(2) Judgment is now. — It is evident that Christ referred to a judgment that had then and there commenced, for the words have a present meaning. " The prince of this world has been judged." We can most easily understand this by referring to a precisely similar utterance in the 31st verse of the 12th chapter: "Now is the judgment of this world ; now shall the prince of this world be cast out." The Saviour had just declared that by His death He should give life to the world. He had just glanced into the awful struggle that was approaching, and His soul was troubled. He had just received from heaven the assurance of final victory, and then He declared, with the glory of the triumph ah-eady brightening, " Now is the judgment of this world ; now shall the prince of this world be cast out." The judgment, therefore, to which He pointed was that conquest which He had already com- menced of the dominion of evil, and the final victory over it which He should gain on His Cross. And the same meaning must be attached to the word " world " here, so that the verse may be rendered thus : " He shall convince the world that evil is conquered, overthrown, and shall finally pass away."
^ " The last judgment " is a phrase which we have almost robbed of its effect because we have used it chiefly for a remote and pictorial future. We have dwelt on the final date of judg- ment, and lost sense of a state of judgment, a judgment always there, and always Jlnal in its nature. We have pictured it in
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ways which have emptied it of spiritual awe, and reduced it to little more than physical terror and moral impotence. We do not realize that the prince of this world has been finally judged, and that we live in a saved world only because we live in a judged world. Either with the orthodox we have made judgment a cosmic catastrophe (and astronomy is full of them, and geology has made them too familiar), or we have reduced it, with the liberals, to the historic process on its ethical side, with its moral crises, and jail-deliveries, and fresh starts, from time to time. We have lost the note of judgment from the Cross, and so from our moral world. And we have lost it, with the orthodox, in a distant judgment scene, or with the liberals, who made it the mere Nemesis of history, which is too slow and subtle to curb the push- ing hour. " The world's history is the world's judgment," says Schiller. He wished to recall the last judgment from its remote- ness to be a power in the heart of present things and living conduct. But there is something more true than Schiller's famous phrase. It is not the world's history, but Christ's history that is the world's judgment. And especially is it Christ's Cross.^
2. " Because the prince of this world hath been judged." Who is the prince of this world ? The phrase " this world " is frequently used in the New Testament to express the collective forces that are on this earth opposed to God ; and in speaking of a Prince, Christ manifestly implies that evil forces are not separated, but combined and connected things; that they form a great living power, a kingdom of wrong. But the phrase means more than this; it points to a personal Evil Spirit as lord of that evil kingdom. Not in the sense that he is the cause of it all, but that he is representative of it, as being the greatest and the first. According to the teaching of Christ and the Apostles, evil began far back in the spiritual world, and came from thence to man. Interpreting the phrase thus, we have the idea of evil as a power mysteriously connected with the invisible world, and of an Evil Spirit as its representative.
^ Do you think of the prince of this world as one who holds in his tyranny a world of victims who are miserable because they struggle in his yoke ? That is not the conception here at all. He represents here all that is most congenial to the world's way. He is the personalized spirit of a willing and admiring world. He is the organ of a world proud of its representative. He has its * P. T. Forsyth, Missions in State and ChurcJi, 72.
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confidence. He is the agent of methods which the world thinks essential to its prosperity and stability, which make its notion of eternal life. The world he represents has no idea that its moral methods can be bettered or its principles overthrown. To its mind the moral is an impertinence and the spiritual is a supersti- tion— feeble, but capable of becoming dangerous. It must therefore be fought. And its antagonist is just as sensible of the antagonism. There is no compromise possible. They were destined to meet in a struggle which is inevitable and a judgment which is final — and that meeting was in the Cross.^
(1) The Spirit will convince the world that the prince of this world has been judged by showing that Christ has conquered sin through obedience to the will of God. And where was this so perfectly accomplished as in His life and death ? All forces were in action to turn Him from submission. From first to last He was perpetually tempted to forsake His chosen path of obedience. The cold, the hunger, and the lonely temptation of the wilderness formed but the prelude to the long struggle with the Evil One, which culminated on Calvary. It was the same temptation throughout to assert His own will against His Father's will. It opened with the challenge in the wilderness, " If thou be the Son of God, command that these stones be made bread " ; " If thou be the Son of God, cast thyself down"; and closed with the last taunt, " If thou be the Son of God, come down from the cross." But the cry, " It is finished," was the herald of conquest — the proclamation to the world that one Man had stemmed the tide of evil and broken its force. The moment of seeming defeat was the moment of mightiest victory.