The following "Question" was asked by a member of the congregation at Grace Community Church in Panorama City, California, and "Answered" by their pastor, John MacArthur Jr. It was transcribed from the tape, GC 70-2, titled "Bible Questions and Answers."  A copy of the tape can be obtained by writing, Word of Grace, P.O. Box 4000, Panorama City, CA 91412 or by dialing toll free 1-800-55-GRACE.  Copyright John MacArthur Jr., All Rights Reserved.

Question

"Does a Christian have an old nature?"

Answer

Does a Christian have an old nature? Okay, back to Romans 6:7. It’s a hard thing to just explain this briefly, but I’m going to make a stab at it. I believe that you have to start with this:

The Bible never uses the term "old nature," but that’s not a problem--it never uses the term, "new nature" either, so we have to realize that those are artificial terms that we have sort of conjured up. But when you say, "Does a person have an old nature?" what you are basically saying, and most of us have come out of that background if we’ve been Christians for very long, that you used to be just an "old nature"--that’s all you were--sin, sin, sin, then you got saved, and you got a new nature. Now you have a new nature and an old nature and they fight each other, right? Like the black dog and the white dog? They used to tell me that the black dog is the old nature, the white dog is the new nature, and the one you say "sick’em" to will win. So say "sick’em" to the new nature or the white dog and so forth and so on. 

Well, there is a rather severe, what we would call, epistemological problem inherent in that view. The problem with that view is it makes salvation addition. In other words, when I get saved, nothing happens to my old nature, I just get something else. So, salvation is not transformation, it’s addition. In other words, I was an old nature and I’m still an old nature, I just got something. So nothing changed, just something new was added. That is very difficult to defend Scripturally…that salvation is addition. Everything I read about it is that, "If any man be in Christ, he is a new creation." It’s got to be metamorphosis. It has to be transformation. 

And so, what I believe then is that your old person, your old man, your old nature is transformed. It’s eliminated in the reality of conversion and you become a new creation. Do you have an old creation? No, no, not in the sense that your old one is still there fully intact, just like it was and now you’ve got a new one side by side with it. No. 

But your new nature still has a problem. That is sin that is in you in your flesh…in your humanness. So let me say it this way so that I’m not misunderstood. The people that have the idea that you have a new nature and an old nature, postulate that idea because they want to acknowledge that sin is still in our lives. And sometimes when I talk about not having an old nature people go into hysterics and they say, "Oh, MacArthur doesn’t believe that you have sin in your life." I didn’t say that at all. Just don’t call it an "old nature". Just call it what the Bible calls it, "Sin that is in me, that is in my flesh." So as long as I have humanness, I have sin, but I am one new creation in Christ. So the answer to your question is, "No, we do not have an old nature. Yes, sin is still there." But let’s use biblical terms and lets not say we are an old nature and a new nature and make conversion look like it was addition rather than transformation.