PURSUED BY LOVE

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3. Regeneration an act of God

God is unchangeable, eternal, omnipresent. This being so, it can never be the case that God lets someone be born and live unnoticed by and independent of Him, then quite suddenly out of the blue be converted and only from that moment on to be the object of His care and keeping. Such a notion belittles God’s glory and attributes.

God’s care for us does not begin at some arbitrary moment, but is interwoven into the whole of our existence and even before conception. Says God: “Yea, I have loved thee with an everlasting love: therefore with lovingkindness have I drawn thee” (Jeremiah 31:3).God does not leave us as sinners for years only then quite suddenly to take hold of us. Our salvation is to be seen as an eternal work with its beginnings hidden in God’s wondrous mercies. God’s hand upon us is hidden within His divine counsel and can be traced in our lives long before the actual day of our conversion. Our heavenly Father performs in us an eternal work, beginning not simply with our conversion, but way back lodged in His eternal counsel that follows us throughout all the days of our life and into eternity.

During the days before our conversion, we departed from God and were going in quite the opposite direction rather than drawing closer to Him. Whilst sin may break through more violently in one person rather than another, nevertheless there is iniquity found in us all. God may give us up to walk in our own ways. That we are being carried along by sin does not go unnoticed by God. Many will admit that if inward sin had not revealed itself and broken forth, they would never have discovered their own inner corruption and cried out to God for mercy realizing their terrible guilt. It is true that even at a time when we are alienated from Him, He yet bestows His grace upon us. We see how evidently God’s grace is working through it all and that despite our sinful intentions. All to bring us to Himself. Our salvation depends not on our conversion, rather our conversion is brought about by the creation in us by God of a new life which then manifests itself in conversion.

Regeneration is God’s act of quickening whereby we are translated from death to life, from the power of darkness into the kingdom of God’s dear Son. “Who hath delivered us from the power of darkness, and hath translated us into the kingdom of his dear Son” (Colossians 1:13) God comes to us as those born in iniquity, dead in trespasses and sins. He plants within us a new spiritual life, in the soul. This is the true meaning of being ‘born again’. Regeneration also has the wider meaning of that entire change wrought within our persons by God’s grace ending in our dying to sin and being born for heaven.

“He that hath ears to hear, let him hear” (Matthew 11:15).  No dead man ever saw or heard anything. A sinner is dead in trespasses and sins and in this is like a soulless, motionless body possessing all the properties that belong to a corpse. Every attempt to ascribe to the sinner any cooperation in his own regeneration destroys the Gospel, is anti-biblical and heretical. Even as we do nothing to initiate our physical birth, so we can do nothing to bring about our spiritual birth.

At the preaching of the Word of God that Word comes not to the stone deaf, but to those able to hear; not to the dead, but to those who have been made alive, even although at times they may be asleep. “So then faith cometh by hearing, and hearing by the word of God” (Romans 10:17). Faith itself is a gift of God’s grace. The preaching of God’s Word and the inner workings of God’s Holy Spirit are divine operations that complement each other. Under such preaching, the Holy Spirit energizes faith and God’s call becomes effective, the sleeper awakes from his slumber. Those that are dead, however, hear nothing. The faith that God then gives results in our conversion. “But God, who is rich in mercy, for his great love wherewith he loved us, Even when we were dead in sins, hath quickened us together with Christ, (by grace ye are saved;) …For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God.” (Ephesians 2:4-8)

At this point we become aware of the life of God planted within us. The ‘old man’, what we were by nature, dies and a ‘new man’ rises. This is conversion.

“The hearing ear, and the seeing eye, the LORD hath made even both of them.” (Proverbs 20:12) This is as much true in the spiritual as in the physical world. Those devoid of God’s life, the unregenerate, are stone deaf and utterly blind. The sinner cannot be represented as a rock because he is still human; but his nature is corrupt and in that corrupt nature spiritually dead. Sinners are worse than a rock which is neither corrupt nor ruined. The unregenerate are wholly dead and already perishing in a most fearful dissolution. This unpalatable truth cannot be sufficiently stressed and certainly not smoothed over. We are all by nature dead in trespasses and sins, under the curse, ready for God’s justice and ripening for eternal condemnation. A dead body although lifeless is still extant, but the eyes do not see neither do the ears hear. Every operation of saving grace must first be preceded by a spiritual quickening, an opening of blind eyes and an unstopping of deaf ears. In regeneration, it follows that we can neither be the worker nor the co-worker. The only worker in this is God Himself.

God justifies the ungodly not the righteous. God calls sinners to repentance. Jesus Himself said: “I came not to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance” (Luke 5:32). The Apostle Paul writes: “But God commendeth his love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us” (Romans 5:8). Regeneration is a real act of God in which we ourselves are absolutely passive and incapable.

God causes His Word to be preached to the unconverted. By this preaching the call to repentance and faith reaches them. For those who respond it is a time of God’s love. The outward call is accompanied by an inner call so that men then turn from their sinful ways. “Being born again, not of corruptible seed, but of incorruptible, by the word of God, which liveth and abideth for ever” (1 Peter 1:23). In true conversion, God accomplishes His good work in those who believe. He causes the Gospel to be preached to them, powerfully illumines their minds by the Holy Spirit, pervades the innermost recesses of the hearer, opens the closed and softens the hardest heart, infuses the will with new qualities.

The Holy Spirit may accomplish the work of regeneration some time before or accompanying the preaching of the Word. However, what must precede the inward call is the opening of deaf ears. It is all one great act of God: quickening, conversion and sanctification. In regeneration we are passive, only God is active. The light enters our soul, independent of the external Word so that we might receive that Word and turn to God in repentance and faith.

 

NEXT GOD WILL NOT BE REFUSED

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