Born of Water and the Spirit

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“Jesus answered, ‘Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God.’”

~ John 3:5, ESV

The above statement by Jesus in John’s Gospel has perplexed scholars and commentaries for centuries.

Particularly the phrase “born of water.”

There’s no question that Jesus’ words are ambiguous, hence, why brilliant minds have come to different conclusions on their meaning.

Bible experts have interpreted the phrase “born of water” as a reference to Christian water baptism (which hadn’t yet started), the baptism of John, the amniotic fluid before birth (a reference to human birth), the Torah, etc.

Recently a friend asked me how I understood the passage.

I’m making my answer public since it might help others. And I’m open to see if it can be refuted.

I don’t claim immaculate perception, so I’m not dogmatic about it. It’s not a hill I’d die on.

My interpretation hangs on what the writer (John) — who only uses “kingdom” in three passages in his Gospel – would have most likely understood Jesus to mean.

It also hangs on what Nicodemus would have likely understood Jesus to mean. I believe the Lord would have spoken in a way that the Pharisee could understand Him, even though it took him awhile to “get” what the Lord was communicating about the new birth.

To my mind, the best interpretation that fits the rest of John’s Gospel and what Nicodemus would have understood is that “water” is a reference to the Spirit of God.

Here’s my explanation.

The Context

Let’s first look at the context of the passage.

Now there was a man of the Pharisees named Nicodemus, a ruler of the Jews. This man came to Jesus by night and said to him, “Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher come from God, for no one can do these signs that you do unless God is with him.” Jesus answered him, “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born again he cannot see the kingdom of God.” 

Nicodemus said to him, “How can a man be born when he is old? Can he enter a second time into his mother’s womb and be born?” Jesus answered, “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God. That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit. Do not marvel that I said to you, ‘You must be born again.’  The wind blows where it wishes, and you hear its sound, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.”

Nicodemus said to him, “How can these things be?” Jesus answered him, “Are you the teacher of Israel and yet you do not understand these things? Truly, truly, I say to you, we speak of what we know, and bear witness to what we have seen, but you do not receive our testimony. If I have told you earthly things and you do not believe, how can you believe if I tell you heavenly things? 

~  John 3:1-12

Notice that Nicodemus makes a statement. Jesus doesn’t respond to it, but abruptly gets straight to the point of his spiritual condition.

Here’s my modern summarization of the opening part of this passage.

Nicodemus: “Jesus, it’s obvious that God is with you.”

Jesus: “To get into God’s kingdom, which you wrongly assume you are already part of, you must have a new birth.”

What mattered to the Jews of Jesus’ day was the issue of being born into the right family.[1] Everything hung on being a child of Abraham. Nicodemus believed this, and it’s where Jesus made His radical challenge.

According to the Lord, it’s not enough to be a son of Abraham. If a person wants to enter and even see God’s kingdom, they must be born a second time, born from above.

Jesus tells Nicodemus that he cannot rely on his natural birthright as a member of God’s chosen nation to be part of God’s kingdom. Instead, he must take the outside place (the place of the Gentiles) and enter God’s kingdom through a spiritual rebirth.[2]

Nicodemus had seen Jesus (the embodiment of God’s kingdom) and His miracles (the signs of the kingdom), yet Nicodemus hadn’t seen the kingdom itself.

This gives us a clue that Jesus’ remarks about the kingdom of God in John 3 emphasize its future aspect.[3]

Nicodemus had to be born from above in order to see the kingdom, let alone enter it. Clearly, Jesus is speaking spiritually. He’s discussing “heavenly things” (John 3:12).

Specifically, Jesus is using wind and water as images for the new birth. (The Greek word for Spirit is pneuma, and it’s also translated “wind” in John 3:8 as well in the rest of the passage for “Spirit.”)[4]

Notice that both water and wind come from above. “Born again,” in this text can mean born a second time, but it probably means “begotten from above.”[5]

So wind signifies the Spirit. And, as I will explain shortly, so does water.

Notice how John links the Spirit with water in John 7:38-39

“Whoever believes in me, as Scripture has said, rivers of living WATER will flow from within them.” By this he meant THE SPIRIT, whom those who believed in him were later to receive. Up to that time the Spirit had not been given, since Jesus had not yet been glorified.

So clearly in John 7, Jesus is using the image of water to depict the Spirit of God.

Nicodemus, being a Pharisee who knew the Hebrew Scriptures, would have understood that both water and wind represented the Spirit.

For example, Isaiah 44:3:

For I will pour WATER on the thirsty land,
    and streams on the dry ground;
I will pour out MY SPIRIT on your offspring,
    and my blessing on your descendants.

The Spirit of God is also linked with water in Ezekiel 36:24–27:

For I will take you out of the nations; I will gather you from all the countries and bring you back into your own land. I will sprinkle clean WATER on you, and you will be clean; I will cleanse you from all your impurities and from all your idols. I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you; I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh. And I will put MY SPIRIT in you and move you to follow my decrees and be careful to keep my laws.

Later, Paul will link regeneration (the new birth) with the Holy Spirit and washing (which is what water does) in Titus 3:5:

He saved us, not because of works done by us in righteousness, but according to his own mercy, by the WASHING of regeneration and renewal of THE HOLY SPIRIT.

My Preferred Interpretation

According to first-rate New Testament scholar Craig Keener,

The Greek wording of John 3:5 can mean either “water and the Spirit” or “water, that is, the Spirit.”[6]

Grant Osborne agrees saying,

The best option is to see “and” as meaning “that is” and to take “water” as a symbol of the Spirit—thus, “born of water, namely the Spirit.”[7]

This was the view of John Calvin:

Calvin in like fashion interpreted water and Spirit as meaning the same thing, comparable to “Spirit and fire” in the preaching of John the Baptist.[8]

Here’s the firsthand quote from Calvin’s commentary on John.

Accordingly, he employed the words Spirit and water to mean the same thing, and this ought not to be regarded as a harsh or forced interpretation; for it is a frequent and common way of speaking in Scripture, when the Spirit is mentioned, to add the word Water or Fire, expressing his power. We sometimes meet with the statement, that it is Christ who baptizeth with the Holy Ghost and with fire, (Matt. 3:11; Luke 3:16,) where fire means nothing different from the Spirit, but only shows what is his efficacy in us. As to the word water being placed first, it is of little consequence; or rather, this mode of speaking flows more naturally than the other, because the metaphor is followed by a plain and direct statement, as if Christ had said that no man is a son of God until he has been renewed by water, and that this water is the Spirit who cleanseth us anew, and who, by spreading his energy over us, imparts to us the vigour of the heavenly life, though by nature we are utterly dry. And most properly does Christ, in order to reprove Nicodemus for his ignorance, employ a form of expression which is common in Scripture; for Nicodemus ought at length to have acknowledged, that what Christ had said was taken from the ordinary doctrine of the Prophets.[9]

Leon Morris also affirms that this interpretation is “the most likely.” According to Morris,

We should accordingly take the passage to mean being born of “spiritual water,” and interpret this as another way of referring to being born “of the Spirit.”[10]

In light of the above, what makes the most sense to me is to translate John 3:5 as Keener, Obsorne, Calvin, and Morris suggest as a valid rendering:

Jesus answered, “Very truly I tell you, no one can enter the kingdom of God unless they are born of water, that is, the Spirit.

If this is what Jesus actually said, He was essentially repeating His statement in John 3:3:

Jesus answered him, “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born again he cannot see the kingdom of God.”

And it’s something He repeats again in John 3:6 and 3:9.

That which is born of the Spirit is spirit (v. 6).

So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit (v. 9).

There’s nothing about water mentioned again in Jesus’ entire discourage (John 3:1-21). He only mentions the Spirit, which strengthens the validity of this view.

So that’s my first choice for the best interpretation.

Another Interpretation

A second choice, if I were forced to choose another, would be to say that the water is the Word of God.

I’ve not read this interpretation in any scholar, by the way. And I’m not sure if Nicodemus would have understood water as a metaphor for God’s Word, but the New Testament often links regeneration with the reception of God’s Word.

To make her holy, cleansing her by the washing with WATER through the WORD.

~ Ephesians 5:26

You are already CLEAN because of the WORD I have spoken to you.

~ John 15:3

For you have been BORN AGAIN, not of perishable seed, but of imperishable, through the living and enduring WORD of God.

~ 1 Peter 1:23

He chose to give us BIRTH through the WORD of truth …

~ James 1:18

These passages reveal that the reception of God’s Word is involved in regeneration. And water symbolizes God’s Word (Ephesians 5:26).

By the way, “the Word of God,” in the context of preaching salvation, is the gospel of the kingdom, the gospel of Christ, the gospel of grace, the gospel of God, and the everlasting gospel (all terms for the same message).[11]

A Final Interpretation

A third choice, if I had to choose another, would be that “born of water” speaks of being baptized in the name of Jesus.

The two strong points supporting this view are that John links water with the Spirit in John 1:32-33 and the way the Israelites entered Canaan (a picture of the kingdom) was through the Red Sea (a picture of water baptism—1 Corinthians 10:1-2).

However, during Nicodemus’ day, there was only the baptism of John the Baptist. Baptizing in the name of Jesus wasn’t something we see until Acts. (While the disciples of Jesus were baptizing, we aren’t clear on the details—John 4:1-2.)

While water baptism is certainly significant in conversion-initiation (see my article Rethinking Water Baptism where I offer an explanation for how vital it is), I believe the first and second interpretations fit the passage better.

NOTES

[1] N.T. Wright, John for Everyone: Part One (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2004), 29.

[2] F.F. Bruce, Answers to Questions (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1972), 67.

[3] I riff on the meaning of seeing the kingdom and entering it in Insurgence: Reclaiming the Gospel of the Kingdom, 155ff.  According to F.F. Bruce, in John 3, seeing the kingdom and entering the kingdom are essentially the same. Just like seeing eternal life and receiving eternal life cannot be separated in John 3:36 and Matthew 19:17. F.F. Bruce, The Gospel of John (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1983), 84. Leon Morris agrees that there is probably no great difference between seeing and entering in this text. Leon Morris, The Gospel According to John, revised, NICNT (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1995), 193. According to Calvin, “To see the Kingdom of God is to enter it, as we shall soon see from the context.” J. Haroutunian and L.P. Smith, eds., Calvin: Commentaries (Westminster Press), 138. Keener believes that “seeing” the kingdom refers to “understanding” it. Craig Keener, The Gospel of John: A Commentary (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2003), 1:537. To my mind, since Jesus says that a person must be born from above to both see and enter the kingdom, seeing and entering are both related to getting into the doors of God’s eternal domain. It takes the new birth to perceive the kingdom (because it’s spiritual) as well as to fully enter it and enjoy its riches.

[4] R.V.C. Tasker, John: An Introduction and Commentary, TNTC, revised edition (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1960), 71.

[5] Craig Keener, The Gospel of John: A Commentary, 1:537-539, 546-547.

[6] Craig Keener, The IVP Bible Background Commentary: New Testament (InterVarsity Press, 1993), John 3:5; The Gospel of John: A Commentary, 1:550-551.

[7] Grant Osborne, Cornerstone Biblical Commentary, John and 1, 2, and 3 John (Tyndale House Publishers, 2007), 51-52.

[8] G.R. Beasley-Murray, John (Word Incorporated, 1999), 48.

[9] John Calvin, Commentary on the Gospel According to John (Logos Bible Software, 2010), 1:111.

[10] Leon Morris, The Gospel According to John, revised, NICNT, 193.

[11] I establish this point in Insurgence: Reclaiming the Gospel of the Kingdom. The apostles didn’t preach a bundle of different gospels. They preached one gospel that went by different names depending on what aspect of the good news was being emphasized. There is only one gospel (Galatians 1:6-9). Compare Luke 8:11 with Matthew 13:19 in the ESV. The word of God is the word (message) of the kingdom.

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