God gives His people time to repent, but He is never idle during that time. Because He desires sons and daughters in His image, He is always working to bring about His spiritual creation, using situations from smitten consciences to large-scale calamities to lead us to or back to the right path. He sent Israel prophet after prophet so they were without excuse, yet the people tuned them out, persecuted them, and took the absence of immediate judgment as license to continue sinning (Ecclesiastes 8:11). God still sends reminders, such as a sermon, and sometimes through means that offend us or seem beneath us, as with Naaman's slave girl, Balaam's donkey, and Habakkuk's unworthy instrument of correction. Humility is needed to receive them. At times God steps back and waits, as He did between David's sin and Nathan's coming, and then uses painful consequences to write His law on the heart. That grace period is a double-edged sword. We may misread it as meaning sin is no big concern, forget gentle promptings, numb conscience, and silence the alarm bells as Israel silenced the prophets. The longer changes are delayed, the easier it is to turn away entirely. God is faithful to His covenant and will do all He can, but He will not force His image on anyone who chooses the world's image. Isaiah teaches that there is a time when the Lord may be sought and found, which implies a time when it is too late. Paul likewise warns that judgment follows our choices, so we must redeem the time and return to God.

God's general pattern is to give people time to repent, even though He is not obligated to grant a sinner one more second of life. Christ says of the woman in Thyatira, "I gave her time to repent... and she did not repent." Exceptions such as Uzzah and Ananias and Sapphira show that judgment can be swift, but the Scriptural norm is patience. This explains the frustration of the godly, like Asaph, who saw the wicked at ease until he grasped that their path ends in ruin, and like Noah, who persevered through 120 years of preaching while his generation had ample time to repent. God's timetable for judgment is far longer than human ideas of justice. Now God commands all men everywhere to repent, and Christ's resurrection guarantees a coming day of judgment with the risen One as Judge. Enough knowledge of the Creator exists that mankind is without excuse, as Romans 1 and God's judgment of the Gentile nations in Amos show. Yet extra time does not guarantee repentance. Ecclesiastes 8:11 teaches that delayed sentences embolden hearts to do evil. Noah's hearers grew accustomed to warnings and overrode them, wasting their time, while Nineveh, given only forty days, repented. Time to repent is a gift that can be squandered.

The opportunity for repentance emerges as the essential solution to the deep divisions that threatened unity in the early church, particularly between Israelites and Gentiles within the Ephesian congregation. This unity was not incidental but reflected the very nature of God Himself, since Jesus declared oneness with the Father and repeatedly prayed that believers would share in that same oneness. Because unity produces peace and disunity produces agitation, and because a great Adversary actively works against unity with God and with one another, the solution to this pervasive problem could only come through God's merciful grace, which is itself unity or oneness with God. The specific historical situation in Ephesians involved Israelites who harbored feelings of superiority and Gentiles who carried resentment, rejection, and a sense of inferiority. Both attitudes were rooted in God's own sovereign choices, since He chose to work through Israel and reveal Himself more fully to that nation while temporarily hiding Himself more from the Gentiles. Neither group was wholly responsible for the situation, yet God required that both sides deal with the resulting attitudes and overcome them. Paul addressed this by reminding the Gentiles of their former separation from Christ and Israel, while simultaneously reminding the Israelites that their circumcision was merely a hand-made physical act, not a supernatural transformation of the heart, thus removing any basis for spiritual boasting. Both groups stood on equal footing, and their only true commonality; faith in Christ, justification, and hope in the Kingdom of God, came solely through God's calling. The real barrier to oneness was not God's moral law but the shared human antagonism against that law, an enmity common to both Jew and Gentile by nature. The Jews had minimized weightier spiritual and moral commands by over-emphasizing ceremony, breeding self-righteousness, while the Gentiles' natural resistance to God's law turned into envious hatred toward the Jews' attitude. Christ's sacrifice abolished this enmity, the hostility between the two peoples, not the law itself. Given that God had already justified both groups and given them His Spirit, removing the worst of their resistance to His law, the responsibility then rested on each individual to complete the process through humility. This required each person to repent, to make the sacrifice of compromise, and to forgive the other out of respect for Christ and shared hope in the Kingdom. God's forgiveness for former resentments and former feelings of superiority was assured, and by making peace with one another through repentance, believers simultaneously made peace with God, so that unity became reality. This same opportunity for repentance remains essential, since although present-day differences may not mirror those of the first century, everyone still needs to repent and make that same sacrifice in order to achieve unity with God and with each other.