Re-incarnation

Nicodemus said to Him, "How can a man be born when he is old? He cannot enter a second time into his mother's womb and be born, can he?" (John 3:4)

There really are all sorts of threads to follow in this passage that take one on different routes to arrive at the same place. As with most conversations, this one between Jesus and Nicodemus contains two separate dialogues – one that is going on at the surface and another going on between the lines. But the second one is always the more important one to learn to discern because that is the conversation of the heart, the real discussion taking place that is usually masked by the external things being talked about.

After Nicodemus' initial introduction, Jesus immediately addressed his blind spot. He did this because He could see the heart of Nicodemus, past his outward courtesy and diplomacy and deep into the inner longings and true desires that were growing more intense in the mind and feelings of Nicodemus. Instead of playing along with the line of reasoning that Nicodemus introduced, Jesus chose to go straight to the point of exposing what was really blocking Nicodemus from experiencing real life and thriving spirituality. But as He did so Nicodemus found himself reacting with typical religious resistance to such candid and open talk about frightening and sensitive issues in his heart that were almost never mentioned with words.

Sadly, religion has become one of the biggest obstacles to connecting our hearts with God, our Father, Redeemer and Lover. Masquerading as the means of getting saved and becoming more like God, religion has far more often done just the opposite because of its penchant for clinging to mistaken views of what God is like. Nicodemus was a man steeped in religion very much like many of us today and displayed similar symptoms of confusion and distorted ideas about reality and God. That is partly why many of us struggle so much today to grasp the real meaning and power of these words of Jesus. It is because we, just like Nicodemus, find ourselves automatically resisting the plainness of Jesus' approach and the radically different nature of reality as viewed by God from what we assume.

Jesus stated very bluntly that unless a person is born again, born of the water and of spirit, there is no way that they can either see or enter into the real kingdom of heaven. This is in stark contrast to how easy it is to become identified with professed religion which claims to be the kingdom of heaven on earth. Even the most stringent and exclusive kinds of religion are easier to identify with than true spirituality God's way because religion is so often formula based, externally oriented, left-brain heavy and humanly measurable.

Even emotionally-oriented religions depend on external measurements and human controls to elicit counterfeit ways of producing effects and emotions that simulate what we suppose a really spiritual person might look like. But the common denominator in all of these counterfeits is that we still remain self-focused, we still to some degree are depending on our own efforts and achievements to save ourselves, we want to keep at least a little of our own pride in tact in order to cling to our own sense of worth. For at the bottom of our hearts, we all desire to feel valuable, to be viewed as important to someone else, to be seen as worthy in some way of being loved and cherished, at least a little bit. But the human heart has been wired by sin to believe that we must do something ourselves to contribute to our own value, at least to some extent, and so we subscribe to whatever label of religion that most closely fits our assumptions about what God demands of us to achieve that.

Jesus is confronting these assumptions generated by religion and false views of God. He is presenting a starkly different path to reconciliation with our Father, the very thing that our heart really wants the most but does not know how to do. We have all been born as sin-tainted humans and because of that it is impossible for us to naturally be able to figure out how to extricate ourselves from the inherent deceptions, fears and twisted thinking that sin has preconditioned us to believe. As children of fallen Adam we have all inherited the iniquities of our fathers all the way down from him. Only the man Jesus has the inherent ability to perceive humanity and reality from God's perspective without the distortion of false lenses, because He did not have a human father through which to inherit iniquities. Although He was fully human through His mother, He was not partaker of our sinful propensities and rebellion against God that everyone else received through their fathers from Adam.

Jesus did something very amazing when He was born as a human being without a human father. What actually took place was the formation and rebirth of an entire species – humankind. Jesus literally created an new species that had a divine origin clean of all infection and iniquity by becoming a human without the inherited contamination passed down through fathers. In doing so, He created an alternative form of humanity that would be completely free of all the curse that other humans found impossible to escape. That is why there is no other way to be saved except through Jesus Christ.

Religion has assumed that when the Bible teaches that we must be saved exclusively through the name of Jesus only that it means that people must externally acknowledge some list of facts or beliefs about Jesus being the Son of God. But this is very typical of external religion and misses the main point of why Jesus became human. It also misses the many explanations by Paul and other apostles about the idea of being “in Christ” and that salvation has come to every person. When we begin to really grasp what it means to be in Christ – not the confusing ideas bantered about by popular Christianity but the really powerful, life-transforming, heart-based new-birth version of this concept – then we will begin to experience the reflection of the face of God beginning to glow through our lives and countenances – everyone who has begun to really experience this new species of humans.

Jesus is stating here that every person who wants to enter into full participation in this new species called the kingdom of heaven has to begin by being born into it. This involves an incarnation very much like the one Jesus experienced. It is not enough to only be born as a human to start with, though that is a prerequisite. This new species is only for those who start out as humans. Of course, by default all humans except Jesus start out infected by sin and rebellion and selfishness. Jesus is here laying out more clearly God's plan to save everyone who will embrace the real truth about how God feels about them and how to enter into God's way of rescuing them from their hopeless, lost condition.

Entering into this kingdom is through the means of being born a second time as a different kind of human, a human that contains the reincarnation of God Himself. For to be a real Christian a person must experience the birth of Jesus Himself incarnated within them, not just as a historical figure to talk about or emulate. Entering into this kingdom requires a radical change in belief in our own identity based on God's redemption through Jesus. And it also requires a transformation in the way we view God's feelings towards us.