The object of the new birth is declared to be that a man may see
and enter into the kingdom of God. But the kingdom of God is
an economy. It includes and implies the organized Christian
community. This is one of the facts which, with its
accompanying obligation, is revealed to the new vision of the
new man. He sees not only God, but the kingdom of God; God
as King of an organized citizenship; God as the Father of the
family of mankind; obligation to God implying obligation to the
neighbor; obligation to Christ implying obligation to the church,
of which He is the head, “which is His body, the fulness of Him
that filleth all things with all things” (Eph. 1:23). Through water
alone, the mere external rite of baptism, a man may pass into the
outward fellowship of the visible church without seeing or
entering the kingdom of God. Through water and the Spirit, he
passes indeed into the outward fellowship, but through that into
the vision and fellowship of the kingdom of God.1
1
Vincent, M. R. (2002). Word studies in the New Testament (2:92-93). Bellingham, WA: Logos Research
Systems, Inc.