Redemption Accomplished and Applied by John Murray

Author:John Murray [Murray, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Redemption, Theology, Religion, General, Christian Theology, Soteriology
ISBN: 9780802811431
Publisher: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing
Published: 1955-12-12T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter 3.

Regeneration

We have found that the application of redemption begins with an effectual call by which God the Father ushers men into the fellowship of his Son. An effectual call, however, must carry along with it the appropriate response on the part of the person called. It is God who calls but it is not God who answers the call; it is the person to whom the call is addressed. And this response must enlist the exercise of the heart and mind and will of the person concerned. It is at this point that we are compelled to ask the question: how can a person who is dead in trespasses and sins, whose mind is enmity against God, and who cannot do that which is well-pleasing to God answer a call to the fellowship of Christ? Fellowship is never one-sided; it is always mutual. Hence the fellowship of Christ must involve the embrace of Christ in faith and love. And how can a person whose heart is depraved and whose mind is enmity against God embrace him who is the supreme manifestation of the glory of God? The answer to this question is that the believing and loving response which the calling requires is a moral and spiritual impossibility on the part of one who is dead in trespasses and sins. "They that are in the flesh cannot please God" (Rom. 8:8). And our Saviour himself gives unequivocal expression to this impossibility when he says: "No one can come unto me except the Father who hath sent me draw him"; "No one can come unto me except it were given to him of the Father" (John 6:44, 65). The fact is that there is a complete incongruity between the glory and virtue to which sinners are called, on the one hand, and the moral and spiritual condition of the called, on the other. How is this incongruity to be resolved and the impossibility overcome?

It is the glory of the gospel of God's grace that it provides for this incongruity. God's call, since it is effectual, carries with it the operative grace whereby the person called is enabled to answer the call and to embrace Jesus Christ as he is freely offered in the gospel. God's grace reaches down to the lowest depths of our need and meets all the exigencies of the moral and spiritual impossiblity which inheres in our depravity and inability. And that grace is the grace of regeneration. It is when we take into account God's recreative power and grace that the contradiction between the call of God and the sinful condition of the called is resolved. "A new heart also will I give you, and a new spirit will I put within you" (Ezek. 36:26). God effects a change which is radical and all-pervasive, a change which cannot be explained in terms of any combination, permutation, or accumulation of human resources, a change which is nothing less than a new creation by him who calls the things that be not as though they were, who spake and it was done, who commanded and it stood fast.

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