Several years ago, I was speaking in Ghana, Africa to a group of high school young people. I wanted to illustrate to them the difference between a reward they must work for and a gift that is freely bestowed on the undeserving.
At the beginning of the presentation, I held up a Cedis, equivalent to a U.S. five-dollar bill. I offered the currency to anyone who would come forward to take it. The young people were hesitant and unbelieving. Finally, one brave young student arose and reluctantly came forward and took the bill. It was his. Those who did not arise and come to take the Cedis missed out on the gift.
“The problem with this analogy,” I told the class, “is that it is a false picture of salvation for it makes the sinner having to do something in order to be saved.”
“Now,” I continued, “I want everyone to bow your heads and close your eyes and think on the goodness of God.”
While heads were bowed and eyes were closed, I began to walk around the room and quietly placed on each student’s desk a Cedi.
“Now, look up,” I said. Each student saw they had been given a gift they did not earn or deserve, they did not work for, and they did not have to do something in order to receive. Their gift was not based on something they did but on a gracious giver.
It was an imperfect illustration of salvation but it was better than many illustrations that only make salvation possible based on something the sinner does. It is not unusually for salvation to be presented as God’s free offer but really conditioned on the sinner doing something such as raising a hand, walking an aisle, saying a prayer, being baptized, joining a church, shedding tears at a mourner’s bench, or something else.
God has not made salvation possible but actual. The redemption Christ accomplished at Calvary is not hypothetical based on the sinner’s response, it is a redemption that is applied to those who are the heirs of salvation. On the night Jesus was born the angels said that the Messiah would save His people from their sins (Matthew 1:21). Jesus did not come to make sinners potentially savable. Jesus came to “seek and to save that which was lost” (Luke 19:10).
The salvation which is from God is that salvation which is sovereignly and freely bestowed on those who are helpless and hopeless because they are dead in trespasses and sin. Dead men cannot believe. Dead men cannot hear. Dead men cannot see. Dead men have no life principle in them. Dead men are dead.
If a dead man is to live then God must come to that soul and save, “Live!” Therefore, regeneration must precede faith. Once God says, “Live” to a soul dead in trespasses and sin, then there is the capacity to believe the gospel realizing that even the faith to believe is the gift of God so that it might be said, “Salvation is of the Lord.”
The Collected Works of Stanford E. Murrell 