Repentence and Conversion

When I came home from Japan, I was surprised by a prompting to do the Come Follow Me readings in Japanese, and then even more surprised to realize how much Japanese I learned reading the Book of Mormon for the challenge from President Nelson: the first chapter I read wasn't half as hard as I'd expected: I have to read it from a paper edition, which means no copy and paste into my dictionary, because it's not in the Gospel Library app (I assume there's some copyright issue; that's typically why stuff like this happens).

So, I'm cruising along, reading in Matthew 13: the Parable of the Sower. That explanation in the middle has always seemed odd to me: "lest at any time they should see with their eyes, and hear with their ears, and should understand with their heart, and should be converted, and I should heal them."

And I noticed two things:

First, the Japanese makes the cause-effect relationship more apparent than the English: the people close their own eyes, they close their own ears, and their own hearts for the purpose that they won't have to repent.

And Second --wait. I didn't remember the word "repent" being in this passage. When I looked at the English, I realized that I don't remember that word being there because... it's not. In English, it says "lest... [they] should be converted, and I should heal them." But the Japanese word here is 悔い改める。I learned to recognize it as "repent" in my Book of Mormon reading, and that's what it says if you look it up in my dictionary. But it's a compound:

悔 -- repent/regret
改 -- reformation/change/modify/renew

I can see how it could have both meanings, and that's a whole new way of looking at conversion for me. I've always thought about repenting as a sort of "I'm sorry" process that we go through with the Lord, followed by change. But this word unifies those two aspects into a single concept, a single verb.

I wondered if there was anywhere else that the words repent and conversion were used interchangeably in Japanese. Surprisingly, there's not a lot of places in the New Testament where you find the word "conversion": only 8. In addition to looking at the Japanese, it would be really interesting to use Strong's Concordance to look at the Greek roots of these words, but I'm so slow at the Japanese that there's no way that I can do that tonight.

• John 12:40. This is basically the same as the verse in Matthew 12, and it has the same word, 悔い改める, for "conversion." 
• Mark 4:12 is another version of the Parable of the Sower, with the same reference to Isaiah as the other verses, and the same rendering of "converted" as 悔い改める. 
• Matthew 18:3 uses a different word for "converted": 入れ代える. This one is a compound of enter/insert, and substitute/change/convert/replace. 
• Acts 28:27 is another reference to the same verse from Isaiah, and it's back to repent/convert being interchangeable with that same word.
• Luke 22:32 uses another different word, 立ち直る, which my dictionary tells me means "to regain one's footing/get back on one's feet/recover". This is when Christ tells Peter, just before the Crucifixion, that when he [Peter] is converted -when he's recovered- strengthen his brethren. What a merciful picture that paints, as Christ is about to be arrested and Peter just hours away from denying him! Because I don't have an electronic edition of the Japanese Bible, I don't really have a way to search for other instances of this word, but I wish that I did. 
• Acts 3:19 actually uses both the word "repent" and the word "converted" in the English, and I'm not sure which one corresponds to 悔い改める. The other phrase that's used is 本心に立ち返る, which means "come back/return to a starting point with a true heart".
• James 5:19 is another different one: 引き戻す, which means "pull/draws to return": "Brethren, if any of you do err from the truth, and one [pulls/draws him to return]; Let him know, that he which [pulls] the sinner [to return] from the error of his way shall save a soul from death." That's a super cool rendition of the verse. 

So far, all the verses like the one that first caught my eye and use "repent" for "converted" are drawing on the same passage from Isaiah, when Isaiah was called as a prophet, and basically told up front that nearly nobody is going to listen to him. This passage has long been a favorite: what intestinal fortitude Isaiah must have had to accept an assignment like that!

I don't know that I really discovered a lot about the use of 悔い改める to mean conversion, but it's made me want to look at the Book of Mormon entries for conversion. There's a ton more of them: 29 instances. But even just here in these few verses, there's a whole lot of food for thought on what the interplay is between repentance and conversion.

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