OUR FATHER WHO SENT HIS SON TO BRING MANY SONS TO GLORY

As Jesus was gaining noteriety around Jerusalem, the religious classes were debating His teachings and were trying to assess what He was up to.  Within the religious class called the pharisees was a faction that had concluded that the miraculous signs that Jesus was doing made it likely that He was from God and so they sent a representative to meet with Him incognito to interview Him in order to gain some understanding of His position.

The book of John chapter 3 verse 1 - 21  recorded the meeting between the emissary named Nicodemus and Jesus;

1 There was a man of the Pharisees named Nicodemus, a ruler of the Jews. 2 This man came to Jesus by night and said to Him, “Rabbi, we know that You are a teacher come from God; for no one can do these signs that You do unless God is with him.”

3 Jesus answered and said to him, “Most assuredly, I say to you, unless one is born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.”

4 Nicodemus said to Him, “How can a man be born when he is old? Can he enter a second time into his mother’s womb and be born?”

5 Jesus answered, “Most assuredly, I say to you, unless one is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God. 6 That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit. 7 Do not marvel that I said to you, ‘You must be born again.’ 8 The wind blows where it wishes, and you hear the sound of it, but cannot tell where it comes from and where it goes. So is everyone who is born of the Spirit.”

Nicodemus  said to Jesus that he and some collegues in the Sanhedrin ( the Jewish religious council ) believed that He was sent by God because of the miraculous signs they were seeing Him doing.

To this statement by Nicodemus, Jesus replied that knowing that He was from God and learning His teachings was not enough for a person to gain access to the kingdom of God but rather, a person would have to be ˋborn againˋ. 

Nicodemus was baffled by the reference to being spiritually reborn because he had interpreted Jesusˋ words to mean a physical rebirth that required a re-entry into the womb. 

Jesus steered Nicodemus towards a more spiritual understanding of what He was saying by establishing that there were two types of births one of which was the physical birth and other being a spiritual birth and it was the only spiritual birth that needed to be repeated and that this rebirth that is the work of the Spirit of God was the means by which such men would be able to live within the confines of the physical world while at the same time being able to move about in the spiritual world.

This explanation that Jesus gave completely confounded Nicodemus who could not even conceive of such things.

9 Nicodemus answered and said to Him, “How can these things be?”

10 Jesus answered and said to him, “Are you the teacher of Israel, and do not know these things? 11 Most assuredly, I say to you, We speak what We know and testify what We have seen, and you do not receive Our witness. 12 If I have told you earthly things and you do not believe, how will you believe if I tell you heavenly things? 13 No one has ascended to heaven but He who came down from heaven, that is, the Son of Man who is in heaven. 14 And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of Man be lifted up, 15 that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have eternal life. 16 For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life. 17 For God did not send His Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world through Him might be saved.

Jesus marvelled that a religious leader in Israel, with all his learning in the books of the law and the prophets, could not understand the basic things being explained.

He assured Nicodemus that the things He was teaching and testifying about were not guesses but rather things that He knew directly and had personally seen because He was from heaven and could therefore ascend to heaven. This was a reference to the book of Genesis Chapter 28 (that Nicodemus would have been very familiar with) which reads;

12 Then he dreamed, and behold, a ladder was set up on the earth, and its top reached to heaven; and there the angels of God were ascending and descending on it.

13 And behold, the Lord stood above it and said: “I am the Lord God of Abraham your father and the God of Isaac; the land on which you lie I will give to you and your descendants.

This dream of Jacob revealed the exchange program between heaven and earth that permitted the movement of beings between the physical realm and the spiritual one. It was the reality of the interpolation of these two realms that Jesus was explaining to Nicodemus but being rigidly trained in the things of the physical world, Nicodemus had a difficult time grappling with the possibilities of a new spiritual life.

Jesus went on to explain to Nicodemus that believing in the only begotten Son of God was the only way to acquire the righteousness that was needed to separate from the kingdom of darkness and ascend into the kingdom of God.

18 “He who believes in Him is not condemned; but he who does not believe is condemned already, because he has not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God. 19 And this is the condemnation, that the light has come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil. 20 For everyone practicing evil hates the light and does not come to the light, lest his deeds should be exposed. 21 But he who does the truth comes to the light, that his deeds may be clearly seen, that they have been done in God.”

The words of Jesus in this passage gives us a view into the mechanics of salvation where our faith in Jesus releases us from condemnation and we are given a new spirit and we are counted as righteous because of the new spirit within us.  Living from the spirit yields righteous deeds and we can come to the light.

Such is the unfathomably priceless gift that Jesus gave us. We are translated from the kingdom of darkness and into the kingdom of light by the work He finished on the cross.

Amen.

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