Clough Proverbs Lesson 6
Regeneration of the Human Spirit
Turn to Genesis
2:7, continuing the introduction to the book of Proverbs, studying the
psychology of the soul as outlined in God’s Word, keeping in mind the principle
that you can study secular psychology and psychiatry and other areas of study
and not come to an accurate understanding of who and what man is, simply
because if the Bible is correct, man is made in the image of God and if man is
made in the image of God, you cannot understand who and what man is unless you
understand who and what God is. And you
can’t understand who and what God is unless you have revelation from that
God. Therefore we conclude, very easily
and very logically that you cannot understand the nature of man apart from the
Word of God. And this way we set the
Word of God in judgment over and against secular ideas of who and what man
is. This is the only way to attain an
adequate understanding of man.
We have been going
through the components of man as outlined in Genesis 2:7. The first one was the body, we spent a very,
very brief time on the body and then secondly the breath of God, which is the
human spirit, we spent considerable time on this and we’ll spend one more week
on the human spirit and then we’ll return back to the body again and the soul,
what it is to do. In other words in the
Bible as far as God’s Word is concerned you have a body plus a spirit equals
soul; that’s the equation. And you
cannot have a soul or a person until you first have a spirit. Last Sunday morning we dealt with the time
that the spirit is placed in the body and as I expected, we usually stir up a
hornet’s nest when this topic is discussed, simply because a lot of people
react out of tradition, a lot of people react out of emotions and they insist
that the woman, when she is pregnant, is carrying a living soul. That is not true according to God’s
Word. God’s Word says that what the
woman is carrying is a partially completed body and that this body is not a
living soul and we gave the evidences in Scripture for this last week. However, last week we had some cards handed
in and questions starting this Sunday we are going to answer these questions at
the beginning of the sermon from the previous week, hoping this will raise questions
and introduce you… act as kind of a review.
The first question
is this, and this by the way was asked by several people so I’ll just read one
of the cards but several people asked this question: How do you reconcile Luke
1:44 with your teaching concerning when a baby begins to live? How can the baby in the womb leap with joy if
he does not live until birth. If you’ll
turn to Luke
We gave three
lines of scriptural evidence last week based on Genesis 2:7; Psalm 139:15;
Ezekiel 37:8-10; Hebrews 10:5 and Exodus 21:22 to show you the scriptural basis
of why the spirit does not come until the first breath is taken by the
baby. Now in Luke 1:44 we have this
statement made about John the Baptist as he was in his mother’s womb. And Elisabeth is speaking out in verse 42,
“Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb. [43] And whence is this to me, that the
mother of my Lord should come to me?
[44] For, lo, as soon as the voice of thy salutation sounded in my ears,
the babe leaped in my womb for joy.”
People would therefore raise the question, what do I do with verse
42. A fundamental principle of
interpreting Scripture is look at the context and the answer is found in verse
41. “And it came to pass that, when Elisabeth
heard the salutation,” remember the Hebrew style of writing, it is a summary
verse first and then the detailed narrative later, so verse 44 is nothing but
an expansion of the content of verse 41.
Verse 41 gives you the answer.
“And it came to pass that, when Elisabeth heard the salutation of Mary,
the babe leaped in her womb; and Elisabeth was filled with the Holy
Spirit.” It doesn’t say the baby was
filled with the Spirit, it says Elisabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit. Only a living person can be filled with the
Holy Spirit because only a living person is a person and can have a personal
relationship to the Lord. And Elisabeth
is the one that is filled with the Spirit; the baby leaped, part of prenatal
movement and the joy that is mentioned in verse 44 therefore is Elisabeth’s
joy, not the baby’s joy. The baby is
leaping there because of the joy of Elisabeth.
Elisabeth is the one who is filled with the Spirit; Elisabeth is the one
who is responding. And so I think the
text is very clear in verse 44 if you just take it in context. That was one question asked.
The second
question that was asked is what does Zechariah 12:1 mean when it says that God
forms the spirit of man within him? Turn
to Zechariah 12:1 so we all understand the nature of the question. “The burden of the word of the LORD for
The third question
that was asked was: if the human spirit is given at physical birth, then how do
you interpret Hebrews 7:9-10, so let’s turn to Hebrews 7:9-10; I’m glad to see
some people know parts of the Word of God.
This was asked by somebody from Dallas Seminary and all I can say is you
haven’t read Dr. Chafer’s Volume II and I don’t think you paid too much
attention to Professor Ryrie’s lectures.
In Hebrews 7:9-10 we have this statement: “And as I may say so, Levi
also, who received tithes, paid tithes in Abraham. [10] For he was yet in the loins of his
father, when Melchizedek met him.” Now
what this is saying, apparently, is you have Levi here, the time say before
1400 BC, obviously, one of the brothers, but Levi’s priesthood expanded then
and that’s one of the issues in Hebrew, actually Levi as the originator of the
priesthood of Israel existed for a certain period of time in history. But before Levi existed he had a great
grandfather, Abraham. The argument of
this verse is that the actions of Abraham included Levi. It’s a complicated context of Hebrews 7 but
the issue is that Levi was in the loins in his great grandfather.
However, let me
point out to you that this has nothing to do with input of the human spirit
because if you put the human spirit at the point of conception you’ve still got
a problem with Hebrews 7:9-10. So
therefore in Hebrews 7 we conclude that Abraham and Levi in this sense is
talking about imputation and goes back to the problem of imputed
responsibility, for example, why we can be held accountable for what Adam did
and so forth; this kind of thing. That’s
the issue that is mentioned in Hebrews 7.
I know what you’re thinking about, how do I work the theological of
traducianism and creationism, and obviously I’m holding to both of them here;
traducianism to explain the continuity of man through the body; creationism the
human spirit. That’s for those of you
who want to study theological fine points.
The fourth
question and this had to do with our bulletin insert on capital punishment,
what is the payment or retribution in the case of manslaughter in the
Bible? Is there not a life taken,
whether premeditated or not? This is why
if you had read very carefully the insert I said that in the Word of God we
have the righteous character of God defining what good and evil is, and man’s
laws can reflect part of His righteousness and can execute judgment on part of
the evil that is going on; not all of it.
It’s partial, not all of it, I was very careful when I worded that and
put that in there, so you’d better re-read.
And let me take you back just briefly to Deuteronomy 21:1 to show you
how they actually did operate when they couldn’t find the person who had killed
someone.
Deuteronomy
21:1-9, again we refer to Israel’s criminal law because that criminal law
reflects God’s righteousness. I want you
to notice how they dealt with criminals whom they never could catch and if
retribution justice is retributive then what do you do about this kind of
thing. Here’s the answer. Deuteronomy 21:1, “If one be found slain in
the land which the LORD thy God gives thee to possess, lying in the field, and
it be not known who hath slain him,” very similar to some of the recent murders
we’ve had in Texas, this guy and girl slaughtered, it would be the same kind of
thing, nobody knows who did it. All
right, Israel had a procedure in that case if they couldn’t catch the criminal.
And the procedure
was outlined in verses 2-9 and that procedure consisted of the elders and
judges taking a tape measure and they would measure from the point of the crime
to the nearest city and the nearest city would bear responsibility for that
crime. [4] “The elders of that city will
bring down a heifer unto a rough valley, which is neither plowed nor sown, and
shall strike off the heifer’s neck there in the valley.” The reason this is done is in the Hebrew the
word “rough valley” means a wadi of continuous flow. The idea is they’re going to sacrifice,
retributive justice, a heifer to replace the life of this person. Now obviously the heifer isn’t going to
replace the life, but it is a standpoint that Christ in His substitutionary
atonement will replace the life, He will pay for the crime. But the heifer is killed to signify that
victim or victims, plural, their lives counted and it is memorialized by the
giving of the sacrifice and it is done in a wadi of continuous flow so that the
rain will drain the blood off the land. The
sacrifice cannot be done on a flat area of land, it cannot be done on farm
land; the sacrifice has to be done where there’s a gradient so that the rain
will wash the blood from the sacrifice away from the land. The reason for this is it pictures the fact
that the land is polluted by murder; the land is polluted by murder.
For example, if
you look at verse 8-9, when the priest would finish this offering they would
then say this phrase, “Be merciful, O LORD, unto thy people Israel,” and kaphar means cover, “whom thou hast
redeemed, and lay not innocent blood unto thy people of Israel’s charge. And the blood shall be forgiven.” Notice, a concern with the cost of the
victim’s life. Then in verse 9, “So
shalt thou put away the guilt of innocent blood from among you, when thou shall
to that which is right in the sight of the LORD.” Now you see the intense concern for the
purity of the land. You just pit that
against what we’re doing in this country and I would venture to say based on
the criminal law of the Old Testament that God is saying to the land of America
that your land stinks! It’s polluted,
it’s stained with the blood of the murders, and that blood, as far as God is
concerned has not been dealt with. That
is retributive justice. And the court is
more concerned with the poor little soul that got dropped on their head when
they were a baby than they are with the victim but that’s because we’ve lost
justice in this country.
Now we continue
with the problem of the human spirit and today we take up where we left off
last time, not on the entrance and exit of the spirit to the body but the
condition.
So we now take up
the fifth sub point under the doctrine of the human spirit, the condition of
the human spirit. What is the human
spirit like? The human spirit is the
second component of man and as the second component of man the human spirit has
certain parts. This diagram indicates
part of some of these parts. On the left
you will find the area of the body. The
body contains the central nervous system which is the key, without the central
nervous system functioning the human spirit can’t operate in and through a
body. This is why brain damage cases,
why injury and so on do curtail the human spirit. Reason: the human spirit can’t operate
through an instrument, you destroy the instrument. So therefore the body is known in Scripture
as the instrument for service; without your body you cannot serve the
Lord. So it ought to show you how
important your body is. Christianity
never went in in its biblical form for extreme forms of punish the body; that
is not Christianity, that is legalism.
The body is to be
built up and protected and the reason for it is that if you have a weak body
you have a weak instrument for God’s service.
And some of you could care less about your body and that shows your
attitude toward the Lord. It’s just a
reflection, you don’t give a damn for your body, which translated means you
don’t care about God’s will, you don’t care enough to maintain the instrument
that God has given you. You can die and
you can’t serve the Lord after you die, can you? Your days in service are all gone when you
lose your body; you don’t have any more opportunity to serve the Lord except in
your body; that is the place where you serve the Lord. So the body becomes the instrument for
service. Then we have the needs of the
body; the nutrition, exercise and elimination, the basic needs of the human
body. And then the origin of the body;
at the point of conception the body originates and therefore everything
associated with the body is inherited.
Everything associated with the body is inherited from your parents. And so we have the origin of the body, then,
at the point of conception.
That’s the body,
that’s the body as it’s carried by the woman as she is pregnant. Then when she
delivers her baby then we have the input of the human spirit and we have this
added, and we indicated this by color overlap, the body is a yellow
transparency, the spirit is a red transparency to show you that later on when
we deal with the soul it’s going to be in the area of the orange, meaning that
the soul is a combination of the two. So
that color there is to try and show you the combination. We’re not dealing with
the soul today, we’re just dealing with the spirit and we’re dealing with only
part of the spirit. One of the primary
functions of the spirit which we’ll deal with next week is the conscience. That is what separates man’s spirit from the
animals; the animals don’t have conscience.
This is that which gives man a sense of absolute truth. So we have conscience as one of the
components of the human spirit. Then we
have the human spirit as that which empowers you. The human spirit is the source of energy;
it’s the source of power. And then we
have the indwelling Holy Spirit in believers.
Then we have the origin of the human spirit at the point of physical
birth, or in the doctrine of regeneration when you become a Christian it’s
regenerated.
So you have two
origins, the origin of your body at the point of conception which is inherited,
and you have the point of origin of the human spirit at the point of physical
birth. So please notice, two components,
starting two different places, with two different contents.
Now we are going
to deal with questions about the interaction of these two. We have said animals
have a spirit but animals obviously do not have a conscience because animals
cannot speak and you cannot speak and carry on conversation unless you have
some sense of absolute standard of truth; that’s the presupposition of all
language and communication, and therefore the presence of language in man and
the absence of language in animals show that the animals do not have a
conscience.
So now we come to
several questions about the condition of this human spirit. The first question we have is one that has
been raised down through the ages and that is, is there a spirit in the
non-Christian man. Does the non-Christian
man have a spirit? In other words, do
you have a spirit before the point of regeneration? Now some would urge, on the basis of 1
Corinthians 2:14 where the unsaved man or the non-Christian man is known as a
natural or soulish man that he does not have a spirit. They would argue from Jude 1:19 that man is
sensual, not having the spirit and therefore this refers to the human
spirit. And on this basis the claim has
been made that unregenerate man does not have any spirit whatever.
However, if you
turn to Deuteronomy 2:30 we’ll look at some of the biblical evidences that the
unsaved man does have a human spirit.
What does it say about Sihon?
Sihon, we know in context was a non-believer. He certainly was not a believer. But what does it say in Deuteronomy 2:30,
that “God hardened his spirit,” there is an unsaved man, how can God harden his
spirit if the unsaved man doesn’t have a spirit? It seems to me pretty conclusive that the
unsaved man does have a spirit. A
parallel reference would be 1 Chronicles 5:26.
Another parallel reference is Psalm 78:8 and 22, those are two other
references. And now a fourth one, if
you’ll turn to James 2:26. Keep in mind
the question, does the non-Christian man have a human spirit. “For as the body without the spirit is dead,
so faith without works is dead also.”
And obviously if the unsaved man doesn’t have a spirit, James 2:26 would
argue that he should be dead physically, because it’s the human spirit that
keeps the body alive.
So we say then
that the unsaved man, the non-Christian does have a human spirit; he does have one. That leads to the second question and that is
why is regeneration of the human spirit necessary? Why is regeneration of the human spirit
necessary? Why is there something that has
to happen to you personally before you can become a believer? Before you can be a child of God there must
be something changed in your human spirit.
Now this is where we’re face to face with grace because there’s nothing
on the face of this earth that you can do to change your human spirit in the
way it needs to be changed. You can come
to church every Sunday at 11:00, or at least every Sunday when you can’t think
of anything else to do at 11:00 o’clock, you can go through all sorts of
religious routines, and go on, but you cannot come up with something that will
change your human spirit. This is a
problem, the bugaboo of all the world’s religions; they have never come up with
something that would change the human spirit into that which is needed.
And so therefore
this change that is needed is called a recreation. Notice, the origin of the human spirit first
at physical birth but there’s a second origin for the believer of a regenerated
spirit at new birth. Now why is
regeneration necessary? Turn to 1
Corinthians 2:14, here is why you must have a regenerated human spirit before
you can do anything in Christianity. And
you might measure yourself as you look at 1 Corinthians 2:14, some have been
raised in a Christian environment and never given the question serious thought,
who have more or less looked upon Christianity as mere tradition, as a custom
inherited from your parents that’s somehow good, meet plenty of businessmen at
11:00 o’clock, good contacts and so forth.
1 Corinthians 2:14
says that there is such a thing as the natural man. Now the natural man is called the soulish
man; that means his soul predominates over his human spirit. His human spirit is not in the fore, though
he has one it is not in the foreground, it is not active, it is not really
aggressive. And the characteristic of
this soulish person, and this would include many people who come to church,
many people who think they’re Christian, “But the natural man receives not the
things of the Spirit of God,” the word “receive” is dechomai in the original language and this means welcome, it
doesn’t mean that the unsaved man can’t understand, he can understand, he can
learn the doctrine, and he can repeat it back to you on an exam, but the
difference is that the unsaved, non-Christian does not welcome the things of
the Spirit of God, they are not a force of
joy and stimulation to him; they’re just another idea, another
interesting thing to pick up and put down some place or avoid. But the difference between the soulish man
and the spiritual man is that the spiritual man doesn’t do this, he welcomes
the things of God. That’s what that
means.
And verse 14 says
the reason why the non-Christian, who may be very religious and appear to be a
Christian on the surface, the reason he doesn’t welcome the “things of the
Spirit of God” is that “they are foolishness unto him;” he couldn’t think of
anything more stupid than the things that he hears in the Word of God. In other words, as far as he’s concerned it’s
just take it or leave it, I don’t care one way or the other. Now if you have that attitude I’m afraid you
come very startlingly close to the condition described in verse 14. Are the things that you hear taught
foolishness to you? Are they put in a
little mental category of your mind where you can take it or leave it, fine, no
problem, interesting, maybe not. If that
is, they’re foolishness to you; you might do well to examine yourself to see
whether you are really regenerated.
“…for they are
foolishness unto him, neither can he know them, because they are spiritually
discerned.” Now the word “know” doesn’t
mean he can’t know them intellectually; the word “know” here is ginosko, and it means to enter into a
personal relationship or as we will see next Sunday, make the truth touch your
conscience. In other words, until these
doctrines touch your conscience and your conscience identifies them to your
heart as the truth, all you have is circulating a lot of stuff in your mind;
it’s just circulating round and round and round and not going anywhere. But if that breaks from your mind and goes
over to the conscience and the conscience connects and plugs in and says it’s
the truth, now you’re doing something, now you really know it, ginosko.
So we have here
two conditions of the non-Christian man, that he does not welcome the things of
the spirit of God, and he never gets plugged in to them. I’ve seen this many times; we see it happen
often and that is that people may come to church all their life, and it’s not
until some major crisis comes into their life until they get stripped of their
business, stripped of their health, stripped of something, their marriage, or
something happens, some pressure that is just enough to break the idol that
they have been trusting in and when the idol that they have been trusting in is
smashed by this crisis experience, then they start looking around and all of a
sudden then they believe.
Now it’s too bad
so many of us have such hard heads that God has to slam them on concrete before
the truth connects with the conscience.
He has to kind of ram the truth over to the conscience, but He will do
that and I’ve seen people who may have become Christians at a very young age
and have done nothing about it and as we will see next week they have done
serious damage to their conscience, in fact.
And as a result of this they’ve gone on through life and they need a
crisis experience to bring them around.
And finally they get with it. And
you will see a change and the change is described here in verse 14; the change
you will observe in their behavior pattern is all of a sudden from the mundane
to the spectacular, all of a sudden they can’t get enough of the Word of God;
all of a sudden there is an observable change of behavior in their life and it
can be watched by an outside observer, that all of a sudden the Word of God
becomes the most critical thing in
their life. Maybe it’s several months to
a year, at first it seems like… it’s like a newborn baby, they can’t get enough
of it, always taking in the Word, over and over and over and over.
Then later on they
continue to take in the Word of God but it becomes a more subtle pattern. But for a while it appears extravagant; this
is why so many parents can’t understand their college students. The parents never gave them a spiritual
upbringing, never shared Christ with them and they come to the campus, they
became Christians and all of a sudden, for about a year or so they just throw
everything to the wind and it’s the Bible, the Bible, the Bible, the Bible,
over and over and over and over and over and over and over. What is this?
It’s the phenomenon of verse 14 in reverse, welcoming the things of the
spirit of God, knowing the things of the Spirit of God and this goes on and on
and on and on and the parents take this for religious fanaticism. Now there’s a danger, it can be fanaticism but
what they’re observing isn’t fanaticism, what they’re observing is just a new
person and suddenly he either has gotten back with it or he has been
regenerated and experiences the tremendous inner change. And just like a new baby, just takes it
in. So this is regeneration and why it’s
necessary. It’s necessary to produce the
change from verse 14; that is why regeneration is necessary.
Now we have the
question, what is regeneration; turn back to Jeremiah 31:31. Here in the Old
Testament the great prophets of the nation bemoaned the fact that the citizens
of the nation were not regenerate; a large majority were not regenerate in the
Old Testament, only individuals here and there were regenerated. And so here Jeremiah is predicting the time
when all Israel will be regenerated, 100% regeneration and he clearly says
it. You look at Jeremiah 31:31 and think
of the social national implications of a massive regeneration by the citizens. Don’t think just in terms of individuals here
and there being regenerated. Think of
what would happen if you had a sudden mass, 100% regeneration at all levels of
society. This is what the prophet looks
forward to.
So in Jeremiah
31:31 he says, “Behold, the days come, saith the LORD that I will make a new
covenant with the house of Israel, and with the house of Judah,” that’s a new
treaty. [32] “Not according to the
covenant that I made with their fathers in the day that I took them by the hand
to bring them out of the land of Egypt, which, my covenant, they broke, although
I was an husband to them, saith the LORD;” what He’s saying there is that He
made a law with Israel, He gave them a law and order in their society but
because the individuals were not personally regenerated all the time you had
inner rebellion against the law and order.
What caused the inner rebellion was the fact that the people personally
were not submitting to the Lord in their own life and therefore not submitting
to Him in their social life. So in verse
33 Jeremiah says “this shall be the covenant that I will make with the house of
Israel: After those days, saith the LORD, I,” and notice this, this is
regeneration, “I will put my law in their inward parts,” now that’s not
mysticism, what it is saying is that He will take the law, it’s the same law,
it’s the Word of God but instead of hearing it through the physical ear and
just stopping with a few nerve cells, what’s going to happen God says is
they’re going to still hear it, the physical hear, they’re still going to hear
the same propositions but what is going to happen is those propositions will
come into the brain, go to the mind, through the central nervous, they will
come through the central nervous system cross over and connect with
conscience. And that’s what he says, “I
will put my truth in their inward parts, I will write it in their hearts, and
will be their God, and they shall be My people.”
Turn to Ezekiel
36:25, this gives some interesting content about regeneration and what it does
to you. May I suggest to you that you
can pay $25 an hour to your friendly psychiatrist and he can’t do one thing to
regenerate you. God gives you a total
regeneration and He doesn’t charge any fees, all grace, all free. No man, I don’t care who he is, minister,
clergyman, pastor, psychiatrist, psychologist, anybody else can’t do this for
you. This is a miracle that is worked in
the human heart by God’s Spirit, all grace, no charge.
Ezekiel 36:25,
“Then,” speaking of the same thing Jeremiah was, I want you to notice the
components of regeneration, “Then I will sprinkle clean water upon you, and you
will be clean; from all your filthiness, and from all your idols, will I
cleanse you. Now notice at least in
verse 25 the motif is water and cleaning.
Now why? Next week we’re going to
find out why; when that little thing there, the conscience, is defiled it just
so happens that God has built you with little inner defense mechanisms in your
mind and when your conscience is defiled we have a feedback mechanism that
works in your soul so that it excludes from your field of perception the
truth. It’s the old story, you see what
you want to see, and when your conscience is saved you can actually stare the
truth in the face and not see it. The
reason is that your conscience has… you have rejected your conscience and you
have certain inner defense mechanisms that start to work in your mind, reject,
reject, reject, reject, reject, suppress, suppress, suppress, suppress,
suppress, and these thing start going on and you can literally physically stare
the truth in the face and not see it.
You know how we know? Because
people sit and look at the person of Jesus Christ and reject Him. You say how can they do that? They had the empirical evidence staring them
in the face, they talked with God eyeball to eyeball and rejected. And even turned around and claimed, why, we
never knew He was God. Now how could
they do that unless there are defense mechanisms that God set up in your mind
to allow you to harden your heart? We’re
going to study those next week with the conscience. By the way, we’ll see that that is the source
of 95.8% of all mental problems.
So this is what
has to happen first, verse 25, the conscience has to be clean and that clean
cannot come by any other means than by God’s Spirit. This has been seen very graphically in recent
memory experiments where it appears that memory is not just stored in the
brain; memory is stored throughout the whole body and various experiments have
been done to show this. So therefore if
memory is stored throughout the whole body it essentially is erasable. Now here’s the interesting proposition. If that’s the case, how do you suppose God
ever erases the memory to you of your rebellion against Him, the agony of
rebelling against Him if memory is erasable?
We don’t know how God does this but selectively, carefully, like a
surgeon’s scalpel the Holy Spirit goes in to wherever the memory is stored and
cuts out the guilt and so on that’s associated with rebellion. We don’t know how it is, it’s a miracle that
happens and there’s no human mechanism, no pills you can take, nothing else
that you can take to do this; only the Holy Spirit with a fine scalpel goes in
to wherever the memory is stored and cuts that little part out that cause that
when we are forgiven. And that is the
cleansing of the water described in verse 25.
The second thing
about regeneration is in verse 26; not only is there the motif of water and
cleansing but in verse 26 there is, “A new heart will I give you, a new
spirit,” the word “heart” means the mentality, a way of thinking, “a new
mentality will I give you,” a new attitude, “a new Spirit will I put within
you, and I will take away the stony
heart out of your flesh, and I will give you a heart of flesh.” What God is saying, the second component is
the spirit, the water and the spirit.
The water is the cleansing and the spirit is that which is given, here
the Holy Spirit comes to indwell and it increases the power of the human spirit
to perceive and do.
So we have, then,
God working and this is why the third thing of regeneration, verse 27, “And I
will put My Spirit within you, and cause you to walk in My statutes,” now later
on we’re going to see why that’s necessary because you have something over here
in the body called flesh and the flesh always rebels against the Word of
God. And so even though if God just
regenerated you, you’d still have a problem because this power of the human
spirit is not sufficient to cope with the flesh, and in order to cope with the
flesh God has put the Holy Spirit in there to deal with the problem, so that
you will have enough power to overcome the flesh. So this is why, when we come to the New
Testament, John 3, this is what Jesus is speaking of when He talks to Nicodemus.
Turn to John 3,
Jesus doesn’t go into the details because He presupposes that Nicodemus, being
a Pharisee, knows his Old Testament. Too
bad that more people that read John 3 don’t know their Old Testament. In John 3:3-5 notice Jesus says, “Verily,
verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born again he cannot see the kingdom
of God. [4] Nicodemus said unto Him, How
can a man be born when he is old? Can he
enter the second time into his mother’s womb, and be born? [5] Jesus said, Verily, verily, I say unto
thee, Except a man be born of water and of the Spirit, he cannot enter into the
kingdom of God.” Now why is Jesus saying
that? Where else have you just heard the
theme water and spirit? Ezekiel 36. And so John 3 is just Jesus’ interpretation
of Ezekiel 36 applied to Nicodemus. He said
Nicodemus, haven’t you understood Ezekiel 36, haven’t you understood that your
conscience has to be cleansed, your human spirit has to be empowered or else
you can’t even see the kingdom of God, no way.
You can see the outward form, you can observe other Christians, but you
can’t really understand into what they have, that precious thing they have you
don’t have, you feel like an outsider looking in because you have never shared
that precious thing on the inside. And
that precious thing on the inside is regeneration; it’s when the person has
come face to face with Jesus Christ. Now
that’s what it says among all who are born again.
Turn to another
passage and you’ll see what regeneration is doing here, just so we’re sure at
what happens at regeneration. You can
understand now why as a counselor one of the first things I have to do with
someone with a problem is determine whether they’re regenerated or not; can you
understand why now? It makes a world of difference how you’re going to solve
the problem. If a person isn’t
regenerated they haven’t got anything on the inside to give them a solution to
the problem so you have to handle it in a totally different way than you can if
the person is regenerated. It makes a
total difference, yet what psychologist have you gone to recently that makes a
difference between the regenerated person and the non-regenerate person.
Romans 7:22-23,
here’s the cry of regeneration without the ministry of the Holy Spirit. In Romans 7:22 Paul describes the fact that
yes, I’m regenerated, I have power for service in my human spirit, that comes
over to my mind and I can discern and welcome the things of God. So in verse 22, “For I delight in the law of
God after the inward man.” See, there’s the inner delight, the attraction. [23] “But” Paul says, “I see another
mechanism,” the word “law” here, nomos,
means mechanism, “I see another mechanism in my members, warring against the
mechanism of my mind, and bringing me into captivity to the mechanism of sin
which is in my members,” that is, in my body.
So Paul experiences regeneration, he experiences the inner desire to do
God’s will. That’s the sign of
regeneration; but he experiences constant frustration in actually accomplishing
God’s will in his life. And he say every
time I want to do God’s will I’m defeated; I want to, but then I’m
defeated.
So he gives us the
answer in Romans 8:11, “But if the Spirit of him,” now that’s not his human
spirit, that’s the Holy Spirit, “if the Holy Spirit of Him that raised up Jesus
from the dead dwell in you, He that raised up Christ from the dead shall also
enliven [give life to]” or “quicken your mortal bodies by His spirit that
dwells in you.” And then in verse 13,
“For if you live after the flesh, ye shall die; but if you, through the Spirit,
mortify the practices” behavior patterns “of the body, ye shall live.” The word “deeds” is the word which we can
translate learned behavior patterns. And
what he is saying is if you allow the Holy Spirit to empower your human spirit
you can erase those learned behavior patterns that are so gross, that are so
defeating, that are so overwhelming and that’s the promise right here. The condition of the promise, however, is
that the Holy Spirit is a gentleman and He doesn’t.…
[Tape turns] … is
opposing the Holy Spirit from doing that in your life. Under the conditions of indwelling you,
you’re the only one, not the Holy Spirit, it’s always you, always me, always
us, we are the ones who are stopping the Holy Spirit. And you can sit there and pray O God, O God,
why don’t you do something. Well, God wants to do something and He’s saying O
man, O man, why don’t you let Me do something.
And if you’ll learn to think that way when you start bellyaching to God
about what He is and isn’t doing in your life, just think of the fact that He’s
probably saying the same thing about you—when is this clod going to learn that
I can do it. This goofball, this idiot
that thinks that he or she can handle her life and doesn’t need me, what does
she think I was in here for, what does she think I came to indwell her for,
that I like to walk around. I’m
omnipresent, I don’t need her body or his body, I don’t need you the Holy
Spirit is saying; why do you think I’ve come to indwell you if it isn’t to do
this changed work in your life. See,
indwelling Holy Spirit.
So we have then
regeneration as two things basically. In
the key sense it’s this cleansing of the conscience that once again allows the
human spirit to function. But in another
sense the regeneration leads to something else called indwelling when the Holy
Spirit comes to indwell our human spirit.
Now we have one
final question today, the third question.
When does regeneration occur?
Some of you have probably been asking; maybe some of you are here this
morning and suddenly discovered for the first time, maybe you’re not
regenerated and so you’re asking yourself, when does regeneration occur. John 1:12, this tells us when regeneration
occurs in the human. Remember the
origin, the origin of the human spirit is at the point of birth; origin of the
body at the point of conception; origin of the regenerated human spirit, new
birth, but when does the new birth occur.
John 1:12 tells us, “As many as received Him, to them gave he authority
to become the sons of God, even to them that believe on His name. [13] Who were born, not of blood, nor of the
will of the flesh,” that is religious exercises, “nor of the will of man,”
going through some gimmick program, “but born of God.”
Now what happens
here when you’re born; obviously you have a human spirit indwell a body. What happens at the point of regeneration;
same thing, the Holy Spirit comes to indwell and your human spirit is now
raised up to a potential power where it can handle the problem with the Holy
Spirit’s help. Verse 12 tells you that
the presupposition or precondition of regeneration is those who receive Christ
and in apposition with the phrase “receive Christ” is the phrase “that believe
on His name.” Now the Greek has an
interesting construction. The Greeks had two ways of using the word pisteuo or believe. One way is to use this verb, p-i-s-t-e-u-o,
is to use pisteuo and say I believe
something, just the way normally you use it, I use it in the English
language. But the Greeks had a special
construction that’s used here, and in fact throughout most of the New
Testament, and that is they just didn’t say I believe, but they took pisteuo and they added a preposition
into after it, eis for those of you
studying Greek; pisteuo eis, and when
you see that construction it means that I believe into something. You see the motion is not a passivity of
well, I just stand by, I believe that, that sounds good, believe it, but rather
to convey the sense of motion toward they added the preposition into. Now that’s what’s used here in verse 12,
“become the sons of God to them that believe into His name.” There’s a commitment to the authority and
person of Jesus Christ above all. That
is the condition for regeneration. All
right, so regeneration occurs when the person believes in Jesus Christ.
Now we come to a
problem that some of you have been plagued with and that is the problem of
infant baptism. What do you do about…
and many church bodies throughout centuries have dealt with this problem of
infant baptism and they believe that the infant is regenerated. Now you can dismiss this from your mind but
just to show you that there is a problem, turn to Luke 1, we’ll give you two
references and cite two others so we’ll have a total of four references on this
problem. In Luke 1:15 we have this
phrase about John the Baptist, remember we’re talking about when does
regeneration occur and look what it says in Luke 1:15, “For he shall be great
in the sight of the Lord, and shall drink neither wine nor strong drink; and he
shall be filled with the Holy Spirit, out from his mother’s womb.” Now, how can John the Baptist, as a little
infant, who can’t even believe, be filled with the Holy Spirit our from his
mother’s womb? Does this teach infant
regeneration?
Turn to Luke 18:15,
the famous time when they bring children to Jesus, “And they brought unto Him
also infants,” and the word here in the Greek is brephos, it means just born, little babies, these are not just
toddlers, these are little infants, brephos,
“they brought unto Him infants that He would touch them; but when His disciples
saw it, they rebuked Him.” Why waste
time on babies. [16] “But Jesus called
them unto Him, and He said, Allow little children to come unto me, and forbid
them not; for of such is the kingdom of God.”
“…of such is the kingdom of God.”
Therefore people
who have argued for infant regeneration use this plus two other passages which
I’ll list and not turn to, Acts 2:39 and 1 Corinthians 7:14. They would argue that believers, the person
who is a Christian can be regenerated at infancy and then as he grows up he
becomes aware of it; infant regeneration, that’s why they’re baptized.
What are we to do
with this? Here is the solution, I
believe, to this problem, that respects the observations of Luke 1:15 and
18:15 but does not conflict with the obvious fact you can’t become regenerated
until after you believe. So therefore
how can we resolve these two seemingly contradictory lines of evidence in
Scripture? Let’s take the new baby; he
is born, he has first in his mother’s womb he has the body; at the time that
baby is delivered he takes his first breath, he has a spirit, but this spirit
is not fully functioning in the newborn infant.
That human spirit actually has to grow and so in the first year of the
child we have basically the baby developing his human spirit, it’s there, and
its developing, and usually in the first year it’s developed along the lines,
first of all, the infant needs orderly environment the first year, that is that
he needs to have the sense that the environment outside of himself does have
order to it. So the first year is
critical in a baby’s growth because that’s when he’s developing the concept of
trust, that he can trust something outside of himself. And believe me, psychological problems have
been traced back to lousy parents actions in this period, when the infant has
never got the word “trust” right because there was never a smooth orderly
external environment around him during this developmental period.
So his human
spirit is developing in this period of time.
The second year to the fourth year is real critical because from ages
2-4 is when the child is learning to speak.
Now what did we say it was that marked the presence of the spirit
anyway? Wasn’t it speaking, wasn’t it
the use of language? And so apparently
then from ages 2-4 is when the infant develops his human spirit to the point
where his conscience now functions. I do
not believe language is possible in an articulate way without conscience. And when conscience goes into action,
whenever your child learns to speak and learns nouns first of all for objects,
and then he starts to discuss and starts to put his sentences together and
conveys to you his thoughts about the external world by using nouns and he
learns a few verbs to connect with them, that is when his human spirit now
begins to activate and his conscience is now coming into work. That is the time when his conscience is
growing and coming into activation. At
that point, whether it be 3, 4, 5, whenever, during that time period when the
child’s conscience starts to activate we have the critical point of
God-consciousness.
Let’s draw a
graph; here’s the graph of spiritual strength; from zero upward; let the
ordinate be the graph of spiritual strength of the child. Let’s make a little mark here and let’s label
that mark God-consciousness because that will be the time when God is going to
hold him responsible for a decision. And
so we’ll make that as a mark; now let’s make chronological age, 0, 1, 2, 3, 4,
5, 6, now the child is growing spiritually and as he grows what is happening to
his human spirit? It’s growing and
growing and growing and growing until finally bang, it hits the point where the
conscience becomes fully active. Now
exactly when this point is reached I don’t know; I suspect on the basis of
Scripture it is tied to that child’s ability to think and use language. I think this is one of the external proofs
that the conscience is beginning to function.
And when the child is beginning to exercise language and can learn
meaning and comes across this so he knows what is right and wrong, then this
point is reached.
Now at that point
he is held responsible for either seeking the truth or rejecting the
truth. Before this point the child is
not held responsible and therefore up until that point the child is not under a
direct judgment of God as an individual; as part of the human race yes, but as
an individual no. So it is possible,
then, for John the Baptist to be filled with the Spirit from here, from the
time that he was delivered and took his first breath it was possible for John
the Baptist to be filled. Why? Because even though his human spirit wasn’t
functioning in some special way, God gave him the filling of the Spirit and
allowed the filling of the Spirit to work in his life in this period because
John had not yet gone on negative volition toward God, it wasn’t an issue with
him. And so God could fill John with the
Spirit and not have that Spirit grieved by John turning against him. After age four and a half or five, say age
five, John the Baptist one day, or maybe over a process of time became aware of
God. What Luke 1:15 is saying is that at
that point immediately John believed and there was continuity of
development.
So again, if we
draw a smaller graph and take the child, say from 0 to 20; 5, 10, 15 20, and
here’s God-consciousness. Here’s John
the Baptist; John the Baptist’s human spirit grew and grew and grew and here
when it reached God-consciousness he immediately believed and so therefore he
kept on growing. So with John’s life
there was no discontinuity of growth because as his human spirit matured and he
reached the point of exercising the conscience he just automatically believed
and went on.
Now I suggest,
therefore, that Luke 1:15, far from being an argument for infant regeneration,
is a model for the Christian family. I
suggest that Luke 1:15 is giving us the idea; the ideal is that the child
become a Christian as soon as he can, as soon as his human spirit is operating
and functioning and that he can believe.
True, it’s not a profound philosophic decision, but for reasons I’ll go
into when I deal with the flesh there are reasons for holding to this view on
child raising because if he doesn’t come here watch what happens: his human
spirit grows, it grows, it grows, it becomes God-conscious, he at the point of
God-conscious rejects, and now his spirit stays status quo until such time in
his life when he believes and then it will start up again. But it’ll just stunt, it’ll just reach a
maximum period and his human spirit can never grow beyond that. And until his human spirit grows beyond that
he won’t be able to handle sin in his life.
And if he can’t handle sin in his life he begins to get a block to the
growth of the spirit in –R learned behavior patterns that he’s beginning to
pick up from this point forward. And so
he begins to develop a crust so that when he does become a Christian he’s got
to crack through those –R learned behavior patterns.
So there, then, is
a physicist of these two things, it is non contradictory, it fits Luke 1:15 and
if you’ll turn to Luke 1:80, this is John over this time period, growing up to
God-consciousness and continuing to go throw it, “The child grew, and became
strong in spirit, and was in the deserts till the day of his showing unto
Israel.” So we have John the Baptist as
one idea; now he was not the sinless savior, John had a sin nature like
everyone else, and so this is the ideal.
Now in Luke 2:40
we have Jesus as an infant. Notice this
same language, remember this Gospel is written by a doctor and that’s why Luke
is very, very critical to use as a reference for these problems. “And the child grew, and became strong in
spirit, filled with wisdom, and the grace of God was upon Him.” And then at the end of Luke 2:52, “And Jesus
increased in wisdom and stature, and in favor with God and man.” We’ll point out next week that “favor with
God and man” is another idiom for conscience.
So we have, then,
John the Baptist growing this way. And
so everybody’s life can be diagramed; your life can be diagramed. You can be a person who can have all sorts
of… we have various combinations, if we had all the facts, which we don’t, your
life could be plotted on a diagram. As a child you came to God-consciousness;
some of you believed because there was enough doctrine in your home, at least
enough so you believed. And so you
believed, you started growing and then you went on negative volition sometime,
say during your early grammar school years, and then you started down
spiritually, and you became kind of a spiritual ignoramus until somebody talked
to you again about Christ on the campus and bang, then you started going up
again and have been growing ever since, and that would be your life in the
sense that you had a time period. But if
you had started back here and grown you would be way ahead of the game; you
lost time in here because you were on negative volition, you were deprived of Bible
doctrine or something and you lost many, many years of your life; it’s nothing
to weep about now, it’s water over the dam but you can make up time by a crash
program of growth.
Some of you grew
up in your homes and you became God-conscious and then you rejected and maybe
your parents couldn’t present the gospel to you or you had so me secondary
means, the primary means would still be the sovereignty of God, but you had
some proximate cause why you didn’t believe so you just kind of fiddle-faddled around
for the rest of your life and then maybe a year ago you suddenly woke up to the
fact that you aren’t anything, all these idols of degrees, all I have to do is
get a degree, be educated, maybe that’s your idol, or all I have to do is make
so many thousand a year and that’s your idols, money, degree or whatever it is,
sex or something is your idol, and you suddenly see your idols kind of wear
thin. If you’re worshiping the dollar
I’ve got news for you, it’s going down, that idol is already shot so let me
save you trouble, pick another idol. So then you can pick on something else and
finally you decide maybe your idol is not working out too well and you look
around and you see there’s no other one left except Jesus Christ, so maybe very
begrudgingly by a process of elimination you come up with Him, so you become a
believer and then you start to grow.
This is how it
happens and regeneration is the time when you respond at the level of
God-consciousness and go one of two ways, and this has to be the point where
you hear the gospel, in the Old Testament it was what you heard of the gospel,
the gospel was always available to all men everywhere, doctrine of heathenism,
Romans 1, but the issue still is that regeneration is this inner change in the
human spirit. So once again we conclude
in this series on the human spirit by taking another look at the human
spirit.
Here it is, and
you might look at your own heart and examine this, where you human spirit is,
your conscience which is the center of God-consciousness in your life, the
awareness of an absolute standard of truth by which you will personally be
judged. Is this operating in you life or
have you psyched it out; have you glossed over your conscience, have you covered
up your conscience with all sorts of trash and so you have immobilized it. What is the state of your conscience? Are you regenerated, and if you are
regenerated are you feeding yourself.
Remember the human spirit has certain needs and these needs are like the
body, nutrition, exercise and elimination, elimination of all guilt, the
cleansing of the blood of Christ, you have to be washed and that is only done
by the power of the Holy Spirit. You
need nutrition and that’s from the Word of God.
What are you giving your human spirit; Jesus said “Man does not live by
bread alone but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God,” what’s
He talking about. He lives by bread, sure he does, but what are you feeding
your human spirit? Tidbits picked up
five minutes on Sunday morning or are you on a conscientious program of
personal study of the Word. Do you have
the attitude of welcoming the things of God or are they just foolishness to
you? Are you one of these people that
hasn’t got any time for anything else during the week, you haven’t especially
got time for the Word, it’s always something else that takes the place, you got
too busy watching TV. These are more
important to you than feeding your human spirit and the only thing that can
feed your human spirit is the Word of God, period, nothing else.
With our heads
bowed…