What Does John 3:9 Mean?
Nicodemus answered and said to him, "How can these things be?"
Key words are shown with the Hebrew or Greek and what each word meant.
Selah Decoded Version The Selah Decoded Version renders what the Hebrew and Greek words meant to the people who first heard them.
King James wording
King James Version
Nicodemus answered and said unto him, How can these things be?THE KEY
The question “How can these things be?” asks how they can come into being, so even the doubt carries the language of birth.
THE MEANING
Whenever a new beginning seems impossible to explain, this question rises: how can it come to be? The surrounding image is birth from above and breath or wind beyond control, so the verse gives honest bewilderment a place at the threshold of life received.
THE ROOT
γενέσθαι
genesthai
GROWS FROM
γεν-
gen-
To come into being, happen, or become.
This form asks about something coming to be, while its word family also names origin and birth. The question about how this happens already touches the language of the new birth it is trying to understand.
ALSO GROWS
genesis: Origin, beginning, birth.
γένεσις
Its sense of origin and birth echoes the question of how this new life comes into being.
gennaō: Beget, give birth.
γεννάω
This related word is used for “be born” in John 3:3, tying the question to the image it follows.
THE PATTERN
New life is shown as received from God rather than produced by human lineage or will.
And the LORD God shaped the ground-being, Adam, from the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and Adam became a living soul.Who were born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of a man, but of God.Having been birthed again, not from seed that can be ruined but from what cannot be ruined, through the word of God, living and remaining for the ages.THE THREAD
Jesus answered and said to him, "Truly, truly, I say to you, unless someone is born from above, they cannot see the governance of God."The verb behind “be” in 3:9 and the verb behind “be born” in 3:3 belong to the same word family: coming-to-be and birth meet in the same image. Jesus’ reply gives the question its immediate frame: the life in view comes from above.
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