The Two Natures and What They Imply

Frederick William Grant

John 3:6; Galatians 5:17

When we speak of there being two natures in the believer, as these passages, with others, plainly teach, it is needful, in the first place, to explain the words that we are using. The more so, as the word ‘nature’ is not of frequent use in Scripture, and such expressions as ‘the old nature’ and ‘the new nature’, which are in frequent use among believers, do not occur. I am not on this account condemning the expressions. They may be useful enough and accurate enough without being taken literally from Scripture.

But what such persons have a right to insist upon, and what we should all be as jealous for, is that these expressions should really represent to us things that are in Scripture — not fancies of our own, but truths of the Word of God. Our business therefore must be to explain the terms we use and justify them by appealing to Scripture and showing that the truths are there for which we use these expressions as convenient terms. 

There is no word for ‘nature’ in the Old Testament. In the New Testament, the word translated so is, in every case but one, the word phusis, meaning ‘growth’. In the exceptional case, it is genesis, a word familiar to us as the title of the first book of Scripture, so called from its describing the origin or ‘birth’ of the world. The two words in this application come nearly to the same meaning: they express the result of what we have by our origin — the qualities that are developed in us by growth.

For us as Christians, there are two births, and two growths, and thus we can rightly speak of two natures — two sets of moral qualities that belong to us: the one as born of Adam, the other as born of God. Each is dependent upon the life received, and from which it springs. We are one thing as children of men merely; we are another as children of God. Let us look at these separately, beginning with that which is first in order of time. Men (human beings) we are, of course, all through. Here, again, we must learn to distinguish between what we are as men by God’s creation and what we are as men fallen from the uprightness in which God created man at the beginning. We must distinguish between our nature as men and our nature as fallen men. Men we are, and are ever to be. Whatever change we pass through in new birth as to spirit and soul, and whatever change awaits the body at the time when the Lord shall call us to be with Himself, we shall never lose our essential identity with what God created us to be at the first.[1] We must therefore distinguish between such terms as ‘our human nature’, ‘our fallen nature’ and ‘our new nature’. The fall did not unmake us as men; our new birth does not unmake us on the other side. What is essential to manhood we never lose, and our individuality too is never changed.

These distinctions are not useless, but on the contrary most important. If we keep them in mind, there could be no misunderstanding (such as there often is) as to the Lord assuming our nature, for instance. Some would press that taking of our nature into consequences as to our blessed Lord such as every true soul would indignantly repudiate.[2] He took our human nature: He was in all respects true man. However, the consequences and conditions of the fall are no essential part of manhood. Let us consider, then, briefly and simply, what is essential to man as man, in order to separate from it as far as possible what is due to the fall: human nature from fallen nature, or what Scripture calls ‘the flesh’.[3]

In the Gospel of John, we find, for the first time, the term ‘flesh’ used in the signification of an evil nature — our sad inheritance from the fall. We hear of a ‘will of the flesh’ from which new birth does not proceed (1:13). And in the third chapter, the Lord enforces upon Nicodemus the absolute necessity of a new birth: ‘That which is born of the flesh is flesh; and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit. Marvel not that I said unto thee, Ye must be born again’ (3:6–7). Thus, out of man’s fallen nature proceeds nothing that can be acceptable to God. Like a field unsown, the heart of man will never produce aught but thorns and thistles, fruit of the curse. Life of the right sort must be dropped into it in the living germ of the Word of God, as our Lord teaches in the parable, and from that alone is there fruit for Him. New life is thus introduced into the field; and while this does take up and assimilate material from the soil, and thus there now goes on an active transformation, yet how misguided to make this transformation the whole thing and ignore the new life which is effecting it! Yet in the spiritual change of new birth, people are doing exactly this. They look at the moral transformation going on, and ignore what Scripture speaks of in the most decisive way: the introduction of a positive new life from God, from which the moral change proceeds.

This new birth the Spirit and the Word combine to effect. In John 3, a man is born of water and of the Spirit, the water here, as the symbol of purification, taking the place that the seed of the Word does elsewhere (e.g. Matt. 13). As the Apostle Peter tells us, we are ‘born again, not of corruptible seed, but of incorruptible, by the word of God … . And this is the word which by the gospel is preached unto you’ (1 Pet. 1:23, 25). 

To take up again the former figure of the seed, used by both the Lord and the apostle, the seed is the incorruptible Word which gives form and character to the life. Thus Scripture speaks of ‘the implanted word’ (Jas. 1:21), and the Apostle John, similarly connecting the new nature with the Word, says, ‘Whosoever is born of God doth not commit sin; for [God’s] seed remaineth in him: and he cannot sin, because he is born of God’ (1 John 3:9).[4]

The ‘nature’ of the seed determines the form of life. The new nature, God’s gift, is not a mixed or partially good thing. It is in itself perfect (though capable of and needing development), without mixture of evil from the beginning and forever. In the man in whom it is implanted, evil indeed exists, as thorns and thistles in the field in which wheat is sown. The character of the seed we have just seen, where John says that the child of God ‘doth not commit [or rather ‘practise’] sin; for his [God’s] seed remaineth in him’. The new life will vindicate its character in one born of God and manifest him as born of God.

Such, then, in its character, and such in its energy, is the new nature. It will be understood that the gospel has to be received, and deliverance realised, before this can be properly enjoyed.

But now we must draw some important distinctions. We speak of the old nature, or ‘flesh’, and of the new. We speak also of the ‘old man’ and of the ‘new’. Is there any difference between these? If so, what is the use of the distinction? A nature and a person are in many ways widely different. Unconverted and converted, the person is of course the same. It is the one who was dead in sins who is quickened and raised up; it is the same person who was condemned and a child of wrath who is justified, sanctified and redeemed to God. It is the person too to whom accountability attaches, and not to the nature. Acts belong to the individual, and not to his nature; and man is responsible to walk contrary to his nature as he actually now possesses it, fallen from its state before the fall. In the day of judgment, therefore, the award will be given not according to the nature (in which all are alike) but to their works, in which they are not alike. God ‘will render to every man according to his deeds’ (Rom. 2:6). 

As to the Christian, we may say that the man that was and the man that is are total opposites. I was a sinner in my sins, freely following the evil that I loved; now I am a child of God, with a new nature, new affections and a new object. Between these two persons there is a wide interval indeed. The first is what Scripture calls ‘the old man, which is corrupt according to the deceitful lusts’ (Eph. 4:22); the second is styled ‘the new man, which after God is created in righteousness and true holiness’ (v. 24) and ‘renewed in knowledge after the image of him that created him: where … Christ is all, and in all’ (Col. 3:10–11). The first it speaks of as being ‘crucified with [Christ]’, as it does of our having ‘put off the old man with his deeds’ (Rom. 6:6; Col. 3:9); the second it says we ‘have put on’ (Col. 3:10). What we were we are not, and never can be again. But while this is happily true of us, it is also true that ‘the flesh’ — the old nature — we have in us still, and shall have till the body of humiliation is either dropped or changed into the glorified likeness of the Lord’s own body. The old man is gone forever, but the flesh abides. In believers, who are possessors of the Spirit, ‘the flesh lusteth against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh’. The exhortation is not to destroy the flesh, as if that were possible, but to ‘walk in the Spirit, and ye shall not fulfil the lust of the flesh’ (Gal. 5:16–17). A poor conclusion this to many in our day! but to those who know themselves, how great a relief to find thus an explanation of what experience testifies to! It may be, and is, a mystery how we can have at the same time in us two natures, total opposites of each other — how Christ can dwell in us and yet sin dwell too; but Scripture affirms it, and experience also. If it is God’s mind to allow us to know thus for a while what evil is, not by yielding to it of course, but as realising its opposition, can He not make this experience even both to serve us and glorify Him?

The flesh remains, and remains unchanged: ‘I know that in me (that is, in my flesh,) dwelleth no good thing’ must always be said by one who identifies himself with the flesh. ‘The mind of the flesh is death; …. Because the mind of the flesh is enmity against God: for it is not subject to the law of God; for neither indeed can it be’ (Rom. 7:18; 8:6–7). Thus the Word speaks of the incurable evil of the old nature. God’s remedy for it is Christ as an object for our hearts in heaven and His cross as that by which we are crucified to a world which the flesh lusts after. We are not in the flesh (Rom. 8:9); we are in Christ before God; our life is hid with Christ in God (Col. 3:3). The knowledge of our portion in Him, as given us by the Spirit, divorces our hearts and turns our eyes away from that which ministers to the evil in us. ‘As strangers and pilgrims’, journeying on to a point which faith, not sight, beholds, we learn to ‘abstain from fleshly lusts, which war against the soul’ (1 Pet. 2:11), and, as a consequence, to ‘mortify the deeds of the body’ (Rom. 8:13). 

This satisfies, and this alone. Christ seen and enjoyed by faith, we grow up unto Him in all things.[5]

[1] Each of us will always remain the same individual we have been since our natural birth. However, having trusted in the Lord, God no longer identifies us with the standing which we had before him as human beings according to the flesh (eds.).

[2] The author is referring to the unscriptural suggestion that the Lord Jesus must have shared in our fallen nature in order truly to be man. The Word of God carefully guards against this terrible blasphemy when it states that God sent His Son as a sacrifice for sin ‘in likeness of flesh of sin’ (Rom. 8:3). The fallen nature is not inherent to humanity (Adam did not have it when he was created). Accordingly, our Lord did not need to share in it in order to become our substitute upon the cross (eds.).

[3] By ‘fallen nature’, the author means the sinful nature which every human being has inherited, from birth, as a result of Adam’s sin. Any suggestion that a person’s nature is innocent at birth and becomes ‘fallen’ at some point during his or her life is contrary to Scripture. The world’s reference to ‘human nature’ (e.g. ‘that’s just human nature’) is also unscriptural (eds.).

[4] Peter and James use the word ‘seed’ for the Word which God uses to effect new birth whereas John uses it for the life and nature produced. That nature is consistent with the means God uses to bring it about (eds.).

[5] Extracted and adapted.

From: Truth and Testimony, 2023