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What Jesus Meant by That Whole “Born Again” Thing
Thinking Like a Child
I clearly remember the moment I became a Christian. I don’t recall how old I was exactly, probably six or seven, but it was a Sunday afternoon and I had been to church that morning. Something about Sunday school must have made an impression on me, because I asked my mother to come to my room to talk to me about getting saved. She graciously led me in a prayer of repentance and faith, and as we finished, I felt great joy and relief sweep over me. I knew that I was going to get into heaven because Jesus had died for me.
If you had asked me at the time what it meant to be “saved,” I’m not sure what I would have told you. However, as I think back now to the theology of my youth, several images come to mind.
For one, I considered salvation as a type of fire insurance. To avoid hell, make sure you sign on the dotted line by doing whatever the preacher says you need to do (believe, repent, have faith, give your life to Jesus), and then rest easy, knowing that you are covered. Your papers are in order, and when that fateful day arrives, everything will be just fine.
Along the same lines, I thought that “getting saved” was like making a reservation at a very ritzy and exclusive club. As long as you have made that phone call at some point in your life, when you show up at the pearly gates, Saint Peter will see that your name is in the book and welcome you in!
In more familial and relational terms, I thought of becoming a child of God as a one-time transaction in which I got a new legal guardian, but one with whom I didn’t get to live. It’s like I was living in an orphanage but had to stay there, even though I was now assigned a new name and even guaranteed an inheritance at some point in the future.
This whole arrangement seemed to me a bit like a professional athlete getting traded from one franchise to another. When a player moves to a new team, he remains the same person. The organization that owns his contract changes and he puts on a different uniform for games, but Joe Football Star is still the same Joe on the inside. Fans generally don’t care about the inside, though. Those who hated Joe when he played for the archrival will now cheer their hearts out for him when he takes the field for the home team, no matter what kind of person he is away from the stadium.
Practically speaking, I realize now that one of the main consequences of this theology was that I lived a spiritually pathetic life. By that I mean that I wasn’t really any different from any of the unbelievers I knew. I was enslaved to the same sins, beset by the same character flaws, and guided by the same materialistic priorities as everyone else. However, this didn’t really bother me much because I didn’t think it mattered as far as my ultimate destination was concerned.
This is not to say that I just sinned rampantly and accepted every evil the world offered. I tried to live a reasonably good life in appreciation for what God had done for me. (And if I remember correctly, that was usually the reason given by pastors to motivate us to moral behavior.) But I didn’t pursue a life of radical righteousness or intimacy with God, largely because I didn’t think it was possible or consider it something God was all that interested in.
I don’t remember ever being taught this explicitly, but the practical consequence of my view of salvation at the time is that “children of God” or “Christians” can stay essentially unchanged on the inside. That is exactly what I did, because I didn’t think it mattered to God what my insides looked like anyway, at least not in relation to my salvation. God didn’t take into account my sin and worldly ambition; he only saw the “Jesus covering” he had placed on me. I figured that I may not be actually righteous, but God saw me as legally righteous, so everything was all right.
I was certainly not alone in this. Indeed, many Christians today operate according to this theology of salvation. That is one reason why the morality of Christians is essentially the same as that of non-Christians.41 Speaking of evangelicals in particular, but making a statement that is applicable across the Christian spectrum, Michael Horton laments: “Christians are as likely to embrace lifestyles every bit as hedonistic, materialistic, self-centered, and sexually immoral as the world in general.”42
More Than a Onetime Legal Transaction
I now realize that my theology was wrong. In the previous two chapters I have argued that God is very concerned with making us into particular kinds of people. That is to say, he actually wants us to be holy and righteous on the inside. He wants us to be like Jesus.
In this chapter I want to drive that truth home with more force and clarity by showing how it applies to salvation and being a child of God. I am convinced that a major reason there are not more saints in the world is that most people think they can get into heaven without being one. They believe that as long as they have had their name checked as “forgiven,” all will be well. They are wrong. Salvation involves much more than that.
As we will see, legal forgiveness is only one part of the equation. God doesn’t just purchase sinners while leaving them essentially unchanged. He doesn’t just take legal guardianship of children and cover their sins. Rather, he creates new children who are in intimate union with him. God doesn’t just look at a believer as if she were a new person; she actually is a new person. The old person is dead; a new person is alive.
Becoming a Christian involves not the covering of the old but the destruction of the old. It is the annihilation of satanic powers and flesh that enslaved us and the creation of a new person who is as united to God as a biological child is to his parents, only more so. Becoming a Christian is to become a new baby in Christ. By its very nature, this is a life of ever-increasing holiness. My theology was missing these truths.
A Major Obstacle to Belief
The reason I bring this up in a book about evangelism is that my childhood beliefs regarding salvation, and the spiritually weak Christians it produces, are a huge stumbling block for skeptics.
Unbelievers simply can’t abide the notion that, when it comes to salvation, God doesn’t care what kind of person you are. They can’t understand why God would forgive some people and let them into heaven ahead of those who have lived morally better lives based on something as seemingly capricious and silly as saying a prayer, intellectually assenting to certain propositions, getting confirmed, or jumping through an equally arbitrary hoop. For example, in the “An Atheist Meets God” video I mentioned earlier, the god character tells the unbeliever that he is going to burn in hell because he failed to believe the propositions written in a 2,000-year-old book even though he has admittedly lived a very moral life. It seems terribly unjust.
Frankly, if the view of salvation I presented above was correct, the skeptics would have valid concerns here. However, it isn’t. These objections are based on a misunderstanding of God and his plan for the world.
A Pattern for Building a Family and Dealing With Sin
We have seen in the previous chapters that God’s plan for humanity is to live in intimate union with him. Our purpose for living is to be part of God’s family, but sin has resulted in a break in that relationship. In this section we will examine how God has worked in history to rebuild his family. As we survey that work briefly, we will see that God has a very consistent and quite explicit pattern for dealing with rebellion and disorder. God doesn’t just declare guilty sinners “not guilty” or offer them forgiveness and a new legal status. He doesn’t just put a coat of whitewash on a deformed planet and label it OKAY. Instead, he makes all things new. Indeed, creation as the solution to sin is one of the key themes in redemptive history.
To see how this theme has played out over time, we first need to realize that the context for the entire biblical narrative is one of a war between God and the forces of evil. This battle is described using many different metaphors: light versus darkness, chaos versus order, and slavery versus freedom, among others. In what follows I will make the case that God’s means of winning this war is an act of new creation that destroys the enemy while at the same time bringing forth the new family of God led by one special man. The decisive action of God brings both judgment and new life.
It seems to me that we usually think of creation as a peaceful act; I envision a painter with his canvas or a sculptor with her clay, for instance. However, although God is certainly an artist, it is more biblical, at least in regard to our theology of salvation, to think of creation as an act of war, as a decisive blow to the enemy in a cosmic battle. This is apparent even from the first verses of Genesis.
The Creation of the Universe as the Defeat of Leviathan
According to Genesis 1, in the beginning there was formlessness, darkness, and water. Traditionally, this has been understood as a state of lifeless disorder. The Spirit of God hovers over the proceedings and, as the Spirit works, the Earth is gradually turned from a chaotic wasteland to a well-ordered planet brimming with life. Here we see the first instance in the Bible of an act of creation that brings judgment and new life at the same time.
The life-giving aspect of the creation story is obvious, as the Spirit draws life out of the water and we end up with not only plants and animals, but the crown of creation: God’s first human children, Adam and Eve. They are the father and mother of the family of God on Earth. God has created descendants for himself.
The destructive part of the original creation is perhaps not so obvious to modern Western readers. However, theologians have long viewed the creation narrative as the story of God’s victory over the sea dragon Leviathan, which represents death.43 The sea symbolizes chaos and God’s victory establishes order. This “cosmic battle” motif was well known to the ancient Israelites and is clearly displayed in several other places in Scripture. For example, Psalm 104:7 describes the waters fleeing at God’s rebuke, and in Psalm 89:9–10 we see God ruling over the surging sea and crushing Rahab, another sea monster; in Job 9:13, the “cohorts of Rahab cowered” at God’s feet.44
As is clear in these passages, the ancient Israelites clearly associated creation with victory over evil forces. Notice also that the sea itself is representative in that culture of the evil forces that God works to defeat. That is one of the reasons Jesus’ calming the storm (Mark 4:35–41) was such a big deal, and why the final act of creation, the new heaven and earth, will have no sea (Revelation 21:1). But I am getting ahead of myself! For now I just want to emphasize that the creation of the world involved both bringing forth life and defeating death. Also, notice again that this life is a family led by one special man. As we will see, the exact same thing can be said about the great flood.
Noah and the Flood
Adam and Eve rebelled against God, and their descendants became more and more evil (Genesis 3–4). God decided to act. Interestingly, he did not give the people a quick and easy legal way out. He did not offer them a free ticket to a future paradise if they would believe some facts about him. He did not decide to pick a few people and arbitrarily label them RIGHTEOUS rather than SINFUL. Instead, he eradicated the evil and started all over again. This was much more than a declaration. The Earth was actually returned to the chaotic, watery, and dead state from which it came, and then God created the world for a second time. Noah was the second Adam, and the story of the fresh start his family received is a second act of creation. I think we see this clearly in the overall narrative, but also in some of the specific literary clues and historical parallels between the two accounts.
For example, the flood begins when “the springs of the great deep burst forth” (Genesis 7:11). The word for deep is the same word used in Genesis 1:2 to describe the initial watery condition of the Earth.
Also, there is an emphasis on the number seven in the flood story: Noah is to take seven pairs of clean animals (Genesis 7:2); he is in the ark for seven days before the flood begins (Genesis 7:4), and a dove is sent every seven days to search for land (Genesis 8:10–12).
As for that dove, the fact that it hovers over the water is reminiscent of the Spirit hovering over the waters in Genesis 1. What is its goal? To bring life (in the form of a branch) out of the water.
Noah’s relationship to Adam is made quite explicit in Genesis 9:1–2, where he is given dominion over the plants and animals and told to be fruitful and multiply. This, of course, is the role and command that God originally gave to Adam (Genesis 1:28). Noah was now the leader of God’s family; he was the new Adam. Noah was the righteous man who would be the father of God’s children. So the flood was a creative act that brought judgment on the sinful human race. At the flood, “the whole universe, soiled by the tide of sin, by the intervention of water was restored to its pristine purity”45 and out of the water came a people of God, a new righteous line led by one special man.
Moses and the Crossing of the Red Sea
The Red Sea crossing was one more instance in which God re-created a family by using one special man to lead people through the water of destruction and out of it to new life. On one side of the water the Israelites were “dead”: Although they were on the run, in a very real sense they still belonged to the Pharaoh and his army. However, on the other side they were newly “alive”: The Pharaoh had been defeated and they were now a new people. God had defeated evil and created for himself (again) a son. Israel had been born again.
Before we delve more deeply into the drama at the Red Sea, let’s set the stage by examining the account of the birth of that special man, Moses. I believe Moses’ early childhood is the first aspect of the Exodus account that shows the connection between creation, the flood, and the Red Sea.
The man whom God would use to deliver his people was born under a death sentence. The Pharaoh had ordered that all male Hebrew babies should be killed by being thrown into the Nile River (Exodus 1:22). In the context of the narrative, the waters of the Nile are the waters of death and destruction.
Moses’ mother protected him for three months, but when she could no longer hide him, she made a basket, put Moses in it, and placed it in the reeds along the bank of the Nile. At that time Pharaoh’s daughter came down to the river to bathe, noticed the baby in the basket, and took him home to raise him as her own. She named him Moses, which means “I drew him out of the water” (Exodus 2:10).
So Moses was born in a similar situation to the people of Earth at the time of the flood: sentenced to death by water. However, Moses, like Noah before him, escaped that judgment by entering into an ark and thus came through the waters of destruction. Indeed, not only did Moses survive, but he was given a new life as a royal son. Moses entered into the water a slave but came out of it as a member of the Pharaoh’s family! There is a very real sense in which Moses was born again in that water. That is why he was given his name. He had been re-created, given new life by being drawn out of the water. Indeed, from an Egyptian perspective (they believed the Pharaoh was a god), Moses had been given divine life.
Moses is like Noah and like Adam. He is the leader of a family of God. Where is this family created? I think it is clear that new life is given to the people of God at the Red Sea. Just like Moses, they are born again as they are drawn out of the water.
Let’s examine this more closely. Like Moses, the Israelites were also in a similar position to the people of Earth before the flood: They were under penalty of death, part of a sinful culture that was under God’s judgment. However, the link between the situation of the Israelites in slavery and humanity at the time of the flood is even more explicit in that the problems of the Israelites in Egypt are allegorically the problems of all humankind since the fall of Adam. They were (1) separated from their true home, (2) in slavery to the Pharaoh, and (3) under God’s judgment for worshiping false gods. In the same way, the people before the flood were (1) separated from God, (2) in slavery to sin and Satan, and (3) under God’s judgment for worshiping false gods. It is the same threefold problem we all face today, by the way.
The parallels between the Red Sea and the flood continue in the way the people were saved. Like those who followed Noah into the ark and through the water before them, the Israelites who followed Moses through the waters of the Red Sea were spared. The dry land appeared (as at the original creation), and the water that brought judgment and death to their Egyptian enemies was defeated. The Red Sea crossing was a creative act that destroyed evil. As such, it conformed perfectly to God’s previously established pattern for dealing with sin.
Before moving on to how this pattern continues right up until our day, let’s pause and point out again that God did not save his people by simply forgiving them. He gave them a new existence. God didn’t just grant the people a cloak of righteousness; he took them through the water to make them a new, holy people.
This is not the end of the story of redemption, of course. Moses and the Israelites are types. They show us how God works and foreshadow his ultimate purpose, which is to create a spiritual and eternal family. He does this, as usual, through one special man.
By now I suspect that you can see where I am going with this: Jesus is like Moses in that he is the one who defeats death and leads us to new life. As we look briefly at a few of the parallels between Jesus and Moses, it should help us to better understand Jesus’ mission and help equip us to be able to correct skeptics’ misconceptions about salvation.
Similarities Between Moses and Jesus
The first similarity between Moses and Jesus involves the circumstances of their births. Moses was born into an oppressed people living under an evil tyrant who tried to have him killed. So was Jesus. Just like the Pharaoh centuries before him, King Herod was concerned about someone rising up to take his throne (Matthew 2:3–6). He heard that a “King of the Jews” had been born and, in order to quell an uprising before it started, he ordered that all male Hebrew babies two years old and younger in and around Bethlehem be killed (Matthew 2:16). Jesus’ parents fled to Egypt, where they stayed until Herod died (Matthew 2:14–15).
Another aspect of Moses’ life that points toward Jesus is the fact that he gave up his position of honor and privilege to identify with the people he loved. Moses was a powerful prince, but he humbled himself and became a shepherd, herding flocks in the middle of nowhere. The writer of Hebrews describes his action this way:
By faith Moses, when he had grown up, refused to be known as the son of Pharaoh’s daughter. He chose to be mistreated along with the people of God rather than to enjoy the fleeting pleasures of sin.
Hebrews 11:24–25
In the same spirit as Moses, Jesus gave up his position in heaven in order to identify with the people he loved. Paul portrays Jesus in these glowing terms:
Who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage; rather, he made himself nothing by taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness. And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself and became obedient to death—even death on a cross!
Philippians 2:6–8
Here is another similarity: When Moses came to lead his people, most didn’t welcome him with open arms. Pharaoh responded to Moses’ first demand to let the people go by making their work even harder, which resulted in the Hebrews cursing Moses for bringing more trouble on them (Exodus 5:19–21).
In the same way, Jesus was “despised and rejected by mankind, a man of suffering, and familiar with pain. Like one from whom people hide their faces he was despised, and we held him in low esteem” (Isaiah 53:3). John explains that “he came to that which was his own, but his own did not receive him” (John 1:11). Jesus came to set humanity free, but most people weren’t interested. Rather than follow, they called for his crucifixion.
Dual Family Ties
Moses and Jesus had remarkably similar life experiences that should make us ponder the link between the two men. However, perhaps the strongest illustrative parallel between Moses and Jesus is the unique family ties that each possessed. Both Moses and Jesus were members of two families, one royal and one common, and these multiple connections were necessary to complete their redemptive missions.
As we discussed above, Moses was born a Jew but was adopted into the Egyptian ruling family. As a Hebrew he was able to relate to the people and exercise the authority necessary to lead them; it seems unlikely they would have followed a non-Israelite. On the other hand, as a member of Pharaoh’s family, Moses was granted the access necessary to enter the court and demand the slaves’ release. It seems unlikely that he would have been able to do this if he did not have that connection. Moses needed to be both an Egyptian royal and an Israelite to accomplish his task.
In the same way, Jesus is a man but is also God. He was born to Mary in Bethlehem, but at the same time has always existed as part of the Godhead (John 1:1). As a member of the human family, he is able to relate to us and exercise the necessary authority to lead us home. As the Son of God, Jesus has access to the very throne room of God, so that he may make intercession for us (Romans 8:34). The fact that he was both God and man was and is absolutely essential to his task.
God providentially placed Moses in Pharaoh’s family so when the time was right, he would have access to the seat of power and secure the Jews’ release. In this way, God illustrated what would later occur with Jesus.46 Jesus is the one who has membership in the divine royal family necessary to save us.
Jesus, Baptism, and the Creation of a Spiritual People of God
This unique nature was dramatically proclaimed and illustrated in one of the more striking and beautiful scenes in the New Testament: Jesus’ baptism by John in the Jordan River. When Jesus came up out of the water, the Spirit of God in the form of a dove descended and landed on him and a voice from heaven proclaimed, “This is my Son” (Matthew 3:17).
This is an amazing episode in that it brings together much of the imagery from this chapter. For example, the Spirit of God, descending in the form of a dove over the river, brings to mind both the initial creation account of the Spirit hovering over the water and the flood in which the dove also hovered over the water. As we discussed, in both cases the Spirit/dove brought life out of the water.
As for bringing life from the water, we have also seen that in each case God brought “divine” life out of the water. Moses was drawn out of the water to be part of the royal family, and in the other instances God brought entire groups out of the water to be part of his family. In the case of Jesus, he is God, a member of the Trinity. He was not made God at his baptism, but his status as God’s Son was officially pronounced to the world at that time. Here we have the fulfillment of everything God had been working toward since the fall: the new Adam that all the other “Adams” had been pointing toward. With Jesus, God’s plan for creating a new family of God through one special man finds fulfillment. A new righteous line has begun, one that is radically unlike the first. The main difference is that while the first Adam was physical, Jesus is a spiritual Adam:
So it is written: “The first man Adam became a living being”; the last Adam, a life-giving spirit. The spiritual did not come first, but the natural, and after that the spiritual. The first man was of the dust of the earth; the second man is of heaven. As was the earthly man, so are those who are of the earth; and as is the heavenly man, so also are those who are of heaven. And just as we have borne the image of the earthly man, so shall we bear the image of the heavenly man.
1 Corinthians 15:45–49
Jesus has divine life and bears children that have divine life as well! Those who become a part of God’s family are not simply forgiven or granted a new legal status, they are re-created.
That is why the entrance rite of the church has always been baptism. We enter the baptismal water under God’s judgment and as slaves to sin and to Satan; we come out of it as free children of God. In fulfillment of the action of the flood and the Red Sea, our evil nature is destroyed in the water and we are granted new life. These connections between the flood, the Red Sea crossing, and baptism are explicitly made by Peter in 1 Peter 3:20–21 and by Paul in 1 Corinthians 10:1–2.
Living As New Creations
The point of this very brief historical survey of God’s redemptive work is to emphasize that salvation involves God making us into new people, not just giving us a whitewash. When Jesus told Nicodemus that he must be born again to enter the kingdom of God (John 3:1–3), he actually meant it. He wasn’t talking about giving Nicodemus new legal standing as a member of God’s family. He wasn’t talking about painting over Nicodemus the sinner with a “righteousness covering.” Jesus actually meant that Nicodemus needed to be created again by God.
When I realized this, my attitude toward sin started to change. I could no longer accept living a mediocre life in which sin still largely had control. If God had made me new, I needed to start living like it. This is exactly Paul’s point in much of his ethical teaching. He spends a lot of time in the beginning of his letters establishing the nature of our new identity, saying things like “If anyone is in Christ he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come!” (2 Corinthians 5:17 NIV1984). He then follows that with an exhortation to live accordingly. For example, this passage from the first half of Ephesians establishes that we are new creations:
As for you, you were dead in your transgressions and sins, in which you used to live when you followed the ways of this world and of the ruler of the kingdom of the air, the spirit who is now at work in those who are disobedient. All of us also lived among them at one time, gratifying the cravings of our flesh and following its desires and thoughts. Like the rest, we were by nature deserving of wrath. But because of his great love for us, God, who is rich in mercy, made us alive with Christ even when we were dead in transgressions—it is by grace you have been saved.
Ephesians 2:1–5
We were dead and now we are alive! It reminds me of what the father said about his prodigal son when he returned: “This son of mine was dead and is alive again” (Luke 15:24). The implications of this truth are spelled out in the last half of Ephesians. They include this instruction:
You were taught, with regard to your former way of life, to put off your old self, which is being corrupted by its deceitful desires; to be made new in the attitude of your minds; and to put on the new self, created to be like God in true righteousness and holiness.
Ephesians 4:22–24
So we are a new creation, one that is intended to actually be righteous and holy. We simply cannot be satisfied with not being so. If we are children of God, something really has changed about us. It is not just a new label, but a new reality. When God has children, he is not giving orphans new names or drafting an expansion team, but actually creating brand-new children. Richard White explains:
We are born with the nature of Adam and are thereby sinners. But Christ is the New Adam. When we are united to Him through grace, we are justified. Paul states, “For as by one man’s disobedience many were made sinners, so by one man’s obedience many will be made righteous” (Romans 5:19). Note that in Adam we are not just declared sinners, we are made sinners. By the same token, in Christ we are not just declared righteous but are made righteous. Our righteousness in Christ is not only legal but real, just as our sinfulness in Adam was not only legal but real.47
As we discussed in the previous chapter, God’s ultimate intent is to have a family of mature adults, living together as the Trinity lives together. God’s first step in that process is to create new life. The skeptics who recoil from a theology of salvation that focuses on legally renaming sinners while leaving them in their sin are right to do so. That has never been God’s intention. Those Christians who think they are saved but bear no evidence of new life need to question whether they truly are children of God: “This is how we know who the children of God are and who the children of the devil are: Anyone who does not do what is right is not a child of God: nor is anyone who does not love his brother” (1 John 3:10 NIV1984).
Conclusion
Skeptics generally reject a view of salvation that is incomplete at best and just plain false at worst. We need to make them aware that salvation is not just forgiveness of sin, although that is part of it. It is not even only about freedom from sin, although that is part of it as well. Salvation is about being created anew as a child of God. Scott Hahn says it well:
Salvation is not only from sin, but for sonship—in Christ. We are not only forgiven by God’s grace, we are adopted and divinized, that is, we “become partakers of the divine nature” (2 Peter 1:4). This is ultimately why God created us, to share in the life-giving love of the Trinity. Self-sacrificial love is the essential law of God’s covenant, which we broke—but Jesus kept. After assuming our humanity, He transformed it into a perfect image—and instrument—of the Trinity’s love, by offering a sacrificial gift-of-self to the Father on our behalf. The Son of God “took the form of a servant” (Philippians 2:7) so that sinful servants may be restored as sons of God. As Saint Athanasius declared: “The Son of God became the Son of Man so that sons of men could become sons of God.”48