Hanging Beside a King
There is a moment that seems to come, sooner or later, in every conversation about salvation. It comes when the questions stop being about ideas and start being about names. Theology slips out of the big words and sits down beside us, wearing the face of someone we love.
There is a moment that seems to come, sooner or later, in every conversation about salvation. It comes when the questions stop being about ideas and start being about names. Theology slips out of the big words and sits down beside us, wearing the face of someone we love.
“But are they really saved?”
The person in question is almost always a loved one—a close friend or family member who perhaps has made some sort of profession of faith, or been recently baptized, or at least begun attending church regularly, but who has yet to show a life marked by change.
“She gave her life to Christ, but in the months since, there’s been little visible growth. She used to pray and go to church, but now she’s just drifting from God and I’m so worried!”
All of this comes tumbling out in Bible study or a home group. Tangled up in fear, hope, and panic-stricken confusion, someone listening reaches for the story that has soothed a thousand anxious hearts:
“Well, remember the thief on the cross.”
Relief floods the room. The thief. The last-minute miracle. The proof that faith can be simple and the reassurance that God doesn’t require too much of us, especially if the end is near.
No one in the room bothers to go look up the story and read it aloud. They don’t need to. They’ve memorized a one-liner that has stood the test of time: a common criminal, ignorant of God, ignorant of Scripture, ignorant of Jesus—who, in his final moments, whispers a simple “I believe” and slips quietly into paradise.
It’s a good story; gentle, merciful, and comforting to many a worried friend by someone who sincerely wants to help.
But it is almost certainly false.
Not a Clueless Convert
The thief on the cross comes to most Evangelicals as a man with a spiritually blank slate—a random sinner who happened to be in the right place at the right time. “Praise God he heard the gospel and believed before he died!” we say.
Historically, that’s an unlikely scenario. Rome did not crucify pickpockets. Crucifixion was typical for traitors, rebels, and insurrectionists—men who had become a problem for the empire. This sentence was a common one for Zealots, who raised much internal havoc in Israel in the days of Jesus. Whatever else this man was, he was not harmless. More importantly, he was not theologically illiterate.
Listen again to what he actually says:
“We are receiving the due reward of our deeds… but this man has done nothing wrong… Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.” Luke 23:41-42
Those are loaded words coming from a man who is not grasping at straws in the dark.
· He believes Jesus is a king—and not the sort who merely reigns in hearts, but one whose rule can be entered.
· He believes Jesus will still receive a kingdom, even though he’s dying on the stake right next to him.
· He believes Jesus’ story does not end at death. This man has a category for understanding the impossibility of a life beyond the grave.
· And he believes Jesus has authority to include others in this future.
This is not the content of “simple faith.” This is eschatological, messianic faith.
This man is making a Jewish, hope-soaked confession at the worst possible moment to do so. And he can do this because he is not starting from nothing. The simple-minded thief we cherish actually seems to possess a robust set of expectations about God, kingship, and the future of the world. He already has a framework for these claims.
“Remember me” is Covenant Language
In the Scriptures, God “remembers” when he is about to act to keep his promises, rescue people, or restore order to his world. God remembers Noah. He remembers Abraham. He remembers Israel in Egypt, the prayers of Hannah. To be remembered is to be delivered; to be gathered back into the story when redemption is finally on the brink of occurring.
What this man is really saying is something like: When God vindicates you and your kingdom finally comes, let me be counted as yours.
And notice where he wants to be remembered: in your kingdom.
He does not seem primarily concerned with his own salvation or his destination in the moments following his death. He’s concerned with belonging to a very real and specific future in this world—a kingdom associated with the reign of God finally setting the world right. This is a stubborn faith that says: God is not finished yet. Not with you. Not with Israel. Not with the world. And not with me.
We have no way of knowing this man’s ethnic background for certain, but it is very possible that he was Jewish, or at the very least, someone very familiar with the Jewish hope that was electrifying Israel in those years: “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is near.”
The backdrop of his crucifixion is Passover in Jerusalem. In that setting, this man…
acknowledges Jesus’ innocence
rebukes the other criminal
publicly aligns himself with a condemned “messianic pretender”
and entrusts himself to Jesus’ future reign.
That is repentance in the deepest biblical sense: a total change of allegiance.
The Courage to Defect
As hard as it is for my worried friends to accept, this is not a story about a man who knows nothing about God or Jesus and stumbles his way to salvation at the last minute.
It is a story about a man who, at the very end of his life, chooses sides—sides he probably had at least some familiarity with long before his crucifixion.
It’s true: he does not have time to make restitution, join a crew of disciples, keep the Torah better, or fix his life.
But he does repent.
While everyone else is mocking or denying Jesus, he does something astonishing: he entrusts himself to a dying king of a not-yet-visible kingdom.
He publicly defects to Jesus’ side when Jesus looks least like a winner—and when he himself has no hope of Jesus fixing anything regarding his current circumstances.
I think, if he had lived, everything suggests that this new allegiance would have recalibrated his entire life.
Somewhere along the way, we turned this story into proof that biblical literacy and repentance don’t really matter. The thief is our evidence that simple faith is what counts most, and living righteously or having some understanding the Jesus we give our lives to doesn’t count much in the end.
“Just believe in Jesus,” we say—without asking what belief in Jesus means, what we think he’s asking of us, or what kind of kingdom we imagine he brings.
I don’t think the thief believed in a vague, generic savior ready to carry him off to heaven. It seems to me he believed in a dying Messiah, a rejected king, and an invisible kingdom that would—against all appearances—still come, in the very city where he was nailed to a stake on a hill.
His faith, it seems, was anchored in that hope.
Stealing from the Thief
The poor thief on the cross.
We have left him there, hanging beside a king, forever enthroning a story about simple faith instead of the identity of the man who died beside him.
We’re afraid of our own shortcomings, worried for the people we love who confess without real allegiance. We’re so desperate to avoid being held accountable to worshipping a God we know, we become thieves ourselves—guilty of stealing the testimony of a repentant rebel and recycling him into a clueless criminal who “got saved” at the last second by a kind king who asks almost nothing.
It’s a retelling that exposes something about the condition of our own hearts.
Maybe we are all just thieves, hanging beside a king on crosses of our own—looking at the crucified man next to us, and deciding what we want him to be.
I usually let these conversations run their course. I save my thoughts for another time, perhaps, when people are less panicked. I’ll try, as gently and honestly as I can, to recover what’s been lost. Maybe they’ll see.
In our doubts and questions, I think we are finally standing where the story has always placed us: at the place of the skull—sifting through the rubble of what we think we know, trying to see who the man in the middle really is.
And just hoping, like the thief, that he will look down from his throne one day and remember us.
Repentance from Dead Works
Hebrews 6 contains one of the most overlooked lists in the New Testament: the elementary principles of faith in Christ.
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.
The Plea of the Lamb
Half of the world is hopeful and drunk
while the other half burns to the ground.
Half of the world is hopeful and drunk
while the other half burns to the ground.
Sipping on cocktails and telling the tall tales
while survivors sweep ash off burial mounds.
Deception hangs thick, the shofar blasts sound,
the days of Noah counting us down.
Glasses in hand, raise a toast to the future,
glazing right over the foreboding picture
while dust collects on our leather-bound scriptures.
Labor pains start.
It’s cold in the human heart.
In Judea the hills still echo the pain
of Mary’s soft wails, a lament for the slain.
But in churches her mourning's drown out by our shouts.
"Death is no more! I was lost, now I'm found!"
When a Passover Lamb is hung up on a tree,
blood over the door, I claim it’s for me.
We shout, “He is risen! He is risen indeed!"
Deaf to its meaning: Israel’s redeemed.
And the songs of Zion
all tangled in Babylon's trees.
Holy land polluted with rivers of blood
fresh as a daisy as envy goes crazy.
Your people stumble, always war and infighting,
missed their Messiah, now Your face is hiding.
A blessing, a promise, all the good in the world.
You’ll bring it through them, yet we twist Your words,
"Did God really say? No way, its not true.
Our theology fixed that. See these New Testament moves?"
Golden calf, on our knees,
worshipping our sound beliefs
as Abel’s blood cries,
“How long will you wait, oh Lord?”
Baby in a basket floats strait to the hunter.
Daddy’s dream saves the baby boy destined to suffer
for the red-headed babies ripped from their mother.
Their caskets float past us while we sit and wonder
which store has the best price on the candy and baskets,
the trinkets we’ll hide to keep ourselves distracted
from the blessing we stole, from the heel we have grabbed,
plant our cross on the hill and claim the side that was jabbed.
We wave palms high and preach, “God died for you.”
Erasing his crime: King of the Jew.
This world goes blind as Rachel's children are dying.
They fade into dust, yet we never stop crying,
"We love you, Lord Jesus!”
Forgotten, the least of these.
So we spurn ‘em, burn ‘em, don’t return ‘em.
Use ‘em, defuse ‘em, execute ‘em.
Back ‘em, sack ‘em, counter-attack ‘em.
Leave ‘em, chide ‘em, evangelize ‘em.
Complain ‘em, frame ‘em, downplay ‘em.
Hate ‘em, grate ‘em, devastate ‘em.
Wreck ‘em, deck ‘em, what-the-heck ‘em.
They’re still God's chosen ones,
still wrestlin’ with the worst of us.
So the Nile runs red,
and Judah’s scepter’s still true.
The stars in the heavens
know he loves you.
His love rests on you, dears,
his love rests on you.
Word in the heavens
is he still loves you.
Yeah, Jacob’s in trouble,
'cause we beat him up.
Sold him for rank,
our silence casting his lot
while they ransack and pillage,
terrorize, rape.
Us emotionless watching, stoic our face.
Lips rehearse empty prayers and hollow we stand,
bloodguilt of our brothers stains our holy hands.
The Son reigns on high
at the right hand,
but the bowls grow heavy
as blood soaks the land.
“Worthy is the Lamb,
at dawn you must ride!
Mount the great clouds
and rescue your bride!”
Still he pleads with the Father
to remember his land,
remember the people he numbers like sand:
"Remember your promise to Abraham,
remember Egypt, and your outstretched hand.
Don’t pour out your wrath yet.
Wait one more generation.
Just a little more time,
for the sake of the nations.
The hatred will grow, yes,
but so will the love.
So the whole world will know
the God of Jacob.
Forgive them all,
great God of Jacob.”
“Through us and the church, infinite wrong was done...We accuse ourselves for not standing to our beliefs more courageously, for not praying more faithfully, for not believing more joyously, and for not loving more completely.”