Did GOD sin thereby having to REPENT ?Agreed, but let's really, I mean really look at the word repent!
Metanoia (Repent): The Response the Kingdom Demands
Mark 1:15 summarizes Jesus’s opening proclamation: The time is fulfilled, and the Kingdom of God is at hand; repent and believe in the Gospel. Jesus calls for a two-part response: repent and believe. The second is familiar. The first is almost always misunderstood.
The Greek word translated repent is metanoia. In the Gospels, the verb (Mark 1:15 has metanoeite) describes a turning or reorientation. New Testament usage carries more than any breakdown of the word’s parts: a turning of the whole person, mind, allegiance, conduct, and hope. Metanoia is not primarily an emotional experience of guilt or remorse, though it may involve those.
It is a total reorientation of mind and life, a fundamental shift in how you see reality, what you value, what you live for, what you expect.
The call to metanoia in response to the Kingdom proclamation makes perfect sense. If the Kingdom of God is arriving, if God’s reign is genuinely breaking into the world and displacing every other order, then the entire framework by which a person has been operating becomes obsolete. The assumption that Rome is permanent becomes obsolete.
The assumption that the powerful are the winners becomes obsolete. The assumption that death has the last word becomes obsolete. The assumption that the way things are is the way things must be becomes obsolete. Everything changes when the Kingdom arrives, and metanoia is the internal revolution that corresponds to the external one.
The call to repent is inseparable from the announcement of the Kingdom, and reducing repentance to a transaction of guilt and forgiveness misses its full scope. Jesus is not primarily calling people to feel bad about their past. He is calling them to reorder their entire existence around a new reality that has just arrived. That reordering, the ongoing, lifelong, community-shaping transformation, is the life of the Kingdom.
In some influential forms of Western evangelicalism, metanoia has been narrowed to feeling sorry for one’s sins and praying to accept Christ. Those elements contain real truth; the trouble is not their presence but their detachment from the Kingdom that gives them their size. When that happens, discipleship is often reduced as well.
What follows growth in character, a reordering of priorities, engagement with the poor, and resistance to the surrounding culture’s assumptions about power and success becomes optional. These elements mark a deeper commitment rather than the foundational aspects of Kingdom life.
In Jesus’s proclamation, metanoia (a change of mind or heart) is the first step in a continuous process of reorientation. Money, relationships, vocation, political allegiance, and the use of time all come under the authority of a different King. This is not merely a high standard added to the Gospel; it is what the Gospel announcement itself demands.
Exo 32:14
And the LORD repented of the evil which he thought to do unto his people.