Just so you know, we will be
in this text for another week, and then we'll move on into verse
16. This is a way of opening our
eyes to some reality of how we take Scripture and sort of paint
it into a corner. Very few people grasp the truth
that John 3.16, which is probably one of the most famous verses
most well-known verses in the world is Actually part of the
discourse that Jesus is having with Nicodemus in relationship
to the new birth so John 3 16 as we'll see in a couple of weeks
is the reason that the Spirit gives life It's not an isolated
truth by itself That's redundant, but you know, it's not an isolated
truth. It's not a pretext that we should take different theologies
from, and as we'll see, it is in the meat of being born again. For, if we see 16, God so loved
the world. The cause of this is See, God
loved the world, therefore all this happened. This is why it
happened, for God loved the world. So keep that in mind as we continue
to move through this text, because it's very easy for us to get
lost in the nuances of our pet Bible verses. Let's start in
chapter 3, verse 1, and go down through verse 15. Now there was
a man of the Pharisees named Nicodemus, a ruler of the Jews. 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.' Jesus answered him, "'Truly, truly, I say to
you, unless one is born again, he cannot see the kingdom of
God.' Gedemus 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?' And Jesus answered, Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one
is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of
God. That which is born of flesh is flesh, and that which is born
of Spirit is spirit. Do not marvel that I say to you,
you must be born again. The wind blows where it wishes
and you hear it sound, but you do not know where it comes from
or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is
born of the Spirit." Nicodemus said to him, how can these things
be? And Jesus answered him, Are you
not the teacher of Israel? And yet you do not understand
these things? Truly, truly, I say to you, we speak of what we know,
and bear witness to what we have seen, but you do not receive
our testimony. If I have told you earthly things
and you do not believe, how can you believe if I tell you heavenly
things? No one has ascended into heaven
except he who descended from heaven, the Son of Man. And as
Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son
of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in Him may have eternal
life." Now I want us to consider what we know thus far about this
text. What we've heard, for those of you who were here for Christmas
last year, I preached out of this text in a frenzy, it seemed. I had so much I wanted to do.
And then also the last few weeks as we prepared to enter this
portion of Scripture, what is it that we've learned thus far?
Well, last week I emphasized the qualifications of Nicodemus.
Last week I talked about what he was, and who he was, and what
he had accomplished, and what Jesus said about all those accomplishments,
and how Jesus even very harshly rebukes him, and is even in some
sense baffled that this man who is so learned could not understand
these things, but yet we know why. This morning I want to answer
the question, what is the new birth? Because it's easy for
us to see it. As George Whitefield during his
time in the states or in the colonies, he would be the one
who sort of coined the phrase in the evangelical push, you
must be born again. Before his time, you did not
hear many people say that. And even today, you don't hear
a lot of that. During what we would know historically
as the Jesus Movement of the 60s, we know that there was a
lot of people who were very enamored and overwhelmed and even intrigued
by the idea of new birth. It was sort of a spiritualism
rather than a conversion. And so a lot of people experiencing
new things, taking new drugs and the like, enjoyed the idea
that there was a new way of being. And so being born again during
that time in our culture became sort of the new fad. Much like
today, being reformed has become the new fad, saying that, you
know, I have the right doctrine. We don't want my grandfather's
church, not in the sense that he sings hymns, but we don't
want to hear the brow beater that says nothing. We want to
hear the exposition that says everything. And in the same manner,
sometimes we get to a point where we talk about being born again.
But do any of us really contemplate what that means? Do any of us
really look deep into the core of what the gospel message is
to recognize that the gospel is the work of God? And the gospel
message is the declaration of what God has done in His power.
It is not about convincing you to believe. It is about declaring
to you that God has provided substitution for you. And in
believing, it is the work of God. We sang it in a song just
a moment ago that we cannot have it in ourselves to obey your
command. And one of the greatest commands
that God has given is to believe on the Son. As a matter of fact,
Jesus would say that that is the work of God. When the multitude
to leave Him, after He teaches this, ask, what must we do to
be doing the works of God? And He says, this is the work
of God that you believe on the Son whom He has sent. So how
ridiculous it was to them that they could not even say, they
could not even see what Jesus was saying even after he explained
it very clearly. I am the bread, eat of me. Find
sustenance in me. Believe in me. I will give you
life forever. Not like your fathers who died
in the wilderness. Nicodemus was no different, no different
than the many multitudes who believed in Jesus that we see
at the end of chapter two, but yet their confession was fruitless.
There was no efficacy, there was no work, there was no certainty
of what they believed, for they had just come to the place of
recognizing Jesus as a man sent from God, and the only one they
were looking for was Messiah, so must be the guy, we believe
he's he. But yet that is not a salvation.
See, we've come way far from the gospel in our culture, especially
in this country. We've come so far from the gospel
that anything goes. We've so forgotten the fact that
the gospel is the work of God that we oftentimes forget to
praise God in the deepest moments and the deepest truths that He
has done the work in us. Now, God has not believed for
us, but God has given us the gift of faith. How that works
is what we'll see today. Let's look at the Word of God.
I'll take this sort of verse by verse and it'll be a little
bit different because we've already gone through contextually most
of this, but it will be a refresher as well as an explanation of
what the new birth is. Next week we'll see what the
new birth does and why it does what it does. But in verses 3
and 4 here, we see that Jesus remarks that one cannot see the
kingdom if he's not born again. You must be born again, Jesus
would say, but you cannot see the kingdom unless one is born
again. Now the reality of this is that Nicodemus had just confessed
to being able to see the kingdom. He confessed to being able to
see what God was doing. You see, seeing the kingdom of
God is to see God. To see God is to see what God
is doing. Jesus would say these things
in John chapter 5, where He begins to say, that which the Father
is doing, I now do. I am doing, so that the work
of God is not stopped and transferred, but Jesus as God, as the only
God, is continuing the work that He's always been doing. If we're
to see that and recognize it for what it is, and to trust
in it, it means that we're trusting in the One who does it. We're
trusting in the work, because we're trusting in the One who
works. And so, Nicodemus is confessing, if we will, that he sees the
work of God, that he can see the kingdom at hand. And Jesus
says, you cannot see it. You have confessed rightly, partially,
but you still can't see. You don't know what you're talking
about, Nicodemus. You are ignorant. You are blind.
You are dead. You cannot see what you are thinking that you
see. You do not understand and comprehend the things of God.
And Jesus will go on to actually say that through an inquiry. Jesus remarks, you must be born
again in order to see. Nicodemus responds in a ridiculous
manner. We saw that last week. How can
that happen? Should I go back into my mother's
womb as a grown man? Be born again? So we know that
Jesus' words caused Nicodemus to consider the fact that he
had to be reborn. This is not a play on words.
This is not some metaphor that Jesus is talking about that's
sort of convoluted. Nicodemus understood clearly
that Jesus was talking about something about how the nature
of man must be rebirthed. Because that's why I asked that
question. If he was thinking some spiritual thing, why would
he answer in the physical? He understood what Jesus meant,
but he could not see it because he had not been born again. He
could not grasp it. So Jesus goes on to explain it.
He says in verse 5, "...unless one is born of water and the
Spirit, He cannot enter the Kingdom of God. Now, there are, and I
don't want to get into all of this, there are five, seven,
seven views that are considered academically worthy of looking
at about what the water is and what the Spirit is. But, if we
look at the context of the Old Testament, if we look at the
Hebrew Scripture, if we look at Ezekiel 36 and 37, if we look
at other places in Scripture, if we look at the book of Acts,
and we see that everywhere there is an illusion of water, or there
is the imagery of water, it is talking about being cleansed.
Cleansed. And this phrase, water and the
Spirit, is not two separate things, but yet one and the same. So
as we'll see here, Jesus is saying you must be born of water and
the Spirit. Not only can you not see the
Kingdom of God, you cannot enter the Kingdom of God. See, because
Nicodemus had a one-way ticket to eternity because of his roots. because of his ability to be
a Pharisee, because of his lineage, because of his blood, because
of his will. As we've already seen this gospel
writer say in the prologue, that it's not by the will of the flesh,
nor of blood, nor the decision of the mind, but by the will
of God that one is born again, that one is made a child of God. Those are the ones who have the
right to become children. because of God's love for them,
because of God's work for them, because of God's power in them.
And so what we see here is this new birth is an imperative, unless
one is born. And even Jesus would say later,
you must be. Truly, truly, I say, you must
be. But the imperative is from the
beginning. You cannot see. That's an imperative. You have
no ability to see. You have no ability to enter.
Unless you're born again, it is an imperative. So the new
birth has to take place if you are to have eternal life. I want
you to grasp that, church, because often we forget that the response
to the gospel is God's doing. Did you hear that? The response
to the gospel. If I preach the gospel to a lost
and dying world, the response to the gospel is what God will
do with the hearing in their ears. That's the response to
the gospel. Because what they will do in
the response to the gospel is not understand it. What they
will do in response to the gospel that I give is that they will
not comprehend it. That they will not see it. And
they will not believe it. Or they will believe it in their
humanity. Or they will believe it in their own psychology. Or
they believe it in their own philosophical way. And they will
say, well, now what? What shall I do in order to have
eternal life? Well, Jesus tells that rich young
ruler, you must be holy. You can't just wash up, buddy.
You can't just wash off with water. In the same way, Nicodemus
understands that. The problem is Nicodemus trusted
in his own righteousness to be justified before God. Now, people
would argue that. People in heretics like N.T.
Wright and others. But we talk about a new perspective,
a different dispensation, a different idea, and how Jews are saved
ethnically. No, it's by the gospel of grace
alone through Jesus Christ. If Christ did not suffer the
sins of someone who's ethnic Israel, they will stand in eternity
and be judged accordingly, guilty before God and His holiness.
But this is an imperative. You must be born again. You must
be born again to see. You know what that does for us
as evangelicals? You know what it does for us
as those who have the command of God everywhere to teach the
nations the gospel? You know what it does for us
where Jesus tells us in Matthew 28, Because all authority in
heaven and earth has been given unto me, therefore go and make
disciples of all nations, teaching them to obey me. Teaching them
to believe. Teaching them to walk in a manner
worthy of the calling. You know who's on the hook for
that? We're on the hook for teaching and for sharing and proclaiming.
It's our role. It's our responsibility. And
God sends us out to do that. But when people do not believe,
who's on the hook for that? They are. So you thought I was
going to say God, didn't you? They are. It's their fault they
don't believe, just like it's our fault if we don't believe.
It's our fault that we're sinners. It's our fault that we're born
into guilt. It's our fault that we rebel against God. It's our
fault. We are not off the hook just
because we're guilty and dead. If I get killed in the commission
of a crime, I'm not the victim. And when I'm dead in my sins,
I'm not the victim. I'm the guilty party. But God,
in His mercy, through the hearing of the Gospel, when we share
the Word of God, listen to this, God, as He wishes, as we'll see
in a minute, opens the eyes and the hearts of the dead. He brings
them to life. He regenerates them. We call
it conversion in our vernacular. That is the new birth. You've
been born again. You've been regenerated. You've
been made into something new, as we'll see. This new birth
is a new status. It's a new place. It's a new
level of which you sit. Not as a different being, but
as a recreated person. A new mind, a new heart. God
doesn't take the old and make it better. He destroys what is
dead and He recreates it new. Friends, there is nothing in
us that can be fixed. There is nothing in our flesh
and in our nature that can be paved over and made to be righteous. Our righteousness belongs to
Jesus Christ. The heart and the mind, without
becoming new, cannot believe. God gifts faith. The new birth is required in
order to see. The new birth is required in
order to inherit eternal life. The new birth is required for
a man to be justified before God. You must be born again. Brothers and sisters, many people
sit amongst the brethren. And they think with all the power
within them that they are born of God. But all they do is know. They know what they think they
know. They know the details. They know
the data. Well friends, knowing the data
is not faith in Jesus. And many people will try to tell
you that because we want to sit easily still in our God chair. We want to sit on our own throne
and say, I know. And thumb our nose at God. I
know. You know what? God will save
who He will save. And if He does not birth us anew,
we can know everything. Having been to seminary for 300
years, I have met a lot of professors that I know without a shadow
of a doubt are lost. that do not understand the gospel,
but they know it. And they don't trust in it. They
just enjoy teaching new material. And I say, well, are you making
judgment? No, I'm just looking and observing. When a man can
confess that he trusts in Christ, we take his word for it. And
we walk accordingly with Him in the good and the bad, in the
obedience and the disobedience, in the whatever you want to call
it, in the good walking and the bad walking. We walk together.
We exercise discipline when it's necessary and we praise God for
the fruitfulness of the Spirit of God. But ultimately, when
man confesses Christ, we receive it and we walk with Him accordingly.
Beloved, many people don't profess Christ by faith. They profess
stuff. They profess doctrine. They profess
place. They profess blood. They profess
membership. Let's check ourselves. Is our
faith in our faith? Is our faith in our church? Is
our faith in our service? Is our faith in our walking?
Is our faith in the semblance of what we call obedience? Or
is our faith in the finished work of Jesus Christ? If you
can see the work of Christ, you have been born again. If you
can trust in what Christ has done, you have been made alive.
You are a new creature by the will of God with His power. The
good thing about it being God's power is that it's not up to
us. And it's not up to us to start
it, and it's not up to us to keep it, and it's not up to us
to finish it. Because God is the finisher of
our faith. God is the author of our faith.
As a matter of fact, that verse in Hebrews, I believe, tells
us that in the same breath. The author and perfecter, or
finisher, of our faith. So unless one is born of water
and the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God. In verse
6, Jesus begins to explain the reality of that. Why you, Nicodemus,
cannot become a Christian. I'm just using the words that
we use. Why you, Nicodemus, cannot convert yourself. Why you cannot
go out into the world and tell someone, be ye converted by your
own power. Sounds authoritative when you
use that old King James, doesn't it? But in our day, what did
you say? Flesh begets flesh and spirit
begets spirit. That's what Jesus is saying.
That which is flesh is flesh and that which is spirit is spirit.
That which is born of the flesh remains flesh and that which
is born of the spirit remains spirit. I want you to think about
what's happening here. Who is He talking to? He's talking
to a man that in His flesh had all the idea that His flesh inherited
Him the Kingdom of God. Had all the idea that His knowledge
of the Messiah would inherit him the kingdom of God. Had all
the idea that his obedience to the law would inherit him the
kingdom of God. Guess what? It doesn't. And Jesus is just
that harsh with him. Why? For your benefit. Why did
Jesus have this conversation? Well, evidences show that Nicodemus
probably was eventually born again. But we don't know what
God did in the heart of Nicodemus. But we do know what Jesus said
to Nicodemus. And because of what Jesus said
to Nicodemus is recorded in the Scripture, now we can have life
listening to what Jesus said to Nicodemus. Now we can take
this very passage of Scripture, and we can go to anyone, anywhere
in the world, as long as they can understand our language,
and we can share this truth with them, and God, through the hearing
of this truth, will bring them to life. It's necessary to be
born anew by the power of God because we are dead in our flesh. We are dead in our trespasses.
Friends, there is a heretical thing that has been going on
since the foundation of humanity that says, and hear me out, that
human beings are innately good. There are people who say that.
There are people who believe that. I've heard many, many of
generations of old, those that were born in the teens in the
turn of the century, the 1900s, that are long gone now. But I remember
being a child and hearing so many of that generation say,
you know, you got good in you, boy. You got good in you. You just
find that good and you run with it. And I'm thinking in my mind,
where is the good? By the Lord's grace, because
many of us go, yeah, you're right. I got some good in me. What good? Nothing good do we bring. There
is no good in us, as we'll see Wednesday night in Romans. No
one is good. No, not one. Now, that doesn't
mean that we have to whip our children every 30 seconds or
throw rocks at them and tell them they're awful, though we
might feel that way from time to time, kids. We're not going
to do that. Because we can, because we can teach you what
the scripture says about your nature, but we can also teach
you what the scripture says about your new nature, about the new
birth. See, flesh is flesh. From Adam
to Nicodemus, there is one lineage, and it's called humanity. And
that humanity, that lineage, is a lineage of guilt, and a
lineage of depravity, and a lineage of death. There is no good in
the hearts of humanity. There is nothing there. Jesus
would teach the parable of the seed and the sower. And He would
talk about how the Word of God is sown, and that the soils are
the hearts of men, the way they receive and understand. And that
some people receive the Word of God and immediately it's eaten
by the birds. And He said that that's the devil,
that he sins to devour the Word and take it from them. as we
see that parallel in chapter 4 of 2 Corinthians where it says
that even though our gospel is veiled, it is only veiled by
those who are perishing. For the God of this world has
blinded the eyes of unbelievers to keep them from seeing the
glory of God. You don't believe that sometimes.
Friends, that's how severe guilt is. That God is just in blinding
humanity. God is just in the verdict of
wrath. or the sentencing of wrath. God
is just to say, I won't let these people believe. But God is also
just in saying, I will let these people believe because they are
for whom Christ died and their guilt has been paid. You see
that. How do we see it? Well, we can't
remain in our flesh because flesh breeds guilt. And with guilt,
there's an inability to see and enter the kingdom of heaven.
There is nothing that man can do. We need a powerful newness. We need to be recreated. We need
to become another creature, if you will, on the inside. Now see, we could take that type
of language and we could really run into some New Age thinking.
We could run into some of these happy-go-lucky pulpiteers who
talk good about humanity and try to help us find the good
things that are there. We could look at the heretical
false gospel of the free will and say, just find that element
of freedom. Find that little spot of goodness
and make the right decision for Jesus. That's never been said
anywhere in the narrative of Scripture. Not one place in all
the books of the Bible has anything like that, near that, or close
to that ever been communicated. The gospel is not, will you choose
Jesus this day? The gospel is, believe on Christ
today. This is what He did. This is
what God has done. And this is what is going to
happen if you do not believe, for God is a holy and just God. This is the gospel. It starts
with the bad news of the depravity of humanity. The need for something
majestic and something divine and something sublime to come
into the darkness and to shine light where light cannot be shown.
It takes a divine miracle of God. in order for a person to
be born again. We must be born again. We must
be something new. Man cannot change or receive
that which he cannot change or receive. That's why the ill-fated
philosophy of free will is not a doctrine found in Scripture.
Beloved, you may not know it yet, but there are a large population
of people in the state of Georgia, who have started their own coalition
to try to stand upon the freedom of the volition of man in response
to the gospel of grace. They call themselves the John
3.16 group, or the whosoever group. And I hate to say it this way,
but there is a massive ignorance in that, and I fear that for
some of them there is a massive judicial blindness in that. They would argue that there is
the glory of God in the Imagio Dei. That's the term that we
use theologically for the image of God in man. God says, let
us make man in our image. They argue that the image of
God and His glorification and creation of man is the freedom
of our will to choose Him. It is a very, very, very, very
dangerous and damnable teaching. Man cannot do what he is unable
to do. Man cannot turn to beast. Man used to not be able to change
his gender. Still can't. Man has never been able to turn
into a bird or turn into a stone. Even the Old Testament would
say, can a leper change his spots? Leopard changes spots. Can an
Ethiopian change the color of his skin? Can we become something
we're not? No. We might desire it, but we
can't do it. So we don't have the freedom of the will to do
that. because it's not in our nature. We don't have the power.
There's no effectual ability. So, in the same way, if we can't
change the natural world, how in heaven are we going to change
the supernatural reality of the justice of God? How are we going
to change the nature of wickedness to the nature of righteousness?
How are we going to choose that which we cannot see? How are
we going to reach out and grasp? Imagine a thousand years ago
walking into the past from now and saying, have you ever seen
an Adam? And I said, well, no, but I've heard of him. He ate
the fruit in the garden. Do you understand that there are microscopic
matter that makes everything else up that we see? That I'm
molecules and you're molecules and you're molecules and the
whole world's... There's air molecules. People will think
you're crazy. Why? They couldn't see it. They
couldn't grasp it. But we can see it now. With the technology
that we have, with the science and innovations that we have,
we understand what DNA is. And the same people who discover
that, they go, wow, there is no God. Professing to be wise,
they became fools and God gave them up to a delusion so that they might worship the
creature rather than the Creator. Romans 1. This new man. must be made new
by the power of the Spirit. You must be born of the water
and the Spirit. You must be made new by God Himself, God the Holy
Spirit, the third person of our triune God, one being, three
persons, one God. Flesh begets flesh, but Spirit
begets Spirit. God the Spirit must produce what
is required in man in order for him to see and enter the kingdom
of heaven. This refers to a new origin. Listen to this. A new origin. Because our old
origin is tied to death. Our old origin is our father
Adam, the Adamic nature, the sin nature, the corrupt nature.
But beloved, when we're born again, God takes and gives a
new nature which comes from Him. He doesn't take the old and blow
it off and dust it and spray it with pledge and buff it out
and go, look at yonder, I got the spots out. Our flesh is still
spotted. Our flesh is still sinful. But
the new birth gives us a mind to believe and trust in the One
who is never spotted, and the One who has never been sinful,
and the One whose righteousness has been counted hours, and His
name is Jesus, and He's talking to Nicodemus right here in this
text, and by the Lord's power and the Lord's grace, He's speaking
to you this morning when you hear the Scripture. A new origin. Life then must
be from God, not from man. Not from within man. In verse
7, Jesus says, don't marvel that I said to you, you must be born
again. Why does this narrative continue to patter back and forth
between this, I don't get it, well here's the point. I don't
get it, here's the point. To prove to you that I'm not
making up what I just said over the last 10 minutes. There is
no man alive on earth during the time of Jesus that should
or could or can have the ability in his own understanding, cognitively,
the truth of the gospel of Jesus Christ better than Nicodemus. Let me say that a little clearer. There is no man in the time of
Jesus that could understand it better than Nicodemus and Nicodemus
could not see it. Jesus says, don't marvel. Don't
be confused. Don't go, whoa, that's deep.
That's not deep. It's simple. The new birth is not a deep mystery. It's a simple, childlike, infantile,
elementary teaching. It's so easy. You know how you
got to this life? You were born through your mother.
You know how you're going to get to the next life in Christ? You've
got to be born from the Father. It's simple. But Nicodemus could
not see it. Why? Because an unbeliever cannot
grasp the realities of the mystery of the gospel except he be born
again first. He got to be born again first.
You cannot believe until you're born again. Let me give you some
theological terms in case you run across them. We believe that
the... No. The Bible teaches a monergistic. Monergistic. However you want
to pronounce that. Monergism. Monergism. Depends
on what side of the tracks you're on. If you're a yeehaw, it might
be something totally different. If you don't know what a yeehaw
is, stick around Claxton for a couple of days. We'll find
one for you. That means it is one-sided power. Only one person has the power
to do something. Synergism is that two sides work
together. Synergism is wrong. Synergism
is a lie from Satan. Synergism is a heresy. Synergism
will send you to hell. Or no, your guilt will send you
to hell. God will send you to hell. Christ will throw you into
hell because you're guilty. And as long as we hold on to
our ability and to where we meet God and think that we can do
something to affect, listen, to affect the gospel in our lives,
we will not have eternal life. God must birth us new before
and then because we've been given us to see, we behold and believe.
Do you understand that? so that when we believe of our
own choice, it's because we've been made new to see. You see,
while Phineism, 19th century evangelism, has so ruined the
gospel, because it became part of what man can do to accept
it, to receive it, to respond to it, rather than God doing
the work of salvation. Which do you want to trust in?
I mean, be honest, beloved. How many of us really, really,
really, really, really, really have ultimate confidence, terminal
confidence in our ability to believe and stay in the faith?
Let me see your hands. Our ability. No, we don't. See, kids are listening, they
raise their hands. But our confidence is in God's
ability to save us. Our confidence. With faith. Confide.
Our confidence is in the work of God through the Son of God. By the Spirit. Through the Word. This new birth cannot be understood. Marveling is what unbelief does.
And sometimes unbelief in marveling turns to hatred of the message
or the messenger. It is imperative, therefore,
that we be made from above. Otherwise, we cannot see and
believe. We cannot have faith. Because Nicodemus had faith,
but it was hopeless. It was not divine. Verse 8, it
teaches us that the new birth is a powerful act of God. There
in verse 8, the wind blows where it wishes and you hear it sound,
but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes.
So it is with everyone born of the Spirit. See, Jesus isn't
just talking about the invisibility of the Spirit of God. He's not
just talking about the fact that God can do things without us
seeing them. He's saying that God blows without
our knowledge and without our permission. into the hearts and
minds of dead people, and those who have been born of God, that
it's because God has blown in their hearts to give them life.
No one commands God. No one declares God do something. Hear me church, no one. There's a popular thing that
has gone on in my entire life, I've heard it, where if we declare
something, if we claim something, and we say something that is
promised in Scripture, that God is on the hook to fulfill it.
You know what God's on the hook for? Nothing. He's God and there
is no other. He does all that He pleases.
He decrees everything that comes to pass. That's what sovereignty
looks like. Sovereignty and exercise of supremacy,
which is the authority that God has. Praise God He has the authority
to bring us to life. Praise God He has the mercy to
do it. And praise God He has the eternal
decree to put our guilt on Jesus Christ that we may be forgiven.
Because if we weren't forgiven, He would not bring us to life. The wind blows where it wishes.
This conversion shows that God is the only actor, verse 8. It's
a monergistic action of God. It's a one-sided work. It's one-sided
power. God goes into the hearts and
minds of unbelievers and He breathes life into them. Just like God
took dirt and made Adam and breathed into him life, so does God in
the same way breathe life into His children eternally. The dirt
didn't decide, I want to make a man. God made man. The dirt of depraved, lost sinners
does not decide, I want to make a righteous one. God makes a
righteous one. The supernatural transformation
is instant and miraculous. God has made us able to believe
through His divine power. by the will of God as he wishes. In verse 9, Nicodemus asks again,
how can these things be? Do you see that Nicodemus had
no spiritual mindset at all? Do you see that? None. He didn't even have a superstitious
mindset. There was no spirituality whatsoever in the cognate of
Nicodemus. In the philosophy of Nicodemus.
In the theology of Nicodemus. It was all cut and dry. How am
I to accomplish this? How am I to do this? What's going
to happen? I don't understand you, Jesus.
You're not making any sense. I don't... How am I to be...
How's the wind going to blow? What? What? I'm lost. You got that right. Same thing
happens in John 4. Same thing happens in John 5.
Same thing happens in John 6. Same thing happened in John 2.
And over and over again, every narrative of Jesus with others,
they could not believe, they did not believe, except that
they'd be born again. In verse 9, we see that this
man, though he was overqualified in every way to understand the
gospel, he could not. that there is no qualification
of man that can set him justified before God. It is only Christ.
In verses 10 and 12, as we see these, Jesus says, Are you not
the teacher of Israel? Yet you don't understand these
things? Truly, truly, I say to you, we speak of what we know,
and we bear witness to what we have seen, but you do not receive
our testimony. If I've told you earthly things
you can't believe and don't believe, how can I tell you heavenly things?
How are you going to believe if I tell you about spiritual
things? How are you going to believe
if I show you some things about the kingdom of God? See, I can
see the kingdom. We know that you are from God
because we can see the kingdom. Jesus is responding in a pluralistic
manner here in a response to Nicodemus' pluralistic confession. This is not a proof text for
the Trinity, y'all. Let's don't read into what the Scripture
says. This is a dialogue, and Jesus responds in the same manner.
Nicodemus says, we know, and Jesus says, no, we know. And
then he immediately, after he says that, goes to I. He goes
to the singular plural. I mean, the singular personal
pronoun, I, from the plural. We know that. You are with God
because nobody can do these things. Jesus says, we speak of what
we know. You're speaking of what you know,
now we're speaking of what we know. Some commentators, he was
talking about the disciples. The disciples were as lost and
confused as Nicodemus was. At the wedding of Cana, while
they knew he was divine, their faith was strengthened, but they
still didn't see it all. At the cleansing of the temple,
John says, they remembered after he was resurrected, he had said
that. And they went, oh, now we get
it, you see. Wow! Boy, we were blind and stupid. There's no ability there. We
can only know what Christ shows us. Christ says, we speak of
what we know and bear witness to what we've seen. The new birth
is not possible by the power of man. It's not possible by
the testimony of man. It's not possible through academics. It's not possible through human
knowledge or wisdom. It is only possible through the
Spirit of God. We know and we bear witness because
Jesus has seen what He is saying. Jesus has come from the abode
of heaven. Jesus is God and the work that He has been doing from
all of eternity He continues to do today. So that what Jesus
is doing and what Jesus is teaching is seeing the kingdom of heaven.
Trusting and believing in Jesus Christ who is God working. is
entering into the Kingdom of Heaven. And the way that works
is to hear the words of Christ, Romans 10, 17. And through the
hearing, the Spirit of God blows where it wishes and brings to
life a dead person so that they can see and enter into Christ. Nicodemus could not receive Jesus'
testimony because he was unable to comprehend it, even though
all of his learning reveals it clearly. And that's why Jesus
is the little harsh one. Are you not the teacher of Israel?
I mean this is a difficult thing for Nicodemus to swallow. Are
you not the teacher of Israel? What in the world? You can't
see? Jesus knew that he couldn't see. He wasn't trying to get
him to see. He was trying to call out the
reality that he could not see. Showing him the simple thing
that should be obvious to you is not obvious because you are
blinded. You cannot understand earthly things. You cannot understand
the imagery and the metaphors of birth and water and wind.
How are you to understand the depths of the glory of heaven? You can't consider heavenly things.
Have you thought about that for a moment? What does it mean to
consider spiritual things? You know what's wrong with many
of us, beloved? And why we feel and sit in such
a defeated place? It's because we look all the
time at temporal things. We look at the world. We look
at our life. We look at our suffering. We
look at the body, and the finances, and the family, and the relationships,
and all the things that are going to die and are passing away already. instead of looking at heavenly
things, instead of looking at eternal
things, instead of looking at Christ. We're looking for Christ
to help us make sense of garbage, when it's just to be tossed aside.
This life, these relationships, these bodies, this illness, all
of the work that we do for nothing except for the glory of God,
It'll all end one day, and all we'll have is one body, a family
of saints, standing justified before the King of kings for
all of eternity, beholding His ineffable glory, seeing Him face
to face, and there will be no tear, and there will be no sickness,
and there will be no death, and there will be no sin. Hallelujah.
Bring it now, Lord Jesus. It's the 24th. You're a day late.
If you didn't know that, the rapture
was predicted yesterday. We're left behind. I mean, consider what it means
to peer into heaven for a minute. Have you ever considered the
ineffable glory of God? I get called up and I get shaky
sometimes when I think about what Moses saw in the shadow
of God's glory. And I get plumb, upside down,
unable to really think very clearly when I think of what John saw
on the cross. And more, what Thomas saw in
the upper room. What we will see when we stand
before our Christ. The majesty of His glory, the
awesomeness of His presence. To contemplate the powerful reflection
of His might. That through His mouth, He spoke
in whatever He said, let there be was. Envision the perfection of His
holiness. Which the scripture says, if we could, we would die. There's no way to see earthly
truths in our broken condition, much less heavenly ones. But
we have seen the glory of God as the only Son of the Father,
full of grace and truth. And it is by grace, upon grace,
upon grace, through which we can see the truth of the gospel.
And it is the work of Christ. And the object of our faith is
Christ. And we see there in verses 13 through 15, and we'll close
with this, and we'll get into these next week in more in-depth.
But Jesus talks about His authority to proclaim such things, and
that the power of the new birth is secure in Him because of who
He is and from where He's come. When He says, no one has ascended,
that means to go up into heaven, except He who descended from
heaven. Remember earlier where He told
the disciples when Nathaniel said, Wow. You saw me, and Jesus says, don't
marvel. You believe because I say I saw you under the fig tree?
Greater things than these you shall see. For you will see heaven
opened on the Son of Man and angels ascending and descending.
See, Jesus is the kingdom of heaven. Jesus has come down that
He might return. And when He goes back, in this
spiritual sense, He has carried with Him hosts of sinners made
saint. We are in Christ this very moment. And we are secure in Him. He
alone is the truth that comes down from heaven. He alone is
the bread of life. He is the one who came to save
His people, and He does so perfectly. He's not a Savior that's possible. He's a sure and certain Savior.
He is the God of creation become man. Jesus was born into this
world. Get this. This is the last thing
I'll say. Jesus, the God of glory, was born into this world and
subject to the futility of creation, hated and despised by the very
ones He came to save. He was born into this world so
that we could be born from above. What a great exchange. What a
great, glorious Savior we have. Heaven is open, and we can see
it, and we can enter into it by faith. And His name is Christ. We believe in the work of God,
and our hope is secure. Let's pray. Father, what Jesus has done, even with Your revelation, even
with the clarity of what You've taught us, in Scripture, even
with what we know, we still are unable to grasp fully the glory
of it all. Because the world that we live
in does continually cloud our ability to meditate and to seek
and to think. So that day when we are made
like you eternally, the day when you come to take your own and
to set all things under your feet, We look forward to knowing You
more intimately and more perfectly. But in these days, we will seek
Your Word and be taught by You through Your Spirit and trust
fully in our confession of Jesus Christ, who is the Lamb who has
taken away our sin, whom You put forward to satisfy Your judgment,
whose body You crushed and whose blood You shed that there might
be remission of sin. Father, as we contemplate this,
let us be serious. Let us be, Lord, and somewhat
fearful of what it means to take this table in an unworthy manner.
And I pray, Lord, as we come and take these elements, Lord,
that we would deeply, by Your Spirit, Remember what you've
done and the cost that was required to save us. We pray these things
in Jesus' name.