What About Human Responsibility?

Jesus has so far affirmed Pharisee soteriology. God first loves an individual. In response to God’s love, the individual cares to keep God’s Law. If a person keeps God’s Law, that person is righteous. God’s love is what brought the person into righteousness (i.e. saved the person). When the person kept the Law, that was evidence that he had been made righteous by God. This is the soteriological conversation that permeated synagogues in the First Century much like debates about predestination and free will fill our churches and schools. There is nothing new. When Jesus says, “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born again he cannot see the kingdom of God,” Nicodemus is immediately aware of the conversation Jesus is starting. He knows the debate. Judging from this conversation in John 3, Nicodemus is hesitant to take a side because he has trouble thinking that people are destined from birth for either righteousness or unrighteousness. To him at this juncture of the conversation, it seems like Jesus will side with the Essenes, who are hard determinists. How can God be just if the elect and reprobate are both chosen beforehand and have no chance?

Nicodemus’s question doesn’t come from a place of ignorance. He knows well the arguments on both sides intellectually. His question is sincere. He doesn’t know how it is possible for God to both be just and also not give people the freedom to come to Him if they so choose. What does Jesus mean that someone cannot see the kingdom unless he is first born again?

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).

We deal with this question today in various forms. We read in the Bible that salvation is from God, to God, and through God. We read that He seeks us rather than us seeking Him. We read that we are chosen from the foundation of the world. We read that we are predestined to be conformed to the image of Christ. We wonder, where is my freedom in this? By what conditions does God save anyone? How is he just if we don’t have the actual freedom to choose Him?  If God gives me my temperament and my desires, how can anyone possibly be at fault for rejecting Him? Is it possible for a man to be given a new nature so long after his natural birth? How can a man be born when he is old? Surely he doesn’t get a do-over. How is God just if some people never have a chance from birth? This is the crux of Nicodemus’s question. We shouldn’t think so little of Nicodemus’s question because we have the same questions today.

As we have seen, Jesus’s question has little to do with our will and more to do with our fleshly nature. Still, we have these questions. The world has these questions. People today expend much time arguing because we want to say that God alone saves but, at the same time, we question how He can be just if salvation only depends on Him. We wonder how a man can be born again.

Nicodemus believes that the righteous are such because God first loved them. He does not know how such a reality is possible. He doesn’t know how the transaction happens. He believes God is just. He does not know how God’s sovereignty and human responsibility can be balanced. He is trying to understand. We can learn much from the question Nicodemus asks.

How can

This question is a direct question about a person’s ability as indicated by the Greek word translated “can” (δυναμαι). All Nicodemus knew was God loved people first. He did not know about the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, who would come to convict the world of sin and teach people all things (cf. John 16:8, 13). Nicodemus knew about the Holy Spirit. He knew that the Spirit strived with sinners (cf. Genesis 6:3). He knew that some judges, prophets, and kings had the help of the Spirit (cf. Numbers 27:18; Judges 3:10; 6:34; 13:25; 14:6; 1 Samuel 10:9, 10; 1 Samuel 16:14). He knew that the Spirit inspired holiness in people (cf. Psalm 143:10).

Added to these, Nicodemus was aware of a prophetic promise made between the years of 592 and 570 BC. Ezekiel, a man captive in Babylon during the Babylonian exile of Israel (597-538 BC), prophesied that Israel would return to her national land. After the people returned to the land, God would put His Spirit within the people. His Spirit would cause the people to walk in His statutes—obey His Law (Ezekiel 36:27). 

The fact that the Holy Spirit would indwell people to cause people to obey God was not new information to Nicodemus. Exactly how the Holy Spirit would do this work was unknown. How was this possible? How can…

a man be born

Nicodemus refers back to a fleshly birth. Pharisees believed that people were born with their temperaments, which were given by God. People always did what was in accordance with their temperaments. Quite literally, Nicodemus was wondering how a man could be recreated. How can he gain a temperament that God did not give him from birth? He cannot be born of the flesh a second time. How can any person be brought to love God who isn’t that way by nature? Nicodemus is not referring specifically to himself but to people in general.

when he is old?

The word translated as “old” here (γερων) can and mostly refers to someone who is advanced in his age. It can also refer to someone who is advanced in maturity or who has an advanced position (e.g. elder, pastor, senator, member of the Sanhedrin). We often teach this line such that Nicodemus is asking how a man advanced in years can literalistically enter again into his mother’s womb and be born again as a child. It is my opinion that Nicodemus is asking how anyone who has been born (is more mature than a fetus) can gain a new temperament because God creates each one with his temperament from birth according to Pharisee theology. 

It seems to me that Nicodemus’s question revolves around the fleshly nature of each person. How can God justly change a person’s nature, giving him a new heart according to Ezekiel 36, when that person has already decided on the course of his life—or, rather, when it has been decided for him because God creates each one intentionally with his temperament from birth. Does God bring a person into His kingdom when that person has already chosen against God or even if a person’s temperament, given by God, is against God? Does God overwrite a person’s nature, or freedom of will, for him to see the kingdom of heaven? If so, how is that right? How is that just? 

Nicodemus is not ignorant like we sometimes portray him. He has sincere questions that have built up in his mind over the decades of conversation in the synagogue and Sanhedrin with his peers.

Jesus answered, “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born of water and the Spirit he cannot enter into the kingdom of God…” (John 3:5).

There’s more to Jesus’s answer. but we’ll get to it later. Jesus first answers Nicodemus by saying something that, in today’s language, would sound something like, “For real. You have to be born again like in Ezekiel 36 first, otherwise you cannot enter the kingdom of God.”

Jesus’s answer is not restrictive. He is not saying, “Unless God chose you from the foundation of the world for righteousness, then you have no hope of becoming righteous or entering the kingdom of God.” We shouldn’t read more into the text than is there. First, consider Nicodemus’s question. Nicodemus has asked how a man who has been born with one nature, in rebellion against God, can possibly assume a new nature, have a new heart placed within him according to Ezekiel 36. Jesus says, ‘It is possible by the Spirit!’ Jesus’s answer offers hope to an otherwise hopeless realization.

God does indeed give us our temperaments from birth. Since we are created in God’s image, our temperaments are like His… But, they are not His. Our nature is like His… But, it is not His. It falls short. All people, having the same human nature, are born with the tendency to pursue their own desires rather than the will of God. This is our nature of the flesh and we are unable to see the kingdom of God by this nature. Instead of insisting that all people are destined to be slaves to their fleshly nature, Jesus here tells us how they assume a new nature. They have a new heart placed within them just like Ezekiel foretold. We learn something about the doctrine of election. Precisely, all people are born into the flesh, sometimes we will say born into sin. All are unable to ascend to God. All are damned. But God, being full of grace and mercy, chooses to save some from the fate of the flesh by giving them a different heart, new desires, eyes to see, and His indwelling Spirit.

Think for a moment back to the Flood account in Genesis 6-9. God left people to their own devices, to live according to their own natures, for 120 years. People proved that every intent of man was only wicked (selfish) all the time (Genesis 6:5). After eliminating evil, God’s Spirit strived with humanity again such that the world would never be destroyed or cursed on account of human sin again (Genesis 8:21-22). All the progress made in the story meant that people could live rather than die. The story climaxes with Jesus’s crucifixion and resurrection. Then, in the New Testament, we see statements like:

Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places in Christ, just as He chose us in Him before the foundation of the world, that we would be holy and blameless before Him. In love He predestined us to adoption as sons through Jesus Christ to Himself, according to the kind intention of His will, to the praise of the glory of His grace, which He freely bestowed on us in the Beloved (Ephesians 1:3-6).

Instead, personal salvation is the temporal intervention in a temporal human’s life by a timeless and eternal God. Instead of doling out souls from the beginning of time, it seems that all people are born of human fleshly nature. Since we cannot see or ascend to God by this nature, we act according to our self-will, our desires. We are all going the way of our own desires. Our destiny, so to speak, is the natural result of our living according to our own desires. All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God (Romans 3:23). We are perfectly free. Yet, because we are unable to see God, we follow our own way and earn our just wages. The wages of such sin is death (Romans 6:23).

God, according to His own will, intervenes, shows Himself, gives many a new heart or new nature. As a result, those people desire to do God’s will rather than their own. This is an intervention from eternity. Thus, if we wake up in Hell, it is because of our free choice to do our own will. If we enter the kingdom of God, it is because God graciously intervened in our lives. He could choose to let us go our own way, to do what we want. We would earn death for ourselves. He chooses to intervene. He primarily intervened by sending His Son because He so loved the world. The Holy Spirit draws people’s attention to God the Son—Jesus Christ. Being born again, people choose to honor God with their lives.

So it is the case that people are free to live as they will. Yet, salvation is entirely monergistic—completely a work of God. Jesus is connecting the dots for Nicodemus who has held human responsibility and God’s sovereignty in tension. In reality, there is no tension. We are born into sin. We are sinners. We earn death by following our own selfish desires. God has great mercy. He intervenes. He adopts many, saving us from our natural destiny. Without God’s intervention, we would truly have a fate we could not escape because of our own natures—simple cause and effect. Since God intervenes, we can experience freedom. It is for freedom that Christ has set us free (Galatians 1:5). In this, I find that God loves sinners much more than we often give Him credit for.

Thus, personal salvation deals specifically with setting us free from the bondage we are in to our selfish natures and sin. God intervenes to free us. We were destined for Hell by our own will. God has freed us from such fatalism and opened the gates of the kingdom of Heaven by grace alone. In this, we do not lose God’s sovereignty. We also do not lose human responsibility. God does not delete the temperament He has given us from birth in the flesh. We are born both of the flesh and spirit. We assume a new to complete the old. God would not undo His own work.  Jesus will continue to explain such a truth as we move through the text.