Sermon
Life Begins With Jesus
June 3-4, 2000
Pastor Donald Sheley

It's nice to have you with us today. I'm going to ask you to take your sermon notes from your bulletin. We've had a wonderful time. We're going to get acquainted with Nicodemus today. We'll not be able to go much further than just getting acquainted, but in your bulletin notes we have put the translation of the Living Bible for our text today. We've arrived in the study of the book of John at chapter 3. If you're using the pew Bible it's page 715.

Lord Jesus, by Your precious Holy Spirit, please be our teacher today and may we grow in the grace and in the knowledge of You, O wonderful Christ. This is our prayer.

After dark one night a Jewish religious leader named Nicodemus, a member of the sect of the Pharisees, came for an interview with Jesus. "sir," he said, "we all know that God has sent you to teach us. Your miracles are proof enough of this." Jesus replied, "With all the earnestness I possess I tell you this: Unless you are born again, you can never get into the Kingdom of God." "Born again!" exclaimed Nicodemus. "What do you mean? How can an old man go back into his mother's womb and be born again?" Jesus replied, "What I am telling you so earnestly is this: Unless one is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the Kingdom of God. Men can only reproduce human life, but the Holy Spirit gives new life from heaven; so don't be surprised at my statement that you must be born again! Just as you can hear the wind but can't tell where it comes from or where it will go next, so it is with the Spirit. We do not know on whom he will next bestow this life from heaven." "What do you mean?" Nicodemus asked. Jesus replied, "You, a respected Jewish teacher, and yet you don't understand these things? I am telling you what I know and have seen--and yet you won't believe me. But if you don't even believe me when I tell you about such things as these that happen here among men, how can you possibly believe if I tell you what is going on in heaven? For only I, the Messiah, have come to earth and will return to heaven again. And as Moses in the wilderness lifted up the bronze image of a serpent on a pole, even so that everyone who believes in me will have eternal life. God did not send his Son into the world to condemn it, but to save it."

Let's stop there. Last Lord's Day we talked about the cleansing of the temple. After Jesus left the marriage at Cana, joined by His family, went to Jerusalem and on His arrival, He cleaned out the temple. We didn't finish the last two verses of chapter 2. So if you'd like to turn there in your Bible they are very interesting verses. Verses 24 and 25 of John chapter 2 reads, But Jesus did not commit Himself to them, because He knew all men, and had no need that anyone should testify of man, for He knew what was in man. Now John places that statement right after Jesus has cleansed the temple, and he makes this comment: Jesus chose at that time not to reveal totally Himself. He would not commit Himself to two people because He knew what was in the human heart, and He knew that soon the wickedness of human hearts would nail Him to a cross. He knew that. And you'll find that frequently Jesus would heal someone but he would say, please don't say anything to anybody, because He knew that He had a timetable and if anger built more rapidly than His timetable, then the plan of God could be disrupted. So Jesus chose not to reveal Himself totally at that time. He committed Himself not to man, because He knows what's in every human heart.

The question is, what does God see when He looks into the heart of man? What did Jesus see when He watched those people of Jerusalem that day? And old Jeremiah answers the question, Jeremiah 17:9 says, The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked and beyond cure; Who can know it? Old Jeremiah said when you get right down to it; the human heart apart from a transformation by the grace of God is a despicable thing. It's wretched, it's wicked, and it's deceitful.

Old Solomon says in Ecclesiastes 9:3, he says, the hearts of men moreover are full of evil, and there is madness in their hearts while they live. So the human heart is not only deceitful, not only wicked, but filled with madness. And when you really believe that, it doesn't take much to understand why the society in our world is in the condition that it's in today. Wicked hearts do wicked things. Now I know that to talk about wicked hearts is not the storyline for some preachers today who desire to make their churches seeker friendly, because they choose not to make such comments. A preacher in the Southland preaches from his pulpit and this is what he said of recent days, he said, the word sin will never be allowed to be spoken in this church again. It's taken out of all of our prayers, all of our hymnals, and out of all of the Scripture reading. For he said the only sin that exists is the warped mind created by Christians as they look upon their own selves and not see them as the beautiful humanity they really are. Isn't that sad?

We're sinners because we see ourselves as sinners, and that's the only sin that exists. So he says, change and look at yourself and see what a wonderful person you are, and all the potential that's there, but there's no such thing and sin. That's a false profit. Jeremiah was right. Jesus was cautious because He knew that the human heart was deceitful and wicked.

In Mark 7:21 Jesus says, what comes out of a man is what makes him unclean. For from within, out of men's hearts, come evil thoughts, sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, greed, malice, deceit, lawlessness, envy, slander, arrogance, and folly. All of these come from the heart. That's what Jesus saw that day, and that's why He cautiously dealt with the people of Jerusalem. Now Paul goes a little further. In Romans 1:28 here's what Paul says, he says that furthermore since they did not think it worthwhile to retained the knowledge of God, He gave them over to a reprobate mind. What's that? A reprobate mind is a mind wherein God has taken away all the sensitivity of morality. There is no possibility of them understanding the difference between right and wrong. There is no conscience. And Paul says because man chose not to retain the knowledge of God, God backed away from their conscience from their mind and they are totally incapable of making a moral decision. And then Paul goes on to say, then they have become filled with every kind of wickedness, evil, greed, gossipers, slanderers, God haters, insolent, arrogant, senseless, faithless, heartless, ruthless. It's not a good picture. God says the human heart, because of sin, is wicked. And Jesus said because of that, I didn't commit Myself. I was cautious. Because He knew that the wickedness of human hearts would in months nail Him to a cross.

Now it's interesting to me that in the original text there are no divisions of chapters, and after John writes that word about Jesus being cautious with wicked hearts, he said, there was a man, after dark one night, whose name was Nicodemus. And he presents to us the representative of the human race. It's fascinating the way John does it. Now in your notes turn to page 2. We'll only have time today to get acquainted with Nicodemus so that in the days to come we will understand why he reacts as he does. As you noticed in my ministry, I take a lot of time giving you history, and background, and tradition so that when we understand the setting of a Scripture, it seems that then the Scripture is just like a flower. It all pops out and we can see what actually the Scripture is saying.

I got a wonderful little note from a 10-year-old girl last Sunday. When I get down in the dumps, and I do, Mary knows I do and some of you, and I wonder if it's worth it all, and this little 10-year-old girl wrote me a beautiful little note, she said, Pastor - probably pester - (congregation laughs) she said I just started coming to church and she said religion has always been difficult for me, but the way you explain the Scriptures, I now understand. I said, God, if I can help a 10-year-old understand, everybody else will. So what I want to do is I want to give you some background so that you'll understand this fellow who comes to Jesus under the cloak of darkness to have a conversation.

John says, back to our notes, let's talk about Nicodemus. I'm on page 2, two-thirds of the way down. For the most part, we see that Jesus was surrounded by the ordinary people, but here we see Him in contact with one of the aristocracy of Jerusalem. How fascinating that a member of the "Who's Who of Jerusalem" should seek out Jesus, a rustic itinerant preacher. Could He have anything in common with Nicodemus, a man with impeccable credentials? John describes Nicodemus as a man of the Pharisees, which meant he was one of the separated ones, an elite lay theologian dedicated to studying and living out every jot and tittle of the law. He was deeply religious.

Secondly, John says that he was a ruler of the Jews, and that simply means that he was part of the aristocracy known as the Sanhedrin. And then we note in our notes there is a strong possibility that Nicodemus was also very wealthy. When Jesus died, it was Nicodemus who brought for His body "a mixture of myrrh and aloes about a hundred pound weight", and only a wealthy man could have brought that for the burial of Jesus. So here he is, a deeply religious man, a man with tremendous political power in his society, and a man with a big bank account. You say, I think he had it all didn't he? No. That's why he sought out Jesus.

Now there are two areas that I want to discuss briefly with you, and that is where it says that he was a member of the sect of the Pharisees. We're going to run across that word over and over again in the gospel of John so let's learn what a Pharisee is. A Pharisee had his origin about 200 years before Christ. There was deep concern in the heart of a few that the purity of Judaism was being tainted, and as a result, they were called separatist and they separated themselves and lived in small communities because they wanted to somehow preserve, by isolation, the purity of their religion. One of them was called the Essenes. Now they were a separatist group, and let me draw you the map. If you look at Palestine, we'll say this is the Mediterranean, here's Spain, here's Italy, and here's Turkey, and here's Syria, and here's Palestine. Down here in Egypt, and this is Africa, and over here it is Assyria. And if you take Palestine, it's only 70 miles wide and about 140 miles in length, so it's a very small country. You look at the map and up here at the top is a little lake called the Sea of Galilee, and then there's a stream. And the reason why it's drawn crocked is because every spring when the rains come, it always changes its course. It just washes out a new way of travel because it's usually very small during the summer. And then you get down to the Dead Sea, and it lies about 1800 feet below sea level. It's so salty you can almost walk on it. And about 35-38 miles east of Jerusalem, and over here in this desert area around the Dead Sea, the Essenes lived. They were very, very religious. They took three baths a day just to keep clean, ceremonially. And they were very meticulous in what they ate, and how they ate, and when they ate, and when they prayed, and they were the ones most likely that stored away in those caves the Dead Sea scrolls that word later found in 1957. They wanted to keep the purity of Judaism.

Well the Pharisees were much like that although they had their communities, little small living communities closer to Jerusalem, and what made them so unique is they were not only committed to Moses' law as all the separatists were, but they went a step further. They committed themselves to all tradition and oral law. Let me explain. Moses received on the mount of the words from God which said the, the Sabbath is a holy day so keep it holy. It's very simple. Well was too simple for the religionists and for the scribes in the ancient past and they said, we're going to give some definition to what God meant by being holy. So they wrote laws, traditions, called the traditions and the oral laws, and they took this one law, of course, and they took them all. But we'll just use the Sabbath for instance, and these scribes and these separatists they said, well, this is what you can do and what you can't do on the Sabbath. We'll tell you what God meant when He said keep it holy. That's what most religions do. So what they did it is they said you can only travel a certain distance, and if your house is further than that distance than synagogue, then you've got to come and camp here and on the Sabbath you can only travel a certain number of days. That was oral tradition. Moses didn't say anything about it, and neither did God.

And they said you can only carry a burden of a certain weight, and they told you it had to be about the weight of a fig. And another thing, in those days, in the days of Jesus, they had false teeth made out of wood. And wooden false teeth were outlawed, I mean, when you went to the synagogue you took your false teeth and left them home because you were carrying a burden on the Sabbath day that violated tradition. That's religion folks. That's why Jesus didn't get religious in His day with those of religion. And that's why Jesus said to the Pharisees, you Pharisees, you're more concerned about filling all of these trivialities created by man, the traditions of men, than the laws of Moses. They were obnoxiously religious. You say what do you mean by that Pastor? Well there are just some people whose religion is very obnoxious. Right? I mean they've got their own set ways and everybody else is wrong, and they're right. Super spiritual people always bother me. And old Nicodemus was a super spiritual guy. He was a Pharisee. And the sad part about the Pharisees is it was their group, and at no time in history did you ever have more than 6000 people who made up the Pharisees group. Their religion is what we would call conservative fundamental Judaism. The opposite were the Sadducees. They were the liberalists, they were the modernist of the day. They didn't believe in life after death. That's why they were sad-you-see. (Congregation laughs) Always remember that. You know that when life is over here, as far as they were concerned, it was all finished. No, the Pharisees said, we believe in angels. We believe in a resurrection, and that's what divided the Pharisees and the Sadducees.

And so old Nicodemus was a very, very religious man. He had committed to keep all 6000 of those regulations meticulously. Secondly, it says that he was a ruler of the Jews. That is, he was part of the Sanhedrin. Now the Sanhedrin was a group of 70 men which they said their origin dated back to Numbers 11:7 where God had said to Moses, you can't take care of these 2 million people all by yourself, select 70 men to help you. So the Sanhedrin says that our group began when God told Moses to get 70 helpers. So there were 70 men who moved alongside Moses to help him govern the nation of Israel. But it's interesting, when you've read the Old Testament very little is said about the Sanhedrin, in fact, they almost disappear from sacred writing. Centuries went by and you didn't here a thing about the Sanhedrin, then you turn to Josephus and you find that about 200 years before Christ the Sanhedrin become very popular and very powerful again, 70 men.

Now the reason for that is this, when you look at the map and you say here's the Mediterranean Sea, here's the coastline of Palestine, and up here's Damascus, Beirut, and over here is Baghdad, and here's Turkey, and down here is Egypt and North Africa. If you were in the Orient or from the East if you were going to go to Africa, the only way you could get to Africa - you couldn't come straight across because you'd cross through the Arabian desert and you'd die in the desert - so what you did it is you took the route following the Euphrates and the Tigris River up to the north to Damascus and then came down through Palestine. And after you went through Palestine, you could go on to Africa. The same way. If you're from Europe you had to either sail through the Mediterranean - you couldn't cross over here at Portugal because you have the isthmus there and the waters are very treacherous - and so on land you traveled across Macedonia and Turkey, Syria, down through Palestine and then off into Africa. It became known as the world's land bridge, and in ancient times when the great monarchs controlled the world, they knew that if they were going to control commerce and transportation, they had to subdue Palestine. That's why when you read the history of Palestine, very few years of their history were spent in freedom. They were always controlled by an outside monarch, because those empires, the Greek empire and the Roman Empire, had to control that piece of land in order to control the world.

But they had a problem, those Jewish people were the most obstinate, arrogant people on the face of the earth. Obstinate in this sense, their religion meant so much to them that they would die if anyone violated their religion. No matter who the outside country might be. They believed so deeply in their Judaistic faith, so the Greeks got smart as well as the Romans and they said, look at, we're not going to rule these people, we'll let the Sanhedrin take care of all of the internal affairs. We'll be the one that can finalize if we want to change the decisions, but the Sanhedrin, those 70 men, will be the men who will control Palestine. Now you can see why Nicodemus held such a prominent position of the top 70 men in the nation. He's a Sanhedrin. A powerful group of men made up mostly of the aristocracy of the priesthood, but most of those were Sadducees. So now you've got a picture. Here's a land where the Pharisees were committed in-depth to the detail of Judaism. Nicodemus is with them. And here's a nation that was allowed by all of the empires to govern their own internal affairs, and old Nicodemus sat on the top rung, and his bank account was full. You say, he's got religion, he's got power, and he's got money, he must have that all. But he didn't.

Probably what happened, Nicodemus makes the comments, Jesus you couldn't do what you to if with you. You know why Nicodemus said that? Because Nicodemus probably sat in some board meetings of the Sanhedrin and they're already deeply concerned about this itinerant Galilean who's messed up business down at the temple. It's probably the main topic point for their gathering, and old Nicodemus is there. But Nicodemus knew one thing, when you trace back through Old Testament prophecies, the cleansing of the temple was one of the things that the Messiah was going to do. You see old Nicodemus didn't miss that prophecy, and he's sitting at night and he's thinking this thing through, and the Bible says that this religious, wealthy, powerful man decided I've got to go talk with Jesus. Why, why did he choose the covering of darkness to do so? It is a fascinating conversation that a man of power, wealthy, and religion had with Jesus. But my time this up and it's dinnertime for you folks, so we'll continue our lesson next week.

Let's pray. Lord Jesus we've had a wonderful time. The musicians have thrilled our hearts, the bell choir, the time we've had together on our knees as a family. It's been a wonderful time, and today we've taken just a few moments to get acquainted with an ancient man of history whose name appears in the text of Scripture. A man who seemed to have everything, but had nothing. A man that represents the human race, for many of us sitting here remember the day when life may have been good to us in many dimensions of sufficiency, but beneath it all we were empty. Something was missing, and Lord Jesus, You came to us in grace, and mercy, and love, and through the work of Your precious Holy Spirit, You reveal truth to us, a truth that set us free because we put our trust in Thee. Thank you for taking us from our darkness and eradicating our spiritual blindness and filling our spiritual emptiness. Thank you for being such a wonderful Savior, and we love You today, and everybody said, amen. God bless you. May you have a wonderful day.