37 Though He had done so many signs before them, they still did not believe in Him, 38 so that the word spoken by the prophet Isaiah might be fulfilled: “Lord, who has believed what he heard from us, and to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed?” 39 Therefore they could not believe. For again Isaiah said, 40 “He has blinded their eyes and hardened their heart, lest they see with their eyes, and understand with their heart, and turn, and I would heal them.”
41 Isaiah said these things because he saw His glory and spoke of Him. 42 Nevertheless, many even of the authorities believed in Him, but for fear of the Pharisees they did not confess it, so that they would not be put out of the synagogue; 43 for they loved the glory that comes from man more than the glory that comes from God.
Unbelief and the dire consequences of unbelief are recurring themes throughout John’s Gospel, and he addresses this issue at the end of chapter 12 when he writes in verse 37, “Though He had done so many signs before them, they still did not believe in Him.” The context of John 12 is Jesus’ final public teaching before His trial and crucifixion, so basically John is saying that despite all of these signs and miracles they had seen, so many people still did not believe that Jesus was who He claimed to be - the Son of God.
John 12:36 tells us that Jesus departed and hid Himself from them after what was His final offer of salvation and reconciliation to the Father. He was about to be lifted up, as He said in verse 32. The cross is the final message to the world of who Jesus is, which is why even now, some 2000 years later, the cross remains central to the Church’s message.
The purpose of the many signs and wonders Jesus performed were to bring people to the point where they would believe, but as we have seen, in many cases the exact opposite happened, as their hearts were hardened by unbelief. This is a difficult concept for us to understand, because the whole idea of unbelief and hardened hearts confuses us.
As John quotes the prophet Isaiah, we see firstly that God knew in advance who would not believe, which then poses a difficult question. In verse 40 we’re told that it was God who blinded their eyes and hardened their hearts. How are we to make sense of this? Is it possible that God deliberately prevents people who want to believe in Jesus from believing in Him? Some might think this is what John is saying, but the simple answer is that God would not be just by preventing those who want to believe from doing so.
We need to look at the bigger picture, rather than make the mistake of just assuming the Bible teaches that God randomly chooses who will and who won’t believe. In the passage of Scripture we’re looking at today, God gives us the reasons for and also the consequences of unbelief.
The first point is that unbelief was expected by God. Nothing surprises Him, as He sees and knows all things from beginning to end. About 700 years before the events described in John 12 the Lord prophesied through Isaiah that unbelief would be the response of many people. Isaiah 53 is the most well-known and clearest Old Testament prophecy of the cross and the sacrifice of Jesus, yet verse 1, which John quotes in verse 38 sets the scene by first speaking of the sin of unbelief. Before Isaiah gives us a wonderful picture of the suffering servant, he begins by saying many would not believe. “Who has believed what he has heard from us? And to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed?” These are rhetorical questions which Isaiah answers in 6:10, also quoted by John in 12:40. “He has blinded their eyes and hardened their heart, lest they see with their eyes, and understand with their heart, and turn, and I would heal them.”
There is a connection between Isaiah’s commission in chapter 6 and his prophecy of the suffering servant in chapter 53, which helps us to understand the seemingly controversial statement of John in 12:38-40.
We’re familiar with Isaiah’s response to God’s commission in 6:8. “I heard the voice of the Lord saying, ‘Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?’ Then I said, ‘Here I am! Send me.’” But we need to read on, because God tells Isaiah that his message, just like Jesus’ 700 years later, would be rejected.
“He said, ‘Go, and say to this people: “Keep on hearing, but do not understand; keep on seeing, but do not perceive.” Make the heart of this people dull, and their ears heavy, and blind their eyes; lest they see with their eyes, and hear with their ears, and understand with their hearts, and turn and be healed.’ Then I said, ‘How long, O Lord?’ And He said: ‘Until cities lie waste without inhabitant, and houses without people, and the land is a desolate waste, and the Lord removes people far away, and the forsaken places are many in the midst of the land.’” (Isaiah 6:9-12)
God commissioned Isaiah to preach to the people, but He told Him that his message would be rejected. In essence, God was saying, “They won’t listen, but tell them anyway.” Just as Isaiah’s message was going to be rejected, Jesus’ teaching and His saving work on the cross would be rejected too.
The question is why. Why did the people not believe? Verse 39 has the answer. “Therefore they could not believe,” and John tells us that because they could not believe, they never would, and so God blinded their eyes and hardened their hearts. A common objection here is that this is grossly unfair, so we need to spend some time trying to understand just what this means.
What does it mean that the people could not believe because God blinded their eyes and hardened their hearts? The quotation from Isaiah 6 provides the answer. God commanded Isaiah to keep preaching to the people, even though his preaching would “Make the heart of this people dull, and their ears heavy, and blind their eyes.” (Isaiah 6:10) God would harden their hearts by the continued preaching of His judgment and the promise of salvation. The more Isaiah preached, the more the people’s hearts were hardened against God and His message so much so that they would reach the point where they could no longer be saved.
We see the same thing in Exodus where God hardened Pharaoh’s heart, not by preventing Pharaoh from listening to Moses, but by giving him sign after sign, which Pharaoh rejected. With each successive plague, Pharaoh rejected God’s command given to him through Moses to let His people go, and the result was that his heart was hardened even further, and the same thing happened in John 12.
Verse 37 says, “Though He had done so many signs before them, they still did not believe in Him.” Despite the many signs Jesus performed, the people would not believe. John lists only seven signs, but we’re told Jesus performed many more. “Jesus did many other signs in the presence of the disciples, which are not written in this book.” (John 20:30) He continued performing signs which only hardened the people’s hearts further with each successive sign. Eyes were blinded and hearts were hardened through Jesus’ signs and teachings.
In his commentary, Merrill Tenney writes, “Why should not the hearers of Jesus believe in Him when the signs so unmistakably accredited His claims? John quotes from Isaiah 6 to show that unbelief is the result of the rejection of light, which gradually makes belief impossible. The cumulative effect of unbelief is a hardened attitude that becomes more impenetrable as time progresses.”
This is a serious warning to those who do not believe. As I said last Sunday, if you have heard and comprehended the Gospel message, and 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, your heart can only become darker. There is no such thing as neutrality when it comes to hearing the Gospel proclaimed. It’s not something you can kind of leave in limbo until you feel you are good and ready to deal with when it suits you. Each time you refuse to repent, you continue to sin and your heart becomes harder.
You will either embrace the message and accept Jesus as Lord and Saviour, or you will become increasingly hostile and hardened to the message. Whenever the Gospel is presented and proclaimed, and every time that message is rejected, the heart becomes progressively harder.
The apostle Paul also refers to Isaiah 53:1 in Romans 10:14-15. “How then will they call on Him in whom they have not believed? And how are they to believe in Him of whom they have never heard? And how are they to hear without someone preaching? And how are they to preach unless they are sent? As it is written, ‘How beautiful are the feet of those who preach the good news!’” The problem is that many people stop at that point, without reading the warning in the following 2 verses: “But they have not all obeyed the Gospel. For Isaiah says, ‘Lord, who has believed what he has heard from us?’ So faith comes from hearing, and hearing through the word of Christ.”
Keep rejecting the word of Christ, and your heart will become so hardened to the Gospel, that you will reach the point of no return. This is exactly what we are seeing in the world today which has become so evil and so wicked. The non-believing world has rejected the truth of God for a lie, so He has hardened their hearts.
Romans 1:18-32 was written nearly 2000 years ago, but it could just as well have been written yesterday.
“The wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth. For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. For His invisible attributes, namely, His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse. For although they knew God, they did not honour Him as God or give thanks to Him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened. Claiming to be wise, they became fools, and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things. Therefore God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the dishonouring of their bodies among themselves, because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshipped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever! Amen. For this reason God gave them up to dishonourable passions. For their women exchanged natural relations for those that are contrary to nature; and the men likewise gave up natural relations with women and were consumed with passion for one another, men committing shameless acts with men and receiving in themselves the due penalty for their error. And since they did not see fit to acknowledge God, God gave them up to a debased mind to do what ought not to be done. They were filled with all manner of unrighteousness, evil, covetousness, malice. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, maliciousness. They are gossips, slanderers, haters of God, insolent, haughty, boastful, inventors of evil, disobedient to parents, foolish, faithless, heartless, ruthless. Though they know God’s righteous decree that those who practice such things deserve to die, they not only do them but give approval to those who practice them.” Reject the Gospel message long enough and consistently enough, and that is the result.
John gives us another reason for unbelief in verses 42-43. “Many even of the authorities believed in Him, but for fear of the Pharisees they did not confess it, so that they would not be put out of the synagogue; for they loved the glory that comes from man more than the glory that comes from God.”
This gives us another warning as Christians. We will find it very hard to completely surrender our lives to Christ if we are afraid of what others might think, say or do to us. If our biggest fear is ridicule or even rejection from others, our faith is on rather shaky ground.
For the Jews in Jesus’ day, life revolved around the synagogue, and the worst thing that could happen to a Jew was to be excommunicated from the synagogue, something the authorities had threatened to do to those who believed in Jesus.
The question is, who do we fear most - God or man? William MacDonald writes, “Many of the rulers of the Jews became convinced that Jesus was the Messiah. However, they did not dare share their conviction with the others lest they be excommunicated. We would like to think that these men were genuine believers in the Lord Jesus, but it is doubtful. Where there is true faith, there will be confession of Christ, sooner or later. When Christ is really accepted as Saviour, one does not hesitate to make it known, regardless of the consequences.”
Romans 10:9-10 says, “If you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, you will be saved. For with the heart one believes and is justified, and with the mouth one confesses and is saved.” It’s been said many times that for the Christian, our faith is a very personal thing. That is absolutely correct. Your faith is very personal, but it is not private.
This is another point which can be easily misunderstood. Do you have to stand up and publicly proclaim your faith in order to be saved? No, but the answer is a bit more complicated. Salvation is a spiritual work performed by the Holy Spirit. Our words don’t save us, because salvation is by grace through the gift of faith, not through the words we speak.
As we’ve seen throughout the history of the Church, confessing Jesus as Lord can be very costly, which is why just after Jesus was arrested, Peter denied three times that he even knew Him. After Jesus’ ascension though, we see a dramatic change in the apostles as they boldly proclaimed that salvation comes through faith in Jesus alone. All of the apostles, with the exception of John were executed for their faith. They were told to stop preaching the Gospel, but they refused. Jesus said in Luke 9:26, “Whoever is ashamed of me and of my words, of him will the Son of Man be ashamed when He comes in His glory and the glory of the Father and of the holy angels.”
He could not have been any clearer here, so yes, we are not to be ashamed to be called followers of Jesus Christ, but words without a true inner change are just words. A simple profession of faith, with no change of heart has no power to save us. Jesus also said that many who think they are saved because of a profession they made will realise one day that they were never His in the first place. “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven. On that day many will say to me, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and cast out demons in your name, and do many mighty works in your name?’ And then will I declare to them, ‘I never knew you; depart from me, you workers of lawlessness.’” (Matthew 7:21–23)
These words have caused many a confessing Christian sleepless nights, but we need to look at what Jesus says in verse 21.
What does He mean by saying “the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven?” He answers that question in John 6:35-40. “I am the bread of life; whoever comes to me shall not hunger, and whoever believes in me shall never thirst. But I said to you that you have seen me and yet do not believe. All that the Father gives me will come to me, and whoever comes to me I will never cast out. For I have come down from heaven, not to do my own will but the will of Him who sent me. And this is the will of Him who sent me, that I should lose nothing of all that He has given me, but raise it up on the last day. For this is the will of my Father, that everyone who looks on the Son and believes in Him should have eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day.”
What this means is that merely professing faith in Jesus, even when it is accompanied by good works, does not guarantee salvation. There needs to be repentance of sin as we are born again from above, and Jesus will then keep us as His own as we follow Him as Lord of our lives, by faith.
The way we conduct our lives is a more powerful profession of faith than mere words. Yes, words are important, and Christians should not be ashamed to say they are believers. There are times when we need to proclaim our faith, but we must remember what Jesus said in John 8:31-32. “If you abide in my word, you are truly my disciples, and you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.”
So what is the answer to protecting ourselves against unbelief and being fearful of what the world may think of us?
There is an important word we see in verses 41 and 43 - glory.
John tells us that many, even though they believed, were reluctant to confess their faith because the world’s glory was more important to them than the glory of God. Isaiah was given a glimpse of the glory of God, and it changed his life forever. “In the year that King Uzziah died I saw the Lord sitting upon a throne, high and lifted up; and the train of His robe filled the temple. Above Him stood the seraphim. Each had six wings: with two he covered his face, and with two he covered his feet, and with two he flew. And one called to another and said: ‘Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts; the whole earth is full of His glory!’ And the foundations of the thresholds shook at the voice of Him who called, and the house was filled with smoke. And I said: ‘Woe is me! For I am lost; for I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips; for my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts!’” (Isaiah 6:1-5)
Isaiah saw the glory of Christ on His throne, and as a result, he no longer feared the world, nor did he chase after worldly glory. We need to see the glory of Christ, just as Isaiah did, because this is what will guard our hearts against seeking the empty, vain glory of the world.
J. C. Ryle wrote in his commentary, “The expulsive power of a new principle, making us see God, Christ, heaven, hell, judgment, eternity, as realities, is the grand secret of getting the victory over the fear of man.”
Now, Isaiah was given a miraculous vision by God. He quite literally, for a brief period, saw into the throne room of heaven itself. So how are we to see the glory of Christ? The answer is that for Christians today, the glory of Christ is found shining through the Word of God.
After the risen Christ appeared to the two disciples on the Emmaus road they said in Luke 24:32, “Did not our hearts burn within us while He talked to us on the road, while He opened to us the Scriptures?”
If you want to protect yourself from unbelief, the hardening of your heart and the fear of man, saturate yourself in the Word of God. God’s primary means of guiding and enlightening our hearts and minds today is through His written Word - the Bible.
Homegroup Study Notes
He has given us this treasure to reveal the glory of Jesus to us.
Read John 12:37-40 and Isaiah 53:1
God told Isaiah that the hearts of the people would be hardened as a direct result of his preaching, and we see the same thing happening with the people Jesus taught.
Why do people continue to reject the Gospel?
The text tells us that it is God who blinds the eyes and hardens the hearts of unbelievers.
(See also Exodus 4:21 and Romans 1:18-32)
How are we to understand the reality that God eventually hardens the hearts of those who continually reject Him?
Read John 12:42-43.
How, as Christians, should we protect ourselves from fear of what others might say or do to us because of our faith?
How have you faced ridicule or persecution, and how did this affect your faith in Jesus?
Read John 12:41 and Isaiah 6:1-5.
Isaiah had the privilege of seeing the glory of Christ, which emboldened him to seek the glory of God, rather than man’s empty praises.
How does reading and knowing the Bible help us to do the same?