June 17, 2009

Like Powerful, Cleansing Waters

2009 1517 page24 capow there was a man of the Pharisees named Nicodemus. . . . He came to Jesus at night” (John 3:1, 2).

 
Big deal?
 
We have made a big deal of the fact that Nicodemus preferred to be an undercover seeker and, therefore, came at night. The bigger deal—right at the beginning of the story—was that he came at all. But the really, really big deal comes at the end, and we’ll come to it.
 
The Nicodemus who came to see the homeless Galilean that night was a member of one of the most distinguished Jewish aristocratic families.1 He had to swallow a lot of pride and prejudice to come. And when he came, he didn’t come with contempt, or a closed mind, or with trick questions. His assertion “You are a teacher who has come from God” didn’t go the distance in accounting for Jesus, but it was, at least, inclusive and gracious.
 
That being the case, the reply of Jesus was a little surprising, as if at cross-purposes with Nicodemus’s concerns: “No one can see the kingdom of God unless he is born again,” Jesus said (John 3:3).
 
2009 1517 page24The response floored Nicodemus and made him bluster.
 
Jesus’ approach was a strategy of cutting to the chase. Sensing that Nicodemus was overly secure in all the wrong assumptions, Jesus was replying to something Nicodemus had not said. For starters, He was defining the bottom line of what Nicodemus needed to know.
 
Jews were accustomed to demanding “new birth” of Gentile converts. But asking for new birth from a Jew—and a Jew of Nicodemus’s standing at that—struck at the root of both his theology and his worldview. He felt he knew that his place in God’s kingdom had been assured by his race, by his circumcision, by his energetic lawkeeping, and by his “head honcho” curriculum vitae.
 
The sheer inappropriateness of Nicodemus’s response (about reentering one’s mother’s womb—see John 3:4) demonstrates how uncomfortable he was.
 
But Jesus did not retreat. Instead, He restated His position, and in doing so made it larger than life and twice as personal: “You must be born again” (verse 7).
 
Nicodemus could have said, “Listen, I’m the big man around here. No one in Jerusalem has a better curriculum vitae than I.” But instead, he swallowed hard, blinked, then offered: “How can this be?” (verse 9).
 
The lack of hostility in Nicodemus’s response speaks volumes about him.
 
The literal translation of the reply of Jesus—“Are you the teacher of Israel and do not understand these things?” (John 3:10, NASB)*—paid tribute to the scholarly status of Nicodemus. He was the teacher, not merely a teacher. He was, in our terms, the leading Old Testament authority at that time. And Jesus was a little exasperated that even “the teacher of Israel” did not understand such a foundational concept as the new birth.
 
Are We Different?
How about us? We can define “grace,” “forgiveness,” and “repentance.” On a good day we might even begin to unpack words such as “justification.” But “new birth”?
 
When something crops up in one of the Gospels that we don’t fully understand, we can do three things: (1) check for parallel passages in the other three Gospels; (2) check the meaning of key words in a scholarly commentary; or (3) pursue any roots the passage might have in the Old Testament.
 
Two parallel passages (Matt. 18:3 and Luke 18:17) come out as: “Unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.” That helps.

There’s a key Greek word, the understanding of which is pivotal to comprehending the new birth concept. The word translated “again” (implying a life crisis equivalent to our biological birth) also means “from above,” implying “from God.” That helps even more. Because it indicates the origin of the experience. Regeneration is not an on-the-spot experience. It’s less dramatic, altogether more gradual, and the Holy Spirit is the Person who brings it about.
2
 
But it’s from the Old Testament that we get the greatest help in understanding the new birth.
 
It Was There All the Time
Nicodemus might have had a magna cum laude in Old Testament, but he would have been summa cum laude if he had not flunked his Ezekiel! For the fact is that if he’d been paying more attention, he’d have found a wonderful picture of the new birth idea in Ezekiel 36:25-27, a picture of God’s sovereign grace at work. In verse 25 the picture is of water cleansing us from the disfiguring dirt of sin: cleansing grace. In verse 26 the idea of a new heart, tender and responsive to God, adds to the notion of cleansing, regenerating grace. Verse 27 begins: “And I will put my Spirit in you.” The whole experience of long-term, over-a-lifetime transformation works through the agency of the Holy Spirit.
 
Nicodemus would have found other pictures of the new birth in Ezekiel. Ezekiel 37 speaks of a landscape covered by unburied human bones picked clean by vultures and bleached white by the sun. God asks Ezekiel, “Can these bones live?” And verse 10 says that “breath entered them; they came to life and stood up on their feet—a vast army.” How’s that for a picture of new birth!

Ezekiel 47 finds the prophet paddling in shallow water trickling east from the Jerusalem Temple. It grows exponentially, and in a hundred yards or so the prophet finds himself knee deep in fast-flowing water. In another hundred yards due east he is waist deep. Soon he has to swim for it. Eventually the torrent of water pours like Niagara Falls down into the Dead Sea, bringing it to life. And on the banks of the river of God, flowing across the lunar landscape between Jerusalem and the Dead Sea, Ezekiel sees orchards of fruit trees growing on both banks (verse 12). Another picture of how God brings new life.
 
Zechariah sees the same river (Zech. 12:10; 13:1; 14:8). It erupts in a Jerusalem of the future when Messiah is “pierced,” and it washes away all sin and uncleanness. Zechariah sees it flowing both east and west.
 
A Light Came On
When Nicodemus left the lodgings of Jesus that night he knew he had a lot of study to do. How would it work—that fountain that would be the source of the river of grace, the source of salvation?
 
The next Jesus-Nicodemus encounter would take place at the Feast of Tabernacles.

Jesus had caused a stir by saying, “If anyone is thirsty, let him come to me and drink.” It resulted in a hasty meeting of the Sanhedrin and a warrant for Jesus’ arrest.
 
But the soldiers dispatched to arrest Him returned bewildered to their commanders, without the prisoner. “No one ever spoke the way this man does,” they said (John 7:46). To which the Pharisees responded, mockingly: “Has any of the rulers or of the Pharisees believed in him?” “No!” they answered their own question, implying that the following of Jesus came from the mob (verses 48, 49).
 
It was then that Nicodemus addressed the 70-member body. Though stopping well short of acknowledging Jesus as Messiah, he stood up as a champion for justice.
 
“Are you from Galilee, too?” his Sanhedrin colleagues remarked sarcastically (see John 7:37-52).
 
By the time crucifixion week began it was known that among the leaders of the Jews were those who believed in Jesus. The assumption was that they hesitated to break cover because they were scared of the probable reaction of the Jerusalem establishment (see John 12:42, 43). As it turned out, however, the erstwhile frightened leaders chose the most unlikely time to break cover. They came out as Jesus slumped dead on the cross. It was a moment when most of Christ’s regular disciples were holed up in upper rooms, bolted and barred “for fear of the Jews” (John 20:19). But a little apart stood Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus.
 
It was at that most unlikely of times they broke cover. They accepted the reproach of being followers of the now dead Nazarene at a time when that reproach could not have been greater. They left Golgotha, returned to the city, sought an interview with Pilate, and received permission to remove the body of Jesus. Taking it down, they gave it a burial fit for a king.3
 
At the foot of the cross so many things had fallen into place for Nicodemus. Critical Old Testament passages came to him, among them Zechariah 13:1: “On that day a fountain will be opened . . . to cleanse them from sin and impurity.” Ezekiel’s life-giving river of God probably also came to mind.
 
Nicodemus also must have remembered the final words of Jesus as they parted after their nighttime interview: “Just as Moses lifted up the snake in the desert, so the Son of Man must be lifted up, that everyone who believes in him may have eternal life” (John 3:14, 15). The reference was to that powerful Old Testament story of the “life-giving” brazen snake in a serpent-infested desert (Num. 21:8, 9).
 
The conversation between Nicodemus and Jesus was almost certainly in Aramaic. In that language the expression “lifted up” in connection with the Son of Man carried the ideas both of exaltation and crucifixion. Most important, Nicodemus realized that he owed to the Son of Man everything he did, everything he was, and everything he could ever hope to be.
 
He reached out and grasped the grace extended. He received the cleansing from the disfiguring dirt of sin. He received the new heart responsive to the promptings of God. And he experienced the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, the agent of regeneration.
 
For Nicodemus, the new birth began at the foot of the cross. There he reached out and grasped the grace of God.
 
Big deal? Yes! For him—as it can be for us—the biggest deal of all time and eternity. 
 
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*Scripture quotations marked NASB are from the New American Standard Bible, copyright © 1960, 1962, 1963, 1968, 1971, 1972, 1973, 1975, 1977, 1995 by The Lockman Foundation. Used by permission.
 
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1William Barclay, The Daily Study Bible: The Gospel of John, vol. 1 (Edinburgh, Scotland: St. Andrew Press), p. 123.
2John 3:6-8; Bruce Milne, The Message of John (Nottingham, England: InterVarsity Press), pp. 78, 79.
3John 19:38-42; Milne, op. cit., pp. 287, 288; C. G. Kruse, Tyndale New Testament Commentaries, John (Nottingham, England: InterVarsity Press), pp. 273, 274.
 
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David Marshall is the senior editor at Stanborough Press in Lincolnshire, England.

 


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