Your Passport To Heaven: So We Can Have Authentic Life

John 3:1–13 (CSB)

1 There was a man from the Pharisees named Nicodemus, a ruler of the Jews. 2 This man came to him at night and said, “Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher who has come from God, for no one could perform these signs you do unless God were with him.”

3 Jesus replied, “Truly I tell you, unless someone is born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.”

4 “How can anyone be born when he is old?” Nicodemus asked him. “Can he enter his mother’s womb a second time and be born?”

5 Jesus answered, “Truly I tell you, unless someone is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God. 6 Whatever is born of the flesh is flesh, and whatever is born of the Spirit is spirit. 7 Do not be amazed that I told you that you must be born again. 8 The wind blows where it pleases, and you hear its sound, but you don’t know where it comes from or where it is going. So it is with everyone born of the Spirit.”

9 “How can these things be?” asked Nicodemus.

10 “Are you a teacher of Israel and don’t know these things?” Jesus replied. 11 “Truly I tell you, we speak what we know and we testify to what we have seen, but you do not accept our testimony. 12 If I have told you about earthly things and you don’t believe, how will you believe if I tell you about heavenly things? 13 No one has ascended into heaven except the one who descended from heaven—the Son of Man.

Havia um homem dos fariseus chamado Nicodemus, um governante dos judeus. Este homem veio até ele à noite e disse: "Rabino, sabemos que você é um professor que veio de Deus, pois ninguém poderia realizar estes sinais que você faz, a menos que Deus estivesse com ele".

Jesus respondeu: "Em verdade vos digo que, a menos que alguém nasça de novo, não poderá ver o reino de Deus".

"Como alguém pode nascer quando é velho?" perguntou-lhe Nicodemus. "Ele pode entrar no ventre de sua mãe uma segunda vez e nascer?"

Jesus respondeu: "Em verdade vos digo que, a menos que alguém nasça da água e do Espírito, não poderá entrar no reino de Deus". O que é nascido da carne é carne, e o que é nascido do Espírito é espírito". Não se espante que eu lhe tenha dito que você deve nascer de novo. O vento sopra onde lhe agrada e você ouve seu som, mas não sabe de onde ele vem ou para onde vai. Assim é com todos os nascidos do Espírito".

"Como podem ser estas coisas?" perguntou Nicodemus.

"Você é um professor de Israel e não sabe essas coisas?" Jesus respondeu. "Em verdade vos digo, falamos o que sabemos e testemunhamos o que vimos, mas vocês não aceitam nosso testemunho". Se eu lhe falei de coisas terrenas e você não acredita, como você acreditará se eu lhe falar de coisas celestiais? Ninguém subiu ao céu, exceto aquele que desceu do céu - o Filho do Homem,

It is hard to get by in this world without the right credentials. You need a Passport to legally cross a national border or a driver’s license to prove your identity within the United States. After Covid, sometimes you need a immunization card to go to a concert, see a sports event, or even go to some restaurants.

Some jobs require that you have certain training or skills. Maybe a recognition as certified plumber or welder. You want one of those high paying jobs you need to have proof you are qualified to do them. These certifications are hard to get. Other jobs require college, sometimes a decade worth of education to get Doctorate. No diploma- no way to get hired.

Some of these credentials can be really hard to get. I remember moving from RI to NY and being turned down for for the “enhanced” drivers license because I couldn’t prove I was really Gary Whitney and that I had moved from RI to NY. The enhanced license was needed to get on a plane, or travel from NY to Canada and back without a passport. They gave me a basic license that was less valuable. Truly, that irritated me. Has anything like that ever happened to you? Where you needed some type of credential to do what you needed to do, and you couldn’t get it? Sometimes it is an inconvenience, sometimes it is life changing, and sometimes it has eternal consequences.

The only credential that guarantees entrance to heaven is being born again, so that is the only credential that leads to authentic life. There are ways to get fake credentials that let you access countries in the world. You can buy somebodies else’s information, or even completely false identities. There are places you can buy fake certifications and degrees. But they are not guarantees. And there is no way to sneak into heaven. Remember the end of last week’s Scripture.

John 2:23–25 (CSB)

23 While he was in Jerusalem during the Passover Festival, many believed in his name when they saw the signs he was doing. 24 Jesus, however, would not entrust himself to them, since he knew them all 25 and because he did not need anyone to testify about man; for he himself knew what was in man.

Enquanto ele estava em Jerusalém durante o Festival de Páscoa, muitos acreditaram em seu nome quando viram os sinais que ele estava fazendo. Jesus, no entanto, não se entregava a eles, pois os conhecia a todos e porque não precisava de ninguém para testemunhar sobre o homem; pois ele mesmo sabia o que estava no homem.

Jesus doesn’t look for a man made document, He looks inside you for the only proof that you are eligible to go to heaven. He sees if you are Born Again! Being Born Again is

Your Passport To Heaven- The Text In Its Context

Religious Credentials Are Not Your Passport To Heaven

Nicodemus was a powerful and respected leader of the Jewish nation who came at night to see Jesus. He came because the leaders recognized that Jesus was a great prophet and teacher. He probably wanted to know what Jesus was going to do. Instead of following Nicodemus’ agenda Jesus drops a foundational statement-

John 3:3 (CSB)

3 Jesus replied, “Truly I tell you, unless someone is born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.”

Jesus respondeu: "Em verdade vos digo que, a menos que alguém nasça de novo, não poderá ver o reino de Deus".

Nicodemus was a Pharisee, which meant he had serious religious credentials.Pharisees were all about obeying God’s Law. One of the signs that Jesus is the Christ is His zeal, His passionate love, for God the Father and His House. The Pharisees were that zealous, not in their love of God but in their passion to obey God’s law. They were serious about obeying every command God had laid out in the Old Testament. Judaism teaches that the Old Testament has 613 commandments—248 dos and 365 don’ts. The Pharisees were committed to obeying every single command. When one became a Pharisee, he pledged in front of three witnesses to uphold every detail of the law for the rest of his life. In fact, they were so committed to obeying each command they developed additional commands based on the original 613 commandments to ensure they didn’t mistakenly violate the originals. These extra commands were intended to put fences around God’s commands so that people couldn’t accidentally break them!

Exalting Jesus in John (Nicodemus’s Religious Credentials (John 3:1–2))

Here are a few examples. One of the original commands was to keep the Sabbath day holy. To keep it holy one must avoid working on the Sabbath. The Pharisees spent time figuring out what constitutes work. Is tying a knot on the Sabbath work? Yes and no. Tying a rope to a bucket to draw water from a well is work. A lady tying a knot in her clothing on the Sabbath is not work. So, if you need water on the Sabbath, you can have a lady tie a knot in her clothes around the handle of the bucket and lower it. That’s acceptable (Barclay, John, 2:142). Jeremiah 17:21 commands the Israelites not to bear a burden on the Sabbath. What constitutes a burden? Here are some of the questions the Pharisees asked (ibid., 143): Is moving a chair closer to the table work? If a woman picks up a broach to pin it on, is it work? Can a man wear dentures on the Sabbath? Are these burdens that violate the law?

Aqui estão alguns exemplos. Um dos comandos originais era manter santo o sábado. Para mantê-lo santo, deve-se evitar trabalhar no Sábado. Os fariseus passavam o tempo descobrindo o que constitui trabalho. Dar um nó no Sábado é trabalhar? Sim e não. Amarrar uma corda a um balde para tirar água de um poço é trabalho. Uma senhora que dá um nó em sua roupa no sábado não é trabalho. Então, se você precisar de água no Sábado, você pode fazer uma senhora dar um nó em suas roupas ao redor do cabo do balde e abaixá-lo. Isso é aceitável (Barclay, João, 2:142). Jeremias 17:21 ordena aos israelitas que não carreguem um fardo no Sábado. O que constitui um fardo? Aqui estão algumas das perguntas feitas pelos fariseus (ibid., 143): Aproximar uma cadeira do trabalho da mesa? Se uma mulher pega um broche para prendê-la, é trabalho? Um homem pode usar a dentadura no sábado? São estes fardos que violam a lei?

Listen Up! If Nicodemus’ religious credentials were not good enough to get into heaven yours won’t get you in either! AMEN?

Jesus refers to Nicodemus as “a teacher of Israel.” In the Greek, Nicodemus is literally the teacher of Israel—he is extremely knowledgeable. You don’t become one of the voices, if not the preeminent religious voice, in Israel without having an amazing grasp of the Old Testament. Nicodemus certainly has lengthy portions of the Old Testament memorized. He’s an expert in the 613 commandments, plus the additional commandments that explicated the original ones. Other religious leaders would have sought Nicodemus for advice. But it doesn’t matter how well you know, or even follow rules of the Law. They don’t get you into heaven.

Matthew 23:1–4 (CSB)

1 Then Jesus spoke to the crowds and to his disciples: 2 “The scribes and the Pharisees are seated in the chair of Moses. 3 Therefore do whatever they tell you, and observe it. But don’t do what they do, because they don’t practice what they teach. 4 They tie up heavy loads that are hard to carry and put them on people’s shoulders, but they themselves aren’t willing to lift a finger to move them.

Então Jesus falou para as multidões e para seus discípulos: "Os escribas e os fariseus estão sentados na cadeira de Moisés". Por isso, façam o que lhes disserem e observem-no. Mas não façam o que eles fazem, porque eles não praticam o que ensinam". Eles amarram cargas pesadas que são difíceis de carregar e as colocam sobre os ombros das pessoas, mas eles mesmos não estão dispostos a levantar um dedo para movê-los.

It takes so much more than following rules to have authentic life.

Matthew 5:20 (CSB)

20 For I tell you, unless your righteousness surpasses that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never get into the kingdom of heaven.

Pois eu vos digo que, a menos que vossa justiça ultrapasse a dos escribas e fariseus, jamais entrareis no reino dos céus.

If that sounds impossible to to you you get Jesus’ point. We are helpless! There is zero chance that we will earn a passport to heaven. Because there is no way we can do better than the Pharisees in keeping the appearance of righteous, holy, living.

Nicodemus thought entering God’s kingdom had everything to do with physical birth. If a person was born a Jew, he would automatically have a spot in God’s kingdom. He would only be kept out if he were blasphemous or extremely wicked. But Jesus says the opposite. No matter who a person is, he is automatically kept out of God’s kingdom by his sin. He would only be let in if he were born again. He would only be let in if he was given new life.

All right- the truth is hard to hear. We all want to deserve our rewards- AMEN? But it isn’t all that hard to believe that we cannot meet God’s standard of holiness. But once we accept that hard truth we are not getting to heaven on our own we need to tackle the even harder question of

How Can I Become Born Again?

Only one thing gains a person entrance to heaven, and that’s being born again. Jesus uses the word unless. The new birth is the exclusive way to enter heaven. The alternative is eternal live enduring the torments of hell so we better find out how a person is born a second time. Nicodemus definitely feels the same way. He exclaims how can this be? Don’t mistake that for ignorance. The rabbis had a saying: “A proselyte who embraces Judaism is like a newborn child.” All things were thought to be completely new, and old connections destroyed. Nicodemus had an idea of what Jesus was talking about. Even more so, he passionately desired that radical, fundamental change. He just didn’t know how it could truly occur. “Can he enter his mother's womb a second time?” Kent Hughes imagines that he was actually saying I want to be radically born again, but you might as well tell me that as a full-grown man I need to go back inside my mother's womb and be born all over! How can this desire become real? I have desired this, the Jewish people have desired this, but we can never seem to do it! It seems impossible to achieve.

Somebody hearing my voice today feels the same way. AMEN? Do you connect with how Nicodemus feels? Do you want to be right with God, but have no idea how to make that happen?Jesus responds with His own question. “You are the top teacher of Scripture in Israel and you don’t understand anything I am saying? We are talking about This is the baby food of understanding, the OT didn’t explicitly teach it but the bones of the principle are present. Jesus was likely responding to Nicodemus’ sarcasm in kind, but He definitely felt that Nicodemus should know God could cause such a change in His people.

The only way to heaven is to be born again. That means Jesus is connected to being born again because

John 14:6 (CSB)

6 Jesus told him, “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.

Jesus lhe disse: "Eu sou o caminho, a verdade e a vida". Ninguém vem ao Pai a não ser por mim. Se vocês me conhecem, também conhecerão meu Pai". De agora em diante, vocês o conhecem e já o viram".

Throughout the Bible God has promised us new life.

Ezekiel 18:31–32 (CSB)

31 Throw off all the transgressions you have committed, and get yourselves a new heart and a new spirit. Why should you die, house of Israel? 32 For I take no pleasure in anyone’s death.” This is the declaration of the Lord God. “So repent and live!

Lancem fora todas as transgressões que vocês cometeram e obtenham um novo coração e um novo espírito. Por que vocês deveriam morrer, casa de Israel? Porque eu não tenho prazer na morte de ninguém". Esta é a declaração do Senhor DEUS. "Portanto, arrependei-vos e vivei!

Then Jesus took it up a notch. How can We tell you things of Heaven if you cannot even understand the simple stuff? Did you notice the “we?” That was definitely unusual. Some commentators think that the disciples were in the room while others think that Jesus was speaking as the earthly representative of the godhead. Perhaps He was even referring to John the Baptist. Regardless, Jesus was speaking boldly and with authority. I believe that He was claiming divine authority, especially considering that he said no one has ascended into heaven except the Son of Man who descended from Heaven. Jesus was claiming divine authority. Jesus is the Great I Am! Thank God that He is, because it takes God to bring about the new birth.

The Apostle John wrote this Gospel so we can be born again and experience authentic life.

John 20:30–31 (CSB)

30 Jesus performed many other signs in the presence of his disciples that are not written in this book. 31 But these are written so that you may believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name.

Jesus realizou muitos outros sinais, na presença de seus discípulos, que não estão escritos neste livro. Mas estes estão escritos para que você possa acreditar que Jesus é o Messias, o Filho de Deus, e que ao acreditar que você pode ter vida em seu nome.

So how do you believe in the name of Jesus?

Romans 10:9–13 (CSB)

9 If you confess with your mouth, “Jesus is Lord,” and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. 10 One believes with the heart, resulting in righteousness, and one confesses with the mouth, resulting in salvation. 11 For the Scripture says, Everyone who believes on him will not be put to shame, 12 since there is no distinction between Jew and Greek, because the same Lord of all richly blesses all who call on him. 13 For everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.

Se você confessar com sua boca, "Jesus é Senhor", e acreditar em seu coração que Deus o ressuscitou dentre os mortos, você será salvo. Acredita-se com o coração, resultando em justiça, e se confessa com a boca, resultando em salvação. Pois a Escritura diz: Todo aquele que crê nele não será envergonhado, pois não há distinção entre judeu e grego, pois o mesmo Senhor de todos abençoa ricamente a todos os que o invocam. Pois todo aquele que invocar o nome do Senhor será salvo.

The only way for us to be born again is if God changes us from the inside out. God can do that- He changed water into wine and he can transform us from sinners into saints. It starts with God. It is powered by the sacrifice of Jesus on the cross. Jesus, who never sinned, died for our sin on the cross. He was buried and rose from the dead. And because He defeated death, we can experience life.

Do you want new life? Authentic Life? Do you passionately want to be born again. Then hear God’s offer for live and cooperate with Him. Accept His offer to open the door to being born again.

Ezekiel 36:25–27 (CSB)

25 I will also sprinkle clean water on you, and you will be clean. I will cleanse you from all your impurities and all your idols. 26 I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit within you; I will remove your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh. 27 I will place my Spirit within you and cause you to follow my statutes and carefully observe my ordinances.

Eu também aspergirei água limpa em você, e você estará limpo. Limparei você de todas as suas impurezas e de todos os seus ídolos. Dar-vos-ei um coração novo e porei um espírito novo dentro de vós; removerei vosso coração de pedra e vos darei um coração de carne. Colocarei meu Espírito dentro de vocês e farei com que sigam meus estatutos e observem cuidadosamente minhas ordenanças.

Do you really want new life? Then

Believe and Receive Jesus - Our Contemporary Application

Nicodemus’ life has not been completely penetrated by Christ. He asks questions but never definitely declares that he follows Jesus. Nicodemus listens but does not believe. We can hope that Jesus decided to follow Jesus later in his life, we get hints that he did stand with Jesus when he argued in front of the Sanhedrin that they did not have proof that convicted Jesus. Nicodemus also showed love for Jesus when he helped bury Jesus. But all that was required for these actions were believing that Jesus had been sent by God. To believe and receive Jesus you need to confess that Jesus is God Himself and believe in your heart that Jesus is the sacrifice for your sin. Scripture never tells us that Nicodemus did that.

We need to ponder our relationship to Jesus. If you have never surrendered your fight against God, but find yourself feeling a tug on your heart today, even just a tiny nudge, DO IT! That is God opening the door to you. That is your offer to be reborn. Act on that tug. Today is the best day ever to be born again. I want to see you in heaven. We all do!

If story of Nicodemus is making you feel uncertain your passport to heaven is genuine, that may also be the Holy Spirit working on your heart. Did you think that your passport was good enough because your family has always attended church. God doesn’t care how good we look from the outside. “If I just get things in order—start making better choices, avoid sin, go to church, tithe faithfully, and look nice—then God will be pleased.” God is not interested in your personal remodeling project. He wants to remake and reshape you from the inside.

Are you struggling today, whether your sin is to great for God to want to cleanse you stop listening to the Devil. God wants each and every one of us to be saved. God wants you to have that passport to heaven. God knows how morally bankrupt we are. And there is no sin you cannot recover from except the sin of not believing Jesus can save your miserable life, or thinking that you don’t need Jesus’ offer of eternal life.

Humanity is truly broken beyond all repair. But God isn’t trying to fix us, He is transforming us into something completely differ. We are truly experiencing a second birth. Jesus says that true spirituality is not finding that last, little flicker of flame in our hearts and feeding that fire. Jesus claims, true religion is “vertical.” It has to do not with the human spirit, but with God’s Spirit. It is a foreign invasion, sabotage of the first order. True religion unites humanity with God’s powerful Spirit, who overwhelms, transforms, and converts its subject.

Our role in this transformation is belief and yet it is a belief that is aided by God’s work within us since we live in the darkness and have our spiritual capacities handicapped by sin. Have you believed and recieved? The only credential that guarantees entrance to heaven is the new birth. So make sure your passport is legit! Believe and receive Jesus today!

Points To Ponder

“Night Landings” by Kenneth O. Gangel

Intense interest captured my mind as I listened to the former naval pilot tie his experience in carrier landings with his Christian faith. Never before had I heard the metaphor developed in this way; never would I forget it.

I paraphrase loosely when I say that he told us three things make night carrier landing possible. The first is phrenol beam, a light sent up from the carrier to guide the plane in. Our speaker linked this to Jesus, the light of the world, a major theme in the Gospel of John. Picture that pilot seeing the beam come up from his home deck at the end of a long run, low on fuel and surrounded by darkness.

The second guideline is a center strobe which starts off the stern of the carrier and goes through the center of the landing area. The angle of landing looks right only if the pilot lines up his plane with the strobe. Here the aviator drew a parallel with the Scriptures which give us the information about landing correctly on God’s ship of salvation—not from the side, not at an awkward angle, but straight down the middle—following the strobe line of the gospel.

Finally, as the pilot puts all these pieces together, he stays in radio contact with the landing signal officer who guides him in. The landing signal officer has only one mission—to keep the pilot focused on the phrenal beam and the strobe line. Here we see the Holy Spirit, said our speaker, who focuses our attention on Jesus and the Scriptures.

A powerful analogy! And one John might have warmed to immediately. That is what this chapter is about: how the Holy Spirit uses the message of God to point to the Son of God and draw believers to him.

[Kenneth O. Gangel, John, vol. 4, Holman New Testament Commentary (Nashville, TN: Broadman & Holman Publishers, 2000), 62–63.]

“Flesh and Spirit” by Kenneth O. Gangel

Although we have dealt with this some in the text, additional treatment may be useful here. The word for “flesh” is sarx, which denotes mortality and earthly creation and connotes frailty and weakness. This is a physical understanding, not to be confused with Paul’s theological treatment of the sinful nature using such words as “fleshly” or “carnal.” John emphasizes the difference between earthly and heavenly and how eternal life can come.

As Borchert puts it, “The flesh of itself is unable, because of its frailty, to attain the destiny of eternal life, but the Spirit is the empowering means of life (cf. John 6:63). In the Old Testament the hope of the eschatological era was tied to the coming days of the Spirit (e.g., Joel 2:28–29; Ezk 36:26–27) and the expectation of Israel centered on the coming of the One who would embody the presence of the Spirit (e.g., Isa 61:1; cf. John 1:31–32; Lk 4:18)” (Borchert, p. 176).

The term spirit, on the other hand, contained significant understandings of Greek philosophy and Jewish theology. We recognize the Greek word pneuma from English words like pneumonia and pneumatic which have to do with breath and air. Even the Greeks regarded air as the bearer of life. In the Old Testament the spirit kept human beings alive (Ezek. 37:8) and also referred to the Spirit of God (Isa. 32:15–20).

The word appears 370 times in the New Testament to describe the inner personality of human beings (Rom. 8:16), good and evil spirits which indwelled the universe (Matt. 8:16), and the third person of the Trinity (as John uses it almost exclusively). Puritan writer Thomas Watson once said, “We may read many truths in the Bible, but we cannot know them savingly, ’til God by His Spirit shines upon our soul … He not only informs our mind, but inclines our will” (cited in Detzler, p. 359).

In my own Bible study in earlier years I profited greatly from the translations and comments of the New Testament scholar Kenneth S. Wuest. Here is a paragraph picking up the theme of new life in Christ through the Spirit: “The teaching here is that man, in his totally depraved condition, cannot be improved. Reformation will not change him into a fit subject for the kingdom of God. The flesh is incurably wicked, and cannot by any process be changed so as to produce a righteous life. What that person needs, Jesus says, is a new nature, a spiritual nature which will produce a life pleasing to God, and which will be a life fit for the kingdom of God … the new birth is a permanent thing, produces a permanent change in the life of the individual, and makes him a fit subject for the kingdom of God” (Wuest, pp. 57–58).

[Kenneth O. Gangel, John, vol. 4, Holman New Testament Commentary (Nashville, TN: Broadman & Holman Publishers, 2000), 64.]

“Jesus and Nicodemus” by Tom Wright

I have lost my birth certificate.

It’s the sort of thing that happens when you move house, which we did not long ago. I know where it was in the old house. It may have been accidentally thrown away; but I suspect it was put into a very, very safe place, and the place was so safe that I still haven’t found it.

Fortunately, I don’t need it at the moment. I have a passport and other documents. Sooner or later, if it doesn’t show up, I shall have to get a replacement, which means going back to the town where I was born and paying to have a new copy made from the register there.

But, of course, the one thing that a birth certificate isn’t needed for is to prove that a birth took place. Here I am, a human being; obviously I must have been born. The fact that at the moment I can’t officially prove when and where is a minor detail.

When Christians discuss the ‘new birth’, the ‘second birth’ or the ‘birth from above’, they often forget this. Some people experience their entry into Christian faith as a huge, tumultuous event, with a dramatic build-up, a painful moment of decision and then tidal waves of relief, joy, exhilaration, forgiveness and love. They are then easily tempted—and there are movements of thought within Western culture which make this temptation all the more powerful—to think that this moment itself is the centre of what it means to be a Christian, as though what God wanted was simply to give people a single wonderful spiritual experience, to be remembered ever afterwards with a warm glow.

But that’s a bit like someone framing their birth certificate, hanging it on the wall, and insisting on showing it to everyone who comes into the house. What matters for most purposes is not that once upon a time you were born—though of course sometimes it matters that you can prove when and where you were born. What matters is that you are alive now, and that your present life, day by day and moment by moment, is showing evidence of health and strength and purpose. Physical birth is often painful and difficult, for the baby as well as for the mother. But you don’t spend your life talking about what a difficult birth you had, unless for some tragic reason it has left you with medical problems. You get on with being the person you now are.

So when Jesus talks to Nicodemus about the new birth, and when John highlights this conversation by making it the first of several in-depth discussions Jesus has in this gospel, we shouldn’t suppose that this means that we should spend all our time thinking about the moment of our own spiritual birth. It matters that it happened, of course. Sadly, there are many, inside the church as well as outside, whose present state suggests that one ought to go back to examine whether in fact a real spiritual birth took place at all. But where there are signs of life it’s more important to feed and nurture it than to spend much time going over and over what happened at the moment of birth.

In fact, what Jesus says here to Nicodemus is more sharply focused than we sometimes imagine. The Judaism that Nicodemus and Jesus both knew had a good deal to do with being born into the right family. What mattered was being a child of Abraham. Of course, other things mattered too, but this was basic. Now, Jesus is saying, God is starting a new family in which this ordinary birth isn’t enough. You need to be born all over again, born ‘from above’. (The same word, here, can mean ‘a second time’ and ‘from above’. We should probably understand both, with the emphasis on ‘from above’; the point, as with 1:12–13, is that the initiative remains God’s.)

The new birth Jesus is talking about is the same thing that has been spoken of in 1:33. ‘Water and spirit’ here must mean the double baptism: baptism in water, which brings people into the kingdom-movement begun by John the Baptist and continued by Jesus’ disciples (3:22; 4:1–2), and baptism in the spirit, the new life, bubbling up from within, that Jesus offers, which is the main thing that this whole book is about.

The two are closely joined. Nobody in the early church supposed that spirit-baptism mattered so much that you could do without water-baptism. From time to time the problem arose of people assuming that as long as you had water-baptism you didn’t need to worry about the new spiritual life (see, for instance, 1 Corinthians 10:1–13). But the point in this passage is that this double-sided new birth, which brings you into the visible community of Jesus’ followers (water-baptism) and gives you the new life of the spirit welling up like a spring of water inside you (spirit-baptism), was now required for membership in God’s kingdom. Indeed (as Jesus says in verse 3), without it you can’t even see God’s kingdom. You can’t glimpse it, let alone get into it.

As with 1:12–13, the point of this is that God’s kingdom is now thrown open to anyone and everyone. The spirit is on the move, like a fresh spring breeze (verse 8; part of the point here is that the word for ‘wind’, in both Hebrew and Greek, is the same word as you’d use for ‘spirit’), and no human family, tribe, organization or system can keep up with it. Opening the window and letting the breeze in can be very inconvenient, especially for the Nicodemuses of this world who suppose they have got things tidied up, labelled and sorted into neat piles.

But unless we are prepared to listen to this dangerous message we aren’t ready to listen to the gospel at all. In verses 10–13 we have the first of many passages in which Jesus speaks about a new knowledge—indeed, a new sort of knowing. It’s a way of knowing that comes from God, from heaven.

It’s humbling for Nicodemus to have to be told this. He is, after all, a respected and senior teacher. But this way of knowing, and the new knowledge we get through it, is given by the mysterious ‘son of man’. As we were told in 1:51, he is now the ladder which joins the two dimensions of God’s world, the heavenly and the earthly. If we want to understand not only the heavenly world, but the way in which God is now joining heaven and earth together, we must listen to him, and walk with him on the road he is now to take.

[Tom Wright, John for Everyone, Part 1: Chapters 1-10 (London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 2004), 27–31.]

Question Needing Answers

1. Who were the Pharisees, and what did they do?

2. What do we know about Nicodemus from this passage?

3. How is Nicodemus’s interaction with Jesus different from the way other Pharisees interacted with Jesus?

4. What are we to believe about Jesus from this passage?

5. How is the central message of this passage good news for you today?

6. What does it mean to be born again?

7. How does the need to be born again show the folly of the Pharisees’ extreme focus on obedience?

8. Is it hard for you to believe that God desires an internal transformation in your life rather than external conformity?

9. What evidence will exist in the life of a person who has been born again?

10. Why are Jesus’s words to Nicodemus a message of hope to sinners?

[Matt Carter and Josh Wredberg, Exalting Jesus in John (Nashville, TN: Holman Reference, 2017), Jn 3:1–13.]

A Week’s Worth of Scripture

Monday

Titus 3:5 (CSB)

5 he saved us—not by works of righteousness that we had done, but according to his mercy—through the washing of regeneration and renewal by the Holy Spirit.

Tuesday

Ecclesiastes 11:5 (CSB)

5 Just as you don’t know the path of the wind,

or how bones develop in the womb of a pregnant woman,

so also you don’t know the work of God who makes everything.

Wednesday

1 Peter 1:23 (CSB)

23 because you have been born again—not of perishable seed but of imperishable—through the living and enduring word of God.

Thursday

Ezekiel 36:25–27 (CSB)

25 I will also sprinkle clean water on you, and you will be clean. I will cleanse you from all your impurities and all your idols. 26 I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit within you; I will remove your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh. 27 I will place my Spirit within you and cause you to follow my statutes and carefully observe my ordinances.

Friday

Galatians 4:9 (CSB)

9 But now, since you know God, or rather have become known by God, how can you turn back again to the weak and worthless elements? Do you want to be enslaved to them all over again?

Saturday

2 Corinthians 5:17 (CSB)

17 Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has passed away, and see, the new has come!