John 12:39-40

John 12:39-40 . For this cause they could not believe, because Isaiah said again, He hath blinded their eyes, and he hardened their heart, that they should not see with their eyes and perceive with their heart, and be turned, and I should heal them. ‘For this cause' does not refer so much to the words themselves of the preceding verse, as to that Divine plan which John sees that they express, and whose further progress, involving a judicial hardening of those who, as we have seen, had first hardened themselves, is expressed in the words that follow. The quotation is from Isaiah 6:9-10, and the changes, especially in that from the commanding to the narrative form, are only such as the prophet himself would have made had he taken up the position of our Evangelist and, at the close of his prophetic ministry, related what he had been made the instrument of effecting. Israel was so wilfully rejecting God in the prophet's days, that the moment for God's judicial treatment of His people had come. By him, therefore, God sent them a new message, that by their rejection of it the blinding of their eyes and the hardening of their hearts might be complete; that they might finally and conclusively reject the tidings through which, otherwise, Isaiah would have ‘healed' them. Was not this exactly what had happened now? He in whom all the prophets of Israel were ‘fulfilled' had come; and John sees Him uttering His mournful complaint over that wilful obstinacy of Israel which had provoked the judicial dealings of God, in the same language as that in which His servant of old, had he been speaking in the narrative form, would have spoken. Thus the words of the Lord to Isaiah (in chap. John 6:9-10), now quoted, describe the radical and unchanging condition of carnal Israel; and, as applied here, they mean that God had made the self-manifestation of Jesus the instrument of blinding and hardening those who had chosen unbelief. Thus also, it will be observed, God is the subject of ‘hath blinded' and of ‘hardened:' and ‘I should heal them' must be understood of Jesus Himself. Hence, accordingly, the remarkable words of the next verse.