The great truth has been cleared: not only that man, sinful man, needed an adequate atonement as well as new birth, but that God loved the world, the guilty lost world, of Gentiles no less than Jews, and loved it so that He gave His only-begotten Son that every one who believeth in Him should not perish but have eternal life. It is in the Son of God that both lines of the truth meet; for He is incarnate and crucified. Accordingly the true light shines, eternal life is given, God's love is known, redemption is accomplished, salvation is come. There is more in and by Him now than if the kingdom were set up in power for which those waited whose expectations were formed and bounded by the Old Testament. Mercy and truth are met together; righteousness and peace have kissed each other; and, though one could not say perhaps till that day that truth shall spring out of the earth, and righteousness shall look down from heaven, yet one knows assuredly that grace and truth came by Jesus Christ, and that righteousness is established and displayed in Him exalted on the throne and glorified in God Himself above. In the bright days of heaven upon the earth He is to judge His people and the world righteously, and will early cut off the wicked; for the quick must be judged by Him at His coming as well as the dead ere He gives up the kingdom to God.
But deeper purposes were in hand now that the Messiah is viewed as rejected by the Jews: eternal life in, and salvation by, the Son of God, who dies atoningly on the cross. “For God sent not His Son into the world that he should judge, the world but that the world might be saved through him.” (Ver. 17.) And as a work beyond comparison deeper and with everlasting consequences was before God, so the objects of His grace are no longer within the circumscribed limits of the land of Israel. If He is to manifest Himself now as a Savior God in His Son, it suits His love to send out the good news to the world as a whole. God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself, not imputing their trespasses to them. Granted that Christ thus present was rejected; but the errand of love was in the way abandoned; rather did it enter on a new ground whence it could go forth in the power of the Spirit. For Him who knew no sin God made sin for us (that is, in the cross), that we might become God's righteousness in Him.
Thus Christ as Savior, not as Judge, expresses the characteristic testimony Of God now made known to man and here declared by our Lord, in contradistinction from His predicted glory as Messiah and Son of man ruling as He will over the earth by-and-by in the age to come. This is followed up by the result for him who receives Christ now. “He that believeth in him is not judged; but he that believeth not hath been already judged, because he hath not believed in the name of the only-begotten Son of God.” (Ver. 18.) Not only is the believer not condemned, but he is not an object of judgment. He will give account, but is never put on his trial. This is explicitly taught in John 5, where the two-fold issue is connected with the mystery of Christ's person. As He is Son of God and Son of man, so He gives life and will exercise judgment, the one for the blessing of believers as owning His glory, the other for His vindication on such as have dishonored Him. Thus, as His stooping to become man exposed Him to unbelief, it is as Son of man that He will judge His despisers, which clearly does not apply to the believer whose joy is even now and ever to honor Him as the Father. And as in this later chapter of John the believer is declared to hare eternal life, and not to come into judgment, but to have passed out of death into life, so here “he that believeth not hath been already judged, because he hath not believed in the name of the only-begotten Son of God.” For John presents the Lord as declaring all decided by the test of His own person received in faith or unbelievingly rejected. Good or evil in all other respects turns on this, as He shows soon after. There is no such touchstone, not even the law of God, weighty and incisive as it is. Hence we see the fallacy of the older divines who drag in the law here as everywhere and thus make it only a question of moral condemnation; whereas the very point of instruction is that it is Christ Himself believed or disbelieved, though no doubt conduct follows accordingly.
But here it is not death for not doing God's commandments, but the unbeliever already judged by Him who sees the end from the beginning, and pronounces on all persons and things as they are before God. Only One can avail him who is dead in trespasses and sins; in nowise the law, which can simply condemn him whose walk is opposed to itself, but the Son who is life and gives life to the believer. But the unbeliever refuses the Son of God: carelessly or deliberately, in haughty pride or in cowardly clinging to other trusts, pleasures, or interests, it is only a difference of form or degree. But he has not believed in the name of the only-begotten Son of God, whose name is not hidden but preached. There is the fullest declaration of what He is, and is to sinners: so that all excuse is vain and can only add sin to sin. His very name implies, yea asserts, that He is the Savior, a divine Savior, yet a Man and so for men. Nor can it be truthfully urged that there is any doubt as to God's feeling and mind; for it had just been said that God sent Him into the world to this end, whatever must be the character of His coming another day when He will reckon with those who would have none of Him. But what is it to God that wretched guilty ruined sinners should despise and reject Him who is at once the only Savior of man, and the only-begotten Son of God! When those who most need mercy least feel it, when they in their utter degradation refuse the Highest who comes down to them in the fullest love to bless, what remains but judgment for those who thus render God's grace null as to themselves, heightened as it is by the glory of Him who in love came for their sakes and by the humiliation in which He deigned to come?