John 12:28 Commentary and Bible Study

And the seventh voice, the final voice, the voice of the Father – ‘Then came there a voice from heaven.’ It is the climax of voices. ‘Saying, I have both glorified it, and will glorify it again.’ He glorified it of course through the fulfilment of prophecy, through the miracles, through the character and the preaching of Christ, through the raising of Lazarus, and now through the voice from heaven.Now, we can assume from this that many of the crowds didn’t actually make out the words. The general way of looking at this is along these lines: Christ, of course, heard the voice. Maybe his disciples – very probably – heard the voice, and other faithful people in the crowd, but unbelief obscured the sense – and that is probably a good explanation, though it isn’t specifically stated here. Well, everybody knew that this was an extraordinary thing, and that God was at work here, because of the way they described it, ‘It thundered.’ ‘The voice of the Lord, thundereth’ - that’s the psalmist. So, it just didn’t happen to sound like thunder, it sounded like thunder to them, but they immediately realised that this must be a divine intervention. The disciples heard it. How do we know the disciples heard it? Well because the people, who only thought it thundered or that it must be an angel, who could not make out the words, were the people that stood by. They are the non-disciples. That little phrase excludes the disciples. It was for the disciples, it was to strengthen them and help them through. They heard the voice of the Father. Three of them had heard it before at the transfiguration, now they all heard it. And the people that stood by, they heard a voice from heaven but they could not make out what it said. To some it thundered, to others it was the voice of an angel.Christ prays to his Father, ‘Show your holiness. Calvary must be enacted. Show the love and mercy of the Godhead and of the Saviour in particular that he would ever come and die for us. Show the power of the Saviour as he would hang on Calvary for six hours, and defeat Satan and make a new kingdom, an eternal kingdom possible. Show the eternity of Christ. He would rise from the dead. Show the faithfulness of Christ and of God. How far he would go to redeem those upon whom he had set his love. Show all the attributes of God, show him glorious. ‘Father, glorify thy name.’