John 3:7-8

“⁷ Do not marvel that I said to you, ‘You must be born again.’ ⁸ The wind blows where it wishes, and you hear its sound, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.”

            In the last verse Jesus described the difference between flesh and the Spirit where the flesh is what is evil in the world—not just physically but spiritually—and the spirit is what is holy or righteous which is described as coming from the Spirit. The Spirit is the third part of the trinity but also the one active in the cleansing of people through being born again. This next section is a cap on what Jesus just said. It is the end of the paragraph and is meant to be taken as an encouragement because even though what Jesus talked about is one of the most important aspects of the gospel, it is also one which should not be overanalyzed. This would make sense with who He was talking to as Nicodemus, being a Pharisee, had spent his life overanalyzing the scriptures.

            The first thing that Jesus said to him was to not marvel at what He had just said. This is a refrain Nicodemus needed to accept the spiritual reality of and not overthink. This was not Jesus saying that Nicodemus should not think about it but He didn’t want Nicodemus to get hyper-fixated on it or overcomplicate it. This makes sense in the context of Nicodemus being a Jewish spiritual leader because the whole job for a spiritual leader at the time was to overanalyze the truths of the Bible.

            The next verse shows why Nicodemus should not marvel at being born again. That was because even though he was personally feeling the effect of being born again, he could not know the previous affected person or who the next would be. Now, when it comes to the Holy Spirit, we know He comes from God, being God also, but the verse is not about the nature of the Spirit but about who is being born again and when which is something only He can know. This mystery of how the Holy Spirit works would have confounded Nicodemus because he was a Jewish leader. They were known for their outside holiness and their strict rules that were built on top of what they thought they knew of the laws in the scriptures. Nicodemus would be tempted to do as other religious leaders and overanalyze what Jesus said about being born again by the Holy Spirit. He was a man comfortable knowing things like what the Spirit was doing and would do. Instead, Jesus was calling him to accept his own experience like a breeze on the wind, not wondering where exactly it came from or where it was going but only how it affected him.  

            For Christians, we must take this to heart for ourselves. We can sometimes wonder who The Holy Spirit is working in or saving but this is not our job. If we start to make this a part of our spirituality, we will be no better than the Pharisees. Our job, once we are born again, is to listen to God’s voice through the scriptures and to share that with everyone else because, as Jesus points out, we do not know where the Holy Spirit is going.

            For non-Christians, you can spend your whole life wondering what Jesus means by being born again and how that makes sense but there comes a time to make a decision. Like Nicodemus, that time to make a decision has come. What will you choose, to be reborn into new life with the Holy Spirt or to stay dead in the flesh?