Rebirth and Resurrection
By John Gavazzoni

Following my dear friend Jonathan Mitchell's encouragement to all who study the message of the New Testament in his translation, i.e., to be open to what the Spirit indicates to them as they consider the amplification, and expansion of the Greek in the text, along with possible alternate renderings, the Spirit combined for me how to express the various nuances of the Greek text of Jn. 3:3. The very familiar KJV has Jesus saying, "except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God." Other popular translations, have "reborn" for "born again," or "born from above." Those do not do serious damage to the Greek, but they fall short of the full sense of Jesus' statement.

The nuances of the Greek expanded and amplified give to me the Lord's sense as follows, "...unless anyone (or someone) can be brought up from above to be given birth again..." This fits with, and goes a long way toward, explaining our Lord's meaning within the larger context in vs. 12. From Jonathan's translation: "Since I tell (or: If I told) you folks the earthly things (or: ones: situations), and you folks are not continuing in belief (do not presently believe, are not proceeding to trust), how will you believe or trust if I should speak to you the things (or: situations; ones) upon the heavens?" In being brought back up from above, even from our earthen state, to be given birth again, we are returned to what is in heaven. We are returned from the above back to the above from below. Nicodemus, was at that point, not anywhere near being able to absorb such sublime truth.

Reiterating: I believe it's clear that the heavenly ones or situations in vs. 12, explain the meaning in vs. 3 of "...be brought up from above to be given birth again..." Comparing both statement of our Lord's we can understand that spiritual regeneration is a matter of being returned FROM above (the action is from above) to a heavenly state. Don't miss the connection between "from above," "given birth again," and "things (or: situations; ones) upon the heavens." Something is repeated, whereby we, in our earthen state, and even in the initial stage, remaining so, we are brought up from above to experience birth again, a birth that is of heavenly origin. This is at the heart of the biblical theme of restoration.

In short, if we are, by being brought up from above to be given birth again, then the source to which we are returned is our original birth. I have discussed in other articles, and in spoken messages, that we ought to understand a distinction between being born of God and being given birth again, that is reborn of God. Both pertain to spiritual birth. Jesus was not contrasting physical birth with spiritual birth (though that's where Nicodemus' head was), he was contrasting a spiritual rebirth back up to that birth by which we have our being in God. REgeneration implies an original generation. Creation is not generation. Creation is a forming from and/or carving out of, the spirit stuff of our original sonship. That's why creation is dependent upon our entering into the liberty of our glory as children of God so that creation might be delivered from its bondage to decay. As go the sons of God, so goes all creation, and this is a present ongoing process.

It was inevitable, and not of creation's own choosing, that we suffer a disconnect from our generation, and so need regeneration. It was a vulnerability imposed upon us by God. Let me be clear that this reality belongs to us in union with God's only/uniquely/singly begotten Son. We are sons of God IN the Son, and it's the Son within the sons, that make the sons sons. In that union, our being brought back up from above, is by the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, wrote St. Peter: "Well-spoken of (or: eulogized; Blessed; or: Well-gathered, laid-out with ease, and worthy of praise) [is] the God and Father of our Lord, Jesus Christ (or: Who is our Owner, Jesus Christ), the One [who], corresponding to and down from His abundant mercy (or: much-existing mercy which is Him), [was/is]--through Jesus Christ's resurrection forth from out of the midst of dead folks--bringing us to birth again (regenerating us; begetting us back up again, causing us to be born again):.." 1 Pet: 1:3 JMT)

I am not aware of much teaching on the correlation of Jesus' resurrection, with us, in Him, being born anew. We speak of being crucified with Christ, buried with Him, raised with Him, but obviously according to Jesus and Peter, we are reborn with Him in and by His resurrection. If we were given birth back up again by His resurrection from the dead, then He, Himself, was reborn back up again to the glory which He had with the Father before the world began. He was/is born of the Spirit, but took upon Himself, our deceived consciousness of abandonment by God which is the essential sense and meaning of spiritual death. The consensus among Bible teachers has been great, that death amounts to an experience of separation/disconnect from one's Source. To be sure, that is not so from God's side, but from our side, we experiences the consciousness of separation.

In Jn. chapter one, John really was introducing the subject of this article, and what He said there is misunderstood. We have a short immediate context consisting of 1:12 and 1:13. It's commonly presumed that it is on the basis of vs. 12, that we have the condition of vs.13. Not so. Verse 13 is the Ground of/for vs. 12. It's because we are born of God, and not born of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, that we receive the authority to become the sons of God. That "authority" is the authority of what is true in the heavens, being the basis of becoming so below.

Again, to reiterate, we are not born of God (as opposed to being born of blood, nor the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man) because we've been given the authority to become the sons of God. It's the reverse: we've been given that right or authority of return upon the GROUND that we are born of God. Having become poor, beggarly versions of our true self, we return to our Father's house on the Ground that that's where we belong. Because we ARE born of God above, we can, by that right and authority, BECOME the sons of God even here below. "Beloved, now are we the sons of God, and it doth not yet appear what we shall be, but when He shall appear, we shall appear with Him in glory." He's the authority of our sonship.

It will help the reader to keep in mind the biblical principle, that we can only become what we are, albeit with the temporal resistance of the flesh that insistently declares that we are what we are not. That lie, mixed into impure versions of the gospel, essentially propagates the strange imagination that we are self-determining beings possessing in some sense, and by some definition, independence of being, i.e., of possessing some measure of self-sovereignty. It amounts to an audacious conviction that Jesus, in fact, is NOT Lord. It essentially posits that, though, of course, our source of being is God, having come from Him, we, in effect, say, "Lord, I can take it from here if you please."

A final observation: Quite evidently, being brought back up from above to be given birth again, pertains to seeing (perceiving) and entering (enjoying the safety, security, and riches of) the kingdom of God, NOT choosing to have a required spiritual experience in order to escape from some mythological hell. Being thusly reborn = "thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven." As it is in heaven, so be it on earth, is what eonian life... life pertaining to the ages... is all about: life lived in the here and now as our heavenly being faces the challenge of the world's enmity. That enmity is like the cocoon within which the butterfly is contained, a cocoon that, while resisting the emergence of the butterfly, it serves enigmatically, by that resistance, the butterfly's final, victorious emergence.