Jesus' answer to Nicodemus' pathetic and almost despairing question-the question which rises from the troubled heart of humanity itself-is sublimely simple. He indicates that man's extremity is God's opportunity, and that the thing which seems to us impossible becomes easy when we have all Omnipotence to aid us. The new life which is the true life is the gift of God. The Spirit breathes where He lists, in the souls of the young or the old, the virtuous or the vicious, the Jew or the Gentile, the Pharisee or the publican; and everywhere His breath is life-giving. The life which He imparts, like every other form of life, is an ultimate reality which man can neither create nor define. But of its truth there can be no reasonable question. Every man who sincerely repents of his sin and accepts Divine forgiveness passes out of death into life. He is “born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God.” And being so born, he can see the Kingdom of God. And this new life is mediated to him by the Son of man, lifted up that whosoever believeth in Him may have life eternal.
The Spirit does His work by glorifying Christ, imparts life by revealing Christ: “He shall take of mine, and declare it unto you.” Regeneration is the beginning of a supernatural life, in which man realizes himself by living in, with, for, and like Christ.
The act of being born again is as mysterious as God. All the complaints which have been showered upon this doctrine have referred to the act-the act with which we have really nothing to do, which is a process of God, the agency of the unseen wind of the Spirit, and which Jesus Himself has expressly warned us not to expect to understand. “Thou canst not tell,” He said, “whence it cometh or whither it goeth.”
But there is nothing to frighten search in this. For precisely the same kind of mystery hangs over every process of nature and life. We do not understand the influence of sunshine on the leaves of a flower at this spring-time, any more than we do the mysterious budding of spiritual life within the soul; but botany is a science for all that.
We do not give up the study of chemistry as hopeless because we fail to comprehend the unseen laws which guide the delicate actions and reactions of matter. Nor do we disbelieve in the influence of food on the vital frame because no man has found the point exactly at which it passes from dead nourishment into life. We do not avoid the subject of electricity because electricity is a mystery, or heat because we cannot see heat, or meteorology because we cannot see the wind. Marvel not then, from the analogy of physical nature, if, concerning this Spirit of Regeneration, we cannot tell whence it cometh and whither it goeth. It is not on that account unintelligible that a man should be born again.1 [Note: Henry Drummond, The Ideal Life, 190.]
