What Does John 9:39 Mean?

(39) **For judgment I am come into this world.**—These words arise immediately out of what has preceded. The beggar has passed from a state of physical blindness, and has received the faculty of sight. He has passed from a state of spiritual blindness, and has received the power to recognise and believe on Jesus Christ as the Son of God. He did not see, but the result of the manifestation of the Messiah is for him that he now does see. Conscious of his own spiritual blindness, he asked, “Who is He, Lord, that I might believe on Him?” and to him, as to every earnest and humble seeker after truth, because in all his seeming need he really “hath,” there is given that he may “have more abundance.” In marked contrast to this spirit of humility and desire to come to the light, was that of the Pharisees. They claimed to have the “key of knowledge” (Matthew 11:25), and were, as a Pharisee represents him who is “called a Jew,” “confident that they were guides of the blind, lights of them which are in darkness” (Romans 2:17 *et seq.;* comp. 1Corinthians 1:21; 1Corinthians 3:18). Conscious of their own spiritual light, they felt no need of a truer Light, and therefore could not see it; and from them, as from every careless and self-trusting possessor of truth, because, in all his seeming abundance, he really *“*hath not,” there is taken away “even that he hath.” (Comp. Note on John 1:16.) This passing from darkness to light, and from light to darkness, suggests thoughts which our Lord has already uttered in John 3:17-19, and which will meet us again more fully in John 12:37-50. (See Notes on these passages.) Judgment is not the ultimate end of His coming, for He came to save the world; but it is an end, and therefore a result. The special form of the word rendered “judgment” in this place is used nowhere else by St. John, and indicates that what is here thought of is not the act of judging, but the concrete result—the sentence pronounced after judgment. His coming was a bringing light into the darkness of men’s hearts, a testing of the false and the true, and as men accepted or rejected Him they pronounced a judicial sentence upon themselves. That light judged no man, and yet by it every man was judged. **That they which see not might see.**—The force of these words lies in the fact that the phrases, “they which see not” and “they which see,” are to be interpreted as from their own point of view—“That they which think they see not might really see; and that they which think they see might really be made blind.”