Part 2 What Is the New Birth?
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If the description which we have thus given of the nature of the new birth be true--and scripturally true we verily and solemnly believe it to be--no lengthened argument will be needed to establish the proposition that it is a DIVINE and SUPERNATURAL work. Holy ancestry does not insure it, pious parentage does not convey it, human eloquence does not inspire it, moral persuasion does not produce it. As high as the heavens are above the earth, so high is the accomplishment of this work above created power. How clear does the Holy Spirit put this--"As many as received him, to them gave he power to become the sons of God, even to those who believe in his name. Who were born not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God," (John 1:12, 13.) "That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the spirit is spirit." "Born again"--marg., "born fromabove."
But we wish in this necessarily brief statement to concentrate the reader's attention upon a single truth--the divine agency of the Holy Spirit in the accomplishment of the new birth. One passage from God's Word will suffice to establish this point--"IT IS THE SPIRIT THAT QUICKENS, THE FLESH PROFITS NOTHING." Clearly and indisputably, then, to be born again is, to be "born of the Spirit." Now, HOW does He produce this great change? By what steps does He conduct the soul to this divine and heavenly birth?
There is first, the Holy Spirit's work in the convincing of sin.He uplifts the veil that enshrouds the heart, and shows its plague and sin and defilement. He makes the sinner to know himself--the first step in real conversion. He breaks up the fountain of feeling, produces godly sorrow, inspires holy contrition, awakens true and saving repentance. It was by His power that Job exclaimed, "I abhor myself, and repent in dust and ashes." It was by His power that David cried out, "Against you and you only have I sinned, and done this evil in your sight." It was by His power that the tax-collector prayed, "God be merciful to me a sinner." Has He wrought this repentance for sin, beloved, in you? Uplifting the veil, has He given you an insight into the chamber of imagery within your breast; in other words, has He so uncovered and revealed and dissected your heart to your own eye as to force from you the exclamation, "I am vile! I am undone! Lord, save me, or I perish!" O blessed discovery! O glorious revelation! O life-breathing cry! You are born again! Flesh and blood did not reveal this to you. Unregenerate nature never sent to heaven such an appeal. Spiritual death never breathed to Jesus such a living cry. It is the Spirit who has shown you your blackness, your vileness, your ignorance, your death, and having thus begun the good work in you, He will conduct you from grace to grace, and from glory to glory.
The next step of the Holy Spirit is to lead the soul to Christ.He deals not cruelly with the poor sinner--revealing the plague, and not the remedy; wounding, and withholding the balm; showing the sinner himself, and veiling Christ from the eye. Having wroughtrepentance towards God, His next step in the process is to work in the heart faith in the Lord Jesus Christ. Making the soul to feel the sickness of sin, He leads it to the balm that is in Gilead, and to the Physician who is there. He takes of the precious things of a precious Christ, and shows them to the soul. He leads to the atoning blood, and applies it. He takes the robe of righteousness, and imputes it. He conducts the trembling soul to Jesus, and unveiling His love, and grace, and merits, brings it to a believing recumbence upon Christ; resting, not only in the blood and righteousness of Jesus, but resting in Jesus Himself.
And what a life-giving, hope-inspiring discovery is JESUS! Penitent, heart-broken, humble sinner, Jesus is just the Savior you need, just the Friend you seek. You have come to the end of your own righteousness, and strength, and striving--you have besought in vain every physician, and have tried every remedy with no avail, and now you have lain you down to die--helpless, hopeless, despairing! Behold the Lamb of God, wounded, bleeding, slain for you! He took your sins, endured your curse, bore your condemnation, paid your debt, and now invites you to the cleansing of His blood, to the investiture of His righteousness, to the pavilion of His love, to the free acceptance of all the precious things of His grace. "Look unto me, and be saved, all the ends of the earth; for I am God, and none else." "Come unto me and I will give you rest." Doubt not either His ability or His willingness to accept and save you to the uttermost extent of your sinful, unworthy, and hopeless condition.
But we must advert to the INSTRUMENTwhich God has ordained in accomplishing in the soul the new birth. The Spirit of God being the Divine and efficient Agent, the Word of God is the Divine and passive instrument of regeneration. A few quotations from this Divinely-inspired Word will establish this. "Being BORN AGAIN, not of corruptible seed, but of incorruptible, BY THE WORD OF GOD, which lives and abides forever," (1 Peter 1:23.) "Of His own will He BEGAT us WITH THE WORD OF TRUTH," (James 1:18.) The apostle gloried in the gospel of Christ, because it was "the power of God unto salvation." The psalmist testified to this truth--"The law of the Lord is perfect, CONVERTING the soul." But the testimony of the Lord Himself sets the question at rest--"The WORDS THAT I SPEAK UNTO YOU, they are spirit and they are life."
Thus then, the revealed word of God is, in the hands of the Holy Spirit, the appointed and Divine instrument of our being born again. As God never works apart from instrumentality, when instruments are made ready for His use, so the Holy Spirit never accomplishes this great and marvelous change in the soul apart from the truth of God. In His hands the gospel is a rod that works the miracle, a sword that pierces the soul, a fire that burns the dross, a hammer that breaks the rock, a light that dispels the darkness, a balsam that heals the wound, a seed that germinates, a voice that awakes the dead. And all this it does because it is the Word of the living God.
Shall we impugn its Divine authority--tracing thus its miraculous and marvelous effects? There are those who dare to do so! But, we ask the bold skeptic, can that be other than a mirror of Divine construction which, faithfully upheld to the soul, brings to view every thought and feeling, purpose and aim, deep-veiled within its secret cloisters? Would the God of truth invest a lie with the mission and power which clothes the gospel of His grace? Would He from whom comes down every good and perfect gift bless a fiction, a falsehood, a myth, as He has blest the gospel in the conversion of countless myriads of souls, of all nations, and tongues, and peoples, who, in the great day of His coming, shall crowd the throne of Christ the Lamb, all attesting its divinity, and witnessing to its effects?
What has wrought such moral revolutions in the world, achieved such spiritual changes, conferred such intellectual freedom, battered down such strongholds of error, as the Gospel of God? If the devotee of superstition has been converted by it, the slave of sin disenthralled by it, the captive of Satan delivered by it, the soul raised from death by it--if it has made the spiritual blind to see, the lame to walk, the deaf to hear, has tamed the lion, transformed the wolf into the lamb, and the vulture into the dove--if it soothes the deepest anguish of the heart, calms the fiercest tempest of the soul, sweetens the bitterest calamity of life, and in life's last hour unfurls the banner of victory over death, and sheds upon the Christian's tomb the radiance of a glorious immortality--then, achieving such marvels, attended by such signs and attested by such evidences, we accept the Gospel as of God, believe in its Divine authority, bow to its ultimate decisions, and stake our eternal all upon its doctrines, promises, and hopes. "Though we or an angel from heaven preach any other gospel unto you than that which we have preached unto you, let him be accursed."
"Should all the forms that men devise,
Assault my faith with treacherous art,
I'd call them vanity and lies,
And bind the gospel to my heart."
What mighty power, then, has the Word of God in the hands of the Spirit! What heavenly dew distills from its promises; what spiritual life breathes from its doctrines; what sanctifying power flows from its precepts; what a heaven of glory is unveiled in its hopes! "One word of the gospel, a single sentence, has erected a heavenly trophy in a soul, which all the volumes of the choicest mere reason could never erect. One plain scripture has turned a face to heaven that never looked that way before, and has made a man fix his eye there against his carnal interest. One plain scripture has killed a man's sins, and quickened his heart into eternal life. One word of Christ remembered by Peter made him weep bitterly; and two or three scriptures pressed by the same Peter upon his hearers pierced their hearts to the quick. How has hell flashed in the face of the sinner out of the small cloud of a threatening, and heaven shot into the soul from one little diamond-spark of a promise. A little seed of the word, like a grain of mustard-seed, changed the soul from a dwarfish to a tall stature." (Charnock.)
This, and this only, is the preaching which will beget souls again, people the world with new creations, and erect, from the ruins of the fall, living temples of the Holy Spirit. Before it the wisdom of man dwindles into foolishness, and the power of man dissolves into weakness, and the glory of man pales into insignificance. To supplement it with human teaching is to blunt the edge of the sword, and to veil the luster of the diamond, and to render the Word of God of no effect. God has made His Word the tabernacle for the Sun of Righteousness to move in, and he who preaches it not fully and faithfully, without reserve and without deceit, throws the pall of hell's darkness around that divine Orb, and leaves the endangered and deathless soul to plunge, unillumined by one ray, into the darkness that is outer and eternal.
We reiterate the important truth that, the Word of God--than which the Church on earth possesses not a treasure so divine, costly, and precious--is the instrument employed by the Spirit in commencing, carrying on, and completing that work of grace on earth which is the soul's preparation for the enjoyment of glory in heaven.
For one moment we venture to detain the reader with a glance at some of the OPERATIONS of the truth of God in the soul. As God's word of wisdom, it makes wise unto salvation. As the word of life, it quickens. As a divine word, it converts the soul. As the truth which is after godliness, it sanctifies. As a nourishing word, it promotes growth in grace. As a word of consolation, it comforts. As a storehouse of supply, it thoroughly furnishes us unto all good works. As the divine light, it is our guide. As a spiritual sword, it is a mighty weapon in the hands of the Spirit. And when the books are opened, it will judge us at the last day. Such is the word of God, which lives and abides forever.
Our Lord, in announcing the momentous doctrine of the new birth to the inquiring ruler, emphatically and solemnly insisted upon its necessity. "Marvel not that I said unto you, You MUST be born again." Were this great spiritual change a matter of no moment in its relation to our future; were it placed upon the same footing in the Bible with baptism, or the Lord's Supper--institutions, the observance of which is not essential to salvation--we could afford to view it with comparative indifference. But, seeing that it is an indispensable condition of salvation, and seeing that without it we cannot enter into the kingdom of grace on earth, and must be forever exiled from the kingdom of glory in heaven, it is a change, the absolute necessity of which we must press with all the arguments which the Scriptures supply, and with all the solemnity which eternity inspires.
What are some of the grounds of the ABSOLUTE NECESSITY of the new birth? Briefly these. It is necessary, in order to fulfill the eternal purpose of God with regard to His people. All His saints are born again. In the mystery of the Spirit's operations--viewless, noiseless as the wind; in the sovereignty of His grace--that wind blowing where it wills--all His elect people pass through the process of the heavenly birth. "So is every one that is born of the Spirit."
It logically follows that the new birth is necessary in order to authenticate our spiritual union with the Lord's people. We possess no scriptural, valid evidence that we are the true disciples of the Lord Jesus, or that the privileges of God's Church, and the immunities of the heavenly citizenship are ours, until we are born again. The true Church of God is composed alone of living stones; the Family, of reconciled and adopted children, the Kingdom of Jesus, of living subjects made willing in the day of His power. All other materials now outwardly mixed up with this--the wood, the hay, the stubble--will be consumed in the fire of the last day, for that day shall try every man's religion and hope of what sort it is.
Solemn thought! Reader, is your conversion of such a nature as to stand this fiery test? Are you spiritually, truly born again? Away with your rites and rituals, your forms and ceremonies, your morals and splendid virtues, your ecclesiastical relations, lifeless creeds, and costly doings. It is written, yes, it is written, "You MUST be BORN AGAIN!"
The New Birth is necessary, also, to the bringing forth of real holiness. There is not one grain of holiness in our unrenewed, unsanctified nature. There dwells in the flesh no good thing. In vain we garnish and adorn this sinful and corrupt humanity with theexternal beauties of holiness--it is but an embalmed corpse. We admit that the moral virtues are necessary to the adornment and well-being of human society. For what would this fallen world be apart from this restraint? And yet, spiritually viewed, what are they, in their highest cultivation, but 'refined flesh'? A picture is not a living being, a glow-worm is not a star, the sun reflected from a lake is not a sun; so, nature 'improved' is not nature 'renewed'; and the soul beautified with virtues is not the soul sanctified by grace; and the life regulated by the recognized laws and conventional manners of society is not a life quickened, ennobled, consecrated by the indwelling Spirit of God. Apart, then, from the New Birth, there is no true holiness, and "without holiness no man can see the Lord."
The last plea for the New Birth is a solemn one--without it there is no admission within the kingdom of heaven. Eternity begins with time--heaven commences on earth--glory has its first fruits in grace. The soul must be educated and disciplined for heaven, brought into holy sympathy and moral assimilation with its nature, character, and employments. An unholy being could not exist for one moment in glory. Its atmosphere would be too pure, its society too holy, its worship too spiritual, its enjoyments too refined. If the pilot, soaring to a lofty altitude above the earth, finds the air too thin to exist; surely an unholy being, in a moment translated to heaven, would discover that in its perfectly pure and holy atmosphere he could not for a moment breathe.
To be fitted for glory, we must be gracious; to dwell in heaven, we must be heavenly; to see God, we must be pure and holy in heart; to be forever with the Lord, we must partake His nature, cultivate His image here, and, constrained by love, confess His name, and bear His cross until we pass from grace to glory.
"Marvel not that I said unto you, you must be born again."
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