You can know a great deal about God without actually knowing Him. That is the quiet danger sitting underneath one of the most familiar conversations in the Bible, and it is worth slowing down for, because knowing about God is the easier of the two and it looks close enough to the real thing to fool almost anyone.
Growing up in the 90s, my two favorite baseball players were Ken Griffey Jr. and Frank Thomas. I still have a big baseball card book at home filled with cards and posters of both of them. Back in 1994 I could have told you a lot about those two guys, and I had never met either of them in my life. This was before the internet was in every home, so everything I knew came off the back of those baseball cards or out of whatever was printed in Sports Illustrated for Kids.
That is the whole point. We can know quite a bit about someone without actually knowing them.
The Mistake Religious People Make Most Often
One of the biggest mistakes we can make in faith is mistaking knowing about God for actually knowing Him.
We can know all the Bible stories. We can memorize the chapter and verse where each one is found. We can show up to church, go to Bible study, and attend Christian conferences. Those things are good, and you will learn things about God at every one of them. But we can know a lot about God and still miss knowing Him, and still miss the sort of life He has called us to.
Nicodemus Knew More About God Than Almost Anyone
Scripture gives us a story about a man who knew a lot about God. If this were the first century and we were looking for the expert on God, we would have been pointed toward Nicodemus or someone like him. He knew a lot. And yet at some point in his faith journey, he seems to have suspected that there was more to faith than having all the answers. So one night, Nicodemus went looking for Jesus.
John 3 begins like this: “Now there was a Pharisee, a man named Nicodemus, who was a member of the Jewish ruling council.” The first thing we learn is that he was a Pharisee, which means he belonged to a sect of Judaism devoted to understanding God’s laws and commands and committed to living them out precisely. Then we find out he was not just a Pharisee but a leader among them, appointed to the Jewish ruling council also known as the Sanhedrin. Today we might call him a religious expert or a religious influencer. His whole life was devoted to shaping people around faith.
Verse two says, “He came to Jesus at night and said, ‘Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher who has come from God. For no one could perform the signs you are doing if God were not with Him.'”
We are not told why he came at night. Maybe he wanted privacy. Maybe he was worried about what the other religious leaders would think if they saw him talking with Jesus. Maybe it was the only time that worked for both of them. What we do know is that despite everything he knew about God, despite his position and his authority, he had been watching Jesus and noticed something different. Something about the way He talked. Something about the way He treated people. Nicodemus was intrigued, and he wanted to understand what it was.
What Does It Mean to Be Born Again?
Jesus answered a question Nicodemus had not asked. “Very truly I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God unless they are born again.”
Nicodemus responded with the logical question: “How can someone be born when they are old? Surely they cannot enter a second time into their mother’s womb to be born!”
Jesus went further. “Very truly I tell you, no one can enter the kingdom of God unless they are born of water and the Spirit. Flesh gives birth to flesh, but the Spirit gives birth to spirit. You should not be surprised at my saying, ‘You must be born again.’ The wind blows wherever it pleases. You hear its sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going. So it is with everyone born of the Spirit.”
If I had been standing there, I would have wondered why He put it so strangely. But there is a reason He used the language of birth. Birth is something every one of us simply received. None of us did anything to earn our way into the world. Jesus was saying that the kingdom of God works the same way. You cannot manufacture it. You receive it.
Why Jesus Did Not Give Him More Information
Jesus knew that Nicodemus did not need more information. This was a smart man, a learned man, a man who taught this material for a living. What Nicodemus needed was a different lens through which to view everything he already knew.
So Jesus told him he had to be born again. He was saying that the thing Nicodemus saw in Him could not be reached through a more meticulous breaking down of the text. There is an aspect of this that has to be received from God.
You can change your behavior without having a changed heart or a changed mind. You can study the Scriptures and know everything in them without ever surrendering to the God who gave them to us. You can become more religious without ever becoming more like Jesus.
What Nicodemus needed, and what you and I need today, is not more knowledge but new life. Life that can only come through the Spirit. Just as our first life was given to us by our parents, this new life, this eternal life, is given to us by God. What we cannot achieve through any amount of hard work, God can accomplish through His Spirit.
Why Jesus Pointed Back to a Snake in the Wilderness
Understandably, Nicodemus was baffled. His response was, “How can this be?”
Jesus answered, “You are Israel’s teacher, and do you not understand these things?” That can sound like a jab, but keep reading. He goes on to say that of course Nicodemus does not understand, because a person can only testify to what he has seen, and Nicodemus has never seen the kingdom of heaven. But Jesus has. And then He explains how Nicodemus could experience it, by pointing forward to the cross through a story reaching back into Israel’s history.
In Numbers 21, the Israelites in the wilderness were dying from snakebites and cried out to God for help. God told Moses to lift up a snake, and anyone who looked at it would live. They simply had to trust that. In John 3:14, Jesus says that story was pointing forward to something better: “Just as Moses lifted up the snake in the wilderness, so the Son of Man must be lifted up, that everyone who believes may have eternal life in Him.”
Our problem today is not snakebites in the wilderness. Our problem is worse. Our problem is sin. We are all guilty of it, and none of us can do anything to escape its consequences. When Jesus says the Son of Man must be lifted up, He is saying that what we cannot accomplish on our own, He came to do for us. Just as the Israelites had to trust that what God provided was the thing, strange as it looked, Jesus asks us to put our trust in Him and receive new life.
Nicodemus had spent his entire life trying to unlock the mystery of the kingdom of God through more study. What he had missed along the way was a relationship with the One who could give him this new and eternal kind of life.
What “For God So Loved the World” Actually Means
The apostle John famously summarizes the whole interaction in John 3:16-17: “For God so loved the world that He gave His one and only Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send His Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through Him.”
More than anything, Jesus wanted Nicodemus to know, and He wants you and me to know, that God so loved this world. This broken and mixed up and sinful world, full of broken and mixed up and sinful people like me and like you. He loves you so much that He gave His Son, so that whoever believes in Him can receive the kingdom of God, can receive new life in the Spirit, can receive eternal life.
Maybe you grew up hearing it called everlasting life. Whatever you call it, it is not something you achieve by learning more. It is something you receive.
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