I recently heard a message on 2 Cor 5:17: “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; old things have passed away; behold, all things have become new.” The speaker said this verse proves that if a Christian has genuine faith, his life will change. Christ is in every believer, and He will be evident in his life. Every child of God will show that he is a new creation by showing that he is a child of the King through his actions.
I understand that part of the problem with this verse is that he is is not in the original, which is why those words are in italics. It may be that Paul means the believer has entered into a new kind of existence—a new creation—and not that the believer himself is a new creation.
But what about the point the speaker was making? If a person is born from above—if he has received the new birth—will he reflect that he is the child of a perfectly holy Father by living a holy life? Is that a guarantee? If a person does not live a holy life, can we conclude that he is not a believer?
Based on 2 Cor 5:17, such a statement might appear logical on the surface. However, a little reflection will reveal that it is absurd. The Bible offers plenty of examples of God’s people living unrighteous lives.
And experience also tells us that children often do not reflect their parents’ character or qualities. Anyone over the age of twenty knows what I mean.
Let’s consider a hypothetical situation that I am sure is similar (in at least some ways) to the experience of many parents. Suppose there are two Nobel Prize winners in physics who marry. They won the prize because of their high intelligence and work ethic. Suppose they have a son.
This son grows up addicted to his smartphone. He spends hours every day looking at YouTube videos of cats doing funny tricks. He becomes addicted to porn. His friends introduce him to marijuana, and he imbibes. His habit robs him of any drive to succeed. He is content doing what he does, knowing his parents’ wealth will allow him to live the life he enjoys.
Such a young man would not reflect his parents’ intelligence or work ethic. We would say that he is not like his parents at all. Again, we know people like that.
How strange would it be, however, if we questioned the son’s paternity? Imagine someone’s saying, “He cannot be the son of those two parents. There must have been a mix-up at the hospital. That poor couple was given the wrong baby!” Anyone who made such a statement would do so only in jest.
It would also be a joke if the father said to the mother, “There is no way that boy is mine. He is not like me in any way. You obviously had an affair with our milkman. That guy was not the sharpest knife in the drawer and was not a hard worker. I want a DNA test to prove ‘our’ son is not mine!”
Again, nobody would take such a statement seriously. We all recognize that a child might not grow up to be like their parents. Cultures change. People may not have good parenting skills. Kids might be influenced by the wrong kind of crowd. That is a recurring theme in the book of Proverbs. (My guess is that some people are just plain lazy.)
The same thing is true concerning our spiritual birth. Everybody who has believed in Jesus for eternal life has been born from above. We are children of God.
But there is no guarantee that our lives will reflect that birth. People might look at us and rightly conclude that we are nothing like our holy Father. There are many reasons that might occur. Maybe we have not been taught well. Maybe we fall in with the wrong crowd and come to love the world. Maybe we’re slugs.
The Nobel Prize-winning father in my hypothetical example will find out, after the DNA test, that the lazy, pot-smoking young man in his basement is indeed his son. If a person has believed in Jesus for eternal life but lives unrighteously, the same thing is true. A spiritual DNA test would show that he is a child of the King.
His spiritual birth will become evident in the resurrection (John 6:40). The lazy son of the physicist missed out on a productive life and wasted it. The disobedient believer will also have wasted his life and lost eternal rewards. But in both cases, the father/Father will say, “That is my boy.”
