Redemption Accomplished and Applied: Regeneration

I’m participating in Tim Challies’ Reading the Classics Together program. The book is Redemption Accomplished and Applied by John Murray, and this week’s reading is the third chapter of Part 2: The Order of Application. And yes, I’m late this week, but I’ve been busy. (Here is Tim’s summary of this chapter.)

In the order of salvation, Murray puts regeneration right after the effective call and faith and repentance. This is the order that typically affirmed by those who are reformed or Calvinistic, with the non-reformed affirming an order that puts faith and repentance before regeneration. The teaching that regeneration precedes and is the cause of faith seems to be  a sticking point and is sometimes found offensive by those who have a non-reformed view of salvation. If I had a dollar for every thread on Christian discussion boards with the title, “Does regeneration precede faith?,” I could buy a junky used car to clutter my driveway.

Here’s the problem for those who teach that faith precedes regeneration: “[H]ow can a person whose heart is depraved and whose mind is enmity against God [as the scriptures teach] embrace him who is the supreme manifestation of the glory of God?” It seems that some sort of heart and mind change is necessary in order for a sinner to respond in faith to the  call of the gospel. This change, says Murray, “is nothing less than a new creation by him who calls the things that be not as though they were…. This, in a word, is regeneration.”

Murray teaches about regeneration using, for the most part, the writings of John. The results (or fruits) of regeneration are

• seeing and entering the kingdom of God (John 3)
• doing righteousness (1 John 2:29)
• not doing sin; incapacity to sin (1 John 3:9)
• loving (1 John 4:7)
• believing that Jesus is the Christ (1 John 5:1)
• overcoming the world (1 John 5:4)
• not sinning; protection from the touch of the evil one (1 John 5:18)

Notice that even faith that Jesus is the Christ is a fruit of regeneration. Regeneration is the cause of faith  in Christ and faith in Christ is “the first evidence of regeneration.”

That regeneration precedes faith might give the impression that it is possible for someone to be regenerate and still an unbeliever. Not so:

We must not think of regeneration as something which can be abstracted for the saving exercises which are it’s effects. … If it is true that no one enters the kingdom of God except by regeneration (John 3:3-5), it is also just as true that everyone who is born again has entered into the kingdom of God.

Regeneration is nothing short of being made into a new creature. This chapter concludes:

It is a stupendous change because it is God’s recreative act. A cheap and tawdry evangelism has tended to rob the gospel which it proclaims of that invincible power which is the glory of the gospel of sovereign grace. May the church come to think and live again in terms of the gospel which is the power of God unto salvation.

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Glossary for Part 2, Chapter 1

• exigencies: demands
• beggarly: impoverished; paltry
• attenuated: weakened in force or effect