Does The Lord Repent Or Regret?
Q: How should we understand passages where God is said not to repent or regret (Numbers 23:19) alongside passages where He appears to regret or relent (Genesis 6:6; Jeremiah 26:13)?
Numbers 23:19 – God is not a man, that He should lie, Nor a son of man, that He should repent. Has He said, and will He not do? Or has He spoken, and will He not make it good?
Gensis 6:6 – And the LORD was sorry that He had made man on the earth, and He was grieved in His heart.
Jeremiah 26:13 – Now therefore, amend your ways and your doings, and obey the voice of the LORD your God; then the LORD will relent concerning the doom that He has pronounced against you.
A: This is what we call an anthropomorphism. The Bible sometimes describes God using human terms. Keep in mind that we’re talking about how things appear to us. God knows the end from the beginning. God is not confused. Things don’t catch God by surprise. God is sovereign. He knows what He’s doing, and He’s rolling out His plan. Nothing catches God by surprise, but from our perspective, there are times when it appears as if God changed His course. It appears as if God said He was going to do something, and then conditions changed, so God said, “Well, I’m not going to do that anymore; I’m going to do something different.” In those cases, God didn’t change His plan. He understands what He is going to do from the beginning to the end of all things. But as it appears from our human perspective, we can say that God relented or God changed His mind.
It is important to clarify that we understand things as they appear to us, not how they actually and truly are in the eternal counsels of heaven. Sometimes the Bible speaks from a heavenly perspective about how God works and moves and thinks. At other times, the Bible speaks from an earthly perspective about how the actions and the workings of God appear to man. Here’s the thing: both are true.
The way things are in heaven is ultimately true, but how it appears to man is what we might call positionally true, or relationally true. It’s true for how it appears to us, but it may not be ultimately true.
Think of the story of Jonah. God tells Jonah, “I’m going to wipe out the people of Nineveh in 40 days. I want you to go and preach to them.” And we know the story. Jonah eventually ends up in Nineveh, and he preaches, and God doesn’t destroy the people of Nineveh. Did God change His mind as appears to man? Yes. But did He ultimately change the councils of heaven? No, God did not change His mind.
I don’t believe that God wants us to assume that prayer means nothing. There are people who think that the only purpose of prayer is self-improvement. They think, “It’s good for me.” Now, that is true. Prayer is good for me. But I think God wants us to believe that prayer moves His hand. If we get too caught up in the theological abstraction that God knows all things, always has His way, and nothing can change it, then we start to wonder why we should even pray.
We find amazing examples in Scripture where it seemed to the person praying that life and death rested on their prayers. Think of Abraham interceding for Sodom, or Moses interceding for Israel, or other stories of fervent prayer. To the people praying, it seemed that life and death depended on their prayer. God forbid that somebody would say, “Well, really, God in heaven was just winking at them and saying, ‘Oh, it doesn’t matter whether you pray or not. I’m going to do whatever I’m going to do.’” No, that’s not how God wants His people to operate.
When we read verses like these, we simply need to remember there is a distinction between truth as it is from the perspective of heaven coming down, and truth as it is as seen from Earth, looking up to God. One of my favorite sayings is that heaven is full of answers to prayer that people have not yet prayed.