John 2:17 - Exposition

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 Psalms 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, 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 , Romans 11:10 ; Acts 1:20 ; cf. also Psalms 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 .