John 3:19

Ver. 19. “ Now this is the judgment, that the light is come into the world, and men loved the darkness rather than the light; for their works were evil. ”

In rejecting Jesus, man judges himself. The strictest inquiry into his whole life would not prove his disposition, as opposed to what is good, better than does his unbelief. The final judicial act will have nothing more to do than to ratify this sentence which he pronounces on himself (John 3:28-29). In order to make the matter understood, the Lord here calls Himself the light, that is to say, the manifested good, the divine holiness realized before the human conscience.

It follows from this, that the attitude which the man takes in relation to Him, reveals infallibly his inmost moral tendency. To the view of Jesus, the experiment has been already made for the world which surrounds Him: “ Men loved rather...” There is in every servant of God, in proportion to his holiness, a spiritual tact which makes him discern immediately the moral sympathy or antipathy which his person and his message excite. The visit of Jesus to Jerusalem had been for Him a sufficient revelation of the moral state of the people and their rulers. They are the men of whom He speaks in this verse, but with the distinct feeling that they are in this point the representatives of fallen humanity. The expression loved rather is not designed, as Lucke thinks, to extenuate the guilt of unbelievers, by intimating that there is still in them an attraction, but a weaker one, towards the truth. As has been well said, the word μᾶλλον does not mean magis, more, but potius, rather. This word, therefore, aggravates the responsibility of the Jews, by bringing out the free preference with which, though placed in presence of the light, they have chosen the darkness (comp. John 3:11). What is, indeed, the ground of this guilty preference? It is that their works are evil. They are determined to persevere in the evil which they have hitherto committed; this is the reason why they flee from the light which condemns it. By displaying the true nature of their works, the light would force them to renounce them. The term τὸ σκότος, the darkness, includes with the love of evil the inward falsehood by which a man seeks to exculpate himself. The aorist ἠγάπησαν, loved, designates the preference as an act which has just been consummated recently, while the imperfect ἦν, were, presents the life of the world in evil as a fact existing long before the appearance of the light. The word ἔργα, works, denotes the whole moral activity, tendency and acts. In the following verse, Jesus explains, by means of a comparison, the psychological relation between immorality, gross or subtle, and unbelief.