<p>5:27- see on Mk. 2:10.</p><p><i>And He has given him authority to execute judgment, because he is a Son of Man</i>- His humanity is His ability to judge us. We will then realize the extent to which He succeeded in every point where we realize we failed, despite being strapped with our same nature. And thus we will respect Him yet the more for His perfection of character, and for the wonder of the salvation that is thereby in Him. We cannot judge because although we too are 'sons of men', we have sinned. Any such judgment would be hypocritical. But the Lord can judge, because He had human nature, being the archetypical &quot;son of man&quot;, and yet never sinned.</p><p>Even in His life, the Father committed all judgment unto the Son (:22). The Lord can therefore talk in some arresting present tenses: &quot;Verily, verily, I say unto you as judge, He that heareth my word, and believeth on Him that sent me, hath everlasting life, and shall not come into condemnation&quot;. According to our response to His word, so we have now our judgment. He goes on to speak of how the believer will again hear His voice, at His return: &quot;The hour is coming, and also now is, when the dead shall hear the voice of the Son of God: and they that hear shall live&quot;. Our response to His word now is a mirror of our response to His word then. Hence the hour is yet future, and yet now is. 'The Son right now has the authority to execute judgment on the basis of response to His word. He will do this at the last day; and yet even as He spoke, He judged as He heard' paraphrase of Jn. 5:27-30. Because He <i>is </i>the Son of man, He even then had the power of judgment given to Him (Jn. 5:27). These present tenses would be meaningless unless the Lord was even then exercising His role as judge. When He says that He doesn't judge / condemn men (Jn. 3:17-21), surely He is saying that <i>He</i> won't so much judge men as they will judge themselves by their attitude to Him. His concentration was and is on saving men. The condemnation is that men loved darkness, and prefer the darkness of rejection to the light of Christ. Likewise Jn. 12:47,48: &quot;If any man hear my words, and believe not, I judge him not: for I came not to so much as to judge the world, but to save the world. He that rejecteth me... hath one that judgeth him: the word his response to the word, supplying the ellipsis that I have spoken, the same shall judge him in the last day&quot;.</p>