In John’s understanding, the potential child of God is first made alive by God, as a result of which he comes to believe on Christ, pursue righteousness, and love the brethren.
Which comes first, faith or life? The question is often asked in discussions of the differences between Calvinistic and Arminian theology, for it expresses the question of whether men choose God by deciding to believe on Christ or whether God first chooses men by making them alive in Christ, as a result of which they believe. John’s first verse answers this question in reference to the new birth. In none of the English versions is the full sense adequately communicated, for the differences in tense are not as striking in English as in Greek. In the Greek text the word “believe” is present tense, indicating a present, continuing activity. The word “born” (in the phrase “born of God,” also translated “is a child of God,” RSV) is in the perfect tense. The perfect tense indicates a past event with continuing consequences.
In other words, as Stott writes, “Our present, continuing activity of believing is the result, and therefore the evidence, of our past experience of new birth by which we became and remain God’s children.”1 We believe and, in fact, do everything else of a spiritual nature precisely because we have first been made alive. If this were not the order, then the tests of life would have no value as indicators that an individual is truly God’s child.
The image of conception and birth is a wonderful picture of what is involved in God’s activity in bringing forth life in those who thereby become His children. This was suggested briefly in the discussion of 1 John 2:28-3:3.
First, it is a reminder of the fact that the initiative in begetting spiritual children is God’s. James indicates this in writing “Of his [that is, God’s] own will begot he us [literally, engendered us] with the word of truth, that we should be a kind of first fruits of his creatures” (James 1:18). In other words, it is the Father’s choice to beget a child, spiritually as well as on the human level. John says the same thing when he writes in the prologue to the Gospel, “But as many as received him, to them gave he power to become the children of God, even to them that believe on his name; who were born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God” (John 1:12-13).
Second, the means of the new birth is suggested; for, as James says, this is by the word of truth, meaning the words of Scripture or of the Gospel. In Peter this function of the Word is even compared explicitly to that of the male life germ or semen, which permeates the ovum of saving faith within the heart as the result of which a spiritual conception takes place and birth follows. Peter writes: “Being born again, not of corruptible seed, but of incorruptible, by the word of God, which liveth and abideth forever” (1 Pet. 1:23).
1John R. W. Stott, The Epistles of John (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1964), 172.