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We as Christians wonder where God’s sovereignty ends and man’s free will begins. In our sinful nature we are completely incapable of accepting Christ, receiving Christ, coming to Christ, and it’s a work of the Holy Spirit; But then there’s also the issue of our culpability, when we tell people to go to the prayer room to get prayer or to accept Christ. So there’s seems to be a paradox between us making a decision on our own effort. We contribute nothing to our salvation, and that it is all the work of the Holy Spirit. So how do we explain that?
The way to understand that is simply to go to the Word of God. And what we find in the Word of God is that sinners are dead, blind, double blind, satanically blinded, blinded by their fallenness, and don’t seek God and have no capacity to seek God.
10 As it is written:
“There is none righteous, no, not one;
11 There is none who understands;
There is none who seeks after God.
12 They have all turned aside;
They have together become unprofitable;
There is none who does good, no, not one.”
Romans 3:10-12
And:
44 "No one can come to Me unless the Father who sent Me draws him; and I will raise him up at the last day. "
John 6:44
To be drawn (“draws”) is an irresistible force. The same way a syringe draws in fluid, it is not by any willful action of the fluid, it is by a irresistible force. Like the way a strong electromagnet can draw a piece of metal to itself where it cannot resist or overcome it, or throwing a large rock off a building, it cannot resist gravity.
Christ is clearly saying here that you must be drawn by God the Father to Christ, which scriptures says, you were predestined before you were even born.
So if anybody is converted, then God must seek them. That begins by regeneration. Regeneration is the first in what’s called the ordo salutis, the first in terms of reasonable elements of salvation. The first thing that has to happen, is the dead sinner has to be given life. He can’t repent, he can’t believe unless he comes alive. So we would say that God has to give life, and that takes you back to John 3, where Jesus says to Nicodemus, “You must be born again.” This is one of the most familiar portions of Scripture, and it’s where all these questions really are answered. And Nicodemus says, “Well how can I be born again?” And what he’s doing is he’s accepting Jesus’ analogy. Jesus is saying to Nicodemus, who’s a teacher in Israel, Old Testament expert, “If you want to enter the kingdom, which is the realm of salvation, you have to be born again.”
Well, Nicodemus is smart enough to get the fact that you can’t do that. You can’t give birth to yourself; that’s the point. The analogy is inescapable. “You must be born again.” And Nicodemus is saying, “Well, how do I do that? How can I crawl back into my mother’s womb and be born again?” And the way to express it is so simple: You had nothing to do with your birth.You made no contribution to your birth; none of us did, none. How could you make a contribution to your birth when you didn’t exist? And that is exactly what Jesus is saying: You can make no contribution to your spiritual birth.
And Nicodemus says, “Well, how do I get in the kingdom?” “You must be born again.” “That’s impossible; you can’t birth yourself. So what do I do?” And Jesus does not say to him, “Well, pray this prayer, and you’ll be born again,” because that would defy the whole analogy. In fact, Jesus says to him, “Well, the wind blows, and we see the wind and we feel it and we hear the sound of it, but we have no control over where it comes from or where it goes. You can experience the wind; you have nothing to do with its course.” And then He analogizes that to the Holy Spirit: “So is the Holy Spirit.” And what He said to Nicodemus is, “You make no contribution to your birth; you make no contribution to your spiritual birth. You made none to your physical birth; you make none to your spiritual birth.” And that is our Lord, in His own words saying that if you are born again, it is an act of God. We talk about it being monergistic; that is, it’s the sole work of God in the soul.
Well then, that’s obviously true. Who are those people that are born by the Spirit? Who is it that the Holy Spirit gives life to? Answer: those who were chosen before the foundation of the world, whose names were written in the Lamb’s Book of Life; those who were predestined to salvation. You can’t argue against that, because that is crystal clear. Your names were written down in the Book of Life before there was any creation, before you even existed. This is predestination. God chose whom He would save, and by the power of the Holy Spirit, in time and space, He saved them by giving them life when they were dead, giving them sight when they were blind. That’s the sovereign side of it.
Ephesians 2:8-10 is so often misunderstood that saving faith is a work of our own when it clearly says “ and that not of yourselves” “not of works” and that spiritual saving faith by grace in no way can be activated by our spiritual deadness until God does it.
“8 For by grace you have been saved through faith, and that not of yourselves; it is the gift of God, 9 not of works, lest anyone should boast. 10 For we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand that we should walk in them.”
Then in Ephesians 1: 4-6
“4 just as He chose us in Him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and without blame before Him in love, 5 having predestined us to adoption as sons by Jesus Christ to Himself, according to the good pleasure of His will, 6 to the praise of the glory of His grace, by which He made us accepted in the Beloved.”
Once again it says “He chose us” before the world was ever made or we existed. “ Having predestined us” and according to the good pleasure of “HIS WILL” not ours. There is this contrast between free will and free spiritual will. It is quite clear we do not have free spiritual will until God activates that which is very clear in John 1:12-13:
“12 But as many as received Him, to them He gave the right to become children of God, to those who believe in His name: 13 who were born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God.”
Once again we have this who “received Him": that is not our own doing. And who were born … “not of the WILL of the flesh” which is pretty self-explanatory, “nor of the WILL of man” there you have it. Not of our own free will. But born “of God” --- it is all His doings.
But on the other hand, you have all those appeals in the New Testament to repent, repent—believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, and you will be saved. How do those go together? And the answer is I have no idea. I have no idea because it is beyond the comprehension of our mind to put those two things together. I do know this: that if you’re saved, it’s because God gave you life; and if you’re rejecting the gospel, it’s because you sinfully refused to believe. Those appear on the surface to our feeble brains as if they’re contradictory.
But I’d like to illustrate the fact that they are only contradictory to us, and that should encourage us a little bit because God should be a lot smarter than we are; we shouldn’t be able to comprehend everything. But let me give you another few ways to understand it.
If I ask you the simple question, Who wrote the book of Romans?—give me an answer.Paul inspired by the Holy Spirit. Is every word out of Paul’s vocabulary? Yes. Was the thought process going on in Paul’s mind? Yes. Was Paul’s reason involved in the unfolding of that? Yes. And yet at the same time, every word was inspired by the Spirit of God. How can it be all Paul and all the Holy Spirit? It’s the same tension.
And if I ask you about your salvation, Is it eternal? You say, “Yes, it is eternal.” Why? Because I have been given eternal security. That’s a common term. But the New Testament says, “You will reach your final salvation if you persevere in the faith.” So is it that God holds you or that you persevere?
Who lives your Christian life? That is a simple question: Who lives your Christian life? You say, “It’s me.” Really? I don’t think so. You say, “Well, it’s the Holy Spirit.” That’s not adequate either, because I don’t want to blame Him for so much of what goes on in my Christian life. We have this grand dilemma in every doctrine there is. We talk about Christ. And in one of the baptisms, and the testimony was that Jesus is a hundred percent God and a hundred percent man. Everywhere in all of theology that connects us to God, that apparent—not a real paradox, but that apparent paradox exists, and you can’t eliminate either side. If you are saved, you know it was because God sovereignly saved you; if you are lost, it is because you refuse to believe.
So how do we bring those two things together? We give God all the glory for salvation, and we give man all the responsibility for rejection. We don’t have to resolve that in our feeble minds, but we just have to be faithful to both of those realities. They run parallel into eternity, and they’ll meet when we get to heaven. But it shouldn’t surprise us that there are things at the very heart of our relationship to the eternal God that are beyond our comprehension, because we just can’t grasp what is very simple to God.
In other studies, on this website there is much in-depth discussion on how God saves us. You can also read this one:
"The Doctrine of our Salvation Explained".
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