John 12:31 What Will Ye Do With Christ? 3/20/2005 ßà
#1. The Tenth Day of Nisan (Ex 12:14,1-6, Heb 3:19)
#2. Now Is the Judgment of This World (John 3:17,16, 1John 2:15-17, 2Cor 5:19, Joh 17:9)
#3. The World of
Fallen Man (John 12:31)
#4. What Will Ye Do With the Son of God? (Matt 22:42, John 10:4, Heb 2:3)
Please open your Bibles to the Gospel According to John 12:20 (2X). The Lord Jesus made here the statement that the hour of His suffering had arrived. And what triggered this utterance of Jesus? It was the inquiry of Greeks that they wanted to talk to Jesus. They were Gentiles who had converted to Judaism some time ago, and now they had come to Jerusalem to fulfill one of the requirements of the Law of God that all the males should appear three times each year before the Lord: at the Passover feast, at the feast of Pentecost, and at the feast of Tabernacles. And now they wanted to talk to Jesus
Joh 12:20 ¶ And
there were certain Greeks among them that came up to worship at the feast:
Joh 12:21 The same
came therefore to Philip, which was of Bethsaida of Galilee, and desired him,
saying, Sir, we would see Jesus.
Joh 12:22-23 Philip
cometh and telleth Andrew: and again Andrew and Philip tell Jesus. And
Jesus answered them, saying, The hour is come, that the Son of man should be
glorified.
Joh 12:24-25 Verily,
verily, I say unto you, Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it
abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit. He
that loveth his life shall lose it; and he that hateth his life in this world
shall keep it unto life eternal.
Joh 12:26 If any man
serve me, let him follow me; and where I am, there shall also my servant be: if
any man serve me, him will my Father honour.
Joh 12:27-28 ¶ Now
is my soul troubled; and what shall I say? Father, save me from this hour: but
for this cause came I unto this hour. Father, glorify thy name. Then came
there a voice from heaven, saying, I have both glorified it, and
will glorify it again.
Joh 12:29 The people
therefore, that stood by, and heard it, said that it thundered: others
said, An angel spake to him.
Joh 12:30 Jesus
answered and said, This voice came not because of me, but for your sakes.
Joh 12:31 Now is the
judgment of this world: now shall the prince of this world be cast out.
Joh 12:32 And I, if
I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all men unto me.
Joh 12:33 This he
said, signifying what death he should die.
The Greeks wanted to see Jesus. Philip and Andrew brought Him the
message. And this triggered in the Lord Jesus the awesome response that He gave
in verse 23, “The hour is come, that the
Son of man should be glorified”. He is
speaking about His crucifixion. Why did Jesus react to that news about the
Greeks in this particular way? He is reminded of the fact that, in addition to
the few Jews who are going to be saved, there are multitudes more of Gentiles
who are going to be saved and whose sins must to be paid for. The Lord Jesus is
reminded of the enormous suffering He had to endure, and the Lord Jesus is
reminded of the glory that is waiting Him after those sufferings have been
endured. And then the voice of the Father was heard from heaven. This was very
significant. Only three times in the life of the Lord Jesus was this voice of
the Father heard: 1st at His baptism by John the Baptist where Jesus was
commissioned for His ministry, 2nd at the Mount of
Transfiguration when Jesus was strengthened for His impending suffering and
death, and 3rd here four days before His crucifixion. What
was so special about this day? Well, this was:
#1. The Tenth Day of Nisan (Ex 12:14,1-6, Heb 3:19)
It was the tenth day of the first month. Put a sticker here in John
chapter 12, and please turn in your Bibles to the Prophecy of Exodus
12:14 (2X). There we read about God’s ordinances concerning the feast of
Passover. The exodus of the children of
Ex 12:1-2 ¶ And the
LORD spake unto Moses and Aaron in the
Ex 12:3 Speak ye
unto all the congregation of
Ex 12:4-5 And if the
household be too little for the lamb, let him and his neighbour next unto his
house take it according to the number of the souls; every man according
to his eating shall make your count for the lamb. Your lamb shall be without blemish, a male of the first
year: ye shall take it out from the sheep, or from the goats:
Ex 12:6 And ye shall
keep it up until the fourteenth day of the same month: and the whole
assembly of the congregation of
I want you to see the time references here. Verse 3: In the 10th
day of the first month they had to select a particular lamb and set it
aside to be the sacrificial lamb. This day marked the beginning of the Passover
ceremony. Verse 6: On the 14th day of the first month
they had to kill it, not in the evening, but the Hebrew text says “between
the evenings”, which means between sundown and sundown. The Lord Jesus ate
His last Passover supper with the disciples in the year AD 33, on Thursday
evening, when the 14th day of the first month had just begun after
sundown. Most other Jews killed their Passover lamb on Friday, which was still
the 14th day of the first month until sundown, and they ate their
Passover meal that evening. And thus, they killed their Passover lamb at the
same time that the Lord Jesus Christ hung on the cross. From this apparent
coincidence we see that it was ordained by God all along. Christ is the true
Passover Lamb who redeemed His elect people out of the house of bondage to sin
and Satan, and leads them out. All the millions of Passover lambs killed during
the 15 centuries prior to Christ’s sacrifice were only pictures, signs and
shadows of Christ’s ultimate sacrifice. And when was this Passover Lamb
selected, or dedicated? It was on the 10th day of the first
month. In AD 33 when was that? On the 9th day of the first
month, on Sunday, was the triumphal entry of Jesus in
#2. Now Is the Judgment of This World (John 3:17,16, 1John 2:15-17, 2Cor 5:19, Joh 17:9)
Did He not say that He did not come to judge the world but that the world
through Him might be saved? Please turn a few pages back to John 3:17
(2X). The Lord Jesus said in John 3:17, “For
God sent not his Son into the world to condemn the world; but that the world
through him might be saved”. Is Jesus
contradicting Himself in John 12:31? Of course this is impossible. God cannot
lie. But what is this world of which the Lord speaks? We must understand
that the word “world” has many different meanings. We cannot quote the
Bible at random on this point. Many people understand that the word “world”
simply means “all men”. That is false. As we can see, it leads to
contradictions, and thus it leads to declaring God a liar. And then the crucial
question becomes, “What will ye do with Christ?” since the Bible
determines who your Christ is. Will ye pick and choose the verses that ye like,
or will we try to harmonize the whole Bible? Of course, what God desires is
that we harmonize the whole Bible. And
so it is that we must interpret the word “world” in different ways, depending
on the context. Two major meanings of the word “world” stand out: One is “God’s
world”, and the other is “fallen man’s world”. #1, God’s world is the world of God’s elect that
Christ came to save, as we can read in John 3:16, “For God so loved
the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him
should not perish, but have everlasting life”. This is the world that God
loves. God does not love the wicked. God does not love those who are going to
pay for their own sins in Hell. Nowhere in the Bible can we find a verse where
God loves the reprobate. God bestows His love only on His elect, only on those
who were in Christ from before the foundation of the world. God’s world
encompasses only God’s elect. This is the world of His everlasting good
pleasure, the world of His love, the world He purposes to save in Christ. #2. We read about the world of
the reprobate in 1John 2:15-17, “For all that is in the world,
the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life, is not
of the Father, but is of the world. And the world passeth away, and the
lust thereof: but he that doeth the will of God abideth for ever”. That is
man’s world, the world of sinful man, motivated through and through by enmity
against God, full of corruption and unrighteousness. And this world is not the
object of the love of God, and may not be the object of our love. On the one
hand we read about God’s world in 2Cor 5:19 “To wit, that God was
in Christ, reconciling the world unto himself, not imputing their trespasses
unto them; and hath committed unto us the word of reconciliation”. On the
other hand we read about man’s fallen world in Joh 17:9, “I pray not
for the world”. These two worlds are temporarily one, just like the wheat
and the chaff are one; since all are by nature in Adam, and thus all are under
sin and under the wrath of God. But God saves His world out of the world
of man, and God saves His world in the way of judgment and of justice.
#3. The World of
Fallen Man (John 12:31)
When the Lord Jesus declared, “Now is the
judgment of this world”, He spoke of “the
world of fallen man”. Man was originally created king of this earthly
creation, in order that with all things he might serve his God. But man
rebelled against God, allied himself with the Devil, and ever since performed
the will of the Devil and he subjects all things into the service of sin and
the Devil. This is the world as it always has existed since the fall of Adam,
and we can clearly see it in our day. It is a world that in all its power and
might, in all its knowledge and presumed wisdom, in its commerce and industry,
in its science and arts, always has been without God and in opposition to God.
This world with its pride and self-exaltation, its trust in man and its trust
in the wisdom of man, its hatred of God and of one another, its covetousness
and lust for power only serves the glory of man. It is a world full of the lust
of the flesh, full of idolatry and adultery, full of profanity and deceit, full
of striving after pleasures and treasures, and also a world full of strife and
debate, full of unrest and revolutions, and full of wars and destruction. And
also it is a world where the self-righteousness of man, and the self-asserted
goodness of man, and its man-made religions are highly exalted as the noblest
things of man. For always that world, with all its iniquity and corruption,
puts on a cloak of righteousness and goodness, and with all its hatred it
speaks of love, and with all its injustice and shedding of blood it speaks of
its own justice. That beautiful, and mighty, and powerful, and glamorous, and
boasting, and self-righteous, and proud, and thoroughly corrupt world, is that
painted and adorned harlot of Rev 17 whom the Lord has in mind when He
said, “Now is the judgment of this world”. On the Last Day when all who
still are in “the world of fallen man” will be cast into the
#4. What Will Ye Do With the Son of God? (Matt 22:42, John 10:4, Heb 2:3)
In what sense is the hour of Jesus’ condemnation by the world, and His
suffering and death also the judgment of the world? You see, through the
suffering of the Lord Jesus Christ the world was put on trial. In Matt 22:42
the Lord Jesus confronted the world with the question: “What think ye of
Christ. Whose Son is He?” And then Jesus clearly showed that the Christ
must be the Son of God. And through His entire public ministry for three and a
half years the Lord Jesus clearly revealed that He was that Christ, and that He
had come to witness the truth, and that He was the Light of the world in a world
of darkness. And so, when this Christ in the hour of His trial stood before the
world as a weak and helpless man, without power and without defense, the world
faced the question, “What will ye do with God’s representative, with the Son
of God, if He should stand before you in the form of a helpless man?” O,
the council did not like this public trial. For it was their intention to kill
Jesus secretly, without any formal trial or judicial procedure. And it must not
be on the feast day. All publicity must be avoided. But this was not God’s
plan. The Lord Jesus had to be tried publicly. For clearly and definitely they
must answer God’s question: “What will ye do with the Son of God?” And
so, their plans were frustrated. What was the cause of their dilemma? There was
the raising of Lazarus, and the resulting growing popularity of Jesus. There
was on Thursday evening the Lord’s dismissal of the traitor Judas Iscariot, who
was now forced to do quickly what he had sold himself to do, by the sudden
exposure of his hypocrisy in the upper room. And thus God arranged it so that
not in secret, but in the way of a public trial by all the world, not in a
forsaken corner of the world, but in the most public place of all the world,
Jerusalem, and on the choicest of all times, on the feast of Passover, the
whole world was placed before the question: “What will ye do with the Son of
God?”. And all the world answered with one accord, “If we can ever get
hold of God we will surely kill Him! Away with Him! Crucify Him!” And so,
that world whose mask of culture and goodness had been torn off, and had been
exposed in all its vileness and wicked enmity against the living God, on that
world God poured out the vials of His wrath. When Christ strove to the place of
execution, He carried His own whom the Father had given Him, His own world, of
which He had been appointed the head from before the foundation of the world. Has
He not said to His own sheep, “he goeth before
them, and the sheep follow him: for they know his voice” (John 10:4). This is how He goeth before them, to
But to all who find
themselves in the world of God’s elect, God assures us that the Lord Jesus
Christ by His obedience fully satisfied for our sins, and obtained for us an
eternal righteousness for that
Let us turn to the Lord in prayer.