Want to know a secret? You’re saved before you know it

Editors’ note: The Christian Post Opinion Page has published two countering views on Calvinism. To read the opposing view in the piece titled “Which comes first in salvation order: Faith or regeneration?” click here. 

Want to know a secret? If you’re a Christian, you were saved before you knew you were.

Now, I’ll bet that the vast majority of you reading this think that you made a personal decision — all on your lonesome — to receive Christ, and once done, you were a child of God in the faith. John Chipman believes this, as evidenced by his article, “Which comes first in salvation order: Faith or regeneration?”

He says, “Faith precedes regeneration. Always. For everyone.”

Many think that the reverse is heresy and short-circuited. Still, I’m going to ask you to give me a few moments to make a case for the position of regeneration (the Spirit’s supernatural work of giving spiritual life to us, transforming the heart, and enabling faith, so that we become a new creation in Christ), preceding faith. I used to believe the reverse in my earlier Christian walk, but am now convinced that we can’t make that move of commitment towards God until He enables us to do it.

And few things glorify God more than that truth.

It’s not you, it’s Him

R. C. Sproul was just like me. In a short article, he reflects back on getting his theological bell rung by one of his seminary professors who taught regeneration precedes faith, saying, “These words were a shock to my system. I had entered seminary believing that the key work of man to effect rebirth was faith. I thought that we first had to believe in Christ in order to be born again.”

But Sproul got a crash course on the topic and ended up becoming one of the staunchest defenders of regeneration coming before faith. What turned him around?

First and foremost was the biblical teaching of our moral inability to choose God. Simply put, Scripture says we can’t believe and have faith in God until He acts first on our behalf.

This is why Jesus said: “I have said to you, that no one can come to Me unless it has been granted him from the Father” (John 6:65) highlighting our lack of moral power to choose God, and why Christ also showed a distinction between those granted faith and those not when He said: “To you it has been granted to know the mysteries of the Kingdom of Heaven, but to them it has not been granted” (Matt. 13:11).

It’s also why Paul writes, “You were dead in your trespasses and sins” (Eph. 2:1), indicating everyone’s initial dead-to-God spiritual state. He goes on to write elsewhere: “For the mind set on the flesh is death, but the mind set on the Spirit is life and peace, because the mind set on the flesh is hostile toward God; for it does not subject itself to the law of God, for it is not even able to do so” (Rom. 8:6–7) and “But a natural man does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him; and he cannot understand them, because they are spiritually appraised” (1 Cor. 2:14).

If a person’s natural mind is not able to subject themselves to God, thinks “the things of God” are so foolish to the point where they “cannot understand them,” can you tell me how they’re able to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps, muster up faith that isn’t there, and receive Christ? 

Augustine saw this inescapable predicament and ruffled many feathers back in his day when he summed up Christ and Paul’s points in this short written prayer: “Grant what thou commandest, and command what thou dost desire.” The second part none of his contemporaries had trouble with, but the first statement? He got the same dirty looks from them that we, who believe God must first grant us the ability to trust Him, do today.

Augustine and those holding to regeneration preceding faith acknowledge that people have free will but lack spiritual liberty when it comes to exercising our will towards God. Our initial state is one where we’ve not lost the ability to make choices — it’s just the choices are bad where God is concerned, meaning you can’t exercise faith and choose God without Him enabling you first.

Martin Luther takes this position when he writes: “Free will without God’s grace is not free at all, but is the permanent prisoner and bondslave of evil, since it cannot turn itself to good.”

Jonathan Edwards describes it like this: “Hence the work of the Spirit of God in regeneration is often in Scripture compared to the giving of a new sense, eyes to see, ears to hear, unstopping the ears of the deaf, opening the eyes of them that were born blind, and turning from darkness unto light…[it] is compared to raising the dead, and to a new creation.”

Which is exactly what the Greek word “regeneration” (palingenesias) means “new genesis,” a “coming back from death to life.” This being true, faith is understood as the fruit of regeneration, not the cause of it.

So, given all the biblical evidence that speaks to our moral inability to exercise faith in God on our own, doesn’t it become fairly difficult to believe that some of us just muscle through, overcome our spiritual deadness, and choose God on our own? We figure it all out where others don’t?

And thus, even the weeniest bit of credit for our salvation goes to us in choosing it?

Nope. Instead, we see Christ affirming the proactive work of the Holy Spirit in bringing about our faith when He says: “The wind blows where it wishes and you hear the sound of it, but do not know where it comes from and where it is going; so is everyone who is born of the Spirit” (John 3:8). John says the same thing earlier in his Gospel when he references believers as those “who were born, not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God” (John 1:13).

That’s pretty clear, wouldn’t you say? Your faith and new birth are not “of the will of man, but of God.” In other words, it’s not you, but Him, where your faith is concerned.

Or as Paul wrote, any faith we have “is not your own doing; it is the gift of God” (Eph 2:8). He underscores this again and again, telling us: “When you were dead in your transgressions and the uncircumcision of your flesh, He made you alive together with Him, having forgiven us all our transgressions” (Col. 2:13, my emphasis) and “For to you it has been granted for Christ’s sake, not only to believe in Him, but also to suffer for His sake” (Phil. 1:29, my emphasis).

These truths are why Martin Luther and Jonathan Edwards referred to their books on this topic (Luther: Bondage of the Will; Edwards: Freedom of the Will) as their most important works. And why I’m laboring hard on this point, where the regeneration preceding faith debate is concerned. If you’re spiritually dead and morally unable to choose God as Scripture says, regeneration has to precede faith.

In the end, I do agree with one thing John Chipman wrote in his article: “…if we get this wrong, we start down a path that leads to an unbiblical god and a hopeless corruption of the Gospel.”

Good advice.

To avoid that, remember two things:

First, He chose you before you chose Him, just as Jesus said: “You did not choose Me but I chose you, and appointed you that you would go and bear fruit, and that your fruit would remain” (John 15:16).

Second, as much as we’d like to think we’re always on the same wavelength as God on these weighty matters, sometimes His way of doing things doesn’t jive with our human logic. As He says in the Psalms: “You thought I was just like you” (Ps. 50:21).

Give all this some prayerful thought and see if you don’t come around to embracing regeneration preceding faith.