Was
There Regeneration in the Old Testament?
Isaiah 57:15; Ephesians
2:1
AS ONE THEOLOGIAN PUTS THE
MATTER, “Regeneration is a particularly problematic
issue with regard to Old Testament believers.”[i] Some teachers insist that
because regeneration is an act of the Holy Spirit, and
because the Holy Spirit would not be given until
Pentecost, it therefore follows that regeneration was
not at work in the Old Testament.
One problem with
this view, it seems to me, is that it assumes that
regeneration is inseparably linked with
indwelling. In other words,
it assumes that the only way the Holy Spirit can
regenerate is if He also indwells (Jn. 14:16–20; Rom.
8:9, 11, 23; 1 Cor. 6:19; 1 Jn. 4:13).
This also assumes that the
Holy Spirit never indwelt Old Testament believers, but
in some cases it appears He did. David cried, “Take not
thy holy spirit from me” (Ps. 51:11), indicating the
Holy Spirit’s presence in him. “The Spirit of the LORD
departed from Saul” (1 Sam. 16:14), indicating that the
Holy Spirit had to be there before He could depart.
While some teachers argue here that the Holy Spirit
didn’t actually dwell within, rather exerted an external
influence, that doesn’t seem to agree with the
language.
So, while the Holy
Spirit never leaves the New Testament believer—He abides
with us forever (Jn. 14:16),
and the absence of His presence indicates a lost
condition (Rom. 8:9)—there was that danger for the Old
Testament believer. In the final analysis, the
difference between the Holy Spirit’s indwelling in the
Old and New Testaments is one of degree. We must
conclude, then, that regeneration and indwelling are
distinct and not inseparable.
I wonder, however, if the
real problem here is that the doctrine of regeneration
itself is not fully understood by many believers. (This
complements our December 2008 issue, which deals with
the result of salvation being a new creation, 2 Cor.
5:17.) Let us, therefore, first take a brief look at the
doctrine of regeneration and then see how it applies to
the Old Testament.
What Is
Regeneration?
Like that wondrous word
charis
(“grace”), the Greek word behind “regeneration”
(paliggenesia) is one of those ancient Greek
words transformed by New Testament usage into something
far deeper than it was before. It is a compound
comprised of palin, “again,” and genesis,
“birth, origin.” It, therefore, meant a restoration,
return to former circumstances, or revivification. The
Stoics believed that the earth would periodically perish
through some conflagration, so they used this word to
refer to “when the earth awakened in the blossoming of
springtime from its winter sleep and revived from its
winter death.” Philo, the first-century Jewish
philosopher, often used it to refer to the world
emerging out of fire in a phoenix-like resurrection, a
belief also held by the Stoics. Even of Noah and his
family, Philo wrote, “They became leaders of a
paliggenesia and chiefs of a
second cycle.”[ii]
It’s significant,
then, that this word is used twice in the New Testament
to refer to a real rebirth.
It appears first in Matthew 19:28, where our Lord
Himself says, “Verily I say unto you, That ye which have
followed me, in the regeneration when the Son of man
shall sit in the throne of his glory, ye also shall sit
upon twelve thrones, judging the twelve tribes of
Israel.” The context, of course, is our Lord’s teaching
concerning future events, so He refers to the
“regeneration,” the “restoration,” the “re-creation,” of
the world that will take place after His Second Coming.
Many creationists and Bible teachers believe that this
will be a restoration of the primeval perfections of the
earth before the Genesis Flood. In stark contrast to
pagan belief, this will be a true rebirth of the
original world by the One True God Who created it. As
Acts 3:21 also declares, “Whom the heaven must receive
until the times of restitution of all things, which God
hath spoken by the mouth of all his holy prophets since
the world began.”
The other occurrence
of paliggenesia is in Titus 3:5: “Not by works of
righteousness which we have done, but according to his
mercy he saved us, by the washing of regeneration, and
renewing of the Holy Ghost.” As God can restore a fallen
world, He also restores those who were once spiritually
alive and then dead in Adam (1 Cor. 15:22;
Rom.5:17) to a new life in
Christ (Rom. 6:4).
What, then, is
regeneration? One theologian offers this excellent
definition:
Regeneration is the Holy
Spirit’s gracious sovereign, quickening act, in which
the divine life and nature is imparted to the soul of
man, causing a reversal of his attitude toward God and
sin, the expression of which, in repentance and faith,
is secured through the instrumentality of the Word of
God.[iii]
This doctrine has been
variously described as: the new birth (Jn. 3:3–7; Jas.
1:18; 1 Pet. 1:23), a spiritual quickening or
resurrection (Jn. 5:21, 25; Eph. 2:1, 10), the
impartation of a new life (2 Pet. 1:4), a spiritual
translation (Col. 1:13), and a transformed life (2 Cor.
5:17).
Why Is
Regeneration Necessary?
We would submit that this
question is, in fact, the heart of the whole matter. At
the root of today’s misunderstanding of salvation in
general, and the Doctrines of Grace in particular, is
that we do not recognize man’s spiritual state before
God regenerates him. What is that state? He is
dead in trespasses and sins (Eph. 2:1, emphasis
added; cf. 5:14; Jn. 5:21; 2 Cor. 5:14; 1 Jn. 3:14).
The Greek for dead
here is nekros, which literally speaks of a dead
body, a corpse, as in James 2:26, “For as the body
without the spirit is dead, so faith without works [as
evidence] is dead also.” Before God regenerates a man,
he is quite literally a spiritual corpse; his
spirit is separated from God. Paul doesn’t mean the
man “looked dead” or was “in danger of death” or
“standing on the precipice of death,” or “looking death
in the eye,” but was really dead. As Scottish commentator John Eadie put it, it’s
a case of “death walking.”[iv]
So important is this truth that Eadie goes on to
point out that dead in trespasses and sins implies three
things.
First, it
implies previous life, since
to die one had to first be alive. When was man alive? In
Adam, of course. But when Adam sinned, the entire race
died spiritually. “For as in Adam all die, even so in
Christ shall all be made alive” (1 Cor. 15:22). The
distinction before and after Christ is clear and
dramatic.
Second, it
implies insensibility. Man is
unaffected by anything spiritual. He feels nothing. He
shrugs his shoulders at even the thought of the
blessings of holiness or the threat of
hell.
Third, and
most significant of all, it implies inability.
One of the basic controversies today about salvation is
the biblical doctrine of man’s inability. While
controversy has raged for years about the doctrine of
election, most people don’t realize that the real
issue is the doctrine of depravity, which is what
makes election necessary. Most people simply do not (or
will not) comprehend (or recognize) the depth of man’s
depravity. Why? Because they don’t take the words of
Scripture literally. Some argue that man has a certain
“spark of divinity,” “glimmer of goodness,” or “residual
free will,” which if properly motivated will produce
salvation. But the Word of God is clear: man’s will has
been so affected by sin that he has lost all will or
ability to any spiritual good. Why? Because he is
dead. As Eadie again
illustrates, “The corpse cannot raise himself from the
tomb and come back to the scenes and society of the
living world.”
To illustrate, can a
drowned man who has taken water into his lungs help
himself? Can he sit up and say, “Oh, I’m not completely
helpless. I have water in my lungs, but I’ll be okay in
a minute.” Of course not. He is totally helpless,
totally unable to give himself CPR. Likewise, the
spiritually dead man can do nothing to resuscitate
himself spiritually. He can do nothing righteous,
nothing good, nothing to please God, and is in himself
incapable of believing.
We can further illustrate
by picturing a cadaver. Medical students can do anything
to a cadaver that they want and that cadaver does not
respond in any way. It is dead to any physical stimulus.
Likewise, apart from Christ we were “spiritual
cadavers.” We could not respond to any spiritual
stimulus. We were not “sick in a fever,”[v] “incapacitated,” or
even “hopelessly crippled” by sin. We were
dead.
One commentator recounts
an analogy that has been used many times to describe
man’s problem:
Fallen man is so overcome
by the power of sin, that he is like a person on his
deathbed, who has no physical power left to save
himself. If he is going to be healed he can’t possibly
do it through his own strength. The only way he can be
made well would be if the physician gave him the
medicine that is necessary to restore him. But the man
is so desperately ill that he doesn’t even have the
power to reach out and take the medicine for himself. So
the nurse approaches his bed, opens the bottle of
medicine, pours it into a spoon, and then moves it over
the dying man’s lips. But he must, by his own power, his
own will and his own initiative, open his mouth to
receive the medicine.[vi]
But if we take
Scripture precisely how it reads, this analogy is false.
A dead man isn’t on his deathbed—he’s already
dead. He not only can’t reach for the medicine,
he can’t even open his mouth to receive it if someone
holds it to his lips. Taken to its final implication, in
fact, that analogy says that the man must do something
for himself to be saved. But that violates the whole
concept of grace, which says that God alone has done it
all. Does man believe? Yes, but as Ephesians 2:8–9 go on
to declare, God even gives us the faith to believe (cf.
Jn. 1:12; 6:65; Acts 18:27; Phil. 1:29; see tott #15),
something we could never have done, or even been
inclined to do, without His intervention. Why?
Because we were dead, not just critically ill,
not just gasping our last breath, not experiencing that
final death rattle, but dead.
Still another analogy,
which I’ve heard at evangelistic crusades, goes like
this: “Picture a drowning man. He’s struggling to stay
afloat. He’s already gone down twice and is now going
down for the third time, with only his desperately
seeking hand still above the surface. His only hope is
for someone to throw him a life preserver. That’s what
God does, but even if the preserver hits the man’s hand,
that’s not enough. The man must close his hand around it
and capture his salvation.”
That’s certainly
dramatic and plays very well in the evangelist’s
emotional appeal, but it’s unbiblical. Is the lost
person drowning? No! He’s dead. He is as
entombed at the bottom of the sea as are the over 1,100
men still entombed in the USS Arizona at the bottom of
Pearl Harbor. His only hope is for God to reach down,
pull his corpse to the surface, and breathe life into
him, that is, regenerate him.
Pastor and commentator Ray
Stedman quite graphically recounts how this truth was
brought home to a friend of his. Stedman’s friend was
given an after-hours tour of a funeral home by a
mortician friend, who took him into a room where several
bodies were laid out on slabs. The mortician pulled back
a sheet to reveal one of the bodies and said to his
guest, “Tell him about Jesus.” Needless to say, it was
something the man never forgot, for that is exactly what
the lost man is, dead and absolutely incapable of
responding.[vii]
Our Lord Himself cut to
the heart of the matter when He declared, “No man can
come to me,
except the Father which hath sent me draw him: and I
will raise him up at the last day” and “therefore . . .
no man can come unto me, except it were given unto him
of my Father” (Jn. 6:44, 65).
In sad contrast, popular
teaching says that man is “free,” that is, totally free
in the sense that he can choose good from evil in the
same way Adam was free to choose, but as noted earlier,
“in Adam all die” (1 Cor. 15:22). The term “free will,”
in fact, has become, in the words of John Owen, an
“idol.”[viii] This term is a symbol of
man’s arrogance in thinking that He can, in and of
himself, choose God when Scripture and history prove
that he always chooses sin and always runs from
God.
It is fascinating,
indeed, that the issue of “free will” was the crux of
the whole Reformation debate, as seen in the story of
Luther and Erasmus. Desiderius Erasmus (1466–1536) was a
Dutch humanist and theologian. While ordained a priest
in 1492, it seems that he never actively worked as a
priest and, like Luther, criticized some of the Church’s
excesses. He and Luther respected one another, but they
had a fundamental disagreement over the human will. In
1524, Erasmus published his book The Freedom of the
Will, which dealt with the issue of grace, but from
a subtle, roundabout way. He chose to make the biggest
issue of all the question of “free will,” that is, how
much impact sin had (or did not have) on man’s will. He wrote, “By free choice
in this place we mean a power of the human will by which
a man can apply himself to the things which lead to
eternal salvation, or turn away from
them.”[ix] In other words, man has
voluntary or free power in and of himself to choose the
way which leads to salvation apart from God’s grace (the
same basic heresy Pelagius taught 1,000 years earlier).
In Erasmus’ mind, then, God and man work together to
bring man’s salvation.
Luther responded to
Erasmus by publishing his most famous work, The
Bondage of the Will, in 1525.
Amazingly, while disagreeing with virtually everything
Erasmus wrote, Luther actually commended Erasmus for
recognizing the core issue separating Rome and true,
pure Christianity. He wrote, in fact,
that
unlike all the rest, you
alone have attacked the real thing, the essential issue.
You have not wearied me with those extraneous issues
about the Papacy, purgatory, indulgences and such like .
. . you and you alone have seen the hinge upon which it
all turns, and aimed for the vital spot. For that I
heartily thank you.[x]
Erasmus was not so
foolish as to defend any of the major points, for they
are indefensible. Rather, he pointed out “the hinge upon
which it all turns.” The issue of “free will” to Luther
was the crux of the whole thing. Is Christianity a
religion of pure grace or partial grace,
that is, either all of God or
partly of God coupled with
man’s aid. Did God simply supply the grace and man in
his own power supply the faith, or did God supply it
all?
Is
Regeneration in the Old Testament?
Again, I believe the above
answers the whole matter of regeneration. While the
above focuses on the New Testament development of this
doctrine, we also find it in Old Testament thought.
This is true of many
doctrines, in fact. Most New Testament doctrines have
their basis in Old Testament theology. From sin, to
salvation, to service, the New Testament is
enfolded in the Old, while the Old is
unfolded in the New. Or as Augustine put it, “The
New is in the Old contained, the Old is in the
New explained.” While some
theological truths (such as the Church) are foreign to
the Old Testament, most New Testament subjects are
rooted in the Old. These include such doctrines as: the
nature of God, creation, man, morality, sin, redemption,
worship, wisdom, truth, and many more. This also
includes regeneration, at least in “seed form,” if we
may coin the term, which then comes to full bloom in the
New Testament.
Therefore, has man’s need
changed from the Old Testament to the New? Is his
spiritual state different in one over the other? Most
importantly, is he regenerated in the New but left dead
in the Old? While some teachers insist that Old
Testament believers will be regenerated when they are
resurrected and not before, this is foreign to
Scripture. Some cite Daniel 12:2 as “proof,” but it
doesn’t say that. It says, “Many of them that sleep in
the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting
life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt.”
Clearly, this refers to resurrection not regeneration.
While Old Testament believers will be resurrected to
“everlasting life” (cf. Matt 19:29; Gal 6:8; etc.),
unbelievers will be resurrected to “everlasting
contempt.”
This brings us to our
second text, Isaiah 57:15: For thus saith the high and
lofty One that inhabiteth eternity, whose name is Holy;
I dwell in the high and holy place, with him also that
is of a contrite and humble spirit, to revive the spirit
of the humble, and to revive the heart of the contrite
ones.
The word revive
translates the Hebrew chayâ,
which appears about 270 times in the Old Testament and
means to live, be alive, remain alive. The word is used
often to indicate something going on in one who is
already a believer.
In the Psalms, for
example, especially 119, chaya is often rendered
“quicken” or “quickened” in the AV. In 119:25, David
prays, “Quicken thou me according to thy word.” The idea
here is reviving someone from sickness, discouragement,
or despair, which only God can do. It will not come from
self-determination, will power, psychological technique,
or clever cliché. It will come only from God’s Word
working in the heart and mind. Further, as chaya
is used in several ways—to show that an object is safe
(Num. 14:38), to indicate that something is reviving
(Ezek. 37:5), and to demonstrate that something is
flourishing (Ps. 22:26)—the Word of God, therefore,
brings life, sustains life, and
is our
life.
Hebrew authorities
point out, however, that chaya is also used to mean “to cause to live.” W. E.
Vine writes of our text, “This word may also mean ‘to
bring to life or ‘to cause to live.’”[xi] Another classic lexicon
also has “be restored to life.”[xii]
We also read twice in Ezekiel of God’s promise to
replace the “stony heart” with “a new heart” that is
made “of flesh” (11:19–20; 36:25–26). Does that not
sound like regeneration and transformation? Of Saul we
also read that “the Spirit of the LORD” came upon him
and “gave him another heart” (1 Sam. 10:6, 9).
While I
unapologetically confess to being a classic
dispensationalist—recognizing a distinction between
Israel and the Church—it is troubling to conclude that
the Holy Spirit did not have to regenerate a spiritually
dead creature in the Old Testament because of some
supposed dispensational difference. If God did not
regenerate hearts in the Old Testament, every Old
Testament character is still dead. No, the doctrine of
regeneration is not fully developed in the Old
Testament, but we submit that it most certainly is
functionally declared.
Dr. J. D.
Watson
Pastor-Teacher
Grace Bible
Church
NOTES
[i] Millard
Erickson, Christian Theology, 2nd
Edition (Baker Books, 1983, 1998), p.
992.
[ii] Richard Trench, Synonyms of
the New Testament (Hendrickson Publishers, 2000
reprint), p. 75.
[iii] Emory Bancroft, Elemental
Theology, Third Edition (Zondervan, 1960), p.
196.
[iv] John Eadie, A Commentary on
the Greek Text of the Epistle of Paul to the
Ephesians Wipf and Stock Publishers, 1998; reprint
of 2nd Edition, 1861), pp. 120-121.
[v] Bishop Alford; cited in Eadie,
p. 119.
[vi] R. C. Sproul, The Purpose of
God: An Exposition of Ephesians (Christian Focus
Publications, 1994), p. 46.
[vii] Ray Stedman, Our Riches in
Christ (Discovery House Publishers, 1998), p.
75.
[viii] John Owen, A Display of
Arminianism (Still Waters Revival Publishers, 1989
reprint), p. 12.
[ix] E. Gordon Rupp, P. Watson,
Luther And Erasmus: Free Will And Salvation
(Westminster Press, 1969), p. 47.
[x] Martin Luther, The Bondage of
the Will (Fleming H. Revell,
1992), p. 319.
[xi] Vine’s Complete Expository
Dictionary of Old and New Testament Words
(electronic edition), “To Live” entry.”
[xii] Brown, Driver, and Briggs
Hebrew-English Lexicon (electronic edition), entry
for Strong’s #2421.
