Good Monday morning! The sun is shining; the birds are singing; the clouds of the next cold front are starting to push in, and the cat is busy slurping himself; what more could you want from a Monday morning? How about an answer to that question of being born of the Spirit? We'll get a little closer with a bit more information today as Jesus continues his answer to Nicodemus.
John 3:6 - "Humans can reproduce only human life, but the Holy Spirit gives birth to spiritual life."
What do we read in this answer? Being born of water is indeed the human birth we have all experienced. I will assume that none of you were hatched from a dinosaur egg, no matter what your parents might have told you. However, the other birth, being born of the Spirit, is something we cannot accomplish. Jesus tells Nicodemus that to be born of the spirit is what he means literally. The Holy Spirit gives us the second birth. That is a great comfort to me, because like Nicodemus, I have no idea how to be reborn. My physical strength, God-given talent, education, and experience in this life has in no way given me the answer to how to be born twice or be born of the Spirit. In fact everything that I have learned thus far says that being born twice is quite impossible. Yes, I realize there is a group of knuckleheads who do the thing with the bag, but that is just dangerous and silly. We can't be physically reborn. Each of us gets the one physical birth in this life and that is it. So to learn that the second birth is accomplished by the Holy Spirit causes us to breathe a sigh of relief. We want to see the Kingdom of God, but have no idea how to rebirth ourselves. Praise the Lord; it isn't something we do, but something the Holy Spirit does!
Of course, Nicodemus is going to ask for more. He stands in for us in this case as neither he nor any of us will understand all that Jesus is giving us from just these two verses. We all know that Jesus wasn't referring to a physical second birth, we get that part, but what is this birth of the Spirit? Taking this one verse at a time, it may seem at times that Jesus is teasing us with a little knowledge or holding back in some way. You might find out that the answer is: yes and yes. Jesus gives Nicodemus and all of us who read His Word, as much as we can take in with each verse. He does give us a hunger for more of the knowledge of the Spirit, but he also holds back from trying to give us the whole knowledge all at once.
We have a couple of problems in our ignorance and unbelief. We tend to think that enough learning in this life will enable us to understand everything. When we labor in our unbelief in Christ, we also tend to discount anything that seems totally preposterous; such as someone telling us we must be born again. The attempt to fix our ignorance through the accumulation of human knowledge tends to reinforce our unbelief in Christ, which in turn feeds our further ignorance of those things that are critical to know for eternal life. No wonder Jesus called us lost sheep! Like Nicodemus, we are sheep walking up the incline of life toward the blank wall of death. We can neither see nor understand what is behind that wall, and we wander hither and yon searching for the answers. Jesus has the answers we seek, but we must repent of our way to follow him. Nicodemus did the right thing by coming to Jesus, but will he understand or take in enough to believe in the way to see the Kingdom of God? I always thought the way to destruction was broad because so many choose it. But in thinking about how lost we are before coming to Jesus, I see that the way to destruction must be broad so that all the lost sheep can wander and stumble into it. Finding the narrow way to Jesus requires a turning around, which little lost sheep do not like to do!
Have a wonderful new week in Christ Jesus!
Bucky
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