1 Peter 19 – The Triune God. 1 Peter 1:3
Before we begin our study this evening, let’s go to
the Lord in prayer. We’ll have a few moments of silent prayer at the beginning
so that you have the opportunity to make sure you’re in right relationship with
the Lord and walking by the Holy Spirit as we begin our time in the Word
together. Let’s go to the Lord in prayer.
“Father, we’re so very grateful for the fact that we
have You to come to. And that no matter what the circumstances in life may be,
no matter how disappointing various political situations and circumstances, and
no matter what bad decisions are made, we know that we can relax and trust in
You. We ought not to let these things disturb us, though they do. We often need
to be reminded that we do not put our trust in man but we put our trust in You.
Even though it’s difficult to live in a nation that is in self-destruct mode,
we know that the only way we can ever recover is through a spiritual solution
and until there is a restoration to spiritual truth and recognition of absolute
truth in Your revelation, there can be no true prosperity or freedom in this
country. Father, we continue to pray for our leaders, especially those who do
have a Biblical framework and do understand truth. We pray that You would give
them wisdom, strength, perseverance, and endurance even in times of
difficulties. We pray for the others that You would restrain their evil and
prevent them from achieving their objectives and that as we go through what
will be a fascinating political season for the next eighteen months, we pray
that You might give us clear thinking as we come to understand who these people
are that seek to lead this nation. We pray that You would make it clear who has
wisdom and who has not. Now for us, as we study this evening, we pray that You
would help us to understand what You have revealed in Your Word that we may
clearly understand it, assimilate it, and tell others about it. We pray this in
Christ’s name. Amen.”
Well, today certainly started off with something
interesting. For those of you who were divorced from the news, which I don’t
think is too many of you, the Supreme Court handed down a ruling in
relationship to this challenge to how funding for these health exchanges worked
on Obamacare. Many people on the right that are opposed to Obamacare thought
that the Supreme Court might overturn this and it would eviscerate Obamacare.
Unfortunately, they did not. What we see in their reasoning is a significant
window into the thinking that dominates this country at this point.
I want to start off this evening by just talking about
that a little bit so we can come to understand it. The real issue here is
hermeneutics. Hermeneutics is a big word for some folks. It basically means how
you interpret what something means, what something means as intended by its
writers. When it comes to the human sphere sometimes people don’t write very
clearly and that’s certainly true in this law. Part of the problem that was
coming up was that Congress did a pretty pathetic job of writing out what they
wanted. There’s a certain ambiguity that was recognized and this is why it
ended up before the Supreme Court.
First thing, I just want to remind you of some basic
rules of interpretation. This applies to any kind of literature. It even
applies to the area of the arts such as music and it applies to visual arts. It
applies to anything that the author is communicating and the author is the one
who determines what he writes means. We call that in the study of interpretation,
authorial intent. This is an important issue. We talk about this a lot when it
comes to understanding the Bible and Biblical teaching that we need to
understand the intent of the author.
In the case of the Bible there is dual authorship.
There is God the Holy Spirit and then there is the human author. You can come
to understand what any author intended whether you’re talking about a writer of
Scripture, whether you’re talking about Thomas Jefferson and the Declaration of
Independence, or whether you’re talking about the writers of the Constitution.
You can determine what they mean by using certain principles. The first is
literal, plain, normal use of language. This means that you can study any
document and on the basis of what these words mean in everyday language you can
determine what that person writes. Today we live in a world where due to the
influence of what we call postmodernism, people don’t think that meaning is
determined by the author, the writer, or the artist; they think meaning is
determined by each individual person, and it’s how you look at something to
determine what it means.
It even applies to how I look at myself. If I look at
myself and decide in my self-consciousness I’m really a woman, then I’m a woman.
That has been legitimized by many different statutes in different cities,
including Houston. They claim you are who you think you are. There’s no
objective truth. Truth is determined by your own individual impression of who
you are. We’ve seen a couple of examples of this negatively in the last couple
of weeks. We have the example of Bruce Jenner. He looks at himself in the
mirror and he sees he is a woman. So now he’s going through this transformation
to be a woman. There is no objective truth. Somebody sent out an e-mail with a
cartoon last week which is a picture of Bruce Jenner’s dog. When you click on
it, there’s a cat there!
There’s no objective truth. Everything is what you
want it to be. The problem with that is that sooner or later that falls
apart on the shoals of reality. It gets shipwrecked on reality. You can’t just
make things up and make the world be what you think it ought to be when reality
is far different. There’s the case of this Caucasian woman up in Spokane who
is, or was, president of the NAACP up there. She said she was black.
She had no African-American heritage or genes and biologically she was strict
Caucasian, but she felt black.
We live in a world where how you feel is more
important than objective truth. We’ve rejected objective truth and when there’s
no objective truth, anything can slip in. Language doesn’t mean what it means,
it means whatever you want it to mean. So the reader can look at a book on how
to understand language in a postmodern world, written by a postmodern, and how
do they expect you to interpret things? By the way they intend it to mean. They
can’t live consistently. If I’m a postmodern writer and I’m telling you that
anything can mean whatever you want it to mean, then you can’t reinterpret that
to mean anything else. I’m trying to communicate to you something objectively
from my mind to your mind.
The unbeliever lives in this fantasy world. Romans
1:18 talks about how unbelievers want to suppress truth in unrighteousness.
They’re truth suppressors and when you suppress truth you have to reinvent
reality. That’s called fantasy. Sooner or later when you’re really living in
your fantasy world, your fantasy castle, if you live there long enough, you’re
what they call psychotic. Your fantasy has become reality to you. The only way
to understand anything is in terms of the plain, normal use of language.
A second rule of interpretation is the single meaning
of the text. When I say something is white, that doesn’t also mean at the same
time that it’s grey or off white or blue or purple or green. If you tell people
we’re going to meet tomorrow and we’re all going to be in a group together so
for identification, everyone wear a red shirt, that doesn’t mean you should
show up in a blue shirt or a green shirt or a yellow shirt. You should show up
wearing a red shirt. Language means something and if language doesn’t mean
anything, doesn’t mean something specific, then language can mean anything.
If language can mean anything you want it to mean,
then language means nothing. It’s ridiculous. We might as well throw everything
out because the written word no longer has meaning or significance. So as
Christians we can say that attacks on language are ultimately attacks on the
Word. The Word is important in the Bible because in the Old Testament in Hebrew
you have this word memra which refers
to the revelation of God. That is brought over into Greek as the LOGOS and Jesus is said to be the LOGOS, the Word of God. So we believe in
the written Word of God and the physical Word of God, the Lord Jesus Christ.
Once you attack meaning in this way, which has
happened over the last hundred years, and you destroy meaning and the Bible
doesn’t mean anything to anyone anymore because it can mean anything to
anybody. You run into conversations with your friends, your neighbor, your
relatives, your kids, and your parents and they say, “I just don’t think it
means that.”
How do you determine meaning? There are clear rules for
determining meaning. These are two of them and the third one is that meaning is
determined by context and usage. When you look at words in Scripture you look
at how they are used. Sometimes they are used with different meanings. If you
were here last week when I taught last
Thursday night at the Chafer Conference on Romans 10:9–10 you
learned that sometimes words have different meanings. Saved sometimes refers to
being saved from the eternal penalty of condemnation. Other times it means
simply to be delivered from a physical trauma. Sometimes it means to be saved
in terms of being saved from the power of the sin nature. Sometimes it means
glorification. You have to look at context to determine usage. This is
important.
I’m just going to go through this. I don’t want to
belabor this but this is a great example for us to learn how people are
thinking out there. This is why we get so frustrated at times. We live in a
culture where the vast majority of people do not think that words have meaning
and that that’s significant. They think it can mean whatever you want it to
mean. That is how they operate.
When this gets into the law courts, we’re in serious
trouble. I have friends who are lawyers and are operating both as legal
counselors and as prosecutors. What they tell me is that this has so permeated
the function of law at the basic court level that we’re in serious trouble.
When you’re trying to interview witnesses or you’re trying to deal with people
who are suspects and they just make anything mean anything they want it to
mean, it’s extremely difficult to even have a meaningful conversation with a
huge segment of our population because language has lost its meaning.
Let me just summarize what has happened here in the
Affordable Care Act, which is really a misnomer because it’s made healthcare
much less affordable. In fact, a report I saw this morning said that in states
such as Hawaii, the cost of health care has gone up 49%. In some other states
it’s gone up 47% and 42%. You can Google the data and find out for yourself.
This is what has happened in this new marketplace. It’s not only the fact that
you have certain progressive Democrats and Republicans who colluded on this,
but the insurance companies discovered they could make an enormous amount of
money off of this. They were glad to jump on board and the insurance lobby
behind this is just incredible.
So the way this was supposed to work is that the Act
created something called an exchange, an insurance exchange in each state. Each
state was motivated by the law to operate these exchanges because they would
get certain freebies from the federal government. They would get all these
“bennies”. There were a couple of states that started it off. They were going
to be the postcard example of how these exchanges worked. One of these was
Oregon and another was New York. What happened is that after they established
their exchanges they realized it was going to cost them more money to have this
exchange through which people would just buy their health insurance than to
just not have the exchange. The government wasn’t giving them enough “bennies”
for what it was going to cost them to have the exchange. According to the law,
every state was supposed to establish their own exchange.
I printed out the whole court filing this afternoon
and I highlighted a few things. It says, “The act requires an exchange in each
state, basically a marketplace that allows people to compare and purchase
insurance plans. The act gives each state…” How are they using the word
“state”? To each of the fifty states. “The act gives each state to establish
their own exchange but provides that the federal government will establish the
exchange if the state does not.” Now this is their summary. Do you discern in
that language that there is a difference between the federal government and the
state? That is obvious and that runs through the whole document. They use the
term state numerous times and it always refers to the individual states. It
doesn’t ever refer to the federal government.
In Section 36b it says, “If the statutory language is
plain, the court must enforce it according to its terms but oftentimes the
meaning or ambiguity of certain words or phrases may only become evident when
placed in context.” So we all recognize that sometimes words are a little bit
ambiguous and it’s the context that informs it. That’s what the argument was
over in the court: over context. The summary goes on to say, “So deciding on
whether the language is plain, the court must read the words in their context
and with a view to their place in the overall statutory scheme.” They recognize
context determines meaning.
Then it goes on to say, “When read in context, the
phrase ‘an exchange established by the state under 42US Para (and so on) is
properly viewed as ambiguous. The phrase may be limited in its reach to state
exchanges but it could also refer to all exchanges, both state and federal for
the purpose of tax credits’.” That’s the real issue. Are the people who live in
states that don’t have exchanges [Texas is one of them] going to be able to get
tax credits since their state doesn’t have exchanges?
Then in the summary it also says, “The Affordable Care
Act [I love this phrase] contains more than a few examples of inartful
drafting.” Inartful drafting means they wrote it so badly that no one knows
what in the world they meant by it. That’s the legislature’s responsibility.
Now we get into looking at the dissent opinion.
Justice Scalia wrote the dissenting opinion along with Justice Thomas and
Justice Alito. They say in summary, “The court holds that when the Patient
Protection and Affordable Care Act says ‘exchange established by the state’
means ‘or the federal government’ they’re adding a phrase. Why in the world
would they want to add that phrase?
Scalia goes on to say, “The Patient Protection and
Affordable Care Act makes major reforms and it provides that if a state does
not comply with this instruction, the Secretary of Health and Human Services
must establish and operate such exchanges within the state.” He goes on to make
a point that what the case is all about is that it requires that someone who
buys insurance established by the state gets tax credits, which is what I just
explained a minute ago. He says, “Words no longer have meaning if an exchange
is not established by a state is established by the state.” That’s the word
game the majority opinion had. They didn’t really mean established by the
state. What they really meant established by the state or something else.
They’re just reading it in there.
He goes on to say, “It’s harder to come up with a
clearer way to limit credits to state exchanges than to use the words
‘established by the state’. How else would you limit it?” They couldn’t have
said it more clearly. He goes on to say, “It’s hard to come up with a reason to
include the words ‘by the state’ other than the purpose of limiting credits to
state exchanges. The plain, obvious and rational meaning [our point number one]
of a stature is always to be preferred to any curious, narrow hidden sense that
nothing but the exigency of a hard case and the ingenuity and study of an acute
and powerful intellect would discover.” In other words, make it up and add it
in.
“Under all the usual rules of interpretation, in
short, the government should lose this case. But normal rules of interpretation
seem always to yield to the overriding principle of the present court: the
Affordable Care Act must be saved.” See, here’s an example like we see in
theology all the time. When people have a theological agenda, for example,
covenant theology, they’re going to ram, cram, and jam that meaning into a text
in order to get that text to fit their theology rather than letting the text
have its own meaning. This is what has happened. I highlighted a bunch of other
stuff but I don’t want to take any more time. That’s the guts of it.
What we see as our culture drifts more and more away
from objective truth is that you can make meaning up and add meaning. The
problem with this has nothing to do really with your political views on
Obamacare. It ought to have something to do with your views of the
Constitution. As they said, it was inartfully written. It was poorly written
but the intent of the law is determined by the legislature, not the courts.
When the court says, “What this really means is…” and they add a phrase, then
the Supreme Court is legislating from the bench. The result of that is that the
Constitution has now been shredded. It is irrelevant. The Supreme Court is
dictating meaning and law to the country and we are now under a judicial
tyranny. The Constitutional Republic is dead.
It’s going to get worse in the next couple of days if
the Supreme Court rules that same-sex marriage is okay. That leaves us, as
believers, in a great quandary. The question in my mind is how in the world I
can exhibit loyalty and faithfulness to a government to which those words have
no meaning. What is means one day is different from what it will mean another
day. How in the world are we know what to do on any given day because on any
given day the meaning of these documents shifts and changes? That leaves us in
a horrible position. It will lead unless there’s a massive shift in the
worldview of the nation, it will lead to either the collapse or anarchy of the
nation or it will lead to total dictatorship and tyranny, one or the other.
We really don’t have a whole lot of options available
to us, unfortunately, except we are commanded in Scripture to pray for those in
power, pray for those in authority, and to a degree we need to respect that but
it doesn’t mean we have to validate it. That’s going to be a real challenge.
Almost every major conservative Christian organization
now such as the large black pastor’s association are calling for civil
disobedience if the government rules in favor of same-sex marriage. Last week
it was the Southern Baptist Convention. Last week it was the American Family
Association and James Dobbs’ Focus on the Family. They’ve all called for
Christians to get involved in civil disobedience. I don’t think that’s the
answer in this because no one is making us do anything. Now if the government
comes in and makes the churches perform same-sex marriage, that’s a different
story. That’s where civil disobedience comes in. You never have a case in
Scripture for civil disobedience unless the government is telling an individual
believer to do something or not to do something that violates Scripture. To
allow for same-sex marriage is very different from mandating that every pastor
or every church will have to perform same-sex marriage.
We may be headed there but that’s not what’s going to
be decided on in this court case. So I think as much as we agree that this is
perverted and horrible and a violation of the meaning of marriage, if marriage
means something else how are we to know what anything means. As much as we may
agree with that, we have another problem.
When Paul wrote about the government, it was a perverted
government. You can never say that people like Caligula were not perverted. The
Roman Empire was clearly perverted. Some rulers were better. Some rulers were
worse. But the perversion that took place and was allowed within the Roman
government and the Roman culture was worse than what we’ve got. Let’s keep
things in perspective.
Let’s get back into the Word that refreshes us. We’re
in 1 Peter 1 and we’re looking at this opening statement in verses 3–5.
“Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.” This is a statement
of praise. We can praise God for a reason. Remember, in 1 Peter 3 Peter is
going to come out and also say that we need to obey the government. The
government was allowing at different times persecution against Christians.
These believers who were Jewish believers were suffering individual opposition
and persecution.
So, “Praise be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus
Christ.” Why? “According to His abundant mercy has begotten us again to a
living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, to an
inheritance incorruptible and undefiled and that does not fade away.” It’s unchangeable;
it’s permanent; it’s eternal. “Reserved in heaven for you who are kept by the
power of God through faith for salvation ready to be revealed in the last
time.”
The whole focus here is on exuberance. We can be
excited, despite whatever negative circumstances are around us. We are focused
on the long-term game; we are not focused in the short term. What happens
today, tomorrow, next week, next year; that is going to fade against eternity.
When we have that perspective we can still have great joy because we have hope.
When we looked at the passage we spent a lot of time
talking about who God is and the attributes of God, the eternity of God and the
immutability of God. We saw that this applies to all three Members of the Trinity:
Father, Son, and God the Holy Spirit. Why do we praise Him? (Slide 6) Because
He, “according to His abundant mercy has begotten us again to a living hope…”
(Slide 7) I broke this down here a little bit so we can see the phraseology.
Each one of these phrases is loaded with significance and with meaning. We
praise the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. Why? Because according to
His abundant mercy…
Now the Greek word that’s translated “according to” is
a preposition that means according to a standard, according to an absolute.
That absolute is God’s mercy. Mercy is related to God’s love. God’s love is an
attribute that is eternal. It’s one of the few attributes where it makes an
absolute statement that God is something. The God of the Bible is said to be
holy. God is holy. He’s also said to be love. God is love. Now the other
attributes are ascribed to God but these attributes are emphasized and brought
out and highlighted by these bold statements saying that God is this. God is
love.
Love manifests itself toward the human race in two
different ways. One way is through grace. Grace is undeserved kindness or
unmerited favor. It means that we don’t deserve any of the good things God
gives us. He gives good things to unbelievers and believers. He gives good
things to those who are obedient and those who are disobedient. God has freely
given His Son to go to the cross and die for sin even when we were obnoxious to
Him. “God demonstrated His love toward us in that while we were yet sinners
Christ died for us.”
God isn’t saying that we need to come toward Him a
little bit and then I’ll do some more for you. God doesn’t say we have to show
Him that we mean it and then He’ll save us. God just says, “Here’s the gift. If
you just accept it, if you just believe it, it’s yours.” The gift is eternal
forgiveness. The gift is eternal life, the very life of God, which is the
foundation for meaning and happiness in life. That’s grace. We’re saved, not by
works Ephesians 2:8–9 says, but by grace. It is God’s goodness. It puts
the emphasis on what God does, not on what we do. Now mercy is related to grace
and to love. Grace is the principle of God’s unmerited favor to man. Mercy is
the application of that grace, that kindness, to people who are specifically
undeserving.
Mercy has to do with grace in action. God’s kindness
to those who don’t deserve kindness. That is God’s mercy when we deserve
something horrible, God negates that and that’s His mercy. So it is according
to His abundant mercy, His manifold mercy, the richness of His mercy. His mercy
is a bottomless measure. It’s infinite. We can’t measure it. We can’t quantify
it. We can’t outdo it. We can’t “out-sin” His mercy. You can’t do anything that
is too great for His mercy to cover. Our sin is finite and limited but God’s
grace is infinite. His mercy is infinite. It is more than enough to handle
whatever problems we have in life. That’s the standard. It comes from His love,
His grace, and His mercy.
So according to that standard of His mercy, He does
something. It says He “has begotten us again to a living hope”. What I like
about this phrase is that it shows directionally. It’s toward something. It’s a
living hope. It doesn’t say to a future hope. Notice He doesn’t say to a dead
hope, either. It’s a living hope, which emphasizes that it is a present
reality. When we wake up in the morning and you turn on Fox News or you turn on
ABC, CBS, or NBC or one of the thirty thousand people in the whole country who
watch Al Jazeera. You can turn on Al Jazeera America and you hear all these
negative things, you can have hope. It doesn’t have to wipe out your day. It
doesn’t have to wipe out your spiritual life. We have a living hope. We need to
focus on the future.
So this whole section is going to help us understand
that we’re going to live today in light of eternity, not in light of tomorrow,
not in light of any of these horrible Supreme Court rulings that are coming
down, not in light of all the machinations that are taking place in Congress,
not in light of the fact that we now have, I’ve lost count, fourteen, fifteen,
sixteen candidates on the Republican side for President. Every day it seems
like someone else is announcing that they’re going to run for president. It’s
just going to turn into an absolute donnybrook for the media. They’re going to
play everyone against everyone else and it’s just going to be a mess.
But God’s in control. We have a living hope. That
means it ought to change and focus our attention every single morning on the
fact that we have hope. It states that He has begotten us again to this living
hope and it’s through something. It’s through the resurrection of Jesus Christ
from the dead. Now when we go back and get there and study the resurrection of
Christ, that’s the reality.
I bet I could ask every person in this room and a
whole lot of other people, “Do you believe Christ was raised from the dead?”
“Sure, not a problem. That tomb is empty. Jesus arose. Hallelujah!” So do you
have a living hope? There’s an application. You say you believe in the
resurrection of Christ, but one of the things that produces according to this
passage, is a living hope because Christ conquered death. His victory is our
victory. And so because He has victory over the greatest problem we’ll ever
face which is death, then all of our problems fade into insignificance. If you
believe in the resurrection, it impacts your mental attitude. If it’s not
impacting your mental attitude, we need to stop and take a look at 1 John 1:9
again and refocus and rethink about what we say we believe and how it should
impact our thinking and what’s going on in our heads.
These doctrines are not just ideas that are
historically significant. They are ideas that should be changing how we live
and interact with the details of life on every single day, every single
occasion. As we work our way through this, we look at the fact that the
standard is grace or mercy and that caused Him to do something. He caused us to
be born again. We need to look at this aspect of the grace solution, which is
regeneration. We need to talk a little bit about what regeneration is and then
we need to see why this is so important.
One of the great tools we can use in talking to an
unbeliever is just draw out a little chart where you put man on one side, God,
on the other side, and a problem between God and man. That is the problem of
sin. You don’t have to get much more complicated than this if you’re talking to
an unbeliever. You can just leave it like this. But if you want to understand
all of the internal dynamics and complexities of salvation then you need to
recognize that the Bible builds this out in a little more detail.
The sin barrier that exists between God and man is
really composed of several different facets. There is more to it than the fact
that we sin. We are not condemned for our sin; we are condemned for Adam’s sin.
We have this barrier. We have six different components to that barrier. The
basic problem of sin is that which separates us from God but it has different
features and facets to it. We’ve all sinned but that’s really Adam’s original
sin. Because of what Adam did, we’re all sinners.
The old Puritan primer said, “In Adam’s fall, we
sinned all.” It’s his sin that condemns the race. Everyone thinks it’s their
nasty little sins that caused their separation from God but we sin because we
are sinners. We sin because when we were born and came out of the womb we were
already sinful. We were corrupt because of Adam’s original sin. We were already
corrupted by sin before we ever exercised our volition. That’s the basic
problem.
Then on top of that there’s a penalty for sin, which
is spiritual death. Another problem is the nature of God. How can God have any
kind of relationship with sinful, unrighteous people? How can light have
fellowship with darkness, the Scripture says? Then we have the problem of
unrighteousness because even if the sin is paid for, we are still unrighteous.
How is God going to solve the problem of our corruption, which is that all of
our righteousnesses are as filthy rags? We have another problem, which is
spiritual death. We’re born spiritually dead and we’re born “in Adam”.
That’s our position. He is our father and we are in the Adamic family.
So we’ve looked at all of these in the past and all
the discussions on these are available under the series I taught on salvation.
So we’re going to look at just the one doctrine we’re talking about here and
that’s regeneration. Regeneration solves the problem of spiritual death. So we
need to come to understand part of what the problem is so we can understand the
solution.
Now if you talk to someone about being regenerate
they’re probably going to look at you like you grew a third eye or a horn or
something between your eyes and have no idea what you’re talking about. Even if
you use the term born again. Jimmy Carter made that popular and overused it. It
got overused and abused so much back in the 70s that it lost its meaning. I
discovered that by witnessing to someone. I was in Denver at a family thing and
I was talking to some guy that my only female cousin was dating at the time. I
asked him if he had ever been born again. He said, “Yeah. I did. You know when
I was in college all of a sudden I decided my parents had given me all these
standards and all these rules to live by and finally I just threw them all away
and I was like a new person. You know I didn’t worry about their morality any
more. I didn’t worry about this or that.”
That’s a perversion of being born again. That tells us
that the unbeliever doesn’t hear things the way we hear things. They often give
Christian terminology different meanings. So we can’t just use these terms
loosely. They’ve often become clichés and you know what happens with clichés.
They lose their distinctiveness and they lose their meaning so we need to
understand the words clearly enough to use our own vocabulary. The first point
we need to cover in talking about this concept of regeneration is to talk about
its meaning.
It means to be spiritually born. Now some people
pervert that. We have a lot of people who get in touch with their spiritual
side. What that means in common everyday language, I think, is that they get in
touch with their emotions. Don’t you think that’s how most people use that
term? When you hear Hollywood stars say, “I’ve just become so much more
spiritual” they are just dwelling on their emotions and their own little
self-absorbed desires. Once they get into touch with fulfilling the fantasies
of their little sin natures then they feel fulfilled. So this concept of
spiritual birth is also something that has a lot of confusion to it so we have
to define that.
What does it mean to be spiritually born? To be born
implies something, doesn’t it? That something didn’t exist but now it does exist.
So spiritual birth or being born again is for Christians the basic meaning. At
the moment a person expresses faith alone in Christ alone, the Holy Spirit
creates a human spirit. Now we’re going to break all of this down but at the
beginning most of you have all of this. The Holy Spirit creates a human spirit
and God the Father simultaneously imputes eternal life to that human spirit and
imparts that spirit to the believer. The believer passes from what the Bible
calls from spiritual death to spiritual life.
Now we have to break all of this down. We’re going to
do it slowly but first a couple of other terms. Regeneration is a technical,
theological term that we classify this under and it’s really derived from three
different Greek words. The first word is PALIGGENESIA. Now when you see a double “g” in
Greek it’s usually pronounced like an “ng” so I pronounce it palingenesia. The
second word is GENNAO
ANOTHEN and the third word is ANAGENNAO. Notice that “gen” syllable that’s
in the middle. That’s the word that means to be born or someone gives birth.
When you read the sections in the Greek that say “so-and-so begat so-and-so”
it’s got that verb in there that means to give birth to someone.
So PALI in the first word is a common word. What does “GENESIA” sound
like to you? Sound anything like genesis? See, same root; something that begins.
So PALI is the
Greek word for again so that literally means to be born again. Then the second
word, GENNAO ANOTHEN is found in John, chapter 3 when Jesus says to Nicodemus that you need
to be born again. The word ANOTHEN can have one of two meanings. It can mean to be born a second time or
it means to be born from above. You’ll find a lot of Calvinists say it means to
be born from above because they’re emphasizing that the origin of the new birth
is from God the Father. You’re born from above. But how did Nicodemus
understand it? Nicodemus’s question is, “Does that mean I have to go into my
mother’s womb again?” If he had understood Jesus to be talking about “from
above” he wouldn’t have ever thought about going back into his mother’s womb.
Context tells you what the meaning is. He understood what Jesus was talking
about which was to be born a second time.
Then ANAGENNAO, that third word, is the one we find here in 1 Peter 1:3. That prefix,
the preposition ANA, also means again so it’s the same verb GENNAO with
that prefix again and it means to be born again. All of these words are used to
communicate the same concept of regeneration or being born again. As I’ve said
here and as we look at our passage in John 3, that’s really the foundation for
understanding the spiritual birth.
So we come down to the bottom for the definition and
there are two key passages: John 3:3–7 and Titus 3:5. That’s where we’re
going to spend some time this week and next week is looking at these two
passages. Turn with me now to John 3. This is always one of my favorite
passages. It’s a favorite passage for many people who witness. When I was in
high school I went on a canoe trip with Camp Peniel up to Colorado. We were
going up to the headwaters of the Rio Grande and coming down. One of the
counselors on the trip, one of the leaders who mostly ran most of the trip, was
a guy named Mike Turnidge. Mike was also the guy you heard me talk about. He
was the one who had me read the book, The
Genesis Flood, by John Whitcomb and Henry Morris back when I was about
fourteen years old so this was a couple of years later. I remember we were
camping at a campsite, one of the numerous roadside campsites in Colorado.
They’re all over the place. We were on our way up there and we were up in the
morning and getting all our gear together and everything. I went with Mike over
to one of these old hand pumps to get water. We were pumping the hand pump to
fill up our water pails. This kid, probably a little older than me, and a
college kid, was camping there. He came over and Mike started talking to him.
This was a great example for me. Mike started talking to him and he used that
as a question. He said, “Are you a Christian? Have you ever been born again?”
He just walked him through the gospel and the kid trusted Christ. He sat down
with him and pulled out his little Bible and went through John 3 with him,
explaining the importance of being born again. That was such a great example to
watch someone in a witnessing situation like that. I’ve seen Gene Brown to do
that too on more than one occasion. You always have to adapt to whatever the
circumstances are. Every situation is going to be a little bit different.
So we come to John, chapter 3. A couple of things we
ought to understand when we look at this. It takes place very early in the
gospel of John. It takes place very early in the Lord’s public ministry. He is
first presented to the crowd in John, chapter 1, when He comes down to be
baptized by John the Baptist. When John the Baptist saw Him he said, “Behold,
the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.” He said it twice. What we
have in chapter one is basically four days at the very beginning of the Lord’s
ministry when He is publicly presented by John the Baptist. And then He picks
up his first six disciples, John, James, Peter, Andrew, Phillip, and Nathaniel
and they begin to follow Him.
Then He performs His very first ministry in Cana of
Galilee in John chapter two. That is turning the water into wine. This is a
creation miracle that is determining that He is the Creator God. Word of that
would have begun to spread. Cana wasn’t very far from His hometown of Nazareth.
We’re told in John 2:11–12, “This beginning of signs Jesus did in Cana of
Galilee and manifested His glory.” That’s always intrigued me. When we think of
the glory of God we think of the shekinah
glory from the Old Testament. We think of a bright light. We think of the
brilliance of God’s character but see, Jesus has that cloaked in hypostatic
union. He’s not showing off His glory. His glory is in what He did. He showed
that He was the eternal Creator God by what He did, not by some sort of
flashing light and sound show.
From there we’re told that He moved to Capernaum in
verse 12 and then He goes to Jerusalem. That is the first Passover He went to
in His public ministry. He goes to Jerusalem and this is His very first
ministry. What is His message? We’ve been studying in Matthew for a long time
so here’s your pop quiz. What is His message during the first part of Jesus’
public ministry? What’s His message? Repent for the kingdom of heaven is at
hand.
Now that ought to give you a clue. What is Jesus going
to tell Nicodemus in verse 3? “Unless you’re born again you can’t see the
kingdom of God.” Now how many of us have read that for hundreds of times and
what we hear is Heaven? Is that what Jesus is talking about? By implication
that would be true but that’s not what He’s talking about. He’s offering the
kingdom at that stage of His ministry. John the Baptist has been teaching that
message. Jesus has been preaching that message and He’s going to send His
disciples out with that message. That’s the message that Nicodemus has heard
that He is preaching. Jesus is saying to Nicodemus, a Jew, maybe even the chief
rabbi of Jerusalem at that time.
The name Nicodemus is probably a title. It means a
ruler of the people. It’s probably not his everyday name. It probably refers to
his position. The text says he is a ruler of the Jews, a teacher of the Law. He
is probably the foremost Bible teacher in Jerusalem at this particular time. He
knows what Jesus has done because he says, “We know that no one can do these
signs unless God is with Him.” So the signs had pointed to who Jesus is as the
Messiah.
Furthermore, Nicodemus in verse 2 says, “You are a
teacher from God.” That was a title the rabbis had for the Messiah. He would be
a teacher from God. He’s indicating by what he says that he understands that
Jesus is the Messiah. Remember what Jim Myers said last Friday night at the
Chafer Conference? He gave a tremendous
presentation on how people were saved in the Old Testament. There
are so many people today, scholars in New Testament departments and Old
Testament departments throughout many different seminaries, who don’t really
believe in messianic prophecies in the Old Testament. They say, “Those weren’t
really messianic.” Yet we look at what happens in the New Testament and Jesus
expects that Nicodemus would understand Messianic truth from the Old Testament.
If it’s not messianic how could He expect that? Well, clearly Nicodemus
understands it. He says, “You’re a teacher from God”, which means you’re the
Messiah.
The sense of what he’s saying is that we know you
claim to be the Messiah. “For no one can do these signs unless God is with
Him.” So Nicodemus already recognizes that He has God’s stamp of approval on
Him. Jesus, then, is going to address him specifically. He says, “Most
assuredly, I say to you, unless one is born again he cannot see the kingdom of
God.” He uses these words GENNAO
ANOTHEN which mean to be born again, to be born a second
time.
This gives us a great insight into the core of the
gospel message. You are spiritually dead, which is why a person needs to be
born again. What we learn from this terminology is that for something to be born,
something comes into existence that wasn’t in existence. That is very important
because as you read different theologians and you talk to them about being born
again they get fuzzy. Not all of them are clear. Even some of the people you
think would be clear aren’t very clear. To be born means something goes form
nonexistence to existence. Something positive, something new, is added.
In 2 Corinthians 5:21 we learn that we become a new
creature in Christ, old things are passed away, all things are new. We become a
new creature in Christ. There is something new that’s added. The reason I bring
that out as I wrap this up for tonight is that I was reading an article that
came out in a theological journal, The
Evangelical Theological Journal in 1997. It wasn’t long before I moved up
to Connecticut. A former classmate of mine in the doctoral program at Dallas
Seminary wrote it and he was writing this article analyzing the conflict that
occurred between Lewis Sperry Chafer and the Princeton theologian, Benjamin
Breckenridge Warfield. Chafer wrote his book, He That is Spiritual, in 1918 and when Warfield, who was considered
the most erudite Presbyterian theologian in America, wrote his book review he
just slammed Lewis Sperry Chafer. He just ripped him up one side and down the
other. There were a lot of issues there. I think Warfield misunderstood some of
the things Chafer was saying because Chafer used victorious life language. He
didn’t mean it so Warfield automatically thought he was getting into the victorious
life Keswick teaching when he wasn’t. But all of that aside, when I read
through that whole article I got to that guy’s conclusion he said, “One of the
weaknesses in Chafer’s theology was he had a weak view of regeneration. He
didn’t have a view of regeneration that limited the power of the sin nature.”
Now think about that. That is because the guy who
wrote it is pretty reformed Calvinistic in his soteriology, in his
understanding of the makeup of man. It clued me into the fact that in reformed
or Calvinistic theology, regeneration isn’t the acquisition of a totally new
nature where something new is there that wasn’t there before. It is the
limitation of the sin nature. Now when you think about lordship salvation, this
suddenly makes sense for in the reformed idea of salvation it means if you’re
really saved you’re not going to do certain things. Or you may do them but not
for very long because your sin nature is not as bad or as nasty as it was
before you were saved.
But that’s not what regeneration means. It means that
something new is given. In fact, there is something that limits the power of
the sin nature. It doesn’t mean you can’t do those things any more. It means
that you can control it. That’s what? Romans 6, the baptism by the Holy Spirit.
Now there’s a relationship between those two, which we’re going to have to get
into here. What this is saying is that you have to be born again.
Now if you look down to verse 6, which we’ll start off
with next time, Jesus is explaining what this new birth this. He says, “That
which is born of flesh is flesh.” That’s material birth. We’re born through
normal processes of procreation and the physical material is passed on from one
generation to the next. “That which is born of flesh is flesh but that which is
born of Spirit is spirit.” I think the King James Version has accurately
interpreted this. In the Greek there’s one word for spirit, PNEUMA and the Greeks don’t capitalize.
But if you look at your English text it says, “that which is born of Spirit [capital
S] is spirit [lower case s]”. It means something that comes into existence is
spirit. It is not something that is material.
God creates this human spirit and imparts that to the
individual at the instant they trust in Christ. That is what it means to be a
new creature in Christ. So we’ll come back next time and finish this and look
at Titus 3:5. This is critical to understand the value we have as believers who
are now new creatures in Christ. We have a new capacity and that capacity is
drawn like a magnet to this living hope. That’s what it goes to. We are born
again to a living hope. There’s a purpose for that. Not just so we can spend
eternity sitting on a cloud strumming a harp but that there’s this living hope.
Those of you who have listened to me long enough knows hope is connected to our
eternal destiny and our rewards and inheritances in Heaven. That’s what this
first couple of paragraphs in 1 Peter drives us toward in recognizing the
importance of living in light of that future destiny.
“Father, we thank You for this opportunity to study
these things this evening, to be encouraged by Your Word that in spite of
negative things happening in our culture around us that looks like it’s just
imploding, we can have joy. We can have hope and we need not be overly
concerned about these things because we know that You are in control. We have
been born again to a living hope that should shape our thinking and our
attitude and everything we do on a day-to-day basis. We thank You for this in
Christ’s name. Amen.”