Jesus answered and said to him, “Most assuredly, I say to
you, unless one is born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.”
In the beginning God
created Adam and Eve, and they were good. He put them in the Garden of Eden and
gave them everything they needed for life and living. Life was good – life was
perfect, but in the middle of the garden were special two trees. One is the “tree
of life”, the other the “tree of the knowledge of good and evil”. God told them
they could eat from all the trees in the Garden except from the tree of the
knowledge of good and evil.
God wanted them to eat
from the tree of life, that’s why He told them that it was special and that
they could eat from it, but God being God and perfect didn’t want to command it
of them. He wanted them to make a conscious decision to choose life – life with
Him forever.
But Adam an Eve either
by ignorance or a lack of understanding never quite made it to eating of the
tree of life. Before they could get to it, they were deceived by Satan, and
they disobeyed God ate of the tree that He told them not to eat of – The tree
of the knowledge of Good and Evil.
I don’t know about you,
but the clue was right there in the name – who wants to know evil? Not me. But
apparently Eve and Adam didn’t quite get it, and I guess if you’ve never seen
or experienced evil you won’t know just how bad evil is. They were deceived and
they ate of the wrong tree and with that sin came into the world. And since
Adam and Eve were the only humans existing that that point, they had
effectively chosen not just for themselves but for everyone else that would
descend from them – thanks guys.
God had also told them
that the day they ate of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil that they
would die, because you see if you don’t choose life, you’ve chosen death. And
on the day they disobeyed God, something in them died and in it’s place sin
took over.
What is sin? Who
is this sin?
Simply put, sin is the
producer of sins. Sin is the producer of evil and all its products like shame,
and fraud and lies and strife within us and in others. And since they had
chosen evil, they had welcomed him into their lives instead of Life. And sin
took over.
Now this posses a
problem. God is holy and perfect and good. In Him is no sin or evil. His eyes
cannot behold sin. He cannot commune with sin. And this effectively separated
us from God and His protection, and his cover. And since that day sin has a
free reign. The world we have today is all the evidence we need to know what
happens when sin has free reign.
But thankfully nothing,
not even sin can separate us from the love of God. Because God loves us even
when we are sinners. And God in His love decided to give us another chance to
chose Life. The life we should have chosen in the Garden of Eden.
Jesus said to him, “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one
comes to the Father except through Me.
But in order for us to
be able to receive life, we need to first eject sin from within us. Unfortunately,
sin said that the only way to release us is by death, for the wages of sin is
death. The only payment sin is willing to collect in exchange for a person is
death. Unfortunately, dead people cannot choose life because after death the
only thing man has to look forward to is judgment. So there has to be another
way – what if someone else died our death? What if someone else paid sin for us
so we didn’t have to?
But how would that
work? Since Adam and Eve effectively chose for us all, this means that sin
lives in all of us, so if anyone dies, they’ll be dying for their own sin.
They’ll be paying sin what they owe him so their death would serve no real
purpose for the rest of us. Their death would not be able to save us. We needed
someone without sin, that way their death would not be for them but for us.
This is where
Our Lord Jesus comes in.
Jesus was born without
sin because He wasn’t born of the seed of Adam. Mary carried the first
surrogate pregnancy recorded in history because she became pregnant not because
she had sex but because the seed of the life of God was implanted into her womb
and she gave birth to Jesus Christ our savior. Finally, there’s hope for
humanity. We now have a man born without sin, who sin had no hold over, who
death had no claim on, if He died, his death would not be His. It could be
ours.
For God so loved the world that He gave His only
begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have
everlasting life. For God did not send His Son into the world to
condemn the world, but that the world through Him might be saved.
Jesus is our second
chance to choose life. The life that Adam and Eve should have chosen in the
Garden of Eden but didn’t. But God is still God, He hasn’t changed. And because
He hasn’t changed, He won’t force us to choose Him. He’s giving us the same
choice He gave Adam and Eve in the beginning to choose life, to choose Him.
How?
Jesus answered and said to him, “Most assuredly, I say to
you, unless one is born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.”
We must be born again.
I know it may sound weird cos no one is really born twice. Especially not an
adult. But the wages of sin is death, and that death must be paid. The only way
around it is if someone dies in our place. He receives our sin and dies for us
and in exchange we receive His life. In this way sin dies in us and we get new
life, Jesus’s life. This is how we are born again.
How do we give
Jesus our sin and receive His life?
even so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that
whoever believes in Him should not perish but have
eternal life.
By believing and by
asking. It’s really that simple. You don’t need me to tell you what to say, use
your own words, from your heart. Cry out today. The Father’s been waiting a
long time to welcome you home.
