1/27: An Evening with Nicodemus (Part 2)
The Gospel of John • Sermon • Submitted
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Scripture Reading
Scripture Reading
1 There was a man from the Pharisees named Nicodemus, a ruler of the Jews. 2 This man came to Him at night and said, “Rabbi, we know that You have come from God as a teacher, for no one could perform these signs You do unless God were with him.”
3 Jesus replied, “I assure you: Unless someone is born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.”
4 “But how can anyone be born when he is old?” Nicodemus asked Him. “Can he enter his mother’s womb a second time and be born?”
5 Jesus answered, “I assure you: Unless someone is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God. 6 Whatever is born of the flesh is flesh, and whatever is born of the Spirit is spirit. 7 Do not be amazed that I told you that you must be born again. 8 The wind blows where it pleases, and you hear its sound, but you don’t know where it comes from or where it is going. So it is with everyone born of the Spirit.”
9 “How can these things be?” asked Nicodemus.
10 “Are you a teacher of Israel and don’t know these things?” Jesus replied. 11 “I assure you: We speak what We know and We testify to what We have seen, but you do not accept Our testimony. 12 If I have told you about things that happen on earth and you don’t believe, how will you believe if I tell you about things of heaven? 13 No one has ascended into heaven except the One who descended from heaven —the Son of Man. 14 Just as Moses lifted up the snake in the wilderness, so the Son of Man must be lifted up, 15 so that everyone who believes in Him will have eternal life.
16 “For God loved the world in this way: He gave His One and Only Son, so that everyone who believes in Him will not perish but have eternal life. 17 For God did not send His Son into the world that He might condemn the world, but that the world might be saved through Him. 18 Anyone who believes in Him is not condemned, but anyone who does not believe is already condemned, because he has not believed in the name of the One and Only Son of God.
19 “This, then, is the judgment: The light has come into the world, and people loved darkness rather than the light because their deeds were evil. 20 For everyone who practices wicked things hates the light and avoids it, so that his deeds may not be exposed. 21 But anyone who lives by the truth comes to the light, so that his works may be shown to be accomplished by God.”
Intro
Intro
I don’t know how many of you got and watch plays or broadway shows, but one thing that you will see is the curtain will drop or slide and that is an indication to you that you are about to enter into a new scene in order to continue the story. The story has not changed, but the scene is different. Maybe you are interacting with new characters or you are following along with the plot of one of the side stories, that will inevitably weave itself back into the main story.
What we read here between Jesus and Nicodemus is not a scene change. We are still in the same place. The conversation is the same as well, however it goes a bit deeper. It focuses our attention on what really is the key for the conversation.
You will remember in John 20:30-31, the purpose of John’s Gospel.
30 Jesus performed many other signs in the presence of His disciples that are not written in this book. 31 But these are written so that you may believe Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and by believing you may have life in His name.
This passage has at its core this basic objective. How salvation can be got.
Body
Body
And so we continue where we left off last time with Jesus declaring the perplexing statement that a person must be born again. Not a physical rebirth, but a spiritual one. Then Jesus cuts to the point on how it is that a person can be saved. And it focuses itself on vs 14-18.
14 Just as Moses lifted up the snake in the wilderness, so the Son of Man must be lifted up, 15 so that everyone who believes in Him will have eternal life.
16 “For God loved the world in this way: He gave His One and Only Son, so that everyone who believes in Him will not perish but have eternal life. 17 For God did not send His Son into the world that He might condemn the world, but that the world might be saved through Him. 18 Anyone who believes in Him is not condemned, but anyone who does not believe is already condemned, because he has not believed in the name of the One and Only Son of God.
In this passage we read about our spiritual condition, the options that we have, and the destinies of each, and the transformation of the believer.
Spiritual Condition (John 3:14-15)
Jesus begins by alluding to a specific event from the Old Testament.
4 Then they set out from Mount Hor by way of the Red Sea to bypass the land of Edom, but the people became impatient because of the journey. 5 The people spoke against God and Moses: “Why have you led us up from Egypt to die in the wilderness? There is no bread or water, and we detest this wretched food!” 6 Then the Lord sent poisonous snakes among the people, and they bit them so that many Israelites died.
7 The people then came to Moses and said, “We have sinned by speaking against the Lord and against you. Intercede with the Lord so that He will take the snakes away from us.” And Moses interceded for the people.
8 Then the Lord said to Moses, “Make a snake image and mount it on a pole. When anyone who is bitten looks at it, he will recover.”
We are all spiritually destitute. We, like the Israelites, have a lack of faith and sin problem. Which leads us to point two...
Options and Destinies (John 3:16)
This is the most popular verse in all the Bible on the love of God. And there is a lot of abuse on this verse. Preachers can focus too heavily on one side and say that you are all damned and describe all of the torment and suffering in Hell. They take the, let’s scare them into the kingdom approach. Others take the love approach. God loves you so much, please come to him. He is infatuated by you and cannot live without you and needs you. And so, don’t you want love. That’s the flattery view. You either get puffed up with pride or exalt yourself too highly or you can feel so wretched or fearful and just be doing it for yourself to escape Hell. I am not going to take either of those approaches. I want us to consider how eternally relevant and important this passage is. How this passage deals with eternal life and eternal death and how this passage speaks against all the other false religions in the world. So, let’s begin...
For God- There is only one God. This is singular. This affirms monotheism. But this also puts to silence those who want to say that there is no God at all.
loved- He is a personal God. Deists claim that God created all things, but then just sat back. God is capable of loving. It is a special sort of love. A love that is extended towards those who love the Son.
21 The one who has My commands and keeps them is the one who loves Me. And the one who loves Me will be loved by My Father. I also will love him and will reveal Myself to him.”
the world- This is a specific love. It is not general. The topic of the conversation has been on being born again. And this is really amazing here. God’s love is not exclusively only for the Jews. This would have been outrageous for the Jews. They thought that God only loved them. We see in Ex 3 and Deut 7 how God chose the people of Israel but here we read of how His love extends beyond just the Israelites. God’s love is extended not just spatially, but temporally, temporally- across time. He has a love for the elect ones from all over the world.
He gave- Some would say again that God has no ability or power to interact with the world. He cannot give anything. But this flies right in the face of this false belief. God can and does give. And the greatest gift that He has ever given to us is....
His One and Only Son- There is an exclusivity here. He is not being redundant for redundancy sake. There is only one Son of God. There is only one second person of the Trinity. In some translations you will also read “only begotten”. The greek monogenes does not refer to chronology or to him being born. But to a uniqueness in kind. We do become adopted sons and daughters of God, but not in the same sense of Jesus. An example we can see of this in Scriptures can be found in
17 By faith Abraham, when he was tested, offered up Isaac, and he who had received the promises was in the act of offering up his only son,
Isaac was not the only son of Abraham. Not even the first son. It asserts the uniqueness of Jesus. It does not in any way imply that Jesus was at any time not God. John starts off his book by making that extremely clear.
1 In the beginning was the Word,
and the Word was with God,
and the Word was God.
How do we know this is talking about Jesus?
14 The Word became flesh
and took up residence among us.
We observed His glory,
the glory as the One and Only Son from the Father,
full of grace and truth.
The author Hebrews continue to express the quality of “Godness” that Jesus has.
3 The Son is the radiance of God’s glory and the exact expression of His nature, sustaining all things by His powerful word. After making purification for sins, He sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on high.
That is the author of Hebrews is saying that Jesus is God. The exact nature and essence as God because he is God.
The Mormons, would like us to believe that all are sons of God. In fact, Satan himself was just another son of God, a brother of Jesus. But here we read that there is only one. What is the way we are to look at ourselves as sons?
4 When the time came to completion, God sent His Son, born of a woman, born under the law, 5 to redeem those under the law, so that we might receive adoption as sons. 6 And because you are sons, God has sent the Spirit of His Son into our hearts, crying, “Abba, Father!” 7 So you are no longer a slave but a son, and if a son, then an heir through God.
everyone who believes- Let’s pause again here. This can be a tricky part of the passage, because many will assert that this verse is clear evidence that everyone can be saved and that Jesus died for the sins of the world and is just sitting in Heaven waiting and hoping for someone to believe. But if you read this text clearly, it never asserts who will or will not believe. It says, to those who do believe in Jesus, they will be saved. Those who do not, they will perish.
This is a cause and effect statement. Let me give you an example, if I run at a 1 min mile pace, I will finish a 5 mile run in 5 minutes. That is simple math. It is logical and it makes sense. Everyone can understand that. Now, having said that, does that mean I automatically can run at a 1 min mile pace? No way! It is just a logical statement. The same is true here in John 3:16. It tells us a fact. Everyone who believes will have eternal life and everyone who does not believe will perish, context being eternity in Hell.
But notice, nowhere does it say that everyone is capable of believing. We cannot insert into this text that everyone can believe. And that may be hard to hear, because if you were like me, we always heard that we can do it. We can believe, we just need to make a choice.
65 He said, “This is why I told you that no one can come to Me unless it is granted to him by the Father.”
18 I’m not speaking about all of you; I know those I have chosen. But the Scripture must be fulfilled: The one who eats My bread has raised his heel against Me.
Throughout the Scripture, we read that it is an act of grace and mercy from God which allows us to have a faith that is given to us by God. Why is it so gracious and merciful? Simply put, it is for those who believe. We do not have to work, it is not for those who have more good than bad, not those who give the most money, it is not even those who have memorized the most Scripture. It is those who believe!
in Him- Universalists get into a lot of trouble here. They say in the end everyone will make it into Heaven. It does not matter at all what it is that you believe in because in the end “Love Wins”. But the truth is, you must have faith and it is a faith that is directed in a direction. It is not blind faith, it is faith in Jesus. You must believe in Him. And this is specific, you must believe in Him.
If one day I were to meet a stranger and he said to me “Oh I know your wife. She is a tall, blonde hair, blue eyed woman who loves doing crossfit, loves cats, and loves to play cricket.” I would quickly say, nope, you do not know my wife. Even if he added “but she is half vietnamese, quarter french, quarter chinese, lives with you and married you on June 13, 2016” I still would not believe him. Why? Because even though he got a lot of things right, he also has a lot of things wrong. In the same way, the Mormons, JW, Muslims, gnostics, christian scientists, etc all describe Jesus and some of them get more details correct than not. But the fact is, they do believe in the right Jesus.
“In Him”- tells us that we must believe in Him and not in someone like him.
will not perish- There is a consequence. For the atheists and agnostics who deny or are skeptical of an afterlife, this is definitive. You will either perish or you will not. There are only two options here. And for the annihilationist’s who want to say that you will be completely destroyed and cease to exist, that is not what this is referring too. Nowhere in Scripture is it taught that that would happen neither.
10 The Devil who deceived them was thrown into the lake of fire and sulfur where the beast and the false prophet are, and they will be tormented day and night forever and ever.
But that’s not Jesus..ok
46 “And they will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life.”
When you deny hell, you essentially deny moral responsibility. Why live righteously? To be with God? Nah, it is ok to just have a bunch of temporary fun in this life because there is nothing afterwards. This is a very low view of sin and a low view of its consequences which is eternally impactful. There will be a day of judgment and for those who believe, they will have eternal life and those who do not, they will have stored up eternal punishment.
And so based on this statement, it is clearly implied that we are all perishing.
why are we perishing and why do we need saving?
19 “This, then, is the judgment: The light has come into the world, and people loved darkness rather than the light because their deeds were evil. 20 For everyone who practices wicked things hates the light and avoids it, so that his deeds may not be exposed. 21 But anyone who lives by the truth comes to the light, so that his works may be shown to be accomplished by God.”
And was this what God wanted? Does God want everyone to perish? No!
4 who wants everyone to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth.
9 The Lord does not delay His promise, as some understand delay, but is patient with you, not wanting any to perish but all to come to repentance.
In fact, that is what John 3:16 is all about. It is not so that we will perish. And it is restated in the verse that follows...
17 For God did not send His Son into the world that He might condemn the world, but that the world might be saved through Him. 18 Anyone who believes in Him is not condemned, but anyone who does not believe is already condemned, because he has not believed in the name of the One and Only Son of God.
A lack of belief means a person is condemned. And that condemnation because of their lack of belief results in bearing the wrath of God.
36 The one who believes in the Son has eternal life, but the one who refuses to believe in the Son will not see life; instead, the wrath of God remains on him.
What does the wrath of God mean?
10 he will also drink the wine of God’s wrath, which is mixed full strength in the cup of His anger. He will be tormented with fire and sulfur in the sight of the holy angels and in the sight of the Lamb, 11 and the smoke of their torment will go up forever and ever. There is no rest day or night for those who worship the beast and his image, or anyone who receives the mark of his name.
but have everlasting life- for the pantheist who claim we go on living as the universe or are reincarnated as another being for a second go or temporary life. God says no. But really the most marvelous part of this verse and the entire conversation between Jesus and Nicodemus is this.
John Piper “The love of God, at the cost of the Son, rescues us from the wrath of God.”
God saves us from God and grants to us eternal life! That is amazing! These last few words are glorious words! They contrast the words of what we read before “perish”. We have life. Instead of torment, we have peace...
4 He will wipe away every tear from their eyes.
Death will no longer exist;
grief, crying, and pain will exist no longer,
because the previous things have passed away.
Instead of the wrath of God, we have peace with God...
1 Therefore, since we have been declared righteous by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.
3 We too all previously lived among them in our fleshly desires, carrying out the inclinations of our flesh and thoughts, and we were by nature children under wrath as the others were also. 4 But God, who is rich in mercy, because of His great love that He had for us, 5 made us alive with the Messiah even though we were dead in trespasses. You are saved by grace!
Instead of eternal perishing and torment and wrath, we have eternal life...
16 “For God loved the world in this way: He gave His One and Only Son, so that everyone who believes in Him will not perish but have eternal life.
That is good news!!
Conclusion
Conclusion
Transformation of the believer (John 3:21)
And so in this verse, we read of our great need. But also our great solution. What does that mean for us? Well, while dead in our sins, we were under the wrath of God and that is terribly bad news. But God changes us. When we are born again, we are made new. Completely transformed and brought to walk into life!
21 But anyone who lives by the truth comes to the light, so that his works may be shown to be accomplished by God.”
Do our lives line up with this? That we have come to live by the truth. So much so that you are walking portraits to the world of God’s marvelous light (1 Peter 2:9). If so, walk in the light. But if you are sitting here this morning and you know that you are not born again. I am going to pray in a little bit and i invite you to consider what we have just read. I want to give you a moment to consider these things. Am I, in this moment, under wrath, or do I have peace with God? Ultimately, I want us all to really meditate on this question, am i born again?
Let’s Pray.