Tag: Mark 1

Believe: Not What You Think It Means

When many people hear the word believe, they think of agreeing that something is true.

Do you believe in gravity?
Do you believe George Washington was the first president?
Do you believe the Earth orbits the sun?

In everyday English, belief usually means accepting a fact or holding an opinion.

But when Jesus announced, “The time has come… The kingdom of God has come near. Repent and believe the gospel.”(Mark 1:15), he was not inviting people merely to accept information about God.

The Greek word translated believe is pisteuō (πιστεύω). And it carries a much richer meaning than simple mental agreement.  It means to trust, rely upon, entrust oneself to, and align one’s life with someone.

In other words, pisteuō is closer to commitment than opinion.

More Than Agreement

The Greek language had ways to describe simple acknowledgment of facts. But pisteuō describes something deeper: placing confidence in someone in a way that shapes one’s actions.

At its heart, the word involves three intertwined ideas:

Trust – placing confidence in someone’s reliability
Reliance – depending on that person
Adherence – orienting one’s life around them

When Jesus called people to “believe the gospel (good news),” he was not asking them merely to agree that the kingdom existed. He was inviting them to trust the king and begin living under his reign.

Belief That Moves Your Feet

One way to understand pisteuō is to notice how belief naturally leads to action.

Imagine standing on the edge of a frozen lake in winter. You might say, “I believe the ice is thick enough.” But if you never step onto the ice, your belief is really just a theory.  Real belief happens when you step out and put your weight on it.  That step – that act of trust – is much closer to the meaning of pisteuō.

Biblical belief is trust that moves your feet.

What Belief Looked Like for Israel

The people who first heard Jesus say “believe the good news” already had a long history of learning what trust in God looked like.  For Israel, belief was never merely intellectual. It was lived out through covenant trust and obedience.

When Abraham left his homeland because God called him to go somewhere he had never seen, that was belief. When Israel stepped into the waters of the Jordan, trusting God to lead them into the land, that was belief. When the prophets called the nation to return to the Lord and trust him rather than political alliances or military strength, they were calling the people back to belief.

In other words, belief meant placing their confidence in God and ordering their lives around his covenant rule.

This helps explain why the Hebrew Scriptures often speak of trusting the Lord rather than simply believing certain truths about him. Faith showed itself in dependence and obedience.

So, when Jesus announced that the kingdom of God had drawn near, he was not introducing a completely new idea. He was calling Israel to renew the very kind of trust God had always sought from his people.

Belief in the First-Century World

There is another dimension to this word that we modern readers sometimes miss.

In the first-century world, belief often carried the sense of loyalty or allegiance. People lived under kings and emperors, and public life involved recognizing and aligning oneself with a ruler’s authority.

To trust a king meant more than believing he existed. It meant acknowledging his rule, relying on his protection, and ordering your life under his authority.

Against that backdrop, the early Christian confession “Jesus is Lord” was profound. It signaled a shift in ultimate loyalty.

Seen in that light, believing in Jesus meant transferring allegiance – entrusting oneself to the king whose kingdom had drawn near.

The Pattern in the New Testament

Throughout the New Testament, belief consistently looks like trustful reliance rather than mere agreement.

In John 5:24, Jesus said that whoever hears his word and believes the one who sent him “has crossed over from death to life.” Belief here describes entrusting oneself to God in a way that results in a change of realm.

In Mark 5:36, when Jairus learned his daughter had died, Jesus told him, “Don’t be afraid; just believe.” In that moment, belief clearly means trusting Jesus enough to rely on him in the middle of fear.

And in Romans 10:9, belief is paired with the confession “Jesus is Lord,” language that points toward recognizing and entrusting oneself to the authority of the risen king.

Again and again, belief is not merely agreement – it is entrusting oneself to a person.

Hearing Jesus’ Words Again

Now listen again to Jesus’ announcement in Mark 1:15:

“The kingdom of God has come near. Repent and believe the gospel (good news).”

Notice the movement…

First, repent – turn around, reorient your life.
Then believe – place your trust in the good news of God’s reign.

Repentance turns us away from the old order.
Belief entrusts us to the new king.

Jesus was not asking people simply to agree with a message.

He was inviting them to step into a kingdom.

The Question Jesus Still Asks

Over time, the English word believe has become thinner than the biblical idea behind it. Today, someone might say, “I believe in Jesus,” and mean little more than agreeing with certain ideas about him.  Or that he existed.

But in the language of the New Testament, belief carried relational weight.

It meant trusting Jesus.
Relying on him.
Aligning one’s life with his reign.

Not just thinking differently but living differently.  Which means the question Jesus asked in Galilee still echoes today.

Not simply:

“Do you agree with this information about me?”

But rather:

“Will you trust me enough to live as if God’s kingdom is truly here?”

Because in the New Testament, belief is not just something that happens in your head…

It is something that eventually shows up in your life.

Repent: Not What You Think It Means

In the previous post in this series, Not What You Think It Means: The Words That Framed Jesus’ Message, we began looking at several words that sit at the very center of Jesus’ proclamation:

“The time has come,” he said. “The kingdom of God has come near. Repent and believe the gospel!” (Mark 1:15)

For many modern readers, words like kingdom, repent, and gospel have become overly familiar. We hear them so often that we assume we know exactly what they mean.

But familiarity can sometimes mask misunderstanding.

In particular, the word repent often carries baggage that may not reflect what Jesus’ original listeners heard. For many people today, the word repent sounds like a stern religious command: feel guilty, confess your sins, and promise to do better.

While repentance certainly involves moral change, that understanding may miss the larger picture of what Jesus was announcing. To see this more clearly, we need to step back and ask a simple question:

What did the word “repent” mean in the world of Jesus?

Seeing Differently

The New Testament word translated repent is the Greek verb metanoeō, with the related noun metanoia. The word comes from two Greek roots:

meta – after, beyond, or change
nous – mind, perception, understanding

At its most basic level, metanoia meant a change of mind. But in Greek thought, the “mind” was not merely intellectual. It referred to the center of perception – how a person understood reality, made judgments, and oriented their life.

Repentance, therefore, described a shift in how someone saw things: a reconsideration of one’s assumptions and a recognition that one’s previous understanding may have been mistaken.

Classical Greek writers used the word this way long before the New Testament. A general might rethink a military strategy, a statesman might reverse a policy after realizing it was misguided, or a person might reconsider a decision after gaining new insight. In those settings, repentance was not primarily religious. It simply meant reconsidering and changing course.

Another Greek word, metamelomai, described emotional regret or remorse. But metanoia focused more on a change in perspective that led to a change in direction.

That distinction matters. Repentance was not primarily about feeling bad. It was about seeing differently.

The Prophets’ Call: Return to the Lord

When Jewish scholars translated the Hebrew Scriptures into Greek (in what we call the Septuagint), they sometimes used metanoeō to translate the Hebrew word shuv, which meant to turn or to return.

In the Old Testament, repentance meant turning back to God – abandoning idols, injustice, and self-reliance and returning to covenant faithfulness. The prophets called Israel to repent not merely by feeling remorse but by reorienting their lives toward Yahweh (cf. Joel 2:12–13; Hosea 14:1–2; Isaiah 55:6–7; Jeremiah 3:12–14; Ezekiel 18:30–32).

“Return to me,” God said through the prophets.

This Hebrew background added an important dimension to the Greek word. Repentance became not only a change of thinking but a relational turning toward God.

What Repentance Meant in Jesus’ World

Now place yourself among the people who first heard Jesus’ words.

John the Baptist had already appeared in the wilderness calling Israel to repentance and warning that God was about to act decisively in history. Then Jesus arrived in Galilee announcing:

“The time has come. The kingdom of God has come near. Repent and believe the gospel.”

Notice the order.

Jesus did not simply say, “Repent.” He said repent because something had happened. “The time has come.”  In other words, the long-awaited moment in God’s story with Israel had arrived.

“The kingdom of God has come near.”  God’s reign – the reality Israel had prayed for, longed for, and sung about in the Psalms – was now breaking into history in a new way.

In light of that announcement, Jesus called people to repent. Seen in this context, repentance sounded less like a rebuke and more like an invitation.

It meant something like this: Rethink everything.

The way you understood God’s work in the world.
The way you imagined the kingdom would come.
The way you expected power, victory, and salvation to look.

God was acting – but not in the ways many expected. The kingdom was arriving not through political revolt or military power but through the surprising ministry of Jesus himself. Tax collectors, fishermen, and ordinary villagers began to follow him. The sick were healed. Sinners were welcomed. Outsiders were brought near.

If people wanted to recognize what God was doing, they had to see differently.

They had to repent.

Rethinking Life Under God’s Reign

When Jesus called people to repent, he was not simply telling them to feel sorry for their sins. He was inviting them to adopt a new vision of reality.

Repentance meant allowing one’s assumptions about God, power, righteousness, and identity to be reshaped by the arrival of the kingdom. It meant recognizing that the story many people thought they were living in was not the whole story.

God was doing something new – yet something deeply rooted in the promises of Israel’s Scriptures. To repent was to step into that story. And once someone began to see the world through the lens of God’s kingdom, life inevitably began to change.

Because when we see differently, we live differently.

Part of the challenge for modern readers is that we often hear repentance through the lens of what sociologists call Moralistic Therapeutic Deism1 – the idea that God mainly wants people to be nice, happy, and feel good about themselves. In that framework, repentance shrinks into little more than moral self-improvement. But Jesus’ call to repent was far more disruptive than that – it was an invitation to rethink everything in light of the arriving kingdom.

Repentance as Good News

For many of us, the word repent still carries echoes of accusation or pressure.

But in the mouth of Jesus, repentance was part of the gospel itself. It was an invitation to wake up – to recognize that God’s kingdom had drawn near and that a new way of seeing and living had become possible.

Repentance was not merely about looking backward at past mistakes. It was about turning toward the reality of what God was doing right now.

In other words:

The kingdom was near.  So rethink everything.

1Smith, C., & Denton, M. L. (2005). Soul searching: The religious and spiritual lives of american teenagers. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press.