Amen. If you would, please turn with me in your Bibles to John chapter 3, beginning at the first verse.
Now there was a man of the Pharisees named Nicodemus, a ruler of the Jews. 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.’
Jesus answered him, ‘Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.’
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?’
Jesus answered, ‘Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God. That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the Spirit is Spirit. Do not marvel that I said to you, ‘You must be born again.”
This is the word of the Lord. Thanks be to God.
Let us pray.
May Father, we thank you for your word. We thank you for our lives and for the birthing of your Spirit. Fill us, encourage us, help us to know that we are born again people, that we trust you, that we love you, that we worship you, and we follow you all of our days. Keep us in your way. We pray this in Jesus’ name. Amen.
The first two chapters of John’s gospel together describe and define who Jesus is—God the Son, the Word, the Lamb of God, the logos who is Theos and Andros. They also broadly describe the content and effect of his ministry, declaring that Jesus performed many different signs and wonders which in turn led people to believe in him as God the Lord.
Now, as we move into this third chapter and the more narrative portions of this gospel, John begins to recount certain specific events, occasions, and conversations from across the breadth of Jesus’s three-year ministry. Some of these events are recorded by the other gospel writers, but many are unique to this gospel.
Perhaps the most famous and popular is Nicodemus’s nighttime visit to Jesus—an important conversation that is only recorded here. However, despite being so well known, there is a lot that we commonly misunderstand or just miss about and from it.
John begins this story with, ‘Now there was a man of the Pharisees named Nicodemus, a ruler of the Jews.’ Within this initial sentence, he provides a lot of information about Nicodemus, giving us a lot of subtext.
First off, Nicodemus was a Pharisee, one of the three principal social, political, and religious sects or philosophies of Judaism within the first century: the Pharisees, Sadducees, and Essenes. Although each of the three shared a common faith in the Lord and many common religious practices as Jews, each group had their own particular theological distinctions that caused their division.
The Sadducees consisted primarily of the social elite; they were a dominant philosophy among the temple leadership, the priests, and the Levites, especially within the family of Annas, many of whom held the high priest’s appointment during the life and death of Jesus. Scripture tells us that they did not believe in any resurrection of the dead, with Josephus adding that they believed in the annihilation of the soul upon death and noting that they limited the authority of scripture to only the law of Moses, the first five books of the Bible, and did not include the prophets or the writings.
He also explains that they denied the applicability of fate, or what we would think of as predestination to life, by affirming human free will and our own moral goodness. The Essenes are best known because of their community at Qumran, the site where the Dead Sea Scrolls were recovered. Although they are not mentioned in the New Testament, some interpreters suggest that they influenced John the Baptist because of their extreme ascetic practices.
They believed themselves to be the true keepers of God’s covenant, that they were true Israel, and they directly opposed the temple leadership, even holding to a completely different religious calendar from the rest of Judaism.
Now, Josephus speaks very unfavorably about them. However, what both Qumran, the Dead Sea Scrolls, and Josephus affirm is that they were extreme social and religious separatists, concerned with ritual purity, obedience to God, and faithfulness to his covenant.
Because of their eschatological expectations and hopes, their perspective regarding scripture’s authority is unclear, as many of the practical documents recovered at Qumran seem to be revised, compiled, or edited versions of the accepted Hebrew scriptures.
But unlike the Sadducees, the Pharisees considered the whole of the Old Testament scriptures—the Torah, the prophets, and the writings—to be authoritative scripture, like we do.
Unfortunately, they also elevated tradition, the oral Torah, to an equal position with scripture for practice in life. Thus, they greatly emphasized and gave great importance to personal holiness and ritual purity as being evidence of a person’s faith and their standing before God.
They also believed that all things should be ascribed to the providence of God or fate. They affirmed that humanity was a moral people, able to know and do good, but without qualifying any initial disposition towards either good or evil.
They also believed that the souls of the righteous would be resurrected to a new physical life, while the souls of the wicked would be subjected to eternal punishment. Josephus describes the theology of the Pharisees as appealing to the general populace, whereas the theology of the Sadducees was more popular among the rich.
There were many diverse reasons that explain this, because most upper-class Jews at the time achieved their position by virtue of their social and political relationships to the Hasmonean and the succeeding Herodian dynasty. Thus, the present and continuing prosperity of this nobility was closely tied to the stability and security of the political status quo, which removed or reduced any kind of desire for a revolutionary or eschatological Messiah.
But the theology of the Pharisees offered people hope for positive social change through works of righteousness and hope for the restoration of Israel’s fortunes in the person of a coming Messiah.
The most important thing to understand concerning the Pharisees at this time is that they were religious scholars. They were dedicated to knowing and understanding the word of God and then applying it to their lives. The Pharisees knew their Bible; they knew that they should be looking for a divine Messiah, and unlike most others, they best should have understood the signs to identify him.
Secondly, calling Nicodemus a ruler of the Jews implies that he was a member of the Sanhedrin, the Jewish Council, and this was a deliberative body comprised of 70 men who decided cases concerning issues of Jewish law, practice, and faith.
So when we talk about Nicodemus, we are talking about an important and influential man coming to see Jesus—a nobody carpenter from the nowhere of the Galilean backwoods.
Next, this man came to Jesus by night. But why would he come to Jesus at night? I mean, elsewhere in John, Jesus has an encounter during dinner time, which was presumably during the evening or night, so clearly we’ve got something different here.
Night suggests that it was late; night suggests that most people would have been asleep. Night suggests that this was a secretive rendezvous happening under cover of darkness—a fact that will prove quite ironic before their conversation is over.
Thus far, in this early in Jesus’s ministry, John has given us no reason to suspect that Jesus was ever too busy to meet with someone like Nicodemus one-on-one. Even more so, socially, if someone like Nicodemus wanted to have a meeting with Jesus, then culturally, Jesus should have, would have, gone to see Nicodemus.
So why did Nicodemus go to visit Jesus at night? What does going then tell us about him? Well, it tells us two things. Nicodemus was probably afraid to be seen going to Jesus, and second, Nicodemus was also humbling himself by going to visit Jesus.
Reasonably, he could have summoned Jesus for the conversation, so he wasn’t using or abusing his station. Instead, this ruler of the Jews humbled himself by going to meet a carpenter-turned-teacher and miracle worker.
Even if no one else knew about this visit, apart from Nicodemus and Jesus, this remained a costly transfer of face, of personal honor and respectability, from Nicodemus to Jesus. By going in this manner, he was submitting himself to the lesser role in a master-servant or teacher-student relationship with Jesus. He was implicitly recognizing and affirming Jesus as the greater authority.
Nicodemus said to him, ‘Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher come from God.’ Notice he says ‘we know.’ ‘We’ (oida) means ‘we understand,’ but we’re left to wonder who is this ‘we’ that he talks about.
John really only offers two options: Nicodemus and the other rulers comprising the Sanhedrin, or Nicodemus and some other unnamed Pharisees whom he was here representing. However, the first is unreasonable because if it were true, then surely he would have come in an official capacity during the day, not at night, or he would have summoned Jesus to him.
So the second option is most reasonable because, as dedicated students of scripture, the Pharisees were best qualified to recognize Jesus as a prophet and perhaps recognize him as being someone more. But how did they come to know this? What helped them understand and recognize this truth about Jesus?
He tells us, ‘For no one can do these signs that you do unless God is with him.’ See, they were merely applying their knowledge of scripture and the understanding and wisdom and insight that they had gained from it to Jesus’s signs.
Men like Nicodemus, those with the eyes to see, saw scripture—the Old Testament pointing to Jesus. They knew (oida), they understood that Jesus was sent from God because of the signs that Jesus did: turning water into wine, zealously driving out the money changers, and by prophecy.
So Nicodemus here is testifying that those signs confirmed, affirmed, and proved who Jesus is. Nicodemus’s testimony reaffirms John’s earlier declaration that many believed in his name when they saw the signs that he was doing.
Then Jesus answered him, ‘Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.’
And 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?’
Now, much has been said about this exchange, and much more will be said about it. Yet it is far more than just a humorous, ironic exchange to emphasize Nicodemus’s lack of understanding—that is an important part of it.
Because as a Pharisee discerning that Jesus has come from God, he likely would feel some pride in his understanding and wisdom. So yes, this exchange does serve to bring him down, to further humble Nicodemus, showing him to be a student requiring instruction and explanation from the teacher.
But it’s also emphasizing the gracious and merciful work of God by explaining for us how he does what we cannot—how he does for us what we cannot.
And when we read them in English, his questions are clear and reasonable, but the translation loses a very important element: a double meaning which was evident and intentional in the original Greek. The word translated here as ‘again’ is ‘anothen,’ which was used in one of two different senses depending upon the context.
‘Again’ as Nicodemus obviously understood it here, and above—as James will use it when he writes, ‘Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of Lights with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change.’
Yet Jesus is using it here both ways at once. But Nicodemus is only thinking of our physical birth, of the physical world and our temporal existence, and presuming a restored earthly divine kingdom. His questions demonstrate that he was thinking about the here and now instead of the spiritual future.
Jesus answered him, ‘Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God. That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the Spirit is Spirit. Do not marvel that I said to you, ‘You must be born again.”
See, Jesus’s dual use of ‘anothen’ becomes clear as he explains, ‘Unless one is born of water and the Spirit.’ By water, Jesus is speaking of our physical reality and natural birth; while by Spirit, he’s speaking about our spiritual birth, of our regeneration unto spiritual and eternal life.
So regeneration is the whole point of this conversation between Nicodemus and Jesus. We must be born again, born a second time; we must be born from above by God the Holy Spirit.
What does it actually mean for us to be born again? First, I’ll tell you what it’s not. It is not a human decision. Our becoming born again is not decided either by us or by our parents when or if they chose to have us baptized as children or infants. Both the decision and the action are solely held within the sovereign providence of God because it is his monergistic work of salvation.
I mean, some people will insist upon our own active and free-willed involvement in receiving this salvation for us to be regenerated—for our being born again—by suggesting that there’s some dependence upon or requirement for our human agency in deciding. But that is biblically and demonstrably false.
Logically, I’ve got a question for you: How many of us here today were born? All of us, I hope. What input did you give your parents in regards to your birth? Did you ask to be born? Did you consent to be born? Did you even consent to be conceived? None? No? No, of course not; that’s utter and total nonsense.
See, the extent of your involvement in your own birth consisted entirely in beginning and ending with your being born. This is perhaps the best example of a passive activity. You were born; you gave no help to birth yourself. Your mother, monergistically, gave birth to you. Certainly, your father, he might think that he helped some, and perhaps the birthing process was medically induced or a C-section performed, but truly on the day of your birth, it was your mom who did all the work.
So thank you, moms. That is the emphasis which Jesus had in view during this part of their conversation. Just as our mothers birthed us, birthing us of water, so too God alone, through the work of his Holy Spirit, births us of the Spirit.
The spiritual birthing is the fruit and consequence of him circumcising our hearts, as he promised us through Moses and the prophets—where Moses wrote, ‘And the Lord your God will circumcise your heart and the heart of your offspring, so that you will love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul, that you may live.’
See, circumcision of the heart is regeneration. It is the replacement of our dead, stony heart with a living heart of flesh, and the Lord promised to do this work upon our hearts so that we will love him and so that we will live. Thus, we are born again—born a second time, as in a second way—and are thus regenerated.
But regenerated from what to what? When we were created back when Adam and Eve were in the Garden of Eden, they were given life by the Lord, and continuing in that life was declared contingent upon their obedience. Our first ancestors had access to the tree of life to begin with, and they had a free moral will in their original state; they could choose to obey God or to not obey him.
But then, after they sinned and transgressed God’s law by eating the forbidden fruit, they died. They died spiritually, and so they lost their communion with God; they lost their desire to commune with the true God, and they tried to hide behind clothing made of sewn leaves.
Later that day, the Lord showed them mercy by sparing their physical lives, yet he did cast them out of the garden into exile. He sent them—and sent us—away from his holy presence because we had become spiritually dead, and death cannot exist in the presence of the source of life, in the presence of the three persons who possess our life itself.
Ever since then, our moral will is no longer free. We fell from the state of innocence and became sinners. Our human nature was corrupted by their first sin, and so our will became always inclined to sin. We became morally constrained, unable to choose to not sin except for whenever God acted within a person and circumcised their heart, regenerating them.
All those whom the Lord regenerates, whom he births again by giving them a living spirit—his living Spirit—while still inclined to sin, they may now also choose to not sin. Those whom the Lord regenerates become his children of adoption, and according to the faith in Christ which they’re also given, we have the hope and promise that one day, through our union with him, we will become unable to sin, becoming like Jesus, him who knew no sin.
Although we are all born physically alive, we were also born spiritually dead. We were born at enmity with God, and by nature, we were friends of the world. It is not that God is against us, but that we each began at a default position, aboring the Lord as his children of wrath.
So truly, it does require an act of God to change our hearts and bring us to repentance and faith. That is what Jesus is helping Nicodemus to understand: people are not naturally born whole, physically alive but spiritually dead.
We need to be born again, to be born a second time, to be born spiritually as well as physically so that then we may enjoy the life that God gives us as he intends—as complete persons. Then, regenerated, we become restored so that we may enjoy communion with the Lord, to enjoy fellowship with him.
That’s what John was writing about in his first letter: ‘That which was from the beginning, which we’ve heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we looked upon and have touched with our hands, concerning the word of life; the life was made manifest and we’ve seen it and testified to it and proclaimed to you the eternal life, which was with the Father and was made manifest to us. That which we have seen and heard, we proclaim also to you, so that you too may have fellowship with us. And indeed, our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son, Jesus Christ.’
The gospel promise of life in Christ Jesus and fellowship—friendship—with God our Father. Once we are regenerated, we can actually see the kingdom of God, just as Jesus told Nicodemus.
And the sense of this seeing is perceiving, having an awareness of. So once we are regenerated, we can now perceive the kingdom of God as it is in and behind the world surrounding us. We can perceive his authoritative hand upon all things, sovereignly governing his creation, even while it persists in act of rebellion.
We can see the kingdom of God as it is and as it will be—the tension of now and not yet—because we have been given faith (pisto) in the only one who has come, conquered death, the logos whose Theos and Andros.
So have you been born again? Perhaps you sometimes wonder or worry that maybe you have not. That’s why the writings of John are such a blessing and a source of encouragement for Christians, because he reminds us and tells us so that we may surely know.
Consider Nicodemus, a Jewish Pharisee. He knew and understood the scriptures, and he was drawn to Jesus Christ. He heard, felt, and answered the Holy Spirit’s call, even when he did not yet understand or recognize it. He believed, but he did not know why or how, because regeneration proceeds faith.
He saw the signs that Jesus performed, he had the scriptures which told him what they meant, and he understood and confessed that Jesus was sent from God. He came to Jesus; he was brought to Jesus against all reason and humbled himself before Christ as a student and servant.
And as becomes quite clear before the end, Nicodemus came to have a confident faith in Christ. So take comfort and be encouraged. Even if you feel like your faith is weak or if you have questions, doubts, and uncertainties, remember that an expert like Nicodemus felt that way—someone who should have known.
Then it’s okay for you as well. Pick up your Bible and read it. Let Jesus’s signs strengthen your faith. Let God’s word fill you and draw you to him in love. Come talk with me or our elders or some of your other friends and family in the faith. Let us pray with you, pray for you, and share in your struggles to help carry your burden.
Pray yourself—open your heart to God and ask him to fill it with his Holy Spirit. Ask him for greater understanding, ask him for more faith, and ask him to help your unbelief.
If you feel him working within you, if you feel him drawing you to himself, calling you, then do not fight against it. Do not quench the Spirit. Instead, fan and feed the flames. Ask him to feed you, to water you, to grow you, transform you, and conform you closer to the image of Christ. Because that’s just the consequence of being born again.
These are the struggles of our sanctification—the life and the way of growing up in faith until we are one day perfected and mature, until one day we are adults raised in glory with Jesus.
You must be born again. The Lord your God will circumcise your heart and the heart of your offspring, so that you will love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, that you may live. Amen.