READ IT AGAIN
By Professor E M Blaiklock D.Litt
XXVIII.
THE NEW BIRTH.
John 3.
Should Nicodemus have been puzzled?
No! Not as "the teacher of the Jews." (It is the definite article in the Greek.) The question to which he was politely working was the eternal one,
"How can we be saved?"
“You must be born again."
The words played upon a knowledge of the Old Testament, which was probably word-perfect.
Nicodemus' thoughts flashed back to Ezekiel and his vision of a valley strewn with the bleached bones of men. It was a message of hope for exiled Jews in Babylon, for as the wind swept down at the prophet's prayer and stirred among the heaps of death, flesh and life came to their desolation. And in the previous chapter was there not a word of God about a new heart?
Ezekiel 36:26, 27
A new heart also will I give you, and a new spirit will I put within you: and I will take away the stony heart out of your flesh, and I will give you an heart of flesh.
And I will put my spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statutes, and ye shall keep my judgments, and do them.
As if in illustration the night wind sighed round the house at Bethany.
John 3:8
The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth: so is every one that is born of the Spirit.
"God must break into Nicodemus’ human life if he is to be saved."
"But how can these things be?" Will God impose His righteousness on unwilling man? The Lord began again to play on memory. He spoke of Moses and the serpent uplifted. They lived who looked in faith. So he came to the immortal sixteenth verse. The lesson was complete. Man is saved when born again by faith in a sacrifice for sin. And the whole truth was hidden in the Old Testament. "The teacher of the Jews" should not have been puzzled.