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“The wind blows wherever it pleases …”
By Scott Harrup | April 11, 2008
Ubiquitous John 3:16. Max Lucado has written about it in his latest best-seller, calling it the “Hope Diamond” of the Bible. During professional sports broadcasts the reference jumps out with highlighter intensity from handmade signs creeping onscreen. In a day of growing biblical illiteracy, the verse remains readily quotable.
Almost reflexively, the words pop in my mind: “For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish but have everlasting life.” That’s King James freehand, and I find I’ve only missed a comma or two when I confirm the wording on my computer’s Bible software.
Less well known are the circumstances under which those words were spoken. I suspect many who quote John 3:16 mistakenly attribute the statement to John acting as Gospel narrator. But Jesus was speaking, and He was talking about God to someone who was supposed to be an authority on all things theological.
John 3 tells the story of Nicodemus, a Pharisee, one of the well-educated religious leaders of Jesus’ day. Mystified and intrigued, Nicodemus had observed Jesus’ ministry from the sidelines. Since the Pharisees wanted nothing to do with Christ, Nicodemus arranged a meeting with Him at night.
When you have a few minutes, read John 3 and try to forget any and all structured sermons you’ve ever heard about that “Hope Diamond” verse. Think instead of what it must have been like for Nicodemus to hear the Son of God personally proclaim God’s love to him. And take a look at the other things Jesus said that can get lost in all the focus on John 3:16.
During some random reading this week that might seem completely unrelated to the Gospels, I thought about this verse: “The wind blows wherever it pleases. You hear its sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going. So it is with everyone born of the Spirit” (John 3:8, NIV).
Nicodemus was struggling with the notion of being “born again.” Jesus pointed to something going on all around us — the wind. It’s invisible and completely unpredictable, yet no reasonable person doubts the reality of wind. Why should being born again seem impossible?
I thought of Jesus’ statement while reading the opening chapter in Brian L. Silver’s The Ascent of Science (1998: Oxford University Press). It turns out, Silver explains, there are about 100 billion billion molecules in just one teaspoonful of the air around me. And those molecules are slamming into each other constantly. Each molecule experiences about 6 billion collisions every second.
All of that activity is going on even when there appears to be no wind at all—screw a lid on a glass jar, and inside that jar every one of the 100 billion billion molecules in every teaspoonful of air will be bouncing away from the molecules around it some 6 billion times every second. In the total absence of a breeze, we experience those collisions as static air pressure.
As I read Silver’s colorful descriptions of molecular motion in gases, I thought of Jesus and Nicodemus. I thought of wind blowing. I pondered the massive number of molecules and individual vectors involved in the smallest gust. I tried to extrapolate that to a local storm, or an entire weather front.
“Nicodemus, you might find the idea of being born again a little hard to wrap your preconceptions around,” Jesus says in my mental view of that evening. “But try to understand a simple breeze. You can’t, but it happens all the time.”
Nicodemus had no way of knowing it, but readers of John’s Gospel can learn right from the start that Jesus created all those molecules He alluded to: “Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made” (1:3).
The Creator of the universe was describing His boundless love for His dearest creations in terms both simple and infinitely profound.
That’s the divine Presence still at work in every air molecule around me, and in my own life since I took a leap of faith years ago and was born again.
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