What is regeneration?

Question 07017.

Regeneration is the theological word for the new birth, the act by which God gives spiritual life to someone who was spiritually dead. Jesus introduced the idea to a highly religious man in the dark, and Nicodemus found it completely baffling, which should encourage the rest of us.

What makes the new birth such an important doctrine is that it describes something done to us rather than something achieved by us. Nobody arranges their own birth. You were not consulted about the first one and you cannot organise the second.

Where the Idea Comes From

John 3 is the classic passage. Jesus tells Nicodemus that unless one is born again he cannot see the kingdom of God, and the Greek word anothen can mean both again and from above. I suspect the double meaning is deliberate, because the new birth is both a second beginning and a beginning that comes down from outside.

Nicodemus takes it literally and asks how a man can enter his mother’s womb a second time. Jesus does not laugh at him. He explains that flesh gives birth to flesh and the Spirit gives birth to spirit, and then uses the wind as an illustration. You hear the sound of it but you cannot say where it comes from or where it goes.

That illustration is worth keeping. The new birth is real, its effects are observable, and its mechanism is not available for inspection.

What Actually Happens

A person who was spiritually dead is made spiritually alive. Ephesians 2:4-5 says that God, being rich in mercy, made us alive together with Christ even when we were dead in our trespasses. Notice that dead people do not improve. They have to be raised.

Titus 3:5 calls it the washing of regeneration and renewal of the Holy Spirit, using the noun palingenesia, which means a new genesis or a fresh beginning. The same word appears in Matthew 19 of the renewal of all things, which tells you the scale of what is being described.

So the new birth is not a decision to turn over a leaf. It is the implanting of a life that was not there before, and everything else in the Christian experience grows out of it.

Does the New Birth Come Before or After Faith?

This is where I differ from a good many of my Reformed friends, and I want to state the difference honestly rather than pretend it does not exist. They hold that God regenerates a person first, so that the person is then able to believe. I hold that a person believes, and God then regenerates.

My reasons are textual. John 1:12 says that to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God, which puts the receiving before the becoming. Ephesians 1:13 has hearing, then believing, then sealing. And the apostolic preaching throughout Acts commands people to believe, which would be a strange command if belief required a prior work that only some would receive.

This is not a small difference, but it is a family difference. Both sides agree that salvation is entirely of grace, that no one can be saved without the Spirit’s work, and that nobody boasts at the end of it.

What the New Birth Does Not Do

It does not remove the capacity to sin. Anyone who has been a Christian for a fortnight knows that. What it does is introduce a new nature with new desires, which is why the Christian life feels like a conflict in a way that the old life did not.

It does not make you instantly mature. A newborn is fully alive and entirely helpless, and both facts are true at once. Peter tells new believers to long for the pure spiritual milk like newborn infants, which is a picture of appetite rather than accomplishment.

And it does not depend on an emotional experience accompanying it. Some are converted dramatically and some so quietly they cannot date it. The new birth is not less real for having been undramatic.

Why Nicodemus of All People?

John tells us that Nicodemus was a Pharisee, a ruler of the Jews, and later that he was the teacher of Israel. If any man in the country had earned an exemption from starting again, it was this one. He had the pedigree, the training, the moral record and the office, and Jesus told him that none of it counted towards entry.

I find that enormously levelling, and I suspect John included the detail for exactly that reason. The new birth cuts straight across every advantage a person might bring. A professor and a prisoner arrive at the same door and need the same thing, which is life they do not possess and cannot manufacture.

There is a quiet postscript worth noticing. Nicodemus turns up twice more in John’s Gospel, first arguing for a fair hearing for Jesus, and finally carrying seventy-five pounds of spices to the tomb of an executed man. Whatever happened in that night conversation, something took. New life often shows itself slowly and in public at the least convenient moment.

What God Puts In at the New Birth

Several things arrive together, and they are worth naming. A new nature, described in 2 Corinthians 5:17 as being a new creation, where the old has passed away and the new has come. A new relationship, since the regenerate person is now a child of God rather than a creature at a distance. A new capacity, because the Spirit takes up residence and Scripture starts to make sense in a way it never did before.

There is also a new set of affections, and this is the change most believers actually notice first. Things you used to find dull become interesting. Things you used to find delicious lose their flavour. Nobody argued you into it. The taste simply changed, which is precisely what you would expect if life rather than logic had been added.

None of this happens by degrees. You are either alive or you are not, and there is no halfway condition between the two. What happens by degrees is everything that follows, which is why the New Testament can speak of believers as babies, children, young men and fathers in the faith without ever suggesting that some of them are more born than others.

Signs That It Has Happened

John’s first letter is the best place to look, because he wrote it precisely so that believers could know where they stood. He says that everyone who believes that Jesus is the Christ has been born of God, that everyone who practises righteousness has been born of him, and that everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God.

So the markers are belief, a changed direction of life, and love for other believers. Not perfection in any of them. A direction.

I would add one homely test that I have found reliable over the years. Sin used to be something you enjoyed and occasionally regretted. Now it is something you regret and occasionally enjoy. That reversal is not natural, and nobody produces it in themselves.

New Birth and Baptism

Some traditions tie the new birth to the moment of water baptism, and I do not think Scripture supports it. Cornelius and his household in Acts 10 received the Spirit before any water was involved, and Peter’s response was to conclude that they must therefore be baptised, which is exactly backwards if baptism produced the life.

Baptism is the outward sign of an inward reality, commanded, important and not to be neglected. It is not the mechanism. I have set out the case in whether baptismal regeneration is biblical and in whether baptism is necessary for salvation.

The order in Acts is consistent enough to settle the question: hear, believe, receive the Spirit, be baptised.

Who Does the Work?

The Holy Spirit, and Jesus says so explicitly. That is why regeneration belongs as much to pneumatology as to soteriology, and why I have written about it from that angle in the Spirit’s role in regeneration.

The instrument is the word of God. Peter says we have been born again not of perishable seed but of imperishable, through the living and abiding word of God, and James says that God brought us forth by the word of truth. The Spirit does not work in a vacuum. He works through Scripture preached, read, remembered and finally believed.

That has an obvious application for anyone praying for an unconverted family member. Get them near the word, and keep asking.

Can the New Birth Be Undone?

No, and the metaphor itself makes the point. Birth is not reversible. You may be a disappointing child, an absent child, even a runaway child, and you remain your parents’ offspring. Nothing you do alters the fact of your birth.

1 John 3:9 says that no one born of God makes a practice of sinning, for God’s seed abides in him. The abiding seed is the life that was given, and John’s argument is that it stays. That is the deepest ground of assurance in the New Testament.

For the wider doctrine see what eternal security is.

So, now what?

So the question to sit with is not whether you are religious, informed, decent or churchgoing. Nicodemus was all four and Jesus told him he needed to start again from the beginning.

Has the new birth happened to you? If you are not sure, do not settle for not being sure. Come to Jesus and ask him for the life he promised, and then read how a person is saved to see what that looks like in practice.

Jesus answered him, Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born again he cannot see the kingdom of God.

John 3:3 (ESV)