WATER AND SPIRIT
“Jesus answered, Verily, verily, I say unto
thee, Except a man be born of water and of
the Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God.” John 3:5
Jesus was speaking to the
teacher of Israel who himself was teaching the Jewish nation concerning the
appearance of the Kingdom of God and the necessary requirements for entrance.
Obviously Nicodemus was teaching in error as Jesus points out to him. By grace
John the Baptist was sent with a correcting message giving the preliminary step
to accept the greater message which was to come from the Messiah Himself. So
here Jesus goes on, very beautifully answering Nicodemus in the realm of
interpretation. Listen to Him. He said, "Except a man be born of water and the Spirit, he
cannot enter into the Kingdom of God." Mark the continuity. You have been hearing
the ministry of one who baptized you in water who was a God sent messenger, and
who also taught you Another would baptize you in the Spirit (John1:33). Except you are born of all
that the water baptism of John signified, which is repentance; and that which
the Spirit baptism accomplishes, regeneration, you cannot enter into the
Kingdom of God. (Titus 3:5) "He saved
us, not on the basis of deeds which we have done in righteousness, but
according to His mercy, by the washing of regeneration and renewing by the Holy
Spirit." This was a
two-step process that Nicodemus did not understand as well as many today. The
heart gets prepared by the word of God and when responded to accomplishes
salvation and entrance into His Kingdom that lasts forever.
This was the
preliminary foretaste to prepare oneself to accept the greater message from the
Greater Preacher One did this by the acceptance of John’s message and
submitting to a display of that acceptance. The baptism of water here was a
washing which was the symbol of repentance, the human condition necessary to
the remission of sins. The baptism of the Spirit was the fact of regeneration,
the Divine answer to the fulfillment of the human condition.
Thus our Lord declared that in order to enter the Kingdom of
God there must be on the part of man repentance, and also on the part of God
the regeneration of the spirit of man. An earthly as well as a heavenly answer to the message preached and taught.
“Water and the Spirit” here has the
connotation of “water,
even the Spirit.” The death and rebirth illustrated by John’s
baptism, in which Nicodemus and his colleagues on the council had been so
interested (John 1:25) was merely
symbolic of rebirth in the Spirit. Some expositors have equated the “water”
here with the Word and others have taken it to mean the water in the mother’s
womb, but the context surely refers to baptism, and that is certainly what
Nicodemus would have understood it to mean. The essential conclusion of
Christ’s reply was that regeneration by the Holy Spirit was prerequisite to
entering the kingdom of God. Paul used the same baptismal figure of the new
life in Romans 6:4 and called it “the washing of
regeneration” in Titus 3:5.
Scripture helps to interpret scripture.
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