Unless You Repent

Our text this evening is short in length but long in weight. Five verses. Two recent tragedies. One sober command, repeated twice. And every soul in this room is addressed by it.

You have not been able to turn on a phone or open a news feed or step outside this past week without seeing the smoke. The Highway 82 fire began on April 20th, sparked, of all things, by a foil balloon striking a power line. Within days it had grown to over thirty square miles. Last we heard, more than eighty homes have been destroyed. Whole neighborhoods evacuated. Schools closed. A lifetime of memories reduced to ash, and a charred cinderblock standing where a home used to be.

Our church property was spared. The Lord, in His providence, kept the flames from our doorstep. But less than a mile down the road, brothers and sisters, neighbors of ours, lost everything. Some of you know them. Some of you have been praying for them by name.

So the question presses in on us, the same question that pressed in on the people standing in front of Jesus that day: why? Why those houses and not our building? Why those families and not ours? Were they worse sinners than the rest of us? Did God have something against them that He did not have against us?

Our Lord answers that question. And His answer is not what we expect. He does not give us a theology of natural disasters. He does not assign blame. He does not even comfort the curious. He turns the question back on every one of us and says, in effect, “You are asking the wrong question, and you are asking it about the wrong people. The question is not why they perished. The question is whether you will.”

Notice the setting. Just before this conversation, in Luke 12, the Lord had rebuked the crowds as hypocrites because they could read the weather but could not read the times. They could feel the south wind and predict a hot day. But standing in front of them was the Son of God, the long-promised Messiah, and they did not discern the hour. They could read the sky but not their souls.

Then verse 1 of chapter 13. Some present brought up the news of the day. Pilate had slaughtered some Galilean worshipers in the very act of offering sacrifice, mingling their blood with the blood of their offerings. It was a horror. We do not have a record of this event outside Scripture, but it fits everything we know about Pontius Pilate. He was brutal. And he was especially brutal toward Galileans.

Why did they bring this up? We are not told plainly. Maybe they wanted Jesus to denounce Pilate. Maybe they wanted Him to take a political side. Maybe they wanted Him to confirm what they already believed, that the Galileans must have done something to deserve it. Whatever they expected, what they got was a sermon. Two questions. Two answers. And one command repeated twice, like a hammer driving a nail: “unless you repent, you will all likewise perish.”

Here is the heart of the matter, written on the wall of your soul: every catastrophe is a summons from God to repent, because every sinner stands under the same sentence and every sinner needs the same Savior.

The Wrong Question

Look again at verse 1. The Lord does not just respond to what they said. He responds to what they were thinking. He answers the assumption underneath the report. They told Him about the Galileans. He said, “Do you think these were greater sinners?” That is the question hiding in their hearts. That is the assumption coloring the whole conversation. And the Lord drags it out into the open.

We do this all the time. We do not ask the question out loud, but it is humming underneath. Someone gets cancer, and we wonder, quietly, what they did to deserve it. A marriage falls apart, and we look for the hidden sin. A man dies young, and we calculate the moral arithmetic in our heads. We are doing what the Galileans of Jesus’ day were doing. We are using the suffering of others as a measuring stick for their guilt.

Then the Lord goes further. Look at verse 4. He brings up a second event, one that, as far as we can tell, His questioners had not even mentioned. A tower in Siloam, near the pool, collapsed. Eighteen men were killed. Was it shoddy construction? Was it an earthquake? We do not know. What we do know is that no Pilate was involved. This was, as we would say, an act of God.

Why does He bring up Siloam? To close every loophole. The Galileans died at the hands of a wicked man, Pilate. Someone could say, “Well, that was a sinful act of a sinful ruler. God sometimes lets the wicked oppress the righteous. That tells us nothing about the spiritual state of those Galileans.” Fine. So the Lord gives them a second example, where there is no human villain at all. Two events. One a human atrocity. The other a sudden providential disaster. The same wrong question lurks behind both.

Why is this the wrong question? At least three reasons.

First, it puts us in the seat of the Judge. Who am I to weigh the souls of the dead? Who are you to look at a charred home in Brantley County and say, “I wonder what they did to deserve that”? That is a throne we have no business climbing onto. The Lord alone weighs hearts. Job’s friends sat for seven days, looking at his ash heap, and then could not stop themselves. They had to explain it. They had to assign the blame. And God said to Eliphaz at the end of the book that His wrath was kindled against him, because he had not spoken of God what was right. The wrong question makes us little Eliphazes.

Second, it gives the survivors a false sense of safety. Do you see what the Galileans were doing, even unconsciously? If those other Galileans were greater sinners, then the ones still standing must be lesser sinners. If those eighteen at Siloam were worse offenders, the men still walking the streets of Jerusalem must be better. Right there is the deadly self-righteousness this whole passage is designed to crush. The disciples did the same thing in John 9. They saw a man born blind and asked who sinned, the man or his parents, that he should be born blind. The question protected them. It put the problem over there, on someone else.

Third, it stops short of the gospel. The wrong question keeps us examining the dead. The right question makes us examine ourselves. The wrong question is a debate. The right question is a summons. And the Lord is not interested in a debate. He is interested in your soul.

Application

This past week we have watched flames eat through Brantley County. The Highway 82 fire has burned over twenty thousand acres. Eighty homes, at least, gone. And every one of us has, somewhere in our minds, asked the wrong question. Why them? Why that house? Why that family?

Then the more dangerous version: why not us? We watched the wind shift. We watched the maps. We watched our own building, where this congregation used to gather, sit untouched while houses just down the road were consumed. There is a temptation, real and subtle, to read that providence as a verdict on us, or even on the criminals who have been unlawfully using our building since January. As if the fire that did not reach our property was God’s seal of approval. As if the families who lost their homes were somehow worse than we are.

Do not believe that for a moment. The Lord has a hard word for that thinking. The fact that the fire stopped short of our property is the kindness of God. It is His mercy, not our righteousness. And the proper response to mercy is not pride. It is repentance.

When we hear of a shooting, when we read of a hurricane, when we see a sudden death in our community, the question is never, “What did they do?” The question is always, “What is God saying to me?” The Lord did not bring up these two tragedies so His audience could analyze the dead. He brought them up so His audience could examine themselves. And He brings up our recent tragedy this evening for the same reason.

The Right Verdict

Look at the Lord’s answer. Verse 3: “I tell you, no.” Verse 5: “I tell you, no.” Twice. The same answer to both questions.

We have to be careful, because there is a way to read those words that misses the whole point. Some have heard “I tell you, no” and concluded that the Lord is saying the victims were innocent. As if Jesus were saying the Galileans were good people, the men at Siloam upstanding citizens, that they did not deserve what happened. That is not what He is saying. Look at the words carefully. He does not say those Galileans were not sinners. He says they were not greater sinners than the others. He does not say the men of Siloam had no offenses. He says they were not worse offenders than the rest of Jerusalem.

Do you see what He has done? He has not let anyone off the hook. He has put everyone on it. He has not lowered the standard, He has raised it. He has said, in effect, “They were guilty, and so are you, and so is everyone in this crowd, and so is everyone in Jerusalem, and so is every son and daughter of Adam who has ever drawn breath.”

This is the right verdict. And it is the verdict of all of Scripture. Romans 3:10, “There is none righteous, not even one.” Romans 3:23, “All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” Isaiah 53:6, “All of us like sheep have gone astray, each of us has turned to his own way.” The right verdict is not, “Some are guilty and some are innocent.” The right verdict is, “All are guilty, and the only difference between the man whose home burned and the man whose home stood is the patience of God.”

What the deaths really meant

Listen carefully. The death of those Galileans, mingled with their sacrifices, did not make them special sinners. It made visible what was already true of them, and of every Galilean, and of every man and woman in that crowd. The collapse of the tower in Siloam did not single those eighteen men out as exceptional offenders. It pulled back the curtain on a reality that hangs over every human being from the moment of conception: we are under the sentence of death because we are under the sentence of sin.

The wages of sin is death. That is the verdict. Genesis 3, Romans 6, the consistent testimony of the Word of God. Every funeral procession you have ever watched is a sermon on that verdict. Every cemetery in Glynn County and Brantley County preaches it, and that includes the cemetery out back of the church property. Every local news report preaches it. Death came into the world because sin came into the world. And every death is a witness to the justice of God.

So when we look at those homes lost, we do not say, “How wicked those families must have been.” We say, “How short life is. How sudden the end can come. How certain the judgment of God is. How urgent it is that I be ready.”

Application

The proper response to every news headline is not, “Why them?” It is, “Why not me?” Not, “What did they do?” but, “What if that had been my house? What if that had been my last day?” When we hear of fire in Brantley County, we should not look outward and judge. We should look inward and tremble.

Hear me carefully. This is not morbid. This is mercy. The Lord brings up tragedies, not to depress us, but to wake us. He pulls back the curtain on death, not to terrify us into despair, but to drive us to the only Refuge there is. A doctor who tells you that your test is positive is not being cruel. He is being honest, because honesty is the road to treatment. The Lord is being honest with us.

The hour is near. The time is short. I think of those firefighters and other first responders this past week, going door to door, knocking on every house in the evacuation zones. They were not trying to terrify anyone. They were trying to save people. “Get out. The fire is coming. Do not wait. Do not gather your things. Do not say, I will leave in an hour. Get out now.”

That is what this passage is. Through the preaching of the gospel, the Lord Jesus Christ is at your door, and He is saying, “The fire is coming. Get out. Flee to Me.”

The Only Escape

The Lord has refused the wrong question. He has given the right verdict. Now He gives the only escape, and He gives it twice, in identical words: “unless you repent, you will all likewise perish.”

When the Lord repeats Himself in the same paragraph, in the same conversation, in the very same words, you and I had better lean in. The repetition is the sermon. The repetition tells us this is the heart of what He came to say. He brought up Pilate’s atrocity for this. He brought up the tower of Siloam for this. Two events, two questions, two refutations, and one command spoken twice: repent.

What it means to repent

The Greek word metanoeo literally means a change of mind. But not a change of mind about a recipe or a route home. It is a change of mind about God, a change of mind about self, and a change of mind about sin. That change of mind always produces a change of direction. To repent is to turn. To turn from sin and to turn to God in faith.

It is the call of John the Baptist in Luke 3, “Bear fruits in keeping with repentance.” It is the call of the Lord Jesus in Mark 1, “Repent and believe in the gospel.” It is the call of Peter at Pentecost in Acts 2, “Repent, and let each of you be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins.” It is the call of Paul in Acts 20, “Solemnly testifying to both Jews and Greeks of repentance toward God and faith in our Lord Jesus Christ.” Repentance and faith are the twin graces of conversion. They are inseparable. You cannot turn from sin without turning to Christ, and you cannot truly turn to Christ without turning from sin.

Let me be plain about what repentance is not. Repentance is not feeling bad about sin. Judas felt bad. Judas hanged himself. That is remorse, not repentance, and remorse without Christ is the pit. Repentance is not promising to do better. Many a man has promised to do better and walked right back into the same sin a week later. Repentance is not a religious ritual or a particular emotional experience. Repentance is a Spirit-wrought turning of the whole soul, away from sin and self, and toward God in Christ.

What “likewise perish” means

Look at the warning. “Unless you repent, you will all likewise perish.” That word likewise is critical. Some have read it superficially and thought the Lord was predicting that every unrepentant person will die in a tower collapse or by Pilate’s sword. That is not what He means.

“Likewise” points to the manner of the perishing. The Galileans were going about their religious duty, offering sacrifice, when death came on them suddenly. The men at Siloam were walking past the tower, going about an ordinary day, when death fell on them suddenly. There was no warning. There was no time to prepare. There was no second chance. And the Lord says: that is how every unrepentant sinner perishes. Suddenly. Finally. Without remedy.

The perishing He has in mind is far worse than physical death. Physical death is only the gate to the perishing. The eternal perishing of which Scripture warns is the everlasting separation of the soul from God under His holy wrath. It is the second death of Revelation 20. It is the outer darkness of Matthew 25. It is the unquenchable fire of Mark 9. The Galileans died once. The men of Siloam died once. But the man who refuses to repent dies twice, and the second death is forever.

The escape is real

Feel the shape of the Lord’s sentence. He says, “Unless you repent.” That little word unless is a door. A door of mercy in a wall of judgment. He could have said, “You will all perish.” Period. End of sentence. He would have been just to say it. We deserve nothing less. But He did not say that. He said, “Unless you repent, you will all likewise perish.” Which means, by the necessary implication of His own words, if you repent, you will not perish.

That is the gospel hiding in this warning. That is grace shining through the storm clouds. The Lord did not come into this world to condemn the world, but that the world through Him might be saved. He stood there that day, looking at people who had just brought Him a story about death, and He offered them life. He told them there is a way out. The way out is not religious activity. It is not better behavior. It is not being among the lucky survivors. It is not even having your name on a church roll somewhere. The way out is repentance toward God and faith in the Lord Jesus Christ.

The One who calls you to repent is the very One who, just months after this conversation, would Himself be led outside the city, where another Roman governor would shed innocent blood. Pilate had mingled the blood of Galileans with their sacrifices. But the Lord Jesus Himself would become the sacrifice. His blood would be shed. And His blood, unlike the blood of those poor Galileans, would not testify to human cruelty. It would testify to divine love. He would die in the place of sinners, so that sinners who repent and believe might live.

That is why the call to repent is not a cruel call. It is the most loving call ever uttered. The Lord is not standing over you with a club. He is standing in front of you with open arms, and He is saying, “Turn. Turn now. Come to Me. Do not perish.”

Application

I have to ask the question this whole article has been building toward. Have you repented? Not, did you walk an aisle once. Not, were you raised in church. Not, do your parents pray for you. Have you, personally, before God, turned from your sin and trusted in Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior?

If you have not, then this passage is a fire alarm in your soul. The Lord Jesus, who is full of grace and truth, is telling you plainly that without repentance there is no escape. The fire that consumed those homes in Brantley County is a faint shadow of the fire that awaits every unrepentant soul. Just as those families had to flee, leaving everything behind, you too must flee. Not from a forest fire. From the wrath to come. There is only one Refuge. His name is Jesus.

To those who have repented and believed, who have fled to Christ already, this passage is still for you. It is still a summons to ongoing repentance. The Christian life, said Martin Luther, is a life of repentance. We do not repent once at conversion and then never again. We repent every day, all our days, until the day we see the face of the One we trusted. Use this past week’s tragedy as the Lord intends. Let the smoke that rose over Brantley County rise also as a kind of incense in your soul, prompting you to examine your heart, confess your sins, and renew your trust in your Savior.

One more application before we close. The kindness of God is not weakness.

The fact that the fire stopped short of our property is not a verdict that we are righteous. It is a mercy that calls us to repentance. The fact that you woke up this morning is a mercy that calls you to repentance. The fact that you are reading the gospel right now is a mercy that calls you to repentance. Do not despise that kindness. Do not waste it. Do not assume it will always be there. Today is the day of salvation. Now is the acceptable time.

The Fire Is Coming

Two tragedies. Two refutations. One repeated command. The Lord answered a question about other people’s deaths by pressing every hearer to consider his own. He used the news of the day to do soul work. He used a Roman governor’s atrocity and a Jerusalem tower’s collapse, and on this Lord’s Day, He uses a fire in Brantley County, to ask you the only question that finally matters: have you repented?

Look at the text one more time. Verse 3: “I tell you, no, but unless you repent, you will all likewise perish.” Verse 5: “I tell you, no, but unless you repent, you will all likewise perish.” Identical words. The Spirit of God carved that warning into Holy Scripture twice, that it might be carved into your soul, that you will walk away not as a forgetful hearer but as a doer of the Word.

Imagine standing in the Brantley County evacuation zone last week, and a deputy pulls up in your driveway. He rolls down the window. He says, “Sir, ma’am, the fire is coming. You need to leave now. The wind is shifting. We cannot promise the road will be open in an hour.” What would you do? Would you say, “Officer, I appreciate your concern, but I have things to do today. Maybe I will think about it next week”? Would you ask him to come back at a more convenient time? Of course not. You would leave. You would grab what you could and you would go, because the warning was real, and the danger was certain, and the time was short.

That is what God’s Word is doing. The Lord Jesus Himself, through the preaching of His Word, has pulled into your driveway. He is rolling down the window. He is saying, “Repent. The fire is coming. The day of judgment is real. You will perish unless you turn. There is a Refuge, and it is Me. Come.”

The fact that the flames stopped short of our church property tells us nothing about our righteousness. It tells us everything about His patience. The same God who held back the wind from our doorstep is the God who has held back His final judgment from a sinful world. But the patience of God is not infinite. The fig tree of the next paragraph in Luke 13, verses 6 through 9, makes that plain. The vineyard owner came seeking fruit and did not find any. He said, “Cut it down.” The vinedresser pleaded for one more year. And next year, if there is no fruit, “cut it down.” That is the patience of God. Real, but limited. Generous, but not infinite. Today is the day. Now is the time.

Some of you, by God’s grace, have already repented. You have already fled to Christ. Praise God for that mercy. Hold fast to your Savior. Let this past week, the smoke and the loss and the mercy of being spared, drive you closer to Him, more thankful, more prayerful, more useful in His vineyard.

But some have not. You have heard sermons, you have sung hymns, you have warmed pews, but you have never bowed before the King. Do not assume there is more time. The Galileans assumed there was more time. They were offering sacrifices when Pilate’s sword fell. The men of Siloam assumed there was more time. They were walking past a tower when it collapsed on them. The families in Brantley County assumed there was more time. The fire took a foil balloon, a power line, a south wind, and one afternoon to do its work.

You may not have tomorrow. You certainly do not have next year guaranteed. You have today. You have this hour.

Repent and believe the gospel. Unless you repent, you will all likewise perish. But if you repent, if you flee to Christ, you will not perish. You will be received. You will be forgiven. You will be saved. And on the day when fire finally consumes the heavens and the earth, you will stand, not in the ashes, but in the courts of the Lamb, clothed in His righteousness, safe forever.