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The word "destroy" is the first aorist imperative of luo, to loosen or destroy. It is the
permissive imperative, not a command to do it. The Jews, misunderstanding what He
was saying, replied, "It has taken forty-six years to build this Temple, and you are going
to raise it in three days? But the Temple He had spoken of was His body" (2: 20, 21).
Herod's Temple began with Herod the Great in B.C.19. The main part was completed
and consecrated in ten years. Other parts were still being carried out, and the building
was not finished until 63A.D., only 7 years before its destruction by the Romans. John
explains that the Lord Jesus was referring to His own body, which was raised from the
dead after three days and three nights in the grave. Christ often spoke in parables,
especially when His hearers were opposing His teaching. The Evangelist gives us the
real meaning of His words which were clear to him after the resurrection, and later on at
the time of writing the Gospel. This language of the Lord is recalled and perverted at His
trial, as "I will destroy" (Mark 14: 58), "I can destroy" (Matt. 26: 61), neither of which
He said. John tells us that the final result of all this was the realization of the object of
his Gospel . . . "they believed the Scripture and the words that Jesus had spoken" (2: 22)
and this is emphasized again in verse 23:
"Now while He was in Jerusalem at the Passover Feast, many people saw the
miraculous signs He was doing and believed in His Name."
But Christ was able to distinguish infallibly between the true believer and the unbeliever:
"But Jesus would not entrust Himself to them (kept refusing to trust Himself,
imperfect tense)."
Why was this? "for He knew all men. He did not need man's testimony about man,
for He knew (kept on knowing, again imperfect tense) what was in man" (2: 24, 25).
This knowledge was because of His deity, not because He was good at guessing.
Chapter 3:
Christ and Nicodemus.
"Now there was a man of the Pharisees named Nicodemus, a member of the Jewish
ruling council. He came to Jesus at night and said, `Rabbi, we know you are a teacher
who has come from God. For no one could perform the miraculous signs you are doing if
God were not with him'." (3: 1, 2). Now, de, so often in John, is explanatory and
transitional, not adversative as it generally is. Nicodemus is an instance of the Lord's
knowledge of men (2: 25) and was an example of a person He could trust. Nicodemus is
a Greek name which means "conqueror of the people", not that we can deduce from this
that he was overbearing. He was a man of position, "a ruler among the Jews", who had
evidently been impressed by the miraculous signs which Christ had performed. His own
prominence made it remarkable that he came at all to the Lord Jesus. We cannot cay
positively why he chose the night to visit Him, as the Evangelist does not tell us. It could
be that he wished to avoid comment by other members of the Sanhedrin, for Christ had
already provoked some of the ecclesiastics by His assumption of authority over the
Temple. But we cannot be sure about this; it is better not to guess. John refers to him on
three separate occasions.