In our last blog, we discussed the miracle of regeneration. To summarize the main point concerning how regeneration relates to the doctrine of irresistible grace, regeneration is the means that God has chosen in our lives to bring about a genuine willingness to be drawn to His saving grace. Non-reformed Christian circles have a strong tendency to emphasize the fact that God doesn’t save anyone in such a way that sinners are being forcibly dragged into the kingdom of heaven kicking and screaming. However, this is a strawman argument against the Calvinistic teaching concerning regeneration because God doesn’t “force” you to choose Christ any more than He would “force” you to use jelly instead of honey in your peanut butter sandwich.
Scripture does in fact teach that humans have a creaturely will and are, therefore, culpable for the sinful choices they make. If people upon hearing the proclaimed gospel decide not to repent and they die in their iniquity, God promises that He will hold them accountable for violating His laws and sentence them to an eternity in the lake of fire. The Calvinistic understanding is that in order to be saved, in order to have a genuine desire for the grace of God in the first place, we have to be regenerated. What exactly does that regeneration look like? How does God completely change someone’s heart to have desires which are in accordance to the new nature? That, my friend, is the miraculous nature of regeneration. We know it happened, just as we know that Jesus turned water into wine and raised Lazarus from the dead, but we can’t truly explain or fully wrap our minds around how it happened! It is precisely what Jesus described as the wind that blows and while we can hear the sound of it, we don’t know where it came from or where it is going (John 3:8).
And, it is because of the mysterious nature of regeneration that I believe there is much confusion among believers concerning the issue of ordo salutis (order of salvation). As we began touching on last time, perhaps the crux of the issue that divides reformed and non-reformed Christians is summed up by this question: does regeneration precede faith, or does faith precede regeneration? Now of course, we understand that the regenerating work of the Spirit and salvific faith occur at exactly the same moment in real time. We can, indeed, say the same thing about other facets of our salvation such as repentance, justification, adoption, conversion, and so on. What we are really discussing here is not a chronological matter but a logical order that exists in the infinite mind of God. Consequently, it is easy to see why many saints struggle with understanding the proper order of salvation. Many truly are convinced that certain passages, some of which we discussed in our last blog, require a faith-precedes-regeneration ordo salutis to make sense of those texts. This is precisely what happened with the Remonstrants in the early 17th Century. These were people who closely followed the work of Jacobus Arminius, and like their predecessor, presupposed that faith precedes regeneration. In response to the teachings of John Calvin, they came up with what became known as the Five Articles of Remonstrance. The fourth article reads as follows:
That this grace of God is the beginning, continuance, and accomplishment of all good, even to this extent, that the regenerate man himself, without prevenient or assisting, awakening, following and cooperative grace, can neither think, will, nor do good, nor withstand any temptations to evil; so that all good deeds or movements, that can be conceived, must be ascribed to the grace of God in Christ. But respects the mode of the operation of this grace, it is not irresistible; inasmuch as it is written concerning many, that they have resisted the Holy Ghost. Acts 7, and elsewhere in many places.
This leads us to our question for today: Can we resist the Holy Spirit? This Remonstrance article cites Acts 7 as a proof-text for the belief that unbelievers can indeed resist the Holy Spirit when He is calling them to salvation. But is that what we find in that passage? Let’s look at the context, beginning in the previous chapter. A Christian in the early church by the name of Stephen was chosen by the apostles to fulfill ministry needs, and the Holy Spirit gave him a unique ability to perform signs and wonders. But, it was the words he spoke that got him arrested by the religious leaders, and he was, therefore, called by the high priest to defend himself in the Council. The entirety of Acts 7 is, then, an account of Stephen’s defense which is a brilliant sermon wherein he summarized Israel’s history to make one crucial point: Israel has a history of rejecting the Lord their God, and the Jews in his own day were no different! In so doing, he concludes his indictment on the Jews with these words, “You men who are stiff-necked and uncircumcised in heart and ears are always resisting the Holy Spirit; you are doing just as your fathers did.” (v. 51).
What is Stephen saying here? Indeed, there is a sense in which the Jews of his time had heard the gospel message clearly proclaimed in their synagogues, yet they refused to repent of their sin and turn to Jesus their Messiah. They are, in the words of Stephen, “resisting the Holy Spirit” by doing what Paul later described as “suppressing the truth in unrighteousness” (Romans 1:18). The Holy Spirit, the third Member of the Trinity, has distinct roles in the affairs of mankind. One such role that He performs is bringing conviction to the whole world concerning sin, righteousness, and judgment (John 16:8). The unbelieving world hates the truth because they love their evil deeds and will do anything to suppress that truth, even if that means resisting the very call to salvation from the Spirit Himself. Why are unbelievers this way? Stephen answers that question by describing them as “stiff-necked, uncircumcised in heart and ears”. It means they haven’t been regenerated! Their desires haven’t changed because they still long for their sin rather than Christ.
But are these unbelieving Jews “resisting the Holy Spirit” in the manner in which the Remonstrants described it? This is where I must draw the line in the sand and respectfully disagree with my Arminian friends because there is something much more fundamental going on that is causing these Jews, and by extension all unbelievers, to resist the Holy Spirit. The Arminian paints “resisting the Holy Spirit” as a situation where God is actively offering saving grace to the unbeliever, but rather than accept God’s offer, he rejects the gospel, thereby resisting the Holy Spirit. But, this is not what Stephen is saying in that passage. Instead, notice that he says they always resist. This is describing the perpetuation of their resistance. This is not talking about a series of isolated decisions that are made on the part of the unbelievers to resist the Holy Spirit; rather, this is something that is unceasing. In other words, it’s engrained in their very nature to resist the Holy Spirit. This is perfectly consistent with the biblical teaching concerning the true degree of our sinful nature apart from Christ, known as the doctrine of total depravity. All of us are sinners from the very moment of our conception, as David wrote in Psalm 51, and as a result of the Fall of Adam, our thoughts and intentions are only evil continually. Until regeneration takes place, we are hopelessly trapped in our darkness, hating any kind of light that exposes our sin. To be unregenerate and a resister of the Holy Spirit is, therefore, one in the same.
There is another way to understand Acts 7 (along with other similar passages such as John 3:16 and Romans 10:9), and it involves drawing a distinction between the general call and effectual call which we will cover in detail next time.