The Controlling Principle.

Geerhardus Vos has written:

“Again, in the new life which follows repentance the absolute supremacy of God is the controlling principle. He who repents turns away from the service of mammon and self to the service of God. Our Lord is emphatic in insisting upon this absolute, undivided surrender of the soul to God as the goal of all true repentance. Because this and nothing less is the goal, he urges the necessity of a constant repetition of the process. Even to his followers he said at a comparatively late stage of his ministry, “Except ye turn and become as little children, ye shall in no wise enter into the kingdom of heaven,” Matt. xviii. 3. From this necessity we must also explain the uncompromising manner in which Jesus requires of his disciples the renunciation of all earthly bonds and possessions which would dispute God his supreme sway over their life, Matt. x. 39; xvi. 25; Lk. xiv. 25-35. The statements to this effect are not meant in the sense that external abandonment of these things is sufficient or even required. The idea is that the inward attachment of the soul to them as the highest good must be in principle destroyed, that God may take the place hitherto claimed by them. Within the kingdom they are entitled to affections on the disciple’s part in so far only as they can be made subordinate and subservient to the love of God. The demand for sacrifice always presupposes that what is to be renounced forms an obstacle to that absolute devotion which the kingdom of God requires, Mk. ix. 43. That not the external possession but the internal entanglement of the heart with temporal goods is condemned, Jesus strikingly indicates by the demand “to hate” one’s father and mother and wife and children and brethren and sister, yea and one’s own life also. The energetic determination of the will to forego even the pleasure of natural affection, where they come in conflict with the supreme duty of the kingdom, is thus described and the word “hating” chosen on purpose to express that in such cases an internal change of mind alone, not a mere external act, can make man fit for the kingdom of God. Matt. x. 37 gives us Jesus’ own interpretation of such seemingly harsh sayings.”

(Vos, Geerhardus, The Teaching of Jesus Concerning the Kingdom of God and the Church, Wipf and Stock Publishers, Eugene, Or., 1998, pp. 174-177.)