It Started in a Tomb
Titus 3:5 - He saved us, not because of works done by us in righteousness, but according to his own mercy, by the washing of regeneration and renewal of the Holy Spirit,
We sat with the first half of this verse yesterday. Today we look at the back end, and there’s one Greek word underneath it that the New Testament uses in only two places. Palingenesia. Rebirth. A beginning made new. It’s built out of palin (again) and genesis (birth or origin), which is why you can almost hear a second Genesis in it. Here in Titus, Paul uses that word for what the Holy Spirit does inside a person: the “washing of regeneration.”
In Matthew 19, Jesus uses that same word for what God will do with the world. Peter has just reminded Him that the disciples left everything, and he wants to know what they get. Jesus promises them thrones, and He says when: in the new world, when the Son of Man sits on His glorious throne. A world made new, and a person made new. What the Titus and Matthew passages show is the same God doing the same kind of thing at two different scales.
Paul tells the Corinthians that Christ has been raised as the firstfruits, the first sheaf of a harvest that guarantees the rest of the field. The new creation broke into history in a garden outside Jerusalem, in a body that was dead on Friday and wasn’t dead on Sunday. That’s where it all began. Everything since has come out of that morning. Then it reached you. If anyone is in Christ, Paul says, he is a new creation. A person joined to the risen Christ, carrying resurrection life around inside an ordinary week.
Then, in Titus, Paul sets a second word beside regeneration. Renewal. The grammar ties the two together as one saving act seen from two angles. Regeneration says the new life has begun. Renewal says the old is being made new. Paul does teach an ongoing renewal, and he says so plainly to the Romans, that we are transformed by the renewing of our minds. The Spirit who made you new keeps making you new! Reaching even into your ordinary Thursdays. The thought you interrupt. The apology you go back and make. The truth you believe again after doubting it the day before.
And whose renewal is it? It belongs to the Holy Spirit. He’s the author of it. That doesn’t put you in a chair as a spectator. The Spirit doesn’t do your obeying for you, but He does produce it in you. And this is the part of the Christian life we keep trying to take back, because being made new by Someone else feels less natural and respectable than improving ourselves. We’ve all played the improvement game. New habits in January. A better system for our quiet time. A promise made in the car after a conversation we handled badly. Improvement has a ceiling, because rearranging what’s already in the room will never produce life.
So Paul puts together two pictures that no self-improvement plan can generate. Washing and birth. His first readers would’ve heard baptism in that washing language, and God’s promise through Ezekiel standing behind it: clean water, a new heart, His own Spirit placed inside His people. Nobody washes away his own guilt. Nobody gives birth to himself.
Sit in that for a minute. Whatever else is uncertain about your week, God has done something in you that you didn’t accomplish and could never have manufactured. It’s a fact with your name attached to it. And it’s one piece of a project that finishes with a new heaven and a new earth. It started in the risen Jesus. And by His Spirit, it has started in you!
Head: What God will do to the whole world one day, He has already done inside me.
Heart: Ask God to make this truth land on your heart as wonder, not just information.
Hands: Read Matthew 19:28 and Titus 3:5 back to back, and find the word they share.
Prayer: “Father, You are making all things new, and You began it by raising Your Son. I praise You that resurrection life reached somebody like me by Your Spirit. Thank You for washing what I could never clean and giving life I could never produce! In Jesus' name, Amen.”
-PK