Must. Post.

Team Pyro has dragged out the Lordship thread for three days, I can’t see why can’t revisit it. 🙂

One of the comments, by ‘Don Sands’ in the thread now yearning for 400 posts was this:

“we need to walk a fine line” -Phil

“we are sinners and saints all at once! That is the paradox of evangelicalism. The Antinomian and the Perfectionist would abolish the paradox– the one drowning the saint in the sinner, and the other concealing the sinner in the saint.” B. B. Warfield

Which captures the question succinctly.

One of those arguing for a non-Lordship, or at least contra-Phil, Lou Martuneac suggests:

This position means man cannot believe or express faith and repentance unless he has first been regenerated, been born again.

The Bible has a different view. Jesus said, “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.”

Which is fairly cherty-picking scripture, since if you back up in the context of the verse Jesus answers the question:

Nicodemus said to him, “How can a man be born when he is old? Can he enter a second time into his mother’s womb and be born?” Jesus answered, “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God. That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit. Do not marvel that I said to you, ‘You must be born again.’ The wind blows where it wishes, and you hear its sound, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.” (John 3:4ff)

It is an arguable point, I suppose that the 3:16 verse is answering a different question. Nicodemus marveled at how on could be born again, and Jesus is saying it is a doing of the Spirit, not of man. Isn’t that what regeneration is, a work of the Spirit?