Adventures With Calvinistman - Episode 3 - Who Is Born Again? All The Believing Ones!

God Centered Theology

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Welcome to Adventures with Calvinist Man. He's faster than a speeding

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Arminian, more powerful than man -centered synergism, and able to leap tall strawmen in a single bound.

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Look up in the sky. It's a bird. It's a tulip. No, it's Calvinist Man.

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Hello and welcome back to Adventures with Calvinist Man. That's right.

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I am your reform theology superhero here to help you dispel the myth of the

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Calvinist boogeyman. And I'm also here to help you navigate the scriptures as we look and see what the text of scripture says about salvation as it has to do with Calvinism, reform theology, making sure that we are accurately representing the scriptures, but also if we disagree or touch on a different viewpoint, whether it is the provisionist or the

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Arminian or something along them lines, that we also fairly represent them as well.

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We want to be fair. We want to do the opposite of what Twitter does where it's just like this all the time.

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We want to make sure we are being fair and right. So your superhero here,

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Calvinist Man, otherwise known by day as Andy Cain, but just like Superman, I take off my glasses and I'm Calvinist Man.

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Yeah, that's right. I've got problems. We're gonna pick back up in John chapter three where we were at last time.

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And we chose this chapter because anytime you deal with the subject of Calvinism or reform theology, inevitably someone's gonna be like, well, bless

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God, what about John 3, 16? He says, whosoever's. Well, you know, that's usually what you hear.

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Maybe not quite like that, but it's always brought up as if we've never heard of that verse.

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Oh no, I've never heard that. Now I must change everything. Well, the key is not what our tradition tells us or even what

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John Calvin tells us or even what Calvinism tells us or anybody else for that matter.

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It's what does scripture say? What did John intend to say with, more particularly, what did

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John intend to communicate with what he recorded? Now we've already gone through a few verses here, but we're gonna kind of read through this again.

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It says, now there was a man of the Pharisees named Nicodemus, a ruler of the Jews. This man came to Jesus by night and said to him,

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Rabbi, we know that you have come from God as a teacher, for no one can do these signs that you do unless God is with him.

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Jesus answered and said to him, truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God. Now we touched on this last time, so we're not gonna rehash it here, that Jesus was communicating to him that he needed to be born again.

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We covered last time how I believe in trichotomy, meaning we are body, we are soul, we are spirit.

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We have a physical body, we have a soul, meaning we have being, meaning we exist, and we have a spirit, but we are born in Adam, which means our spirit is dead in sin and trespasses.

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Our spirit has to be raised to life just as our bodies are, in a sense, brought to life when we are born physically through our mothers.

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And so in a sense, we're not being resurrected there, we're being raised to life in the sense that we are being brought into existence, being brought into life.

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So in that same vein, but somewhat different, our spirits have to be raised to life, but the spirit of man was marred, was placed under the bondage of sin and to be dead in sin because of the fall of Adam.

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So in that sense, our spirits are resurrected or raised to life in that manner. So that's why we say that one day our bodies will be resurrected bodily, physically, in the same way our spirits have been.

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And so as we covered last time, in order to worship God, in order to please him, one must do so through faith,

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Hebrews 11, six, but also John talks about how the true people of God worship in spirit and in truth.

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Well, we have the truth of God and as the mechanism by which we know what truth is, but in order to worship that and apply that truth correctly, one must have their spirit raised to life.

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And that's why reformed theology, Calvinism, if you will, coming from your superhero

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Calvinist man here, we would teach that regeneration, which is the process and the power by which the

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Holy Spirit, it's a miracle, by which the Holy Spirit raises a person's spirit to life, they regenerate them, they make them a new creature in Christ, we believe this would precede faith because a natural consequence of having a spirit that is alive is it has faith, true biblical faith that is an obedient faith that recognizes the

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Lordship of Christ. And we see this here as it is tied here when he says you must be born again, or you cannot see the kingdom of God.

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Well, there's a lot going on there in that you see the kingdom of God through spiritual eyes, and therefore you need a spirit that is raised to life in order to see how the spirit of God is in operation both in your life and in the world.

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But also the Jews were of particular interest, very concerned with the kingdom and was God gonna set it up then?

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And we covered this last time, how the disciples when he ascended said, you know, are you gonna set up your kingdom now?

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And he's like, you know, that's not for you to know. And so the very entrance into the kingdom of God is through salvation.

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It is through being raised to life in Christ, being one of the spiritual children of God that are adopted into his family.

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And so he moves on here and Nicodemus says, you know, how can a man be born when he is old? Can he enter the second time until his mother's womb to be born?

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So Nicodemus, much like many of the unregenerate, much like all of the unregenerate, all of those who don't have spiritual eyes that has raised to life to see and to understand these things, as Corinthians tells us, you know, the natural man can't understand the things of God, but the spiritual man.

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So you must be born again first to be able to understand these things. He doesn't get it.

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He's just thinking in terms of what he can see, what makes sense to him. He's doing it in terms of what he can wrap his head around.

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He's doing what is man -centered. The man -centered response to the thing is to hear spiritual truths.

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And instead of taking it as it's written or as it's been stated, or as God intended to communicate to us, we can't fully understand it through our finite minds.

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So we start from a position of man. We start from a position of what is rational and reasonable or makes sense to me.

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And then we reason up to God and therefore create a God or an idol, if you will, out of only the capacity and the box by which we can understand.

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Whereas to be God -centered, hence this is God -centered theology and your resident superhero here,

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Calvinist man, is a part of God -centered theology. God -centered theology starts with God.

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It recognizes God first. And then it says, what has God said?

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What has God communicated? And therefore it's not what man thinks, but what God has said. And so Nicodemus is thinking here through a man -centered lens.

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He's thinking, born again. Well, I've already been born once. How can I possibly do that again?

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And he's missing the point that God is communicating to him in the person of Jesus Christ.

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So Jesus' answer said, truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born of water and the spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God.

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So obviously one has to be born of water, meaning you have to have a physical birth. There are no non -existent human beings in the kingdom of God.

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One must exist. That is a prerequisite. You have to actually exist to be in the kingdom of God.

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And you have to be born of the spirit, meaning your spirit has to be raised to life. And you're gonna hear me repeat that phrase all throughout these episodes as Calvinist man teaches you about these things because it is the truly the greatest miracle that anyone can experience, anyone can witness, or anyone can be a part of is to see a person, whether it's yourself or someone else, have their spirit raised to life in Christ by the

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Holy Spirit of God, the third person of the Trinity. And so this is the prerequisite. You have to be born, you have to exist, and you also have to be saved.

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You have to be raised to life by the spirit to enter the kingdom of God. You don't enter the kingdom of God by repeating a prayer or following a list of do's and don'ts, knowing the right people, having a lot of money, all those things.

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Our obedience to Christ, our recognition of his lordship, our exercising faith in worship is all a result of one who has had their spirit raised to life.

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Our recognition of sin and repenting of it and putting our faith in Christ is a result of being raised to life in regeneration by the spirit.

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It doesn't produce it. And I believe scripture is clear on this based on what Jesus outlines here and other places, of course.

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That which is born of flesh is flesh and that which has been born of spirit is spirit. Do not marvel then that I said to you, you must be born again or from above.

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This phrase born again means born from above, born spiritually. The wind blows, and that's where we ended last time.

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So we're picking up in verse eight. The wind blows where it wishes and you hear it sound, but you do not know where it comes from and where it is going.

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So is everyone who has been born of the spirit. So they are in like fashion, like a literal spirit in the sense that the wind being blowing and no one knows where it's coming from or it's sound.

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The spiritual life is an immaterial thing. It's not something you can put your hands on.

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It's not something that you can see or hear. Cause notice he says, it blows where it wishes and you hear it sound.

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So you'll hear the results of it. You'll see the results of it. So we hear the wind blowing.

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We don't necessarily know where it's coming or where it's going, but you can see the results of the wind blowing. If the wind blows, say there's an old wooden shed out in a yard and the wind blows really hard, knocks it over.

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You didn't physically literally see the wind, but we would say something like, well,

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I saw the wind. Well, how? It's immaterial. It's not visible.

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What we mean is that we saw what the wind did. We saw the results of the wind.

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So yes, then it is true to say, I saw the wind, even though we may not mean it ultra literally in that sense, but we literally mean, yes,

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I did see the wind because I see what it accomplished or what it did. That's the point he's making here.

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So is everyone who is born of the spirit. This is the whole point in James chapter two.

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And he says, you know, show me your work, show me your faith, that whole thing. It's yes and yes.

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Yes, you will demonstrate works. Yes, you will demonstrate faith and obedience, but yes, it's because of your faith.

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It's faith and works working together, not to save you. Our justification is by faith alone, but our faith that is what saves us is a result of being raised to life by the spirit.

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And so the spiritual birth, this spirit living, the

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Christians that live and worship in spirit and truth, it always say, well, how do I know you're saved?

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How do I know your spirit's been raised to life? How do I know you're really a

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Christian or the power of God is on your life? Well, it's not something you can physically see literally, but you can see the results of it.

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A person that is truly born again, that is part of the kingdom of God. You won't literally see their wind to borrow the term here, but you'll see what their wind produces.

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And remember, he says you're born of the spirit, meaning the Holy Spirit. So it's not you that's producing it.

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It's the Holy Spirit that's working in you and through you. And it's his power that demonstrates that he's changed your life in the works and obedience and the faith that is produced in you.

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And that's the whole crux of the matter when it comes to being born again. And so Nicodemus answered him and said again, and he says, how can these things be?

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Well, he's confused because his whole life he's been, I believe he was on the Sanhedrin, if I'm not mistaken.

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I might be mistaken by that. I'm pretty sure he was. But regardless, he's a Jewish believer. He's someone that's always thought in terms of, okay, the law says this and I do that.

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And then I can be right with God. And he's like, somebody can be made right with God and they've done nothing to accomplish it.

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God just simply makes them right because he raises them to life. And yes, you'll be born again, just as we have nothing to do with our physical birth.

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I didn't do what was necessary to create me. I was just simply created. The same way

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Jesus is making it clear here, it has to do with your spiritual birth. You have nothing to do with it.

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It's done in you and for you. Jesus answers him in verse 10 and says, are you the teacher of Israel and you do not understand these things?

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Jesus, a lot of the time, would confront and hold Old Testament people accountable for what was said in the scripture.

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Yes, this is God in human flesh, but we need to take the same view of scripture that Jesus does, that it's infallible, it's inerrant.

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It's what God has said and what God has revealed. And he says, if you'd have known, he tells one group of people, if you truly understood

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Moses and Abraham and all of them, you would know me. And it's essentially what he's saying here. How could you be so well -versed in the scriptures,

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Nicodemus, and not understand? Because it's there. Jeremiah, it's all throughout the

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Old Testament. It is there, although, and I'm hyper -spiritual on here.

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You obviously have the lens of hindsight and we have the full canon, so we need to be careful not to pile on our

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Old Testament friends here. But yes, they didn't have the full canon, the full revelation like we do.

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And so he says in verse 11, truly, truly, I say to you, we speak of what we know and bear witness of what we have seen, and you do not accept our witness.

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If I told you earthly things and you do not believe, how will you believe if I tell you heavenly things?

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No one has ascended into heaven, but he who descended from heaven, the son of man.

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And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so the son of man be lifted up.

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And so he's predicting the manner in which he will die here. When Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, it was for all those to be healed by that.

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And so the same way, in the same manner, by looking upon the son, we have salvation, we have forgiveness for our sins, we have true healing, true peace, all those things that we absolutely need, we find in Christ.

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And what Moses did was a precursor or a foreshadowing of what the true

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Messiah would do. And so he says here, so that whoever believes will in him have eternal life.

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Notice this passage here is not teaching about the sense of what we talk about, capacity, total depravity in terms of whether one can or cannot believe.

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It says whoever believes, and of course, verse 16 says that whoever believes in him should not perish.

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This passage here is not teaching about whether one has that capacity, although he's just directly stating you must be born again.

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There's something about you pre -salvation the way you were born that doesn't automatically put you in the kingdom of God, so something has to change.

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That's what this text is teaching. So Jesus is teaching here, you have to be born again to enter the kingdom of God.

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The kingdom is like this, it's like the wind, it's spiritual, it can't be seen literally, but it can see what it produces, you see the results.

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Nicodemus doesn't understand. So he says, look, just like Moses lifted up the servant, everyone that looks upon me will be saved and have peace and have righteousness.

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Whoever believes in him, the Son of Man, Jesus Christ, has eternal life.

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That isn't teaching capacity. So the whole argument we have, Calvinist versus Arminian, you know, provisionists, and whether someone can believe without anything being done to them, or if it's that synergism, or if it's

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God and man working together, you know, God sort of prods or pushes or kind of leans somebody in the right direction and they accept and it's sort of a man and God working together, or is it monergism, which is the reformed perspective, it's all of God, without God raising you to life, you would die in your sin, loving your sin, choosing your sin, have no desire to love

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God. That debate is not what is found here. And that's one of the reasons

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I wanted to start here. We need to make sure that we interpret the text of Scripture based on what it's saying and its context and all those things, but only take our application as far as the text takes us.

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So when it says whoever believes, it's not saying, and this is largely what it comes from, is the independent fundamentalist movement and King James -onlyism that says what says in the

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King James, whosoever. And this is the difference between man -centered theology and God -centered theology, a man -centered understanding of the

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English word whosoever, we naturally attach capacity to that.

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Well, if it says whosoever, that must mean, well, whoever, anybody can do this.

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No, that's not what's being said here. For example, in John 3 .16,

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when it says, for God so loved the world, that gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish, but have eternal life, in the original language, what that is saying, it isn't saying whosoever, anybody can do this, it's saying all the believing ones will have eternal life.

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All those believing in Him have eternal life. It's just simply making a simple declarative statement that all the people that are the believing ones that have faith, it's a category determination here.

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You have a category of people that are unsaved, they're not, they've been born of the flesh, but they haven't been born of the spirit, so they're not part of the kingdom of God, they're not demonstrating in their life what the spirit of God looks like in their life.

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Then you have another category of here, of all those that have belief, repentant of their sin, they're demonstrating righteousness, the spirit of God is moving in their life, so just as you see the wind knock over a shed, you'll see the wind of the spirit of God in this sense moving in their life, producing righteousness, and so there's two categories of people.

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And what Jesus is saying here, all those in the category of believing are the ones that in Christ have eternal life, because this passage is not teaching about whether one has that capacity.

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It is demonstrating that a person needs to be born again, but whether or not a man can do this on his own or by the will of God, now

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I would argue there is enough here that one could come to that conclusion in this sense. He's saying you have to be born again or born from above, and since he's using the example of the mother and we had no control over our physical birth,

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I believe there's enough here to tie an application that it would follow logically that we would have nothing to do with our spiritual birth.

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So I'm not saying that this text is completely absent of capacity.

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More of what I'm saying is that any application about capacity that you can make from this text needs to be consistent with what the text is saying.

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And if you follow the logic of the text, Jesus is using an example that just as you had nothing to do with your physical birth, so it follows with your spiritual.

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It would be inconsistent with the text to then somehow grant man this full capacity of belief or rejection as if he had a neutral, there's neutrality, and he somehow could go either way when he had no control over his physical birth.

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And that's the neutrality myth is one thing you find in all the non -reformed perspectives pretty much is that somehow man's neutral and if he's just nudged one way or the other.

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But where you get into trouble there is a lot of the perspectives that say, well, it's all up to man and man has to choose.

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Man can reject or choose Christ and God can't have nothing to do with it. No other influence, it has to come straight from his choice.

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Those same people will still pray for God to help save so -and -so. So there's inconsistency there.

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I believe the reformed perspective is the most consistent because we can pray, God, I pray that you would save so -and -so.

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We know full well that he has the power if he chooses to do so. But at the same time, we recognize it's

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God's decree and God's will, not our own. And so if it turns out that that person would not be saved, we would submit our desires to the decree of God, to the will of God.

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And so, yes, I believe if you are consistent with the text, you can draw some capacity application out of this.

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But we need to keep in mind the main point of the text is to communicate to Nicodemus and to communicate to us that man's greatest need is to be born again spiritually.

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And that if one is born spiritually, not only are they a part of the kingdom of God, but they demonstrate that they've been born again spiritually in like manner of how we see the wind moving and producing and doing things.

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And so when he says here, whoever believes, he's just simply saying, yes, all the believing ones have eternal life.

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There is a more eternal truth and a more concrete truth here in that with this text, you can say more confidently that it is the best text in scripture to say with absolute certainty that every single believing one has eternal life.

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So those that would say, well, you know, you may be a believing one, but you may gain eternal life through obedience or through doing certain rituals or things like that.

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This scripture dispels that myth of greater breakdown of categories where, okay, well, you may have

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Christians, but then, you know, you have mature Christians, immature Christians, obedient Christians, disobedient

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Christians. And based on where you fall in these categories, you have certain things. And, you know, the goal is to funnel down here and get to eternal life.

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This text completely destroys any of that teaching. This text is very clear that those that are born again, those that are the believing ones, every single one, every whoever, every believing one has eternal life.

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So in that sense, I would say it's not teaching about capacity or something that someone can do to be saved and know they have eternal life.

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The key here is that all the believing ones have eternal life.

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It is a result and it is part of our assurance that we're saved because God tells us here that God loved the world in this way.

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This word translated world here is cosmos, the created order. He loves it in this way that he gives the only begotten, the monogamized, the unique, the one and only son in that whoever believes, the believing ones will be saved.

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They shall not perish. They have eternal life as a current possession as a result of being born again.

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You naturally believe and you naturally are obedient. You naturally will do the things that are consistent with kingdom living.

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And so it can be sort of difficult to weed through this at times and say, well, how much is capacity being taught?

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How much is it just a logical conclusion? We do make sure we're very careful that we stick to what the text says and any application or conclusions we draw from it would be consistent with what is being said and what is not being said.

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And so just by way of review here, we'll pick up in verse 17 next time.

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This text is clearly teaching. You must be born again to enter the kingdom of God.

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Just like you were born physically, you must be born spiritually. Just as how you had nothing to do with your physical birth, you really have nothing to do with your spiritual birth here.

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It's something that is done in you and to you. It says, unless you're born again, you cannot see the kingdom of God.

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And how do you know you're born again? Just like the spirit moves and the wind blows, you will see the results.

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And also that all the believing ones, all those that have been born again have the guarantee and the promise that they do have eternal life in like manner, like when

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Moses lifted up the serpent. All those that looked to the serpent and were healed, the same, in fact, is an even greater promise and an even greater miracle, an even greater thing that occurs when someone looks upon Christ because all their sins are forgiven and they have eternal life, which is not just a quantitative, but a qualitative thing.

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And so great, deep truth here. I hope this is something that you have enjoyed.

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I hope this has been understandable for you. I hope you see the points I'm trying to draw and to make here about how we need to be

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God -centered and how we approach this. And so I want you to go into the text yourself and study for yourself and do some deep diving as well.

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So thank you for joining me here on Adventures with Calvinist Man. And remember, I am your reformed superhero,