John 12:38 - Exposition

In order that the words of Isaiah the prophet might be fulfilled, which he spake, Lord, who believed our report? or the message which the prophets have delivered—the prediction they made of a suffering and rejected Christ, of One who would "sprinkle many nations," and in the very "travail of his soul see his seed." To whom was the arm of the Lord revealed? It does not mean that no hearts responded to the appeal, that the voice from heaven fell on no susceptible ears; but that it is one of the anomalies of human life that man does seem so insensible to his own highest interests. Prophets are always wondering at the condition of mankind. Even Jesus marveled at the unbelief of his hearers. The λόγος of Isaiah shows that prophets foresaw the issue of the kind of reception that a people who had been so faithless to Jehovah's lesser manifestations would give to the most amazing of all his self-disclosures. The ἵνα πληρωθῇ must not be explained away, the outline was presented by Isaiah of the reception which the favored but prejudiced and hardened house of Israel gave to Divine revelations. It would be filled in by the events which were then about to be enacted. God's intuition of actual facts, his unconditional foreknowledge of all contingent phenomena, do not necessitate their occurrence so as to deprive sinners of their guilt; yet when they have occurred, the causes which produced the widespread unbelief in the days of Isaiah were seen to be still at work, and to account for the strange incomprehensible mystery that blindness in part had happened to Israel. God works by law, and works freely by men and in them, not only foreseeing the evil and blindness, but positively punishing sin by blindness, taking away from a man that which he seemeth to have. By this means the "altar was built, the wood and the knife" for the great sacrifice. The use made of various portions of this oracle, by the Lord, by evangelists, by the apostles, by the deacon Philip, by Paul and Peter, shows that the early Church regarded it as the detailed description of the character suffering, and work of Christ. It became virtually a portion of the New Testament, and it was practically treated as such by Barnabas and Justin Martyr. The fifty-third of Isaiah may have been imperfectly understood by its author, may in his mind have had this, that, or the other original reference, and have suffered various Judaic interpretations. Modern criticism may scoff at it as a Messianic prophecy. All this does not touch the patent fact that nearly all the writers of the New Testament and numerous classes in the early Church used it as descriptive of their idea of Christ's work. It thus becomes of priceless value.