Nicodemus and Pharaoh

Imagine being a Hebrew slave, crying out to God for help, and Moses shows up as your deliverer. What he says just makes Pharaoh angrier and more of a tyrant than before. A lot of bitterness could stem from his “deliverance.” In the end, however, you would be able to celebrate your freedom from slavery on the banks of the Red Sea with your fellow Hebrews. We read of their song of praise in Exodus 15, but it wasn’t until the complete process of deliverance that the people recognized God’s hand in it.

In a similar way, Jesus showed up as a kind of new and improved Moses to deliver God’s people from the bondage of sin. The Gospel story is the good news of deliverance, but the story helps us see how that wonderful message met with resistance. Some Jews, especially the religious Jewish leaders, refused to see Jesus as the Messiah.

Yet, there was at least one Jewish leader that did recognize Jesus as a messenger of God - Nicodemus. We read of that famous meeting in John 3 where Nicodemus says to Jesus, “Rabbi, we know that You are a teacher who has come from God. For no one could perform the signs you are doing if God were not with Him.” (John 3:2) He saw what Pharaoh had been too stubborn to see in Moses.

However, simply acknowledging Jesus as God’s messenger, or even the Messiah didn’t equate to acceptance of His kingship. Jesus said to him, “Very truly I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God unless they are born again.” (3:3) And in the dialogue we realize Jesus is inviting him to see what has been revealed in the Bible the whole time, and to trust what God is doing.

“No one has ever gone into heaven except the one who came from heaven—the Son of Man. Just as Moses lifted up the snake in the wilderness, so the Son of Man must be lifted up, that everyone who believes may have eternal life in Him. For God so loved the world that He gave His one and only Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send His Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through Him.” (3:13-17).

Why couldn’t other religious leaders follow Nicodemus’ example by humbly coming to Jesus and trying to find out what it all meant? Like Pharaoh, this is stubborn pride; they simply refused to see. To that, Jesus said in John 3:18, “Whoever believes in Him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe stands condemned already because they have not believed in the name of God’s one and only Son.” Or as He would conclude their conversation with, “This is the verdict: Light has come into the world, but people loved darkness instead of light because their deeds were evil…”

Our goal is to see how Jesus the Christ is leading us out of bondage like Moses led the Israelites out of bondage. As Peter would later say in 1 Peter 5:5, “God opposes the proud but shows favor to the humble.”