Sermon Tone Analysis

John 12:23-36

One of the most famous Christmas scenes in the Bible is the announcement to the shepherds by an angel that the Savior is born.

Turn with me to begin in Luke 2:11-14............

In that announcement, we hear of Glory to God in the highest.......

A preacher wrote....... “Glory to God, peace to man.

The angels are sent to make something crystal clear: the Son of God has come into his creation to display the glory of God and to reconcile people from alienation to peace with God.

To make God look great in salvation, and to make man glad in God.”

Now let’s turn to John 12:23-36........Jesus explains this to the disciples, in turn explaining it to us.

Glory is the description of what is best or great about someone!

To be glorified is to be boasted of and if you boast of something in this terminology, that means is to the highest extreme!

So, here we have Jesus explaining to His disciples the purpose of His coming!

It is to glorify God the Father!

Jesus came to this hour for that purpose!

In His death and resurrection God will be glorified!

I spoke of last week, that Jesus came to get messy, and that is what He truly came to do, but it is not to stay messy, but to get messy to glorify the Father!

We know that Jesus is speaking of His death because in verse 23 He tells the disciples that the only way a seed/grain of wheat produces much grain or harvest, is if it goes into the ground and dies!

The glory of the Father will and has produce much fruit in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ!

This was of much agony to Jesus, the strain of knowing your death is imminent to the human body is truly agony, but there was more to this for Jesus!

I have heard some say that the human body was not designed originally to die and that is why it is so dreadful for us, as well as the finality of it, as far as this life is concerned.

Jesus, however was experiencing something much greater than just death, He had proven the ability to overcome death by raising Lazarus from the dead, in the previous chapter!

Jesus was drawing near to experiencing the wrath of God, which is bad enough, but He will experience the shame of even though He was never deserving of it!

The shame and agony placed on Jesus was extreme, place God the Son in a human body, with that agony the body will respond!

Have you ever been distressed, sorrowful, in pain, to the point that your physical being just was at the point of death!

Maybe so, but not to the extreme that Jesus felt it this night!

Matthew records the scene in Gethsemane: Matthew 26:38-39 “Then saith Jesus unto them, My soul is exceeding sorrowful, even unto death: tarry ye here, and watch with me.

And He went a little further, and fell on His face, and prayed, saying, O my Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me: nevertheless not as I will, but as thou wilt.”

Luke the doctor adds in his account: Luke 22:44 “And being in an agony he prayed more earnestly: and his sweat was as it were great drops of blood falling down to the ground.”

This was an hour that was His entire purpose.......

To pay the penalty for sin.....Man’s redemption placed on God the Son.......He came to get messy and in that glorified God or maybe you can say the Godhead!

The Father hears Jesus’ prayer and answers in verse 28b, “I have glorified it, and I will glorify it again.”

He had just glorified his name in the resurrection of Lazarus (John 11:4, 40), and now he will glorify it in the death and resurrection of Jesus.

Good News About God’s Glory:...........And don’t miss the emphasis on God’s own commitment to glorify God.

The text doesn’t just say that Jesus prayed for God to glorify God.

Verse 28: “Father, glorify your name.”

It also tells us that God himself says, I have and I will.

God sent angels to say it in Luke 2. And God himself says it in John 12:28b, “I have glorified [my name], and I will glorify it again.”

The deepest reason why we live for the glory of God is because God lives for the glory of God.

We are passionate about God’s glory because God is passionate about God’s glory.

And what makes this such good news especially in the Gospel of John is that the glory of God is full of grace and truth.

John 1:14 “And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, (and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father,) full of grace and truth.”

The most glorious thing about God is that He is so completely, fully self-sufficient that the glory of the Fullness of His Being overflows in Truth and Grace for His creatures.

He doesn’t need us.

And therefore in His Fullness He overflows for us.

The most Glorious attributes of God are poured over to us and in His Glory is our Glory!

If God is glorified then that is Great for us!

That is why in Revelation your hear the saints in Heaven and every being, declaring the He alone is worthy of praise, honor and glory.....because without His existence we cease to exist and without His existence which full of Grace & Truth, there would be nothing but death for us!

After the voice from Heaven Jesus told them what was about to happen through His death and resurrection:

Judgement is come to the world.....Jesus is the judge and He will execute judgement, in His 2nd coming.....

A preacher once said: “Now!

Not just at the end of history.

Now.

The day of judgment comes in the death of Jesus.”

John 5:24, “Truly, truly, I say to you, whoever hears my word and believes him who sent me has eternal life.

He does not come into judgment, but has passed from death to life.”

In other words, those who trust Christ to reconcile them to God will not come into judgment.

Why?

Because they have already passed from the condemned state of death into the justified state of eternal life.

Their judgment already happened.

When did it happen?

That’s what our text today tells us.

John 12:31, “Now is the judgment of this world.”

Now.

In the death of Jesus.

In other words, the death of Jesus becomes the decisive dividing line between the condemned and the vindicated.

If you trust Jesus, you are united to him and his death is your death (Galatians 2:20), and his condemnation is your condemnation (Romans 8:1 “There is therefore now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus, who walk not after the flesh, but after the Spirit.”

).

And if you never trust Jesus, you stand condemned both by your sin, and by your rejection of the offer of forgiveness.

John 12:31 “Now is the judgment of this world; now will the ruler of this world be cast out.”

Satan is definitely still at work in this world, so in what sense is he cast out.....at this point?

The devil will be destroyed one day, but what is Jesus meaning here?

There is a sense of the meaning in John 14:30-31 “Hereafter I will not talk much with you: for the prince of this world cometh, and hath nothing in me.

But that the world may know that I love the Father; and as the Father gave me commandment, even so I do.

Arise, let us go hence.”

The devil has nothing on Jesus, because He will do what is commanded of Him by the Father!

So, Jesus is telling us that the only way satan has anything on Him is that if He disobeyed the Father!

Satan, has definitely tried to kill Jesus and is leading in that direction now, but that is not the soul purpose of the deceiver......if he could get Jesus to disobey then the whole work of salvation would be destroyed!

That is his thinking of course, that was never in doubt, but that was his master plan.

If you notice, when Jesus was tempted in the wilderness it was always either to go against God’s way by exploiting the human weaknesses, hunger, pride.

This is the plan here and that is why Jesus was sweating drops of blood, because the horror of God’s wrath that awaits Him was beyond our thoughts of extreme!

Hence, when Jesus cried out on the cross Matthew 27:46 “And about the ninth hour Jesus cried with a loud voice, saying, Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani?

that is to say, My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”

That is not to be passed by lightly.....

1st Jesus is the Only One that can rightly declare that........

2nd This was not some ordinary death, this was separation from God, so that God’s wrath could be poured onto Jesus for our sin!......2 Corinthians 5:21 “For God hath made Jesus to be sin for us, Jesus, who knew no sin; that we might be made the righteousness of God in Jesus.”

So, the picture is that Satan was making a final move against Jesus in the hope that he could possibly make his final hours so bad as to destroy his faith and obedience, and thus undermine the whole work of salvation.

He failed.

And in failing, he himself was judged and decisively defeated.

Jesus says in John 16:11 that the Holy Spirit is coming to convict the world “concerning judgment, because the ruler of this world has been judged.”

The sense in which “the ruler of this world was cast out” or “judged” is that he experienced his decisive defeat at the cross—not the final defeat, but the one that secures and guarantees the final defeat.

Jesus did not give in.

He kept entrusting himself to God.

He did not sin.

This is why Jesus is our merciful and faithful High Priest.......Hebrews 2:17 “Wherefore in all things it behoved him to be made like unto his brethren, that he might be a merciful and faithful high priest in things pertaining to God, to make reconciliation for the sins of the people.”

Hebrews 2:18 “For in that he himself hath suffered being tempted, he is able to succour them that are tempted.”

We looked at this Wed night..........Jesus has experienced it all and remained faithful to God....when you are tempted it is to pull you from God’s way, we have a Faithful and Merciful High Priest that has experienced it all and can sympathize with and He is the Only Help!

Back to satan failing.......Jesus stripped Satan of the one weapon that he had that could damn us: namely, the valid accusation of our unforgiven sin.

That weapon is taken from his hand.

He is disarmed.

We have no unforgiven sin.

The blood of Jesus covers our sin—all of it.

Therefore the cross was the decisive defeat of the condemning designs of the devil.