At the time of conversion every true Christian comes to the point of having saving faith. This faith involves believing the basic truths of Christianity and also trusting in Christ for personal salvation.
At conversion too every true Christian is regenerated by God. This is also referred to as being born again or born of God or becoming God’s child. Regeneration is an act of God that enables a person to be His child and to have a Holy Spirit-empowered, supernatural form of life.
So Christians have faith and they have been regenerated. But what is the relationship between these things? Does God cause us to be regenerated, which leads to our having faith? Or does He respond to our faith by regenerating us?
This is an area where Christians disagree. Some say that God causes believers to be regenerated and this leads to them having faith. A greater number say that God responds to believers’ faith by granting regeneration.
I would suggest that to a large degree this is an issue where the two sides are actually usually more in agreement than they might realise. But I would still agree with the majority that we should say that God responds to faith by granting regeneration. In what follows I will explain what I mean.
Some degree of spiritual life precedes coming to faith
For the time being, let’s set aside the word ‘regeneration’ and think simply in terms of gaining spiritual life at the time of conversion. And let’s think first about what goes on inside people before they come to faith in Christ.
There are some biblical passages which make it clear that God needs to work in a person’s life before they can have faith.
For example, in John 6:44 Jesus states:
‘No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him . . .’
Similarly, in 1 Corinthians 2:14 Paul tells his readers:
‘But the natural person does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him, and he is not able to understand them, because they are spiritually discerned.’
This passage makes it clear that a person in his natural, sinful state regards Christian things as ‘foolishness’. This implies that God has to do some sort of enlivening of a person out of his natural state before he can come to faith in Christ.
So we can say that before a person can have faith in Jesus, God needs to sovereignly cause that person to receive some measure of spiritual life.
God responds to faith by giving a greater degree of spiritual life
Let’s think next about what goes on inside people after they come to faith in Christ.
There are biblical passages which make it clear that God responds to faith by giving spiritual life.
For example, in John 3:14-15 Jesus says:
‘. . . the Son of Man must be lifted up, so that everyone who believes in him might have eternal life.’
When Jesus says that everyone who believes might have eternal life, this clearly implies that believing logically precedes gaining eternal life. If I do A, so that I might have B, A must logically precede B. In other words, faith leads to eternal life.
Importantly, John’s Gospel uses the term ‘eternal life’ to refer to something that begins not at death but at conversion.
For example, John 3:36 states:
‘The person who believes in the Son has eternal life.’
Similarly, in John 5:24 Jesus says:
‘. . . the person who believes him who sent me has eternal life and does not come into judgment, but has passed out of death into life.’
In John’s gospel, then, eternal life begins at conversion. So John 3:14-15 is saying that at conversion coming to faith leads to gaining eternal life, which must be a spiritual form of life.
The same sort of statement is found in John 3:16:
‘. . . He [God] gave his one and only Son, so that everyone who believes in him might not perish but have eternal life.’
And it is found in John 6:40:
‘For this is the will of my Father, that everyone who looks at the Son and believes in him might have eternal life . . .’
Similarly, in John 5:40 Jesus criticises people with these words:
‘. . . you are unwilling to come to me so that you may have life.’
What the people Jesus is speaking to in this verse should have done is come to Jesus (in faith) so that they might gain life (at conversion). Again, this implies that faith logically precedes gaining spiritual life.
We should have no hesitation, then, in saying that the Bible teaches that faith leads to gaining spiritual life.
And because, as we saw in the last section, people need to have already gained a degree of life before they can have faith, the life that God gives in response to faith must be a greater degree of life than they gained before they had faith. (And at death or the return of the Lord we will gain an even greater degree of spiritual life, although that is not our concern in this article.)
The logical order of events at Christian conversion
So the logical order of events at Christian conversion regarding faith and spiritual life is as follows:
(1) God sovereignly causes a person to gain a degree of spiritual life.
(2) This person is now able to come to faith in Christ.
(3) God responds to this faith by giving this person a greater degree of spiritual life.
The two sides are not that far apart
There are many Christians who have a faulty understanding of these things, because they miss either the first or the second stage of God giving life.
Many rightly insist that God needs to give spiritual life before someone can come to faith, but they miss that the Bible teaches that God responds to faith by giving spiritual life. And many others rightly insist that God responds to faith by giving spiritual life, but they miss that the Bible teaches that God needs to give spiritual life before someone can come to faith.
However, these two sides are not nearly as far apart as might first seem to be the case. When it is pointed out to those on either side that God gives life in two stages, most are happy to agree with this.
The main focus of some is that God needs to give life before a person can have faith, and that is correct. And the main focus of others is that God responds to faith by giving life, and that is also correct. But these ideas fit together. They are both true.
Regeneration as a metaphor
So, because new Christians actually receive life in two stages, and because regeneration is about gaining life, which of the stages should be described as regeneration? Should we say that the life God gives before faith is regeneration? Or should we say that the life God gives in response to faith is regeneration? Or should we even call each of these things regeneration?
Regeneration is what is known as a metaphor, i.e., a word-picture. Christians are pictured being regenerated, i.e., born again, into new life. So it might at first seem to make sense to use this metaphor as a reference to each of the stages of Christians receiving life.
However, as it happens, the Bible never uses the image of regeneration or becoming a child of God to refer to the life that is given before faith. Instead, Scripture consistently uses this image to refer to the second stage of gaining life, i.e., to the gaining of life that God gives in response to faith. Various passages point in this direction.
John 1:11-13
John 1:11-13 is a passage that connects regeneration with God’s response to faith. Here we read:
‘11 He [Jesus] came to what was his own, but his own did not accept him. 12 But as many as did accept him, to them he gave the right to become children of God, to those believing in his name, 13 who were born not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of a man, but of God.’
This passage refers to those who ‘accept’ Jesus, and in v. 12 those who accept Him are described as those believing in His name, i.e., having faith in Him. In this passage, then, the accepting of Jesus is certainly an accepting of Him in faith.
So we are told that those who accepted Jesus in faith were given the right to become children of God, i.e., to be regenerated. But the order of the words in v. 12 strongly implies that accepting him logically precedes being given the right to become children of God. ‘But as many as did accept him’ comes before ‘to them he gave the right to become children of God’, and this seems to be the order in which things happen.
If it were true that regeneration leads to faith, we would expect this passage to read:
‘He came to what was his own, but his own did not accept him. But as many as had been given the right to become children of God, they accepted him . . .’
This, however, is not what the text says.
Verse 13 tells us that ‘the will of a man’ is not something that leads to regeneration. It is sometimes argued that this shows that faith, which involves use of the human will, doesn’t lead to regeneration.
Verse 13, however, is simply saying that regeneration has nothing in common with normal procreation. ‘Man’ in ‘the will of a man’, translates the Greek word aner, which refers specifically to a male. And the text is saying that the decision of a man to sleep with a woman is not part of what causes regeneration. Verse 13 is not saying that regeneration is not God’s response to faith, which would in any case seem strongly to contradict what v. 12 has just said.
John 1:11-13, then, uses the image of people becoming children of God, i.e., regenerated, to refer to what God does in response to faith.
Part 2 of this article can be found here.
See also:
New Christians Should Be Baptized Immediately
Should Hands Be Laid on New Christians?
Salvation Is Not by Doing Good but Only Those Who Do Good Will Be Saved
