Immediately after their creation, Adam and Eve were perfect in every way, enjoying the blessedness of the Garden of Eden, where God had placed them. In particular, their wills were perfect; they were happy to be completely subject to God and His will in everything. They were totally free from rebellion; they could both say to their Maker: “I delight to do Thy will, O my God: yea, Thy law is within my heart” (Ps 40:8). Their wills were moulded by God’s will.
But that did not last. The leader of the rebellion in heaven, Satan himself, came into the Garden, with his temptations. He too had been created perfect, but he had fallen, and his will was corrupted; so it was his great aim to bring Adam and Eve – and the whole human race with them –into that same fallen condition. “No sooner”, says Matthew Henry, was he “a traitor than [he was] a tempter, as one enraged against God and His glory and envious of man and his happiness.” His will was “to draw our first parents to sin, and separate between them and their God”. And he succeeded with his wicked temptations. Before Satan spoke to her, Eve was totally willing to obey God. But soon she had a fallen will; she was willing to listen to Satan and to disobey her Creator. She ate the forbidden fruit, and Adam followed her in disobedience to God; it was clear that he now had a fallen will also.
Previously Adam and Eve would have been glad to be in God’s presence. Now, with their corrupt wills, they wanted to get away from Him; they “hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God amongst the trees of the garden” (Gen 3:8). Their knowledge of God was corrupted; their whole thinking was disordered. Could they really have forgotten that God knew everything about them and that they could not escape from His presence? But, guilty creatures that they now were, they did not want to remember these things; they no longer wished to be in the presence of the holy God, who could punish them because of their sin. Besides, they had no wish to return to Him, which is true of all their natural descendants – including each of us – unless changed by grace. That is what Jesus was telling the Jews: “Ye will not come to Me, that ye might have life” (Jn 5:40). They were unwilling, He was telling them, to come to the Saviour who is ready to give eternal life to everyone who comes to Him – who, in other words, believes on Him.
It is still the same; sinners are rebels; they resist the call of Christ, even although obedience would be so wonderfully beneficial to them; they would be delivered from the wrath to come and enjoy eternal blessedness at last in heaven. Yet they continue in determined opposition to Christ’s call; they do not want to forsake sin and enter the family of God, as adopted children. Their wills are free to go on sinning; they are willing to go on doing so, but they are not free to believe or to live holy lives; they are altogether in bondage to sin; they cannot escape from sin through their own power.
The fact is that sinners need divine power to make them willing to turn from sin. They need to be completely changed; that is why Jesus told Nicodemus: “Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God” (Jn 3:3). Their whole being must be transformed, including their will. To quote Matthew Henry again: “By our first birth we are corrupt, shapen in iniquity; we must therefore undergo a second birth; our souls must be fashioned and enlivened anew”.
The Saviour went on to say, “Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born of water and of the Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God” (Jn 3:5). Writing on this verse, Henry states, “To be born again is to be born of the Spirit. The change is not wrought by any wisdom or power of our own, but by the power and influence of the blessed Spirit of grace. It is the … ‘renewing of the Holy Ghost’ (Tts 3:5).” The reference to water indicates that this complete change involves a cleansing, by the power of the Spirit – removing the old nature, which is so resistant to grace, and implanting a new heart in which grace reigns.
So necessary is this change, and so impossible is it for sinners to change themselves, that Jesus further told Nicodemus: “Marvel not that I said unto thee, Ye must be born again” (Jn 3:7). We must not be surprised that the Saviour insisted on the necessity of the new birth; nor should we be surprised when preachers and writers insist on it. Yet we are not able to bring it about, nor can any preacher or writer. We must always look to the Holy Spirit’s power to bring about the radical change which is the new birth, on the basis of Christ’s redeeming work.
Consider the jailer in Philippi. He had thrust Paul and Silas into the inner part of the prison when they were brought to him. Then followed the earthquake which opened all the doors of the prison. Afraid that all the prisoners would escape, he was ready to take his own life. We can see that Satan was driving him on to eternal destruction. Neither Paul nor Silas could stop the jailer; much greater power was necessary than they could muster. They spoke to him, and spoke wisely when they directed him: “Do thyself no harm” (Acts 16:28). But it was divine power acting on his soul that brought him to ask, “Sirs, what must I do to be saved?” They gave him the right answer: “Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved, and thy house”, and went on to speak “unto him the word of the Lord, and to all that were in his house”. At some point, the Holy Spirit applied the truth to the jailer and his household, so that they were born again; as a result, he believed “in God with all his house”.
Paul and his companion were by no means irrelevant to what happened at the jail in Philippi; we are told that sinners are “born again . . . by the word of God” (1 Pet 1:23). Commenting on this verse, Alexander Nisbet, a successor of David Dickson as minister of Irvine, in south-west Scotland, states, “Although the Word, separated from the working of the Spirit, can do nothing to the regenerating of a sinner, yet the Word is the ordinary instrument of the Spirit, who makes use of all the principal parts of it in that work: of the law, to put the sinner [into] fear of deserved wrath; and of the gospel to revive the soul and liberate it from those fears; and of the law again to direct the regenerate how to walk suitably”^1 in their new state of soul. It was God that made the jailer willing to believe in Christ and to follow in the ways of new obedience, until he was brought at last to heaven.
John Cotton, later a noted minister in America, began his studies in Cambridge University in 1598, when he was only 12. Under the ministry of William Perkins, one of the most respected preachers of his time, Cotton experienced much conviction of sin, but, says Cotton Mather, “he resisted and smothered those convictions, through a vain persuasion that, if he became a godly man, it would spoil him from being a learned one”. If he had not been born again, Cotton would have continued in his unwillingness and hardness of heart, determined not to submit to the voice of God speaking to him through the preaching of Perkins and others. Mather continues, “Such was the secret enmity and prejudice of an unregenerate soul against real holiness, and such the torment which our Lord’s witnesses give to the consciences of the earthly-minded that, when he heard the bell toll for the funeral of Mr Perkins, his mind secretly rejoiced in his deliverance from that powerful ministry, by which his conscience had been so oft beleaguered: the remembrance of which thing afterwards did break his heart exceedingly”. After Perkins’ death, Cotton sat under the ministry of Richard Sibbes and was thoroughly awakened by a sermon in which Sibbes spoke of “the misery of those who had only a negative righteousness” – in other words, those who had no more than an outward, “sober, honest blamelessness before men” – those who did not have the righteousness of Christ imputed to them. Cotton now became very conscious “of his own miserable condition before God; and the arrows of these convictions did stick so fast upon him that, after no less than three years’ disconsolate apprehensions under them, the grace of God made him a thoroughly renewed Christian and filled him with a sacred joy, which accompanied him unto the fullness of joy for ever”. Mather comments, “So the yoke of sore temptation and afflictions and spiritual trials fitted him to be an eminently useful servant of God in his generation”.^2 It was another sermon by Sibbes, on the doctrine of regeneration, that God used to deliver him from his “disconsolate apprehensions”.
In both these examples, we have men who were totally unwilling, of themselves, to submit to Christ as the Saviour whom God has appointed to deliver sinners from their ungodliness and from the wrath to come. No human power could make these men willing; as we have noticed more than once already, they needed the supernatural power of the Holy Spirit to work in their hearts to bring them through the new birth and so make them willing to receive the truth by a living, God-given faith in Jesus Christ. They experienced a day of divine power; that was how their unwillingness was subdued. So David addressed the Most High: “Thy people shall be willing in the day of Thy power” (Ps 110:3). Apart from that power, these men would never have come to Christ.
God is still dealing graciously with sinners, giving them a new heart and making them willing to believe in Christ and be saved. We should be clear that here is no limit to the Holy Spirit’s power. We have no reason today to despair of the salvation of any individual, or even of the multitudes who today are most firmly caught in Satan’s snare – nor has anyone a right to despair of their own salvation. Manasseh was perhaps the most unlikely of all the kings of Judah to be delivered from his antipathy against the true God; Saul of Tarsus was possibly the least likely among the Pharisees to be delivered from his self-righteousness and embrace Jesus of Nazareth as the Messiah; likewise the jailer in Philippi may have been the most unlikely in his city to receive the truths of Christianity and trust in the Saviour.
But all of them were born again and made willing to turn from their false religion and believe the gospel, through divine power. Let us then pray for God’s blessing on His Word in our time, whenever and wherever it is read or preached; and let us bear in mind the infinite, irresistible power of the Holy Spirit to make sinners willing to forsake sin and turn to God through Christ, the one Saviour of sinners.
^1 Nisbet, An Exposition of 1 & 2 Peter, Banner of Truth reprint, 1982, p 52.
^2 Quotations in these two paragraphs are from Cotton Mather, The Great Works of Christ in America, Banner of Truth reprint, 1979, pp 255-6. Mather was John Cotton’s grandson.