Does regeneration come before faith?

from the old testament

• The human heart is entirely corrupt. Jeremiah noted that “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick; who can understand it?” (Jeremiah 17:9). We are incapable of understanding just how wicked our hearts are. That corruption is embedded in our nature. After we fell (Genesis 3), God judged us with corruption and death (vv 16–19). Then we read, “The LORD saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every intention of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually (Genesis 6:5). Even after he destroyed wicked humanity with the flood, He still said, “the intention of man’s heart is evil from his youth” (Genesis 8:21). Every person is inherently evil and corrupt.
• Even God’s people, those He chose (Deuteronomy 7:6–7) and to whom He gave His law (Exodus 20:1–2), were incapable of obeying Him (cf. Romans 8:3). God said that true change would only come in the future when He changed their nature: “I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit I will put within you. And I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh. And I will put my Spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statutes and be careful to obey my rules (Ezekiel 36:26–27).

from the new testament

• After Jesus came and died for sin (1 Peter 3:18), the only way of salvation was made possible (John 14:6). It is through faith in Jesus that one is saved (Romans 3:22–26). However, Scripture describes faith as a gift. Paul said, “By grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast” (Ephesians 2:8–9). While some argue that faith is not a work and thus can logically precede regeneration, the passage makes clear that everything that brings salvation is a gift of God.
• In contrast, the unregenerate person is called dead (Ephesians 2:1–3). The metaphor of death is intended to mean that just as a dead person cannot choose to live, a spiritually dead person is incapable of choosing spiritual life. Indeed, “The natural person does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are folly to him, and he is not able to understand them because they are spiritually discerned” (1 Corinthians 2:14). A ‘natural man,” an unregenerate person, is incapable of accepting what God says because it requires being spiritually awakened. Quoting from the Old Testament, Paul said, “None is righteous, no, not one; no one understands; no one seeks for God” (Romans 3:10–11).
• Faith pleases God (Hebrews 11:6), but if no one seeks God, then no one has faith until something changes. Jesus said that “unless one is born again he cannot see the kingdom of God” (John 3:3). He was saying that being born again is what enables one to see God’s Kingdom, i.e., to be saved. Being born again is another way of saying “regenerated.” Jesus described being born again as being born of the Spirit (John 3:5). The Spirit must somehow change an unbeliever into a believer before he or she can respond rightly to the call of repentance.
• Paul also described the unbeliever as enslaved to sin (Romans 6:17). He meant they were incapable of not sinning (Romans 6:20) and hostile to the truth (Romans 8:9). In contrast, the believer is one who has been freed from that slavery (Romans 6:18; cf. John 8:34).
• Additionally, Scripture says of believers that God must first draw them (John 6:44) and call them (Romans 8:30) before they are saved.
• When considering God’s sovereignty in salvation, the fact that unbelievers are, by nature, incapable and unwilling to be saved (cf. Romans 1:18–23) means that the logical ordering of salvation is regeneration, which makes one capable of understanding spiritual things and rightly appraising Jesus’ worth, immediately followed by faith.
• Because the logical order places regeneration first, but the chronological order is regeneration and faith at the same moment, Scripture can both say “Believe in the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved” (Acts 16:31) and “as many as were appointed to eternal life believed” (Acts 13:48 ) without contradiction. God must work, and in everyone He does, they believe and are saved.

implications for today

There are real theological debates about how exactly to logically order various aspects of salvation. Some true Christians strongly believe that faith logically precedes regeneration. However, as this article has tried to show, the natural understanding of our inability to believe because of sin (Romans 8:7–8), our spiritual deadness (Ephesians 2:1), statements that only those whom God draws are saved (John 6:44), and so forth, means that regeneration logically precedes faith.

That said, the order is logical, not chronological. They happen at the same moment in time. Scripture never teaches to “wait for regeneration” or to “regenerate, believe, and then confess” or any other such thing that implies we are to wait for God to work before we turn from our sin. Rather, while declaring God as sovereign (Romans 9:15–16), it also declares us as responsible. For example, Peter told the listeners to repent (Acts 2:38), Paul said that God “commands all people everywhere to repent” (Acts 17:30), and Jesus said that He would turn no one away who came to Him (John 6:37) and would keep all who did (John 6:39). The implication is that your worry should be whether or not you believe in Jesus, not whether God has regenerated you.

It’s good and helpful to be theologically accurate, and there are implications when we get the order wrong, but at the end of the day, regardless of the mechanics, we can affirm the New Testament: “Believe in the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved” (Acts 16:31)!