8. The God Who Grants New Birth
8
The God Who Grants New Birth
The Bible’s storyline, we have discovered, has, from the opening chapters of Genesis, set up a massive tension—cosmic in scope but descending all the way down to the level of the individual. The tension is grounded in the fact that God made everything good. God himself, the Creator, is different from the creation, but all that he made was initially God-centered and good. The nature of evil is tied to revolution against this God. In Genesis 3, we saw how this is depicted as obsessive desire to challenge God—to become God ourselves, to usurp to ourselves the prerogatives that belong only to the Creator. Out of this idolatry come all of the social evils, the horizontal evils that we know.
With everybody wanting to be at the center of the universe, there can only be strife. I know full well that nobody goes around chanting, “I’m at the center of the universe.” Yet if I were to hold up your high school or college graduation class photo and say, “Here’s your graduation class photo,” whose face do you look for first? Or suppose you have a really good knock-down, drag-out argument (a one-in-ten-years type). You go away from it seething. You remember all the things you could have said, all the things you should have said and would have said if only you had thought of them fast enough. Then you deploy all of these things as you replay the whole thing in your mind. Who wins?
In my time I have lost many arguments; I have never lost a rerun.
These sorts of reflections are the small indexes of how we want to prevail, how we want to control, how we want to be at the center. Even God—if he, she, or it exists—jolly well better serve me or I’ll find another one, thank you. In other words, here is the beginning of all idolatry.
But if our life has come from God and now we view him as our enemy, what do we have but death? Yet instead of instantly wiping out rebels, the God of the Bible, in his sovereign mercy, acts in a variety of ways to restore large numbers of them. He calls out one man, Abraham, and his family. Although they are flawed through and through, God begins the process of starting a new humanity through them, establishing a covenant or agreement with Abraham and his descendants that anticipates what God is going to do to save men and women drawn from every tongue and tribe and nation around the world. In due course he shows what good law should be and how there needs to be sacrifice for sin. If the inevitable result of our revolt against God is death, then does not God’s justice require some kind of death, even while this God forgives the sinner? So we witness the beginning of the sacrificial system as it was set up under the old covenant. Eventually God promises in due course a Redeemer, a Messiah, someone from the royal Davidic line. As the promises unfold in the Old Testament, this ultimate Davidic king is portrayed as more than just one more person with David’s genes. For we are given glimpses that we recite with pleasure at Christmas:
6For to us a child is born,
to us a son is given,
and the government will be on his shoulders.
And he will be called
Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God,
Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.
7Of the increase of his government and peace
there will be no end.
Isaiah 9:6–7
The Lord God will give him the throne of his father David.
Luke 1:32
An array of biblical texts promises a Davidic king who is nevertheless identified with God himself. So we glanced at some of the Old Testament promises that look forward to the time when the Word, God’s own self-expression, becomes a human being, living for a while among us. He became flesh. In becoming flesh he ultimately became the one who is the perfect locus of grace and truth. No one has seen God at any time, but we have seen Jesus. Here is God as he has disclosed himself to us. He is the God who is there and who has disclosed himself. This Word made flesh is named—and his name is Jesus, Yahweh saves, for he came to save his people from their sins.
But so what? Precisely how does this help? So he comes. The God who is there has disclosed himself. How, precisely, does his coming help us? Granted the sweep of the Bible’s storyline so far, this is what we need:
1. We need to be reconciled to God.
2. We need to be morally transformed, or else we will just keep on rebelling again and again.
3. We need all the effects of sin somehow to be reversed and overcome. That includes not only our relationships with one another but death itself. Otherwise death just keeps on winning. This is still a decaying universe. There is still betrayal, disappointment, pain, sorrow, and death.
All these things Jesus directly confronts. In other words, the Bible holds out the prospect of utter transformation. Biblical Christianity is much more than simply making a decision for Jesus so that we can live happy lives. We must be genuinely reconciled to the holy God who is there. We ourselves must be transformed—in measure right now, and for the rest of our lives, and ultimately with the kind of thorough transformation that leaves no hint of self-centeredness and death behind and leaves us swamped in sheer delight at the glory and centrality of God.
In large measure, that is where we are going in the rest of this book. We got as far as what Christians call the “incarnation”—the “in-fleshing” of the Word, God becoming a human being, a first-century Jewish human being by the name of Jesus. How, then, in line with the Bible, does he address the needs we have listed?
At least in part, he does so by granting us new birth.
Introduction to the New Birth
There are several passages in the New Testament that talk about the new birth, but I shall focus on John 3. John’s Gospel is the fourth book of the New Testament. We should begin by reading the first fifteen verses of his third chapter.
1Now there was a Pharisee, a man named Nicodemus who was a member of the Jewish ruling council. 2He came to Jesus at night and said, “Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher who has come from God. For no one could perform the signs you are doing if God were not with him.”
3Jesus replied, “Very truly I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God without being born again.”
4“How can anyone be born when they are old?” Nicodemus asked. “Surely they cannot enter a second time into their mother’s womb to be born!”
5Jesus answered, “Very truly I tell you, no one can enter the kingdom of God without being born of water and the Spirit. 6Flesh gives birth to flesh, but the Spirit gives birth to spirit. 7You should not be surprised at my saying, ‘You must be born again.’ 8The wind blows wherever it pleases. You hear its sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going. So it is with everyone born of the Spirit.”
9“How can this be?” Nicodemus asked.
10“You are Israel’s teacher,” said Jesus, “and do you not understand these things? 11Very truly I tell you, we speak of what we know, and we testify to what we have seen, but still you people do not accept our testimony. 12I have spoken to you of earthly things and you do not believe; how then will you believe if I speak of heavenly things? 13No one has ever gone into heaven except the one who came from heaven—the Son of Man. 14Just as Moses lifted up the snake in the wilderness, so the Son of Man must be lifted up, 15that everyone who believes may have eternal life in him.”
John 3:1–15
This language of new birth: what does it mean? I am old enough to remember when people drove Datsun automobiles. They were produced by the Nissan Motor company, but the base model was the Datsun. Then somewhere along the line they decided that they would change Datsun to Nissan, and all over America there were slogans about the “born-again Datsun.” So what does born again mean? A name change?
Or sometimes a Democrat becomes a Republican, or the reverse; a liberal becomes a conservative or vice versa. Someone in the media will start chiding this “born-again” Republican or whatever.
Not too long ago a pollster by the name of Barna polled many self-described “born-again” folk. Of course, to conduct such a poll you have to define what born again means. He defined a born-again person as someone with a personal commitment to Jesus Christ that is still important to them today. To be admitted to the polling group they had to affirm things like “I have a personal commitment to Jesus Christ. It’s important to me” and “I believe that I will go to heaven when I die. I have confessed my sins and accepted Jesus Christ as my Savior.” When he had his group, Barna discovered, rather sadly, that the morals and way of life of these self-identified born-again people are not substantially different from those of the general public. He found that 26 percent of them did not think premarital sex is wrong. They are just as likely to divorce as are non-Christians. Research of this sort has generated book titles such as Ron Sider’s The Scandal of the Evangelical Conscience: Why Are Christians Living Just Like the Rest of the World?[1]
So what is “new birth” or “regeneration” really about? Does it mean that you have changed your name? Your party affiliation? Undergone some sort of religious experience?
Not for a moment am I suggesting that the research of these pollsters is wrong. At the purely phenomenological level, it is doubtless disturbingly accurate. But to reach its conclusions it has horribly abused the “new birth” or “regeneration” language used by New Testament writers. The pollsters reason something like this: We’ll find those who make a certain evangelical profession of faith; those who make such a profession we’ll acknowledge to be born again. We’ll plot their morals or lack of morals, and if we discover that their morals are no different from the morals of the broader culture, we will be forced to conclude that the new birth does not radically change people.
By contrast, the reasoning of the New Testament writers is something like this: The new birth is a powerful regeneration, by God himself, in the human life, such that those who have been born again are necessarily transformed. It follows that professing Christians whose lives are indistinguishable from those of unbelievers have no biblical ground for thinking they have been born again. The pollsters are running their logic in exactly the wrong direction.
Indeed to talk about the new birth as if it is primarily a metaphor for a specific religious commitment is slightly bizarre. The child about to be born does not make a commitment to come out of his mother’s womb. As far as I know, it is the mother who is doing all the work and pushing the little tyke out. The source of new birth comes from the parents. New birth language is strangely chosen if it is primarily a way of referring to the commitment of the one so born.
As far as we know, born-again language was not used (as far as our sources show) in the Jewish world of Jesus’s day until he invented the term. So it is important to try to find out what he meant by it if we are going to embrace some kind of born-again-ism or born-again theology. We shall proceed in three quite uneven points.
What Jesus Actually Said about Being Born Again (John 3:1–10)
We are introduced to a chap called Nicodemus, who is identified as a Pharisee. That means that he was from a conservative branch of first-century Judaism, a branch known and largely respected in the community for discipline, good deeds, and a certain kind of orthodoxy, though sometimes given to excessive rules. On top of his religious affiliation, he was a member of the Jewish ruling council; almost certainly that is referring to the Sanhedrin, the top council of seventy or seventy-two people who ruled the country under the Roman government. So this means that he belonged both to a specific religious/ political party and to the political elite. This combination of political elite and religious elite put him at the top of a lot of heaps in the country. Jesus calls him “Israel’s teacher” (John 3:10): the expression suggests that he was widely regarded as “the teacher of Israel,” the distinguished professor of divinity. So he is politically and religiously connected, and he is learned and professorial. Later on in the book, it appears that he is probably connected with considerable wealth.
He comes to Jesus “at night” (John 3:2). Why? There have been many suggestions. Perhaps he did not want to show up in the day. He might have been a trifle embarrassed: after all, Jesus was a kind of itinerant teacher from the relatively despised area Galilee, complete with funny accent. How could Jesus stack up beside Nicodemus himself, the distinguished professor of divinity? Why would he approach an itinerant preacher to get some theological advice? But I confess I do not believe that theory for a moment. Nicodemus shows up several times in this book, and every time he doesn’t really care what people think. He possesses an extraordinarily independent spirit. So why did Nicodemus come at night?
To understand what John means by faithfully recording that it was night, you have to see how John himself in his book uses the contrasts light and darkness, night and day. Doubtless the interview took place at night. But does John record the time merely to add factual detail? Almost certainly he does so because he likes to play with light/darkness and day/night polarities. Later on, for instance, when Jesus is betrayed, Jesus dismisses Judas, the man who betrays him. And as the man goes out, John comments, “And it was night” (13:30). It is as if John is saying, “He went out into horrible darkness and lostness without light and hope ever again.”
If that is what is going on here, then the text is saying that when Nicodemus came to Jesus, doubtless during the night, he came with a certain kind of lostness. He did not even know how to approach Jesus properly. He was a bit baffled by him. That becomes pretty obvious as you read on. On the one hand, he approaches Jesus with a certain kind of respect. It is remarkable that this “teacher of Israel” approaches an itinerant provincial preacher and addresses him with the respectful “Rabbi” (3:2). Nevertheless his approach cannot hide a touch of arrogance. He says, “Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher who has come from God. For no one could perform the signs you are doing if God were not with him” (3:2).
We can start by asking why Nicodemus uses this “we.” There is no indication that he has brought his students with him: “My class and I together, we have come to this conclusion.” There is no hint that anybody else is there. It can scarcely be a royal “we.” An editorial “we,” perhaps? Later on we will observe that Jesus himself carefully draws attention to this slightly pretentious “we.” It is almost impossible to avoid the conclusion that for all the formal respect Nicodemus displays toward Jesus, there is a little element of self-importance: “Rabbi, we have been examining you, and we have observed that you are not the run-of-the-mill religious teacher. There are all kinds of quacks out there who claim to do miracles, and they are all fraudulent, psychosomatic, or faddish. But we look at the kind of thing that you do, and we cannot deny that this is miraculous. The only explanation is that it is from God. So we have come to the conclusion, we have, that you are a teacher sent from God.” That’s what it sounds like.
In one sense the comment is commendable. At least Nicodemus is looking honestly at the phenomena; he is not simply dismissing Jesus as some sort of nutcase, one more religious quack. The ancient religious world had their quacks, of course, and we have our share today too. The kinds of things that Jesus did were a cut above, and Nicodemus was not going to deny the evident. And yet this editorial “we,” this “we theologians,” perhaps, or “we Pharisees,” or “we the leaders of the Sanhedrin,” does sound a bit pompous.
Then Jesus responds: “Very truly I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God without being born again” (3:3). How is that in any sense a response to what Nicodemus said? Follow the sequence again: Nicodemus says, “We know that you are a teacher who has come from God. For no one could perform the signs you are doing if God were not with him,” and Jesus replies, “Very truly I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God without being born again” (3:2–3). What’s the connection?
Some have suggested we are to assume something was left out, as if the conversation really went something like this: Nicodemus said, “We know that you are a teacher sent from God because nobody could do what you are doing unless God were with him. So tell us: are you the one who is going to bring in the coming kingdom? Are you the one who is going to make David’s kingdom finally dawn?” And Jesus answered, “The crucial question is not whether I’m going to make the kingdom dawn but whether you’re qualified to get in it.” But that is an awful lot of material for John to leave out and for us to reinsert to make sense of the flow of the passage.
I suggest the connection is far simpler. You may recall that in one of the earlier chapters, chapter 5, I mentioned that the notion of “kingdom” can be quite diverse, depending on context. In broad terms, God’s kingdom has to do with his dynamic reign, with his authority and power. Sometimes the specific reference is to his sweeping sovereignty, and sometimes it refers to the exercise of God’s reign over the Israelites of the old covenant. There was a broad anticipation that eventually great David’s greater son would come and introduce the long-awaited and restored kingdom. And now what does Nicodemus see? He sees Jesus doing miraculous signs that cannot be explained as the tricks of some quack. He sees this as God’s reign, God’s power. “We have come to the conclusion,” he says, “that God is with you.” This must be God’s reign operating in some sense. Nicodemus is claiming to see something, to discern, perhaps, the coming of the promised kingdom. And Jesus says, “My dear Nicodemus, let me tell you the truth. You do not see a blessed thing. You cannot see the kingdom unless you are born again. You might see the miraculous signs, but you really do not understand their significance. You do not see the kingdom at all.” In other words, what Jesus is doing is actually gently but firmly knocking down Nicodemus’s pretentions. To see this kingdom, the kingdom that Jesus is introducing, you have to be born again, he says. That is the logical connection between verse 2 and verse 3.
Nicodemus replies with a bit of a sneer: “How can anyone be born when they are old? . . . Surely they cannot enter a second time into their mother’s womb to be born!” (3:4). Some have tried to argue that Nicodemus here shows himself to be a rather thick professor of divinity. Does he really imagine that Jesus is seriously suggesting that you have to crawl back into your mother’s tummy and start all over again? This reading means that he cannot see a metaphor when it is leaping out to strike him. He is just slow and literalistic. But that does not make any sense either. Nicodemus was not a stupid man. You do not get to be the teacher of Israel without being able to discern the odd metaphor that comes your way. I think that he is simply replying to Jesus in Jesus’s own terms. It is as if Nicodemus is saying, “It is easy to promise a lot of things. You can promise that some will turn over a new leaf; you can promise fulfillment in marriage; you could say, ‘If you want to get wealthy, follow me.’ You can promise all kinds of things, but what you are promising is frankly over the top. You are promising too much. A new beginning? A new birth? How can anyone possibly start over? Time does not run backwards except in some sci-fi stories. You can’t crawl back into your mother’s womb and have another go at life. You are promising too much. How can any man be born again?”
In point of fact, hasn’t this sentiment been expressed by many writers and poets over the years? The English nineteenth-century poet Alfred Lord Tennyson wrote, “Ah, for a man to arise in me / That the man I am may no longer be.” The poet John Clare wrote, “If life had a second edition, how I would correct the proofs.” But life does not have a second edition. How can you start over by being born again? Jesus seems to be saying, in effect: “What we need is new men and women, not new institutions. What we need is new lives, not new laws. What we need is new creatures, not new creeds. What we need is new people, not mere displays of power. And so from your vantage point, Nicodemus, you really do not see very much. You see the display of power, but you do not see the kingdom in any saving and transforming sense. You do not really understand what is going on at all.”
“Jesus, you are encouraging the impossible. There is no new beginning. There is no new birth. Messianic figure you may be, but you are now promising too much.”
But Jesus will not back down: “Very truly I tell you, no one can enter the kingdom of God without being born of water and the Spirit” (John 3:5).
What does Jesus mean by his more extended expression, “being born of water and the Spirit”? Over the generations people have understood this expression “born of water and the Spirit” in a large number of ways.
Some people think it refers to two births: natural birth plus some kind of spiritual birth. “Born of water” perhaps refers to the breaking of the water just before the birth. The two births, then, are natural birth followed by supernatural birth. One has to be born of water and of the Spirit.
I doubt that is what the expression means, partly because I have not been able to find anywhere in the ancient world that people spoke of natural birth as being born of water. Moreover, if you very carefully compare verse 3 with verse 5, you discover a crucial parallelism that helps to explain the passage:
Very truly I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God without being born again.
John 3:3, emphasis added
Very truly I tell you, no one can enter the kingdom of God without being born of water and the Spirit.
John 3:5, emphasis added
The two sentences are parallel. Verse 5 exchanges “enter” for “see,” but the idea in both cases is similar. More importantly, verse 5 moves from “born again” to “born of water and the Spirit.” In other words, “born again” is parallel to “born of water and the Spirit.” Thus, “born of water and the Spirit” does not signal two births, but one—that is, the entire expression “born of water and the Spirit” is parallel to “born again” and means the same thing. So what is Jesus adding or explaining about “born again” when he adds “born of water and the Spirit”?
There is one other small detail we must pick up before we conclude what it means. Down in verse 9, after Jesus has given his answer, Nicodemus still does not quite understand: “How can this be?” Jesus replies, “You are Israel’s teacher . . . and do you not understand these things?” (3:10). “Israel’s teacher,” I’ve suggested, was probably a title. So what things should Nicodemus have understood because he was “Israel’s teacher”? The focus of his expertise was what we call the Old Testament, the first two-thirds of the Bible, plus a large body of Jewish legal and other tradition. So the question becomes, “Where does the Old Testament talk about new birth? Why is Jesus holding Nicodemus responsible for understanding what Jesus is talking about?”
The reality is that nowhere does the Old Testament explicitly talk about “new birth.”
Interestingly enough, however, in quite a few places it does talk about water and Spirit. In other words, when Jesus says, “The birth I am talking about is of water and Spirit,” he expects Nicodemus to pick up on that sort of language because after all, he is Israel’s teacher and is intimately familiar with the text of the Old Testament.
There are a number of Old Testament passages where water and Spirit are linked, but perhaps the most striking is found in the writings of a sixth century BC Old Testament prophet by the name of Ezekiel. In Ezekiel 36, God promises a time when he will transform his people. “I will sprinkle clean water on you, and you will be clean,” indicating a moral cleaning (36:25). “And I will put my Spirit in you,” indicating life and power from God himself (36:27). So whatever else this new birth is, if it is in line with the promise of a prophet six centuries earlier, it is bound up with the dawning of a new covenant that would be characterized by moral transformation (the water sprinkling the heart) and by the power and life of God to transform and renew. That is what Jesus means by a new birth of water and the Spirit.
Jesus is quick to explain a little further: “Flesh gives birth to flesh, but the Spirit gives birth to spirit. You should not be surprised at my saying, ‘You must be born again’” (John 3:6–7). What he means by this is that like produces like: “Pigs give birth to pigs; cockroaches generate cockroaches; bats generate bats; kind produces kind; flesh produces flesh. So how on earth do you take lost, self-centered, human beings, and actually connect them with the life of God? You are not going to produce such transformation by natural selection. You are not going to generate moral revolution by merely trying harder or by selective breeding. What you really must have is what Ezekiel said: an act of God that does truly clean you up and that actually fills you with power from God himself, from his Spirit, so that we are changed, transformed. You must have that, or you cannot possibly be connected with the life of God. ‘Flesh gives birth to flesh, but the Spirit gives birth to spirit. You should not be surprised at my saying, ‘You must be born again.’”
Then he gives another analogy that depends in part on the fact that the word we translate “spirit” can also mean “wind,” depending on the context. So in the original, it is a bit of a pun: “The wind [spirit] blows wherever it pleases. You hear its sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going. So it is with everyone born of the Spirit [wind]” (3:8). Perhaps Jesus and Nicodemus are standing on a street corner in Jerusalem, and a sycamore branch is swaying in the evening breeze or a tumbleweed dances down the street. Jesus nods at these phenomena and says, in effect, “Do you see the effect of the wind/spirit? Do you really know where it comes from?” Even then they knew something of meteorology but not all that much—a good deal less than we know today. Nobody was sitting around thinking, “There must be a high in the Arabian desert. Is this cyclonic or anti-cyclonic? Where is the line between the depression and the high pressure air mass?” Nobody was thinking in such terms. But that doesn’t mean that people denied the existence and power of wind! They saw the effects. They might not have been able to explain all of the dynamics and all of the physical forces that brought this wind about, but they could not deny the effects.
Then Jesus concludes, “So it is with everyone born of the Spirit” (3:8). Understand this: you and I may not be able to explain all the mechanics of new birth. From the Bible we may study passages like this one and a handful of others that talk about new birth, and doubtless we can infer quite a few things about how this new birth works. But at the end of the day, we will not possess a full analysis of how God works powerfully within us to transform us. Nevertheless, where there is genuine new birth you always see the results. You can’t deny them. “So it is with everyone born of the Spirit” (3:8). That is why Barna’s interpretation of “born again” is so abysmally off base. New birth has not necessarily taken place because “somebody’s made a commitment to Jesus.” Where there is new birth—where it has genuinely come from God—you will see transformation. You will see change in the life. That does not mean that people have suddenly reached perfection: we shall have more Christian growth and Christian failures in due course. But where new birth takes place, there is a change of direction, of origin. There is a cleaning up in the life. There is a transformation. There is the beginning of life from God himself that shapes our existence in a new direction.
“So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit. And, my dear Nicodemus, you cannot see the kingdom, the real power of God, and you cannot enter this kingdom unless you are born again. That is what you must have. You must be born again.”
This passage is dead-set against those who think that Christianity is a matter of ritual or religious practice or mysticism or conventional morality. The Bible keeps saying these kinds of things. The same writer, John, who reports this exchange between Jesus and Nicodemus, also wrote several letters that have been included in the New Testament. In one of them, the one we call 1 John, he keeps saying things like this: “Unless you obey Jesus’s words, you really have no part in it. You are not a Christian. Unless you love the brothers and sisters, you cannot possibly have been born again. Unless you overcome the worldliness around you, your life shows you have never experienced the new birth” (see 1 John 2:29; 4:7; 5:4, 18). The new birth signals more than a profession of faith; it signals transforming power.
In the eighteenth century there was a very famous preacher (probably the most famous preacher in the Western world at the time) named George Whitefield. He was a Brit, but he sailed across the Atlantic thirteen times (taking six weeks to three months), so he became as famous a preacher in the thirteen colonies as he was on the English side. He preached to vast crowds without a PA system. He must have had spectacular lungs and vocal chords. Again and again, he preached from this text, “You must be born again,” until finally somebody got really ticked with him, cornered him one day, and asked, “Mr. Whitefield, why is it that you keep preaching again and again, ‘You must be born again. You must be born again’?”
“Because, sir,” Whitefield replied, “you must be born again.”
For unless you are born again, you will not enter into this saving, transforming kingdom of God, this dawning kingdom of David’s son. Here is the culmination of the Old Testament’s story coming to a focus in Jesus, and if you have not been born again you will not participate in it.
This is what Jesus says about the new birth.
Why Jesus Could Speak about Being Born Again (John 3:11–13)
What gave Jesus the authority to speak like that?
11Very truly I tell you, we speak of what we know, and we testify to what we have seen, but still you people do not accept our testimony. 12I have spoken to you of earthly things and you do not believe; how then will you believe if I speak of heavenly things? 13No one has ever gone into heaven except the one who came from heaven—the Son of Man.
John 3:11–13
Now initially this passage may strike us as a bit strange. Have you noticed how Jesus begins with the first person plural: “we speak of what we know, and we testify to what we have seen, but still you people do not accept our testimony” (3:11, emphasis added)? Then in the next verse he switches to the first person singular: “I have spoken to you of earthly things and you do not believe; how then will you believe if I speak of heavenly things?” (3:12, emphasis added). Why does Jesus begin with the first person plural?
I suspect it is because he is answering Nicodemus in his own terms. Nicodemus said, “Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher who has come from God, we do.” Jesus now smiles toward the end of this exchange and comments, “Nicodemus, we know one or two things too, we do, because quite frankly no one has been to heaven to describe what goes on in the throne room of God. No one has come back to tell us. But that is where I come from.”
Make no mistake: the reason that Jesus can speak so bluntly about the new birth is grounded in a claim to revelation, that is, a claim that what he is teaching is revelation from God himself. This is not one more theologian protecting his corner among theologians who like to squabble and write books. This is the word of someone who claims to have come from the very presence of God, God’s own peer, God’s own self—which is of course exactly what we saw in the last chapter. He is God’s Word, God’s own self-expression, one with God, truly God, in this complexity of one God who has become a human being—Jesus has come from there, so he speaks with the authority of revelation.
He says, in effect, “Nicodemus, if I were to try to depict the throne room of God for you in all of its spectacular, transcendent glory, you would not have a clue what I would be talking about. You are having a hard enough time believing anything I say when I describe things that take place on earth—things like the new birth.” After all, that is where the new birth takes place. It takes place on earth. That is what Jesus means by “earthly things.” “If you do not believe when I talk about earthly things—things that take place down here on earth, like the new birth—how are you possibly going to believe if I start describing to you the glories of the transcendent God?”
At the end of the day, to understand Christianity, sooner or later you must come to grips with Christianity’s revelation claims. What do you do with Jesus, who claims to come from God, to be one with God, who gives you information about things that you cannot otherwise have information about? No one has made a trip there, taken notes, come back, and filed a report. This is either true, or it is the most unmitigated garbage, blasphemous silliness. But there is no way that you can walk away from this thinking, “Well, Jesus is a nice, moralizing teacher.” The reason why Jesus could speak about being born again with the authority and confidence he displayed is bound up in his identity. To dismiss what he says is to deny who he is.
How Jesus Brings about This New Birth (John 3:14–15)
Clearly in this context the eternal life of which Jesus speaks must be the product of new birth. If you have new birth, you have life, and this life is eternal life. How do you get it? What Jesus says in verses 14–15 might have made more sense to Nicodemus than initially it makes to us because Nicodemus, for all his strengths and weaknesses, did know the Old Testament. Jesus here alludes to an Old Testament passage that some of us won’t know anything about: “Just as Moses lifted up the snake in the wilderness, so the Son of Man must be lifted up, that everyone who believes may have eternal life in him” (John 3:14–15).
The passage to which Jesus is referring, which of course Nicodemus would have picked up on because he knew his Old Testament, is found in the fourth book of the Bible: Numbers. It is a very short account:
4They [i.e., the Israelites, who had now escaped from slavery in Egypt but had not reached their own land] traveled from Mount Hor along the route to the Red Sea, to go around Edom. But the people grew impatient on the way; 5they spoke against God and against Moses, and said, “Why have you brought us up out of Egypt to die in the wilderness? There is no bread! There is no water! And we detest this miserable food!”
6Then the Lord sent venomous snakes among them; they bit the people and many Israelites died. 7The people came to Moses and said, “We sinned when we spoke against the Lord and against you. Pray that the Lord will take the snakes away from us.” So Moses prayed for the people.
8The Lord said to Moses, “Make a snake and put it up on a pole; anyone who is bitten can look at it and live.” 9So Moses made a bronze snake and put it up on a pole. Then when anyone was bitten by a snake and looked at the bronze snake, they lived.
Numbers 21:4–9
That is all that is said, the entire account. The nature of the murmuring and grumbling, the whining and complaining, was bound up with a profound dissatisfaction with God. Once again all the way back in Genesis 3 we find the pattern set: you make your own rules, you become your own god, you decide your own destiny, you do not trust God, you do not delight in God or his sovereign care or depend on him for anything, you merely dictate to God, and if you cannot have your own way, you whine and complain. This spells death all over again. And so they die. If they are to escape this snake-induced death, only God can provide the solution. His solution is a plain, flat-out miracle. God tells Moses to cast a bronze snake and stick it up on a pole. Those who have the venom in them will look at the bronze snake and live. How bizarre! Nothing about, “Make sure you say enough ritual ‘Hail Marys.’ Make sure you do a lot of penance. Lash yourself with some whips to show that you are really sorry. Fast. Do a lot of good works.” None of that.
It is as if God is saying, “Will you not learn? You people provide the sin. I provide life. You provide the death and the destruction. I provide the forgiveness. The only way out of this sentence of death is not by digging yourself out but by the provision that I myself make. You look at my provision, and you live.” That is the entire account.
A millennium and a half later, Jesus says, in effect, “Just as Moses lifted up the snake in the desert and as a result people lived, so the Son of Man [one of Jesus’s ways of referring to himself] will be lifted up.” He is now referring to his crucifixion on another stick, another pole, a cross-shaped pole, that those who look to him, those who believe in him, will live. How could it be any other way? We have already seen that we cannot barter with God. We cannot offer him something and make a trade. If people are healed, if people gain eternal life, it is going to be the result of his sovereign grace: there is no other way. The point is frequently made in the Bible, and it was modeled for them again in the episode of the cast bronze serpent. Now that pattern comes to its climactic fulfillment in Jesus. On his cross Jesus provided the means by which we have new birth. By his death we have life. By his crucifixion on a pole, we begin eternal life. The new birth is grounded in Jesus’s death. That is what Jesus is saying. You and I receive the benefit of this not by trying harder or by being ultra-religious but by believing in Jesus.
Conclusion
There is much more to say about what moves God to send his own Son to die our death and bring about our new birth. The following verses in John ground God’s motives in his unfathomable love. That is what we must explore in the next chapter.