Commentary on the Gospel of John

                                  Chapter Twelve

                                                                                                                                              Verses 23-27

Jesus answered these Greeks by preaching the gospel to them. Jesus told them that His time had come for His Father to glorify Him because of His self-sacrifice for the whole human race. Jesus preached that, like a seed of corn, He would die, be put into the ground, but He would rise again to bring salvation to all who would believe in Him. God will eventually cause all humans to believe in Christ. Everything God does can only be eternal. Since Christ bore the sins and evil of the whole human race on the cross, then God must save the entire fallen, human race. Ecclesiastes 3:14; Psalm 111:7-8; Revelation 21:5.

Jesus taught them that those who love their earthly lives; that is, those who love their lives of sin will lose their lives. But Jesus did not say they would lose their lives forever. Jesus must consign unrepentant sinners to the regions of death after their physical deaths because God cannot accept the nastiness of their sins which still adheres to their lives. Hebrews 9:27. But God created their lives to be good although they became stained by sin. Genesis 1:31; Genesis 4:7. God cannot lose their good lives that He creates and loves. Ecclesiastes 3:14; I Corinthians 13:8. God has provided a means to cleanse their good lives from all their sins and the spiritual deaths that stain them. God told Noah to make a burnt offering. Genesis 8:20-21. The burnt offering symbolizes God's use of His fiery wrath against evil to dissolve the systems of all humans confined to the regions of death so that He can separate their sins. their evil, and their spiritual deaths from their good lives which He will recreate, and He will cast their spiritual deaths, with all their sins and evil, into the eternal lake of fire. God will recreate their good lives for them to live forever on His new earth. I Corinthians 3:11-15; II Peter 3:9-13; Psalm 75:3; Revelation 21:1-5.

God's plan for this process follows. Jesus bore the sins and spiritual deaths of all humans when He suffered and died on the cross. I John 2:2; Hebrews 2:9. Jesus shed His blood and water on the cross to save by His grace all who would believe in Him while still alive in the flesh. I John 1:7; Revelation 1:5; I Corinthians 6:11. When Jesus died on the cross, He dismissed His Spirit who descended into Hell bearing the sins and spiritual deaths of all humans who did not become saved by grace. Luke 27:46; Ephesians 4:8-10. The Holy Spirit had to have borne the sins and spiritual deaths of all living humans not saved by grace to the regions of death because they could not have just disappeared nor could Jesus' sacrifice for them have become ineffective. I John 2:2; Hebrews 2:9. The Holy Spirit had to have left all of the sins and spiritual deaths of all living humans not saved by grace behind in the fires of Hell because He ascended immaculate from the regions of death to reanimate the perfect body of Jesus so that He could rise from the dead victorious over Hell, the Devil, and all spiritual death. Psalm 16:9-10; Acts 2:25-31; Revelation 1:17-18.