John Chapter 2 verse 17 Holy Bible

John 2 : 17 Bible Verse Songs

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Pulpit Commentary

Pulpit CommentaryVerse 17. - His disciples remembered that it was written, The zeal of thy house will consume me. The future tense, affirmed by the best manuscripts, never (Meyer) bears the present meaning. The disciples, familiar with the Old Testament, remembered at the time the words of Psalm 69:9. In that psalm the theocratic Sufferer approached the climax of his sorrows, and admitted that a holy zeal for God's house will ultimately consume him - eat him up. Tile word is used for consuming emotions (cf. Aristoph., 'Vespae,' 287), and there is a foreshadowing of the reproach and agony which will befall the righteous Servant of God in his passion for God's honour. The parallelism of the second clause of the verse, "The reproaches of them that reproached thee have fallen upon me," confirm the application, though the words are not cited. Several other citations are made in the New Testament from this psalm, which, whether it be Messianic in the oracular sense or not, is dearly one that furnished the mind of the early Church with abundant illustration of the suffering of the Christ (Romans 15:3; Romans 11:9, 10; Acts 1:20; cf. also Psalm 69:21 with the narrative of the Crucifixion). Thoma labours to find in the Old Testament prophecies generally the true source of the Johannine narrative. He points to Hosea 6:5; Malachi 3:11; Jeremiah 25:29.

Ellicott's Commentary

Ellicott's Commentary for English Readers(17) Was written . . . hath eaten me up .--More literally, is written . . . shall eat me up. The verse is full of interest in many ways. It gives us the thought of the disciples at the time (comp. John 2:22) which could be known only to one of their number. It shows us what we too seldom realise in reading the New Testament, that the Jewish mind was filled to overflowing with thoughts of the Old Testament. The child was taught to say by heart large portions of the Law and Psalms and Prophets, and they formed the very texture of the mind, ready to pass into conscious thought whenever occasion suggested. With the exception of the 22nd Psalm, no part of the Old Testament is so frequently referred to in the New as the psalm from which these words are taken (Psalm 69:9), and yet that psalm could not have been in its historic meaning Messianic (see, e.g., John 2:5; John 2:22-25). This reference to it gives us, then, their method of interpretation. Every human life is typical. The persecution without reason, the wrong heaped upon the innocent, the appeal to and trust in Jehovah, the song of thanksgiving from him whose parched throat was weary of calling--all this was true of some representative sufferer of earlier days, and we may hear in it almost certainly the voice of Jeremiah; but it was true of him in that he was a forerunner of the representative sufferer. The darker features of the psalm belong to the individual; the Life which sustains in all, and the Light which illumines in all, was even then in the world, though men knew Him not. The words of Jeremiah are Messianic, because his life--like every noble, self-forgetting, others' sorrow bearing, man and God loving life--was itself Messianic.The change of tense, from the past of the Psalmist to the future here, is itself significant. The words were true of the inner burning which consumed the prophet-priest. They come to the heart as true, with a fuller truth, of Christ's spirit burning with righteous indignation, and cast down by deepest sorrow; but shrinking not from the painful task, which leaves its mark falling on that face as the shadow of a deeper darkness. They are to be, in a deeper sense, truer still.