03. The Aspect of New Birth
The Aspect of New Birth
It is very essential that we should have a right understanding of the cross, of what the Lord Jesus Christ, through His death, has really accomplished; because victory for the daily life depends upon how we enter into the fullest experience of the cross and stand there in and with Christ. So let us just begin at the very beginning. John 3:7 is the first aspect of the cross: “Marvel not that I said unto thee, Ye must be born again.” There is nothing for us unless we have come there. What the Lord calls “the new birth” is just the door into the riches of our inheritance in grace. I trust we have all passed through the door.
What does the new birth mean? It means new life, new life whereby we become the children of God, even as by natural birth we are the children of our parents. Now how is that brought about? John 1:12-13, “But as many as received Him [the Lord Jesus], to them gave He power [or authority] to become the sons [or children] of God, even to them that believe on His name: which were born, not of blood [we are not born Christians], nor of the will of the flesh [we are not the children of God through any self effort], nor of the will of man [a man is not a Christian because some other body says he is a Christian or looks like a Christian or lives like a Christian], but of God.” The new birth becomes an actual experience the moment that we receive the Lord Jesus Christ as our Savior. By that act, on the ground of the atoning sacrifice of the Son of God, we receive new life, even the life of God; we pass into a new stage, that of spiritual regeneration, regeneration by the Holy Spirit; and we enter into a new position, that of being the children of God.
Now I dare not and cannot emphasize too strongly the necessity of the new birth, simply because the new birth produces the new creation, and the new creation is God’s imperative demand and requirement for new life and for new service.
One of our old Scottish preachers once said, “All mankind hangs either at the girdle of Adam or at the girdle of Christ,” and we have to choose. I venture to say that the ordinary church-goer has little or no idea of the meaning of that, and yet it is one of the essential facts of the Word of God. The old head of the race was Adam, and Adam, failed and fell, and the old creation failed in him and fell with him. It is very important to be quite clear about that. I want to quote from a great Bible teacher: “If man never fell, then the Christ of the Gospels lived and taught and died unnecessarily.” These are words that ought to be placarded abroad today: “That man is consistent who abandons all, rather than he who, professing still to own allegiance to Christ, denies some parts of the whole.” It is a pity that all our liberal theologians could not read these words by G. Campbell Morgan in the introduction to the book of Genesis in his valuable work, The Analyzed Bible.
Human nature as in Adam has fallen. It is not incapable, mark you, of reaching high levels of nobility and goodness according to human standards, but finds it an utter impossibility to adjust itself to the requirements of God’s holiness. And the fallen nature is the material through which the self life is always manifesting itself. It is on that that Satan is continually working in order to produce failure and weakness and loss in us, and unless we come to this point, to which the great apostle Paul was brought by the sheer logic of his own intellect and personal experience in the face of sin, we can never be in the position where we can say truthfully, “There is therefore now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus …” (Romans 8:1). That is only possible in its fullest sense for the one who understands what God has done with the old creation.
You and I need not wonder at the attempts on the part of the enemy to banish from books, from many sources, and even from some so-called revisions of the Bible, all mention of the truth of the atonement, because the atonement is the proof of the reality of the fall. And you need not be surprised that he is inciting many men today to cover with ridicule and scorn the fact of the fall, because the fall is the proof of the necessity of the atonement. These two things go together, and here throbs the very heart of the Gospel to a lost and ruined race. The old head of the race failed God, and the old creation failed with the head; but God has a new head, even Christ Jesus, His own Son, and He is getting a new creation. When Christ went to the cross He took the old creation, which was the offspring of the fall, to the cross with Him, just because there was no other way by which God could get His new creation and man could experience deliverance and liberty. The old creation, no matter how commendable it may be from human standpoints—and I grant everything that could be said in its favor—the old creation is under the curse of God, it is under the sentence of death, it has been condemned in Christ, and the only way in which a man can be set free from the curse is to be born over again, re-made in Christ, identified with Christ in His death, for “Christ hath redeemed us from the curse of the law …” (Galatians 3:13). That is the foundation truth of the Gospel. That is the foundation fact for Christian life and for Christian service. That is the first aspect of the cross.