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The Birthing

 Part 1

By Warren Litzman 

“Ye must be born again” (John 3:7).

                                            Introduction

“Ye must be born again” is a favorite sermon topic, but relatively few Christians really understand what it means to be born again. Why is it such a rare thing to hear a simple exposition of what the new birth means and what takes place when one is born again? This has always perplexed me because the fact is our supernatural birth is as real as our natural birth.

In order to understand the birthing, or what it means to be born again, a historical setting may be helpful. In the Old Testament, salvation was of the soul. That makes salvation easy to understand because most of us grew up in religion where we learned a vocabulary to express the concept of salvation by our soul-winning campaigns and by being encouraged to be a soul-winner. The use of the word soul is primarily Old Testament terminology. In the Old Testament, the saving of the soul was all there was because the saving of the spirit by Christ was not yet a reality. Christ had not yet died on the cross, and no provision had been made to have an exchange in spirit wrought by Christ in the person at that time. This exchange takes place in the believer’s spirit; Satan out and Christ in. All soul salvation was of self-effort, and the person had to do something to make it happen. An example of this would be Abraham, who was said to be a great man of faith, but the Scripture states that what made him a great man was his obedience—which is self-effort. Obedience salvation requires that you do something to make it so. All salvation in the Old Testament was soulish with no exchange taking place in spirit.

In the Old Testament, the word soul is used eight times more than in the New Testament. In Paul’s epistles, he uses the word soul only nine times. There is little mention of soul in the New Testament because once Christ is birthed in the spirit of the believer, there is not anything you can do to improve the condition of the spirit. In the Old Testament, salvation was something that was done soulishly, and the human spirit (Satan’s nature, kindly referred to as “Adamic nature”) was brought under subjection. That was very tenuous because even the greatest people in the Old Testament had a difficult time bringing their spirit under subjection.

                                       The Liberating Secret

It is my understanding that the entire purpose of the third-dimensional world that exists around us is to facilitate what I see in the Scripture to be the “liberating secret.” The liberating secret is something hidden in God that no man in the Scriptures knew anything about until it was revealed to Paul by God (Gal. 1:15–16), and Paul told it to us in his epistles. Paul would finally summarize the liberating secret in Colossians 1:26–27 as “Christ in you, the hope of glory.” He would go on to teach us that the creature was a container with the Creator living His life in and through the creature. All this comes about as a result of the birthing.

The word birth, when used literally, always means a new life, which has the same nature as the parents, coming into existence. When a wolf or a sheep is born, there is a new life which has the wolf nature or the sheep nature, as the case may be. When a child is born into the world, a new life comes into existence. This life has the nature of the child’s parents which is sinful and subject to death. This is the birth that Jesus called “of the flesh,” and the result of that birth is flesh. This birth of the flesh receives its nature from Adam, the father of the human race. The Adamic nature, however, is a sin-nature or a Satan-nature. The only thing God could do with the flesh was to judge it, and the judgment resulted in condemnation and execution (Rom. 8:3; Gal. 2:19; Rom. 6:6). Scripture does not teach that the human being has a nature of its own. To be re-birthed does not mean that this life which is born of the flesh is changed or made over. Because Satan’s nature misused the Creator’s creation of the human, the creature had to have a miracle to ever function according to its original, Godly creation. That miracle would be an exchange of natures, making the new birth imperative.

The new birth is a birth in the Spirit. It is to be “born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God” (John 1:13). It is the coming into being of a new life which has the incorruptible and immortal (not subject to death) nature of its father, God. Of the new birth, Peter writes: “Being born again, not of corruptible seed but of incorruptible, by the word of God, which liveth and abideth forever” (1 Peter 1:23).

This seed not only lives forever, but it also remains (1 John 3:9) in the one who is born of God. Such life must be eternal, and that is what Jesus said it is (John 3:16). Life, which is eternal, cannot die. All who are born of the incorruptible seed have an incorruptible nature (the God-nature), which is eternal life. It is impossible for such to be unborn, for that would mean the corruption of the divine nature and the death of that which cannot die.

                            The Origin of the Plan of God

If someone were to ask you what your origin was, what would you say? Your first idea might be that you had a mother and a father, and when they came together you came out of their union. But that is not really your origin. Someone else might say, My origin was when I was saved. That is when I was birthed, or born again. But that would not be your origin either. You might even go all the way back to Adam and say that your origin was in Adam, your forefather. But that would not be correct either. In order to answer this question you must start with God and the plan He had before the foundation of the world:

“According as he hath chosen us in him [Christ] before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and without blame before him in love” (Eph. 1:4, author’s translation added).

What was behind this great plan of God? Before anything was created that is in the Bible, we are told that God had a house full of creatures. The creatures that God created had no sonship quality in them and did not bear the earmarks of God’s nature. Having a father spirit, God took one of these creatures and placed him as a son. He did not birth him as a son; He placed him as a son, and we know that son to be Lucifer. One day this son, Lucifer, who is called son of the morning in Isaiah 14:12, decided that he was greater than God and tried to take over God’s house, which led to God taking action.  

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