John 12:39-40

“ And indeed they could not believe, because Isaiah said again, 40 He has blinded their eyes and hardened their hearts, that they should not see with their eyes and understand with their heart, and be converted, and I should heal them. ”

The omnipotence of God itself worked to the end of realizing that which His omniscience had foretold, and to make Israel do the impossible thing. Not only they did not believe (John 12:37); but they could not believe (John 12:39). The word πάλιν (again) reminds us that there is here a second idea, serving to explain the fact by completing the first. This logical relation answers to the meaning of the two expressions of Isaiah quoted by John. The διὰ τοῦτο, for this cause, refers, as ordinarily in John (John 12:18; John 10:17, etc.), to the following ὅτι, because: “And this is the reason why they could not believe: it is because Isaiah in another passage (πάλιν) said.” It is in vain that Weiss tries to make the διὰ τοῦτο, for this cause, also refer to the preceding idea, namely, that of the fact; it refers to the following ὅτι and consequently to the cause of the fact (see Keil). These words are taken from Isaiah 6:9-10.

The word of address, Lord, added by the LXX., passed thence to John. The quotation differs both from the Hebrew text and from that of the LXX., in that according to the former, it is Isaiah who is said to blind and harden the people by his ministry: “ Make the heart of this people fat; ” according to the latter, this hardening is a simple fact laid to the charge of Israel: “ The heart of this people is hardened; ” in John, on the contrary, the understood subject of the two verbs (he has blinded, he has hardened) can only be God. This third form is evidently a deliberate correction of the latter, in order to go back to the meaning of the former. For this fact accomplished by Isaiah, being the execution of the command of God, is rightly attributed by John to God Himself. This passage proves that the evangelist, while attaching himself to the Greek translation, was not dependent on it and was acquainted with the Hebrew text (vol. I., p. 197f.). Τυφλοῦν, to make blind, designates the depriving of intellectual light, of the sense of the true and even of the useful, of simple good sense; πωροῦν, to harden the skin, the depriving of moral sensibility, the sense of the good. From the paralysis of these two organs unbelief must necessarily result; the people may see miracle after miracle, may hear testimony after testimony, yet they will not discern in the one whom God thus points out, and who gives all these testimonies to Himself, their Messiah. The subject of the two verbs is undoubtedly God (Meyer, Reuss), but God in the person of that Adonai who (according to Isaiah 6:1) gives the command to the prophet. The reading of nearly all the Mjj. is ἰάσομαι, and I shall heal them. This future might signify: “And I shall end by bringing them to myself through the means of their very hardening.” The two καί and...and, however, are too closely related to each other for such a contrast between the last verb and those which precede it to be admissible. The force of the formidable ἵνα μή, in order that I..., evidently extends as far as the end of the sentence. The construction of the indicative with this conjunction has nothing unusual in it (1 Corinthians 13:3; 1 Peter 3:1; Rev 22:14); it is frequent also in the classic Greek with ὅπως. We might undoubtedly explain in this way: “lest they should be converted, in which case I will heal them” (for: I would heal them). But the other sense remains the more natural one: God does not desire to heal them; it is not in accordance with His actual intentions towards them. This is precisely the reason why He does not desire that they should believe a thing which would force Him to pardon and heal them.

If such is the meaning of the words of the prophet and of those of the evangelist, how can it be justified? These declarations would be inexplicable and revolting if, at the moment when God addresses them to Israel and treats Israel in this way, this people were in the normal state, and God regarded them still as His people.

But it was by no means so; when sending Isaiah, God said to him: “ Go and tell THIS people ” (Isaiah 6:9). And we know what a father means, when speaking of his son, he says: this child, instead of my child: the paternal and filial relation is momentarily broken. An abnormal state has begun, which obliges God to use means of an extraordinary character. This divine dispensation towards Israel enters therefore into the category of chastisements. The creature who has long abused the divine favors falls under the most terrible of punishments; from an end it becomes for the time a means. In fact man can, by virtue of his liberty, refuse to glorify God by his obedience and salvation; but even in this case he cannot prevent God from glorifying Himself in him by a chastisement capable of making the odious character of his sin shine forth conspicuously. “God,” says Hengstenberg, “has so constituted man, that, when he does not resist the first beginnings of sin, he loses the right of disposing of himself and forcibly obeys even to the end the power to which he has surrendered himself.” God does not merely permit this development of evil; He wills it and concurs in it. But how, it will be said, will the holiness of God, as thus understood, be reconciled with His love? This is that which St. Paul explains to the Jews by the example of their ancient oppressor, Pharaoh, Romans 9:17: In the first place, this king refuses to hearken to God and to be saved; he has the prerogative to do so. But after this he is passively used for the salvation of others.

God paralyses in him both the sense of the true and the sense of the good; he becomes deaf to the appeals of conscience and even to the calculations of self-interest properly understood; he is given up to the inspirations of his own foolish pride, in order that, through the conspicuous example of the ruin into which he precipitates himself, the world may learn what it costs wickedly to resist the first appeals of God. Thereby he at least serves the salvation of the world. The history of Pharaoh is reproduced in that of the Jews in the time of Jesus Christ. Already at the epoch of Isaiah the mass of the people were so carnal that their future unbelief in the Messiah, the man of sorrows, appears to the prophet an inevitable moral fact (Isaiah 53). We must even go further and say, with Paul and John, that, things being thus, this unbelief must have been willed of God. What would have become of the kingdom of God, indeed, if an Israel like this had outwardly and without a change of heart received Jesus as its Messiah and had become with such dispositions the nucleus of the Church?

This purely intellectual adherence of Israel, instead of advancing the divine work in the heathen world, would have served only to hinder it. We have the proof of this in the injurious part which was played in the Apostolic Church by the Pharisaic minority who accepted the faith. Suppose that the Jewish people en masse had acted thus and had governed the Church, the work of St. Paul would not have been possible; the Jewish monopoly would have taken possession of the gospel; there would have been an end of the universalism which is the essential characteristic of the new covenant. The rejection of the Jews thus disposed was therefore a measure necessary to the salvation of the world. It is in this sense that St. Paul says in Romans 11:12: “that the fall of Israel has become the riches of the world,” and John 12:15: “that its rejection has been the reconciliation of the world.” How, indeed, could the Gentiles have welcomed a salvation connected with circumcision and the Mosaic observances? God was therefore obliged to make Israel blind, that the miracles of Jesus might be as nothing in their eyes and as not having taken place, and to harden them, that His preachings might remain for them as empty sounds (Isaiah 6). Thus Israel proud, legal, carnal, rejected and could be rejected freely. This decided position did not in reality make Israel's lot worse; but it had for the salvation of the Gentiles the excellent results which St. Paul develops in Romans 11. Far more than this, by this very chastisement, Israel became what it had refused to be by its salvation, the apostle of the world; and, like Judas its type, it fulfilled, willingly or unwillingly, its irrevocable commission; comp. Romans 11:7-10. Moreover, it is clear that, in the midst of this national judgment, every individual remained free to turn to God by repentance and to escape the general hardening. John 12:13 of Isaiah and John 12:42 of John are the proof of this.

As to the relation of the Jewish unbelief to the divine prevision (John 12:37-38), John does not indicate the metaphysical theory by means of which he succeeds in reconciling the foreknowledge of God with the responsibility of man; he simply accepts these two data, the one of the religious sentiment, the other of the moral consciousness. But if we reflect that God is above time, that, properly speaking, He does not foresee an event which is for us yet to come, but that He sees it, absolutely as we behold a present event; that, consequently, when He declares it at any moment whatsoever, He does not foretell it, but describes it as a spectator and witness, the apparent contradiction between these two seemingly contradictory elements vanishes. Once foretold, the event undoubtedly cannot fail to happen, because the eye of God cannot have presented to Him as existing that which will not be. But the event does not exist because God has seen it; God, on the contrary, has seen it because it will be, or rather because to His view it already is. Thus the real cause of Jewish unbelief, foretold by God, is not the divine foreseeing. This cause is, in the last analysis, the moral state of the people themselves. This state it is which, when once established by the earlier unfaithfulnesses of Israel, necessarily implies the punishment of unbelief which must strike the people at the decisive moment, the judgment of hardening.