Kindness leads to repentance

• Habakkuk 2:4 (NASB)
• Romans 2:4 (NASB)

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In the New Covenant, it is the kindness of God that leads to repentance, not his judgement, says Romans 2:4.

In the Old Covenant, sin was met with dramatic judgement and punishment. In fact, you could say that before Jesus, where sin abounded, punishment abounded much more. (This is evidenced in the simple fact that the list of curses on the Old Covenant for disobedience is nearly double in size of the blessings for obedience in Deuteronomy 28.) By contrast, in the New Covenant, where sin abounds, grace abounds much more—not as credit to sin, but in spite of it and to the credit of God's amazing mercy in Christ.

The only way God could show mercy to people in the Old Covenant is if they had faith that reached out and appropriated the future / eternal sacrifice of Jesus and the provisions of that better covenant, in which "the just shall live by faith," Habakuk 2:4. We see this evidenced in Romans 3:25, where Paul says, the sacrifice of Jesus "shows that God was being fair when he held back and did not punish those who sinned in timed past," NLT. In other words, God was able to show mercy in the Old Covenant because of the coming sacrifice of Jesus. People in the Old Testament appropriated this coming grace through faith, as did Abraham, according to Romans 4.

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