Why Does God Regret and Repent in the Bible?

00:00:00.000 | Welcome back to the Ask Pastor John podcast. Ryan, a podcast listener, writes in

00:00:04.640 | to say this. "Hello Tony and Pastor John. I am a frequent listener of the podcast

00:00:08.360 | from Northern Ireland and I find all of the resources at DesiringGod.org to be

00:00:12.480 | extremely helpful and insightful in my walk with Christ. My question is about

00:00:16.360 | God regretting his decisions. Two times the Bible says that God regretted

00:00:22.360 | something that he had done in the past, and in at least 15 places the Bible says

00:00:27.040 | that he regretted or that he might regret something he was about to do in

00:00:31.120 | the future. Now I stumble over the idea of a sovereign God regretting something

00:00:36.020 | as though he would do it differently if he had another chance." What would you say

00:00:40.120 | to Ryan, Pastor John? This is a huge and important issue. Back in the mid-90s, mid

00:00:48.240 | 1990s, I was embroiled in disputes over what is called open theism, which argues

00:00:59.440 | that God is open to the future in the sense that he does not have exhaustive

00:01:09.160 | knowledge of what is coming in the future. So he's open, ended. Now I regard

00:01:17.480 | that position as profoundly wrong, unbiblical, dishonoring to the Lord,

00:01:23.800 | undermining to the gospel, and to his purposes in the world. So you can see why

00:01:28.280 | I was embroiled in this controversy. One of the arguments used by open theists is

00:01:37.960 | that there are passages in the Bible where God regrets or repents, as the old

00:01:45.320 | King James says, what he has done and therefore must not have been able to

00:01:53.640 | foresee what would come of his decisions, otherwise he would not have done them if

00:02:01.000 | he really regrets them. Now Ryan, in asking his question, has mentioned two of

00:02:06.880 | these, Genesis 6, 6 and 7, and 1 Samuel 15, 11. So what I'm going to do is

00:02:14.520 | take just one of those, 15, 11, because I think if we can show how one is explained

00:02:20.080 | and other passages in the Bible fall into place as well. When Saul disobeys

00:02:27.600 | Samuel, God says, "I regret," or King James, "I repent that I have made Saul king, for he

00:02:38.600 | has turned back from following me and has not carried out my commands." That's

00:02:42.880 | 1 Samuel 15, 11. So some have argued, as I said, that since God repents, regrets,

00:02:51.200 | making him king, therefore if he had to do over again, he wouldn't because he

00:02:56.200 | couldn't see what was coming, else why would he repent or regret if he knew in

00:03:02.320 | advance the consequence of his decision and chose to do it anyway? Now I don't

00:03:08.080 | think that is a compelling argument against God's foreknowledge, complete

00:03:15.000 | exhaustive foreknowledge, of what was going to come of Saul, and for several

00:03:21.800 | reasons. I'll just mention a couple. One has to do with the complexity of God's

00:03:27.160 | emotional life, and the other has to do with the context in 1 Samuel 15, where I

00:03:35.560 | think the writer explicitly does something to keep us from drawing a

00:03:41.120 | wrong conclusion about God's foreknowledge. So the first problem

00:03:45.560 | with that view is that it assumes God could not or would not lament over a

00:03:54.120 | state of affairs that he himself chose to bring about, but that assumption I

00:04:01.880 | think is not true to experience and not true to the Bible, and more importantly

00:04:07.360 | God's heart is capable of complex combinations of emotions infinitely more

00:04:17.240 | remarkable than ours. He may well be capable of lamenting over something he

00:04:24.920 | chose to bring about, and God may be capable of looking back on the very act

00:04:33.360 | of bringing something about and lamenting that act in one regard while

00:04:40.160 | affirming it as best in another regard. Here's an example from from my

00:04:46.840 | experience, see if this helps. If I spank my son for blatant disobedience and he

00:04:56.080 | runs away from home because I spanked him, I may feel some remorse over the

00:05:05.600 | spanking, not in the sense that I disapprove of what I did, but in the

00:05:13.400 | sense that I feel some sorrow that the spanking was necessary and a part of a

00:05:20.080 | wise way of dealing with my son in this situation, and great sorrow that he ran

00:05:27.840 | away. If I had to do it over again I would still spank him. It was the right

00:05:35.840 | thing to do, even knowing that one consequence would be alienation for a

00:05:41.840 | season. I approve the spanking from one angle and at the same time I regret the

00:05:49.480 | spanking from another angle. If such a combination of emotions is possible for

00:05:56.640 | me in my finite decisions, it's not hard for me to imagine that God's infinite

00:06:04.400 | mind, the infinite complexity of God's emotional life would be capable of

00:06:09.880 | something similar or even more complex. But most important is the context of

00:06:17.240 | 1st Samuel 15, not just my effort to try to imagine God's emotional life. Verse 11,

00:06:24.600 | "I repent or I regret that I have made Saul king." Then he says, "As if to clarify

00:06:32.080 | and protect us from misusing," verse 11, he says in verse 29, so this would be 28

00:06:39.400 | verses later, I mean 18 verses later, "The glory of Israel will not lie or repent

00:06:46.680 | or regret, for he is not a man that he should repent." Now the point of that

00:06:56.360 | verse seems to be that even though there is a sense in which God does repent, it

00:07:03.520 | says so in verse 11, he did, there's another sense in which he does not

00:07:08.400 | repent. Verse 29, same word in Hebrew. He does repent? No, he doesn't repent. And the

00:07:16.120 | difference would naturally be that God's repentance happens in spite of perfect

00:07:24.680 | foreknowledge, and that's what it means to be God, while most human repentance

00:07:30.400 | happens because we lack foreknowledge. God's way of repenting is unique to God.

00:07:36.480 | God is not man that he should repent, the writer says, meaning God is not man that

00:07:44.480 | he should repent as a man repents in his ignorance of the future. For God to say,

00:07:51.160 | "I feel sorrow that I made Saul king," is not the same thing as saying, "I would not

00:07:58.840 | make him king if I had to do it over." Oh yes, he would. God is able to feel sorrow

00:08:05.480 | for an act in view of foreknown evil, foreknown pain and sorrow and misery, and

00:08:13.920 | yet go ahead and do it for wise reasons. And so later when he looks back on the

00:08:21.800 | act, he can feel that very sorrow for the act that he knew was leading to the sad

00:08:29.400 | conditions like Saul's disobedience. One of the great implications of all this is

00:08:36.600 | that when God makes a promise to us, he does it with complete foreknowledge of

00:08:44.800 | all the future circumstances, and is therefore never caught off guard by

00:08:50.480 | anything. And so his promises will stand according to his infinite wisdom.

00:08:59.280 | That is a great assurance. Thank you, Pastor John, and thank you for the question, Ryan.

00:09:03.360 | These are the great, thoughtful, and sharp questions that we love to get. Send us

00:09:07.440 | your questions. Go to our online home at DesiringGod.org/AskPastorJohn,

00:09:12.200 | and there you can send us an email with it. Well, speaking of important questions,

00:09:16.840 | we have about 30 of them all on the same subject in the inbox over the years as

00:09:22.320 | to whether or not it's sinful to watch porn with a spouse. Oh man, it's next time

00:09:27.720 | on Wednesday. Pastor John will weigh into this more common-than-you-might-expect

00:09:31.120 | question that we get. I'm your host Tony Reinke. We'll see you then.

00:09:36.800 | [BLANK_AUDIO]

Why Does God Regret and Repent in the Bible?

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