Before we can be redeemed, we have to be condemned. Before we can be reborn, we have to have perished. Before we can be healed, we have to be broken.

And we have to be condemned, and perished, and broken, because we don’t recognize our natural fallen state until what little good we have is taken away. Though death is our certain end, we don’t feel the reality of it until we sin. Sin reveals to us the fallen nature we were always under and makes death itself more real to us. Sin brings upon us a sense of condemnation both for our guilt and our mortality.

Thus, we start in a state of innocent delusion, and we break that delusion by being awoken to our state of condemned mortality. But then we are reborn from that state of condemned mortality, not back into a state of delusion, but into the genuine article of eternal life. Though first we had to die, we are reborn into the reality of redemption.