John 9:39 Commentary and Bible Study

There are Pharisees and leading Jews coming around him even as he says this. I have come into this world, says Christ, for judgment. By this he does not mean that he came to judge all men immediately and to send them straight away to their final destination – heaven or hell. In another place in John’s Gospel he says clearly that he had not come to do that. ‘I came not to judge the world, but to save the world (John 12:47). The sense in which he has come into the world for judgment is that he has come to give his verdict on the world, God’s verdict on the world, to warn lost men and women of God’s sentence on them if they will not come to him for life. This world is a world that is out of order, a topsy-turvy world, a world whose values are the reverse of God’s values; that thinks darkness is light and light is darkness. Christ will not allow this reverse value of man to stand. All that Christ taught is consistent with the judgment of the last day, but the sentence is delayed until then. He came to make a difference between those who love him and those who reject his rule over them. He already knows what he thinks of this world and he is not going to change his mind about it. Christ’s judgment is the opposite of man’s judgment and it overturns the judgment of the world. He does not disagree with us only slightly. He overturns man’s judgment not in small matters but in the greatest matters of all: in our assessment of God, in our view of ourselves, and in what he came into the world to do. This is the meaning of the miracle he has done. It is a picture of judgment: the blind man was given sight, but the Pharisees were made blind, exposed as those who cannot see the truth. The gospel continues to have this effect; it brings light to some and confirms others in their darkness. Mankind passes judgment on Christ but does not realise that it is judged in the process.