REGENERATION IS A SOVEREIGN WORK OF GOD
Here is a theological formula that may strike you as strange: “Regeneration precedes faith.” We have seen that regeneration, or spiritual rebirth, is the beginning of the Christian life. If regeneration is the first step, obviously it must come before the second step. Spiritually dead people do not suddenly develop faith, causing God to regenerate them. Rather, faith is the fruit of the regeneration God performs in our hearts: “Even when we were dead in our trespasses, [God] made us alive together with Christ” (Eph. 2:4b). We are born again (regenerated), then we come to faith, then we are justified, and then we begin to undergo the lifelong sanctification process (Rom. 8:30). All these events comprise the whole complex of the Christian life. But the starting point, the first act in the chain, is all of God—it is a monergistic work, as we saw in the previous chapter.
In short, regeneration is a sovereign work of God. In other words, God exercises His power and His authority over you in His time and His way to bring about the regeneration of your heart. I stress this because many people understand regeneration as merely an activity of moral persuasion whereby God woos or entices us to change and to come in His direction. I am suggesting, following the thinking of Augustine and other giants of the Christian faith, that regeneration is not just God standing apart from us and trying to persuade us to come to Him, but God coming inside of us. He invades the soul, because there has to be a substantive change in the heart before we can come to Christ. In order for us to desire the things of God, we have to be made alive, and to be made alive requires a sovereign act of God.
A Hebrew of Hebrews
In Acts 9, we have the most famous record of a conversion in the history of the church. It is the conversion of Saul, the man who became the apostle Paul. The New Testament teaches that not many wise and great people were called of God to be part of the foundation for the Christian church (1 Cor. 1:26–27). Rather, the early church was made up primarily of the oppressed, the poor, the exploited, and those of limited means. It was part of the plan of God, in the main, to not choose the rich, powerful, and famous for the establishing of His church. But the Scriptures do not say “none” but “not many” were taken from leadership positions or sophisticated levels of status. One who was from such a background was Saul of Tarsus.
Saul was from a family of merchants and had received an extraordinary higher education. Certain experts have maintained that if Saul had never been confronted by Christ on the road to Damascus and radically converted, if God had left him alone to pursue the course he was following, the modern world probably still would be cognizant of him, because he was among the most educated Jews in the first century. He was the star pupil of Gamaliel, the leading rabbi in Jerusalem. He had the equivalent of two PhDs by the time that he was twenty-one years old. As a young man, he had risen in a meteoric fashion to a position of political, theological, and ecclesiastical authority in Israel.
Not only was Saul learned and accomplished, he was highly passionate. He was a zealot. He described himself as “extremely zealous … for the traditions of my fathers” (Gal. 1:14b) and as a “Hebrew of Hebrews” (Phil. 3:5). We’re not exactly sure what he meant by that, but we know that he was describing himself with a superlative in the Jewish language, similar to the terms “King of kings” or “Lord of lords.” In other words, Saul was in a class by himself. He had reached the highest possible level.
Saul was also a Pharisee (Phil. 3:5), a member of the conservative party of Jewish leaders who were committed to strict observance of the Mosaic law. One tradition from the days of the early church suggests that among the Pharisees there was an inner core who held the belief that if any one of them would perfectly keep all the sundry laws they were dedicated to for just one day, that act of virtue would prompt God to send the Messiah. So there was a handful of zealots among the Pharisees who practiced all kinds of self-denial and asceticism. They were devout in their studies and scrupulous to every detail of the law in their attempt to keep it perfectly for a twenty-four-hour period. Some conjecture that Saul himself was one of these zealous Pharisees.
We meet Saul for the first time when he is holding the garments of those who are stoning Stephen (Acts 7:58). In Acts 8 and 9, we see him turn his passion into a militant form of hostility against the nascent church, which he regards as a serious distortion of orthodox Judaism. He sees the Christian movement not as a fulfillment of the Old Testament Scriptures but as the undermining of everything dear to him. So Saul works with the Jewish religious authorities to bring formal charges against the Christians. He is filled with hostility toward Jesus and everything that Jesus stands for.
Christ Confronts Saul
But everything changes in Acts 9, which opens with these words: “But Saul, still breathing threats and murder against the disciples of the Lord, went to the high priest and asked him for letters to the synagogues at Damascus, so that if he found any belonging to the Way, men or women, he might bring them bound to Jerusalem” (vv. 1–2). Every breath Saul exhaled brought some kind of diabolical threat against the lives of believers, and not just those in Jerusalem. He asked the high priest for letters of official support so he could pursue his investigation, prosecution, and persecution of Christians in Damascus. He wanted to go all the way to Damascus to find any Jews who might have been infected by this Christian heresy. This was akin to a police officer going to a judge to get a court order. Saul wanted to hunt down Christians, both men and women, and bring them in chains to Jerusalem.
But Saul never carried out his mission in Damascus: “Now as he went on his way, he approached Damascus, and suddenly a light from heaven flashed around him. And falling to the ground he heard a voice saying to him, ‘Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me?’ And he said, ‘Who are you, Lord?’ And he said, ‘I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting. But rise and enter the city, and you will be told what you are to do’ ” (vv. 3–6).
If there is any evidence in Scripture that regeneration is a sovereign act, this is it. Saul had done nothing to deserve this marvelous intervention in his life. There was no merit in his work or life that could have induced God to send this gracious visitation; indeed, there was a great deal of demerit. Yet, Jesus came to Saul, and Saul was sovereignly, effectively converted on the spot.
Later, writing as the apostle Paul, he remembered that Jesus also said, “It is hard for you to kick against the goads” (Acts 26:14). That’s a strange image. In the ancient world, when oxen were used to pull carts, the oxen sometimes became stubborn, just like mules, and the driver would crack a whip on their backs to get them moving. Sometimes, when the oxen strongly preferred not to move and were displeased by the sting of the whip, they would throw up their back feet and kick, possibly smashing the cart. So people began to put ox goads on the fronts of their carts. On the ox goad, there were strong, sharp spikes that would hurt the oxen’s hooves and deter them from kicking. But sometimes an ox that was particularly dumb would “kick against the goads.” The pain from kicking against the goad once would make the ox even angrier, and it would kick again even harder. The more it kicked, the more it would hurt, and the more it hurt, the madder it would get, and the madder it got, the more it would kick. The ox would turn itself into a bloody mess as it fought against the ox goad.
Jesus was saying: “Saul, you’re a stupid ox. Why are you persecuting Me? You can’t win. You’re like an ox kicking against the spikes of an ox goad.”
As Saul was lying on the ground, he looked up into the brilliant light and asked, “Who are you, Lord?” He didn’t know who had stopped him in his tracks, but he knew that it must be the Lord, for no one else could light up the desert in the middle of the day with a blazing light of refulgent glory. No one else could knock him to the ground and blind him. No one else could speak to him in a voice from heaven in his own language. It must be the Lord who was speaking to him. Jesus replied: “I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting. But rise and enter the city, and you will be told what you are to do.”
Has God Confronted You?
Maybe you have never seen a bright light on the road to Damascus. Maybe you have never been knocked to the ground. I’m confident that you have never heard an audible voice from heaven. In Saul’s case, those were simply outward manifestations of the inward, mysterious work of rebirth. But the same sovereign power and authority manifested on the road to Damascus that day has been at work in your soul if indeed you are reborn.
Regeneration is a work of the omnipotent power of God, power that nothing can overcome or resist. If God breathes a person back from the dead, that person comes back from the dead. There is no contest when this power is exercised. God sovereignly confronted Saul and sovereignly changed and redeemed him. Has He done the same for you?
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