John 15:25

John 15:25. But this cometh to pass, that the word may be fulfilled that is written in their law, They hated me without a cause. The quotation is in all probability from Psalms 69:4, with which Psalms 35:19; Psalms 109:3 may be compared. On the ‘fulfilment' spoken of see what has already been said on chaps, John 2:17 and John 12:38. The quotation is made for the purpose of bringing out the aggravated guilt of those who were rejecting Jesus. They had condemned their fathers because of the persecutions to which God's Righteous Servant of old had been exposed: yet they ‘filled up the measure of their fathers.' Their pride and carnal dependence upon outward descent from Abraham blinded their eyes to the distinction between truth and falsehood, right and wrong, and made them do what they acknowledged in the light of Divine truth, of Scriptures which they honoured, to be worthy of condemnation in their own fathers.

Light is thus thrown upon the words ‘ their law,' which become the Fourth Gospel rendering of Matthew 23:30. The very law of which the Jews boasted, and into which, from imagined reverence for it, they were continually searching, in that very law they might see themselves. In such a connection of thought might it not he called ‘their law'?