Let us look at our Lord's words a little more closely. There seems to be a contradiction here—if you lose, you save; if you want to save, you lose. How can it work? The following context helps us out. In verse 26 Jesus explains verses 24-25 in terms of His second coming. The parallel passage, Matthew 16:27, is clearer. “For the Son of the Man is going to come in the glory of His Father, with His angels, and then He will repay each according to his deeds.” Christ was thinking of the day of reckoning. In other words, “we will all stand before the judgment seat of Christ” (Romans 14:10) and “each of us will give account of himself to God” (Romans 14:12). “For we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ, so that each one may receive his due according to what he has done while in the body, whether good or bad” (2 Corinthians 5:10). I understand that 1 Corinthians 3:11-15 is referring to the same occasion, the day of reckoning. After declaring that Jesus Christ is the only foundation, Paul speaks of different materials that one might use in building on it: “gold, silver, precious stones” or “wood, hay, straw”. (Although the primary interpretation of this passage presumably has to do with the performance of teachers and leaders in the church, I believe it clearly applies to the daily life of each believer as well.) The point is, our deeds will be tested by fire. If fire has any effect upon gold or silver it is only to purify them, but its effect on hay and straw is devastating! Okay, so what?
Let us go back to the beginning. God created the human being for His glory; to reflect it and contribute to it. I suppose we may understand Psalm 19:1 and Isaiah 43:7 in this way, at least by extension. But Adam lost this capacity when he rebelled against God. For this reason the sentence that weighs against our race is that we “fall short of the glory of God” (Romans 3:23). But the Son came into the world to restore our lost potential. Ephesians 1:12 and 14 tell us that the object of the plan of salvation is “the praise of His glory” (see also 2 Corinthians 1:20). And 1 Corinthians 10:31 puts it into a command: “Whether you eat or drink, or whatever you do, do all to the glory of God.” Now then, the point of all this is not to ‘ruin’ our lives, to take all the ‘fun’ out of them (as many seem to think). God is not being arrogant, unreasonable, too demanding. Quite the contrary—He is just trying to save us from throwing away our lives. Surely, because the glory of God is eternal (Psalm 104:31), and when I do something for His glory, that something is transformed and acquires eternal value—it becomes “gold, silver, precious stones”. Works done for the glory of God will go through the fire without harm. On the other hand, what is done with a view to our own ambitions and ideas is “straw”. We all know what fire does to straw!
So there it is. To be a slave of Christ means to live with reference to the Kingdom; it means to do everything for the glory of God. In this way the slave “saves” his life because he will be building it with “gold and silver”, which will pass through the fire at the judgment seat of Christ without loss. In contrast, the believer who refuses to be a slave of Jesus builds his life with “hay and straw”, which will be consumed by the fire—and so he “loses” his life; he lived in vain; the potential that his life represented was wasted, thrown away. What a tragedy! 26 If anyone would serve me, let him follow me; and where I am, my servant will be too.† If we want to be where Jesus is, we need to stick close to Him. (Well, you know, that's really kind of obvious, but how many of us do it?) Further, if anyone serves me, the Father will honor him.‡ Each underlined pronoun corresponds to an emphatic pronoun in the Original Text. What the Lord did here was quite unusual; in other places He emphasized one pronoun, but not five in a row, and especially with all five referring to Himself! So what was He trying to tell us? I take it that He is telling us to focus on HIM, his person and our relationship to Him. He needs to be number one, without competition. He is talking about total commitment, but not without recompense—“the Father will honor him.”
*^ This incident must not be confused with the one recorded in Matthew 26:6 and Mark 14:3. Here Mary anoints His feet on Saturday (March 30, 30), while in Matthew and Mark an unidentified woman anoints His head on Wednesday (April 3, 30). The houses are also different.
†12:3 She has obviously forgiven Him for letting her brother die, and might even have been making amends for having doubted Him.
‡12:5 300 denarii represented one year's wages for a working man (manual labor); it was indeed an expensive offering.
§12:6 This is an editorial comment offered after the fact. Obviously they all trusted Judas at the time or they wouldn't have made him treasurer, and if he was caught the purse would go to someone else. In fact, John may have received this information by divine revelation.
*12:10 If they succeeded in killing Jesus first, then He would not be around to raise Lazarus a second time.
†12:12 If they had “come” to the feast, they were not local residents. As Matthew 21:10 makes clear, the locals did not know what was going on.
‡12:12 I wonder how that happened.
§12:13 This is a quote from Psalm 118:26, where “the Lord” is Jehovah.
*12:13 Comparing the parallel accounts, we get a better idea of the variety of expression: “Hosanna to the Son of David!” “Hosanna in the highest!” “Blessed is the kingdom of our father David that comes in the name of the Lord!” “Blessed is the King who comes in the name of the Lord!” “Peace in heaven and glory in the highest!”
†12:15 See Zechariah 9:9.
‡12:16 Presumably the Holy Spirit was involved in this—John 14:26, 1 Corinthians 2:13. The ‘remembering’ would not necessarily have been immediate or automatic.
§12:20 It is difficult to know just when this episode occurred; as I compare all four accounts, I doubt that it happened as part of the triumphal entry. It seems more likely to me that it happened the next day, after the cleansing of the temple. The atmosphere would be tense, and as non-Jews (even though converts to Judaism) they were keeping a low profile; so they act indirectly.
*12:21 They were not asking to look at Him from a distance; they could manage that without help. They wanted to talk with Him.
†12:23 The impression one gets is that Jesus did not address the Greeks directly, but I wonder if they didn't sort of tag along and thus were within earshot. We know that the Lord could read thoughts, and so He would know what they really wanted—I assume that what they wanted did not fit in the Plan at that point. However, if the Greeks were within range, verses 24-26 would be for them just as much as for anyone else.
‡12:24 Once a seed is planted, if it doesn't germinate it rots, and is wasted, but the germinating process destroys the seed, it ‘dies’. How this applies to us is developed in the next verse.
§12:24 Jehovah the Son had ‘fallen to the ground’ some 34 years before, but now He was going to die—the ‘fruit’ is still being produced!
*12:25 To understand what the Lord is saying here, let us go to the parallel passage in Luke 9:23-25. “If anyone desires to come after me let him deny himself, take up his cross each day and follow me. For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake, he will save it. For what will it profit a man to gain the whole world but waste or forfeit himself?” What does the Lord mean when He speaks of losing one's “life”? One does not lose one's soul for love of Christ. Nor is the reference to being killed. Rather, Jesus has in mind the life we live, the accumulated results of our living. All that I have done up to this moment plus all that I will yet do until overtaken by death or the rapture of the Church, whichever happens first—that is the “life” that is at risk (in my own case). Let us look at our Lord's words a little more closely. There seems to be a contradiction here—if you lose, you save; if you want to save, you lose. How can it work? The following context helps us out. In verse 26 Jesus explains verses 24-25 in terms of His second coming. The parallel passage, Matthew 16:27, is clearer. “For the Son of the Man is going to come in the glory of His Father, with His angels, and then He will repay each according to his deeds.” Christ was thinking of the day of reckoning. In other words, “we will all stand before the judgment seat of Christ” (Romans 14:10) and “each of us will give account of himself to God” (Romans 14:12). “For we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ, so that each one may receive his due according to what he has done while in the body, whether good or bad” (2 Corinthians 5:10). I understand that 1 Corinthians 3:11-15 is referring to the same occasion, the day of reckoning. After declaring that Jesus Christ is the only foundation, Paul speaks of different materials that one might use in building on it: “gold, silver, precious stones” or “wood, hay, straw”. (Although the primary interpretation of this passage presumably has to do with the performance of teachers and leaders in the church, I believe it clearly applies to the daily life of each believer as well.) The point is, our deeds will be tested by fire. If fire has any effect upon gold or silver it is only to purify them, but its effect on hay and straw is devastating! Okay, so what? Let us go back to the beginning. God created the human being for His glory; to reflect it and contribute to it. I suppose we may understand Psalm 19:1 and Isaiah 43:7 in this way, at least by extension. But Adam lost this capacity when he rebelled against God. For this reason the sentence that weighs against our race is that we “fall short of the glory of God” (Romans 3:23). But the Son came into the world to restore our lost potential. Ephesians 1:12 and 14 tell us that the object of the plan of salvation is “the praise of His glory” (see also 2 Corinthians 1:20). And 1 Corinthians 10:31 puts it into a command: “Whether you eat or drink, or whatever you do, do all to the glory of God.” Now then, the point of all this is not to ‘ruin’ our lives, to take all the ‘fun’ out of them (as many seem to think). God is not being arrogant, unreasonable, too demanding. Quite the contrary—He is just trying to save us from throwing away our lives. Surely, because the glory of God is eternal (Psalm 104:31), and when I do something for His glory, that something is transformed and acquires eternal value—it becomes “gold, silver, precious stones”. Works done for the glory of God will go through the fire without harm. On the other hand, what is done with a view to our own ambitions and ideas is “straw”. We all know what fire does to straw! So there it is. To be a slave of Christ means to live with reference to the Kingdom; it means to do everything for the glory of God. In this way the slave “saves” his life because he will be building it with “gold and silver”, which will pass through the fire at the judgment seat of Christ without loss. In contrast, the believer who refuses to be a slave of Jesus builds his life with “hay and straw”, which will be consumed by the fire—and so he “loses” his life; he lived in vain; the potential that his life represented was wasted, thrown away. What a tragedy!
†12:26 If we want to be where Jesus is, we need to stick close to Him. (Well, you know, that's really kind of obvious, but how many of us do it?)
‡12:26 Each underlined pronoun corresponds to an emphatic pronoun in the Original Text. What the Lord did here was quite unusual; in other places He emphasized one pronoun, but not five in a row, and especially with all five referring to Himself! So what was He trying to tell us? I take it that He is telling us to focus on HIM, his person and our relationship to Him. He needs to be number one, without competition. He is talking about total commitment, but not without recompense—“the Father will honor him.”
§12:29 It seems clear that the bystanders did not hear the words, at least not to distinguish them; they heard the Voice, which must have been impressive (they compared it to thunder). A similar thing happened on the road to Damascus; only Paul understood the words.
*12:31 “Thrown out” as ruler of this world; upon Christ's victory through the cross and the resurrection Satan was deposed. Satan continues to carry on as if he were still the ruler, but he is acting on the basis of bluff and usurpation. If Christ is now the true and legitimate ruler of this world, why is Satan allowed to carry on? The Father is ‘seeking’ those who will worship Him in spirit and truth, not because it is easy or convenient. So there has to be testing, there has to be an adverse context; so no one can claim that God is ‘buying votes’ (which was Satan's allegation about Job).
†12:33 Again, although our Lord was literally ‘lifted up’, His intended meaning would not be immediately obvious to His hearers.
‡12:34 I find it interesting that the people were evidently equating ‘the Son of the Man’ with the Messiah, which was precisely correct; but what Jesus was saying did not match their expectations.
§12:35 Since most people did their traveling on foot, they would understand this principle very well—you need to make as much distance as you can while there is light.
*12:36 Presumably He was referring to His physical presence among them.
†12:36 By believing into Jesus they would become ‘sons of light’—they would live according to the values of the Kingdom of Light, not those of the kingdom of darkness.
‡12:38 The reference is to Isaiah 53:1. Many years ago (over 50) I did an exegesis of this passage for my Hebrew professor at Dallas Seminary. The section really begins at 52:13—in verses 13-15 Jehovah describes the suffering of the Messiah. In verses 1-3 the people of Israel try to justify or explain why they rejected Him; you can almost hear them whine: “Who would have believed what was reported to us? And to whom has the arm of Jehovah really been revealed?” (They argue that the way in which the Messiah was presented was unexpected, unreasonable, unacceptable.) The word usually rendered ‘report’ (in verse 38), ακοη, refers to something you hear, not something you say.
§12:40 Both Matthew (13:15) and Paul (Acts 28:27) also quote Isaiah 6:10 (as John is doing here), and they agree with the LXX; they give the impression that the people did it to themselves, rather than being a judicial act of God. What is involved is a different vowel pointing for the consonants of the main verbs. Since the original text had no vowel pointing, and both sets of pointings are possible and legitimate, we are looking at an option of the translator or interpreter. I imagine that both sides of the ambiguity are true, much as in the case of Pharaoh—during the first five plagues he hardened his own heart, after that God hardened his heart.
*12:41 Less than 2% of the Greek manuscripts, of inferior quality, read “because” instead of “when” (as in NIV, NASB, LB, TEV, etc.). The difference in meaning is significant.
†12:41 Wait a minute! Whom did Isaiah see? John is talking about Jesus, so when did Isaiah see Jesus? The quote in verse 40 is from Isaiah 6:10. The quoted words were spoken by Jehovah, verse 8, the One who was sitting on the throne, verse 1. In verse 5 Isaiah says of Him, “my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts”. So John is affirming that the One on the throne was Jehovah the Son, Jesus. I love it!
‡12:42 To be barred from the synagogue was to be excommunicated, and in consequence to be socially ostracized.
§12:43 This is bothersome. In Matthew 10:32 the Lord Jesus said, “whoever confesses me before men, I will also confess him before my Father who is in the heavens”. So what happens if you don't confess? Like the rulers here who were ‘secret believers’. But in verse 33 the Lord goes on to say, “whoever denies me before men, I will also deny him before my Father who is in the heavens”. Is there a difference between denying and keeping quiet? Proverbs 29:25 says, “the fear of man brings a snare”. Writing to the Laodicean church the glorified Christ said, “because you are lukewarm, and neither hot nor cold, I will vomit you out of my mouth” (Revelation 3:16). If confessing is to be ‘hot’, and denying is to be ‘cold’, then keeping quiet is to be ‘lukewarm’. All in all it looks like the odds are in favor of confessing (see Luke 12:4-5). (See the note at John 5:44.)
*12:46 In verses 35 and 36 He has already referred to Himself as “the Light”—here there is no article, so I take it that He is emphasizing the quality inherent in the noun.
†12:46 Again, ‘the darkness’ refers to Satan's kingdom.
‡12:47 This refers to His first advent. At His second advent He will indeed judge.
§12:48 ‘Ignorance of the law is no excuse.’ If the Bible exists in your language and you know how to read (or you know someone who can read), then you could have learned Jesus' sayings. Claiming that you did not know will not hack it.
*12:50 In John 5:19 Jesus affirms that he only did what He saw the Father do. Here He affirms that He only said what He heard the Father say. Although the Father and the Son are distinct persons, as Jesus repeatedly made clear, His identification with the Father was so complete that to see Him was to see the Father, to believe into Him was to believe into the Father (verses 44-45, above).