John cites verses from Isaiah 53:1 and 6:9-10 to show that the LORD has blinded eyes, hardened hearts to prevent understanding and belief. Dr. Sproul explains the ramifications of this verse in relation to sin and salvation. Dr. Sproul continues with an explanation of Jesus' statements concerning light and darkness and His speaking "just as the Father has told Me."

We are going to continue our study of the gospel according to Saint John—even though this Sunday is designated to prepare our congregation for our annual mission conference, and I was given the assignment to preach on missions this morning. So, I am going to do that by applying the text we have for today to that enterprise. I would like the congregation to stand for the reading of the gospel. I am going to read John 12:35–50:

Then Jesus said to them, “A little while longer the light is with you. Walk while you have the light, lest darkness overtake you; he who walks in darkness does not know where he is going. While you have the light, believe in the light, that you may become sons of light.” These things Jesus spoke, and departed, and was hidden from them.

But although He had done so many signs before them, they did not believe in Him, that the word of Isaiah the prophet might be fulfilled, which he spoke:

“Lord, who has believed our report?
And to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed?”

Therefore they could not believe, because Isaiah said again:

“He has blinded their eyes and hardened their hearts,
Lest they should see with their eyes,
Lest they should understand with their hearts and turn,
So that I should heal them.”

These things Isaiah said when he saw His glory and spoke of Him.

Nevertheless even among the rulers many believed in Him, but because of the Pharisees they did not confess Him, lest they should be put out of the synagogue; for they loved the praise of men more than the praise of God.

Then Jesus cried out and said, “He who believes in Me, believes not in Me but in Him who sent Me. And he who sees Me sees Him who sent Me. I have come as a light into the world, that whoever believes in Me should not abide in darkness. And if anyone hears My words and does not believe, I do not judge him; for I did not come to judge the world but to save the world. He who rejects Me, and does not receive My words, has that which judges him—the word that I have spoken will judge him in the last day. For I have not spoken on My own authority; but the Father who sent Me gave Me a command, what I should say and what I should speak. And I know that His command is everlasting life. Therefore, whatever I speak, just as the Father has told Me, so I speak.”

He who has ears to hear the Word of God, let him hear it. You may be seated.

We thank you, O God, that by the power of Your Spirit You have removed the blindness from our eyes and given us eyes to see and ears to hear, so that in this very moment we pray for the illumination of the Holy Ghost, that we might understand and apply to our lives these things that have been spoken by Jesus. For we ask them in His name. Amen.

Plunged into Darkness

We picked it up this morning at verse 35, when Jesus gave those gathered on that occasion this warning: “A little while longer the light is with you”—that is: “The light that shines in your presence right this moment is only for a short while. That light is about to be removed from you.” He gave these remarks against the backdrop of the cross that He was facing.

“Walk while you have the light, lest darkness overtake you; he who walks in darkness does not know where he is going.” Notice this theme of light and darkness, which John introduced in the very first chapter of his gospel. The backdrop of the gospel announcement of Christ, as we learn from Paul in the Epistles, is that the whole world has been plunged into darkness by its rejection of the light God gave to every human being in creation.

The theological question I hear more often than any other has a direct impact on the subject of missions. People ask me, “What happens to the poor, innocent native in Africa who has never heard the gospel?” Behind that question is the practical consideration: “Why should I be involved? Why should I be engaged? Why should I be concerned with world missions?”

I always give the same answer: “The poor, innocent native in Africa doesn’t need to hear the gospel. Don’t worry for another minute about the innocent native in Africa who’s never heard of Christ. The poor, innocent native, when he dies, goes straight to heaven. The last thing he needs is to have his felicity disturbed by some foreign missionary. Don’t worry about it.” But then let us ask the question another way: What happens to the poor, guilty native in Africa who has never heard the gospel?

I do not worry about poor, innocent natives in Africa, South America, Kuwait, Iraq, or anywhere in the world. Why? Because the Bible makes it clear there are no innocent natives anywhere. The whole world has rejected God’s plain revelation of Himself, which He gives in nature and in the human soul, so that we, being made in the image of God, know of His existence. The reason the New Testament puts the whole world before the tribunal of God is that God’s light has shone into every nook and cranny of this universe, but every human being in his fallen condition suppresses the light of revelation and prefers darkness over light.

People worry: “What if people never hear of Jesus? Will they be sent to hell for rejecting Christ, of whom they have never heard?” Of course not. God is not going to send anyone to hell for rejecting someone of whom they have never heard or even had the opportunity to hear. People hear that and give a gasping sigh of relief, thinking, “Then I don’t have to worry about the Great Commission”

Do you not understand that Christ comes into a world already under the universal indictment of God, not for rejecting Christ, but for rejecting the Father, whom they have known? We see this darkness pervading the whole world, and into the world comes the light of the world, the Savior of the world, and He gives to the church His task to make sure the light of the gospel shines in every place where the darkness already enslaves people.

You can sense Jesus’ urgency during His earthly ministry when the light He has in His own person is about to be taken from Jerusalem. He tells the people, in effect: “If you walk in darkness, you don’t know where you’re going. But while you have the light, believe in the light.” Jesus said these things, then He left, and we are told He was hidden from them.

Judgment on Unbelief

What follows is John’s evaluation of the crowd’s response. We read in verse 37, “But although He had done so many signs before them, they did not believe in Him.” Can you imagine being present at the raising of Lazarus from the dead and remaining in unbelief? The problem is that faith, in New Testament categories, is not something that rests simply on intellectual cognition or submission.

Satan knew the truth of Christ before Christ ever raised Lazarus from the dead. Satan could observe the resurrection of Lazarus, and still he would not be converted, because it is not that Satan does not know the truth. It is that he hates the truth.

All the signs Jesus gave were not enough to persuade people of the truth of Christ. In addition to those outward signs, what was required for faith then is the same thing required for faith now: namely, the ministry of the Holy Spirit, who accompanies those signs and those words to remove the scales from our eyes and to unstop our ears.

John is observing this now, and here we see once again the relentless Calvinism of the Apostle John: “But although He had done so many signs before them, they did not believe in Him.” Why?

That the word of Isaiah the prophet might be fulfilled, which he spoke:

“Lord, who has believed our report?
And to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed?”

Are those verses familiar to you? I read them often during the celebration of the Lord’s Supper. These are the opening verses of Isaiah 53, which begins with this question, “Who has believed our report?”

Notice that John uses a strange combination of two completely different texts from the book of the prophet Isaiah. The first one is from Isaiah 53, as I have just noted. But then he gives us the reason why people have not believed the report and have not believed in Christ, even though He manifested Himself so plainly in the visible signs He gave to them.

To understand that, John goes to Isaiah 6. There, after Isaiah has the vision of the Lord high and lifted up, and his sin is taken away, the Lord speaks to Isaiah, saying,

Whom shall I send,
And who will go for Us?

Isaiah answers: “Here am I! Send me” (Isa. 6:8).

Remember that when Isaiah was given his commission, God said to him, in essence, “Go, but in seeing they will not see; in hearing they will not hear,” because God has made a judicial judgment against sinful people. He has given them a spirit of blindness and a spirit of hardness of heart. He stops their ears and actually prevents them from believing as a judgment.

It is not that God forces people into sin and then, once they are in sin, refuses to rescue them. Rather, He turns the sinner over to his sin, which is the most ghastly judgment any person can ever receive from the hands of God. When we fast-forward to the apocalypse in the New Testament, where God sends people to everlasting judgment, He says, “Let him who is wicked be wicked still.” If people do not want to hear, God stops their ears. If they do not want to see, He covers their eyes. That is the reason Isaiah is told not just that they did not believe, but in verse 39:

Therefore they could not believe, because Isaiah said again:

“He has blinded their eyes and hardened their hearts,
Lest they should see with their eyes,
Lest they should understand with their hearts and turn,
So that I should heal them.”

These things Isaiah said when he saw His glory and spoke of Him.

Christ in His Glory

I have to take a minute on the end of the text I just read. This is a very cryptic statement from the gospel of John, but one that is very important. It is not certain to whom John is referring when he says, “Isaiah said these things when he saw His glory and when he spoke of Him.”

This whole conversation is referring not to God the Father but to God the Son. There is much in this text, as well as in Peter’s epistle, to incline us to see whom Isaiah saw. When he saw the seraphim around the throne of God, when he saw the Lord high and lifted up, he saw the pre-incarnate Logos, the divine One whom God would send into the world to redeem us. Isaiah saw Christ on the throne in His glory before Christ was even born. I think that is what John is declaring here.

John says: “Nevertheless even among the rulers many believed in Him, but because of the Pharisees they did not confess Him, lest they should be put out of the synagogue; for they loved the praise of men more than the praise of God.”

The Mission of Jesus

“Then Jesus cried out, ‘He who believes in Me, believes not in Me’”—that is, “If you believe in Me, in the final analysis, it’s not Me that you’re believing in”—“but in Him who sent Me.” Time after time during His earthly ministry, Jesus repeats this affirmation that He says nothing on His own authority. He is not here to fulfill His agenda, but He is here to do the will of His Father. He is to do everything that He was sent to do.

What does this have to do with missions? All week long, we have been looking at the television and watching a war in real time. We are watching the incredible force and power of modern technology, particularly in the form of missiles. You have watched Patriot missiles, Scud missiles, and so on. What is a missile? If you looked up the word missile in the dictionary, you would see that it comes from the Latin word mittere, which means “to send” and is the root word of the noun . A missile that goes across the air and is destructive is “one that is sent.” is the word we use for a letter sent from one person to another because the very concept of mittere or missio is sending. That is the root word from which we get the word mission or missionary.

A missionary, in terms of linguistic background, is a person who is sent to fulfill the purpose of the sending, which is the mission. The first missionary of the Christian church is Christ, and His mission was not established as an afterthought, after the fall of this world. Rather, the missionary endeavor of the church and of Christ began in eternity, in what we call the covenant of redemption.

Before God ever made a covenant with Adam, before He ever made a covenant with Noah, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, David, or anyone else, there was a covenant in eternity among the three persons of the Godhead: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. From all eternity it was the plan of God to create a world and to redeem it by sending God the Son into that world on a mission as His appointed missionary. In this context, Jesus reminds the people that He is there to fulfill this mission:

He who believes in Me, believes not in Me but in Him who sent Me. And he who sees Me sees Him who sent Me. I have come as a light into the world, that whoever believes in Me should not abide in darkness. And if anyone hears My words and does not believe, I do not judge him; for I did not come to judge the world but to save the world. He who rejects Me, and does not receive My words, has that which judges him—the word that I have spoken will judge him in the last day.

Jesus Sends You

Then Jesus says, “For I have not spoken on My own authority; but the Father who sent Me gave Me a command.” Later on, Jesus says to His disciples, “As the Father sent Me, I also send you” (John 20:21). That is the basis for the missionary enterprise of the church.

I realize we live in a culture that has embraced pluralism and relativism, and you hear that message bombarding your ears every day, one that completely repudiates proselytizing or trying to convert people to Christianity. People say, “Leave them alone, and they’ll come home, wagging their tails behind them.” But the Lord Himself was sent by the Father, and He came to seek and save the lost. Then, He turned around and passed the baton. He gave the baton, the mission, to His disciples, and He said, “As the Father sent Me, so send I you.”

Paul says in Romans 10, “How can they hear without a preacher? And how can there be a preacher unless he is sent?” This is not complicated. But again, people are going to say, “If God has this all figured out from the foundation of the world, and He uses His judicial blinding so that people can’t respond, and they’ll stay in darkness because they love the darkness rather than the light unless God the Holy Spirit opens their eyes, then why should we be engaged in this enterprise?”

I was asked that in seminary. The professor said, “If God is sovereign and if election is true, why in the world should we be involved in missionary activity?” One by one, he went around the room, and every student said: “I don’t know. I always wondered myself,” or “That beats me.”

When he came to me, and I said: “I know this isn’t what you’re looking for, but one small reason we should be involved in evangelism and missionary activity is, if God is sovereign, then He sovereignly commands us to do it. If for no other reason, we should be doing it because He commands us to do it. Jesus commanded us to do it.”

The professor looked at me, and he laughed. He said: “Yes, Mr. Sproul. What could possibly be a more insignificant reason than that the Savior of your soul and the Lord God omnipotent should command you to do something?” I said: “I guess it isn’t a small reason after all. It’s a pretty strong one.”

Not only that, God ordains not only the ends but the means. God, from all eternity, has chosen the foolishness of preaching as the means by which He will bring His people to salvation. He does not need you; He does not need me. But He gives to you and to me the unspeakable privilege and opportunity of participating in this mission.

We have heard the word mission in the news often in recent weeks. We have even heard the thanksgiving offered by the leaders of this country for our men and women who are in harm’s way, who are involved in this mission. They say, “We thank them for their courage; we thank them for their bravery; we thank them for their sacrifice.”

Oh, that the Lord God would look at our church and say: “Thank you for your courage. Thank you for your bravery. I thank you for your sacrifice. I thank you because you took seriously the mission that I gave you to go into all the world and to preach the gospel to every living creature, to people from every tongue, tribe, and nation.”

There are people from among us who, as I speak, are risking their lives for that mission. I urge you to stand behind them, to hear them when they come to us this coming week, so that they will know that this church is committed to the Great Commission because we have been blessed by the light that has come into the darkness, the person of Christ.

This transcript has been lightly edited for readability.