Repentance Vs. Regret

“When the people of Israel cried out to the Lord on account of the Midianites, the Lord sent a prophet to the people of Israel. And he said to them, ‘Thus says the Lord, the God of Israel: I led you up from Egypt and brought you out of the house of slavery.” – Judges 6:7

Judges has a cycle of rebellion, retribution, repentance, and rescue, which is repeated six times throughout the course of the book. The fact that God sends an unnamed prophet here to speak to the Israelites suggests that there is something about their cry for help that may be regret, but falls short of true repentance. What is the difference between the two? Regret, or worldly sorrow (2 Corinthians 7), is sad over the consequences of sin rather than the sin itself. Once the consequences go away, the behavior returns. Repentance is sad at how the sin grieves God and results in the loss of a relationship with him. Repentance opens the door to grace and restoration, the ability to move on past the sin. 

Regret is about ourselves; repentance is about God. The prophet’s brief sermon is entirely God-centered: he wants them to see who God is and what He has done; he wants to drive home what their disobedience means to that God, rather than just what their disobedience means to them.  

How can we discern whether we respond to sin with regret or repentance? We can go to God’s word, just as the prophet quotes God to his people. We can observe patterns of sin in our lives. As one commentator wrote, “If you are continually falling into the same spiritual pit and your falls are not decreasing in number or intensity, you may be responding to sin in regret rather than repentance. In other words, you may regret the troubles your sin causes but be unwilling to reject the idol underlying the sin, which is still attractive to you.”

We can examine our patterns of confession. It is telling that we so often find it easier to confess alone or within a congregation than to one or two other people. Dietrich Bonhoeffer puts it well:

“Why is it that it is often easier for us to confess our sins to God than to a brother? God is holy and sinless, He is a just judge of evil and the enemy of all disobedience. But a brother is sinful as we are. He knows from his own experience the dark night of secret sin. Why should we not find it easier to go to a brother than to the holy God? But if we do, we must ask ourselves whether we have not often been deceiving ourselves with our confession of sin to God, whether we have not rather been confessing our sins to ourselves and also granting ourselves absolution... Who can give us the certainty that, in the confession and the forgiveness of our sins, we are not dealing with ourselves but with the living God? God gives us this certainty through our brother. Our brother breaks the circle of self-deception. A man who confesses his sins in the presence of a brother knows that he is no longer alone with himself; he experiences the presence of God in the reality of the other person.”