Clough John Lesson 15

The New Birth – John 3:1-5

From John 2:12 through the end of chapter 3 John gives us Jesus’ first trip to Jerusalem. The objective of the part we covered in chapter 2 and all of chapter 3 fits with the overall theme of the Gospel. What was the overall theme of the Gospel? Evidence to show that Jesus Christ was who He claimed to be; that there was no excuse on the part of the Jews for their rejection of Jesus Christ. Because they rejected they were condemned. And John wants to establish the case that the condemnation of the Jew was not an unjust condemnation because sufficient evidence did exist for them to believe. We’ve noticed, so far, John’s style; we’ve noticed that he has a peculiar style, which first appears just to stress the literal physical event and that’s all, until you do a double take and look at it again, and you discover lo and behold, in the middle of that literal physical event he has so arranged and so described it to show what his theme is in John 1:14, “We have beheld the glory, glory of the only begotten Son of God.” And so the glory of Jesus Christ is prevalent in the text of this Scripture, and the degree to which we apprehend the glory is a sign of our own maturity. Some can grasp some of it, some cannot, but everybody can grasp something of the glory of the person of Christ through John’s very unique style.

We saw how this style worked from John 1:19 through John 2:11, the first seven days of Jesus’ ministry we found the peculiar fact that when you take those days of Jesus ministry and arrange them in their chronological order, lo and behold, those days give events typical of the dispensations of the Church, for he starts out with Jesus with John the Baptist, typical of the Old Testament dispensation. He winds up with Jesus Christ at the wedding feast, which is typical of the millennial kingdom. And then we began to see the same thing in John 2, Jesus cleansing the temple, and in that temple cleansing when Jesus Christ accomplished what no rabbi had been able to accomplish for a decade or over a decade, the cleaning out or Annas’ son’s bazaar, when He did this we saw a theme, two themes really emerge. When Jesus Christ came down and He started the feud, and that feud resulted in His crucifixion, what does He say, or what did His disciples remember about the event? “The zeal of thine house will eat me up.” And there’s the theme of the crucifixion of Christ. And right after that when the Jews asked for a sign what was Jesus reply? Go ahead, destroy this naos, and in three days I’ll raise it up. And what was that theme? The theme of the resurrection.

Was the temple cleansing literal? Yes. Was it an event that actually happened inside that temple? Of course. But did John so describe it to get another point over? You bet; John so arranged the event and his description of the event to show really what was in that event, that the other synoptic writers had overlooked, and that was that what Jesus did there, the cleansing of the temple, pointed to His death and resurrection.

There was something else that we didn’t add last time, about the cleansing of the temple and in preparation for chapter 3 I recall it once again, and that is one of the features of the Jewish home before Passover is the cleansing of the house, and everybody has to go through the house to purge out the leaven and the man of the house must make a prayer after the house has been cleansed and purged of all the leaven, that as far as he knows there is no leaven in this house and whatsoever leaven there remains he is not responsible for. And that is a preparation for the Passover. Now doesn’t it strike you as a bit coincidental, to use a nice Calvinistic expression, isn’t it a bit coincidental that this occurred on a Passover visit to Jerusalem, and what did Jesus do but cleanse the house of the leaven. And so again the theme of the Passover is seen to flow; there’s thousand of themes that this apostle weaves in all these events. That’s why this book is so frustrating to teach, because you can’t trace a theme; you trace one theme and you get this, then you see a parallel theme running here. And this is what people have complained about over the years in the study of John. You study it and study it and study it and study it and you never can say I really grasp this point because you grasp his points, plural, but you always more points. And that’s of course the picture of the depth and the riches of the Word of God.

Tonight we begin our study of John 3; we are still in that first Jerusalem visit and so we want to make sure that as we go through this chapter we interpret it in the context. Understand in John 3:1, for example, where it says “There as a man of the Pharisees, named Nicodemus, a ruler of the Jews,” that ought to be read very closely to John 2:23-25, “When he was in Jerusalem at the Passover, in the feast days, many believed in His name, when they saw the miracles which He did. [24] But Jesus did not commit Himself unto them, because He knew all men, [25] And needed not that any should testify of man; for He knew what was in man,” one of the favorite sub themes of the apostle. Every time someone comes to Jesus in this apostle Jesus reads them like a book, with perfect omniscience and that last statement in verse 25 we said was a deliberate claim to deity, when viewed as a Jewish reader would have viewed verse 25 for one of the seven things the rabbis taught that no man had was the ability to know his neighbor. And for John to assert in verse 25 that Jesus had no need that anyone testify of a neighbor or anyone else meant that Jesus had something that no man ought to have had by the rabbinic teaching, thus showing once again the full deity of the Lord Jesus Christ.

John is very subtle in his claims; he plays a little game with you. He says come Christian, come listen to my test, and listen carefully and don’t read too fast, and so we will want to, as we go through John 3, read slowly. “There was a man of the Pharisees, named Nicodemus, a ruler of the Jews; [2] The same came to Jesus by night, and said unto him, Rabbi, we know that You are a teacher come from God; for no man can do these miracles that You do, except God be with him. [3] Jesus answered, and said unto him, Verily, verily, I say unto you, Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God. [4] Nicodemus said unto Him, How can a man be born when he is old? Can he enter the second time into his mother’s womb, and be born? [5] Jesus answered, Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born of water and of the Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God.”

Now that’s a familiar text to many people; some have been led to Jesus Christ through the use of this text. Certainly it’s a text when I remember reading it for the first time made the issue very clear to me that the issue was not one of religion but of regeneration and that one had to have this regeneration occur to him on a personal individual basis. But there’s a lot more than just that. Whereas we’ve all read, those of us who’ve been Christians for some time, we’ve read this chapter over and over and over again, what we want to do tonight is put it in the setting of the overall Gospel and then see what more things we can see in it.

First, “There was a man of the Pharisees,” he is to be included among those mentioned in the previous verses, the ones that Jesus “needed not” that any man testify of, the ones that Jesus knew perfectly, the ones who saw the miracles that He was doing all during this time. Nicodemus represents a personal study, a study of a man’s character as well as the theology of regeneration. What John is trying to do for us in verse 1 is to show us first that many of those that believed in verse 23, included people in the highest strata of Jerusalem society. That’s the first thing he wants to show. He wants to deny the claim that Christianity was just a movement that involved stupid people from Galilee, which would have been easily made in the first century. It is not a Galilean movement, says John. The people who are included in Jesus’ disciples include those in the very Sanhedrin, for when it says “a ruler of the Jews,” that means that Nicodemus is a member of the powerful Sanhedrin. This would be equivalent to saying a man who would be in the Congress of the United States. Or a man who served in an intimate position on the White House staff; that’s the claim that is being made here in verse 1; that’s the claim. So in the highest levels people were shocked by what happened on Jesus’ first trip, therefore if one does not believe it is not due to Jesus lack of evidence; it is due to one’s own rebellion against God’s Word.

But John wants to show something else and this whole narrative is couched with a certain flavor to it; we want to pick this flavor up as we move through it. The whole orientation of this Nicodemus incident is to show yes, there were people that believed in Jerusalem, but their faith was very, very weak. And John wants to do this because he’s got to explain why it was that in the capital city of God’s chosen elect nation that had all the typology of the temple, that had all the learning of the Torah, why wasn’t the Galilean carpenter accepted for who He claimed to be? This is an apologetic for the Christian faith. Why did this happen this way? Because the people in Jerusalem were out in the toulies spiritually, that’s John’s answer, in LBC terminology. These people were just out of it, they thought they had a Biblical culture and they did not. They had conservatism but it was not Biblical conservatism.

And I must say that this is a danger in this particular part of the country. In the New England part of the country there’s no pretense about believing in the Bible, people just frank out I don’t believe it. The unbelief is a lot plainer and people don’t feel pressured to put on a phony façade of Christian fundamentalism to get by socially with the result they don’t. And so in a way… in a way it’s easier to work with that kind of person because it’s very clear what you are working with to start with. In this part of the country, the tendency is to place security in what was once a Biblical culture, the Bible-belt culture, and people will have their security in the culture rather than security in the Word of God. This is why we see, for example, people that still insist on the 11:00 o’clock nod to God operation that goes on, and think nothing of taking in the Word of God apart from 11:00 o’clock. For some strange reason the human soul is only open to divine revelation for one hour during the week and then we just omit it for the rest of the time. Now the reason that that holds true and it’s very funny to me because we set the service around here at different times, that’s how I can see what happens, and I’ve noticed the same people, no matter when we set the time, no matter when I close, we can be in the middle of John 3:16 or we can be in the middle of the offertory there’s a certain group of people that sit in the back row that take off exactly at 11:59, I have my watch, these people go out and they must have their watches by the same time that I do because it always winds up, 11:59 every Sunday morning. I’ve often wondered if I could kind of exchange places here with somebody, I’d like to tail them to see what strange force operates at 11:59. I thought at first it might be food in the oven, but that theory broke down due to some things that happened so that wasn’t it. So it’s just habit, just part of tradition. We had other people that used to come here, they don’t any longer, they used to come here and they had a tradition that certain things aren’t to be said for the pulpit and I broke that one right away. And then when we got teaching about the Philistines in Samuel, that took care of the rest of it.

Now that’s just an illustration in this part of the country of a particular hang-up. In the New England area they have lots of other different kind of hang-ups, but in this particular part of the country the hang-up is the Bible belt culture, 11:00-12:00 and that’s it. And boy, you’re a dead person if you dare challenge that in any way, shape or form. Some people haven’t been back since I dealt with the doctrine of drinking in John 2. I’ve often thought what a neat thing it would be to put real wine in a three to one basis, soundly Biblical in the communion some day without announcing it. I bet some of these people would drink it and never know the difference. Some of them would probably faint in the aisle, I’d have to tell the ushers, now when you hand this thing, be careful, you’ve got to catch some people because people have this thing about this certain Biblical Bible belt culture that is holy and sacred, as it was in the beginning it is now and ever shall be. If the Word of God even challenges that then we side with the culture against the Word of God. And you’ll see that time and time again. So don’t think what’s going to happen here with Nicodemus is unduly strange or far removed from West Texas. This might have been West Jerusalem but still, it is connected very intimately with the principles.

Nicodemus is another character that Jesus meets that has a very outstanding kind of personality. So far we see Andrew, the evangelist; we’ve seen him, he’s the one that goes out and gets people for Christ. We’ve seen Peter come to Jesus and He looks at this guy, unstable as water and He calls him a rock because Jesus sees Peter’s potential. We see Him look at Nathanael, a man in whom there is no guile, and Nathanael says you’re right, proving what Jesus just said. Then we see Philip, kind of stupid, and he’s the first one that picks out which is comforting for us all. And then we come to Nicodemus.

Now what kind of a person is Nicodemus. He appears twice again in this Gospel; turn to John 7:50, they’re having a conference, the rulers are, about how come they sent these men out to arrest Jesus and they came back empty handed, this is an aborted arrest and there’s a big long discussion in the council, and remember, that this council, this shows you something of Nicodemus’ power; Nicodemus sits on the council that will decide to crucify Jesus Christ. And for all intents and purposes, we can’t be dogmatic, but for all intents and purposes it looks for sure he’s a believer; he sure is a believer by the time the resurrection comes around. And here he is, everybody is giving their opinion. Nicodemus, very quietly, verse 50, “Nicodemus said unto them, (he that came to Jesus by night, being one of them), [51] Does our law judge any man, before it hears him, and knows what he does? [52] And they answered, and said unto him, Are you also of Galilee? Search and look, for out of Galilee arise no prophet.” Now when I showed you the slide of Nazareth, what did I also show you? The home town of Jonah, so they’re wrong. Jonah lived only about five miles up the road from where Jesus was raised as a child. So that’s a wrong statement biblically.

But the point is, Nicodemus doesn’t really come out strong for the Lord Jesus Christ; he’s just kind of a believer that’s like Peter all during this thing, Peter’s out with the cock crowing three times and Nicodemus is inside the building with the 69 others of the Sanhedrin. Now to show you the transformation that happened to Nicodemus, moving from a very timid, shy man in a high place, sort of like a lot of academic people, they never can make their mind up, turn to John 19:39.

Look at the context in John 9:38; now everyday was shook, the disciples were scared, they took off, the only people that showed gumption, I hate to admit, were the women. In verse 38, “And after this, Joseph, or Arimathaea, being a disciple of Jesus, but secretly for fear of the Jews, besought Pilate that he might take away the body of Jesus; and Pilate gave him leave. He came, therefore, and took the body of Jesus.” At least he came out of the wall and did something. [39] “And there came also Nicodemus, who at the first came to Jesus by night, and brought a mixture of myrrh and aloes, about an hundred pound weight.” And so it was Joseph of Arimathaea and Nicodemus, two believers, who were afraid, who very gingerly went out and got Jesus body and at least did something with it… at least they did something. Now that shows you the character of this man, Nicodemus. He is a fearful person in a high place that has excellent academic credentials.

The other thing to notice about him; what did you notice about every time John brings Nicodemus up? He repeats, he is “the one who came to Jesus by night.” So that brings us back to John 3 and the text. “There was a man of the Pharisees, named Nicodemus,” keep in mind the Sanhedrin had both Sadducees and Pharisees on it, so our first verse informs us that Nicodemus is on the Sanhedrin but of the Pharisaical sect. That will play a role in what’s coming up.

John 3:2, “The same came to Jesus by night,” now since every other time Nicodemus is mentioned John always adds that little phrase, yeah, he’s the guy that showed up at night, John must want us to know something about Nicodemus by repeating this phrase. Well, what is it that he wants us to know? There’s been a lot of speculations, some of them probably true but we can’t tell, but at least we know one thing from Nicodemus’ character and that is that he’s a very timid and fearful person. Coming to Jesus by night he wouldn’t be identified, it’s kind of a hush-hush meeting. He wouldn’t want to be identified in public with Jesus, after all, what had just happened? He practically tore up the temple down the street. So we don’t want somebody on the Sanhedrin, of all things, to be associated with this rabble rouser that just cleaned out the temple. That’s one thing.

But I’m persuaded, knowing how John uses words, that John has a lot more to say than just Nicodemus is a timid man and so therefore he showed up to Jesus by night. John uses the word “night” over and over and over and over and over in his Gospel. An what is it a symbol of? It’s always a symbol of sin and of the blackness of this world. And so when he has Nicodemus coming to Jesus by night and Nicodemus did, don’t think that he didn’t, in space/time history he did come to Jesus by night. But John wants us to note, yeah, he did and he came by night, I want you to see something here, it’s a principle. Nicodemus is a person, he is typical of the sinner coming to Christ out of the darkness of the world system, timid, afraid, but he comes. It may be an indecisive coming but at least it’s left, right, left, right, left, right, left, right, left, right and he finally does make it to the Lord Jesus Christ. So Nicodemus stands as a type, just like the other men in this Gospel, stand as types of different people that come to Christ. And here’s the person who comes to Christ out of great darkness, great, great darkness. There’s all sorts of irony to this darkness; here he is a PhD in the field of religion in Jerusalem, the center of the world as far as content of revelation. And when he starts discoursing, as the narrative goes on with Jesus, he shows himself to be in complete darkness. So not only is Nicodemus in darkness, the whole city is in darkness. John says this is just the typical Jerusalem situation. That’s what we ran into, every time we went down to Jerusalem that’s what happened, darkness. So Nicodemus is one who comes to Jesus by darkness.

How do we know that John wants this point to come forward in the text? It’s simple, as we read down, verse after verse after verse, what do we read in verses 18, 19 and 20? “He that believeth on Him is not condemned; but he that believeth not is condemned already, because he has not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God. [19] And this is the condemnation, that light is come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil. [20] For everyone that does evil hates the light, neither comes to the light, lest his deeds should be reproved. [21] But he that doeth truth cometh to the light, that his deeds may be made manifest, that they are wrought in God.” So it’s not again just a coincidence that verses 18-21 just happen to be tacked on to the end of this Nicodemus incident. So Nicodemus comes to Jesus by night, so there’s the physical picture of this rabbi on the Sanhedrin coming to Jesus by night for information, timidly but he gets there. But in back of that John says I want you to see something. It’s typical of us all, isn’t it; we come out of the darkness to get to the light.

And he says to Jesus Christ, he starts a conversation, somewhat like the disciples; remember the disciples, John and Andrew? They saw Jesus walk by John the Baptist and they started walking after Him and Jesus turned around and said, What do you want? And they said uh, we would like to know where you’re staying, and Jesus knew that that really wasn’t the question. They weren’t selling real estate, they could say Jesus slept here and get a bigger sale; they were interested in getting to know Jesus so that they’d have time to spend with Him. That’s what they were interested in. These men were timid and Jesus understood their timidity. Jesus didn’t humiliate people that came to Him in fear and timidity, He opened them up and said yeah, I know, I really know what you’re after and you don’t have to ask Me in an indirect way, just ask Me directly.

So here we have another incident, he starts off with the indirect approach. “Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher come from God; for no man can do these miracles which you do except God be with him.” Now the fact that he answers “Rabbi” when he addresses Jesus, under the circumstances, shows us a lot about how far he has already come out of the darkness and into the light because you must recall that for a man to be selected on the Sanhedrin meant he had to have very, very high professional qualifications. Moreover, in that time and era to have somebody drop in from Galilee who would be considered uneducated crass material, just gross people, for him to address a rabbi or a teacher who was from Galilee, who had not had all the degrees, as a rabbi, says a lot about Nicodemus spiritually. This man has progressed quite far by the time he took those steps for a nighttime appointment with Jesus Christ. He has moved quite far in his life.

“Rabbi, we know,” …we know, not I know, “we know.” That indicates, if he’s on the Sanhedrin that there’s more than one believer on the Sanhedrin, “we know.” Jesus temple cleansing had become an item of intense controversy on the Sanhedrin council and he says Jesus, I want you to know there are some of us who have recognized your claim to be Messiah. But you say he didn’t say that here. Yes he does, when he says “we know that You are a teacher come from God,” he is essentially calling Him Messiah because a teacher come from God was a term that was found in the Qumran text, the great teacher that will come in the latter days. So we understand that this is a flag term, it’s a special term, it has a lot…it’s not just a term that well, if you’re a good boy. That’s not what it means; this is a technical word. “You are a teacher sent from God,” sent from God in the same way Moses was sent from God. Moses, now isn’t that interesting, for who is mentioned in verse 14? Moses, the one who is the archetype of the great teacher. See how the narrative flows together. There are a lot of loose ends here but they all are tied as we work through the passage verse by verse.

Now I want you to notice the logic of verse 2; I want you to see how far his thought process had developed because later on when we get down to verse 12-13 we’re going to take one Sunday night and we’re going to discuss how do we know Christianity is the truth. And I’m going to develop the apologetic base for the Christian faith at that point, but this is a preliminary to that, and in verse 2, when it says, “The same came to Jesus by night,” when it’s talking about this whole incident, there’s a line of reasoning that is followed. We can’t use this exact line of reasoning today but we can learn something from it. It follows three steps.

The first step is that Nicodemus is utterly completely convinced of the validity of the worldview of the Old Testament. So he accepts the validity of the Old Testament, the Old Testament worldview, the worldview being that God is Creator, all the universe is created, God as the sovereign Creator is moving history toward a consummated goal. So we have the Old Testament worldview. That is the presupposition behind the whole argument here. Late on when we get to verse 12-13 we’re going to have to deal with how do we work it, since the people we work with don’t have that presupposition. We’ll get there but in this case, in this time, these people did have that presupposition, that the Old Testament was basically correct.

The second part of the argument, we’ll diagram it and then look at it in the text, is that Jesus’ credentials were seen. These people knew about Him, they had studied His person, they had studied His works, they had studied His words. That’s why John relates this incident, not that he’s going to use the same argumentation against the Greeks in Asia Minor; it’s just that he’s showing that this second point, these people know Jesus Christ. And on the basis of their presupposition it was very obvious who Jesus was.

Conclusion to the argument, therefore Jesus, His credentials, fit the Old Testament pattern proving that He is Messiah. So they have the Old Testament worldview as kind of a template, they take the person of Jesus Christ and He fits the template, the conclusion is yes, Jesus Christ is Messiah; that’s the argument. Now let’s see how the argument works in verse 2.

He says, “We know that you are a teacher come from God,” that’s point three, we know this, that’s our conclusion that we have come to. How do we know it? “For no man can do the miracles that You do unless God be with him.” “No man can do these miracles unless God be with Him,” is a restatement of the first presupposition. “No man can do these kind of miracles except the God of the Old Testament be with Him.” He, for example, wouldn’t be like the modern man, well it’s just by chance. They don’t accept that. And then notice in the middle of that causal clause in verse 2, “No man can do the things that You are doing,” that’s your second statement, “You” are doing. Now that logic follows as night follows day, that to a person exposed thoroughly to Jesus Christ in the Gospels, who know the Old Testament worldview, the logic is proof that Jesus Christ is who He claimed to be. That’s the airtight case as far as John is concerned. And I want you to notice this argument will crop up again and again, the same thing with the woman at the well, she’s going to go through the same old thing and you’ll see this same three-step argument several times in this Gospel. So it’s there to show you that John did not expect you to have your faith in some emotional experience. He wanted you to have your head screwed on when you trusted.

John 3:3, here we come to the controversial statement: “Jesus said to Him,” notice it says “Jesus answered,” why does it say this again? Had Nicodemus asked a question? Indirectly he had; Jesus recognized, Nicodemus, you really have asked Me a question, and your question isn’t about Me, your question is about yourself. Nicodemus is worried about his own salvation in this passage, I’ll show you that too. It’s become very personal with him, perhaps as he watched that temple cleansing, maybe a day or two before, but Nicodemus has questions about his own salvation and so Jesus says, Nicodemus, let’s dispense with all the double-talk and the indirect stuff and all the rest of it and let’s just save time and get down to the issue. And “I say unto you, Unless a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.” We want to take this carefully.

The fact that Jesus says “Verily, verily, I say unto you,” means it’s the strongest affirmation possible the way John writes with his style of Greek. That’s John’s way of having a really superlative sense of the thing. I say in the strongest way, with no exceptions whatsoever, even for one Pharisee on the Sanhedrin council—that’s what Jesus is saying. No exceptions! “I say unto you unless a man,” and everybody, all parties to this particular conversation know what just “a man” means; in this case “a man” is the old man Nicodemus, that’s who “a man” is. “Except a man be born again,” see, Jesus has a slight sense of humor. Nicodemus want the indirect approach so Jesus gives him the indirect approach. It’s like those people who come to you and say I have a friend who has a problem. Well, friends who have problems, and then you can go on, play the little game. It’s the same thing here, he has just said “now no man can do these miracles,” so Jesus says, “Unless a man be born again.” See, that’s what you want to see, there’s a little jousting going on in the conversation between Jesus and Nicodemus. Jesus was a fascinating person, this is why He was so well liked in social circles. When you watch Jesus converse with people there was always this jousting going on, in love, but there’s always a firm jousting and it made His conversation fantastically interesting to spectators. The disciples just enjoyed watching this thing. In several cases you find it, particularly in the Synoptics, they just stand back and they just like it, it’s just entertaining for them. That was back in the days when people talked instead of looking at the boob tube.

“Unless a man be born again,” the word “again” is one of these little tricky words that John has, so this word that John uses, like so many of his words, can mean two things, and he frustrates us, every time he pulls this little gimmick off; it can mean above or again, both of those meanings in the Greek, the Greek doesn’t tell you, you’ve got to decide on the basis of the context. There’s not one lexicon that you can go to that’s going to decide this question for you; which is meant here. Now from what we’ve already dealt with so far in this particular style of getting used to this apostle and how he’s teaching us, you ought to see the conclusion immediately that John means both of these are true. But like always, what is John’s little ploy? There’s a surface meaning that’s obvious and then there’s a secondary meaning. What’s the surface meaning? Number two: again, “born again,” that’s the surface meaning. Obviously if there’s a new birth it’s the second birth of something again, that’s obvious. So which, the profound or the obvious, is the one that Nicodemus responds to?

John 3:4, how can a man enter a second time into his mother’s womb? He responds to the trivial meaning. See the clever way John exposes the darkness in the city of Jerusalem, with a ThD on the Sanhedrin and Jesus says, “You must be born anothen,” and he says born again, how do you do that? And then Jesus very much pulls in the direction of above, because you see what He says in verse 8, “The wind blows where it listeth, and you hear the sound thereof, but you can’t tell where it goes.” Verse 13 he talks about ascending up to heaven. In verse 31 John the Baptist says he that comes from above is above all. So how does the chapter end? It starts with a simple literal meaning of this word “again,” John takes us for a little ride, and by the time we get to the end of the chapter what are we talking about? Being born from above, not being born again, born from above. So the word does mean two things; to everybody it means again, but to those with spiritual insight it means unless a man be born from above he cannot see the kingdom of God.

Now why is this such a shocker? We have to understand what had happened at this time in history. The doctrine of regeneration was known by that word, but known only in the sense of Isaiah 66:22. So let’s trace a little development here that was going on in the background and this is what Nicodemus is thinking of, then you can understand what Jesus is talking about. If you had walked around and talked about regeneration in the language of the time, the average person on the street would have read you this way: Isaiah 66:2, this is what the average run of the mill person in the street would have thought about regeneration: “For as the new heavens and the new earth, which I will make, shall remain before me, saith the LORD, so shall your seed and you name remain. [23] And it shall come to pass that, from one new moon to another, and from one Shabbat to another, shall all flesh come to worship before Me, saith the Lord. [24] And they shall go forth, and look upon the carcasses of the men that have transgressed against Me….” This is the future age. So regeneration would have been applied to the future age, not to individuals, but to the age. It would have been applied not to the souls of men but to the physical universe; that’s what regeneration originally meant out of the Old Testament, the new age that would come when God would come to consummate history. That is regeneration.

To confirm that view come to Matthew 19:28, “And Jesus said unto them, Verily I say unto you that ye who have followed Me, in the regeneration, when the Son of man shall sit on the throne of His glory, ye also shall sit upon twelve thrones….” So what does he mean here? He refers to Isaiah 66. Matthew 19:28 is just but a reaffirmation of Isaiah. Jesus is saying the same thing; what is the regeneration? Re-generation, or re-creation, and what was creation? Physical universe. What is re-creation? Physical universe. It’s that simple. So that’s the big picture in back of it.

Now Jesus taught in seed form something else and apparently the disciples did not catch onto this until years later when the Apostle John… we’ll look at this, means the physical universe. But in Jesus’ teaching He hinted at something else that later on the Holy Spirit through John brings and that is individuals, individual believers. It wasn’t quite clear when He taught it, so on the way chronologically we’ll move to 1 Corinthians 15 because Paul came to 1 Corinthians 15 and that doctrine before this Gospel was written. So we’re moving chronologically; we start with the idea in the Old Testament, we carry it now to Paul. Paul wrote this before John wrote the Gospel of John. So turn to 1 Corinthians 15:35. He’s dealing with the problem of the resurrection, this is read at funerals, often when I read it I just really wonder how much comfort it gives because I wonder how many people understand what it’s saying.

1 Corinthians 15:35, you can’t sit there and give an exegesis of 55 verses while the wind is blowing and somebody’s casket is being lowered in the hole, which is a principle, by the way, of life; the time to learn to learn doctrine is when you’re in Bible class, not when you’re having to buried a loved one, or not when you’re in the casket. The point is you take doctrine in when you can get it because you might not always be able to get it. All of us, our lives are just that way. So here’s the discourse on this regeneration thing, and he’s trying to get people to see that the physical universe, this physical universe… remember, we’re bridging a gap from point one to point two, point one is Old Testament, point two was in seed form in Jesus day but Paul starts to develop it here when he says now look at that physical universe, the physical universe will one day be transformed and it will still be physical. Be careful of that, that’s Docetism, the heresy that says that the spiritual is immaterial and what you have to do is demean everything material. That’s not true, the Bible says that the material universe will be transformed but it will not disappear. It will be transformed. When Jesus was resurrected He ate fish with His resurrection body. He wasn’t a spirit, He said if you think I’m a spirit and you demean matter, then you just come over and you touch Me. If He was a spirit it would have gone right through Him. So He insists that the resurrection is a transformation of the physical universe, not just the spiritual.

So Paul takes this up and then argues in 1 Corinthians 15:38, “But God gives it a body as it has pleased Him, and to every seed its own body. [39] All flesh is not the same flesh, but there is one kind of flesh of men, another flesh of beasts, another of fish, and another of birds.” Paul believed in the Genesis literal account because verses 39-40 is proof that he held to the Genesis “kind.” So if you want to take a theistic evolutionary view then this is another chapter you can rip out of your already abbreviated New Testament. Verse 42, “So also is the resurrection of the dead.” Now watch this, he uses the agricultural image of the seed and the body, “It is sown in corruption; it is raised in incorruption. [43] It is sown in dishonor; it is raised in glory. It is sown in weakness; it is raised in power. [44] It is sown a soulish body; it is raised a spiritual body. There is a soulish body, and there is a spiritual body,” and notice he says “body.” Both of these are bodies. And the difference is, and this is a vocabulary word that is technical but it’s a good word to know.

The difference between what is mortal and what is immortal, and here is the difference. When Adam and Eve were created, they were created mortal. They were created mortal! What does that mean? They were created such that if they sinned they would die. That’s what mortal mean; mortal doesn’t mean they have to die, it means they have the capacity to die. So Adam and Eve in their first bodies were created mortal. Immortal means that the body cannot die and this is why both the damned and believers obtain a resurrection body, because in eternity our moral status is fixed forever. And this is what’s so damning about hell; people go to hell not in a natural body, they go to hell in a resurrection body and that’s what makes it hell, because they can’t die, they can’t get out of it. They’re trapped in a body forever and ever and ever and ever, with all the sensory perceptions of the body. The body is the input for perception of the soul, and that in hell is what makes it so painful, is that the resurrection body has sensory input and the person with the pain, at least in the mortal body, the pain exceeds a certain level and you die because of the injury. But in an immortal, incorruptible body the pain goes on and on and on and on and you never die, you never get out of it. That’s why there’s a resurrection of both the wicked and the just in Scripture. So both the wicked and the believers to into immortality. That’s just a general principle.

Now in history Adam and Eve were created as mortal; they didn’t have to die but they could have died. And when they died we have a fallen mortal body as contrasted to an unfallen mortal body before that point. We, then, in our status today, have fallen or dying mortal bodies, some more progressed than others but all mortal bodies. Now, in the immortal the body carries over with apparently the same characteristics, though obviously people who are crippled and so on, we would guess, would not carry the signs of injury and crippledness into the eternal state, the only one who does that is Jesus Christ, He will always carry the marks of His hands and His feet. But apart from Him everyone else will go through okay, and into the immortal world. Now when the physical body is transformed into the immortal physical body then you have people prepared for eternity. Fine; Paul says in verse 50, “This I say, brethren, that flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God; neither does corruption inherit incorruption.” Now later on Jesus will clarify this and point out, flesh and bones still occupy the immortal body; over here we have the term “flesh” plus “blood,” which we would say, paraphrase those three words, flesh that functions with blood. In the immortal body we also have flesh because Jesus insists He has flesh when He was risen from the dead, but here He has flesh minus blood. And it’s a new kind of flesh, it doesn’t need blood. And I you know a little bit about physiology what does blood do? Blood is the conveyer of nutrients from the physical environment. Blood is the element in your system that is a sign of its dependency on the external physical environment. It transports O2 to the cells, takes CO2 back out to the environment. So if you have flesh that doesn’t have blood, what you have is autonomous flesh, or flesh that is no longer dependent upon the physical environment. So whatever our resurrection bodies are, they’re bodies that are independent in and of themselves, not totally in the sense that they’re independent from God but they’re independent from this physical interaction of our usual mortal bodies.

All right, Paul developed, then, the idea that look, if the whole world is going to be turned into an immortal world in eternity future, then obviously the bodies have to be. So Paul advanced the thought from the overall world to the body. Now John goes back years later and he advances the thought some more, and now we turn to John 3. You see, we use these terms in our fundamentalist circles about believe in the Lord Jesus Christ and thou shalt have eternal life; what’s eternal life? You say it’s life that goes on forever. A person in hell has life that goes on forever, doesn’t he? See, eternal life isn’t quite so simple. And so John, since he’s going to be talking about eternal life because what’s coming up in verse 16 but the famous verse about eternal life, he’s got to set the stage so he can define the term so when the term comes everyone will understand what eternal life is all about. So here’s where he’s setting the stage for what is eternal life.

So John says we go from the world, the world is created, it’s re-created, the bodies are re-created, and now what Jesus is doing here is saying that our souls, actually, are re-created. The world is last, the body is next, and the soul is first. That’s the order chronologically. So at regeneration, when you become a Christian there is something that occurs on the inside that is the first step of a three-step process. The first step is whatever happens here and Jesus confesses that it’s a mystery, He refuses to go into the details. But something happens at the point that we become a Christian called regeneration of the spirit or the soul, whatever you want to talk about. Actually I should say regeneration of the human spirit if you want to be technical. Since I have people who want to be technical I’d better be technical. So the Spirit is regenerated.

Then we go to the second stage which is going to occur when? The rapture; at the rapture, say you go out here and get hit by a car, and so your spirit is out from the body, an then at the rapture your spirit is rejoined to the body. And now you have stage two, and you go on in stage two for a while because the millennium takes a thousand years to get through before it’s done with, and then finally after the millennium you have the eternal state and you’ve reached stage three.

So you see how one doctrine that looks simple, regeneration, now suddenly expands out and has all sorts of implications. Here, then, is where Jesus is talking about the spirit, and this is what John is going to define, subsequently, as eternal life. John 3:3, “Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.” The “kingdom of God” is part three. He’s never going to get there if he doesn’t start the three-step process. So he’s got to start some place and here’s where you start. And if you don’t start you’re never going to get to stage three, that’s what Jesus is saying.

Now Nicodemus…it just blows his mind, and the reason it blows his mind is because what does the first one tell you he was? He was on the Sanhedrin, but what party? Sadducee? That would have been bad enough because they didn’t believe in the resurrection. But what does it say? Pharisee; now we know from the Mishnah what the Pharisees talked about—new birth! Now this is really ironic, the Pharisees had a doctrine of the new birth of the individual already, but what was the doctrine the Pharisees held of the new birth? It was when you become as a Gentile a convert to Judaism you are as a newborn babe. Or when a bridegroom would marry he would be said to be a new person, as a babe. Or when a king sat on a throne he was said to have been a new person. Now there’s a play on words, just like the shoe latchet, that little thing John the Baptist talked about, that shoe latchet, we put that back to what a Jewish student did.

The same thing here. What Jesus has just done is twist something around 180 degrees. The Pharisees taught that once you were on the way ethically, on good works, you then were born again. In other words, the new birth was the result of salvation by works. Jesus says, completely twisting the whole thing around from the way they taught it, He says no-no, you’ve got it all backwards. Unless you are born first you’re never going to get to the kingdom of God. So this is what yanks Nicodemus all out of shape, and why he reverts to this physical literal interpretation. And he just says, “Can a man be born when he is old,” and that is a pathetic statement because you know who this man is? Nicodemus, he’s an old man. And so all this indirect thing, all this indirect little pulling that’s going on between Jesus and Nicodemus now comes to the surface and you have a pathetic situation of a man with a doctorate, a man who is in the high ruling circles of the society and He asks pathetically, I am an old man and how can I be born. It’s the cry of a person who wants salvation but it’s a cry…this is pathetically ignorant compared to what he should know: “can a man be born when he is old? Can he enter the second time into his mother’s womb, and be born?”

And so Jesus comes back with His explanation, “Verily, verily,” He prefaces it again which says this is a very critical point I’m making to you Nicodemus, “I say unto you, unless a man be born of water and of the Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God.” So now instead of saying “being born from above,” Jesus substitutes, “born from above,” He replaces by “born—water, spirit.” The two terms are identical, they are just two ways of saying the same thing. And Jesus is trying to advance the understanding. Now what is “water” and “spirit.” The word “spirit” can also be translated as wind, it’s the same word, pneuma. Where do you notice “wind” in the context? Verse 8, now here is where if we understand how John is teaching us we’ll pick up a fascinating little point. People struggle and struggle about the spirit and the flesh and the water and the wind and the rain here and get all fouled up.

But if we just relax and just ask ourselves, every time Jesus talked to somebody, what do you notice He does with them? What did He do to Nathanael? Didn’t He teach Nathanael something about when you were under the fig tree, something concrete. When He was cleaning out the temple and He wanted to teach the resurrection, what did He do? He said, Destroy the naos, and in three days I’ll raise it up. What did He do with the woman at the well? Woman, if you knew who I really was you’d ask Me and I’d have given you a drink that you would never thirst again, you’d never have to come back to this well. Now when the people started coming down from the mountain, what did He say? The fields are white unto the harvest. So what does John have Jesus do every time He’s talking to somebody. Doesn’t Jesus pick out a natural element from the immediate environment? He picks out the naos, I showed you that on the slide, Herod’s naos, the center of the temple. He used that to teach. With the woman at the well He used the woman’s well to teach here; when we get to the woman at the well I’ll show you, the well is still there, you can look down in it. When the men come down from Samaria what does he say? The fields are white unto the harvest.

So if Jesus inevitably, every time He’s talking to somebody he picks out something in the locale to teach them with, and since the word “spirit” can mean wind, and since wind is mentioned in verse 8, and since he’s talking about ascending into heaven, what does He really say? He’s using a natural element, they are at night, they are under the starlit sky and Jesus has already said I want to be born from above? What comes from above but the wind and the rain, the two vehicles for life; the wind brings the rain, the showers that come to the central Israelite area, and so he’s… maybe it’s a partly cloudy night and He looks up and maybe there’s a gentle breeze blowing because He mentions the breeze, “the wind is blowing where it lists,” Nicodemus, hear the wind. He was up on one of these rooftops of one of these buildings and the wind blows at night, there’s hills there and you have a nocturnal drainage so there’s always a wind blowing on a hill at night. So He’s again, as with the woman at the well, He’s saying here look Nicodemus, you’re born from above and what comes from above is the wind and the rain and that gives life, and that’s what I mean, unless you’re born, unless you have new life, you cannot enter into the kingdom of God. You’ve got to have life.

Now baptism is not meant in any part of this verse, and there are three reasons why baptism is not meant. One I have just given you; it fits better with John’s method of teaching to take these words in their normal literal sense of some nearby physical object visible to both viewers of the conversation. Jesus taught using a concrete teaching aid of a local object, over and over, you’ll see Him do it in John 6, He does it again in John 7, He does it in John 8, He does it in John 9, it’s His usual teaching method. And if you’re not going to interpret the wind and the rain here in verse 5 you’ve the peculiar fact this is the only time Jesus ever talked to somebody and He doesn’t point to something physically concrete in the environment. That’s one reason.

The second thing is that “water” in John never means baptism. It means salvation in chapter 4, or the Holy Spirit, chapter 7. And you have no precedence for saying baptism is mentioned here.

And finally we go back to Ezekiel 36:25 and here’s the passage that Jesus has on His mind, the New Covenant, a covenant that will one day be formed for the nation Israel but a covenant which has already come into [can’t understand word]. “Then,” this is a promise to Israel but available on an individual basis in the Church Age. “Then I will sprinkle clean water upon you, and ye shall be clean; from all your filthiness, and from all your idols, will I cleanse you. [26] A new heart also will I give you, and a new spirit will I put within you,” and what do you notice are the two elements in Ezekiel 36:25-26? This is what’s going to bring in the kingdom. You notice in verse 25 water and you notice in verse 26 spirit, and baptism isn’t at all involved because the water in verse 25 has got to be metaphorical because what’s the last part of verse 25 saying? Show me how you can get in a bathtub and wash away idols. You can’t. So obviously the water in verse 25 is a metaphorical use of water. And it would have been understood by anybody that knew this passage. And so obviously the spirit in verse 26.

This is not talking about baptism. Baptism and communion are never mentioned in John’s Gospel. John’s Gospel sounds a death knell to Catholic theology because John’s Gospel has Mariolatry thoroughly and totally discredited at every point. And it discredits this whole concept that baptism and communion are means of grace. The Gospel is set up to oppose that idea.

Now let’s turn back to John and finish off this verse. Jesus says then, “Unless a man be born from the things above, the water and the wind,” and those two things are rich images that means the theology of Ezekiel 36:25. But then as John always does, it means something else too that’s true. What else does it mean? Who has He introduced in chapter 1 that baptizes with water, and prophesies of one who comes after that would baptize with the Spirit, but John and Jesus. Now what Jesus has said, Nicodemus, the program that John the Baptist began, that you guys went out into the wilderness to see, that program, unless people repent and believe on Me, repent unto John the Baptist and believe on Me, they’re not going to see the kingdom of God. And you remember that long hot dusty road out in the wilderness that I showed you; people who were interested in the Word had to exercise effort to get to the Word. A lot of Christians today would never have made it the 20 miles out into the wilderness to see John the Baptist, and John would never have considered you as believers.

So we find that Jesus argues that in verse 5, Nicodemus, regeneration must occur individually, not just to the universe, but to you individually; not just to your body by resurrection but to your soul, and He’s going to go on and explain that a little bit more and we’ll cover that next week.

I want to show you some background slides of this area. On the north side of the city of Jerusalem there has been found, found a couple of years ago, the tombs of the Sanhedrin, and here’s what they look like, this is just an interest item to show you how important the Sanhedrin was to these people, they had their own burial site and this was one of them. It shows you this whole thing, carved out of rock, they didn’t pour concrete, it was carved out of rock and there are 70 places in it; just as the Scriptures say, 70 Sanhedrin. This is a mikvah at Herodium, and the mikvah is a place for their washing. Keep in mind that washing, the water of Ezekiel, that cleansing, the Jews sought cleansing, and he would go over and over into these mikvahs, it was like a baptistery. Here is the mikvah at Masada, always cleansing himself. You must visualize these mikvahs to understand the water. Every time you see water in the Gospel think of the Jew perpetually washing and washing and washing and washing and washing, always conscious of his sin, always trying to wash it away. And that’s why Jesus picks the term “water” so often.

Here is the model of the city as it existed in Jesus day; the temple is to the left. This is the common people’s area; Nicodemus probably did not live out there; this is the area where these small homes, just the size of the wall relative to the home. Notice the flat roofs, people went out on the roof. Here in the upper class area, notice the difference in the style of the homes. And it was probably in one of these homes where Nicodemus went; it could have been the other one but scholars suspect that the home mentioned here is none other than John the Apostle’s. And he had a home in this area, and somewhere up on one of those roofs Jesus talked with Nicodemus. So if you want a mental picture of what’s happening here, he’s on this roof in a nice starry night. So that’s the setting for the story that we are going to be studying for the next couple of weeks.

Let’s finish verse 5 and just ask a concluding question. Jesus says in two places that unless one is born in this spiritual way he cannot in any way participate with Christ forever and ever and ever. When Jesus says this, He says, “Verily, Verily, I say unto you,” meaning that He exercises the strongest most superlative terminology. If Jesus does this then we can only say there’s one question left for us and that is to ask ourselves, are we personally regenerate. That’s the application, there isn’t any other. And that’s a section of Scripture you ought to know very, very well because in seeking to lead someone to Christ or show his need of Christ this is a Scripture that deals with the depths of the human soul. The human soul must be regenerated.

With out heads bowed…..

[site showing Avi Yohnah’s model: http://holylandnetwork.com/temple/model.htm]