What Scripture Shows About Changing a Decision

It is impossible for us to run briefly through everything. For who could count up nearly all the patriarchs and the countless saints who became, so to speak, defenders of lying: some to save life, others out of desire for a blessing, others out of pity, others to conceal some secret, others out of zeal for God, others in searching for the truth? And though not all of them can be listed, not all of them ought to be passed over entirely. Love for his family drove the blessed Joseph to bring a false charge against his brothers, even with an oath by the life of the king. He said: “You are spies. You have come to see the nakedness of the land.” And a little further on: “Send one of you,” he says, “and bring your brother here. But you will be kept here until your words are shown to be true or false. And if not, by the life of Pharaoh, you are spies.” For if he had not frightened them with this lie out of pity, he could not have seen his father and his brother again, nor kept them alive in their great danger of starvation, nor freed his brothers’ conscience from the guilt of selling him. So frightening his brothers with a lie was not as blameworthy as it was holy and praiseworthy to drive his enemies, who had once sought his life, to a saving repentance by a pretended danger. And in the end, when they were weighed down by the shame of so serious a charge, their consciences were stricken, not by the false accusation brought against them, but by the thought of their earlier crime. They said to one another: “We deserve to suffer this, because we sinned against our brother. We saw the anguish of his soul when he pleaded with us, and we would not listen to him. That is why all this trouble has come upon us.” And this confession, we think, by its most wholesome humility, atoned for their terrible sin, not only against their brother, whom they had wronged with wicked cruelty, but also against God. [a]

What about Solomon, who showed the gift of wisdom he had received from God in his first judgment only by making use of a falsehood? To get at the truth that the woman’s lie had hidden, he too used the help of a most cleverly invented lie, saying: “Bring me a sword, and divide the living child in two, and give half to the one and half to the other.” This pretended cruelty stirred the heart of the true mother, while the woman who was not the mother received it with approval. Then at last, having found out the truth in this most shrewd way, he pronounced the judgment that everyone has felt to be inspired by God: “Give her the living child, and do not kill it. She is its mother.”

Other passages of Scripture teach us even more fully that we neither can nor should carry out everything we decide on, whether calmly or in agitation of mind. For we often hear that holy men and angels, and even Almighty God himself, have changed what they had decided. The blessed David made a decision and confirmed it with an oath, saying: “May God do so to the enemies of David, and more besides, if by morning I leave a single male of all who belong to Nabal.” But presently, when Abigail, Nabal’s wife, interceded and pleaded for him, David gave up his threats and lightened the sentence. He preferred to be counted a breaker of his word rather than keep his sworn oath by cruelly carrying it out. He said: “As the Lord lives, if you had not come quickly to meet me, not a single male would have been left to Nabal by the morning light.” We do not hold that his readiness to take a rash oath, which came from his anger and agitation of mind, should be copied by us; but we do think that his pardon and his change of decision should be followed. The “chosen vessel,” writing to the Corinthians, promises without condition to come back, saying: “But I will come to you when I pass through Macedonia, for I will pass through Macedonia. But I will stay with you, or even spend the winter with you, so that you may send me on my way wherever I go. For I do not want to see you only in passing; I hope to stay with you for some time.” He recalls this in the second letter, in these words: “In this confidence I intended to come to you first, so that you might receive a second benefit, and to pass by you into Macedonia, and to come back to you again from Macedonia, and be sent on by you to Judea.” But a better plan suggested itself, and he plainly admits that he is not going to do what he had promised. “When I intended this, then,” he says, “did I act with fickleness? Or do I make my plans according to the flesh, so that with me it is yes, yes and no, no?” Lastly, he declares even with the solemnity of an oath why he preferred to set aside his pledged word rather than bring a burden and grief to his disciples by his presence: “But I call God as witness upon my soul that it was to spare you that I did not come to Corinth. For I made up my mind not to come to you in sorrow.”

Again, when the angels had refused to enter Lot’s house at Sodom, saying to him, “We will not come in, but will stay in the street,” they were soon pressed by his prayers into changing their decision, as Scripture adds: “And Lot pressed them, and they turned in to him.” Certainly, if they knew they would turn in to him, they refused his request with a sham excuse; but if their excuse was real, they are clearly shown to have changed their minds. And we certainly hold that the Holy Spirit put this into the sacred book for no other reason than to teach us by their example that we ought not to cling stubbornly to our own decisions, but to keep them under our will. In this way we keep our judgment free from all the chains of law, so that it may be ready to follow the call of good counsel in any direction, and may not put off or refuse to pass at once to whatever sound discernment finds to be the better choice.

To rise to still higher examples: when King Hezekiah was lying on his bed, afflicted with grievous sickness, the prophet Isaiah spoke to him in the person of God and said: “This is what the Lord says: Set your house in order, for you will die and not live.” “And Hezekiah,” it says, “turned his face to the wall and prayed to the Lord, and said: I beg you, O Lord, remember how I have walked before you in truth and with a whole heart, and how I have done what was right in your sight. And Hezekiah wept bitterly.” After this it was said to the prophet again: “Go back and say to Hezekiah, king of Judah: This is what the Lord, the God of your father David, says: I have heard your prayer, I have seen your tears. Look, I will add fifteen years to your days. And I will deliver you out of the hand of the king of the Assyrians, and I will defend this city for your sake and for the sake of my servant David.” What could prove more clearly that, out of regard for mercy and goodness, the Lord would rather break his word, and extend the life of the man who prayed by fifteen years beyond the limit set for his death, than be found unbending because of his unchangeable decree? In the same way, the divine sentence says to the people of Nineveh: “Three days more, and Nineveh will be overthrown.” And presently this stern and abrupt sentence is softened by their repentance and fasting, and is turned toward mercy by a goodness that is easily moved by prayer. Someone may hold that the Lord threatened the destruction of their city, though he foreknew that they would turn back to him, for this reason: to rouse them to a saving repentance. If so, it follows that those who are set over their brothers may, when there is need, threaten those who need correcting with harsher treatment than they really mean to inflict, without any blame for telling a lie. But someone may say that God withdrew that harsh sentence out of regard for their repentance, as he says through Ezekiel: “If I say to the wicked man, You will surely die, and he repents of his sin and does what is just and right, he will surely live; he will not die.” If so, we are likewise taught that we ought not to stick stubbornly to our decision, but should soften with gentle pity the threats that necessity called out of us.

And so that we may not imagine the Lord granted this to the people of Nineveh as a special favor, he repeatedly declares through Jeremiah that he will do the same toward everyone in general, and promises that he will change his sentence without delay according to what we deserve. He says: “I will suddenly speak against a nation and against a kingdom, to root it out and pull it down and destroy it. If that nation repents of the evil I have spoken against it, I too will repent of the evil I thought to do to them. And I will suddenly speak of a nation and a kingdom, to build it up and to plant it. If it does evil in my sight, so that it does not obey my voice, I will repent of the good I thought to do to it.” And to Ezekiel also: “Do not leave out a word; perhaps they will listen and turn, every one from his evil way, so that I may repent of the evil I thought to do to them because of the wickedness of their deeds.” By these passages it is declared that we ought not to stick stubbornly to our decisions, but should adjust them with reason and judgment. Better courses should always be taken up and preferred, and we should turn without any delay to the course that is judged more profitable. For above all, that priceless saying teaches us this. Although each person’s end is known to God before that person is born, he still somehow orders all things for all people by a plan and a method that takes account of each person’s disposition. He decides everything, not by the bare exercise of his power, nor according to the inexpressible knowledge that his foreknowledge holds, but according to people’s present actions. He rejects each one or draws each one to himself, and daily either grants or withholds his grace. The choosing of Saul shows us that this is so. God’s foreknowledge certainly could not be ignorant of Saul’s miserable end. Yet God chose him out of so many thousands of Israel and anointed him king, rewarding the merits of his life as it then was and not considering the sin of his coming fall. So after Saul was rejected, God complains almost in human terms and with human feelings, as if he repented of his choice, saying: “I repent that I have made Saul king, for he has forsaken me and has not carried out my words.” And again: “But Samuel grieved over Saul, because the Lord repented that he had made Saul king over Israel.”

Finally, what he afterward carried out in Saul’s case, the Lord also declares through the prophet Ezekiel that he will do with all people by his daily judgment. He says: “Even if I say to the righteous man that he will surely live, and he, trusting in his righteousness, commits wickedness, all his righteousness will be forgotten, and in the wickedness he has committed, in that he will die. And if I say to the wicked man, You will surely die, and he repents of his sin and does what is just and righteous, and that wicked man gives back the pledge and returns what he has robbed, and walks in the commands of life, and does nothing unrighteous, he will surely live; he will not die. None of the sins he has committed will be counted against him.” And when, because of their swift fall, the Lord was about to turn his merciful face away from the people he had chosen out of all the nations, the lawgiver stepped in on their behalf and cried out: “I beg you, O Lord, this people has sinned a great sin; they have made gods of gold for themselves. Now, if you will forgive their sin, forgive it; but if not, blot me out of your book that you have written.” The Lord answered him: “Whoever has sinned before me, I will blot him out of my book.” David too, complaining in a prophetic spirit about Judas and the Lord’s persecutors, says: “Let them be blotted out of the book of the living.” And because the guilt of their great sin made them unworthy to come to a saving repentance, he adds: “And let them not be written among the righteous.” In the end, the meaning of the prophetic curse was plainly fulfilled in the case of Judas himself. When his deadly sin was complete, he killed himself by hanging, so that after his name had been blotted out he might not turn back and repent and deserve to be written once more among the righteous in heaven. We must not doubt, then, that at the time when he was chosen by Christ and received a place among the apostles, the name of Judas was written in the book of the living, and that he heard, as well as the rest, the words: “Do not rejoice because the demons are subject to you, but rejoice because your names are written in heaven.” But because he was corrupted by the plague of greed and had his name struck out of that heavenly list, the prophet fittingly says of him and of men like him: “O Lord, let all who forsake you be put to shame. Let those who depart from you be written in the earth, because they have forsaken the Lord, the spring of living waters.” And elsewhere: “They will not be in the council of my people, nor will they be written in the register of the house of Israel, nor will they enter the land of Israel.”