Dec. 17, 2017 Eternity Invades the Temporal by Pastor Josh Sheldon

The Prologue of John’s Gospel and the Advent Series

The message this morning will be from those first 18 verses, what we call the prologue in this gospel. And we've taken time out from our series in Romans for a short series, a three-part series, this being the second, regarding the advent.

Last week was Matthew's genealogy, and this week, how John opens his gospel, speaking of the coming of the Lord Jesus Christ. So John chapter 1, I'll read to you verses 1 -18. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.

He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through him, and without him was not anything made that was made. In him was life, and the life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.

There was a man sent from God whose name was John. He came as a witness to bear witness about that light that all might believe through him. He was not the light, but came to bear witness about the light.

The true light, which gives light to everyone, was coming into the world. He was in the world, and the world was made through him, yet the world did not know him. He came to his own, and his own people did not receive him.

But to all who did receive him, he gave the right to become children of God, who were born not of blood, nor the will of the flesh, nor the will of man, but of God. And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.

And we have seen his glory. Glory is of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth. John bore witness about him and cried out, This is he of whom I said, He who comes after me ranks before me, because he was before me.

For from his fullness we have all received grace upon grace. For the law was given through Moses. Grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. No one has ever seen God, the only God, who is at the Father's side.

He has made him known. May God bless us as we attend to his Word. I just read to you the prologue of John's Gospel. And in John's Gospel, there's an underlying purpose. Now it's not between the lines, it's not dark and mysterious, but it's not right out there on the surface.

Correcting the Error That Jesus Is Less Than God

But there's this underlying purpose he has of correcting prevalent error. John wrote, well after Matthew, Mark, and Luke wrote, I believe he wrote in the mid to late 90s, in that first century. And so by his time, by John's time, serious errors were cropping up regarding the nature of Jesus Christ.

And these errors were actually worse than just misunderstandings. Men were teaching that Jesus as the Son of God was less than God. And by John's day, before the first century had come to a completion, this heresy, this damnable heresy, had cropped up.

And much of what John says throughout his Gospel, most profoundly I would say, in his prologue, is to correct that error, to teach the truth to God's people. To us this day, to remind us of the truth.

Men teaching then, as men do today, Jesus is less than God. And if Jesus is less than God, then salvation itself is a false hope, and our time here, to borrow from the Apostle in 1 Corinthians 15, is an utter waste of time.

If there's anything about Jesus Christ that is not God, not just reflecting God, not just like God, that is not God, I speak of his power, his sovereignty, his holiness, his justice, anything that we attribute to God, if Jesus is one scintilla less than that, he's not God, and if not God, then Lord willing, as we shall see, he cannot save anyone.

There's a somewhat apocryphal story told about the Apostle John. One time in a bathhouse, and in entered a man who was known to be a docetist, and I don't remember from the first time I heard this, what that man's name is, but it'd be Greek and complicated, so it doesn't matter, we'll call him Joe the Docetist.

And docetist comes from the word doceo, which means it seems. And what the docetist taught was that Jesus Christ did not come in flesh and blood. He was not actually even a physical person, he only seemed to be, doceo, so they get docetist.

Those who said he only seemed to be what he appeared, like an apparition, almost like a phantom. And John the Apostle had to deal with this. So there he is in the bathhouse, and in walks Joe the Docetist, and John is said in this apocryphal story to have cried out, run for your lives, for Joe the Docetist is here, and maybe these walls only seem to be brick and mortar, and they're gonna fall in on us, and we will all perish.

I don't know if that story is actually true, but I like it. The reality of the incarnation, the coming of God as God, in the person of God the Son, that was a very early battle, and is a battle that is a conflict that remains with us this day.

And this season, as we think about the advent, and as God willing, our neighbors and our co-workers and unbelievers around us are thinking about the advent, here's truth for us. In this advent season, to give to others.

That the advent means more than presence and family get-together, it doesn't even mean that really. It means that God became man, in the person of the eternal God the Son, we call Jesus Christ. For John, Jesus' introduction to us in this prologue has as much to do with the what, what Jesus is, what we attribute to him, what qualities he has, as much to do with the what as it does the when.

And this is no small matter. A Jesus as God, with a when, is a Jesus who is not God. Last week we talked and we preached from Matthew's genealogy, the first verses of that gospel, Matthew 1, 1 -17. He's speaking of a when, when Jesus came, it was about 4 AD, roughly 2 ,000 years ago.

He's speaking of the when of Jesus' birth, well John doesn't cover the birth at all. He's speaking of a when, Matthew spoke of a when, John speaks of a when far further back than Matthew's. Matthew and Luke spent a good deal of time in their accounts on Jesus' conception, his birth, which is a when, a time and space sort of when.

But where John's gospel opens, the when is really beyond definition because while Jesus of man was born about 2 ,000 years ago, Jesus as God has a when that is eternity. It is eternity. And I had Joseph read to you the entire chapter, Micah 5.

And really I was focused on that one verse, whose comings and goings are from of old, from everlasting. This Jesus who is to come from Bethlehem as the prophet proclaimed, also proclaimed in that same context that this Jesus never was, not in this incarnation, season, this advent period, this winter time.

Let us remember this, that this Jesus who is so well thought of in this season by everyone around us, never wasn't. I want to talk about the when of Jesus and then these five qualities that in this prologue John attributes to him.

Five qualities that we see right away and all these are so crucial to the nature, to the person of this Jesus that we hold preeminent in this place. All of these of virtually equal importance. He's the eternal word, that's first.

He is the eternal word, in the beginning was the word. And then John tells us he's the creator. Third thing we have, and we'll go through these in order, he is light. And the fourth thing, and these are in order of appearance in the prologue, not in order of importance, but the fourth thing is he is God.

He is God, let us never forget that, let us never blanch away from this, never be ashamed of this fact that Jesus is God. And fifth and last, he is glory, he is the very glory of God. He is the word. In the beginning was the word.

The Eternal Word and the Creator of All Things

The allusion to Genesis 1 -1 is very clear. In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. And it's clear on the surface that the one who does the creating has to exist before the thing he creates, right?

If God created, then God was before what he made. Anything else would just not make any sense. It would be like a boy looking at a model made before he was born and saying that he's the one who made it.

That would be impossible. The maker has to be before what he makes. But with God, of course, it's more than a toy or a model. God takes credit for the existence of everything. Everything, an all-inclusive term.

Everything, whatever it is, it is because God made it. Not just here on earth, anywhere in the entirety of all existence. If it is, it is because God said it will be. Hebrews 11 -3 adds for this. By faith we understand that the universe was created by the word of God.

And that what is seen was not made out of things that are visible. In other words, ex nihilo as we call it, out of nothing. You know that term, ex nihilo? That's all it means, out of nothing. Out of nothing, God spoke.

And so from nothing, something was. What was? Whatever he spoke. It sounds circular, but that is the truth. The power of God to call things into existence that do not exist, like Romans 4 -17 says, is crucial to our understanding of who and what God is.

Let's take a moment on how important this is. When I say important, I mean to our salvation. I'm talking about your eternal soul. Your destiny forever and ever and ever. How important is this? If God did not call into existence, existence itself, if he did not call existence to exist out of nothing that before existed, then neither did or even could he call sinners into existence.

Think about this a moment. If you are one who has repented and believe the gospel that Jesus Christ died for your sins and on the third day God raised him from the dead, if you believe something like that, well, if you believe that, I should say, if you believe that truth, you believe that the scripture from beginning to end is the truth of God that tells us everything we need to know about God and all we need to do to please him, if you believe that, how do you believe that?

Because God made you able to repent. God gave you a heart to believe. God called you to be what you didn't exist as. He called you to be a saint. How were you? You were a sinner. You were not a saint.

You do not exist as anything holy or good or at all pleasurable to God. And he called you to exist as a saint. If God didn't call everything that is to the farthest star and infinitely beyond that furthest star, if that is not all existing now from nothing that was, because when it wasn't, God called it to be, if that is not the truth, then neither could he save us and call us to exist as saints who did not exist as saints.

Oh, the power of God, not just to call the universe to exist, but to call you to exist as a beloved, as one accepted because you're in Jesus Christ. Everything John is going to write about Jesus depends on this opening salvo.

Jesus, the preexistent word, the preexistent word. In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was God. That word for was doesn't mean at one time he became. It means always was, always shall be, never was, not that.

The word translated as word. In the beginning was the word. That word there is logos. We've heard this before. In the beginning was the logos. Again, John, by the time he wrote this gospel, was meeting head on some very strange thoughts, some heresies, some ancient philosophies that were becoming prevalent that were compromising the gospel, that were being brought into the church, this Greek way of thinking.

And so by 90, there was such a corruption that he had to very strongly go against those things to show the church what is right, what is true, what is correct. The ancient Greek way of thinking thought of logos as the rational principle by which everything exists, the logical way that things come together.

Now, there is a rational, logical order to the universe. I mean, everything ultimately makes sense. Even the things that we don't know now, if the Lord tarries and allows man to continue to explore, I believe they're going to fall into place more and more and more.

They're going to make sense. They're going to be logical. There's going to be rational explanations for every phenomenon in all creation because the God who made it is rational and logical. Dark matter is like that.

I don't even know what dark matter is. Our son, who sort of understands it a lot better than me, had a chance to talk to a scientist about a year ago who was actually one of the discoverers of dark matter.

And whatever dark matter is, and I don't want to talk to you about it because it'll make my brain hurt after I preach, but if you know what it is, God bless you. Keep it to yourself. But I know it was really important, and I know it explained a lot of things.

Things fell into place, unexplained phenomena that seemed irrational, that seemed illogical, we couldn't figure them out. Dark matter explained it. Well, I hear something like that, and I say, well, as we explore, not become smarter, but learn more of what God has given us in this universe, it's going to make sense because the God who made it made it make sense, and he made it to make sense.

John's point here, when he says, in the beginning was the logos, there is an order, there's a logic, there's a rationale to things, but it's a created order. Why are things logical? Why are things rational?

Why are they explicable? Not because there's some overruling principle out there of logic or rational thinking or anything like that, because God created logic and rational thinking and everything like that.

It all reflects him. Far from the stoic thought that had to be confronted so early in the church that logos came first, and logos is the organizing principle. Before it even was, before logos came to be as this organizing principle, there was logos.

Logos, the word, the Son of God, the eternal Son of God came first, eternally first. In the beginning, before any of that happened, there was Jesus. There was the word, the logos, with God and was God.

Is now, was then, ever shall be, and will be nothing other than God. There's a core truth about the nature of God. Matthew's genealogy makes the point that Jesus is the center and the point and the goal and the focus of history.

Most importantly, redemptive history, this flow of God's redemption of mankind from the sin in Genesis 3 to our final redemption at the end of Revelation. That's what we mean by redemptive history. Jesus is the focal point.

He's the hinge on it. He's the one upon whom it all depends. John carries the point further. He makes Jesus the center and the point of everything. History, the universe, everything. We see society today is really kind of falling off the tracks, trying to make sense out of things from marriage to politics to sexual identity to the meaning or the value of life itself.

They look for this organizing principle that can serve as this leaping off point for direction, for decisions. But where are they looking? They're looking inwards. They're looking to themselves. They're looking to find a rational principle as though that principle has always existed and all they need to do is find it and learn about it.

They look inwards instead of outwards. They look down to the temporal instead of upwards to heaven. Looking for man's truth and all men are liars as the apostle says instead of God's truth. And from that, from man's truth, try to build this organizing principle around which to think your ethical thoughts, to make your moral decisions, to set your policies.

You may as well try to build a battleship by following a recipe for banana bread as try to make sense of a world without reference to its maker because this world has to refer to its maker because everything that is reflects him.

Without Jesus at the center, history makes no sense. Without him, the creation itself is senseless. He's the Logos. Do you want an organizing principle for your life? Do you want something around which you can organize your day, your week, your month, your year, your entire life?

Not to give you a more organized, easier, more efficient life. To put you into sync, into line with the principles by which you were made is Jesus, the Logos, the eternal word of God. He is that rational principle around which all things exist and by which they exist and for whom they exist and the purpose for which they exist including you and the pew bench that's holding you up right now.

Everything for him. He's the creator. First, he's the Logos. He's that rational principle. He is the creator. The Greeks made up a god called the Demiurge. It was a craftsman of sorts. It was a made being.

It was created by God and given the task of forming physical matter, earth and man and planets and all like that. John says no. No, there is no Demiurge craftsman. There is the eternal Logos who made all there is without tools and the like.

He spoke and it was. In the beginning. In the beginning was the word. Greek thought of the day and again, John is meeting this head on. It was influenced by the philosopher Plato and he made this distinction between the supreme, what we would call God and the physical world.

When we speak of being dualistic, this is usually what we mean, being platonic where you make this dividing line, this distinction between everything spiritual and everything physical. If it's physical, it's bad.

It needs to be gotten away from. If it's spiritual, that's all there is. Forgetting what the apostle says about things to be received with thanksgiving because they are given to you by God for your good.

What was he speaking of there? Homes, food, husbands, wives, jobs, brothers and sisters, physical churches to be comfortable in, to be received with thanksgiving. And John is meeting this platonic idea that if it's physical, it's bad.

And so the Greeks said there had to be a demiurge because God, the supreme, would never touch, get his fingers dirty in something as profane as a physical creation. So they made up the demiurge to do that for them.

It was a delegated being, a mini-God. Something had to be created and God made it and said, okay, I'm not going to touch you because you're going to touch the physical. If that were the case, then we couldn't read Genesis 1 -1 or John 1 -1.

In the beginning God created, or in the beginning was the Word. It would have to say in the beginning God created a creator, which it does not say. It says in the beginning God and then everything else flows from that.

In the beginning was the Word and everything comes from Him. We know of no such God and we proclaim no such God who will not have to do with what He made. He's different than what He made. He's apart from what He made.

He's holy and we are not and yet He interacts with us. He is with us by His Spirit. He doesn't look upon what He made and say, ooh, that's icky and I can't touch it. I have to make a demiurge to go do that for me.

God relates to what He has made insofar as it all reflects Him and most especially mankind who has the image of God exclusively designated to carry that within. And this is what Paul had in mind in what Joseph read to you.

Let me just read a couple of those verses again. He, that is Jesus, excuse me, He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation, for by Him all things were created in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities.

All things were created through Him and for Him and He is before all things and in Him all things hold together. There can be no thought that any but God created and nor did He delegate the task to some lesser God, one that He had to call into existence first.

Creation is by the Word. Creation is by the Word from the Word, from the Son of God. Implication is huge. The edemy urge came about in their imagination because they couldn't see how God could have anything to do with something so dirty as material things.

But God is always related to His creation. He looks down from heaven, He looks down from afar upon it. One translation of a psalm says that He humbles Himself to take notice of us. God humbles Himself to even look and see that we exist.

He does interact with us and we should revel in this fact. He does notice us. He's not part of what He made but He does take part in what He made. And how did He prove this? How do we prove this? What's the advent?

The sending and the birth of Jesus Christ, the Word, the Logos, the eternal Son of God, John says, became flesh and dwelt among us. Brethren, God is not some distant, faraway being who cannot become, who cannot interact with what we are and what He has made.

The Word became flesh. God became flesh and dwelt among us as we do. Not seem to be flesh and blood. He was this eternal Word. So He is the Logos. He's the rational principle. He is the creator of all things.

The Light of the World and the Darkness of Sin

He is God. He is light. He is light. Light means life. Light means salvation. Jesus said, I am the light of the world. Not just a general light. That's what the sun casts. This is more of a beacon light.

This is more of a laser beam, illumining a path straight to God. Jesus is that light. The light of the world came. No one comes to the Father except through me, says Jesus. That's the path that this light illumines.

Through Him, to the Father, by faith in Him, to God. John 3, 19, Jesus said to Nicodemus, this is the judgment, the light Himself. The light is coming to the world and people love the darkness rather than the light because their deeds were evil.

Light is a hard thing to bear, isn't it? This kind of light certainly is. It's a revealer of hidden things. It shows things that are hidden by the dark. If you think about it, darkness is really not a thing at all.

Darkness is an absence of light. Where light is absence, that's darkness. Verse 5 says that the darkness did not overcome the light. If you think about it, darkness cannot overcome light. I mean, even if you're in a cave that is so dark that you can feel it, to kind of piggyback off what it says in Revelation.

I was in a cave like that once. It was a tour in a national park. I forget which one it is. It had the low level lighting and you get to sit on this stone bench that they had there and the ranger was explaining about how these caverns were made over the millions and millions and millions of years but it was still interesting.

And then he turned off the low level darkness or the low level lighting and it was a darkness you could feel. I felt like the guys in Revelation. I wanted to gnaw, I was a little claustrophobic then. I wanted to gnaw my tongue off like they did.

But when he turned on that low level light again, it was just these little bulbs. It just took a little bit of light to overcome the darkness. Darkness cannot overcome light. Of course, John is speaking in spiritual terms here of light and darkness where Jesus is light and men love the darkness.

So what is light? Light is the goodness, the purity, the holiness of God in his son Jesus Christ. What is darkness? Well, darkness is sin. Darkness is iniquity. Darkness is that for which Jesus came to redeem us.

Light and darkness, in the Bible, they're metaphors for man's spiritual condition. Even the literal judgment against Egypt in the ninth plague, the one just before the death of the firstborn, it was a signal of the dreadful consequences of ignoring the Lord.

Darkness. When God brings darkness, what is he saying? Here is where you are. Here is your state without my son Jesus Christ. You are darkness, the apostle Paul says, but you were once darkness. That's what you exist as.

And it's only by the creative power of the Logos, Jesus Christ himself, who calls you from darkness into what does the apostle continue with. But now our light in the Lord. God is light, says 1 John 1, 5.

In him is no darkness at all. He shines his beam to your heart and there he exposes your heart's true nature. And by that light, that beam, that laser-like beam going into your heart, he dispels darkness by showing you what?

The truth. The truth that your heart is dark. Black as coal. And in need, not of fixing, not of finding a book that will tell you how to do better. You're in need of a new heart. A heart that can even know what the light is.

You get to the tail end of a cold when you're not having a cold anymore. You have that dry spot back here. That's what's happening when I take these short breaks. What's that? I've got water here. Thank you.

The light is Jesus. The light of the world. He's a saving light. Darkness expelled if you will see the darkness for what it is. If you will thank God for exposing, if you will repent of your sins and trust in Christ the Savior, the Lagos, the light of the world.

That light shows the darkness but it dispels the darkness. Darkness cannot overcome it if you will but believe in him. 2 Corinthians 4, 4 -6. It says, The God of this world has blinded the minds of the unbelievers to keep them from seeing the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ who is the image of God.

For what we proclaim is not ourselves but Jesus Christ as Lord with ourselves as your servants for Jesus' sake. For God who said let light shine out of darkness has shown in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.

The light of the world. In him was light and that light was the light of the world and that light was the life of man. Life meaning salvation. Eternal life. We continue in order. The next thing John says about Jesus, he is God.

Jesus Christ Is God and Reveals the Father

Now it might seem redundant for me to say anything more that John says about because I've said it so many times already but it bears repeating. Jesus is God. Nothing is more important than this. He is God.

The misunderstandings on this score are everywhere. Jesus is called a great teacher. The best teacher. The ultimate of all the Buddhas. He's called the greatest of all the prophets and none of these will do.

None of these will do. In the beginning was the word and the word was with God and the word was God. He is God. Skipping down to verse 18, the end of the prologue. No one has seen God. The only God who is at the Father's side.

He has made him known. Thank you John. The first thing you notice here, who makes God known? The only God. The only God. He has made him known. So God in that sense seems to be differentiated from the God who makes him known.

No one has seen the God he makes known and this one who reveals him is not the Father but is at the Father's side. The only God. He has revealed him. No one has seen God. The only God has revealed God.

Do you see that? The one who reveals him is not the Father but is at the Father's side. If this one who is the only true God is not different from the God he reveals then this is undecipherable gibberish.

But John's point is clear. It's not undecipherable. It's on the surface. It is God the Son. It is God the Son, Jesus who reveals God the Father. They're not the same. The Father is not the Son any more than the other way around.

The Son and the Father are different persons of the triune God. Father, Son, Holy Spirit. The Spirit is not the Father. The Father is not the Son. The Son is not the Father. But God is one. The only true God reveals God to us.

The only true God, God the Son, reveals God the Father to us. No one comes to the Father but through me says God the Son. He is glory. When the glory of God fell on the tabernacle, do you remember what happened?

Men had to flee. The priests couldn't do their work. They had followed all the protocols. They had made all the sacrifices for their sins. Everything had been. It was, if we can use that word, not in a theological sense, but in the human sense, it was perfect.

It had all been done right according to each command of the Lord. Every stitch in the curtains was correct. God's glory fell upon it. And the men couldn't work. They had to flee. In Isaiah chapter 6, when Isaiah saw the glory of Christ, it says in John 12, the glory he saw was Jesus.

And what did he say? He said, I am ruined for I'm a man of unclean lips. I dwell among a people of unclean lips. In other words, I'm a sinner. And that glory, that light of God revealing that sin, that glory is God's glory.

There's not one glory for the Father and another for the Son and then yet another for the Spirit. The glory of God is what Jesus is and what he brought to men. It was important for us to note in Jesus Christ, the glory of God is a mediated glory.

It's the same glory as the glory of God when the logos, the word became flesh, when he advented, when he was incarnated, men could look upon him and see the glory of God and not die. Not bearable because it's a different glory.

Bearable because it's a mediated glory. By the incarnate Son of God. By God, the word of God, the eternal Son of God who became flesh. Most shocking to the Greek way of thinking, I think it would really be scandalous for them, is John's bold statement here that in Jesus, God becomes just that, flesh, because like I said a few minutes ago, they had this dichotomy between the Spirit and the physical world.

And for them, for God, for the Supreme to become flesh, to actually come and touch anything physical would be beyond belief. Scandalous. What would they think of a Jesus who could touch a leper? The most feared and dreaded of diseases.

The most profound symbol of sin as it manifests in a disease that sin brought. Leprosy. What would they think of a Jesus? Jesus. Flesh and blood. God the Son walking amongst us as He did once in the garden.

God walking with us. And then touching, touching, physically touching the physical body of Jesus Christ. Touching that awful disease and healing and coming away as pure as when He started. Now in Jesus, the glory of God is the same glory of God but a mediated glory of God.

It's the whole idea of the incarnation, the embodiment of God and the person of Christ. The middle of that word, incarnation, carne, it means flesh like it's in carne asada, that meat dish. Jesus coming is the infleshing of God and our hymn gets it just right.

Christ by heaven, highest heaven adored, Christ the everlasting Lord, late in time behold Him come, offspring of a virgin's womb, excuse me, veiled in flesh, the Godhead see, hail the incarnate deity, pleased as man with man to dwell, Jesus our Emmanuel.

Not the unknown God that Paul ran into in Athens. Not the intelligent designer made up by men who can't reconcile science and scripture. He's not the far away God of the ancient Greeks and the Gnostics and the Dositists.

He is a triune God. The triune God, Father, Son, Spirit who became as God what we are, flesh and blood. He, Jesus, the Son of God is He who alone grants the right to become children of God to all who received Him.

To all believed in His name says the apostle. He gave the right. He gave the right to become children of God. Note well what he says. To become. To become. To exist as what you are not now if you know not the Lord Jesus Christ.

You exist now as a sinner and you do not exist as a saint. Turn. Turn to Jesus Christ. Repent of your sin. Repentance towards God and faith in the Lord Jesus Christ. Turn to Him. And Jesus Christ creates from that that which was not.

Not now a saint. And that's what He then calls you. Creates you to be. You remain flesh and blood with all who believe in His name. He gave this right, this privilege, this blessing of all blessings to be the children of God.

And see well what the next verse says where John eliminates the many ways that men think that they come to this status. John says, born not of blood. To be born of blood is simply to be born. The birth John speaks of anticipates John 3 .3.

Unless one is born again he cannot see the kingdom of God. Nor the will of the flesh. That takes away the pride of the flesh. The hope of man that he has in himself the power to will himself to God and salvation.

The will of the flesh is all self-effort which is something the Apostle Paul labors to drive us away from in much of the book of Romans. John goes on. Nor the will of man. Try as they might men can offer no worthwhile guidance here.

They've tried for centuries to have to themselves that which God gave no other. The authority and the power to direct men's destinies. No, that's only God. Not of blood. Not the will of the flesh. Not the will of man.

But of Christ. The Logos. The Creator. God who became flesh. And that's how he ends this. If not those things if not any of this man's effort but of God. In him alone is rebirth found. In him alone is the impetus found.

Not a natural birth. That much is clear. It is a new heart. A remade spirit. It is granted by God the Son by Jesus who by his sacrificial death paid the price for our sins. A benefit applied to us by the Holy Spirit.

Father, Son, Spirit all working together in accordance with the Father's will. The original language has born in that verse at the end of the sentence so the emphasis is a bit different. Who not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man but of God were born.