BELIEVE
John 3:1-15
“Very truly I tell you, we speak of what we know, and we testify to what we have seen, but still you people do not accept our testimony. I have spoken to you of earthly things and you do not believe; how then will you believe if I speak of heavenly things?”
Nicodemus came to Jesus wanting to know. But he struggles to understand. “You are Israel’s teacher,” said Jesus, “and do you not understand these things?”
The problem with Nicodemus, I think, is that he is a scholar and is interested in knowledge but not in letting that knowledge shape his mind, heart and life. And so he knows, and seeks to know even more, and yet still does not know because he fails to embrace what he already knows. “Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher who has come from God”, he tells Jesus, yet instead of openly engaging him, he comes to him in the night. So does he really know that Jesus is a teacher who has come from God?
Yet Jesus generously tells him what he wants to know, and helps him to understand what will happen with a reference to an incident in the past: “Just as Moses lifted up the snake in the wilderness, so the Son of Man must be lifted up, that everyone who believes may have eternal life in him.” The people spoke against Moses and God sent snakes and many died from their poisonous bites. But after he interceded for them, God instructed Moses to construct a snake on a high pole and anyone bitten needed only to look at the snake lifted up to be saved (Numbers 21).
But Nicodemus still has to undo the knot that is in his mind and heart; he has to decide whether to trust the One who has told him answers he would never know (or even understand) otherwise. He still has to embrace Jesus or he will never know.
This is the question that all of us must also deal with constantly. Believing is nothing if it is only a mental tick in the head. To truly believe, one must respond appropriately. Without the appropriate response you still remain where you are and you remain who you are; that is as good as not believing. Believing is not a one time action; it sets the direction, the agenda, the context, and the focus of the rest of your life. The Gospel proclaims that God has now made powerful forces available to you: Jesus your King; the Holy Spirit who will birth you into the Kingdom; and God the Father, who now loves you as his child; but you still have to surrender yourself to Jesus as King, the Holy Spirit as your Guide and God as your Father, in order for you to move from the domain of darkness into the kingdom of light. This is what it means to believe.
For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him. Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe stands condemned already because they have not believed in the name of God’s one and only Son.