You Must Be Born Again (Rom. 2:25-29)
Portrait of Nicodemus by James Tissot I want you to imagine what it must have been like to be a Jewish man or woman in the first century A.D. You were a member of the people of God that were in covenant with him through Abraham and Moses. And more than that, your nation was the only nation on the face of the planet for which this was true, and this was the way it had been for 1500 years. The temple, the rite of circumcision and the possession of the law of God were the clear signposts that your nation was a divinely favored nation. The history of your nation was the history of the Exodus, Sinai, the conquest of Canaan, the kings and the prophets. Now it cannot be surprising that many Israelites would think that all this made God’s favor a sort of automatic thing for them, at least as long as they kept their noses clean relative to the other nations. They remembered that other part of their history, their defeat at the hands of pagan nations and their deportation into foreign lan
