How would you and I have comprehended what Jesus told Nicodemus? Nicodemus had been raised thinking nothing was as important as the ancestry of Abraham. All his waking hours this had ever been before him. He had known nothing much of the Spirit world. All his religious up-bringing had done nothing to allow him to comprehend spiritual things. When he came to Jesus that night he was stepping way out of the box just to come. If he were sent, we know not from whom; if he came of his own volition, we will consider he was more honest than the others with whom he had had daily fellowship, or if he just passed by where Jesus was (no doubt he thought he knew where Jesus was staying) and if he found Him, he had a prepared, opening speech, planned. Jesus had to be considered the outsider, the enemy, perhaps even to Nicodemus, but Nicodemus, a worthy of Israel, had to at least find out if all he had heard about Christ was founded in truth. Sometimes curiosity is an extremely forceful driving thing!!
As if Jesus interrupted his planned opening, Nicodemus must have been dumbfounded by their discussion. Thinking as a Jew, Nicodemus might have even known there was much to question in exactly WHO Jesus earthly father was. You can be sure the stories about Joseph and Mary had had much play among the sophisticates of his day. But Nicodemus came throwing himself before Jesus, giving Him the benefit of all the stories, all the guesses, and all the lies he had heard! Question, did he know or did he believe Jesus was the promised Messiah?
Nicodemus would have had to have been a religious historian to understand WHY Jesus, not John the baptist came working miracles. They both taught the same gospel, yet only one of them worked miracles! WHY? Every time God created something new that had could not been comprehended by mankind, He began it with miracles-the creation-the Law of Moses-and now the Church of Christ!! The creation the heavens and the earth were physical, the Law of Moses was physical, that was the only realm in which man thought!! It seems to make sense that Jesus interrupted Nicodemus “warm up” speech out of respect, not indifference. He was going to make it easy of Nicodemus and get to what Nicodemus really wanted-even though he did not know exactly what it was!! What messed Nicodemus up worse was when you have your mind made up as to how the answer must be to your own question- when the answer that is given is completely out of that realm and beyond your ability to consider, even to reason about, if you could have been comfortable in a conversation, you would be thrown at a loss.
You know how sometimes when you have been waiting for so long for someone, anyone to get the answer you have been preparing for so long, you jump in in front of them and give it, anyway? It was not that Jesus was over anxious, it was that this was to be the greatest work God would ever perform for His greatest creation and the answer could not wait a second longer!! Ever since Christ had created Adam and Eve, according to the “mystery of the ages” given Him by God, the Father, the reason for creating man had been in doubt. Why man? Putting an over-balanced spiritual make-up in a physical being just would not make sense to anyone who could have reasoned on God’s level! 2/3’s of the make-up of all human beings was spiritual, but they were put in a physical world. Was God going to come down to this physical place and dwell among man or was physical man one day change in a fashion not understood but alluded and have man to come to a place where this same human specimen could live with God? What did not help was that God had created spiritual servants, called angels, for this physical creation! Also, these spiritual servants were created BEFORE they whom they would serve!! Again, you must question, why man? Then, God put this physical man and woman in a physical Garden where everything in the garden was what would serve the pleasure and appetites of spiritual beings, not physical! God put in the Garden a “tree of life” when He had never intended for man to live eternally in this human clay. He put in another tree that showed choice before man ever HAD such a thing given him by God. Finally, God had introduced Adam and Eve to plants and animals who had metamorphosis as a pattern. Did Adam and Eve understand metamorphosis? Probably no more than they understood why the “tree of life” or the “tree of knowledge of good and evil” were there, but then again, all these things were there whether they understood them or not, were they not?!!
