We arrive now at a new division of the Gospel introduced by the prefatory verses as to man and his state, which conclude chapter 2. The coming and inquiry of Nicodemus give rise to our Lord's testimony to the necessity of a new birth for the kingdom of God, the cross, eternal life, the love of God, and the world's condemnation, closing with the Baptist's testimony to the glory of His person.
“Now when he was at Jerusalem at the passover, at the feast, many believed on his name, beholding the signs which he did. But Jesus himself did not trust himself to them, inasmuch as he knew all [men], and because he needed not that any should testify of man, for himself knew what was in man.” (Ver. 23-25.)
It was at the city of solemnities; it was a feast of Jehovah, nay, the most fundamental of the sacred feasts; and the Messiah was there, the object of faith, working in power, and manifesting His glory in appropriate signs. And many behooved on His name accordingly. It was man doing and feeling his best under circumstances the most favorable. Yet did not Jesus Himself trust Himself to them. Certainly it was from no lack of love or pity in Him; for whoever did or could love as He? And the reason, calmly given, is truly overwhelming:” inasmuch as he knew all men, and because he needed not that any should testify of man, for himself knew what was in man.” What a sentence! from whom! and on what grounds! We do well to weigh it gravely: who is not concerned in it? It is the ordained Judge of quick and dead who thus pronounces. Is it not all over with man?
One great fact, one truth, accounts for it; the total evil, the irremediable evil, of man as such. The ways of the Lord are in the strictest accord with the words of the Spirit by the Apostle Paul: the mind of the flesh (and this is all that is in man) is enmity against God; it is not subject to the law of God, for neither indeed can it be. Hence they that are in the flesh cannot please God. Its doings and its sufferings are selfish and worthless Godward. Its faith as here is no better; for it is not the soul subject to God’s testimony, but mind judging on evidence satisfactory to itself. It is a conclusion that Jesus must be Messiah, not submission to, nor reception of, divine testimony. For in this case the mind sits on the throne of judgment, and pronounces for or against, according to its estimate of reasons favoring or adverse, instead of the soul setting to its seal (in the face of all appearances it may be, yea, the most real difficulties), that God is true. For what ground to expect the love of the Holy One to the vile and rebellious? Christ, received according to God's testimony, Christ, in grace to the lost, dying for the ungodly and the powerless, Christ accounts for, as He displays, all; miracles or signs not in the least. They arrest the eye; they exercise the mind; they may touch and win the affections. But nothing short of God's word judges the man, or reveals what He is in Christ to man thus judged; and this only, as we shall see, is of the Spirit, for He only, not man, has before Him the true object, the Son of God's love given in grace to a ruined and guilty world.
The truth is that our judgments flow from our affections. What we love we easily believe; what makes nothing of us we naturally resist and reject. As long as Jesus seemed to be an ameliorator of humanity, there seemed to be the readiest, warmest, welcome. Man would accredit Jesus if he thought Jesus accredited man. But how could he receive what makes nothing of himself, what condemns him morally, what keeps before him the solemn warning of eternal judgment and the lake of fire? No, he hates the testimony and the person who is the central object of it, and all connected with it and Him. When broken down before God and made willing to own one's utter and inexcusable sins and sinfulness, it is a wholly different matter; and He who was dreaded and repugnant is turned to as the only hope from God, oven Jesus the Deliverer from the wrath to come. This is indeed conversion, and grace by quickening power alone effects it.
So it is when Christian doctrine is made to suit the world by being emasculated and changed to build up what in truth it judges. Then indeed it is no longer a seed that takes root, and grows and bears fruit, but is a leaven that spreads and may assimilate largely to itself. Such is Christendom, when human will was engaged on its side, and the religion became traditional.
But here it is the holy and awful witness of Jesus to man at his best estate, when no enmity had appeared, but all looked full of bright promise. And, again, we see John beginning where the other Gospels close. It is not Messiah rejected, but Jesus the Son of God, who knows the end from the beginning, treating man as altogether vanity and sin; and this, because God is in none of his thought, but self, without real sorrow or shame about his opposition to God, without any due sense of it or consequently a serious care about it. He gathered from the evidence of the signs before him that none but Messiah could have wrought them; but such an inference did not affect his moral state either with God or with man. He was just as he had been with another object for his busy mind to work on, but his nature unjudged, God no better known, and the enemy with just the same power over him as ever. As yet, it was man and not God; for there is no work of God till the word is received as it is in truth, revealing His grace to man consciously needing it. Here was nothing of the sort, but a simple process of man's own mind and feelings, without a question of his sins or state before God, without the smallest felt need of a Savior. Jesus knew what it was worth and trusted not Himself to man, even when he thus believed on Him. It was human faith, of which we have instances not infrequently in this Gospel as elsewhere, whilst as clearly we have that divinely given faith which has eternal life; this having to do with God, as that, being of man, rises not above its source. “Beware of men,” said He to His apostles at a later day, Himself about to prove in the cross how truly from the first He Himself knew what was in man.