The new birth is grounded in Jesus’ death. That is what Jesus is saying. You and I receive the benefit of this not by trying harder or by being ultra-religious, but by believing in Jesus.

God is transcendent in His omnipotence, omniscience and omnipresence; but God is also personal: a moral agent who knows, intends, feels and acts. In this sense we are like God with respect to personality, but in a finite way.

The burden of the New Testament is that Jesus dies a substitutionary death. He does not deserve to die. When God sent Him to do His Father’s will, to go to the cross and die, it was with a purpose: to die our death so that we do not have to die, so that we may have eternal life. But we must trust Him and discover that His life becomes ours as our death becomes His. His life becomes ours! Much of the New Testament is given to unpacking precisely that point.

We have been privileged beyond measure to be saved by God’s love, shown and informed about His love, and to know the mind of God. It is our responsibility to seek to understand God’s love and to pass it on to others who need to understand it, so that in understanding it, they can also receive His love.

It is wonderful for believers to try to magnify God’s name, but not ever because they succumb to the illusion that they are doing God a favor. Worshiping God, magnifying His name, ought to be the response of gratitude and adoration and nothing else

God has displayed clearly that He holds His people accountable. He sent Adam and Eve away from His presence because of sin and they (nor we) could not be reconciled to God and His presence on their own. He must do it Himself; and He did, in Christ.

Psalm 51:10 Create in me a clean heart, O God, And renew a steadfast spirit within me

The key to societal stability is reverence and respect for parents and their authority. Within the borders of their territory, God expects parents to not tolerate juvenile delinquency, which at heart is overt disrespect for parents and authority.

Here we see the destruction of the marriage relationship because of sin in this world. When you read on through the following chapters in Genesis, you also see: the first homicide, the first double murders, the first polygamy, and eventually the first genocide. On and on and on and on, all because at the very beginning someone said, “I will be God.”

If you or I defy God, we cannot undo the defiance. It cannot be undone, we can only cover ourselves in shame. There is no way back to innocence, the Bible says there is only one way to correct this, not going back, but going forward, to the cross where Jesus death restores the broken relationship between God and fallen man.