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May 21, 2006
God Loves the World
Numbers 21: 4-9 / John 3: 1-16
May 21st, 2006
This morning very early I went out the front door of our home and looked up at the clear, star-filled sky. And again it struck me how odd and remarkable a thing it is to preach, to speak on behalf of Almighty God, the Creator of this vast sky with all its stars, to people like myself.
I’ve been thinking about the two passages before us this morning over the past week—two passages that come to us by the will of this God who created that great star-filled sky. Written a long time ago they still speak to you and me. They are timeless, given by the eternal God.
The first of these Scriptures tells of a disastrous span of time late in Israel’s sojourn in the wilderness. God had just delivered them from Canaanite enemies, but led them around the land of Edom, instead of conquering Edom too, perhaps because the Edomites were descendants of Esau—brother of their patriarch Jacob.
The people became impatient with this detour. They spoke against God and against Moses. They loathed the worthless food God was giving them. They thought it worthless. God did not. They loathed Moses for not supplying them better—when he apparently had the ability to make God give them what they wanted—or at least better than this.
So God sent venomous snakes that bit many of them. They crawled about everywhere. It was a far worse case of what happens in Arizona these days as housing developments are built out into the desert, the natural home of rattlesnakes.
The people couldn’t escape them. Avert your eyes one minute from looking down at the ground and you’ll be bitten. The people recognized the connection between this onslaught of snakes and their complaining. They begged Moses to pray to the Lord to take the plague of poisonous snakes away. So Moses prayed, but instead of simply taking away the snakes, as He conquered the lethal Canaanites, God told Moses to make a fiery serpent and set it up on a pole. Moses couldn’t make a snake so he made a bronze serpent that looked like these deadly snakes and set it up on a pole, and everyone who had been bitten would live if he looked up at that snake.
That bronze serpent had an afterlife in Israel. Understandably it was preserved as a relic of great significance because it granted a new lease on life to people who thought they were as good as dead. “Only look up and you will live,” was a word that desperate people were glad to follow. But a problem developed when people forgot that bronze snake was only useful because God was teaching His people how completely dependent they were on Him for life. It was not the snake but God. Ironically, it was a snake in the Garden of Eden that was the cause of death to Adam and Eve. And it was a snake God used to bring life to His sin-bitten people. I sometimes think we miss God’s sense of humor.
Israel didn’t catch the humor. They took that snake very seriously for far too long. It was preserved and found its way into the Temple in Jerusalem as an object of worship. But good King Hezekiah took it down and broke it in pieces “because he trusted in the Lord, the God of Israel.”
But we just read of this snake again as Jesus brought it up in speaking to Nicodemas, a Pharisee, a man learned in the law of God. Jesus uses that snake as a symbol of Himself, to whom all can look to find eternal life. Those who looked up at the bronze snake in the wilderness would all die eventually. But those who look up to Jesus find eternal life.
But I’m getting ahead of the story. Seldom do we read of conversations Jesus had with particular people. Here we read of a friendly conversation with Nicodemas, a Pharisee, a ruler among the Jewish people, which means, a member of the Sanhedrin. I wish we might read this together in the Greek because John tells us of this conversation so suggestively. Nicodemas came at night—maybe in order not to be seen by others, or maybe because he’d been studying the law late into the night and realized he’d come to the end of his possibilities. So he came to Jesus, finally, after having labored in his studies into the night.
Nicodemas is speaking for more than himself. “Rabbi, we know you have come from God, a teacher.” How did those for whom he spoke know this? Because nobody could do the signs Jesus did if he were not from God.
Someone has proposed that John is here showing us not just a conversation between Jesus and Nicodemas, but more than this, a conversation between the Church and the synagogue. That is, between God’s chosen forerunner and God’s chosen fulfillment of His plan from of old. Nicodemas comes to Jesus in a friendly manner to learn the secret of life after studying late into the night. We don’t know what passage of Scripture he had been studying. Might it have been the passage from Numbers we read together a few moments ago?
It seems that Jesus changes the subject. Nicodemas says good things about Jesus. He recognizes that Jesus could not do the signs which he had heard about unless God was with him. Jesus leaps from this to speak of the Kingdom of God. “Unless someone is born from above he is not able to see the kingdom of God.” Heaven is up. The Kingdom of God is where His will is done. Jesus would later teach His disciples to pray, “Thy Kingdom come on earth as it is in heaven.” Nicodemas recognized that Jesus is doing here on earth something only God can do. He must have been puzzled at Jesus’ reply.
The word Jesus spoke in replying to Nicodemas can have two meanings. The Greek words gennethe anothen can mean either “born from above,” which suggests where heaven is, or it can mean “born again.” Nicodemas took it the second way, maybe because he was thinking of how God gave a second lease on life to those who looked up at the bronze serpent that Moses lifted up in the wilderness.
He pressed the question taking “born again” very literally. “How can an old person enter his mother’s womb and be born again?” Jesus replied still more cryptically: “Truly, truly I say to you, unless someone is born of water and spirit he is not able to enter the Kingdom of God.” Nicodemas last word is a question: “How can these things be?” Jesus seems to scold him for not being able to understand.
But we too labor to understand. It seems Jesus expected Nicodemas to understand what he meant when he said, “Unless someone is born of water and spirit he is not able to enter the Kingdom of God.” What did Jesus mean, “Born of water and spirit?”
Perhaps “born of water” referred to the new thing John the Baptist introduced, where baptism was a sign of repentance and cleansing from sin. But some who have thought about this have proposed that Jesus may have been speaking of something more “earthly” than this. God’s first act of creation was to separate water from earth. Take away water and what are we? We’re a tiny little bit of minerals that can fit in the palm of your hand. We are born with water as our most constituent part.
Not only that, but the first clue that a child is about to be born is when “the water breaks.” Maybe this was the “earthly thing” which Jesus expected Nicodemas to understand. Maybe John’s baptism; maybe the basic element of all living things as water; maybe being born physically out of the water in our mother’s womb.
Being born of spirit suggests the first thing that happens once we are born—in an earthly sense. When you were born the first thing you had to do was breathe. The word for wind and spirit is the same in several ancient languages—Greek and Hebrew among them. Jesus expected Nicodemas to understand this earthly description about birth. This because the heavenly sense follows from the earthly sense.
The clue to the heavenly sense Jesus was teaching He found in the story of the bronze serpent. Because here the new lease on life not only depended on an act of God, but also on the will of the person who wanted to live. No baby that is born chooses to exist. When you and I were born it was altogether as a result of the love of our parents.
But if we are to be born again, born from above, we must look at the One signified by the bronze serpent that was lifted up on a pole in the wilderness. That act was so small, so helpless, but it had to happen. A person who was bitten by a snake might know all about that bronze snake on a pole and say humbug!, refusing to look. And that person died. But the one who swallowed his pride and looked at the snake got a new lease on life.
That look is the earthly symbol of the faith by which we look to Jesus to get eternal life. The faith by which we find the “new birth,” that gets for us eternal life, the life of God, is as helpless as a look up at the bronze serpent in the wilderness.
But we should not rest on that realization because if we have been born again it means we have entered into a new kind of life. It is very obvious that this new life does not just happen of its own. The Apostle Paul never uses the term, “Born again,” but he does tell us that if anyone is “in Christ that person is a new creation. The old has passed, the new has come.” Or as the KJV puts it, “All things have become new.”
He goes on to tell us how this new becoming happens. In a passage I often read at the funeral of a beloved Christian brother or sister we remember that Paul tells us, “Our inner nature is being renewed every day . . . we walk by faith and not by sight.” In the famed Romans 12 Paul beseeches us “by the mercies of God that you present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable to God.” He is writing about the same thing that Jesus had in mind in speaking of being “born again.” The impulse has a beginning point, as when a baby is begun when a part from the mother and a part from the father come together. Until the time of birth the baby is a helpless participant in a process. But once born, the baby that thrives must have a will to live.
There are babies born who do not thrive because they lack that inner impulse. They may simply die because of a lack of a will to live that is natural to most babies that are born. This earthly fact has a heavenly pertinence.
I think of how Billy Graham has made that term, “born again” to echo throughout the world. How often he has invited people to come down the aisles of great stadiums to receive Christ and be born again to “Just as I Am, without One Plea”. Hundreds of thousands of people have left their seats and streamed to the front before that humble man of God. And they trust that the emotions that moved them to leave their seats were at the prompting of the Spirit of God, by which they were born again. And thank God, often this has been the case.
But as I look at the state of Christian humanity I wonder if somehow we have treated that term “born again” somewhat the way ancient Israel treated the bronze serpent Moses set on a pole in the wilderness. We look at the term itself, and have made it an icon.
I included the beloved John 3: 16 in our reading this morning, when ordinarily the section ends with verse 15. I included John 3: 16 because in it we read of the love of God for the world, so great that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have eternal life.”
This verse seems to follow Jesus’ conversation with Nicodemas. Now John is writing. It is not Jesus speaking to Nicodemas. John is writing for the benefit of all of us who have eavesdropped on the conversation Jesus had with Nicodemas. God told Moses to set the bronze serpent on a pole in the wilderness because, despite their incessant complaining, God still loved Israel. And God let His Son be hung up on a cross outside Jerusalem so that we could look up at Him and live because God not only loved Israel, but also the whole world.
But which truth should we emphasize most? The directive to be “born again,” or the information that God loves the world so much that He gave His Son?
My concern is this. If we are born again it is something that God alone can do; we cannot make it happen any more than a baby can bring about its own birth. We often hear the term, “Born again Christian” a term that often sounds like an in-group claim. A “born again Christian” is my kind of Christian. A born again Christian thinks as I do. And so there is the danger of looking to a humanly devised kind of system with an element of pride that we have the right goods.
And in stressing the love of God for the world there is the temptation to forget that the picture Jesus would have us see in the story about Israel and the bronze snake on a pole means that we must not only think of it as a symbol of God’s love for the world, but also must look at it to live.
I am concerned that it is possible to be a part of a system in which we know the Bible stories, and can quote John 3: 7 about being born again, and 3: 16 about God’s love for the world, while continuing to live as though we have no demand put on us in having come to Jesus by faith. Without the love of God we are hopeless. Without the possibility of God taking these broken lives of ours and fashioning a new creation from them, we have no hope. But once we have thankfully believed God’s love, and have looked up to the Son of God hanging on the cross—but now risen again, God expects us to “walk in newness of life.”
We are so made that we don’t much like it when others point out to us where we fail to walk in this newness of life. We respond by saying, “Mind your own business” to whomever proposes to help us reform our ways. But if you and I have put ourselves at the foot of the cross and looked up at the “dying form of One who suffered there for me,” and then looked at ourselves, perhaps we can find that new path of life. Did Jesus die so I would continue behaving like this—in a way which when I see it in others I despise it? Did Jesus give me only a new label on the old life? When the question forms inside your own heart, you are more apt to answer it truthfully.
And so I ask you this morning to eavesdrop again on Jesus’ conversation with Nicodemas. Take a lesson from earthly things, about the miracle of birth and the total dependence of the child on powers beyond itself. But once born, that child must choose the path it will walk in life. And you and I, if we have looked up at Jesus by faith, are promised a new birth, newness of life. But it is then our task to walk in newness of life. Are you walking the old way with a Christian label? Or are you walking in newness of life?
I wish we would all think often of John 3: 16 and be amazed at God’s love, given at such cost. And then let us live gratefully—certainly an uncommon instinct in this world where we are taught to cling to ourselves as the center of everything important. Live gratefully to God, and you will be living out this new life, this “born again” thing of which Jesus spoke not only to Nicodemas, but to you and me.
Let us pray: O Lord God, thank you for the wonders of this earthly life. But thank you still more for the wonders of your love that offers us the hope of eternal life, and a new birth, a new life in Jesus Christ. Grant us this life, and the wisdom to walk in it. In Jesus’ name. Amen.
Pastor Stuart D. Robertson
Faith Presbyterian Church
West Lafayette, IN 47906
Posted by faithpres at May 21, 2006 09:30 AM