Gospel Foundations — The New Birth
He came at night. A ruler of the Jews, a teacher of Israel, a man who had spent his life mastering the law — and he came in the dark, because a man with that much to lose does not walk up to Jesus in daylight. Nicodemus opened with a compliment. Jesus answered with an earthquake.
Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born again he cannot see the kingdom of God.
John 3:3, NASB1995
Nicodemus had every religious credential a man could hold. And Jesus looked at all of it and said, in effect: it is not enough. Not close. You need something you cannot manufacture. You need to be born a second time.
Why “Born” and Not “Improved”
Notice the word Jesus chose. Not reformed. Not educated. Not turned over a new leaf. Born. It is the most helpless word in the human vocabulary. No one contributes to his own birth. No one plans it, earns it, or assists at it. A baby does not cooperate with being born; it is simply brought into a life it did not have before.
That is exactly the point. If Jesus had said “you must improve,” Nicodemus could have gotten to work — he was, after all, a professional improver. But you cannot improve your way from death to life. A corpse does not need coaching. It needs resurrection. And that is the diagnosis under the whole conversation: apart from Christ, we are not sick and needing tips. We are dead and needing life.
And you were dead in your trespasses and sins… But God, being rich in mercy, because of His great love with which He loved us, even when we were dead in our transgressions, made us alive together with Christ.
Ephesians 2:1, 4-5, NASB1995
Nicodemus Takes It Literally — and Misses It
“How can a man be born when he is old?” Nicodemus asks. “He cannot enter a second time into his mother’s womb and be born, can he?” It sounds like a foolish question. It is actually the right instinct. He hears “born again” and knows immediately that it is impossible for a man to do. He just does not yet know that impossibility is the doorway, not the dead end.
Jesus does not soften it. He deepens it.
Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born of water and the Spirit he cannot enter into the kingdom of God. That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit.
John 3:5-6, NASB1995
Flesh produces flesh; it cannot produce spirit. Whatever you generate by your own effort will be the same kind of thing you already are. Religious flesh is still flesh. A cleaned-up, disciplined, respectable version of the old life is still the old life. The new birth is not the old man renovated. It is a new man given.
The Wind Blows Where It Wishes
Then Jesus reaches for the wind.
The wind blows where it wishes and you hear the sound of it, but do not know where it comes from and where it is going; so is everyone who is born of the Spirit.
John 3:8, NASB1995
You cannot command the wind. You cannot schedule it or bottle it or take credit for it. But you are not left in doubt about whether it is blowing — you hear it, you see the branches move, you feel it on your face. So it is with the new birth. It is the sovereign work of God the Spirit, and it is unmistakable in its effects. You do not produce it. But when it happens, there is evidence: a new love for Christ, a new hatred of the sin you used to defend, a new hunger for the Word, a new pull toward the people of God.
How the New Birth Comes
So if I cannot birth myself, what do I do? This is where the most famous verse in the Bible arrives — not as a greeting-card line, but as the answer to Nicodemus’s impossibility.
For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish, but have eternal life.
John 3:16, NASB1995
The new birth is God’s work; faith is the God-given response that receives it. You do not gestate the life — but you do look, and believe, and cling. Jesus said it moments earlier by pointing back to the bronze serpent lifted in the wilderness: the dying Israelites did nothing to heal themselves; they simply looked at what God had lifted up, and lived (John 3:14-15). So we look to the Son lifted up on the cross. We stop trusting our record. We trust His.
Repentance and faith are the two hands that receive Christ: turning from sin as your hope, turning to Christ as your only hope. Not “I will try harder.” Rather, “I cannot, but He did, and I am His.”
Why It Is Not Optional
Some will want to file the new birth under “advanced Christianity” — a bonus experience for the very committed. Jesus files it under the entrance. “Unless one is born again he cannot see the kingdom of God.” Not may not. Cannot. It is not a higher tier; it is the door. There is no side entrance for the well-behaved, no members’ line for the religious. Everyone comes the same way, or not at all.
Which means the most dangerous position in the world is not the addict in the gutter. It is the respectable man, sure he is fine, who has never been born again — the man who came to Jesus at night with his credentials in hand. Church attendance is not the new birth. Growing up in a Christian home is not the new birth. Agreeing that Jesus was a good teacher is not the new birth. Have you been made alive?
The Mercy in the Impossibility
Here is the gospel hiding inside the hardest word Jesus said. If salvation depended on your improvement, you could never be sure you had improved enough. But if salvation is a birth God performs, then your security does not rest on your performance at all. The One who gave you life keeps it.
Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who according to His great mercy has caused us to be born again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.
1 Peter 1:3, NASB1995
You cannot birth yourself. That is not bad news. That is the best news you have ever heard — because the God who is rich in mercy specializes in raising the dead. Do not clean up the corpse. Come to Christ, and be made alive.
Teaching the Word. Watching the Times.
— SmithForChrist