After 5-months of torture at the hands of the locust-like demons and then with the killing of one out of every three people, still no one repents of the work of their hands (all their attempts to serve, honor, and please God to obtain His favor, blessing, and forgiveness). To God these are unclean offerings: lawlessness.
There is a fiction surrounding what it means to be “in” Christ lurking behind this refusal to repent. To be found “in” Christ is not a result of a “prayer” but a result of a surrendered life where one chooses to become a little child dependent upon God for all things all the time, including one’s righteousness which cannot be derived from anything a person does, but only from Yahweh Tsidkenu. To be “in” Christ is to live a life where all things come by grace-through-faith (what God does as a result of our now believing) where faith is a now thing. This is how one exercises that choice to become a child of God and not just a resident in His household that is still bound to law, still trying to please God through all they do for God.
Yahweh wants us only to be willing to invite Him to come strip us of all our tendencies to live like a slave instead of a Son who dwells in unrestrained freedom.
