79. Man's Side of Salvation
Man’s Side of Salvation
Then on man’s side of the transaction there are still other words that define what is included in salvation. One word that seems to compass within itself at least an outline of all that salvation means is the new birth. This word does not have any mystical, figurative or accommodated meaning. It means just what it says—a birth, as real in the spiritual realm as our physical birth was in the natural (John 3:3-8).
There is everywhere among the lost an inveterate determination to believe that man not only can but must do something to make it possible for God to save. Either the sinner must himself bring about an improvement in his life, or he must help or at least permit God to bring it about, for otherwise salvation would be impossible. To tell the average sinner that as we were born into this world, we are past all possibility of even the least moral improvement, would amaze him out of measure. But Paul, who in the book of Romans unfolds the doctrine of salvation, first indicts Gentiles, then Jews, and then includes the whole world in the indictment, so that every mouth may be stopped, and then brings in every individual man guilty and in helpless corruption before God. In Romans 5:8; Romans 5:10; Romans 5:15; Romans 5:17; Romans 5:20, he shows that as individuals we are sinners and condemned, enemies and alienated, dead and ruined, slaves and helpless, and outlaws and speechless. Where is the hope of improvement with those in such a condition? There is none! They are forever beyond the reach of it. Nor can we find the least hint in Scripture that God ever improves anything He has made. For everything was perfect to begin with, and so improvement is impossible. And yet with the human race we find man everything else but perfect. But in spite of that, to be told that even the noble, the virtuous, the followers of high ideals, are spiritually dead and morally ruined, and that moral and spiritual improvement is impossible even in the best of them, and that the only progress they can make is progress in corruption—the average unsaved person would be scandalized out of measure by such a statement.
Nevertheless God is not running a repair shop for mending wrecked and ruined humanity! What man mars He never mends! We are forever forgetting that He is a Creator, and that He works only in that realm. So instead of mending a wrecked humanity, He heads it for the “discard,” and in all who are willing He brings into being within them a nature that is as completely a new spiritual creation in Him, as we were all new natural creations when we were born on this earth. “For if any man be in Christ, there is a new creation” (2 Corinthians 5:17, lit. trans.). For by God’s exceeding great and precious promises we become in the new birth actual “partakers of the divine nature” (2 Peter 1:4); for being “born, not of blood (natural birth), nor of the will of the flesh (self-effort), nor of the will of man (any human program), but of God” (John 1:13); and “being born again, not of corruptible seed, but of incorruptible” (1 Peter 1:23), we are, in that new nature, beyond the need of improvement, for that “new creation” by which we have become “partakers of the divine nature” is beyond the corruption of sin.