John 12:43

43. Loved the praise of men And hence, according to John 5:44, while this love filled their hearts, they could not believe. This was, properly speaking, no so-called “moral inability.” It was simply an incompatibility between the two things. Whilst they retained that worldly love, which they could and ought to have cast out from their hearts, belief in Christ was in itself impossible. The two opposites could not unite in the same mind. Thus does our Evangelist, in the spirit of sober sadness, account for the final unbelief of his race and nation. For that unbelief he had seen their downfall and their rejection of God. He had accepted those awful facts in pensive calmness, yet was cheered by the glorious future opened before his view in the Lord’s discourse before the Greeks, describing the overthrow of the prince of darkness in the heathen world, and the opening of an age of Christian triumph. He now proceeds to give a recapitulation of the great mission of Jesus by the Jews rejected.

Closing summary of Jesus’s public testimony to the Jews, John 12:44-50. This final summary consists mainly of memoranda collected from the various teachings of Jesus. We have, John 12:44-46, Christ identified with God as Testifier and Light; John 12:47-50, the rejection of him, being a rejection of the Father, shall be judged not by him now personally, but by his uttered word reproduced at the last day, being authenticated by the Father himself, by whose command and upon whose divine authority it is spoken.