Quick Answers to Calvinism, part 3 (#14-18: "born again")
[Topic of this post: "We can't make ourselves born again." Click here for part 1 and part 2. And okay, let's face it, these will never be as "quick" as I want them to be. But that's what you get when you try to tackle Calvinism's errors. (And I guess I'm not ending this blog yet like I planned. It just keeps going. I don't know how that happens.)]
#14-18: "We can't make ourselves born again":
(There's some overlap here with other "quick answer" posts, but oh well. It's important.)
Calvinists say "We can't make ourselves born again, only the Spirit can do that. And God decides whom to make born again."
As my Calvinist pastor preached in his February 2024 sermon on being born again:
"If anybody is going to end up in the kingdom of God, a person must experience new birth... It may surprise you, [but] there is no command to be born again in the Bible. In fact, there is no explanation how to be born again in the Bible... because it's not up to us. It is a supernatural miracle and work of God that He gives to some... The new birth is a sovereign work of God. It is not something we choose to do for ourselves.
... What must occur for us to enter the kingdom of God is, in fact, something we are unable to do ourselves... The verb 'to be born' is passive in the Greek. It means we don't play any role in the new birth. It's why there is no command given, no explanation how to do this. Jesus is just declaring a fact. And just like we had nothing to do with our physical birth - I mean think about it, how much did you have to do with being born again? how much choice did you have in the whole process of physical birth? - the point is that it's the same with spiritual birth.
... The only way to get to heaven, says Jesus and the apostles, is if God chooses to give someone new life... It is a sovereign gift of God given to some. And like the wind from our perspective, God's Spirit blows where He chooses. And the unmistakable sign that someone has been born again is that they have the ability to repent and believe the gospel."
Sounds legit and convincing, doesn't it? Biblical?
Sure... until you consider these:
Quick answer #14: Many Christians will be tricked into thinking that "the Holy Spirit makes us born again" means "the Holy Spirit makes us believe, the Spirit decides and controls who believes." But belief and being born again are two different things.
Quick answer #15: Calvinists reverse the order of belief and born again. They say that we are saved/born again first, before we believe, that being saved/born again leads to being able to believe. As my pastor said: "the unmistakable sign that someone has been born again is that they have the ability to repent and believe the gospel." And as Calvinist Loraine Boettner famously said in The Reformed Doctrine of Predestination: "A man is not saved because he believes in Christ; he believes in Christ because he is saved."
And so... think about this... if Calvinists believe that we are saved/born again before we believe in Jesus, then they are really saying that we are saved/born again without belief in Jesus, apart from belief in Jesus.
And who do you think is behind the idea that salvation happens without belief in Jesus?
But the Bible clearly and repeatedly - clearly and repeatedly! - tells us the true order of salvation: Belief in Jesus leads to salvation and being born again. Not the other way around as Calvinism teaches.
John 20:31: “But these are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name.”
John 3:16,36: “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.... Whoever believes in the Son has eternal life...”
Romans 10:9: “… if you confess with your mouth, ‘Jesus is Lord,’ and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.”
Quick answer #16: Yes, it's true that we can't make ourselves born again (that's the Spirit's job)... but it's also true that He does it in response to what we can do: believe. Believing is our job, the one responsibility God gave us to do to be saved: "Then they asked him, 'What must we do to do the works God requires?' Jesus answered, 'The work of God is this: to believe in the one he has sent [Jesus].'" John 6:28-29.
Quick answer #17: Inevitably, Calvinists will then cry "But belief is a work, and we can't work for salvation. If you say that you believe in Jesus to be saved, then you're saying you saved yourself - because belief is a work."
And the quick answer here is "Not according to God!"
Not only did we just see in the verse above that God says believing is the one "work" we must do to be saved, but God does not put "belief in Jesus (accepting His offer of salvation)" in the same category as the other kinds of "works" people do to try to earn heaven (praying, tithing, being good, etc.).
Only Calvinists do that, convincing us that belief is a work and that since we can't work our way to heaven, then we can't choose to believe either.
But notice in this verse how differently God sees "belief" and "works":
'Abraham believed God, and it was credited to him as righteousness.' Now when a man works, his wages are not credited to him as a gift, but as an obligation. However, to a man who does not work but trusts God who justifies the wicked, his faith is credited as righteousness. David says the same thing when he speaks of the blessedness of the man to whom God credits righteousness apart from works:" (Romans 4:3-6)
"A man who does not work but trusts God." God is contrasting Abraham's belief/faith/trust in Him with those who "work" for their justification and righteousness, who try to earn/work their way to Him. He's saying that "belief/faith" is not the same thing as "works," and that belief/faith is what we must do to be saved.
Only in Calvinism is "believing in Jesus/accepting the gift of eternal life" considered "working for your salvation."
God has done all the work to make salvation possible for us, and all He asks - all He requires - is that we accept it, that we open up our hands and receive it and say "Thank you. I believe." That's not "work."
Here's a question to consider: If the Bible says that "belief" is the one work we must do to be saved, but Calvinists say it's something we can't do to be saved, can anyone really be saved under honest Calvinist preaching?
And so I ask, who do you think profits from spreading the idea that people cannot decide to believe in Jesus to be saved, when God Himself says that we must believe in Jesus to be saved?
Quick answer #18: When Calvinists talk about their belief that the Holy Spirit controls who gets born again, they quote John 3:7-8 to "prove" it: "You must be born again. The wind blows wherever it pleases. You hear its sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going. So it is with everyone born of the Spirit."
As my pastor said: "The only way to get to heaven, says Jesus and the apostles, is if God chooses to give someone new life... It is a sovereign gift of God given to some. And like the wind from our perspective, God's Spirit blows where He chooses."
They use the "Spirit is like the wind" analogy to describe how they think the Spirit saves people - that He blows here and there, regenerating whomever He wants to and passing by others, and there's nothing we can do about it because we have no choice about it or control over it.
But that's not what this verse means. Jesus is not saying that the Spirit chooses who gets saved or that He causes them to believe. He's saying that work of the Spirit in spiritual birth is an invisible thing, like how the wind is invisible. He's contrasting invisible spiritual birth to visible physical birth. That's all this verse is about: the invisible compared to the visible. Not about who gets saved or how they are "chosen" or regenerated. (Ridiculous.)
It's ironic that when Calvinists say things like "just like you had nothing to do with your physical birth, you can have nothing to do with your spiritual birth because God's Spirit blows where He chooses," they have actually fallen into the same trap as Nicodemus in John 3:4.
Nicodemus conflates spiritual birth and physical birth, treating them as the same thing. After being told he must be born again, Nicodemus asks, "How can a man be born when he is old?... Surely he cannot enter a second time into his mother's womb to be born!"
But Jesus corrects Nicodemus by saying that spiritual birth is not the same as physical birth, that one is invisible (on the inside, of the heart/spirit/mind, etc.) and the other is visible (on the outside, of the tangible, physical body). They are not the same thing: "Flesh gives birth to flesh, but the Spirit gives birth to spirit" (verse 6).
Nicodemus confused the spiritual with the physical. And so do Calvinists. They commit the same error as Nicodemus when they present spiritual birth as the same thing as physical birth, acting as if they happen the same way, falsely inferring that since we can't affect our physical birth then we can't affect our spiritual birth either.
Of course, we can't affect our physical birth, but the Bible tells us that we do affect whether or not we are spiritually born again. Because although we can't make ourselves born again (because that's the Spirit's job), God has given us the job - the one job - of deciding if we will believe in Jesus or not. That is our job, our God-given responsibility. And if we choose to believe - to put our faith in Jesus as our Lord and Savior - then we will be born again by the Spirit.
Acts 2:38: "Peter replied, 'Repent and be baptized ... And you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit.'"
Ephesians 1:13: "And you also were included in Christ when you heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation. Having believed, you were marked in him with a seal, the promised Holy Spirit."
John 5:24: “I tell you the truth, whoever hears my word and believes him who sent me has eternal life and will not be condemned; he has crossed over from death to life.”
John 1:12: “Yet to all who received him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God.”
We do the believing part first, and then the Spirit does the "born again" part second, as a result of our belief.
But if you let Calvinists convince you that the Bible doesn't mean things the way it says them and that it teaches things it doesn't say - if you let them convince you that belief is a work we can't do because it's decided by and controlled by the Spirit; if you let them convince you that being saved/born again comes before belief; if you let them convince you that you can't affect your spiritual birth just like you couldn't affect your physical birth; if you let them convince you that since the Spirit makes us born again then it also means He makes us believe; if you let them convince you that the Spirit moving like the wind is about who gets saved and how they get saved - then you will become a Calvinist.
And you will drift further and further from God's truth, from God Himself, because you'll read His Word through twisted Calvinist glasses. And eventually it might destroy your trust in Him and your faith, your simple faith. And as you share your Calvinism with others, you'll bring them down with you too, spreading the destruction down the line.
