What should I eat? What will I wear? What am I going to do tonight?
Decisions. Every day humans make decisions. We weigh the options and go one way or the other. Free will. A responsibility. A privilege.
While we are free to make choices in many areas of life, there comes a moment when we can’t make such choices anymore. When we die. Those dead can choose nothing. No longer can they choose what to wear. No longer can they choose how to comb their hair. They are dead.
God says that by nature we are dead spiritually (Ephesians 2:1). While we may have free will in regard to certain physical decisions, it is impossible to speak about free will spiritually. To be dead is to have the ability to do nothing.
Is it proper, then, to suggest that the spiritually dead have the ability to choose either to believe in Christ or to reject Christ?
The Scripture agrees that people have the ability to reject Christ. Jesus, mourning the rejection of so many Jews, said, “Jerusalem, Jerusalem, . . . how often I have longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, but you were not willing” (Matthew 23:37). We bear the blame and the consequences for rejection.
But do we share the credit for acceptance? Human logic would insist, “Yes.” We must have some part, if only the smallest. But by nature we are spiritually dead. Dead people can do nothing.
Human logic is dashed. Human pride is crushed. We wonder out loud, “Who then can be saved?”
God’s answer? With man this is impossible, but with God all things are possible.
“It is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this not from yourselves, it is the gift of God” (Ephesians 2:8). Whatever faith is--whatever acceptance is--it is not an act produced by the human will, but it is a gift of God himself.
We were dead. To believe is to be alive. Whatever faith is, it is a resurrection. “You were dead in your transgressions and sins” (Ephesians 2:1), “but because of his great love for us, God, who is rich in mercy, made us alive with Christ even when we were dead in transgressions—it is by grace you have been saved” (Ephesians 2:4-5).
What is the power to make such a resurrection occur? “Faith comes by hearing the message” (Romans 10:17). “For you have been born again, not of perishable seed, but of imperishable, through the living and enduring word of God” (1 Peter 1:23).
Just as the words of Jesus outside the tomb of Lazarus were the power to make one physically dead come to life, so the good news that Jesus is the Savior of the world is power to make the spiritually dead come to life.
The dead cannot make a decision. But there was a decision made. God’s graciously chose to give his children life. Praise his glorious grace!