Repentance from Dead Works
The following essay is adapted from a message I recently shared at Friends Community Church. What began as a teaching for a gathered local body has been revised here for readers beyond that setting, though the heart of the teaching remains the same.
As I considered what to share today, I found it difficult to ignore the wider moment in which we are living. Ours is a fractured and unsettled generation—marked by division and a steady erosion of trust. It is a season that demands discernment. And in such moments, novelty is not what the church most needs. There are times when Christians do not require new ideas so much as a renewed grasp of old ones.
Wouldn’t it be something if Scripture offered a clear list of the foundational elements of our faith—those teachings so basic that they form the backbone of what it means to follow Jesus? Well, we are in luck. Hebrews 6 provides precisely such a list.
The chapter opens with an arresting claim. The author urges his readers to “leave the elementary teaching of the Christ and go on to maturity,” then proceeds to list what he considers foundational aspects of faith in Christ:
repentance from dead works
faith toward God
instruction about washings
laying on of hands
resurrection of the dead
and eternal judgment.
These were not considered advanced theological concepts meant for scholars. They are described as basic—assumed knowledge for first-century believers who are trying to follow Christ. That assumption should give modern readers pause.
Most Christians today can articulate personal salvation, God’s grace, and God’s love. But repentance from dead works? Washings? Escatology? These are not typically things we explicitly teach to new believers. Maybe we should.
Hebrews is not scolding ignorance for ignorance’s sake, but it is diagnosing a problem: maturity is impossible when foundations haven’t been mastered. Yet the times we live in call for maturity. As believers, we are expected to not simply know the things on this list, but to be able to teach them to others. The author of Hebrews was particularly frusterated by this, “By now you should be teachers, yet you have need of someone to feed you milk and not solid food!”
If repentance from dead works stands first in this list of elementary principles, then it deserves our careful attention today. Repentance was the primary message of Jesus and of John the Baptist. They seemed to understand that repentance was critical to the coming kingdom and to faith in the Messiah who rules that kingdom. So today, we too head back to basics. Our focus will be to ask and answer this question: what does repentance from dead works mean to this author and his audience?
What is Repentance?
Repentance in Scripture is not primarily emotional. The Hebrew word, shuv, simply means “to turn.” It describes a reorientation of direction, allegiance, and future. Repentance is not about remorse or feeling bad; it is about changing course.
John the Baptist preached repentance as his core message, a tradition our Master adopted as well. John’s call was urgent and concrete: Repent! Turn around, quit sining, obey God, align your life with his Torah, because the kingdom is drawing near.
One of the best biblical examples of repentance comes to us from Jonah 3.
Jonah is an Israelite prophet to the nations. God sends him to Nineveh, a city famous for violence and wickedness. The city’s outcry had reach God, and he needed to confront it with judgement and justics. So God tasks Jonah with giving the Ninevite’s a stark warning: “Yet forty days, and Nineveh shall be overturned.”
Jonah goes through the city announcing this, with no promise of mercy attached to the message. Amazingly, the people of Nineveh respond:
“The Ninevites believed God. A fast was proclaimed…’Let everyone urgently call on God. Let them turn from their wicknedness and from the violence in their hands. Who knows? Maybe God will turn and have compassion and relent from his feirce anger so that we will not perish.’” Jon. 3, selected verses
They fast. They abandon violence. They turn from their evil ways. Their repentance, in this account, is public, behavioral, and communal.
Then comes the surprising turn: God repents!
Jonah 3 states plainly that when God saw what the Ninevites did—how they turned from their evil ways—he turned from the destruction he had planned. The Hebrew verb used here, nacham, is often translated “relent,” “be moved to compassion,” or even “repent.” This is not an isolated occurrence. The same language is used of God after Moses’ intercession in Exodus 32. Jeremiah 18 explicitly lays out the principle: if a nation turns from evil, God relents of judgment; if it turns toward evil, He relents of blessing. Joel describes God as gracious and merciful, “relenting from disaster.”
This is not an embarrassment in Scripture. It is a declared covenant pattern.
God’s character does not change.
God’s purposes do not change.
God’s righteous standards do not change.
But God is responsive to human behavior. We can change. He can change us.
What changes is the relational outcome when human beings alter their direction. God is responsive—not because he was wrong, but because obedience and repentance are always his preference.
Jonah understands this perfectly, which is why he is furious in the following chapter. “I knew that you are a gracious God and merciful,” he protests. Jonah is not surprised by God’s mercy; he is angry because God has been faithful to his character.
Repentance, then, is directional. It asks not whether sufficient remorse has been generated, but where a given path leads. This brings us back to Hebrews and its phrase: “repentance from dead works.” If repentance means to turn, what dead works are we meant to turn from?
What are “Dead Works?
Modern readers often assume that “dead works” refers to Jewish law, ritual, or Torah observance—a legacy of post-Reformation, supersessionist categories rather than first-century realities. When the author of Hebrews speaks of “repentance from dead works,” we should resist the assumption that he is criticizing Torah or Jewish obedience.
The audience of this letter was made up largely of Jewish believers in Jesus—people who had grown up shaped by the Scriptures of Israel. They were still praying, gathering at the temple, and living within those rhythms. They did not view God’s instruction as lifeless or obsolete. We know all this from Acts. Luke does not even try to hide this information from us. In the first-century world of faith in the Messiah, the Torah was described as the way of life. And Jesus did not contradict this.
So when Hebrews speaks of “dead works,” it’s not attacking covenant faithfulness or Jewish practices. It’s referring to actions and ways of living that lead to death—patterns shaped by sin, injustice, idolatry, or rebellion. And repentance is about turning from one road to the other.
The Scriptures themselves are unambiguous on this point. Deuteronomy 30 records God’s declaration: “I have set before you life and good, death and evil… therefore choose life.” Life and death in the Torah are not merely destinations after death. They are covenantal trajectories. Life is alignment with God’s instruction; death is the consequence of turning away from it—often experienced long before physical death occurs.
The book of Proverbs develops this framework with relentless consistency. It speaks of paths, ways, and roads. “The path of the righteous is like the light of dawn,” growing brighter with time, while “the way of the wicked is deep darkness.” There is a way that seems right, Proverbs warns, but its end is death. Death is not merely imposed later as punishment; it is embedded in certain ways of living. Actions carry trajectories. Habits form destinations.
Crucially, Proverbs describes God’s instruction itself as the way of life. “The commandment is a lamp… and the reproofs of discipline are the way of life.” Turning away from Torah is not portrayed as liberation but as corruption. Even prayer, Proverbs insists, becomes distorted when God’s instruction is rejected.
Against this backdrop, the phrase “dead works” becomes clearer. Dead works are not acts of obedience, earning one’s salvation, or even participating in Jewish worship. They are actions, habits, and allegiances that carry death within them—ways of living that align with injustice, idolatry, violence, or rebellion, even when they appear productive, respectable, or religious. Something can look righteous and still lead away from life.
This is why repentance is foundational. It is the act of leaving a road whose end is death and turning toward the path of life God has revealed.
The Kingdom and Repentance—Why It Matters
Jesus’ own preaching confirms this orientation. “Repent, for the kingdom of God is near.” Repentance is not the result of the kingdom’s arrival, but the doorway into it. The kingdom Jesus proclaimed was not an abstract spiritual realm but a promised future marked by restoration, healing, resurrection, judgment, and blessing to the nations. Hebrews shares this vision. Its elementary principles all concern a real, tangible future world promised to those who place faith in the Messiah.
Repentance from things that lead to death prepares people to inherit what is coming.
This raises uncomfortable but necessary questions for us. We need to ask ourselves what ways of life hasour culture normalized that lead us toward death? Are there paths we are walking now that we need to repent of and change direction?
What’s on our screens and speaks? What images and voices shape our day? After scrolling, are we walking away with more love and wisdom? Or more anger, anxiety, and division? Do we put down our phones and feel like we love our enemies even more?
What about the pace of life have we accepted as “normal”? Is it producing patience and love—or exhaustion and irritability? Personally, this is an area I have to constantly evaluate in my own life. Have I weighed the costs of hustle-culture against the structure required to go deep into understanding who we are as images of God? To raising children within that structure? Things can look good and well-intentioned on my schedule, but is it robbing me of the valuable time I need to build a family-culture around these things? Do I need to repent and make changes there?
What do our financial habits suggest we believe life actually is—and have those beliefs delivered what they promised?
These questions extend even into Christian culture. Are there habits we cling to because they are perceived as “religious” or “Christian” that are not leading us into God’s ways? Are we showing up to services, studies, or events—but remaining unchanged in our behaviors? In an age of nearly endless information, wre we blindly consuming sermons, podcasts, or books at the expensive of personal study and meditation on the Bible? Psalm 1 says blessed is the one who meditates on the Torah day and night, not blessed is the one who has a pastor that meditates on the Torah day and night. Are we truly committing ourselves to becoming disciples of the Word of God? What about prayer? Are we using prayer primarily to manage our own anxieties rather than to seek and agree with God’s will and purposes? Does how we pray agree with Scripture, and how God plans to make his name great among the nations?
None of these questions are accusations, but we do ourselves no favors by ignoring the hard truths. These are diagnostic questions God invites us to ask. The biblical concern is not whether something looks faithful on the surface, but whether it leads to life.
Hebrews reminds its readers—and us—that the first step in following Jesus is repentance from anything that leads away from life and toward death. Turning from obvious sin matters. But repentnance is not a one-time thing. Maturity involves more than that.
As believers, we are offered the gift to keep turning, again and again, as we follow the Messiah and become people fit and ready for the kingdom he is bringing.