“Now there was a man of the Pharisees named Nicodemus. . . . He came to Jesus at night” (John 3:1, 2).
e’ve made a big deal of the fact that Nicodemus preferred to be an undercover seeker and, therefore, came at night. The bigger deal was that he came at all. And the really, really big deal comes only at the end of the story.
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 he didn’t come with contempt, a closed mind, or trick questions. His assertion, “You are a teacher who has come from God” (John 3:2), didn’t go the distance in accounting for who Jesus was, but at least it was inclusive and gracious.
That being the case, Jesus’ reply was a little surprising, sounding as if at cross-purposes with His visitor’s gracious sentiments. “No one can see the kingdom of God unless he is born again,” He said (verse 3).
The statement floored Nicodemus and made him bluster. It was a “let’s cut to the chase” approach. Jesus was replying to something Nicodemus hadn’t said. Sensing that Nicodemus was overly secure in all the wrong assumptions, Jesus defined the bottom line of what Nicodemus needed to know.
The Initial Shock
Jews were accustomed to requiring a “new birth” of Gentile converts. But asking for a new birth from a Jew—and a Jew of Nicodemus’s standing at that—struck at the root of both the Jewish leader’s theology and his worldview. His place in God’s kingdom had been assured—what with his race, his circumcision, his energetic lawkeeping, and his head-honcho curriculum vitae (CV).
The sheer inappropriateness of Nicodemus’s response demonstrates how uncomfortable he was. “How can a man be born when he is old? . . . Surely he cannot enter a second time into his mother’s womb to be born!” (verse 4).
But Jesus did not retreat. 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! I’m the connection around here! No one in Jerusalem has a CV better than mine.” But, instead, he swallowed hard, blinked, then said, “How can this be?” (verse 9). The lack of hostility in Nicodemus’s response speaks volumes about him.
Jesus’ response (literally translated) “Are you the teacher of Israel and do not understand these things?” (verse 10, NASB)* paid tribute to the scholarly status of Nicodemus. Jesus called him the teacher, not merely a teacher. He was, in our terms, the leading Old Testament authority at the time. And Jesus was a little exasperated that even “the teacher of Israel” did not understand such a foundational concept as new birth.
How About Us?
We can define “grace,” “forgiveness,” and “repentance.” And 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 the passage’s Old Testament roots.
As regards parallel passages, Matthew 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.
And in regard to key words, the term “again” also means “from above” (implying “from God”). That helps even more, indicating the origin of the experience. It shows that regeneration is the work of the Holy Spirit (John 3:6-8).2
But we get the most help in understanding the new birth from the Old Testament. 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!
Graphic and Powerful
In Ezekiel Nicodemus could have found a wonderful picture of new birth. Chapter 36:25-27 is 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, which introduces the idea of a new heart—tender and responsive to God, cleansing grace is joined by regenerating grace. Verse 27 begins: “And I will put my Spirit in you” and shows that 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 new birth in Ezekiel. Chapter 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?” Verse 10 says: “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 (91 meters) or so, the prophet finds himself knee deep in fast-flowing water. In another hundred yards due east he is in waist deep. Soon he has to swim for it. Eventually the torrent of water pours like Niagara Falls down into the Dead Sea, bringing the latter to life. 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.
When Nicodemus left the lodgings of Jesus that night, he knew he had a lot of studying to do.
The next Jesus-Nicodemus encounter took place at the Feast of the Tabernacles. Jesus had caused a stir with the pronouncement: “If anyone is thirsty, let him come to me and drink” (John 7:37).
A hasty meeting of the Sanhedrin issued a warrant for Jesus’ arrest. But the soldiers dispatched to bring Him in returned without a prisoner, reporting: “No one ever spoke the way this man does” (verse 46). The Pharisees mocked them: “Has any of the rulers or of the Pharisees believed in him? No! But this mob that knows nothing of the law—there is a curse on them” (verses 48, 49).
Though he stopped well short of acknowledging Jesus as Messiah before the 70-strong body, Nicodemus stood up as a champion for justice that day, saying just enough for them to ask him, sarcastically: “Are you from Galilee, too?” (verse 52).
Crunch Time
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 afraid of the probable reaction of the Jerusalem establishment (see John 12:42, 43).
But those “leaders of the Jews” would choose the most unlikely time to break cover. Above them Jesus slumped dead from the cross. Soldiers pierced His side. And immediately below the cross stood five women and John, most of the regular disciples of Christ being holed up in bolted rooms “for fear of the Jews” (see John 20:19).
But, a little apart, stood Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus.
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. Leaving Golgotha, they returned to the city and sought an interview with Pilate, asking for and receiving permission to remove the body of Jesus. “Nicodemus brought a mixture of myrrh and aloes, about seventy-five pounds.” They took the body of Jesus and gave it a burial fit for a king (John 19:38-42).3
At the foot of the cross so many things had fallen into place for Nicodemus. Among other things, he perhaps remembered the words of Jesus as they met in that 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 story was to remind him of the venomous desert snakes that imperiled ancient Israel, and of the brass snake hoisted by Moses, to which the Israelites were to look and live (see Num. 21:5-9).
The conversation between Nicodemus and Jesus was almost certainly in Aramaic. In Aramaic the expression “lifted up” in connection with the Son of Man carried the idea both of exaltation and crucifixion. Most important, Nicodemus realized that he owed to the Son of Man everything he was, and everything he could ever hope to be.
In short, he reached out and laid hold of grace, receiving the cleansing from the disfiguring dirt of sin and a new heart responsive to the promptings of God. And the Holy Spirit, the agent of regeneration, came to dwell in him. As for Nicodemus, new birth begins at the foot of the cross when we reach out and grasp God’s grace.
Big deal? Yes! The biggest deal—for all time and for 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 Gospel of John, vol. 1, The Daily Study Bible Series (Edinburgh: Saint Andrew Press, 1955), p. 123.
2Bruce Milne, The Message of John (Leicester, U.K.: Inter-Varsity Press, 1993), pp. 78, 79.
3Milne, pp. 287, 288; C. G. Kruse, Tyndale New Testament Commentaries, John (Leicester, U.K.: Inter-Varsity Press, 2003), pp. 273, 274.
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David Marshall is editor of Stanborough Press in Grantham, Lincolnshire, England. This article was published February 25, 2010.
