By Colleen Tinker
What does Easter have to do with the new birth?
I wish I had an easy way to explain why Easter is different now. I used to watch it come and go almost as if I were watching someone else’s party, peering at people celebrating something I didn’t understand. I could see their joy, but I could only imagine why they felt it.
I remember seeing newspaper ads of Easter hams on sale; I read stories of mothers taking their daughters to buy new dresses for Easter. I saw the signs outside Sunday churches proclaiming “He Is Risen!”
I both envied and resented Sunday-Christians’ Easter joy. I felt vaguely superior when I saw announcements for Easter sunrise services; the “venerable day of the Sun” was pagan, and I knew that Jesus’ resurrection gave us no excuse to observe false worship on a false day. In fact, Sunday was a work day for Jesus. He honored the Sabbath by resting in death, and He did the work of resurrection after the holy hours had passed.
Of course I knew Jesus rose from death on that first day of the week, but I couldn’t see anything about that resurrection that was important for me now. It was the evidence that one day all of us would be resurrected—a dubious promise because none of us knew whether we would be raised to eternal life or to everlasting annihilation after a temporary burn. Nevertheless, Jesus’ resurrection was the event that confirmed we would all rise one day.
The resurrection just didn’t seem to be that significant to me except as a promise that one day I would face judgment. That future certainty brought me only fear, never joy.
I concluded that Sunday Christians celebrated Easter because they didn’t understand the truth. The truth they were missing was the intrinsic sacredness of Sabbath; their Easter celebrations were a pagan deception. The resurrection was just an event for future fulfillment; Sunday-worshipers had overlooked God’s ultimate gift and test: the holiness of the seventh-day Sabbath.
New life
Then the gospel invaded my life. Jesus had done everything necessary for my salvation, and I could know absolutely that I am saved! Jesus had kept all the terms of the covenant with His Father as my Substitute! He took my sin; He became the sufficient Sacrifice. He gave up His own life after experiencing the suffocation of being forsaken by His Father because of human sin—MY sin. He was mocked and beaten and buried in a tomb, and on the third day, according to Scripture, the ground shook and Jesus arose in an eternal, glorified human body!
Jesus had taken the curse of death to which the law had sentenced everyone. He became sin for us and died a sinner’s death, even though He had no sin in Him—and then He arose! He literally broke the curse of death into which each person ever born was condemned.
If I believed and trusted Jesus’ finished work of atonement for my sin, I no longer had to fear I might not be saved. I could KNOW my sin was no longer on me but on Jesus, and if I trusted Him, I would pass at that moment from death to life (Jn. 5:24)!
When I understood and believed the gospel and the miracle of the new covenant in Jesus’ blood, I was born again. What Jesus had said to Nicodemus in John 3:3–6 suddenly made sense: when I believed in the Lord Jesus, I was born of the Spirit. God’s promise given through Ezekiel became reality for me:
“Then I will sprinkle clean water on you, and you will be clean. I will cleanse you from all your filthiness and from all your idols. Moreover, I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit within you; and I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh” (Ez. 36:25–26).
There are no words that adequately explain receiving that new heart and new spirit from the Lord. I knew, though, that I was different. I felt joy; I knew I was forgiven and saved. I knew also that the promised indwelling Holy Spirit (Eph. 1:13–14) had come to me.
I had always been an anxious, hyper-vigilant person. I worried about doing things right, about being prepared for the future, about rectifying my sins and being better. I even thought to myself that I had two “places”: the past which was filled with failures and warnings for the future, and the future which demanded that I be conscientious and persistent so I would not fail.
One evening shortly after trusting Jesus alone, I had a sudden realization that the Lord had addressed my anxiety. We had just finished our weekly Bible study with our Christian neighbors with whom we were systematically reading through whole books of the New Testament. After our neighbors left, I had taken out the trash, and as I walked back into the house, I looked through our windows from the outside. The lights were on, and the house looked warm and inviting. As I walked, I felt content—a deep contentment that was unusual. I was aware that the Lord had given me that moment, that peace, and that joy in His word.
Suddenly I knew what I was experiencing. “This is the Holy Spirit,” I remember saying out loud to myself. “The Holy Spirit has given me TODAY!”
I could not remember ever feeling that I had either permission or the ability to enjoy the present moment. I had to be vigilant, on guard, prepared, never resting in the moment for fear I was blindsided by an unexpected crisis.
That night I knew that the Lord had given me my life. He had relieved my anxiety by giving me Himself. For the first time I could remember, I felt peaceful. I was experiencing rest in Jesus!
New birth
As an Adventist, I had been annoyed with Christians who claimed to be “born again”, as if they were some sort of superior beings who had some subjective “experience” that we who cared about “truth” didn’t claim. Oh, I knew that Jesus had used that term as the necessary “thing” for seeing the kingdom of God, but Adventism couldn’t explain what the new birth actually was.
Sometimes it was assumed to be a commitment to turning away from one’s old life to embracing living according to Adventism’s tenets, a decision symbolized by being baptized as an Adventist. Sometimes it was simply assumed to be embracing the beliefs of Adventism as defined by Ellen White and turning away from doctrines, even biblical ones, that disagreed with the worldview described by Ellen White’s great controversy paradigm.
In fact, just days ago I heard someone who no longer espouses Adventism but who has embraced a reactionary, Ellen White view of doctrine, speaking of being “born again” as a way to assume common ground with Christians for whom “born again” means something very different,
The biblical concept of being “born again” is not a metaphor as Adventism implied it is. Rather it is something real that happens in our spirits when we believe in the Lord Jesus and embrace His gospel of our salvation (Eph. 1:13-14). Jesus described it like this:
Truly, truly, I say to you unless one is born of water and the Spirit he cannot enter into 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 be amazed that I said to you, “You must be born again” (Jn 3:5-7).
Jesus said “that which is born of flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit.” In other words, we are born physically when our mothers deliver us from the womb into the world. Flesh gives birth to flesh. But when we are born, our spirits—the part of us that is distinct from our flesh and which goes to be with the Lord when we are absent from the flesh (2 Cor. 5:1-9), are born dead.
Adventism does not teach that we are born literally spiritually dead, because Adventism denies that we have immaterial spirits. Ephesians 2:1–3, however, states that we are all at first dead in trespasses and sins, subject to the “prince of the power of the air, of the spirit that is now working in the sons of disobedience.”
In fact, Paul says we are “by nature children of wrath” (Eph. 2:3).
We are naturally born into the “domain of darkness,” and when we believe in Jesus and His finished work, God is the One who rescues us and transfers us into “the kingdom of His beloved Son” (Col 1:13).
To put it another way, when we believe in the Lord Jesus and trust Him alone, we at that moment have “eternal life,” and we do “not come into judgment, but [have] passed out of death into life” (Jn. 5:24).
John explained the miracle of new birth this way:
But as many as received Him, to them He gave the right to become children of God, even to those who believe in His name, who were born, not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God” (Jn. 1:12, 13).
New birth and the resurrection
Here’s what I did not understand as an Adventist. First, because I believed that man is merely physical, that “spirit” was merely “breath” and that when one ceased to breathe, he ceased to be a living soul and ceased to exist, I did not understand that I was literally born dead, not merely infected with corrupted genes which predisposed me to sin.
Because I am human, I was born spiritually dead because of Adam’s legacy to me: death (Rom. 5:12–14; 1 Cor. 15:22). At the same time, my dead spirit lived in a breathing body. I needed to be born of the Spirit!
Even more, I had no idea that the new birth—whatever it was—was intimately connected with the Lord Jesus’s resurrection. The birth of our dead spirits by the Holy Spirit, our reception of new spirits as God promised long ago through Ezekiel and Jeremiah, is the heart of our new covenant reality. Because Jesus offered the sufficient sacrifice to pay for human sin, He became the One who broke the curse of death.
As 1 Corinthians 15:56 says, “The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law.”
Jesus broke the power of sin by paying the price God demanded for it—death as articulated in the law. He also broke the power of death—the curse given to every human since Adam’s fall. In Jesus the power of sin and the curse of death are broken!
Because Jesus broke the power of sin and the curse of death, He opened a new, living way for us to approach God (Heb. 10:20). His broken body and shed blood opened the only doorway out of our domain of darkness into which we are born.
Through believing in Jesus’ sacrifice and resurrection, His victory over our otherwise inevitable eternal destruction, we are reconciled to God and born of the Spirit. Our dead spirits come to life by the resurrection life of the Lord Jesus!
Romans 5:8–10 explains it this way:
But God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. Much more then, having now been justified by His blood, we shall be saved from the wrath of God through Him. For if while we were enemies we were reconciled to God through the death of His Son, much more, having been reconciled, we shall be saved by His life.
In other words, Jesus’ blood cancels our debt of sin, but His resurrection life is what actually saves us. Because He paid for the sins which demanded our death, He broke death’s legal hold on us, and when we trust Jesus, we receive eternal life. Jesus’s breaking the curse of death is what gives us our eternal life.
Paul says this in 1 Corinthians 15:17:
If Christ has not been raised, your faith is worthless; you are still in your sins.
Paul further connects Jesus’s resurrection with our spiritual life in Romans 8:8–11:
Those who are in the flesh cannot please God. However, you are not in the flesh but in the Spirit, if indeed the Spirit of God dwells in you. But if anyone does not have the spirit of Christ, he does not belong to Him. If Christ is in you, though the body is dead because of sin, yet the spirit is alive because of righteousness. But if the Spirit of Him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, He who raised Christ Jesus from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through His Spirit who dwells in you.
In other words, when we believe the gospel of our salvation and trust Jesus’ death, burial, and resurrection as the full atonement for our sin, we pass from death to life. Our dead spirits are born again, born of God the Spirit, and we receive eternal life—spiritual life—at that very moment.
The indwelling Holy Spirit gives eternal life to our human spirits, even though we still live in our mortal bodies, but the indwelling Holy Spirit makes us new creatures with new desires and identities in Christ. Moreover, the Holy Spirit not only gives us spiritual life the moment we believe, taking us out of the domain of darkness, but His presence is the guarantee that He will ultimately give us resurrected, glorified bodies as well!
Conclusion
I have come to understand why the resurrection is perhaps the most glorious of all Christian celebrations. Yes, Christmas is glorious as well—the day we remember that the second person of the Trinity took humanity and lived among us in order to be our perfect Sacrifice and Substitute.
The resurrection, though, is the reason we can be born again. Jesus paid the price for our sin, and the resurrection has broken the curse under which we were born.
He brings our dead spirits to life the moment we trust Him, and His indwelling Spirit is our guarantee that one day our bodies as well will receive eternal life.
Because Jesus rose from death, I have been born again and indwelled by His Spirit. I am a new creation born of God, not of the flesh, and because I am in Jesus, I have eternal life.
My spirit is alive with Jesus’ resurrection life, and one day my body will be glorified as well. He is risen!
He is risen indeed! †
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