Spatial Join and Definition Query

I can't imagine this hasn't been covered before, but I'm not finding any old threads.

Quite simply, why doesn't a spatial join honor a defintion query? I want to join the closest point from one layer to the other, but I only want a subset of the layer being joined based on an attribute. The results of the join return closest features that should be "filtered out" based on the definition query on that layer.

Why?

Thanks.

Gary