Thursday/8/21/14
In Ezekiel’s vision the Lord told him, “I will sprinkle clean water upon you. And ”He said, I will
give you a new heart and place a new spirit within you.”
Jesus seemed to have had this passage in mind in Chapter
Three of John’s Gospel. Speaking
with the Pharisee Nicodemus, he said, “No one can enter the kingdom of God
without being born of water and the Spirit.”
Nicodemus was a certified teacher of the Jewish Religion, so
Jesus chided him for not seeing this connection to what God had said to
Ezekiel.
Let’s switch our attention to that conversation between
Jesus and Nicodemus. Jesus told him “A man cannot enter the kingdom of heaven
unless he be born from above.”
John’s Greek word which every good Bible translates as “from
above” was anothen. There was a
similar Greek word which translates to “again,” and Nicodemus mistakenly took that meaning. It had
him asking, “How can a person once grown old be born again?
To illustrate what he meant by “being born from above,”
Jesus said God touches our souls in a mysterious way, coming like wind that no
one sees.
It’s a shame that the mistaken way Nicodemus heard Our
Lord’s words have hung on, filling our air waves with spiritual advice from
born again people.
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