Counterfeit Repentance, Part 1

By Chris McKnight, Teaching Pastor at Kerrville Bible Church

No series on repentance is complete that doesn’t cover counterfeits. Some try to fake their way into heaven. If that’s you, I want you to be rescued.

Theologian Louis Berkoff wrote that repentance is “that change wrought in the conscious life of the sinner, by which he turns away from sin.” He then added three crucial elements that make up this change. Miss any one of them and the result is Counterfeit Repentance.

One, repentance has an intellectual element, a change in your thoughts about your sin, seeing your sin as sin, with appropriate personal guilt and a sense of helplessness to change yourself. Something you once thought was fun and fulfilling now isn’t. Something you once considered harmless now brings a guilty conscience.

Two, repentance has an emotional element, a change in your feelings toward your sin. As we’ve seen, a new sorrow arises over sin against a holy, just and good God, where we used to could care less.

Three, repentance has a volitional element, an inward turning away from sin, purposing in our heart to obey Christ, not just talk about obeying Christ. This element of the will involves a deep commitment to Him as Lord, not just feeling badly about sin.

By the way, as we might expect, saving faith has the same three elements.

If playing baseball, one out of three at the plate for fifteen years, would land you in the Hall of Fame. If playing basketball, two out of three from the floor would always lead the league. But in repentance, anything but three for three and you are deceived about your salvation, “holding to a form of godliness although [you] have denied it’s power” (2 Tim. 3:5). What power is that? The power over sin.

Our Puritan friend, Thomas Watson, wrote in the Doctrine of Repentance (I paraphrase): “A man has lived long in sin. At last God gets his attention, shows him what a desperate and dangerous course he has run and he is filled with pain. But very soon the storm of a guilty conscience blows over and he is calm. Then he concludes that he is a repentant because he has felt some bitterness for sin. Do not be deceived: this is not repentance. Ahab and Judas had some trouble of mind. It is one thing to be a terrified sinner and another to be a repenting sinner. A sense of guilt is enough to breed or produce fear. Infusion of grace breeds repentance.”

Given that nearly everything good and right can be counterfeited, we need to make sure our own repentance isn’t one of them. To do so we will look at real people who in different ways came up short and seek to learn from their bad example.

The first is our father, Adam, at least initially. He may have eventually and genuinely repented, but his initial steps weren’t great. After God’s gracious and inevitable “finding” of Adam, we encounter his first counterfeit repentance in Gen.3:10. He had a knowledge of God’s activity in his life – “I heard the sound of You in the garden” – a fear of judgment – “I was afraid because I was naked” – and even shame – “so I hid myself.” But was he really turning to God in confession? Is this repentance?

Notice in his answer the self-absorption: I, I, I, I. Wasn’t there two of them? Sin is pulling them apart, breeding isolation, division and a new self-centeredness.

Then when God asks him if he ate it, Adam said, “The woman whom You gave to be with me …” Yeah, yeah God, I did it, but really it’s the woman’s fault. No actually, it’s Your fault! Adam goes from “I,I,I,I” to acknowledging her existence, but only as a convenient scapegoat. First of many cases of blameshifting.

Counterfeit repentance can include a confession of sin, while in your heart justifying, rationalizing, excusing or blaming others. We never hear Adam speak again.

Our second example is Esau. His story begins in Gen. 25:24-34. His sin? He despised the family covenant God made with his granddad Abraham and renewed with his dad Isaac (no small covenant!) He turned his back on the double portion as the first born, dishonoring both his parents and his culture. For food again, he turned away from what is infinitely valuable for a passing pleasure, pun intended.

Did he repent? No, instead he took wives from among the Canaanites God had cast off, wives possessing the Canaanite character, becoming literally a “bitterness of spirit” to the 100 year old Isaac. Keil and Delitzsch comment: “these marriages furnished another proof, how thoroughly his heart was set upon earthly things.”

In the end, the blessing of the firstborn goes to Jacob. No doubt Esau felt stupid and even ashamed. He mourned his loss.

“Pursue peace with all men, and the sanctification without which no one will see the Lord. See to it that no one comes short of the grace of God; that no root of bitterness springing up causes trouble, and by it many be defiled; that there be no immoral or godless person like Esau, who sold his own birthright for a single meal. For you know that even afterwards, when he desired to inherit the blessing, he was rejected, for he found no place for repentance, though he sought for it with tears” (Heb. 12:14-17). Esau cried bitterly, but not over his sin. He begged for blessing, but not for God Himself.

What’s the difference between his tears and those of Peter? Esau cried over worldly regret; Peter cried over disowning and disappointing the Lord Jesus.

It drips with irony. Esau suffered no earthly loss at the time – he married two women, had lots of kids and prospered financially. Yet in his unbelief, he walked away from everything of spiritual value, membership in the Abrahamic covenant.
Peter suffered no worldly loss for denying Christ, in fact it likely spared him persecution and maybe arrest, but in disappointing the Son of the living God, he went out and wept bitterly.

The difference was what they cried over. Let Esau be a warning to us all.