"What Is Repentance?"

I have been pondering repentance. Amidst my ponderings of repentance, I have spent much time thinking about and studying about what repentance actually means and what it entails. Protestantism's view of repentance is, as a wise old man once said, quite anemic. Within many circles of protestantism, repentance is equivocal to feeling bad about your sins and telling God, "I won't do it again." The idea is that a heart that is sorry for sin is a repentant heart; never mind that the "sorrow" over sin could be due to nothing more than a prefabricated guilt complex, or even due to one's own pride. In thinking about repentance, I've started studying repentance from the perspective of the Old Testament. This is because the conceptions of repentance found in the New Testament--written almost entirely by Christians with Jewish background and thus influenced heavily by Jewish thought and convictions--are built upon what we find in the Old. And, to put it bluntly, this popular perception of repentance found within protestantism--namely, the idea that it is feeling sorry for sin--is not only anemic but also nothing like what we find in the Old Testament.

In the Old Testament, repentance is always founded upon a change in behavior. At the heart of repentance is the idea of turning. In this sense, we can repent either TO God or AWAY from God. The prophet Jeremiah shouted at the disobedient Judeans, "Repent from your repenting, you repenters!" In other words, "Turn from your turning, you turners." This play on words meant that they were to stop turning away from God. The call to repentance in this case was in the negative; most often the call to repentance is in the positive--"Turn TO God" but Jeremiah used it in this instance in the negative ("Turn AWAY from turning"). Repentance is the act of turning, and it is both negative (turning away from something) and positive (turning to something). When in reference to the repentance God demands, it is turning from sin (purging evil) and turning to Him (living in obedience). In the Old Testament it involved forsaking false gods (of which were plethora) and worshiping YHWH (the Judeo-Christian God) alone. The worship of YHWH involved a restructuring of one's entire life to avoid sin and to live obediently before Him. The calls to repentance found in the Old Testament are very pragmatically-focused due to the circumstances and nature of the disobedience being addressed; thus repentance can take on a variety of forms depending on one's "situation in life." In Old Testament though, repentance brought about blessings and restoration, and continual disobedience brought about curses and ruin, and eventual judgment.

When we get to the New Testament and study repentance, we fail if we do not keep the whole of the Jewish thought of repentance in mind. The anemic view of repentance stated at the beginning of this post is due in large, I think, to the precise failure of not heeding what is found in the Old Testament. Reading the Old Testament, no one would be stupid enough to say that Jeremiah--and all the other prophets--were simply asking the disobedient people of God to feel sorry for their rebellion. The prophets demanded a restructuring of life around the worship of YHWH. When we get to the New Testament, this is the case, too. One might point out that the main Greek words used in the New Testament do not necessarily imply any sort of behavioral change; "They just mean a change of mind about sin!" one might say, and then such a person could leap into the idea of the words meaning to feel sorry for repentance. Never mind that this completely ignores all the Old Testament background and preconceived notions regarding repentance held by the New Testament writers. The use of the Greek words, I think, is merely because the letters were written in Greek and those were the closest equivalents to the Jewish thought of repentance. When repentance is spelled out in the New Testament, it always involves behavioral change. Of course, those holding to the view of repentance being a change of mind will say that behavioral change is a necessity if repentance is genuine. In the end, the exact meaning of the Greek words is irrelevant as long as the heart of the matter is kept pure: behavioral change is a necessity.

And just as for the people of the Old Testament, so for us, too, repentance involves a restructuring of our life in purging evil and obeying God. Entire novels could be written on the ins-and-outs of what repentance looks like ("Do This, Don't Do That," "Maybe You Can Do This"), but such novels would miss the point. The repentance-cries of the prophets were drastically different from one another at times depending on the exact nature of the repentance. At the heart of the matter, I think, is that in repentance, a person turns from devotion to himself and his kingdom to a devotion to God and His kingdom. The person who must repent is the person who has dedicated himself to himself. It is the person who lives to satisfy his own cravings, to invest in his pride, to build up his own kingdom in whatever manner he finds fit. Such a person is demanded by God to repent: to forsake the pursuit of himself and to pursue God; and to abandon the construction of his own kingdom and to work towards God's own kingdom. Repentance--devoting oneself to God and His kingdom rather than to himself and his kingdom--will manifest itself in a variety of ways.

And this point I want to make very clear: it WILL manifest itself. So many people claim to be repentant but fail to restructure and reorient their lives around God and His kingdom. In this sense, whether or not a person is repentant (and this is good to remember for self-analysis) can be seen in where that person's priorities, goals, ambitions, and dreams lie. If our priorities are still inwardly-focused, if our goals are founded upon our own pride, if our ambitions and dreams are to build up our own kingdoms however we see fit, then repentance is not a reality in our lives. Granted, the penitent person will no doubt struggle in his devotion to God and forsaking himself and his kingdom. If this were not the case, then no one would ever be considered penitent. But the overarching "appearance" of the penitent person is a life devoted to God and His kingdom, even if that devotion wavers or struggles or doubts at times.