John 12:34 Commentary and Bible Study

This scornful question is not asked by a chief priest, by a scribe, by a Pharisee, but by the multitude. There must have been some particularly strident voice raised, and they all repeat the question and they shout for an answer. ‘We have heard out of the law that Christ abideth for ever: and how sayest thou, The Son of man must be lifted up? Who is this Son of man?’ They show by the question that they understand what he is saying about himself, as the Son of God, but they just put up the barricades. Now think, we have just had the triumphant entry into Jerusalem. The Lord has ridden into the city from the Jericho road that runs through Bethany down the mountain into the city. He has just come and thousands have followed him. The people have flocked out of the city to meet him and they have cried out, ‘Hosanna: [save us, Lord] Blessed be he that cometh in the name of the Lord’, and they have proclaimed him as Messiah. But suddenly they are disillusioned; they are horrified at what he said to them. What is it that so turns them round? It is that he has said, I am going to die, I am going to be crucified. They know the authorities are trying to arrest him, but they feel sure that will not happen. They feel sure he is their Messiah, and is going to deliver them from the Roman occupation. Surely he is going to raise his army or do something grand and glorious. And yet he has said, ‘And I, if I be lifted up from the earth … This he said, signifying what death he should die.’ They all knew that meant crucifixion. ‘What?’, they respond, ‘Then how can you be our deliverer?’He had said to them repeatedly in so many words, I am your spiritual Messiah. I have come to bring deliverance from sin. I have come to urge your repentance. I have come, not that you should have a better life now, but that you should have spiritual life that will last all eternity. They had not taken any notice, they had not believed it. They had brushed it aside. No, they said to themselves, you are our present political Messiah. Now, almost at once they are disillusioned and they are shouting out in scorn.‘We have heard that Messiah lives for ever.’ Where had they heard that? Well, they were misinterpreting the Old Testament. They were interpreting the Old Testament in a cruelly literal way. Psalm 110 – ‘Thou art a priest for ever after the order of Melchizedek.’ ‘Of the increase of his government,’ says Isaiah, ‘there shall be no end.’ He is going to live for ever. So they had this literal interpretation. They did not understand that these words were spiritual. He would suffer and die. He would rise again and then he would be alive eternally.