Upon the hearing of this thundering sound from heaven, “Jesus said, ‘This voice has not come for My benefit but for yours. Now is the judgment of this world; now the ruler of this world will be driven out’.” (12:30-31) When we read about “judgment,” we are naturally prone to think of God’s wrath, but that need not always necessarily be so. In this case, in relation to the glorification of God, “judgment” is accompanied by the driving out of the ruler of the world. Because of this, there is both a positive and a negative aspect of judgment.
The positive aspect of judgment is that of “liberation.” Taking the positive sense then, the ruler of the world that is being driven out is death, as death has reigned since Adam. Through Christ’s pending crucifixion and Resurrection, death will be defeated. With that, the world will be liberated from its bondage to and fear of death, as the power of the Resurrection will reign in this world through those that are in union with Jesus, in a trusting allegiance in Him as King. This Resurrection power, in operation by God’s Spirit, will be the tool that God uses, through His children, to deal with evil in the world and to push back darkness, as He makes His chosen people to be reflectors of His light and glory.
If we take this in the negative sense, which is that of the wrath of God falling, then we can understand Jesus speaking of Himself, as Messiah, and therefore as the rightful and proper ruler of the world, being driven out to His death on a cross. Wrathful judgment then, comes on those that put to death God’s messiah. Either way, the ruler of the world is being driven out and some type of judgment is going to come, because Jesus is connecting the judgment with His death and with the glorification of both Himself and the Father, as He says, “And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to Myself” (12:32). To this, the author adds an explanation that Jesus “said this to indicate clearly what kind of death He was going to die” (12:33).
This issue of “glory” is quite pronounced in the Gospel of John. It almost seems to be the crux of the author’s narrative. We see it in the first chapter, when we read “Now the Word became flesh and took up residence among us. We saw His glory---the glory of the One and only, full of grace and truth, Who came from the Father” (1:14). In addition to this glory, there is a steady stream of references to “light” throughout this Gospel, which can be taken as a sideways reference to “glory,” as God’s people, and therefore the One Who came and stood as a representative for God’s people, were to be lights in the world for the purpose of God’s glory.
We find the next use of “glory” in the eighth chapter, where Jesus says, “If I glorify Myself, My glory is worthless. The One Who glorified Me is My Father, about Whom you people say, ‘He is our God’.” (8:54) This is in response to a declaration by the people that they had Abraham as their father, and in which they gloried as God’s special people through physical descent. Jesus mocks this as nothing more than self-glorification and as being akin to idolatry, as the people glorify Abraham, and then themselves through Abraham, basically putting aside the God that they claim as their own.
What we’ll notice is that the issue of “glory” become quite a bit more pronounced once we get to the story of Lazarus, which, of course, basically begins with Jesus’ statement about the glory of God being shown through Lazarus sickness and death, and the raising that Jesus already had in mind. We have already demonstrated that the Lazarus event becomes the catalyst to the rapid succession of events that brings about Jesus’ crucifixion and eventual Resurrection, but it also appears that the story of Lazarus, and his being raised, becomes the major turning point of the story of that which serves to bring and advance God’s glory. With what follows from what Jesus says about Himself and the death that He was going to die, and the multiple announcements about and references to glory to come, we move very rapidly to the culmination of the narrative and to the crowning event of all of history, in which the glory of God will be fully manifest.
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