Read - John 3:1-16
Imagine this scene. It is night time. Nicodemus, a Pharisee, a religious ruler and
teacher, comes to talk to Jesus while it is dark.
Boys and girls, why would someone sneak over to visit when it
is dark? Why didn’t Nicodemus come to
talk with Jesus in the day time?
-
Maybe
because he doesn’t want anyone to recognize him, or to see that he is going to
talk with Jesus.
Most of the Pharisees didn’t like Jesus or the message he was
teaching. Most of them didn’t believe
that Jesus was God’s Son, the Messiah.
But it seems like Nicodemus is interested in Jesus and his message. Nicodemus thinks the miracles Jesus is doing
might be signs which show that God is with Jesus in a powerful way.
We know from later in John’s gospel that Nicodemus is sympathetic to Jesus.
In Jn. 7 when the religious
authorities want to arrest Jesus, Nicodemus reminds them that the law requires
a fair hearing and a fair judgment Jesus’ actions.
In Jn. 19, after Jesus’
crucifixion, Joseph of Arimathea, who is a disciple of Jesus secretly because
he is afraid of the religious leaders, and Nicodemus, take Jesus’ body and
prepare it for burial (here it doesn’t mention that Nicodemus is a secret
disciple).
It seems like here in Jn. 3, Nicodemus is drawn to Jesus and
wants to know more about his teaching, but he is afraid that certain people
might see him with Jesus.
Jesus tells Nicodemus something that
sounds very strange: he says that to
become one of God’s true children, you need to be “born again.” At least it sounded strange to
Nicodemus.
Nicodemus doesn’t understand Jesus. He asks Jesus how an old man like him can get
into his mother’s womb to be born a second time. Even you girls and boys know that can’t
happen, right?
Jesus says, “that’s not what I am
talking about, Nicodemus.” Jesus
explains that to be “born again” means that God makes us into new people, into
his own children; that God gives us new hearts.
Well, let’s get right to the point of what Jesus spoke to Nicodemus
about. We are going to look at what
Jesus means when he says that to enter the kingdom of God, a person must be
born again.
** We are going to
look at what it means to be ‘born again’ in terms how our passage speaks of the
three persons of the Trinity – God the Holy
Spirit, God the Son, and God the Father.
**
So…. Nicodemus the Pharisee comes to Jesus by night to speak
with him.
v.2: Nicodemus says to
Jesus, “we know that you are a teacher come from God, for no one can do
these signs unless God is with him.”
Nicodemus recognized that God was with Jesus, but not that Jesus
was God-with-us. Jesus is
Immanuel, God in the flesh, come to dwell among us and bring salvation to a
world lost in darkness.
Jn. 1 tells us that “in the
beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God….And
the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as
of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth” (Jn. 1:1,
14).
v. 3: Jesus cuts right
to the heart of the matter: he says that “unless one is born again they
cannot see the kingdom of God.”
Nicodemus doesn’t understand what it means to be born again.
Let’s look at Jesus’ answer to Nicodemus……
1) First, lets look at what Jesus says to Nicodemus
about the Holy Spirit.
The term “born again” can also mean “born from
above”. I think it has this double
sense here. To be born again is to
experience heavenly birth, spiritual birth, a rebirth from above.
It is through a special work of God’s Spirit that someone can
enter God’s kingdom, or become part of God’s family.
As Calvin says, by ‘born again’ Jesus “means not the
amendment of a part but the renewal of the whole nature” since every part
of us is affected by sin. It is not merely
a case of thinking new thoughts, or of doing new actions. To become part of God’s family, to enter God’s
kingdom, one must be given new life by the Holy Spirit.
In v. 5, Jesus uses different language for being born again:
“unless one is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of
God.”
Being “born of water” probably means several
things here, including baptism and baptism’s relationship with repentance. But most importantly, if we look at Jesus’
encounter with the Samaritan woman at the well in the next chapter (Jn. 4), he
tells her of living water that he gives. If someone drinks his living water, it will “become
in them a spring of water welling up to eternal life” (Jn. 4:14). The water Jesus gives is a metaphor for
new life of the Spirit, new life in God by the Spirit.
The language of being born of water
and of the Spirit comes from Ezek. 36:25-27.
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. 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. And I will put my Spirit within you….
This passage comes right before
Ezekiel 37, which is one of the OT’s most powerful images of re-birth and new
life. There God tells the prophet
Ezekiel to preach to a valley full of dry bones, and as he preaches the bones
become living people once more. God
tells Ezekiel that someday he will send a servant-king of David’s line who will
accomplish this kind of regeneration, who will shepherd God’s people, and
through whom God will dwell among his people forever.
So, taken together, being “born of water and of the Spirit” means
to be born again to new life by a miraculous work of God’s Spirit; it means
the life-giving Spirit dwelling inside a person, graciously given by God
through Christ, and not attainable through any human effort.
It is good to remember here that baptism,
because it is a sacrament, commanded by God and not an optional statement that
some serious Christians make about their personal commitment to Jesus, is not a
work but part of the grace of God in the process of the new birth. It is ineffective without faith, which is
itself a gift of God, but it isn’t a human work. It is a gracious work of God.
Paul tells us in 1 Cor. 15:50 that “flesh and blood cannot
inherit the kingdom of God.” Jesus
explains “that which is born of the flesh is flesh and that which is born of
the Spirit is spirit” (v.6).
Jesus uses the imagery of wind to describe being born
again by the work of the Spirit:
We can witness the effects of the wind, but we can’t see
it. So it is with the Spirit: we can witness the effects of the new birth –
people go from spiritual death to life and their lives are different (Jn. 3:21).
But because it is a work of the Spirit, like
the wind, it is not something we can predict or control.
This is the Spirit’s part in new birth.
Ø Is this new life something you have
experienced? Do you think being ‘born
again’ is only for radicals? Jesus says
that unless someone is born again, they cannot enter the God’s kingdom, God’s
family.
2) Second, lets look at the work of the Son
in the new birth.
v. 9-10: Nicodemus asks
how these things can be. He is a teacher
of Israel, but he doesn’t understand Jesus. It is here we see the Son’s work in the new
birth.
In vv. 11-13 Jesus says that he knows what he is talking
about because he himself comes from heaven.
Jesus is God the Son, the Word made flesh as John ch. 1 puts it. Jesus is the Son of Man, who has descended to
earth in order to do the work which makes the new birth possible.
v. 14 Jesus recalls a story from Numbers 21:
After God freed Israel from slavery
in Egypt, Israel grumbled against God.
God sends poisonous serpents among the people. Some people are bitten and die. The rest of the people repent of their
grumbling and cry out to God for mercy.
God tells Moses to make a bronze serpent and raise it up on a pole, so
that whoever is bitten may look to the bronze serpent in faith and live.
v. 15: Jesus says that
just as the serpent was lifted up in the wilderness and all who looked to it
were saved, so also the Son of Man must be lifted up so that “whoever
believes in him may have eternal life”.
* Jesus is talking about the cross. This is the Son’s role in the new birth. *
He gives “his life as a ransom for many” (Mt.
20:28). He makes atonement for the sins
of all those “who like sheep have gone astray and turned each one to their
own way” (Is. 53:6). Jesus came to
pay the penalty for our sin by his death on the cross, so “that whoever
believes in him may have eternal life” (v. 15).
The bronze snake was a symbol of the judgement of sinful
Israel, a bronze rendering of God’s wrath against sin. And Jesus became sin for us (2 Cor. 5:21),
and in our place received the penalty that our sin deserved when he was lifted
up on the cross.
It is this belief in Jesus that Jn. 1 speaks of when it says
that “to all who did receive him, to all who believed in his name, he gave
the right to become children of God, who were born, not of blood nor of the
will of the flesh nor of human will, but of God” (vv. 12-13).
This is the Son’s part in the new birth.
“Where meek souls will receive him, still the dear Christ
enters in.”
Ø Can you say that you have looked to
the Son of Man as he is revealed to us as lifted up on the cross for the sins
of the world…..for your own sin? Can you
say that you continue to look to the cross of Christ, daily, and trust in Christ’s
own sacrificial giving of himself “for us and for our salvation”?
3) Now for the Father’s part
in the new birth.
v. 16 is perhaps the most famous verse in the NT. Like many of you, it was one of the first
passages of Scripture I ever memorized. We
had it on a wooden plaque in our home when I was a kid. It speaks of God’s love for the world, a love
so deep that the Father gave his Son to accomplish salvation by his death on our
behalf.
This interpretation of Jn. 3:16 has
fallen on hard times lately. What kind
of a loving Father would send his innocent Son to die in the place of the
guilty? Some say this isn’t a
demonstration of love; it is divine child abuse.
But this criticism can only come from a faulty view of the
Trinity. When the Father, out of his
great love for the world, sends the Son, the Son for his part, out of that
same love, willingly offers himself to make atonement for sin.
The Son says, “No one takes [my
life] from me, but I lay it down of my own accord. I have authority to lay it
down, and I have authority to take it up again” (Jn. 10:18).
It is important to remember that the love of God the Father
for the world is also the love of God the Son and God the Holy Spirit for the
world. Their love is one, for they
are one God.
When one person of the Trinity acts for our salvation, all
the triune persons act together.
v. 17-18 tell us that in his great love, the Father sent
Jesus not to condemn the world but to save the world from the condemnation that
it was already under due to sin, rebellion against God, and alienation from God. It tells us that any who reject God’s Messiah,
Jesus, remain under that condemnation because they refuse and reject God’s Rescuer,
who is himself God come in the flesh.
This is the Father’s loving part in the new birth.
Ø Do you view the Father as the cranky
person of the Trinity? As a God of wrath
and judgement, whereas Jesus, the Son, is the loving one? Do you need to readjust your understanding of
God? Further, do you know God’s love
personally? Do you see yourself as an
adherent to correct Christian doctrine and moralse, or do you know yourself even
more fundamentally to be a child of God the Father, your Father, beloved by
God?
Conclusion: To wrap up…..
God’s triune wisdom planned our salvation, and then his
triune action accomplished salvation.
The language in each collect we pray
throughout Advent and Christmas is trinitarian.
However, none more overtly so than today’s. In our collect today, we thank the Father
for giving his only-begotten Son, born in flesh, so that we might be born
of the Spirit, “born again and made God’s children by adoption and grace.” And we pray for daily renewal by the Holy
Spirit for those who are born again.
Because of the Father’s great love, whoever believes in the
Son should not perish but have eternal life through the Spirit.
Let us pray our collect together again (Dec. 29):
Almighty God, you have given your
only-begotten Son to take our nature upon him, and to be born of a pure virgin:
Grant that we, who have been born again and made your children by adoption and
grace, may daily be renewed by your Holy Spirit; through Jesus Christ our Lord,
to whom with you and the same Spirit be honour and glory, now and for
ever. Amen.
