You must be born again, through My death (3:1-15)

Opening their conversation respectfully, Nicodemus acknowledges that Jesus's miracles prove that God is with Him.  In that sense, he is representative of those who had seen Jesus’miracles at Passover and come to some sort of faith - but not saving faith (2:23-25).  He was also a highly respected Torah scholar (the Teacher of Israel (v10), a senior politician in the Jewish Parliament (Sanhedrin), and a man of independent mind, willing to go against the tide of his peers’ opinion (7:50-52).  Later, he would help Joseph of Arimathea bury Jesus (19:38-39), suggesting that he had become a secret believer.

As a person, Nicodemus reveals two negatives about finding our way to God.  Firstly, it's not about where one is born, or one’s family origins or nationality, or one’s social standing, or even one’s studying of the scriptures.  Secondly, it isn’t about one’s intelligence. No-one can reason their way to belief in Christ.  “For the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. For it is written: ‘I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, And bring to nothing the understanding of the prudent'.  Where is the wise?  Where is the scribe?  Where is the disputer of this age?  Has not God made foolish the wisdom of this world?  For since, in the wisdom of God, the world through wisdom did not know God, it pleased God through the foolishness of the message preached to save those who believe.  For Jews request a sign, and Greeks seek after wisdom; but we preach Christ crucified, to the Jews a stumbling block and to the Greeks foolishness, but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God.” (1 Corinthians 1:18–24, NKJV).

What Nicodemus's motives were, whether he came alone, and why he came by night, we can only guess.  The common assumption is that he came secretly, on a personal mission to find out more. The conversation with Jesus seems to start in a disjointed way, in that he doesn’t actually ask a question, and Jesus seems to immediately change the subject. However it makes perfect sense if one remembers that the Pharisees have recently asked John the Baptist a string of questions about who he is - and the Sanhedrin held itself responsible for investigating any claims of Messiahship.  Jesus has just referred to the Temple as ‘My Father’s house’ - His first self-identification as the Son of God.  So an alternative explanation would be that the Pharisees having been left non-plussed after questioning John publicly, had decided on a different approach to investigating Jesus.

Nicodemus’s use of the plural, ‘We know …”, suggests he was coming on behalf of a wider group: and it becomes clear later on that some of the Pharisees did believe that Jesus was from God, and was sinless (9:13-16).  So maybe he was coming unofficially on behalf of a sub-group of the Pharisees.  Certainly his approach was respectful, addressing Jesus as a fellow Rabbi even though He’d had no official training as such.

We might expect Jesus to have shown deference, flattery, or at least an eagerness to please, at this breakthrough moment, when one of the top religious leaders in Israel had sought Him out.  But there is none of this; nor indeed any irony, argumentativeness or superiority.  His sole concern is for Nicodemus’s salvation.

So we could perhaps paraphrase their opening conversation like this:-

Nicodemus: Rabbi, as a respected teacher myself, I and some of my colleagues recognise that your miracles prove God is with You, and thus validate your teaching.  But who are You? Are you the Messiah, Elijah, or the Prophet? Or if not, why do you call God your Father and claim the Temple as your family residence? (V2) 
Jesus: So you’re really asking, Is this the arrival of the long-awaited Messianic kingdom, huh?

Nicodemus would have known that the Old Testament identified Israel as God’s ‘kingdom of priests, and a holy nation’ (Ex 19:6); and that the prophets had foretold that after the Babylonian Exile, one day God would restore the kingdom to Israel through ‘One greater than David’, the Messiah King (Acts 1:6).  But Daniel had gone further, foreseeing that Messiah would reign not just over Israel but over the whole earth (Dan 7:23-27), and that after Messiah was killed on behalf of others’ sin (Dan 9:26) there would be a general resurrection of the dead, and judgement (Dan 12:1-3).  Jews expected that they would all automatically be part of Messiah’s kingdom, except perhaps for apostates, just by virtue of being ‘Abraham’s seed’.  Jesus immediately disabuses him:

Jesus: You acknowledge Me as ‘come from God’ - from above - but you’re questioning whether I am truly Messiah, come to reign.  You assume that if I am, all Israel, and especially you as a respected Torah expert, will have places of honour in it.  But - and this is really important - no-one can see the Kingdom of God, unless he’s born again from above. (v3) 

Nicodemus, like all devout Jews, has been looking for the Kingdom for years.  But he won’t be able to recognise it when does arrive, unless God opens his eyes.  Faith is essential, to be able to see spiritual realities. ‘Faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the evidence of unseen realities’ (Heb 11:1).   Faith enabled Abraham to see the Lamb of God whom Yahweh would provide, just as he was about to sacrifice his only remaining child. Faith enabled him to continue searching for ‘the city whose maker and builder is God’, rather than abandoning his tent for the security of a house amongst the Canaanites.  Faith enabled Moses to resist Pharoah’s displeasure, and to endure ‘as seeing Him who is invisible’.

When Jesus said, You must be born again', the Greek word used is ‘anothen’ .  This is another of John's double-entendres, for it can mean either ‘again’, or ‘from above’.   Jesus was using both its meanings, but Nicodemus didn't get the metaphor, and took it literally even though Jews sometimes used the phrase ‘born again’ to describe major life changes such as one’s Bar Mitzvah, marriage, a king’s coronation, or when a Gentile became a Jewish proselyte.
Nicodemus: Are you saying you’ve found the elixir of life, that ageing can be reversed?   How on earth could anyone climb back into their mother’s womb? (v4)

Jesus: Listen very carefully, I won’t say this again, and it’s really important that you believe it.  You’re asking how this regeneration happens… Unless you are born of water and spirit, you will never enter the Kingdom of God.   (v5)

John uses words such as ‘water’ with various symbolic meanings in different contexts.  (When he uses such ambiguity, it is as if he wants to make us think carefully.) Theologians have come up with several different interpretations of this verse, some more plausible than others.  Some see it as referring to physical birth (when the mother’s waters break), and spiritual birth; some, to water baptism and Spirit baptism; some, to cleansing through repentance, and power through the Spirit; and some, simply as 'water, meaning the Spirit'.  However both Paul (Eph 5:26) and Peter (1 Pet 1:23) use ‘water’ to refer to the role of the word of God in the new birth.  So we can read this as ‘by the word of God and the Spirit of God’.
Without such a birth, not only will he remain blind to the Kingdom, but he will never enter it.  Entering the Kingdom means coming under Messiah’s rule, submitting to His Lordship and authority - doing obeisance, bowing the knee and ‘kissing the Son’ (Ps 2:12).  At the Name of Jesus, every knee must bow.   We must become like little children, coming obediently whenever Jesus speaks to us (Matt 18:3,4).  All arrogance and intellectual pride must humble itself or be humbled.  Not only must we be born again by the Spirit, we must walk by the Spirit and not rely on the works of the Law, such as being circumcised for example (Gal 3:2-5).

Jesus: Fallen human nature can only beget fallen human nature. Spiritual life requires spiritual birth
This new life is a ‘new creation’ (2 Cor 5:17), de novo, totally unrelated to our old sinful nature.  But our old nature doesn’t just disappear.  Just as Ishmael persecuted Isaac, mocking and belittling him, the flesh will always strive against the spirit.  There is a continual conflict within us (Rom 7:18) and we need to ‘cast out the bondwoman and her son’ (Gal 4:21-31).  
How do we do this? In several ways.  By considering our old nature as dead (Rom 6:11) - we have been crucified with Christ, and yet are alive, Christ living in us.  By feeding our new nature with the word of God, and starving the old (1 Pet 2:1-2) - by refusing to give it any houseroom in our behaviours.  By living by the Spirit, rather than the flesh: developing love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness, faithfulness and self-control (Gal 5:16ff)

Jesus: Don’t be shocked by My insistence on this. It’s essential that you, and all your fellow Jews, be born again from above. (v7)
The ‘you’ in ‘You must be born again’, is plural.  Jesus may be referring to Nicodemus’s ‘We’ (3:2) in which case He is saying, “You and all your colleagues who sent you”.  Or He may be referring to all those Jews who had been impressed by the signs (2:23-24) but didn’t yet have true faith.

There’s a forcefulness in Jesus’s words: it’s a command. We can’t avoid this.

Jesus: The wind blows wherever it wants, and though you can hear it, you can’t tell what drives it or what it is doing. The same is true of the Spirit’s work in regeneration. (V8)
John is using a double-entendre again. The same Greek word (pneuma) can mean breath, wind or spirit.  Guest chambers in Jewish homes were usually built on the roof, and accessed by an external staircase.  So if Jesus was a guest in someone’s home, in Jerusalem (maybe John’s, cf 19:27), he and Nicodemus would have been very aware of the spring winds gusting around them.
Anyone who’s sailed or wind-surfed knows how capricious the wind can be.  Meteorology can nowadays give us a general idea, but it can’t tell us why cyclones form when and where they do, or why a tornado follows the exact path it does, destroying one house whilst leaving its neighbour untouched.  We can hear a gale howling, and observe its effects, but the wind itself is invisible.  We can harness the power of the wind, but we can’t control its direction.

Note that Jesus is still answering Nicodemus’s question, ‘How can these things be?’  His point is, that new birth is not some mechanical, penny-in-the-slot process, guaranteed by saying the sinner’s prayer.  Salvation is entirely of God, utterly under His sovereignty. Why He chooses one and not another, we cannot say.  One thing is for sure, it’s not because of any inherent merit in us who are saved: it’s all of grace.

But while the wind is invisible, its effects are not.  Ocean breakers crash into surf, trees bend and break. Likewise the Spirit will come and break a man, as He did with John Newton. Or He will enable ordinary Galilean fishermen to do astonishing miracles, and to preach with great power.  There should be visible evidence of the Spirit’s work, when we are born again.

Nicodemus: I’m still having difficulty grasping what you’re telling me. (v9)

Though Jesus has demolished Nicodemus’s wrong assumption about entitlement to enter the Kingdom,
and then bypassed his tendency to concrete thinking, his skepticism remains unbroken. Jesus challenges him head-on, with three arguments tailored to Nicodemus’s mindset:
● As an expert in the Law, he should recognise the truth of what Jesus is saying (v10)
● Jesus claims authority on the grounds He is the only eye-witness of heavenly truths (v11-13)
● The story of Moses and the bronze serpent clearly prefigures what Christ is saying (v14-15)

But as well as challenging his skepticism, Jesus is also teaching him more about the New Birth: as well as being of the Spirit, it is also by faith, and through the Cross.

Jesus:  Every Jew regards you as the best bible teacher of your time, so how come you didn’t already know what I’ve told you? (v10)
Jesus would have been thinking of scriptures such as Ezekiel 36:25-27, where God says, “I will sprinkle clean water on you, and you shall be clean: I will cleanse you from all your filthiness and from all your idols. I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit within you.  I will take the heart of stone out of your flesh and give you a heart of flesh. I will put My Spirit within you and cause you to walk in My statutes, and you will keep My judgements and do them."
Or maybe Ezekiel 37:1-14, the valley of the dry bones.  Ezekiel is told to prophesy to the wind (or breath) and then, God says, “I will put My Spirit in you, and you shall live”.

Jesus: Seriously, I’m telling you that We are telling you heavenly truth, and you are rejecting it .  No-one else has ever been an eye-witness in heaven, (v11-13)

Just as a father waiting outside the delivery suite doesn’t see how his child is born, whereas the midwife does, Jesus is saying that in heaven He has watched re-births happening.
He is an eye-witness - something which in Jewish law was highly significant in validating testimony.  In fact, He is the only eye-witness we will ever have.  The Jews believed Moses had been to heaven to receive the Torah, but he’d only been to the top of the mountain. Elijah went to heaven, but never came back again. Spiritualist mediums claim to communicate with the dead, but if indeed they do so, the spirits they commune with are certainly not in heaven!
Who are the ‘We’ that Jesus is referring to?  It cannot be the disciples, because they haven’t ascended to heaven, nor is it likely to be ironic response to Nicodemus’s ‘We’.
It can only really make sense, if Jesus is speaking on behalf of Father, Son and Holy Spirit (1Jn 5:7).  Later, He will go on to explain to His disciples in private that ‘I and the Father are One’.  But at this point, Jesus’s direct assertion of His divinity, and His authority to speak on behalf of the whole Godhead, must have been really startling to Nicodemus. His claim comes with an implicit warning: 'You do not receive our witness' (v11).  Nicodemus’s unbelief amounts to rejecting God.  This is the ultimate sin, the only unforgivable sin (if you will): not to believe in Jesus and His words (3:18)

Jesus: Do you remember the story of Moses nailing a bronze effigy of a snake, onto a pole; and how anyone who looked at it would be healed from fatally-venomous snake bites?   That’s a picture of what will happen to Me, and how I will bring life to the spiritually dead. (Vss 14,15)
In His struggle to bring him from skepticism to faith, Jesus lastly refers Nicodemus back to the scriptures he has loved since birth.  How gentle and loving He is, in handling this man who thought he knew better than God did!
The Israelites had been grumbling against God and His servant Moses; and God’s response was to bring a plague of venomous snakes, such that many of the people died (Num 21:4-9).  They asked Moses to intercede, which he did; but instead of just stopping the snakes, God told him to make an effigy of a snake then nail it up on a high pole, so that anyone could see it wherever they were. Just looking at the effigy was enough to bring instant healing.  But it required faith, to look up and not down! After all, there were plenty more snakes around as well as the one you’d been bitten by.  And it took faith to believe that looking at the pole was more important than applying a tourniquet and sucking out the venom.  
This story, Jesus says, tells Nicodemus what will happen to Jesus (He will be lifted up and nailed to a cross), and how He will save people from death by giving them eternal life (not just preventing them dying) if they will only look to Him, by faith.  The serpent represents not so much Satan, as our old sinful nature.  Christ, who was sinless, would become sin for us - so that in Him, we might become righteous just as He is.
Yet again, John uses a double-entendre. Being ‘lifted up' refers both to Jesus being physically hoisted, but also to His being glorified.  The Cross which was intended to utterly humiliate and shame Him, will in fact bring Him such glory that it will draw people of every nation to Him (12:31,32).  What the enemy intended to kill Him, will instead bring judgement on the organised opposition to God, built into fallen human society - and the ruler of this world will be cast out.

Here we have

Three great truths about the Cross:

1. It is the means of eternal life, and salvation from sin, through substitutionary atonement
2. It is the place where the Devil, the Prince of this world, was defeated
3. It is a worldwide magnet, drawing people from every nation to Christ

At this point (v16), most commentators suggest that the remainder of the ‘discourse’ represents John’s retrospective reflection  on the conversation, rather than further dialogue between Jesus and Nicodemus.  It is written in the past tense, implying a post-Calvary viewpoint.  Many regard John 3:16 as the ultimate crystallisation of the gospel: but as we shall see, it needs to be taken in the wider context of verses 14-21.

The heart of the gospel

God so loved the world, that He gave His only-begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him, should not perish but have everlasting life” (3:16)

The Cross, the means of eternal life, springs from the agape love of God. Yes, we are saved from His wrath - but saved by His love. It is quite wrong to see Jesus and God as if they were the traditional movie duo of ‘Good guy - Bad guy’. God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself. His holiness cannot leave sin unpunished, however, for ‘the wages of sin is death’. But as He says way back in Leviticus, “The life of the flesh is in the blood; and I have given it to you upon the altar to make atonement for your souls” (Lev 17:11).

Does this verse say that all will be saved?

Yes, it says God loves the world - the sum total of fallen humankind. Not just Jews but all nations too - this is the breadth of His love. Salvation is available to all. God shows the incredible length His love went to for us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us (Rom 5:6-8). He shows the depth of His love in that He gave His only child, His continuously-being-fathered Son, His beloved Son to whom He had always been so utterly close. And its height is shown at Calvary, as Jesus is lifted up naked, flayed alive, crowned with thorns, his beautiful feet and hands nailed to the Cross.

But no, only those who believe in Christ are given authority to become children of God (1:12), and given the gift of eternal (Zoe) life.

What does it mean, to believe in Jesus?

Greek has two separate words for ‘in’: ‘en’, meaning position, and ‘eis’, meaning direction of movement. (We might say someone ‘moved in’, in which case the Greek would use ‘eis’: but if we said they ‘lived in’, Greek would use ‘en’). In this case, the word is ‘eis’: Zoe life is only given to those who believe into Jesus. Those who don’t believe, or don’t believe in a way that produces movement and change in them, will perish, or be destroyed by the wrath of God. But God doesn’t want anyone to perish: though He gave Jesus authority to judge, and one day Christ will judge all men, He sent His Son into the world not to judge, but to save.

Our response to Christ’s incarnation settles our future fate. For how we respond to His incarnation, and whether we believe that ‘Jesus Christ is come in the flesh’, determines whether we are condemned or forgiven on Judgement Day.  John sees belief in Christ's divinity as more central than belief in Him being our atonement - for without the former, the Cross could not be effective; Jesus could not be 'the Lamb of God' for us.

Because Jesus is the Light of the world, showing up our sins and sinfulness, most will choose to avoid coming into His Presence, because our deeds are evil (v19,20) and we don’t want to be exposed. ‘God is Light, and in Him is no darkness at all’: He cannot and will not condone sin of any kind.

But some will ‘do truth’ (v21)… This doesn’t mean that we completely overcome our sinful nature, but rather, that we ‘walk in the light’, being honest about our sins and confessing them to God.

• We may claim to know God whilst continuing to sin, but if so we are lying (1Jn 1:6).

• We may claim sinlessness, but if so, the only person we deceive is ourselves (1Jn 1:8).

• If we say we haven’t sinned, when God says we have, we make Him out to be a liar (1Jn 1:10)

Walking in the light means we don’t have to hide from God or our fellow believers any more: as we confess our sins, the blood of Jesus God’s Son continuously brings forgiveness for them, and cleansing from all their resulting defilement. If we live in this way, we will be happy to give God all the credit. We’ll acknowledge that anything and everything good that we have done, has been solely down to God working in us (v21).