The Old Nature and the New Birth
George Cutting
Those who have much to do with the difficulties and exercises of the newly converted are constantly hearing some such expression as this: ‘I thought I was saved once, but I now begin to fear that after all I’ve only been deceiving myself. Not only do I feel no better in myself, but, if anything, even worse than before I professed to be converted.’
Now, in such cases, one generally finds that it is not so much their sins that trouble them as the heart-sickening disappointment they feel as more and more the truth is forced upon them that their new birth has not only effected no improvement in their evil nature but that that nature seems much worse than before their conversion. Then comes many a fruitless effort to improve it; but, alas! only to end in deeper wretchedness than ever. In such a state of soul Satan finds but too fitting an opportunity of hurling his terrible darts. He suggests that they are only miserable hypocrites, professing to be what they know they are not; that they had far better give up the whole thing and own that they have never been converted at all!
Oh, what intense soul-agony do such assaults cause, when, as yet, true liberty is unknown!
God’s facts and our experiences
Many believers pass through the sorest distress because they are continually searching their own hearts for evidence that they have been truly converted to God. ‘When I compare my daily experience with the plain truths in God’s Word’, such a soul will say, ‘I begin to fear that I am not born again at all.’
In 1 John, three absolute facts are stated about the one who is ‘born of God’:
1. he does not and cannot sin (3:9);
2. he overcomes the world (5:4); and
3. the wicked one does not touch him (5:18).
Now, in the face of such scriptures, one is bound to confess:
1. I can, and, alas!, do sin;
2. instead of my overcoming the world, it constantly overcomes me; and
3. the enemy has defeated me times without number — thus he does touch me.
Let us say for our comfort that those who are ‘dead in [their] sins’ (Col. 2:13) never experience such conflict, only converted ones who really desire to answer to the thoughts and wishes of God. The unconverted desire not the knowledge of His ways (Job 21:14). They have ‘no fear of God before their eyes’ (Rom. 3:18).
Let us look at another impossibility: ‘the carnal mind [literally ‘mind of the flesh’] 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’ (Rom. 8:7–8). Mark well these important contrasts:
1. The one who is ‘in the flesh’, as ‘born of the flesh’ (John 3:6), ‘cannot please God’.
2. The one who is ‘born of God doth not commit sin’ (1 John 3:9).
It may be well to state here what is meant by ‘the flesh’ in the subject before us. It is the evil nature in every child of Adam, poisoned by indwelling sin. It is the real source of every sinful action performed by him.
Two distinct natures in one person
We have an evil nature from our natural birth, so evil that God says it is impossible to make it subject to His holy law. It cannot please Him. ‘Behold’, says the psalmist, ‘I was shapen in iniquity; and in sin did my mother conceive me’ (Ps. 51:5). At our spiritual or second birth we received, through the sovereign operation of the Spirit by means of the Word of God (Jas. 1:18; 1 Pet. 1:23), another nature entirely, a ‘divine nature’ (2 Pet. 1:4). The blessed Lord puts it to Nicodemus in a few words thus: ‘That which is born of the flesh is flesh; and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit’ (John 3:6). So the believer actually possesses two natures: ‘that which is born of the flesh’, and which, because of its very nature, ‘cannot please God’; and ‘that which is born of the Spirit’, which from its essential nature ‘cannot sin, because [it] is born of God’. In Romans 7, we find these two natures distinctly mentioned side by side. See, for example, the last verse: ‘So then with the mind [the renewed mind, or, as we have been expressing it, the new nature] I myself serve the law of God; but with the flesh [the old nature] the law of sin.’ Also verses 22–23: ‘I delight in the law of God after the inward man: but I see another law in my members, warring against the law of my mind’.
Is the old nature improved by the new?
There is but one answer: nothing can improve the flesh. It was tried in every possible way, from the fall of Adam in Eden to the cross of Christ at Calvary. And what was the result? God’s holy law was wilfully broken, particularly when He came righteously demanding obedience from man. His Son was cruelly murdered when He visited this world in grace to man. Indeed, instead of the presence of a divine life improving the old nature, it only manifests its utter badness.
But if my old nature can neither be forgiven nor improved, two difficulties at once present themselves:
1. How can I be delivered from it?
2. How do I get power over it?
In considering these difficulties, it will be well to notice the important difference in Scripture between ‘sin’ in the flesh and ‘sins’. Very frequently, the evil principle, born in us naturally, is simply called ‘sin’, while the evil actions, words and thoughts which are the consequence of possessing this corrupt nature are called ‘sins’. We see the distinction in 1 John 1:8–9: ‘if we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us’; and: ‘if we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins’. This distinction is of the greater importance when we find in Scripture that while, through the shedding of the blood of Christ, God forgives our sinful deeds (that is, our sins), He never forgives sin, but ‘condemns’ or judges it. Suppose a child who has naturally a violent temper. In a fit of passion one day, he throws a book at his brother, and breaks a large pane of glass in the window. Well, upon penitent confession of the naughty deed, the parents would be free to forgive him. But what about the bad temper that made him do it? Do they forgive that? Impossible! They detest it, and, if they could, would get rid of it. They utterly condemn it. And so I repeat: though God freely forgives the believer’s sins, He never forgives the indwelling sin. Condemnation is the only thing He can righteously apply to it. Death is our only way out of it ‘God sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh, and for sin [a sacrifice for sin], condemned sin in the flesh’ (Rom. 8:3).
In the earlier chapters of Romans, the apostle is occupied in demonstrating our deliverance from sins; but in chapter 6 he shows how we are delivered from sin: ‘he that has died is justified from sin’ (v. 7). Scripture teaches that not only did Christ go down into death for the believer, but that the believer himself has been into death: ‘for ye have died’ (Col. 3:3). Thus all that we are by nature, as well as all that we have done, has already been dealt with on the cross; and He who there bore our condemnation said, ‘It is finished’ (John 19:30). Who then shall condemn us? Is there anything left to condemn? No, nothing. Does Satan bring our sins before us? We have neither to deny nor excuse them; by faith we simply answer, ‘Christ died for them.’ Is it the sinfulness of our nature that he would harass us with? Faith can add: ‘And I died too.’
But now comes a practical difficulty with many. The writer once heard a believer pray most earnestly that he ‘might feel that he was dead with Christ’. But does God ever speak about our feeling dead? Never. He says, ‘reckon ye also yourselves to be dead indeed unto sin, but alive unto God through Jesus Christ our Lord’ (Rom. 6:11). We are called on to believe that in Christ’s death we died simply because God says so, and not because we feel dead, or ever will. God Himself clearly states the fact for us, and says ‘ye are dead’. Thus our old standing, as children of fallen Adam, came to an end before God at the cross, or, as Scripture puts it, ‘our old man is crucified with him’ (Rom. 6:6), and we are now connected in life with the last Adam — the risen Christ — or, as it is expressed in Romans 7:4: ‘married to another, even to him who is raised from the dead’. As believers, we have been brought into a new position altogether. He who took our condemnation, by being made sin for us upon the cross, is now risen out of death; and since God sees us ‘in Him’ we are necessarily beyond the reach of condemnation.
When the believer who has learned from God these blessed truths, discovers, as he surely will, that sin still dwells in him, and that the old nature is as bad as ever, or worse, he can, instead of fruitlessly attempting to make it better, take sides with God against it. He never regards it as anything but the deadliest enemy, ever to be distrusted, and never to be indulged. He knows that God has utterly condemned it at the cross, and, therefore, he utterly condemns it too. He reckons himself to be dead to it, but ‘alive to God in Christ Jesus’ (Rom. 6:11).
Oh, what a comfort it is that God is expecting no good thing from the flesh! He has given it up for ever as a totally worthless thing, and He would have us do the same! Neither has it any rightful claim upon us. We are no longer debtors to the flesh to live according to the flesh (Rom. 8:12). And, though still responsible to exercise the greatest watchfulness in not allowing it to act, yet God gives us, through the death and resurrection of Christ, to regard it as no longer having any place in our new state as ‘in the Spirit’ before Him (Rom. 8:9). The cross of Christ for ever snapped the link that we once had with the first Adam, fallen, and the Holy Ghost has brought into our souls the life of the last Adam, risen. The only life that we now have before us is the life of Christ. So the apostle could say: ‘I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me: and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me, and gave Himself for me’ (Gal. 2:20).
What is the secret of our power?
What troubles the new convert is that he cannot make the flesh to be what the Word of God teaches him a new-born soul ought to be, and the law, though he delights in it after the inward man, gives him no power. In other words, he is trying to accomplish what God has declared to be an utter impossibility: making the flesh subject to His holy law (Rom. 8:7–8). He finds that the flesh will mind the things of the flesh, and is very enmity itself to the law of God, and even to God Himself. And since this is so, the greater his earnestness to accomplish this impossibility the more intense his misery. Though the new-born soul has a nature that ‘would do good’ yet he finds, alas! that ‘evil is present with [him]’ (7:21), and it is not until he gives up his struggle as utterly hopeless and looks outside himself crying, ‘O wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me?’ that deliverance really comes. And then he thanks God through Jesus Christ (vs. 24–25). Thus he has learned what everyone must learn before deliverance can be realised in an experimental way: first, that the flesh is an utterly worthless thing, that there is neither good in it nor remedy for it (Rom. 7:18; 8:7), and second, that even in the new nature, with all its right desires, there is no real power either for good or against evil. So the Spirit of God does more than merely quicken a dead sinner into life. He afterwards becomes the power of that life. When the new-born soul believes the ‘gospel of [his] salvation’, the Holy Spirit, as a distinct person, comes into him as an abiding dweller there (Eph. 1:13). He is ‘sealed unto the day of redemption’ — the redemption of the body (4:30). According to 1 Corinthians 6:19–20, his body becomes ‘the temple of the Holy Ghost’ which is in him. He is no longer his own, but ‘bought with a price’.
Herein is the believer’s power for every activity that is according to God. Here is his power to control the flesh, to ‘mortify the deeds of the body’ (Rom. 8:13).
Which nature shall I gratify?
There are not only two natures, but with their different origins they have different tastes. Thus, there are ‘the things of the flesh’ and ‘the things of the Spirit’ (Rom. 8:5). Let us not forget that their natures will be daily calling our attention to their distinctive cravings. We are told therefore in Romans 13:14 to make no provision for the flesh to fulfil its lusts, and in 1 Peter 2:11 to ‘abstain from fleshly lusts, which war against the soul’. On the other hand, we are exhorted: ‘as newborn babes, desire the sincere milk of the word, that ye may grow thereby’ (1 Pet. 2:2). Let us then be like vigilant sentries on the watch, challenging all that we read, think, do or say with this test: will this be food for the renewed nature, or will it minister to the flesh? Let us allow nothing that would do the latter. Peter warns us that it is our fleshly lusts which ‘war against the soul’.
May increased tenderness of conscience and distrust of self be ours. May Christ Himself be more and more our daily food and His precious Word our constant delight.[1]
[1] Extracted and adapted.
From: Truth and Testimony, 2023