Bible Wonders - REPENT

Did you ever wonder? Did you ever wonder?

I do. Did you ever wonder? Why the sun always rises, but the stars never fall? Why dry land is never satisfied by water? And why fire never says, enough?

Enough. When I look at the word in the Hebrew letters, in just the book of Genesis, it seems to be that the word means comfort in some ways, but it also, it has the sense of repented. But exactly what does it mean, like in Genesis 6, 6, when it says, And it repented the Lord that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved his heart. And again, in Genesis 6, 7, he goes, And the Lord said, I will destroy man whom I have created from the face of the earth, both man and beast, and the creeping thing, and the fowls of the air.

For it repenteth me that I made them. So here between Genesis 5 and 6, we hear this word used in the story of Noah, that Noah was going to, in Genesis 5, 25, the same word, it says, And his name will be called Noah, saying, This same shall comfort us concerning our work in the toil of our hands, as God the Lord hath cursed. So how can the word mean comfort, but at the same point in time, God wants comfort for having made us?

In other words, he's fixed to destroy the world. So as I looked at that word in Hebrew, it really was an interesting challenge for me to try to decipher how these three letters would mean that God at one point would want to repent from having made man. And in some way, that would comfort him, as Noah was comforting those in his day. So the first letter is a nun, which we've talked about several times on this program already. But the nun is in the ancient, ancient Hebrew script is a seed.

But it's also sort of this bent over person praying. It means faith in so many different ways. And so here we have this idea of faith or a seed. So the second letter is a het, which, you know, is kind of the sign for life, which is kind of when I first started studying this and when it came to repenting.

But in a way, you do choose life when you repent. But the thing that really opened the door for me was that it also means a structure or a wall. And so I thought about this, that when your faith hits the wall, so to speak, and the other side of that letter would be a man, we'll get to that in a minute. But I don't know how many people I've talked to that as I listen to their salvation experience, it seems like their faith hit the wall. And they turned.

Because, you know, I had a good friend who would unfortunately, you know, abuse his wife, a bead on her, and he would drink. But one night he heard God say to him, and what he said was a very audible voice, this, he was fixing to take another drink. And he heard the Holy Spirit, God, somebody tell him, Lester, this is your last chance. His faith hit the wall.

He didn't take that drink. It scared him. It got his attention. And his life was changed. And again, I knew Lester almost when he was 90 years old, and he was one of the most wonderful saints you'd ever meet. He and his wife were so close, it was unbelievable.

They would sit up till two or three in the morning talking. The relationship that God had redeemed on what Lester had repented of was just unbelievable. Oh, and I think that, you know, it's always concerned me that God wanted to repent from having made us. But it almost sounds like God's faith hit a wall. These people were doing such crazy things that it couldn't go any further than it was going, and so he had to turn and go in a new direction.

Which, you know, clearly is what God is doing. And when we turn, as with the prodigal son, eating those peat pods, his faith hit the wall, and he turned. And he came back to his senses, the Scriptures say, as Jesus told us about that story. And he went, and what did his father do? He put the robe on him and the signet ring and killed the fatted calf.

He was eating steak dinner. He didn't ask for more comfort for a kid that had done so much. So the amazing thing, as I think about the word repent, on the other side of the wall is that mem we talked about in just an episode at the end of last week, which in this sense, again, is chaos. And so if you go through that wall, as my friend, if he'd taken that one more drink, he was going into chaos.

If the boy hadn't turned and gone back to the father, what was he headed into? Chaos, right? If God hadn't repented of what he was doing with the Noah experience and flooded the earth, it was falling into chaos, okay? So praise God that he gave us some kind of wall. You know, I ran into that wall when I was reading the Book of Job, and all of a sudden I could clearly see that I needed to turn, because on the other side of what I was thinking, the direction I was going, I would be in total and complete chaos. I'm hoping this week you'll be thinking about repenting. In other words, at what point did your faith hit the wall?