As we conclude these start of the year random messages, this morning I want to go back to the fount of God’s blessing to us. To refresh ourselves in the basics and ask each other: is this what you believe? Can we unite around this?
I invite you to open your Bible to John’s Gospel, chapter three. At the end of his presentation of Jesus, John will say “These things [in the gospel of John] are written that you might believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that believing you might have life in his name.”
And as part of this project – to get life into people – John has recorded a few conversations that Jesus had with certain individuals, conversations that get down to the bedrock of reality. The first of these conversations is with a fine man named Nicodemus. Let’s listen in.
Now there was a man of the Pharisees named Nicodemus, a ruler of the Jews.
2 This man came to Jesus by night and said to him, “Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher come from God, for no one can do these signs that you do unless God is with him.”
3 Jesus answered him, “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born again he cannot see the kingdom of God.”
4 Nicodemus said to him, “How can a man be born when he is old? Can he enter a second time into his mother’s womb and be born?”
5 Jesus answered, “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God.
6 That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit.
7 Do not marvel that I said to you, ‘You must be born again.’
8 The wind blows where it wishes, and you hear its sound, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.”
9 Nicodemus said to him, “How can these things be?”
10 Jesus answered him, “Are you the teacher of Israel and yet you do not understand these things?
11 Truly, truly, I say to you, we speak of what we know, and bear witness to what we have seen, but you do not receive our testimony.
12 If I have told you earthly things and you do not believe, how can you believe if I tell you heavenly things?
13 No one has ascended into heaven except he who descended from heaven, the Son of Man.
14 And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up,
15 that whoever believes in him may have eternal life.
By several measures Nicodemus is an admirable character. He belongs to the Pharisees, a conservative party that was attempting to stem the tide of worldliness streaming into the nation in the form of Hellenism. They were a principled, serious organization who were zealous for the good. Nicodemus is also called “a ruler of the Jews,” meaning he was a leading member of the Great Sanhedrin, the group of 71 who governed Israel. Think of him as a mix of Jordan Peterson with Tom Cotton.
These were his titles but what kind of man was he? Throughout this episode he comes off as respectful, open-minded. And it appears that he’s genuinely a truth-seeker – after all he comes to Jesus. His opening line tells us that he’s open minded enough and not too proud to believe that Jesus – an outsider to the establishment, from inferior Galilee – has come from God.
Jesus sizes him up immediately.
And so, Jesus’ reply to Nicodemus’ opening lines seems indirect, but maybe not? Maybe he was replying to Nicodemus’ unspoken question.? In any case, listen closely to what Jesus says. It’s one sentence and it’s a conditional sentence: Let’s first state just the main clause, which Jesus puts negatively: He cannot see the kingdom of God.
You won’t see, that is, you won’t get close enough even to see God renewing the world. When everything is light and bright and flourishing under God’s authority – injustice swept away, physical and moral pollution cleared out – you won’t be on the scene.
Unless.
But here’s the thing: Nicodemus is just the sort of person that we’d expect to fit right into God’s new world. He’s made the most of his chances. He’s worked hard. He has obviously up to this point enjoyed the blessing of God. He’s got integrity, humility. Spiritual sensitivity. Upright curiosity. A good man.
And a man who cannot see the kingdom of God. Unless this happens.
Unless what?
Unless he is born again. Generally: Nicodemus, you need to start over.
What’s the harsh truth behind that? Nicodemus…Nicodemus!… doesn’t measure up. Nicodemus has a problem, but the problem isn’t merely some part of Nicodemus. It’s Nicodemus himself. You couldn’t do spiritual or moral surgery and cut something out of Nicodemus and then he’s ready for God’s future.
Let’s press pause for a second. As John is making his case for how people might have life through believing Jesus, he begins with a good, successful man. Seemingly one that already has life. That’s a big point.
But then there’s a second big point to uncover: Ok, Nicodemus doesn’t know how this new birth could happen. But I find it interesting that he doesn’t dispute that it needs to happen, the implication that he’s fundamentally a failed creation. I suppose this is what drew him to seek out Jesus in the first place. Things can look so good from the outside…or everyone is covering for you and making excuses for you…and yet you know of your basic inadequacy. Career? Check. Family? Check. Respect? Check. Nicodemus?…Un-check.
As I said, Nicodemus does pick up on the thrust, that there’s something deep-down wrong with him….yet he doesn’t get miffed and walk away. He keeps asking questions. And because he’s a good guy, he starts as literally as possible: V. 4: How can this be?
And Jesus replies and repeats that main clause: ‘He cannot enter the kingdom of God.’ We need to hear the cannot written over our life. Your parents say, you can do it. Your coach says, we can do it. Your teachers say, if you’ll work at it, you can do it. Your employer says, we need to get this done. And people can do a lot of things.
But then there’s Jesus with cannot. The most important and enduring thing is closed to you.
Have you gotten to the place where you acknowledge: I cannot enter the kingdom of God.? I am not the person that can live in God’s renewed world.? The future is closed off to me, because the future belongs to God, and I cannot live toward God.? (Even though that’s what a human is for.)
Unless. And now he expands on that unless. Not just born again, but (v.5) Unless you are born of water and the Spirit.
Now what could that mean?
To answer that question, take a look further down in v.10 when Jesus reproaches Nicodemus: “Are you the teacher of Israel and yet you do not understand these things?” Being a teacher, Nicodemus should have immediately caught on to what Jesus was talking about – – Oh yeah, I was expecting this. Because the Old Testament referred to this rebirth by water and the Spirit. This birth from above is something God has been pointing to for a while.
Let’s look for that. Turn in your bible to Ezekiel 36: 24-27, written some 600 years before Jesus speaks with Nicodemus. In this passage God tells His people what someday He will do for them:
24 I will take you from the nations and gather you from all the countries and bring you into your own land.
25 I will sprinkle clean water on you, and you shall be clean from all your uncleannesses, and from all your idols I will cleanse you.
26 And I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit I will put within you. And I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh.
27 And I will put my Spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statutes and be careful to obey my rules.
“I will sprinkle clean water and you shall be clean” –– the deep contamination in them will be washed away by God
“I will give you a new heart and a new spirit” – not superficial change but renewal as deep down as you can go. A new birth unto a new nature.
“I will put my Spirit within you” – God will bestow his own life through his personal presence
To fill in some details, let’s look at two other passages: First, Titus 3:5, where Paul speaks of what God has done in him and others, and it’ll sound a lot like Ezekiel and Jesus with Nicodemus:
[God] 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 were deeply and fatally contaminated, yet God rescued us through the washing of regeneration (born-again-ness) and renewal of his Holy Spirit.
And finally, Ephesians 5:26:
…that [Christ] might sanctify [the church], having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word,
Christ made the church holy by washing them with water – the word.
Here is a summary of what Nicodemus should have already known: A person’s life is so deeply stained with idolatry and all the associated misbehavior that nothing he does, no process he undergoes, can remove it. Whatever else people around us might notice, in God’s eyes we are contaminated in all our parts. Which means that we, I, you do not belong in the new world that God will create by his authoritative power because that world is wholesome… and we’re not.
But God mercifully sends His Spirit to defiled people, and the Spirit by means of the Word washes out that contamination, so that God calls the one who had been defiled, clean. This washing of the person by the Spirit is so thorough that it can be said that God actually re-creates a person: he is born again.
There are a couple of things Jesus emphasizes. V. 6: Flesh gives birth to flesh – you cannot escape or rise above your nature. Adam’s children cannot escape being Adam’s children, through education, political power, etc. Because of our contamination we – Adam’s children – simply can’t be good at what we’re created to be, image bearers of God. Only birth of the Spirit changes our fundamental nature.
V. 8: The entrance of the Spirit in a person’s life is likened to the wind. How so? The Spirit himself cannot be programmed, managed, manipulated, put into a bottle, predicted. This isn’t air-conditioning! This wind is wild!
This wild, unconstrained wind that is the Spirit blows through a person’s life, that is, she hears the Word of God and believes and is re-born. But there’s always an element of mystery to this. Why her? Why now? What happened? There are obvious changes after the Spirit enters, but those changes are not the causes of birth but the result. To everyone except the Spirit, it’s hard to know why this person believes when.
In his autobiography, “Surprised by Joy,” C.S. Lewis writes about his move from atheism to theism. Here’s the thing: he hated the thought of believing in God. How inconvenient that’d be. He didn’t want to believe! He resisted it. And yet, the wind!
You must picture me alone in that room in Magdalen [“Maudlin”], night after night, feeling, whenever my mind lifted even for a second from my work, the steady, unrelenting approach of Him whom I so earnestly desired not to meet. That which I greatly feared had at last come upon me. In the Trinity Term of 1929 I gave in, and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed: perhaps, that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England. I did not then see what is now the most shining and obvious thing; the Divine humility which will accept a convert even on such terms. The Prodigal Son at least walked home on his own feet. But who can duly adore that Love which will open the high gates to a prodigal who is brought in kicking, struggling, resentful, and darting his eyes in every direction for a chance of escape?
Jesus wants to be clear that this cleansing that remakes a person so that he/she can dwell with God is not our work, it’s God’s work, the Spirit making alive. Salvation is of God.
We won’t take the time to go through every phrase of vv. 11-13; rather summarize. Jesus has come from the presence of God, and so of course you’ll hear things that are different, unexpected, hard to take in.
What’s different about Jesus’ message? What’s hard to take in?
- On his own, no one is fit for the future that God is creating by his authority.
- In order to be ready for God’s new world, your life will have to start over from scratch.
- God’s been saying this for a long time.
- This re-birth is not in your control.
But maybe the last part of this conversation is the most bizarre.
In v. 14, Jesus concludes the conversation by alluding to an episode recorded in the O.T. books of Numbers. Israel is in the wilderness. They’re in one of their complaining periods. In response, God sends venomous serpents into their camp, and many are dying. The people are scared and regret their whining, and they ask Moses to pray to God for mercy. God instructs Moses to fashion a bronze serpent and set it upon a post and place the post in the center of the camp. When someone is bitten, he can look up to the serpent, and just by looking, God would heal him.
[I just want to mention this and invite your further thought: If I were God, I wouldn’t have had Moses forge an image of a serpent…wasn’t that the very thing that killed them? I would have had him make a statue of a big needle dripping with vaccine…or a torniquet…or something that obviously healed. Why is the remedy to look to an image of the very thing that threatened them?]
V. 14 in full: “Even as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of Man be lifted up…
The Son of Man lifted up – to what is Jesus referring? He’s looking down the road to that day when he was marched out to the hill of Golgotha, ordered to lay down on two crosspieces fastened together, himself nailed into those pieces of wood, and then, fastened to the crosspiece, hoisted up and – THUD – the crosspiece drops into the ground. Moses lifts up the bronze serpent. The Son of Man is lifted up.
V. 15. 15 that whoever believes in him may have eternal life.
That’s the word that washes and makes alive: the message of the Son of Man’s crucifixion. The Spirit brings us the renewing word of Jesus pinned like an insect onto lumber, rivulets of blood streaming down his body, struggling for air, occasionally shouting one phrase and then another… and eventually going limp.
When we, guided by the scripture, in our minds eye look to Jesus on the cross, do we understand that in those six hours of dying the justly angry punishment of God against humanity was falling on him? Do we realize that, in the suffering body of Jesus, God was condemning sin? Do we realize that by Jesus’ death he crushes the head of the ancient serpent, and now his power is only to deceive…and nothing more.
Probably not for a long while. At first, each person whose heart is being swept along by the Spirit comes to dwell properly on that ghastly crucifixion scene only after he has sensed that there’s something wrong with himself, at least in relation to God. That he’s not prepared to happily meet God and walk with him into the future.
And then, guided by the Spirit through the Word – often that has been spoken by a friend who’s a believer – he does look at that Man hanging between heaven and earth.
And God’s Spirit speaks into his spirit: that’s for what’s wrong with you.
And he believes.
And at that moment (most often not even recognized by him) at some deep-down level, there’s born that that won’t ever die.
Three applications for Christians:
- There’s ongoing renewal and cleansing in bringing to mind the crucifixion of our Lord.
- The Spirit of Jesus gets people to see that there’s something wrong with them…most often through the Church.
- The Spirit of Jesus gets people to grasp that there’s no future with the prince of this world – the fatal blow against the Devil has been struck. There is deliverance for every person who looks to Jesus. The Spirit will bring them Jesus through the Church. We who are living in the last days of this world but have already been born into the world to come – – abound in the work of God to portray the victory in Christ crucified to those who are dead in their sins. Let them know that God loves them, and he loves them this way, by sending his son as a remedy unto true and everlasting image-bearing.
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