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Which Comes First

Does the Spirit make a man alive so that he can believe, or is the Spirit given through believing? Both cases at full strength

R.C. Sproul put it about as plainly as it can be put: it is not that we are offered salvation and will be born again if we choose to believe, but that we cannot even believe until God first changes the disposition of our souls by His sovereign work of regeneration. That is not a caricature of the Reformed position. It is the Reformed position, stated by one of its best teachers, and Chosen by God gives a whole chapter to it under the title “Regeneration Precedes Faith.”

A question follows almost immediately, and it is worth answering before anything else, because the way the claim is usually repeated hides it: does that mean a man is born again before he receives the Holy Spirit?

No. And anyone arguing against Sproul without knowing that will miss him entirely.

What the position actually says

In this scheme the Holy Spirit is the one who regenerates. The order is not new birth, then the Spirit. It is:

  1. The Spirit sovereignly gives new life to a man who is spiritually dead.
  2. That man, now alive, believes — and can, because the disposition has been changed.
  3. Faith is followed by justification, and by the sealing and indwelling.

So the Spirit is not standing outside while the man is born. The claim is that His first work on a dead man is not persuasion but resurrection, and that only a living man can believe. Sproul's picture is Lazarus, and it is a good one: the corpse does not cooperate with the call, it obeys it. “Lazarus, come forth” (John 11:43).

The texts underneath it are real and should be felt rather than answered quickly. Paul says we were not sick but “dead in trespasses and sins” (Ephesians 2:1), and that God “hath quickened us together with Christ” while we were in that state (Ephesians 2:5). Christ says “it is the spirit that quickeneth; the flesh profiteth nothing” (John 6:63). Paul says “no man can say that Jesus is the Lord, but by the Holy Ghost” (1 Corinthians 12:3). And Titus 3:5 puts regeneration and the Spirit in the same breath: God “saved us, by the washing of regeneration, and renewing of the Holy Ghost” (Titus 3:5).

Anyone who thinks that case is weak has not read it.

The distinction it depends on

But it requires one move, and the move is worth naming because it is rarely stated out loud when the position is repeated on a graphic. It requires the Spirit to work on a man twice, in two different ways: a regenerating work that precedes faith, and an indwelling and sealing that follows it.

That is a coherent distinction and it is not invented to escape a problem; careful Reformed writers have held it for centuries. But it is a systematic necessity rather than a stated one. Scripture nowhere separates the two operations in so many words, and the reason it is needed is that Scripture keeps putting the receiving of the Spirit after believing.

The careful form of the position puts it this way: a man must believe and must repent, but those acts of the will are the evidence of having been born again, not its cause; and the order is logical, not chronological, since the whole of salvation is one simultaneous work of God in the heart. That is fair, and it is stated with more care than the graphic. Two things can be said back to it, both in John 3 itself. First, Romans 8:7-8 is granted whole: “the carnal mind is enmity against God: for it is not subject to the law of God, neither indeed can be. So then they that are in the flesh cannot please God” (Romans 8:7-8). Nobody on either side says a dead man makes himself alive. Second, the chapter that gives us “Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God” (John 3:3) does not stop at verse 8. Nine verses later Jesus tells the same man how the life is had: “as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of man be lifted up: That whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have eternal life” (John 3:14-15). The bitten Israelite looked, and then lived. And if the order is not chronological, so that the man believes in the same instant he is made alive, it is worth asking what is lost by saying it the way John says it at the end of his book: believing, ye might have life.

The verses that keep saying after

In whom ye also trusted, after that ye heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation: in whom also after that ye believed, ye were sealed with that holy Spirit of promise Ephesians 1:13

Paul is not being careless there; he builds a sequence and then puts the Spirit at the end of it. One honesty note, since this page asks it of Ephesians 2:8: "after that ye believed" is the King James rendering of an aorist participle, pisteusantes, and an aorist participle beside an aorist main verb can mean "when ye believed" as easily as "after." The sequence is real, but it is carried by Galatians 3 and Acts 19 rather than by this participle alone. He does the same to the Galatians, twice, and the second time he is not describing an order but arguing from it: “Received ye the Spirit by the works of the law, or by the hearing of faith?” (Galatians 3:2), and “that we might receive the promise of the Spirit through faith” (Galatians 3:14).

Luke assumes it in the shape of a question. Paul meets some disciples at Ephesus and asks, “Have ye received the Holy Ghost since ye believed?” (Acts 19:2). You do not ask a man that if the Spirit is what made him able to believe in the first place. And at Caesarea the Spirit falls on a room of Gentiles “while Peter yet spake these words” (Acts 10:44) — on hearers of a sermon, at the moment of hearing.

And the new birth comes by the word

There is a second line of texts, and it presses harder than the first, because it names the instrument of the new birth and the instrument turns out to be something a man must hear.

Peter: we are “born again, not of corruptible seed, but of incorruptible, by the word of God” (1 Peter 1:23). James: “of his own will begat he us with the word of truth” (James 1:18). And Paul supplies the link: “faith cometh by hearing, and hearing by the word of God” (Romans 10:17).

Word, then faith, then life. If the new birth is worked by the word, then it is worked through the very thing that produces faith, and the two are far harder to prise apart into a sequence than the diagram requires.

The two texts most often brought against this do not break it; read whole, they say the same thing. Lydia believed because “the Lord opened” her heart, and the verse goes on to say what the opening was for: “whose heart the Lord opened, that she attended unto the things which were spoken of Paul” (Acts 16:14). The opening came first and it came to a woman sitting under a sermon. And the drawing of John 6:44 is explained in the next verse: “It is written in the prophets, And they shall be all taught of God. Every man therefore that hath heard, and hath learned of the Father, cometh unto me” (John 6:45). The Father draws by teaching, and the man who comes is the man who heard and learned. The Spirit works through the word that is reasoned and heard, not around it. That is why Paul reasoned in the synagogues and the Bereans searched the Scriptures: not in competition with grace, but as the means grace ordinarily uses.

John says why he wrote his Gospel

And then there is the sentence in which the writer most quoted on the new birth states his own purpose in writing, and states the order as he understands it:

But these are written, that ye might believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God; and that believing ye might have life through his name John 20:31

Written so that you might believe, and that believing you might have life. Not: given life so that you might believe. That is John's own account of what his book is for, placed at the end of it, and it runs the other way.

The same order sits in his opening. “As many as received him, to them gave he power to become the sons of God, even to them that believe on his name” (John 1:12) comes before “which were born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God” (John 1:13). Verse 13 is the verse the system leans on, and it stands after the receiving and the believing rather than before them.

A separate strand of the same argument, that the Gospels keep showing real faith in people before any conversion — the Syrophoenician woman, the centurion, the friends who dug through a roof — is taken up on TULIP rather than repeated here.

Where this lands

We do not hold this one closed, and we say so on the roadmap: whether faith is itself the gift or our answer to the gift is held as a tension, not a settled question. Both halves are plainly said. Ephesians 2:8 is genuinely ambiguous in the Greek about what “that” refers to, and pretending otherwise in either direction would be dishonest.

What we do hold, and hold firmly, is the first half of what Sproul is protecting. Grace goes first. Nobody comes to God on his own. No dead man raises himself, and every account of a conversion in Scripture has God moving before the man does. That is not the Reformed distinctive; it is Christianity, and Irenaeus and Wesley would both sign it.

Where we cannot follow is the further step: that the drawing cannot be refused, and that the order must therefore be regeneration first and faith second. Because Paul had every opportunity to say the Spirit comes first and instead said “after that ye believed.” Because the new birth is worked by a word that has to be heard. And because John, writing the Gospel the doctrine is built from, said he wrote it so that believing, we might have life.

The seam is where we cannot see. He supplied the object, so the beginning is His. The answer is genuinely ours.

Study the passages

Read them in context. Links open our Study Bible, with the King James beside the Berean, the Douay-Rheims and the Reina-Valera.

Related: TULIP: The Five Points, Tested by Scripture, where the Gospels' own examples of faith before conversion are weighed; Predestination; Born Again; The Spirit Isn’t Always Tidy and Take Not Thy Holy Spirit From Me, on the Spirit who came, went, and at last remained. R.C. Sproul's Chosen by God remains in copyright and is described here rather than quoted at length. Scripture from the King James Version, linked to our Study Bible.