What did Nicodemus misunderstand?

In the previous sections, we looked at two very common misunderstandings concerning rebirth. The first is that many people think of rebirth as a New Testament concept. Yet from the story of Nicodemus, we can see that it should not have been something new to him when Jesus spoke to him about being born again.

The second misunderstanding is that many associate rebirth with the beginning of the life of faith. But what happens at that point, to use a comparison, corresponds much more to conception than to birth. Rebirth is a process — but we will talk more about that later.

Now I would like to point out a third major misunderstanding about rebirth. Even today, almost everyone falls into the same error that Nicodemus himself struggled with. Let us look again at the beginning of that conversation:

“Now there was a man of the Pharisees named Nicodemus, a ruler of the Jews. He came to Jesus by night and said to him, ‘Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher come from God, for no one can do these signs that you do unless God is with him.’ Jesus answered him, ‘Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born again he cannot see the kingdom of God.’ Nicodemus said to him, ‘How can a man be born when he is old? Can he enter a second time into his mother’s womb and be born?’” (John 3:1–4)

When Jesus brought up the question of rebirth, what was Nicodemus’s reaction? What did he immediately associate it with? Pregnancy, birth, a newborn baby — and then the next thought came naturally: should we go back into our mother’s womb and be born again? But Jesus was not talking about that at all.

Rebirth is not quite the same as earthly birth; there is a very important difference. Rebirth is God’s creative, renewing work within us. When God created man — Adam and his wife — He did not create two babies, but a mature man and woman, ready for marriage. The same thing happens in rebirth. The person who is born again is not a baby but a spiritually mature adult — the mature state described, for example, in the Letter to the Ephesians and the Letter to the Hebrews.

Just as Nicodemus once imagined the born-again person as a newborn child, people today tend to make the same mistake. But in the kingdom of God, it is not a baby who comes into the world at rebirth, but a mature man or woman.

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