27 “Now is my soul troubled. And what shall I say? ‘Father, save me from this hour?’ But for this purpose I have come to this hour. 28 Father, glorify your name.” Then a voice came from heaven: “I have glorified it, and I will glorify it again.” 29 The crowd that stood there and heard it said that it had thundered. Others said, “An angel has spoken to Him.” 30 Jesus answered, “This voice has come for your sake, not mine. 31 Now is the judgment of this world; now will the ruler of this world be cast out. 32 And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself.” 33 He said this to show by what kind of death He was going to die. 34 So the crowd answered Him, “We have heard from the Law that the Christ remains forever. How can you say that the Son of Man must be lifted up? Who is this Son of Man?” 35 So Jesus said to them, “The light is among you for a little while longer. Walk while you have the light, lest darkness overtake you. The one who walks in the darkness does not know where he is going. 36 While you have the light, believe in the light, that you may become sons of light.” When Jesus had said these things, He departed and hid Himself from them.
You’ll remember from last week that we looked at what some theologians call the paradox of the cross - the mysterious truth that even as Jesus suffered and died the death of the worst of criminals, God was glorified the most. There is much about God that we simply cannot understand with our limited minds, and the suffering of Jesus on the Cross of Calvary is one of the greatest mysteries.
In verse 27 He says, “Now is my soul troubled.” Jesus, in His humanity, remained at all times fully God. At no point during His earthly life was His divine nature diminished in the slightest, so knowing the whole purpose of His life and death, and being fully aware of the glory He would receive while on the cross, what did He mean by saying His soul was troubled? How do we understand His prayer of anguish in Gethsemane? “Father, if you are willing, remove this cup from me.”
This was God Himself in all of His fullness in human form, at all times in complete and total control, yet He approached the cross with a troubled soul. What was it that troubled Him? The answer is that as torturous as His physical suffering was, the one thing which troubled Him above all other things was the spiritual suffering as He bore the full brunt of God’s wrath for human sin. The insults and physical abuse He endured were bad enough, but it was the prospect of being made a curse for us, as Paul wrote in Galatians 3:13, and suffering the righteous wrath of God at our sin that caused His soul to be troubled. We will never fully grasp (at least on this side of eternity) just what Jesus endured in order for us to be redeemed.
Knowing exactly what lay ahead of Him, Jesus said, “Now is my soul troubled. And what shall I say? ‘Father, save me from this hour?’ But for this purpose I have come to this hour. Father, glorify your name.” (John 12:27–28)
Isaiah 53:10 says, “It was the will of the Lord to crush Him; He has put Him to grief; when His soul makes an offering for guilt.” Jesus went to the cross because it was the Father’s will that He do so. It was the whole purpose of Jesus’ life to come to the hour of His cross. He was born to die. Even the name given to Him at His birth pointed to His sacrificial death. The Hebrew name Yeshua means “Yahweh saves,” or “the Lord is salvation.” When Joseph was told that Mary was pregnant the angel said to him, “You shall call His name Jesus, for He will save His people from their sins.” (Matthew 1:21)
So it had always been the will of the Father that Jesus would go to the cross in order for us to be saved, but there was an even higher purpose or motivation for Him, as He said in John 12:28. “Father, glorify your name.”
As wonderful a gift salvation is for us, it does not compare to the glory that God receives through the cross. God’s glory was the chief aim of Jesus’ atoning death, and as those who have been redeemed at such measureless cost, our lives should be motivated by bringing glory to God too. Remember, we are called to a life of holiness. This is the only logical response to a God who has done so much in order for us to be forgiven. Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 6:19-20, “Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, whom you have from God? You are not your own, for you were bought with a price. So glorify God in your body.”
Jesus prayed in verse 28, “Father, glorify your name,” and we can only wonder at how those who were there reacted to the response. “Then a voice came from heaven: ‘I have glorified it, and I will glorify it again.’” This was not the first time God the Father spoke from heaven in order to approve of His Son. After Jesus was baptised He said, “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased.” (Matthew 3:17) At the Mount of Transfiguration He said something very similar. “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased; listen to Him.” (Matthew 17:5)
And now, just days before going to the cross, when Jesus says, “Father, glorify your name,” God replied from heaven, “I have glorified it, and I will glorify it again.” (John 12:28) In the first part of the Father’s reply in the past tense, He is confirming that by His sinless life, Jesus had already glorified His name, and in the second part God is referring to the glory He will receive at Calvary.
God was glorified in Jesus’ birth, which is why the angels sang, “Glory to God in the highest.” (Luke 2:14) He was glorified in Jesus’ perfect life as He perfectly kept God’s law. He was glorified in Jesus’ ministry through His miracles and teaching, but the ultimate crowning glory would be at the cross where as Jesus said He would be lifted up from the earth.
Human history is full of stories of human glory, whether it be by great military and political leaders, the fame and fortune of movie and sports stars, discoveries and inventions by people which have quite literally changed the world - the list is endless. There are countless famous and infamous people whom we either admire or despise, but eventually their glory fades away, and James 4:14 applies us much to the rich and famous as it does to every person who has ever lived. “What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes.”
Not so with Jesus. When He glorified the Father by His death on the cross, He achieved a glory that will never end, because it is nothing like the glory and fame we see in this world.
We’re told in verse 29 that the voice of God, which some thought was the voice of an angel thundered, and Jesus told them that the voice of God was not for His benefit, but theirs. He said in verses 30 and 31, “This voice has come for your sake, not mine. Now is the judgment of this world; now will the ruler of this world be cast out.” Jesus had just been talking about bringing glory to God, and here He explains in part, just how that glory will be achieved - by the judgment of the world and the defeat of Satan.
How does the cross of Christ judge the world? Firstly, it gives us some idea of the depravity of human sin, something we have become immune to. The cross graphically shows us just how depraved the human heart is, as Jesus suffered so dreadfully on our behalf.
J. C. Ryle wrote, “Terribly black must that guilt be for which nothing but the blood of the Son of God could make satisfaction. Heavy must that weight of human sin be which made Jesus groan and sweat drops of blood in agony at Gethsemane and cry at Golgotha, ‘My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me?’”
We have become immune to the reality of how bad sin is in the sense that we really don’t understand just how far we fall short of God’s holy standards. You hardly hear the word sin being used in the world today. People talk about a broken society, we speak about my “mistakes and bad choices” and many of the ills we see in the world are regarded as minor issues which can be rectified with human intervention and behaviour modification. People don’t like to be told they are depraved sinners who need to confess their sin and seek forgiveness through Jesus Christ. This is a prime reason why that name which is above every other name is so hated in our world. It is because Jesus, by His cross exposes the evil of human sin and in that way the cross judges the world.
Secondly, the world’s attitude toward Jesus is judged at the cross. In accordance with God’s eternal plan of salvation, Jesus was crucified as the atoning sacrifice for our sin, but from the perspective of the sinful world, He was removed by a world that hated Him. To those who rejected Him, the cross was the solution to the “Jesus problem.”
Here is another picture of the depth of depravity of the sinful heart. Jesus lived a perfect life of truth and love. He healed and taught wherever He went, and what did the world do to Him? They killed him, and the cross stands in judgment of this world against such evil.
The cross not only judges the world, but also “the ruler of this world,” as Jesus said in verse 31. He is referring here to Satan. Again, here we see the paradox of the cross. The devil was not the victor by the death of Jesus. He became the vanquished. Jesus said of Satan in John 8:44, “He was a murderer from the beginning, and does not stand in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks out of his own character, for he is a liar and the father of lies.” It has always been the devil’s desire to lie to us about God, and he has been doing so since the Garden of Eden. “You will not surely die. For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” (Genesis 3:4-5)
The way Satan was defeated at Calvary is by the death of Jesus removing our sin by paying the debt of our guilt. And that is just the start, because when we turn to Christ in repentance and faith, Jesus sends the Holy Spirit to deliver us from the grip of Satan’s power. John reminds us of this truth in 1 John 4:4, “Little children, you are from God and have overcome them, for He who is in you is greater than he who is in the world.”
At the point of conversion, the Christian is delivered from the power of sin. We are not yet delivered from the presence of sin - that will only come when we are finally in glory, but Christians are set free from both the penalty and power of sin by Jesus’s death, and this is how Satan is defeated by the cross.
Jesus continues with a remarkable statement in verse 32. “And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself.” As His death on the cross will glorify the Father, Jesus will use the cross to draw His people to Himself, yet another reminder that the Cross of Calvary is the great divider between the redeemed and the lost.
The Puritan preacher Jeremiah Burroughs wrote some 400 years ago, “Behold the infinite love of God to mankind and the love of Jesus Christ that, rather than God see the children of men to perish eternally, would send His Son to take our nature upon Him and thus suffer such dreadful things. Herein God shows His love. Oh, what a powerful, mighty, drawing, efficacious meditation this should be to us!” To say that something is efficacious means simply that an act or event was successful or effective in producing a desired result. In other words, the cross achieved exactly what God intended it to achieve.
We need to look at verse 32 in a bit more detail, because it is easy to misunderstand Jesus here. When He says He will draw all people to Himself, He is not talking about the false doctrine of universalism, a belief that all will be saved, and none will be lost. Even the most basic study of the New Testament debunks that lie. He said to Nicodemus in John 3:18 that “whoever does not believe is condemned,” so when Jesus says “all people” in verse 32, He means all kinds of people, from all nations, races, and tongues.
The Reformation Study Bible notes say, “The cross exerts a universal attraction, and people of all nationalities, Gentiles as well as Jews, will be saved through it. ‘All’ means all kinds of people without distinction - rich and poor, Jew and Gentile, not all members of the human race without exception.”
The Christian author Kent Hughes wrote in one of his books, “Christ was not saying that the whole world would be saved, but that all who will be saved will be saved by looking to and relying upon Him. If you are not yet a believer, see His troubled soul as He became a curse for you, as He suffered separation from the Father, as He lovingly bore the penalty of your sins.”
There is also a clear connection between Jesus’ words in verse 32 and what He said to the crowd He had miraculously fed in John 6:44. “No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him. And I will raise him up on the last day.”
Salvation occurs when we are drawn to Jesus. I said a couple of weeks ago that you will never argue anyone into the Kingdom. It is only God who draws the lost to Himself. Our role as the Church is to faithfully and Biblically proclaim the Gospel message to the lost, reminding people of their great need to be saved from the condemnation of their sin, while telling them the good news that the cross of Christ does exactly that. God will do the rest as Jesus draws His elect to Himself.
Part of the problem with the sinful human heart is that our sin separates us from God so profoundly that unless God intervenes and draws us to Himself, no one will come to Him. This then poses the question we often hear: What then, is the point of evangelising? If salvation is something which begins and ends with God and God alone, why tell anyone about Jesus?
Charles Spurgeon once asked the same question, and then answered it when he wrote of John 12:32, “Sometimes, when I am trying to prepare a sermon to preach, I say to myself, ‘Why must I take all this trouble?’ If men were in their senses, they would run to Christ without calling. Why must we put this business so temptingly? Why must we plead? Why must we be so earnest? Because men do not want to come, not even to their own Saviour. They do not wish to have their sins forgiven. They do not wish to be renewed in heart; and they never will come - no, not one mother’s son of them - unless He that sent Christ to them shall draw them to Christ. A work of grace in the heart is absolutely necessary before the sacrifice of the Lord Jesus will be accepted by any one of us.”
Again, why preach the Gospel? Because if Jesus is going to draw His own to Himself through His cross, we must preach His cross. Many are offended by the cross’ message of judgment of sin, but it is through that selfsame cross, as we proclaim it, that Christ will draw His elect. This is precisely the point the apostle Paul makes in 1 Corinthians 1:22-23. “Jews demand signs and Greeks seek wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles, but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God.”
As we have seen so often, the people Jesus was talking to just didn’t understand, and they show their lack of understanding in verse 34. “We have heard from the Law that the Christ remains forever. How can you say that the Son of Man must be lifted up? Who is this Son of Man?”
The point they were making was that the Old Testament consistently teaches about the eternal nature of God’s promised Messiah. Just one example is when God made His covenant with King David in 2 Samuel 7:12–13. “When your days are fulfilled and you lie down with your fathers, I will raise up your offspring after you, who shall come from your body, and I will establish His kingdom. He shall build a house for my name, and I will establish the throne of His kingdom forever.”
Jesus though, in John 12:32 and 33 had just told them that He was about to die, so they were confused by this. How can the eternal Son of God die? They weren’t looking at the full counsel of God’s Word, because there are many other passages which teach that the Messiah would first suffer for His people. Daniel 9:26 speaks of a Messiah who “shall be cut off and shall have nothing.”
Isaiah gives us the clearest Old Testament prophecy of the cross. 52:13-14 says, “He shall be high and lifted up, and shall be exalted. His appearance was so marred, beyond human semblance, and His form beyond that of the children of mankind,” and in 53:10 which we looked at earlier: “It was the will of the Lord to crush Him; He has put Him to grief; when His soul makes an offering for guilt.”
The lesson the people Jesus was talking to in John 12 is the same we need to learn. We cannot be saved without our sins first being forgiven. It is only as Jesus suffered and died on our behalf that we can be saved.
And then we come to a key passage in the Gospel of John, our final 2 verses for this week. “Jesus said to them, ‘The light is among you for a little while longer. Walk while you have the light, lest darkness overtake you. The one who walks in the darkness does not know where he is going. While you have the light, believe in the light, that you may become sons of light.’ When Jesus had said these things, He departed and hid Himself from them.” (John 12:35-36)
Here John records for us the very last time Jesus appeals to the lost to turn to Him for forgiveness, after which “He departed and hid Himself from them.” Jesus would not be seen publicly again until His trial and crucifixion.
What Jesus says is a summary of John’s message. “The light is among you for a little while longer. Walk while you have the light, lest darkness overtake you.” Throughout his Gospel, John used light to describe Jesus. All the way back in his introduction in chapter 1 he wrote, “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 any thing 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 the 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.” (John 1:1-9)
Jesus, in verse 35 is appealing to His listeners to walk in the light while they still have the opportunity. If you are still in the darkness, you have that same opportunity, but this window of opportunity will not last indefinitely, because He warns us in the next verse that His light will soon fade away. “While you have the light, believe in the light, that you may become sons of light.”
The Pharisees and the others who rejected Jesus just didn’t realise the awful truth of their rejection. Alexander Maclaren was a Christian author who died in 1910. He wrote, “Rejected light is the parent of the densest darkness, and the man who, having the light, does not trust it, piles around himself thick clouds of obscurity and gloom, far more doleful and impenetrable than the twilight that glimmers round the men who have never known the daylight of revelation.”
The Pharisees had now reached a point where they were surrounded by such thick spiritual darkness that they could no longer comprehend what light really was. They had seen Jesus heal a blind man and raise a dead man from the grave, but their depravity was so bad, and their hearts were so hardened, that they rejected the light of Christ as darkness completely engulfed them.
If you have heard and comprehended the Gospel message, if you have seen a glimpse of the true light who has come into the world, but have yet to turn to Jesus Christ in repentance and faith, you need to know that your heart can only become darker. Turn to Him now, before the Light of the World is completely blocked out.
Jesus presents His Gospel message to His audience in John 12:35-36 for the final time, but it ends with a chilling warning. “When Jesus had said these things, He departed and hid Himself from them.”
The time is coming for unbelievers when the Gospel will no longer be available. It might come with death, but it can also come through hardened unbelief, just like the Pharisees who would stop at nothing to have Jesus silenced. For all those who do not accept God’s gracious offer of salvation, the day is coming when Jesus will hide Himself from them. That is the final condemnation, and the point of no return.
We looked at a quote from Kent Hughes earlier. “If you are not yet a believer, see His troubled soul as He became a curse for you, as He suffered separation from the Father, as He lovingly bore the penalty of your sins.”
And then finally, Jesus’ words in verse 36 once more. “While you have the light, believe in the light, that you may become sons of light.”
Homegroup Study Notes
Read John 12:27-36
See also the accounts of Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane in Matthew 26, Mark 14 and Luke 22.
What did Jesus mean by saying that His heart was troubled in John 12:27?
How is the world and the prince of this world (Satan) judged by the Cross of Calvary?
Read verse 32 and John 6:44. What does Jesus mean by saying that He will draw all people to Himself?
Who does He mean by “all people?”
Discuss the question asked by the crowd in verse 34.
Not for the first time, they completely missed who Jesus really was, and what He was teaching.
How had they confused the eternal Messiah promised in the Old Testament with the fact that Jesus was about to die?
Read John 1:1-9
John often used the analogy of light when speaking about Jesus. Discuss Jesus’ final appeal to the people before His death in verses 35-36.
How does the final sentence in verse 36 apply to unbelievers today?