannot fail. Third, examine the genuineness of your repentance, not the greatness of your sin. The Confession's qualification, "those who truly repent," directs the sinner's attention away from the catalog of his transgressions and toward the character of his response to them. The question to ask is not "Were my sins too great?" but "Has my repentance been true?" True repentance, as the earlier sections of this chapter have established, involves a sight of the evil of sin, a grief for having committed it, a hatred of its filthiness, an apprehension of God's mercy in Christ, and a turning from sin unto new obedience. Where these are present, even in weakness and imperfection, there is true repentance. And where true repentance is present, the promise of pardon is sure. Do not torment yourself by measuring the depth of your sorrow against some imagined standard. Do not compare your repentance to another's and conclude that yours is insufficient because his tears were more and his reformation more visible. The question is not quantity but quality: not how much you have wept but whether your sorrow is genuinely directed toward God, not how thoroughly you have reformed but whether your turning is sincere. The publican in the temple offered no elaborate confession; he simply beat his breast and cried, "God be merciful to me a sinner" (Luke 18:13), and went home justified. The sincerity of a moment's genuine turning outweighs years of superficial religiosity. Fourth, let the greatness of pardoned sin fuel the greatness of your love. Our Lord Himself taught this principle when He said of the woman who washed His feet with her tears, "Her sins, which are many, are forgiven; for she loved much: but to whom little is forgiven, the same loveth little" (Luke 7:47). The depth of gratitude corresponds to the depth of the debt that has been canceled. If you have been forgiven much, you have reason to love much. Do not let the memory of forgiven sin become a burden that crushes you; let it become a fuel that drives you to love Christ more fervently, to serve Him more gladly, to hate sin more thoroughly. Every recollection of the pit from which you were dug should sweeten your appreciation of the grace that lifted you out. The saints in glory will sing the song of the Lamb forever, and their song will not be diminished by the memory of the sins from which they were cleansed; it will be enriched by it. So let it be with you now, in the pilgrim state. Your sins, great as they were, are covered by a greater grace. Let that truth make you a more loving, more grateful, more humble follower of Christ. Fifth, extend to others the same mercy you have received. There is a peculiar ugliness in the forgiven sinner who refuses to forgive. The servant in our Lord's parable, who had been forgiven an unpayable debt of ten thousand talents, went out and seized his fellow servant by the throat over a debt of a hundred pence. His master's response was severe: "O thou wicked servant, I forgave thee all that debt, because thou desiredst me: shouldest not thou also have had compassion on thy fellowservant, even as I had pity on thee?" (Matthew 18:32-33). The point is not that forgiving others earns God's forgiveness: the parable does not teach justification by works. The point is that the experience of being forgiven transforms the heart so that it becomes forgiving. If you have truly grasped that your great sins are pardoned through the blood of Christ, you will not withhold pardon from those who have sinned against you, however genuinely they have wronged you. Their offenses, real as they are, are the hundred-pence debts measured against the ten-thousand-talent debt that God has canceled for you. The church is meant to be a community of forgiven forgivers. Where bitterness and resentment fester among those who profess to have received mercy, something is profoundly wrong. Examine your heart. Is there anyone against whom you are holding a grudge, nursing a wound, refusing reconciliation? The same grace that covered your scarlet sins calls you to cover the offenses of others.

Prayer

Almighty and most merciful God, who art of purer eyes than to behold iniquity and yet hast made a way for sinners to draw near to Thee through the blood of Thy dear Son, we bow before Thee as those who have no standing in themselves. We confess that we have sinned against Thee in ways both great and small. We have loved what Thou hatest and neglected what Thou commandest. We have spoken words that ought never to have been spoken and kept silence when we ought to have spoken. We have harbored thoughts of pride, envy, and unbelief in the very chambers of our hearts where Thy Spirit dwells. If Thou shouldst mark iniquities, O Lord, who could stand? Yet we bless Thee that there is forgiveness with Thee, that Thou mayest be feared. We thank Thee that the blood of Jesus Christ Thy Son cleanseth from all sin: the small sins we have excused, the great sins over which we have despaired, the secret sins we have hidden, the open sins that have shamed us before men. We praise Thee that where sin abounded, grace did much more abound, and that the mercy Thou dost multiply toward the penitent is greater than the guilt that clings to the impenitent. Grant us, we pray, true repentance. Make us to see the damnable nature of every sin, that we may never trifle with what cost our Savior His life. And make us also to see the boundless reach of Thy mercy, that we may never despair of pardon when we have truly turned from our sins. Break the hard heart that will not mourn. Lift the despairing heart that cannot hope. Lead every sinner among us to the cross, where justice and mercy meet, and where crimson sins are washed as white as snow. We pray for those among Thy people who are burdened with the memory of great sins committed long ago. Let them know that the blood of Christ reaches backward as well as forward, and that the sins they have truly repented of are cast into the depths of the sea, remembered against them no more. And we pray for those who are trifling with small sins, imagining that the eternal God will overlook what they have chosen to overlook in themselves. Awaken them before it is too late, and grant them the grief that leads to life. Make us, we pray, a people who forgive as we have been forgiven, who extend to others the mercy we have received, and who walk in the joyful liberty of those whose debt has been canceled at infinite cost. Teach us to hate sin with a perfect hatred, to love righteousness with a whole heart, and to rest all our hope for time and eternity not in the quality of our repentance but in the sufficiency of our Redeemer. Hear us for His sake, in whose name we pray. Amen.