What does it mean to have spiritual life?

But the truth our Lord gave to Nicodemus has a wider application. Man is spiritually dead, destitute of spiritual life. In order to enter the Kingdom of God, to be in the presence of God, man must be born anew. Such a statement is nowhere found in the preceding Gospels. In the Gospel of John, the Gospel of Eternal Life, it is put into the foreground. Nicodemus is the only person to whom the Lord spoke of the absolute necessity of the new birth. He never made such a statement to the publicans and the harlots. And who was Nicodemus? A Pharisee, and therefore an extremely religious man. A ruler of the Jews, which necessitated a moral life. The teacher of Israel, one who possessed much learning. Religiousness, morality, education and culture are insufficient to save man and give him a place in the Kingdom of God. The new birth is the one thing needed. "That which is born of the flesh is flesh." The flesh is the old nature which every human being brings into the world; it is a fallen, a corrupt nature and can never be anything else. And "they that are in the flesh cannot please God." (Romans 8:8). The natural man may do anything he pleases, become religious and philanthropic, but he cannot please God. What then is the new birth? It is not reformation. Nor is it, as so often stated, an action of the Holy Spirit to make an evil nature good. The flesh cannot be changed into something better. The new birth is the impartation of a new nature, the divine nature, by the Holy Spirit. "That which is born of the Spirit is spirit." This new nature is absolutely holy, as the old nature is absolutely corrupt. This new nature is the only thing which fits man to be in the presence of God.

Tell me, beloved friends, have you no need? I never in all my experience knew even one person who came to Christ without being compelled to do so by a sense of need. Nicodemus comes and applies to Him as a teacher. No, no, says the Lord, I am not going to teach flesh, Nicodemus; it is not a question of teaching yet. You must get another life first; you must be born again; you do not want teaching until you get life. It was teaching of the highest order, but he had not the spiritual faculties to coalesce with it. Christ meets him by showing the absolute necessity of a new nature, and this on the ground of redemption - a thing which all Christians profess to believe; but to my mind it is an immense reality. Do not you see what it is? I have nothing - nothing in me which can have to do with God, even as a Christian. There is nothing in myself which can please God. I can only receive from Him. Flesh never ceases to be flesh. I must be born of the Spirit, partaker of the divine nature, born of God, but I must not confound this with responsibility. I am responsible as born of Adam. I have a conscience or power of discerning good from evil. I feel that I do evil and not good. Then I am lost. This evil thing cannot be spared; it must perish. I must be born again; or, as one sometimes says, cut down and grafted. The light and truth of God reveals this to me.

But the Lord does not leave the inquiring Nicodemus here. He shows definitively the way of entering into the kingdom "A man must be born of water and of the Spirit." (v. 5.) Of the Word and Spirit of God. The word of God - the revelation of God's thoughts - must operate in the power of the Spirit, judging all in man, bringing in God's mind instead of his own, supplanting it by God's, and an absolute new life from God, in which these thoughts have their seat and living reality - a new nature and life. It is not that two births are here,* but two important aspects and realities in being born again. "Of His own will begat He us with the word of truth" (James 1:18); "That He might sanctify and cleanse it with the washing of water by the Word" (Eph. 5:26); "Ye are clean through the word which I have spoken unto you." (John 15:3.) It is not teaching flesh, which has its own thoughts, but supplanting all its thoughts by God's. We are born of water. Next, it is a nature coming from the Spirit - "That which is born of the flesh is flesh; and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit." (John 3:6.) Everything born follows - is of - the nature of that which begat it. So here. The water acts on man as man; his person is not changed; but the Spirit communicates a new life, which is of itself [the Spirit] just as flesh's nature is flesh - in that which is born of it. We have now, not flesh taught, but the thoughts of God, operative in power, and the partaking of the divine nature which is imparted by. the Spirit. The mind and nature of God vitally communicated to us. This is my life, as mere flesh was before. This clearly opens out the blessing to Gentiles. "Marvel not," said the Lord to Nicodemus, "that I said unto thee, Ye [Jews] must be born again. The wind bloweth where it listeth; … so is every one that is born of the Spirit." (John 3:7-8.) The sovereign communication of a new nature (needed by the Jew as much as by the Gentile, when we come to his nature) as an entirely new thing, a new nature given in which the man thenceforth lives with God, is as applicable to a Gentile as to a Jew. For thus a man, as to his life, is neither [Jew nor Gentile]. "He is born of God." This truth is here not unfolded; only the groundwork is laid down for it. The far deeper truth of the fact of the divine life, and that sovereignly imparted, is what is taught, only the other is directly implied.

The new nature, derived through the Spirit implanting the word in the soul, is divine as its source. Born of the Spirit, men are thereby partakers of the divine nature, and actually possess a life which is distinct from the life they have from Adam; a life absolutely new. Christ is the source, the pattern, the expression of this life; He is the life itself, we receive it from Him by the Spirit.

Now, it is deeply interesting to turn from Satan's lie in reference to the truth and love of God, to the mission of the Lord Jesus Christ, who came from the bosom of the Father in order to reveal what He really is. "Grace and truth" — the very things which man lost, in his fall — "came by Jesus Christ." (John 1:17) He was "the faithful witness" of what God was. (Rev. 1:5) Truth reveals God as He is; but this truth is connected with the revelation of perfect grace; and thus the sinner finds, to his, unspeakable joy, that the revelation of what God is, instead of being his destruction, becomes the basis of his eternal salvation. "This is life eternal, that they might know thee, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom thou hast sent." (John 17:3.) I cannot know God and not have life. The loss of the knowledge of God was death; but the knowledge of God is life. This, necessarily, makes life a thing entirely outside of ourselves, and dependent upon what God is. Let me arrive at what amount of self-knowledge I may, it is not said that "this is life eternal, to know themselves;" though, no doubt, the knowledge of God and the knowledge of self-will go very much together; still, "eternal life" is connected with the former, and not with the latter. To know God as He is, is life; and "all who know not God" shall be "punished with everlasting destruction from His presence."

The last clause, as was noticed, is the link of transition from righteousness to love. Men set these two things in opposition one to another: but they are perfectly united in Christ, the perfection of both righteousness and love. Hence it is thoroughly applicable to the Christian, since Christ is the life of the Christian. We really and truly receive by faith that life which was in the Lord Himself; not the life of Adam that all men have, but a new life possessed by none of us until we believed in the Lord Jesus. Being life, it is not capable of any outward mark of a sensible nature; still less is there a visible presentation of itself to us, though we know where it exists by its operations and effects. If this be so with the natural life, how much less could it be expected of the supernatural or spiritual life? We ought not to ask for it, and thereby show that we do not know what life is; yet however difficult it may be to define life, everybody knows that, when life departs, death sets in. There may be the working of death before we depart, and there is, since sin came into the world. There is mortality, but death is when mortality has come to its issue. Everyone can tell as the general rule when a man, or any other animal, is dead. We know exceptions occur now and then: there are exceptions to every rule probably, and there are difficulties as to all truths. But there is no difficulty about God's word to make any real hindrance to spiritual intelligence. Doubtless an insuperable difficulty exists for those who have no knowledge of God; but this knowledge is communicated by the faith of Christ. "This is life eternal to know Thee, the only true God, and Jesus Christ Whom Thou didst send."

If we speak of life as connected with this lower creation, we deal with something which defies our analysis and definitions, yet obviously the word on our lips has more senses than one. We contemplate, for instance, not only the vital spark in man or beast but also the conditions needed for that spark to exist. There is no fish life without water; no human life without air. Even so there is no spiritual and eternal life without the knowledge of God; and no knowledge of God without the revelation which reaches us in the word of the Sent One and the faith which receives it. Because of this, we believe, Jesus spoke not only of the believer having eternal life but of his passing out of that spiritual death which is marked by utter ignorance of God into the realm of life which is filled with the light of the knowledge of the Father. No wonder He laid such emphasis on this wonderful statement.

If it is impossible to define life, whether natural or eternal, it is nevertheless possible for us to apprehend in what life consists. We know that man could not live without the blood that courses through his veins, for "the life is in the blood"; and we also know that human life consists in the relationships, affections, pleasures and pursuits that belong to men. In the same way we can apprehend that divine life has been communicated to those who believe in our Lord Jesus Christ; it is altogether different from the natural life that is in flesh and blood, and is heavenly and spiritual, and ours because the Son could say, "I in them." This life also consists in divine relationships and affections, with pleasures and pursuits altogether unknown to the natural man.

This life is the life of the Father’s world of glory, in which the believer lives, the power of the Spirit of God uniting itself to that life, and energizing it so that that life which was exhibited in all its infinite perfections in the Son is continued in the midst of this world of death in those who are born of God. It is life in the midst of death, light in the midst of darkness, the eternal in the midst of the temporal, that which is heavenly found in the sphere of earth, and love divine in the presence of human hatred.

The presence of life is determined by its action. An absolutely impassive life is unthinkable. This is true of physical life which invariably exhibits itself in motion; where there is none, death is assumed. And so, by analogy, it is spiritually; without motion Godward, there is spiritual death. But if a person possesses eternal life, he has passed "from death unto life." Such a person has the consciousness of God as Father, of the Son as Saviour and Lord. He has esteem, regard and reverence, as well as adoration and worship, for the Father and the Son.