First Regenerated; Then We Seek God
James Laning argues that the biblical order of salvation places regeneration before seeking—that only a spiritually dead person made alive by God's power will ever truly seek Him. The article defends the Reformed doctrine that unregenerate persons cannot and will not seek God, directly opposing those who teach that human seeking precedes divine regeneration, and grounds this position in careful exegesis of Romans 3:10-11 and the Psalms.
Previous article in this series: May 1, 2013, p. 348. A person whose spiritual heart is dead is said to be unregenerate. In this article we consider the fact that an unregenerate person will never call out to God for salvation. The proper order, therefore, is this: First God gives a person a new heart, and only then does he begin to seek God. Although that is the proper order, many professing Christians teach the opposite. They say that first an unregenerate person must seek God, and only...
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