To a typical Pharisee, what Jesus was saying to Nicodemus [in John 3] would likely have come across as highly offensive. Jesus was attacking the very core of Nicodemus’s belief system, plainly implying that Nicodemus was lost, spiritually lifeless, and ultimately no better off in his rigid Pharisaism than an utterly immoral Gentile without God. Indeed, as we shall observe throughout this study, Jesus said that verything to the Pharisees quite often.)

This was a direct answer to Nicodemus’s questions (“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 was telling Nicodemus, in language Nicodemus was sure to grasp, that not only was He not speaking of any superficial or fleshly self-reformation, but He was in fact calling for something Nicodemus was powerless to do for himself. This punctured the heart of Nicodemus’s religious convictions. To a Pharisee like him, the worst imaginable news would be that there was nothing he could possibly do to help himself spiritually.

Jesus had basically equated this distinguished Pharisee with the most debased and dissipated kind of sinner. He had described Nicodemus’s case as utterly hopeless. Talk about harsh! But that is, after all, the very starting point of the gospel message. Sinners are “dead in trespasses and sins . . . by nature children of wrath . . . having no hope and without God” (Ephesians 2:1, 3, 12). This is one of the universal effects of Adam’s sin on his offspring (Romans 5:12). We are born with sinful tendencies and fallen hearts, and we all sin. “All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (Romans 3:23). “There is none righteous, no, not one” (v. 10). “All we like sheep have gone astray” (Isaiah 53:6).

Furthermore, Scripture says we are hopeless to redeem ourselves, atone for our own sin, reform our hearts and minds, or earn any kind of merit in the eyes of God. Romans 8:7–8 says, “The carnal mind is enmity against God; for it is not subject to the law of God, nor indeed can be. So then, those who are in the flesh cannot please God.” That describes the fallen condition of all humanity, not merely a special, notorious class of particularly sinful people. Even the very best of people, apart from Christ and His holy Spirit, are helplessly in bondage to sin. Even those who in the eyes of the world manage to seem respectable, altruistic, or “good” by comparison are not really good at all by the divine standard. (As Jesus told the rich young ruler in Matthew 19:17, “No one is good but One, that is, God.”)

Therefore sinners in their fallen state are under God’s condemnation, with no hope of redeeming themselves. Let’s face it: the idea that the entire human race is fallen and condemned is simply too harsh for most people’s tastes. They would rather believe that most people are fundamentally good. Virtually every popular arbiter of our culture’s highest, noblest values—from Oprah Winfrey to the Hallmark Channel—tells us so constantly. All we need to do, they say, is cultivate our underlying goodness, and we can fix everything wrong with human society. That’s not terribly different from what the Pharisees believed about themselves. But Scripture says otherwise. We are hopelessly corrupted by sin.

All who do not have Christ as Lord and Savior are in bondage to evil, condemned by a just God, and bound for hell. Jesus not only strongly implied those very things in his opening words to Nicodemus; before He had finished fully explaining the gospel that evening, He made His meaning explicit: “He who does not believe is condemned already” (John 3:18). (The Jesus You Can’t Ignore: What You Must Learn From the Bold Confrontations of Christ, 62-64)

John MacArthur

See also:

JOHN MACARTHUR: WHEN BEING “NICE” IS WRONG

THE NIGHTMARE BEGINNING FOR MAINSTREAM EVANGELICALISM

APPRISING MINISTRIES WITH A PEEK AT THE COMING SOTERIOLOGY OF EMERGENCE CHRISTIANITY

ELCA AND HOMOSEXUALITY

MAINSTREAM EVANGELICALISM NOW ON THE RAPID SLIDE TO APOSTASY

THERE IS NO SPIRITUAL SWITZERLAND

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