Scripture makes perfectly plain that even upright, sincere, religious individuals—a group to which Nicodemus would have belonged—are without hope and without God in the world (Eph. 2:12) if they are not born again. The religious and the irreligious are under the same indictment: devoid of spiritual life, born in transgression, and unable to rectify their predicament (Eph. 2:1–3). Such individuals need regeneration, not information; they require spiritual transformation, not renovation. The same was true for Nicodemus.

Commenting on Jesus’ ministry, Sinclair Ferguson says, “The pulse beat of God’s heart has an evangelistic rhythm.”¹ Jesus even identified His mission in terms of evangelism: “The Son of Man came to seek and to save the lost” (Luke 19:10).

Jesus had numerous extraordinary encounters throughout the Gospels. In Mark 2, He forgave a paralytic’s sins and restored his ability to walk. In John 4, He encountered a religious nobody who, in the middle of the day, asked for a drink and found living water. And a chapter earlier, in John 3, Jesus encountered a religious somebody named Nicodemus.

“A man of the Pharisees,” this high member of the religious establishment approached the Lord under cover of darkness (v. 1). In the conversation that followed, Jesus stressed the insufficiency of superficial belief and the necessity of the new birth. From this exchange that occurred over two millennia ago, we can learn a great deal about God’s relationship to man—and about what God requires of us.

The Opening Gambit

Nicodemus had presumably heard enough of Jesus to recognize that He was “a teacher come from God” (John 3:2). Yet while this opening statement was pretty good, it’s a far cry from proclaiming Jesus to be the Promised One. We might wonder: What led Nicodemus to Jesus by night on this occasion? Alfred Edersheim suggests one possibility:

It must have been a mighty power of conviction, to break down prejudice so far as to lead this old Sanhedrist to acknowledge a Galilean, untrained in the Schools, as a Teacher come from God, and to repair to Him for direction on, perhaps, the most delicate and important point in Jewish theology.²

If Edersheim is right, that it was “a mighty power of conviction” that guided Nicodemus to Christ, then we might say that the real darkness surrounding the events in John 3 was a moral darkness. Nicodemus’s own night was blacker than the cover of darkness under which he came. Unknown to him, he approached no ordinary Galilean carpenter. He was in the presence of “the true light, which gives light to everyone” (John 1:9).

Scripture makes perfectly plain that even upright, sincere, religious individuals—a group to which Nicodemus would have belonged—are without hope and without God in the world (Eph. 2:12) if they are not born again. The religious and the irreligious are under the same indictment: devoid of spiritual life, born in transgression, and unable to rectify their predicament (Eph. 2:1–3). Such individuals need regeneration, not information; they require spiritual transformation, not renovation. The same was true for Nicodemus.

A Striking Response

As a good Jew, Nicodemus was no doubt acquainted with the kingdom of God. You can probably imagine, then, how much Jesus’ response would have startled the Pharisee: “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born again he cannot see the kingdom of God” (John 3:3).

In Jewish thought, the kingdom of God was to be inaugurated at the end of the age. Entry into the kingdom was guaranteed, they believed, so long as one was a good Jew. But Jesus wasn’t talking here about the kingdom in its future dimension.

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