Manuscripts

We continue this week in our brief series of messages from the Old Testament book of Jonah. As we said last week, Jonah is forever identified as the book where a fish swallows a prophet.  But it has so much more that is genuinely helpful to those who want to know and love God better.  Last week, as we walked through chapter one, we were introduced to Nineveh—the city to which God called Jonah to bring his message of judgment.

The Assyrian Empire that Nineveh was a part of was the dominant power in the Ancient Near East and it was infamously brutal and savage.  The Assyrians were hated by all other nations and the Jews shared that hatred of them.  These pagan idolaters in Nineveh were the worst enemies of the Jews and when God called Jonah to physically relocate to this place and pronounce his judgment on it—he was calling this prophet to make unique and remarkable sacrifices.

Jonah had been a prophet or a spokesman for God for years when the events of this book play out.  However, he simply could not stomach the prospect of preaching to these wicked people in Nineveh.  So, he bolted from God’s presence and immediately sought to sail as far away from Nineveh as he could.  This was a case of instantaneous rebellion from Jonah and the author very intentionally paints a negative picture of him as he contrasts this Hebrew prophet of God with the pagan sailors who he accompanied aboard this ship sailing for Nineveh.

This first chapter also reveals some powerful truths about God. One is that God is completely sovereign over his creation.  He is in control—not only over the wind and wave that he used to violently batter Jonah’s ship.  He was also sovereign over Jonah.  We see this in the fact that, though Jonah took many, very intentional—even drastic steps to escape from God’s call on him to go to Nineveh, he could not escape God.  As we’ll see again today, God in his sovereign power foils his escape plans, drags him back to himself and later, reissues his commission to Jonah to go to Nineveh.

This morning, you heard Brian begin with the account of Jonah being swallowed by a giant fish.  That part of this story is so far-fetched that it has caused many over the centuries to doubt whether any of this actually happened.  When we’re confronted with those kinds of doubts and even ridicule for believing such an outrageous story, there are at least two responses that are the most common.  One is—some believers seek to scientifically prove that it was indeed plausible for this event to have occurred.  These folks try to address questions about what kind of animal might this have been that swallowed Jonah.

Here, you find topics discussed like the average size of the esophagus of a Sperm whale and how long it takes for digestive juices to reduce a person to mush.  Although you can read several opinions online about those questions, it’s generally not a profitable direction to take.  This is because it’s simply NOT possible to prove scientifically that it is plausible for what Jonah describes here to happen-because there are no verifiable[1] instances where this has ever happened before. Even harder to know for certain is how Jonah could have known that he’d been in the belly of this creature for three days and nights.

A more sane response to these kinds of questions related to Jonah or any miracle in the bible is to root your faith, not in finding a rational explanation, but in the infinite power that God has to do ANYTHING he wants to do.  If God can create the sun, moon and stars, then keeping a man alive in the belly of a sea creature for three days and nights is a piece of cake.  If finite, fallen and foolish humans can build submarines that enable hundreds of men to live in the ocean for months at a time, then the all-powerful Lord of the universe can surely create a fish to with a belly large enough for a passenger.

It’s also helpful to remember someone with amazing credibility and who clearly believed this story.  That would be, Jesus.  In the gospels of Matthew and Luke, Jesus cites Jonah’s three-day-and-night journey in the belly of a fish, and he doesn’t treat it like a myth or fairy tale or a parable.  He teaches it as historical fact and compares it to another well-verified historical event, his own burial and resurrection.  If Jesus, who knew everything and believed this story, then it would seem more credible for others to assume it’s a true story.

This prayer we heard a few minutes ago of Jonah’s in chapter two is the turning point in the book.  It’s in this chapter where Jonah comes back to God and is ready to go to Nineveh and preach to wicked Assyrians. This prayer is in the form of poetry and Jonah quotes many phrases from the book of Psalms.  It’s important to clarify the way Jonah composed this poetic prayer.  Obviously, Jonah didn’t have parchment paper and ink with him inside the belly of the fish.  This prayer was obviously written after this event.  But because its Jonah’s account of this event and because its inspired by God, this poem accurately represents the events described here as well as the feelings Jonah had at the time.

The poetic prayer divides into the three parts.  The first and shortest section we could call “God’s rescue of Jonah.”  The second part we could call “God’s discipline of Jonah” and the third part is “Jonah’s response to God.”  First, let’s briefly look at God’s rescue of Jonah.  Even though the rescue obviously follows Jonah’s time in the ocean, we’ll look at it first because it appears first in the text.  You can find at least three elements of God’s rescue.  The first element is one you see so often in Jonah and that is—God’s rescue of Jonah was totally sovereign.  God is always sovereign—that is, he is always in complete control of all things.  But in Jonah, we see his sovereign control over persons and events in very obvious and powerful ways that force us to see his sovereignty.

In 1:17, the author credits God with the rescue saying, “And the LORD appointed a great fish to swallow up Jonah.”  The presence of this unique fish in these waters was no coincidence.  Whatever kind of sea creature this was with this strange capacity for swallowing rebel prophets, God sent it to this area so that—at precisely the right moment in time, when Jonah as mere moments from death, the fish would deliver him from this watery grave.  In verse 10, when the fish had accomplished its mission, the author is again careful to explicitly credit the LORD. “And the LORD spoke to the fish, and it vomited Jonah out upon the dry land.”  This prophet regurgitation occurred at the precise moment of God’s prompting and God gave that order when the fish was near dry land.  This story again shows us what a big God we have, and we must need to be constantly reminded of that because the bible is chocked full of evidence of it.  The author wants us to see how muscular God’s sovereign power is to deliver Jonah like a package to whatever destination HE chooses in whatever form of transport HE chooses.

Another element of this rescue of Jonah is—God’s rescue of Jonah was fruitful.  We will see just how fruitful this was regarding Jonah’s future ministry later in the book.  But we see the “firstfruits” of this rescue in Jonah’s heart.  Verse one says, “Then Jonah prayed to the LORD his God from the belly of the fish.”  The instructive phrase there is “the LORD his God.”  That’s the author’s way of telling us that this prophet, who had not only rejected his call to be a prophet, but also rejected God himself, has now turned back to him God in some way.  As we’ll see, the rest of the prayer supports that Jonah has reconnected with God.  He has gone from running from God to crying out to him in prayer.

The second part of this story begins we see in verses three and four.  Let’s look at God’s discipline of Jonah. When we use the word “discipline” for how the Lord treats one of his people, we are not talking about him being disgusted with someone and letting them have it.  Hebrews 12 tells us that when God disciplines his people, it is rooted in his love for us and is intended to produce “the peaceful fruit of righteousness” [12:11] and to the end “that we might share his holiness” [12:10].  God’s discipline is intended to train those he disciplines, and we clearly see that intent here as Jonah describes his terrible trial in the ocean.

Did you notice that Jonah’s prayer says nothing about what it was like in the belly of the fish?  We can imagine that this would not have been at all pleasant.  But when Jonah recounts God’s discipline of him, he completely limits that to this harrowing experience in the water before the fish swallows him.  For Jonah, THAT time under water was the worst part of this entire experience and he clearly sees that this came directly from God.  In verse three Jonah prays to the LORD, “For you cast me into the deep and the flood surrounded me; all your waves and your billows passed over me.”  Again, we see that one element of God’s discipline is God’s discipline of Jonah is God’s sovereign doing.

We know from the story that it was the sailors who throw Jonah overboard.  But Jonah clearly understands that his near drowning experience was an act of God.  Jonah sees these sailors as God’s tools he used to throw him overboard.  To Jonah, it would have been no less evident that God was behind this if God had sent fiery angels to fling him into the sea.  In his prayer to God, he calls the waves and billows on the surface of the ocean, “your waves” and “your billows.” Again, Jonah sees this entire trip into the sea as God’s doing.

Another element of God’s discipline that the author goes out of his way to reveal is God’s discipline of Jonah is severe.  Part of the reason this is written in graphic poetic language is to better capture the sheer terror Jonah must have felt as he descended into the deep.  Notice the progression here.  In verse five, he says, “The waters closed in over me to take my life.”  So, after he hits the water, he immediately begins his descent.  Next, he says, “the deep surrounded me.”  So, he’s sinking deeper and is totally surrounded by miles of water. Finally, he vividly communicates what happened when he had sunk to the bottom of the ocean.

He says in verse five, “…weeds were wrapped about my head at the roots of the mountains.”  The scholars tell us that the words translated “wrapped about my head” convey that Jonah was “hopelessly entangled.”[2]  If you’ve ever had a near-drowning experience, you know the terror it is to be totally out of control under water and feeling entombed.  In verse two, he summarizes the experience as being in “the belly of Sheol.”  Sheol was the Hebrew word for what they believed was an underground cavern where the souls of dead people ended up.  That’s how trapped Jonah felt and it’s clear that he knew with absolute certainty that he was a goner.  That’s what he conveys in verse six where he says, “I went down to the land whose bars closed upon me, forever…”  He was so certain of his imminent death that it felt as if the door of death had been bolted behind him and that it was impossible for that door to ever reopen for him.  Jonah KNOWS he is a dead man at this point.  He summarizes the experience in verse seven by saying, “When my life was fainting away…”

One modern-day comparable experience that illustrates this kind of certainty of death would be if you were on a jet airliner at 38,000 feet and both engines failed.  After some time gliding, the plane eventually falls from the air at a rapid descent.  You are in free-fall for about 30 seconds and by that time, you have no doubt that you and everyone else on that airplane will very soon be violently reduced to a statistic.  That kind of absolute, abject horror of the utter certainty of death is what this poetic language intends to communicate.  Then, as Jonah is trapped and is certainly mere moments from death by drowning, he says in verse six, “…yet you brought up my life from the pit, O LORD my God.”

The use of poetry is intended to cause us to feel the desperate situation in which Jonah found himself.  The point is—this was severe discipline from God.  God brought Jonah to the very brink of death—allowed him to feel the utter terror that comes from this kind of utter hopelessness.  This was not like your friend at the swimming pool holding your head under water for a few moments.  If you have a dream like this, you wake up terrified.

God could have stopped the discipline at this horrific storm he brought that caused the pagan sailors to cry out to their gods in terror.  THAT was surely a horrible experience where everyone had all but given up any hope of survival.  But God causes Jonah, not only to endure that terrible trauma, he had a much worse one in store for him after he was thrown in.  This was severe discipline for Jonah—severe enough to cause him to decide it was ok for him to preach to those undeserving Ninevites.

The third part of the poem reveals Jonah’s Response to God.  We’ve seen much of this already but notice five short elements of Jonah’s response.  First, as we have seen, Jonah is desperate.  His summary of this event in verse two says, “I called out to the LORD, out of my distress…”  One scholar says that word translated “distress” communicates that “…Jonah believed that he was as good as dead, that he had been “eaten” by death, which was often spoken of as an enemy that devours.”[3]  So, before Jonah was “eaten” by this fish, he had, in his mind, already been eaten by death and he is utterly terrified.

A second element of Jonah’s response is Jonah is thankful.  Unless you have been through such a hopeless, near-death experience, you surely cannot appreciate the pure glee associated with getting back your life after you had been certain it was lost.  The adrenaline rush alone from that must have been overwhelming.  We see Jonah’s thankfulness in verse nine as he says to the LORD, “But I with the voice of thanksgiving will sacrifice to you…”  Jonah will worship the Lord in ecstatic thanksgiving fitting a man who had lost his life only to miraculously find it again.

Another element of Jonah’s response is Jonah is refreshed in his commitment to the Lord.  This is what is conveyed when he says in the second half of verse nine, “what I have vowed I will pay.”  He doesn’t specify tell us the nature of this vow he had made.  Perhaps Jonah vowed to God that, if he saved him from this certain drowning, he would never refuse God’s call to preach again.  We can’t know for certain.  What we CAN know is that this rescue of God, for at least a short time, made Jonah more committed to the LORD and we see that in his journey back to Nineveh.

A fourth element of Jonah’s response is Jonah reaffirms his trust in God’s power to save.  That’s what he means in the last sentence in verse nine.  “Salvation belongs to the LORD!”  That is—no one but God saves from imminent destruction—be it in drowning or in spiritual judgment—no one but God.  Commentators tell us that this verse serves as the pillar verse of the entire book of Jonah because it supports everything else here.  God saves Jonah and God will save the Ninevites if they repent.  At least one scholar has said that this is the pillar verse of the entire Bible!

A final and the most fascinating element of Jonah’s response is found not in anything Jonah says, but in what Jonah does not say.  In his response, Jonah is manifestly incomplete.  Did you notice the absolutely glaring omission in Jonah’s prayer?  Think about it.  He has just gone through this horrific ordeal where his life flashes before his eyes in the certainty of his imminent and violent death.  He is rescued and he is thankful, newly committed and reaffirming of God’s power to save.  But ALL of this trial that he has written so graphically about in his prayer is due to one thing.  That is—his fateful decision to run from God to Tarshish.  THAT was the root cause of ALL of his troubles.  God did nothing to him here except in direct response to Jonah’s willful sin of rebellion.

Jonah is grateful, recommitted, newly appreciative of God’s saving power, but one thing Jonah is not is—penitent.  There is ZERO explicit evidence of Jonah expressing regret for his sin against God even though we know from chapter one that he was absolutely aware that HE and his sin were the cause of this calamity.  And yet as Jonah makes his confession of this amazing trial and rescue, as it relates to any sign of repentance, he is as silent as the grave from which he had been rescued.  In verse nine Jonah speaks of offering a sacrifice of thanksgiving.  What about another, much more important sacrifice?

Jonah promises that he will make sacrifices to God in response to his rescue of him.  But in King David’s psalm of repentance, Psalm 51, he says in verse 17, “¹⁷ The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise.”  You can look high and low throughout the length of Jonah’s prayer and you will not find one scintilla of evidence pointing to “a broken and contrite heart” over his rebellion.  In verse four, when he speaks of his earlier separation from God, it would have been accurate for him to say, “I intentionally and rebelliously fled from your presence.”  But notice how does he expresses his separation from God in verse four.  “I am driven away from your sight.”

That makes it sound like his role in this was passive.  That God had for some unknown reason driven him away from his.  That’s not at all what chapter one says.  It’s clear that Jonah was the active participant here in running away from God.  This was not about driving Jonah anywhere. It was about Jonah running from God!

This omission is so crucial in the way it contributes to one of the main messages of the book.  The book of Jonah is filled with irony and we will see more of that in the weeks to come.  But the central irony of the book is that Jonah here thankfully accepts the Lord’s merciful forgiveness and a second chance at life but, as we’ll see, his heart desperately wants to deny those expressions of mercy to the Ninevites.[4]   And, what the author is trying to tell us is that at least one of the major reasons why Jonah’s heart was not completely transformed here into wanting the Ninevites to repent and be saved is because, he never repented of hatred of them.  Out of his gratitude to God for his rescue, he would stop running and go back to Nineveh and do the bare minimum there to be faithful to God.  But there was no mercy in his heart toward the pagans because he never repented of his bigotry toward them.

This communicates some very important truths about how God changes a life in repentance.  As we’ve said before the Greek word for “repent” literally means “a change of mind.”  By a change of mind, we don’t mean, “I used to think that sinful attitude, desire or action was ok, but now I know it’s sinful—I’ve changed my mind about it.”  No!  Most of us know in our minds the difference between sinful and right attitudes, desires and actions. The truth is–repentance results in a change of behavior but is itself NOT a change in behavior.  Now that may sound like an unimportant detail, but it’s actually very important.

The actual change in a person’s behavior is what the Bible calls “the fruit of repentance.”   When John the Baptist was preaching repentance, his call was to “⁸ Bear fruit in keeping with repentance.”  In Luke 3:8, Jesus says, “⁸ Bear fruits in keeping with repentance…”   In Acts, Paul is preaching in chapter 26 and says of the Gentiles “… they should repent and turn to God, performing deeds in keeping with their repentance.”  Repentance is not itself a change in behavior; it LEADS TO a change in behavior.

To repent of a sin means that you think differently about it in the sense that what you once found appealing you now find appalling.  THAT kind of radical shift in your attitude toward your sin is repentance and Jonah doesn’t show an ounce of that.  That’s why, on the one hand, a grateful Jonah is willing to go to the Ninevites and preach a terse message of God’s judgment—his gratitude will take him that far.  But his heart toward the Ninevites hasn’t changed.  The mercy that he had received from God over his sin had done nothing to soften his heart to want to give mercy to the Ninevites.  That’s why, as we’ll see later in the book, when they repent of their sins, Jonah is positively adolescent in his reaction to it.

Paul says two things bring repentance to a sinful soul.  In Romans chapter two, Paul says in verse four, “⁴ Or do you presume on the riches of his kindness and forbearance and patience, not knowing that God’s kindness is meant to lead you to repentance?”  In Second Corinthians chapter seven, Paul says in verse 10, “¹⁰ For godly grief produces a repentance that leads to salvation without regret, whereas worldly grief produces death.”  So, on the one hand, God’s kindness and patience over our sin leads us to repent but on the other, godly sorrow produces repentance.

The way those two fit together is this—if you know in your heart how kind God has been to you in the cross, when you sin grievously, you will feel godly sorrow—sorrow directed toward God because you realize that you have grieved the heart of One who sent his only Son to die for you.  ITS THAT response to God over our sin that brings about transformation.  As we see the glory of Christ in the cross and we see and internalize God’s kindness to us there, then the sin we once found appealing we will now find appalling because we don’t want to grieve a God who has done so much for us.

Apply that to Jonah.  Jonah had tasted of the Lord’s kindness in ways few people have EVER experienced it.  Jonah was absolutely filled with gratitude over God’s kindness—so much so that he was willing to go preach to the Ninevites.  But Jonah never experienced this godly sorrow, this penitence, this broken and contrite heart that David had.  Deep down, he still hated the Ninevites and had not changed the way he viewed them or what they deserved.  Because there was no godly sorrow in response to what he had one in response to a God who had been so kind in rescuing him, instead of repenting, he felt freedom to wallow in bitterness when the Ninevites turn from their sin.

We’re running out of time, let’s just leave the application at this.  If we want to see transformation in our lives, we must preach BOTH halves of the gospel to ourselves. We’re always reminding the church to preach the gospel to ourselves every day.  We need to be constantly reminded of how much God loves us because we cannot show the kind of loving, fervent obedience God wants from us unless that is rooted in a sense of God’s love and acceptance of us.  If you are unsure of God’s love for you, you will never be radically obedience because “we love because he first loved us” [1 John 4:19].

The story of Jonah reminds us that we must not only show gratitude for God’s rescue of us in the cross.  Jonah did that much with his rescue.  What Jonah failed to do and what we must do if we are to live in constant repentance, is also remind ourselves of the horror of our sin before a holy God.  We don’t do that to beat ourselves us.  This is not spiritual self-abuse.  But unless we see the tremendous debt that our sin had racked up before God, we will not rightly appreciate or be transformed by the knowledge that God in his grace has rescued us.

This is what Jesus is getting at in Luke chapter seven.  Simon the Pharisee invites Jesus into his house and the story ends up with the prostitute showing profound gratitude to Jesus for forgiving her sins while Simon is disgusted by this woman’s love for Jesus.  Jesus summarizes the difference between this woman and the Pharisee in 7:47. Jesus tells Simon, ⁴⁷ …I tell you, her sins, which are many, are forgiven—for she loved much. But he who is forgiven little, loves little.”  This woman saw what a terrible sinner she was.  When she found forgiveness from Jesus, she was profoundly grateful and willing, with joy, to do whatever Jesus wanted.

Jonah clearly had not processed his sin against God but only his rescue of him.  The result was that his heart was not transformed—he just wanted to repay God the favor he had done for him.  If we want our hearts transformed by the gospel, we must meditate not only on what God has done for us, but the depths of our sin that made it necessary.  May God give us the grace to be transformed for his glory and our joy as we preach the full truth of the gospel to ourselves.

[1] A few unverified reports have surfaced over the centuries, but nothing with any credible documentation.

[2] The Minor Prophets” Volume Two, A Commentary on Obadiah, Jonah, Micah, Nahum, Habakkuk, Thomas McComiskey, Editor, Joyce Baldwin, commentator on Jonah, Baker Books, p 570, 1993.

[3] Smith, B.K., & Page, F.S. (1995).  Amos, Obadiah, Jonah (Vol. 19B, pp. 242-245).  Nashville:  Broadman & Holman Publishers.

[4] Smith, 1995, Broadman and Holman.

Today, we begin a new series of messages from the Old Testament book named for the prophet Jonah.  When people think about this book, their minds are drawn to the miracle of a big fish swallowing a man, swimming around for three days with him in his belly before vomiting him up onto dry land.  It’s easy to understand why that’s the attention-grabber in this book.  But within the pages of this beautifully written story, there is so much to teach us about God, his heart, his ways, his agenda.

We want to introduce this brief book today and set the table for our treatment of it.  We need to do this because, like all the books of the bible, the events recorded in Jonah didn’t happen in a vacuum.  They occurred within a certain period of biblical history with a certain set of political and spiritual realities operating in the background.  Unless we know some of this background information, we won’t understand or appreciate the message of this book nearly as much as we should.  So, the plan for today is to look at chapter one, which introduces the major themes, and weave this important background information into our treatment of what God reveals in this chapter.

Andy read the story for us and we want to divide it into the three main topics revealed in chapter one.  First, let’s look at Nineveh because we must know something about this “great city” God calls Jonah to if we’re going to understand the main message of this book.  We also want to use this first chapter to introduce us to the prophet Jonah himself as he is obviously very important to understanding what God is saying here.  Finally, and most importantly, we want to focus on God and what he reveals about himself and the gospel in this story because HE is always the most important focus in any section of Scripture.  So, taking our cue from Jonah here in chapter one, let’s plunge in.

The first two verses of the book tell us, “¹ Now the word of the LORD came to Jonah the son of Amittai, saying, ² “Arise, go to Nineveh, that great city, and call out against it, for their evil has come up before me.”  Again, we want to begin our look at this book by focusing on the city of Nineveh and the Assyrian Empire it was a part of.  If we do that, we’ll be much more equipped to know why Jonah responded as he did to God’s call to go to Nineveh.  Nineveh was on the east bank of the Tigris River in what is modern-day Iraq about 250 miles north of Baghdad.  God calls Nineveh a “great city” three times in Jonah because it was great in many ways.  As we’ll see later in the book, it was a very large city for its time in history.

Beyond that, Nineveh was part of the Assyrian Empire.  That means, first of all, that these people to whom God calls Jonah were not Jews.  God had not brought these people into covenant with him and these Gentiles were not only enemies of Israel; they were enemies of the God of Israel.  For God to call a prophet to go and preach to a Gentile nation was unheard of at this time.  The prophets wrote out oracles of judgment and condemnation to Gentile nations like Assyria and Egypt and Babylon.  But to call one of his Hebrew prophets to physical relocate to a hostile Gentile nation and preach his judgment to them was—without precedent.  This is why some people call Jonah the world’s first foreign missionary.

Just as God was calling Jonah as a prophet, and for about the next 150 years, Assyria was THE big kid on the block in the Ancient Near East.  They were the dominant power to be reckoned with.  So, Jonah ends up prophesying to Nineveh as the Assyrian Empire was on the rise in this region.  And the city of Nineveh—where God specifically calls Jonah to go—was the most powerful city in the Ancient Near East.

To put these events within an Old Testament timeline, the events in Jonah occurred around 760 BC—about 250 years after King David.  The Assyrians were the dominant military power until they fell to Babylon and King Nebuchadnezzar—the king we read so much about in the book of Daniel.

To give us another important historical reference point from the bible, the northern Kingdom of Israel was destroyed in 722 BC—about 40 years after the events in this story–and the nation that God used to bring his judgment on his wayward people was this same Assyrian Empire.  The Assyrians were his instrument of wrath against Israel and its rampant idolatry.  The Assyrians easily conquered the northern tribe of Israel and exiled the Jewish people off their homeland.  The carted them off to Assyria, about 650 miles away.

So, Nineveh is the most powerful city in the most powerful empire in the Ancient Near East at the time of Jonah.  But even more crucial to understanding the story of Jonah is knowing something about the kind of people who ruled Nineveh and the Assyrian Empire.  Historians tell us that the ancient Assyrians were as brutal as any other empire in human history.  I could relay the way the Assyrians treated their conquered enemies but the sheer gore and violence of it would be “R” rated and not suitable for children.

Let’s just say they did unspeakable, satanically inspired things to all their enemies and that made them THE terror of the Ancient Near East.  World War Two Japan was known to be very harsh to its captured enemies.  But they were rank amateurs compared to the Assyrians in terms of how they treated their enemies.  This was a historically, epically brutalizing empire.  Assyria was THE worst enemy of God’s people and the bane of the ancient world.

Everyone in the Ancient Near East was terrified of the Assyrians and they seethed in anger toward them because of their absolutely inhuman cruelty and brutality. THAT’S the nation that God called Jonah to go and preach his word of judgment to.  Maybe now you get a better idea about why Jonah showed such hardened resistance and rebellion to God’s call.

So, let’s talk about this man, the prophet Jonah.  In the book of Jonah, nowhere is he called a prophet.  This is probably because at the beginning of the story he rejects his call to be a prophet.  But we know that God called him to be a prophet of Israel because he’s mentioned in the history recorded in the book of Second Kings, chapter 14.  There we discover that during Jonah’s early ministry as a prophet, King Jeroboam II is king over Israel.  He is a wicked king and thanks to an unbroken streak of 200 years of wicked kings in Israel, the nation had been in a long and steady decline.  In God’s amazing mercy however, during Jeroboam II reign, God chose to give him some military victories that enabled Israel to take back all the territory they had lost to their enemies over the preceding two centuries.  God allowed them to extend their borders back to where they were during King Solomon’s reign when Israel was at its peak influence in the region.

The author of Second Kings is speaking of King Jeroboam and says, “²⁵ He restored the border of Israel from Lebo-hamath as far as the Sea of the Arabah, according to the word of the LORD, the God of Israel, which he spoke by his servant Jonah the son of Amittai, the prophet, who was from Gath-hepher.”  That tells us that Jonah was God’s messenger and he was given the enviable prophetic task of miraculously predicting something that probably no one would have expected—this re-expansion of Israel.  Prophets didn’t predict things that were expected to happen.

They predicted things that only GOD knew would happen.  So, this is choice duty for a prophet of Israel.  Jonah gets to stand in the very presence of God and personally receive a message from the Lord –this amazing and encouraging prophecy which he then pronounces to a grateful nation of Israel.  Jonah was preaching GOOD news to Israel and these words would have been met with celebration and anticipation.

So, even though this is the only time Jonah is mentioned outside the book of Jonah, we know that he was an already established prophet when God calls him to Nineveh.  It also tells us that Jonah went from this really “cushy” prophetic duty—giving God’s good news of unexpected blessing to a receptive Jewish nation. He went from that assignment—to a uniquely difficult prophetic assignment—giving God’s BAD news of judgment to a very powerful and (what he assumed) probably a very hostile Gentile audience.

Verses two and three of chapter one in Jonah set the stage for the rest of the book.  God tells Jonah, “² Arise, go to Nineveh, that great city, and call out against it, for their evil has come up before me.” ³ But Jonah rose to flee to Tarshish from the presence of the LORD. He went down to Joppa and found a ship going to Tarshish. So, he paid the fare and went down into it, to go with them to Tarshish, away from the presence of the LORD.”

You don’t need any great level of discernment to get the impression that Jonah is not favorably disposed toward this Nineveh assignment!  Actually, the details of the story reveal a dramatic and violent reaction from Jonah.  Jonah does NOT hear this very strange assignment from God and ask some follow up questions to clarify.  There’s no discussion here.  Jonah doesn’t enter into any prolonged period of anguish over whether to obey this very repulsive call from God.  The story reveals NO evidence of ANY internal struggle within Jonah at the prospect of taking on this prophetic assignment.  We see this in at least two ways in Jonah.

First, the impression we get here in chapter one that Jonah immediately runs away from God is confirmed in chapter four when Jonah later reveals why he refused to go to Nineveh.  He tells God in verse two “² That is why I made haste to flee to Tarshish; for I knew that you are a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love, and relenting from disaster.”  “Made haste” means “immediately.”  So, the way this played out is clear.  God in one moment tells Jonah the assignment he had for him. And Jonah, in the next instant, bolts from God’s presence and heads for the nearest ship bound for Tarshish.  No struggle, no anguish—just, “Oh, you want me to prophecy to our hated enemies in Nineveh.  I don’t think so.  I’m out a’ here.”

Jonah’s rebellion is dramatic in a second way and that’s revealed in the alternate destination Jonah heads for.  Nineveh was east of Israel while Tarshish at the time was literally THE FARTHEST KNOWN CITY to the west.  It was on the southwest coast of Spain.[1]  The point is–Jonah doesn’t hear this assignment and then contemplate it on the Sea of Galilee a few miles away.  No.  He hightails it for the farthest place away from Nineveh he can find.  He leaves the Promised Land of his fellow Jews to journey to a far-away place where Jews would have been all but non-existent.  He goes to live almost exclusively among Gentiles in order to escape this wretched assignment.

It’s important for us to tease out what a horrible assignment God gives to Jonah to help us understand a bit more clearly Jonah’s visceral reaction to it We don’t want to be overly critical of Jonah.  Jonah is a big target and from our distance of 2700 years, it’s easy to think of him as a complete loser who was just waiting for an opportunity to rebel against Yahweh.  If we think that way, it’s because we don’t have an appreciation for what God was asking of Jonah.  However, neither must we be too easy on Jonah because the story will not allow that.

The truth is—he had been given a unique and rare privilege to serve as a prophet of the Most High.  He had stood in the very presence of God and God had spoken to him personally and infallibly of his plans for the future of Israel.  He was in the inner circle of ALL inner circles!  Only a relative handful of people in human history were ever been given the chance to experience what Jonah had experienced.  We also know from many places in Scripture that God never sends his servants on any mission without giving them the grace to accomplish his assignments, but Jonah never even seriously considers obeying God in this instance.  This mission was out of the question from the get-go for Jonah.  So, with that mixed record, how do we measure Jonah?  The only fair way to evaluate Jonah is to compare him with the other prophets.

The truth is that NONE of the Hebrew prophets who were faithful had it easy.  The New Testament author of Hebrews speaks mostly of prophets when he says that they were “tortured, mocked, flogged, chained, imprisoned, stoned, sawn in two, killed with the sword.  They were destitute, afflicted and mistreated—not a very appealing description.  The prophet Isaiah preached to a hostile Jewish audience for 40 years with no evidence of any spiritual fruit.  Jeremiah was treated despicably for much of his ministry and suffered much anguish.  God repeated picked up Ezekiel by his hair like a rag doll and carried him to places where he would publicly act out these bizarre pantomime-like scenes for sometimes months at a time.

The call of the prophet was not an easy one.  It would be easier for us to assess Jonah more positively if he’d even thought hard about the assignment and then, after days of struggle and in an anguished terror, ran away.  That would have been no less disobedience, but it would help us empathize with him more.  That’s not in the story.  The story is–Jonah hears from God, Jonah bolts from God.  It’s all very cut and dried here for Jonah.  The author doesn’t present any better picture of Jonah for most of the rest of this chapter either.  After he leaves God’s presence, he goes to the only seaport Israel had at the time, Joppa, and pays the fare to have this cargo vessel sail him away to Tarshish.  This would have been expensive.  So, Jonah didn’t just run away from God, he paid good money to run away from him.

When he gets on board the ship, the author helps us see how far Jonah had fallen.  He does that by intentionally contrasting him with the pagan crew members aboard the ship.  The result is that we see that Jonah–this “man of God” looks far less devout than even these pagan sailors.  When the storm hits the ship, the pagan crewmen are crying out to their gods.  They’re heroically hurling their cargo into the sea.  They didn’t care that they were throwing a small fortune overboard—they were scared of dying and were doing whatever they could to rescue themselves.

Conversely, verse five tells us that Jonah is in the bowels of the ship, fast asleep.  In verse six, the pagan captain rightly rebukes this prophet of Yahweh.  “…What do you mean, you sleeper?  Arise, call out to your god!  Perhaps the god will give a thought to us, that we may not perish.”  The captain can’t believe Jonah is asleep and not doing something to help rescue the ship.  This pagan captain is acting as Jonah’s prophet—telling him to pray to his God.  The pagans had been praying—Jonah had been sleeping.  And if Jonah HAD BEEN awake, there’s no evidence he would have been praying because how do you pray to a God you’re running away from as fast and far as possible?

The sailors make a very common assumption about the gods that people made in these ancient cultures.  That is—if a natural calamity (like a storm) hits and is so serious that it threatens to kill everyone on board ship, this must be one of their gods judging someone on this ship–someone aboard must have sinned against his god.  So, they cast lots, which was the Ancient Near Eastern equivalent of flipping a coin, to discover who the culprit is.  Miraculously, God chooses to use this method of discovering his will to “out” Jonah.  The crew members tell Jonah in verse eight. ⁸ “…Tell us on whose account this evil has come upon us. What is your occupation? And where do you come from? What is your country? And of what people are you?”

Jonah is rather selective about which of those questions he chooses to answer.  He responds in verse nine, “⁹ And he said to them, “I am a Hebrew, and I fear the LORD, the God of heaven, who made the sea and the dry land.” ¹⁰  Then the men were exceedingly afraid and said to him, “What is this that you have done!” For the men knew that he was fleeing from the presence of the LORD, because he had told them.”

He tells them that he is a Hebrew—his race.  He tells them that he worships the Hebrew God, Yahweh, and that the God he serves just happens to be the Ruler of heaven—where the storm originated—and the sea—that was bucking and heaving beneath them.  He also tells them that he is “fleeing from the presence of the Lord.”  But he doesn’t come across with his occupation.  He leaves out that part of his resume and that is the whole point.  The author twice tells us in verse three that Jonah was fleeing, “the presence of the Lord.”

When the author twice tells us that Jonah was fleeing the presence of the LORD, he’s telling us that Jonah is hanging up his prophet’s mantle.  He didn’t reveal his occupation to these sailors because he had just resigned his commission.  The author continues this contrast between the pagan sailors and Jonah and Jonah always comes out looking bad.  The sailors mercifully try to avoid throwing Jonah in—they show mercy to this renegade Jew by trying to row their way out of the storm.  They don’t have the nerve to pronounce the death sentence on Jonah, so they ask Jonah in verse 11, “…What shall we do to you, that the sea may quiet down for us…”

In verse 12, Jonah does something that is as close to a noble act as anything in this chapter.  He says, “Pick me up and hurl me into the sea, then the sea will quiet down for you, for I know it is because of me that this great tempest has come upon you.”   Jonah tells them to hurl him into the sea, which was a good response, but it’s not as noble as you might first imagine.  First, at this point, he and the rest of the crew know they’re all going to die apart from divine intervention.  So, the choice for Jonah wasn’t between life and death.  It was between being forcefully being hurled into the sea and going down with the ship.

Also, why did Jonah put this horrible responsibility on the sailors to kill him?  The text tells us that he knows that the sea will calm down when he goes overboard.  Since he knew that, why didn’t he just unceremoniously slip off the ship.  That would have spared these sailors from the trauma of having to execute him.  So, even in this seemingly noble act, Jonah is no model of chivalry.  He’s no Sir Walter Raleigh, here.

A final contrast between Jonah and these pagan sailors is in their response to God’s miraculous act of deliverance. Verse 16 says, “¹⁶ Then the men feared the LORD [the God of Israel] exceedingly, and they offered a sacrifice to the LORD and made vows.”   While Jonah is running from his covenant God and his call on his life, these pagans worship Jonah’s God in their gratitude for his rescue. That’s how the author introduces us to Jonah.

Finally, now that we’ve looked at Nineveh and Jonah, let’s see what this story reveals about God.  In this chapter, we mainly see two attributes of God on display—his sovereign control over his creation and his great mercy.  We see his sovereign control on multiple levels.  First, the author is quite clear that God is the one that [v.4] “…hurled a great wind upon the sea, and a mighty tempest on the sea, so that the ship threatened to break up.”  Also, when they tossed Jonah in, “the sea ceased from its raging.”[v.15]  It’s clear that God does that.  This is similar to the miracle that Jesus would perform much later on the Sea of Galilee.  God fully deserved the worship of the sailors.  He IS Lord over all creation. Every lightning bolt, every thunderclap, every storm and tsunami are measured out by God.  He’s Lord over the wind and the waves.

God also shows his sovereign rule over Jonah.  He gives Jonah a mission, Jonah rejects the mission.  But God doesn’t fret about it and reassign the mission to Hosea or Amos.  God called JONAH to Nineveh and he was going to GET Jonah to Nineveh.  His sovereign power is more than a match for Jonah’s rebellion and his stubborn hatred of the Ninevites. The fact that Jonah books passage on a ship bound for Tarshish does NOTHING to hinder God from using Jonah on this mission to Nineveh.  All the time and money and energy Jonah had spent to escape this assignment was ALL wasted energy.

God is bigger than any feeble plan Jonah has to run away.  Ultimately, you can only successfully say “no” to God, when God allows you to remain opposed to him.  If God wants to do something, you can’t stop him from doing it.  In Job 42:2 Job tells God, “² I know that you can do all things, and that no purpose of yours can be thwarted.”  As we’ll see next time, when Jonah balked at God’s mission, God made him an offer he couldn’t refuse!  This is not the ridiculous so-called “Gentleman” God you sometimes hear Christians talk about who will never violate our “free wills.”  This is the mighty sovereign God(!) of Psalm 115 who “…does ALL that he pleases.” [v.3] There is nothing that pleases God that he cannot and does not do and if that means using an unwilling prophet to preach to a hostile gentile nation, he will prevail!

But it’s not just God’s awesome sovereignty that we see here.  God’s immeasurable mercy is also revealed here in multiple ways.  First, he’s merciful to Jonah.  As a rebel prophet on the run, God could have crushed him like a bug, but instead, he patiently pursues him.  He could have just permitted Jonah to run off to Tarshish and miss the opportunity to see a series of amazing miracles in Nineveh.

Most dramatically, we see God’s mercy toward his enemies.  The fact that he is even concerned about these evil pagan Ninevites (who he knows will one day drag away his chosen people) is …miraculous.  God is merciful to his enemies and this is what Jonah couldn’t understand.  Tim Keller in his commentary on Jonah puts it this way, “Jonah wants a God of his own making, a God who simply smites the bad people, for instance, the wicked Ninevites and blesses the good people, for instance, Jonah and his countrymen.  When the real God—not Jonah’s counterfeit—keeps showing up, Jonah is thrown into fury or despair.  Jonah finds the real God to be an enigma because he cannot reconcile the mercy of God with his justice.   How, Jonah asks, can God be merciful and forgiving to people who have done such violence and evil?  How can God be both merciful and just?”

This is a question many people have asked about God over the centuries.  People naturally assume that a just God must punish the bad people and show his mercy to good people.  But that assumption is riddled with falsehood.  First, there ARE no good people as God measures “good.”  The bible teaches that we all deserve God’s judgment—even one sin against God is enough for a holy, sin-hating God to condemn us to eternal punishment.  Though some people are much more kind than others, no one deserves God’s mercy.  He gives his mercy only as an undeserved gift.

So, because God is holy and must punish sin and we are all sinners deserving of his justice—his just punishment, how can he be merciful to us?  How can God punish our sin without sending us to hell?  How can a just God show mercy to sinners?  We’re reminded of the answer in the Lord’s Table we’re going to celebrate in a few minutes.  God IS holy and he MUST punish sin.  Yet, he also loves sinners and wants to spare his people.

So, in answer to that dilemma, he sent his Son, Jesus to the earth.  Jesus never sinned and never deserved God’s just punishment.  But Jesus agreed to go to the cross where God would “impute” to him our sin and guilt.  That is–he would copy and paste our sin and guilt onto Jesus while he was on the cross.  He would pour onto his Son the wrath that our sins deserve.

That means that God is just because he punished sin the way it’s supposed to be punished—with his holy justice.  But he doesn’t punish believers because Jesus took our punishment …as our substitute …in our place.  He punished Jesus for our sins because he is merciful.  In the cross, we see the perfect marriage uniting God’s just punishment of sin and God’s merciful forgiveness of sin.  But its even better than that.  He took the perfect righteousness of Jesus’ sinless life and, for anyone who will trust in Jesus, he copies and pastes that same righteousness onto us so that God will accept and love us the same way he loves his sinless Son, Jesus.

So, in God’s justice, Jesus gets our sin and receives the curse it deserves—God’s death sentence on the cross and his wrath against our sin.  And in God’s mercy, anyone who believes on Jesus receives forgiveness of their sin and the very righteousness of Christ—his perfect life copied and pasted onto our lives.  It’s in the gospel that we see the beauty of God’s justice and mercy.

As we move to the Lord’s Table, may God give us the grace to be amazed at his sovereign power and his justice and mercy for his glory and our joy.

[1] Smith, J.E. (1994) The Minor Prophets.  (pp. 101-107).  Joplin, MO:  College Press.  Electronic version.

This morning we come to the end of our brief series of messages from John’s gospel.  As Jesus concludes his great prayer of the 17^th chapter, he shifts from praying for his original apostles to “those who will believe in me through their word.”  That means that in this section he’s praying for all believers everywhere from the death of the last apostle until he returns.  That, of course, includes us in the church today.  And the petitions he makes in this prayer tell us that he’s not praying for our individual needs—Jesus is praying for his church as a group.  When Brian read this, you probably noticed that in this part of the prayer, Jesus makes some of the same requests that he has prayed for the 12 apostles.

Part of the reason for that is because, as we’ve seen, Jesus is praying with the ultimate motivation that his Father would equip his followers for their mission to reveal Jesus to the world.  Whether it’s the 12 apostles or the church today, we all need the same equipping in order to accomplish that mission.  In verse 21, Jesus explicitly states this motivation for his prayer for all future believers. He prays, “…so that the world may believe that you have sent me.”  Again, in verse 23 he says that he is praying “so that the world may know that you sent me and loved them even as you loved me.”  Jesus wants the world to know about him and, like the first apostles, we too are sent into the world to reveal Jesus to all the nations—including those around us.

One implication of the prayer for us is–in order for us to reveal Jesus to the world, we must possess certain qualities or characteristics as a group.  In this prayer, Jesus is praying that the Father would give us these Christ-revealing qualities because we don’t have any of them in and of ourselves.  In fact, we require manifold expressions of God’s grace to reveal Christ to the world and ultimately, THAT is what Jesus is praying for us.

Before we dig into the text, a disclaimer of sorts.  This is a VERY hard text to understand for at least two reasons.  First, because Jesus asks that the relationships within the church reflect the relationship between two transcendent members of the Trinity.  What is that about!?  There’s only so much of that we are going to be able to conceptualize.  Second, because the way we do church in North America gives us NOTHING by way of experience relate to this.  Spending an hour or so together on a Sunday morning

The main expression of grace Jesus prays for us here in this section is a special kind of Christ-revealing unity.  Last week, we focused on three other expressions of this grace Jesus asks for that will reveal him to the world.  We saw that Jesus prays that they might have his joy.  He also prays that the Father would protect his disciples in this hostile world.  Third, he asks that God, through the truth of his word, would do a sanctifying work in his disciples so might reveal Christ as we live out holy lives.  Finally, as Jesus also prayed back in verse 11 that the disciples might be one, he repeatedly makes that request for us as well.  That is—that we would live together in such a profound unity with one another that it would reveal him to the world.

In these verses, this is the main expression of grace necessary for us to faithfully reveal Christ to the world that Jesus prays for.  That is– the presence of radical unity borne out/rooted in God’s amazing love for us.  This prayer for unity in the church is much more detailed than the petition he makes back in verse 11.  Here, Jesus helps us understand more about the kind of profound and radical unity he wants the Father to give to us.  When we think about what Jesus is praying for here, it’s clear that the kind of unity Jesus prays for the church is not like any other kind of unity in any other group.  This is more intense than soldiers who have fought together for years.  This is a closer bond than the closest of siblings.

To show us how very important it is to him that the church reveal him to the world through this miraculous level of unity, Jesus in this prayer repeats this request three times in slightly different ways.  As we saw from verse 23, Jesus prays for the church, “that they may be one even as we are one, I in them and you in me, that they may become perfectly one…”  Compare that to verse 11 where he prayed, “…Holy Father, keep them in your name, which you have given me, that they may be one, even as we are one.”  He is praying that God would keep us saved so that we might show the same kind of unity God the Father has with God the Son.  In verse 21, he is even more specific about what he means by this kind of God-the-Father/God-the-Son unity he wants for his church when he prays, “that they may be in us… “just as you Father, are in me, and I in you.” 

We need to spend some time here unpacking this.  So, in verse 11, he prays for a unity in the church—that we would be one—in the same way that the Father and the Son are one.  Here in verse 21 he is more precise because he prays that our unity or oneness would not just REFLECT the kind of unity God the Father shares with God the Son.  Here, he prays that this unity would be as a result of us being PART of the divine unity of the Father and the Son.  That’s the clear meaning of “…you, Father are in me, and I in you, that they may also be in us.”  The combined impact of those two requests is that our unity with one another would reflect the unity the Father shares with the Son BECAUSE we would spiritually share their unity—that we would BE IN THEM.

The Father and the Son are united because they are IN one another or are ONE with each other. What that means is this:  though the Father and the Son are distinct from one another—they have different identities and personalities and are two separate persons, they are also one with each other because—they are IN each other and share a unique spiritual bond.

The only illustration in the Bible of any relationship that in some ways reflects this kind of bond is the marriage relationship.  The husband and wife are two distinct persons and yet, in their marriage, Christ unites them into what Genesis and Paul call a one-flesh union.  This includes the physical oneness in the sexual union, but it is a more profound unity even than that.

In Ephesians, Paul uses the marriage relationship to illustrate the kind of oneness the church has with Jesus.  Paul is talking about the oneness that the husband and wife share and says in verse 29 about the husband,
^“29 For no one ever hated his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it, just as Christ does the church,” And then he expands on that in verse 30, “because we [the church] are members of his body.”

Did you catch that?  The reason Christ nourishes and cherishes the church is because we in his church are “members” of his spiritual body in ways that are reflected in the union of a husband and wife within their one-flesh relationship.  So, the oneness the church has with Jesus is expressed as he is the head of the church and we are all parts of his one body.

The biblical metaphor Paul in Ephesians is teaching here that describes this union between Christ and his church is that the church is united with Christ or “in” Christ because we are his BRIDE and are therefore one with our spiritual husband.  He is in union with the church as the head of his body the church and the husband of his bride, the church.  BOTH of those in some ways reflect this profound union share with him.

The reason the church is one with the Father as well as the Son is in verse 23 where Jesus says, “I in them, and you in me.”  We are one with Jesus by our union with him as our spiritual head and husband—He is “in us.”  By extension, because the Son is or “united” with the Father, the church—is also therefore “united with” the Father.  We have unity or oneness with the Father because of our unity or oneness with Jesus who is one with the Father.

This kind of unity with one another Jesus is praying for that reflects our unity with the Father and the Son goes WAY, WAY beyond a unity where we share the same basic worldview or values.  The political parties share THAT level of unity. This is inestimably more profound than that we all get along and we all move in basically the same direction.  This unity is MUCH deeper in nature than that.

The fact that Jesus intends the church to have the same kind of unity among ourselves that the Father and the Son share with each other blows up all our boxes.  This is not something we are mainly supposed to be able to quantify or figure out which is why this is hard to explain or figure out in concrete terms.  Jesus is not praying that we will mentally understand this unity or be able to explain this.  This is something to be experienced with one another far more than it is to be explained.

Though the church is clearly not divine like God is—we’re not part of the Trinity, the reason this kind of inter-Trinity unity is possible in the church is because we in the church have been resurrected up into the fellowship of this divine family.  God the Father is our adoptive Father and God the Son is our spiritual Bridegroom.  Do you hear how those are not just labels or metaphors!?  Though the church is obviously not a member of the Trinity, we have been raised to be uniquely and profoundly inter-related to the Trinity because we are sons of the Father and the bride of the Son.  

Because of what Jesus has done for us in the gospel, we in the church have been adopted, and are married into the fellowship of the divine, eternal Trinity!  We know that this is the direction of Jesus’ thinking here because in verse 23 he says that one reason he is praying for this unity is, “…so that the world may know that…you loved them even as you loved me.”  Jesus is praying that the world would know that, as Don Carson says, “Christians…have been caught up into the love of the Father for the Son.”[1]

I have no doubt that when we’re in glory, we’ll appreciate this far more than we do now.  Most believers don’t think nearly enough about this transcendent, “catching up” of the church into the Father’s love for the Son because of the gospel.  Do we mediate on what it is to have been brought into the same eternal and holy fellowship as members of the divine Trinity?

I hope what we’re seeing is just who God has made us in Christ through the gospel. It is exalted. It is glorious. It is eternal.  It’s also humbling because, apart from grace, we would be as out of place among that divine fellowship as a bulldog in a beauty pageant. This cosmic identity of the church is one that should stir us to worship as we see how far God has brought us—from God-hating, God-blaspheming rebels, to people who, by the Spirit, have been brought into the direct and intimate fellowship of the eternal Trinity.

In this prayer, Jesus is grounding our unity with each other in this union we have with God through the Spirit.  One of the main reasons why we in the church can find it so easy to remain angry with or slander one another or tear each other down is because we have NO IDEA of how utterly, profoundly contrary that is to who we are through our unity with one another that is rooted in our mutual unity with the triune God!  Because we are so ignorant of our spiritual identity, we cannot possibly conceive of how it must grieve the heart of God when we act as if we have a right to withhold our love from a brother or sister because he/she insulted us or lied to us or wronged us in some other way.

Do we think about the kind of unity we’re created in Christ to share—like the unity the Father has with the Son—because we’ve been placed in union with the Father and Son?  When Jesus sees how far we are from the kind of unity he shed his blood to purchase for us, and that he here so repeatedly prays for, what grief he must experience.

To put it positively, because the unity that God has given us to reveal Christ to the world is so deep and so profound, that implies that we have access to enormous grace to help us love one another even when we have hurt each other or exhausted our patience with one another.

Again, we must never forget that the reason Jesus asks the Father for this unity in the church is for our mission to reveal Jesus to the—[v.21] “that they would may believe you sent me”…[v.23] “that the world may know that you sent me and loved them even as you loved me.”  There are some characteristics the world must see revealed in the church if they are to see Jesus in the church.  That is—that the Father loves his blood-bought, adopted children in the church in the same manner in which he loves his infinite, divine, one and only begotten Son, Jesus.

The question is—HOW does this kind of unity in the church reveal to the world that 1. Jesus was sent into this world by the Father [v.21,23]  and 2. That we are loved by the Father as he loves Jesus?[v.23]  First, when the world sees this group of people called the church who are very different culturally, socio-economically, ethnically—with varying degrees and kinds of gifts—when they see that intensely diverse group of people—who would never be together apart from their mutual love for Christ—and they are loving each other and seamlessly working together-with a unity the world does not see anywhere else.  When the world sees that reality, they will know that something not of this world is going on.  Something supernatural pointing to Jesus is happening.

Church history bears witness that this is precisely how the world responds when they see this kind of love in the church.  An early Christian leader named Tertullian reported that the Romans would exclaim, about the church, “See how they love one another!”  It was the love of one Christian for another that made the Romans sit up and take notice.  Many pagans converted to Christianity in part because they wanted to be part of a community that loved each other so profoundly.

Another early leader of the church, Justin Martyr, sketched Christian love this way: “We who used to value the acquisition of wealth and possessions more than anything else, now bring what we have into a common fund and share it with anyone who needs it. We used to hate and destroy one another and refused to associate with people of another race or country. Now, because of Christ, we live together with such people and pray for our enemies.”  Through their unity of heart and purpose, the early church revealed to the pagan world came to know what Jesus Christ was like.

Another early Christian leader, Clement, describing a typical believer wrote, “He impoverishes himself out of love, so that he is certain he may never overlook a brother in need, especially if he knows he can bear poverty better than his brother. He likewise considers the pain of another as his own pain. And if he suffers any hardship because of having given out of his own poverty, he does not complain.”[2]  When the world sees that kind of miraculous love and unity that you would expect of a member of the church raised up in this profound unity within the Trinity that reveals to them what Jesus is like.

Second, as we see in verse 23, because of our unity, the world will know that we are loved by God in the same way he loves his Son. HOW?  How does our love and unity with one another reveal that God loves us with the same love he has for Jesus?  The main answer is because– the only motivation we can have for loving other believers in this radical way is—our ongoing awareness that the Father loves me with the same love he has for Jesus.  When a church of sinners understands what it is to be loved by the Father—much less that he loves us as he loves his sinless Son, we will increasingly love each other.

This is the witness of First John 4:19, “¹⁹ We love [God and each other] because he first loved us.”  Tim Keller says it this way, “You’ll never completely love until you know you’re loved completely.”[3]  This is so true.  Its only when we’re completely secure in the knowledge of God’s infinite love for us that we will feel the freedom, the boldness to manifest the kind of honest vulnerability and transparency required for these kinds of profoundly loving relationships in the church.  Its only when our hearts are overflowing with the assurance of God’s love for us– that his infinite, invincible love for me overflows from my heart and pours out to my brothers and sisters.  That is how the world will see this love amazing love from God in the church as we love each other.

The second expression of grace necessary for us to faithfully reveal Christ to a watching world is the way in which each element of grace God gives us to reveal Jesus work together with one other.    As Jesus prays for the church, he includes multiple elements of grace we’ve seen these past two weeks.  He prays for joy, unity, truth, holiness, protection from the evil one so that we may reveal Jesus to the world.

But in verse 22 he gives a different element.  That is—the unifying glory. “The glory that you have given me I have given to them, that they may become perfectly one.”  When Jesus speaks of “glory” he’s probably referring to what John says in 1:14.  “¹⁴ And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth.”  God has sent his glory to earth in two major expressions in the Old Testament before he sent it in its fullest expression in his Son.

His glory appeared to Moses in the wilderness tabernacle.  That expression of glory points to Jesus as the one who, in his incarnation according to John 1:14, “tabernacled” among us.  Later, in Old Testament history God sent his glory to the temple.  That glory also points to Jesus because in John chapter two Jesus calls himself the “temple” of God.  But if Jesus is ascending to the Father, what is this glory Jesus prays about when he says in verse 22, “The glory that you have given me I have given to them, that they may become perfectly one?”

The answer is–the Holy Spirit which Jesus in this discourse has repeatedly spoken of as his “replacement,” if you will.  In First Peter chapter four he is called “the Spirit of glory.”  Jesus is so certain that God will pour out his Spirit that he speaks of this “glory” as something he has already given to them.  It’s the Spirit that unites the church to Jesus.  It’s the Spirit that gives the power to accomplish the mission in so many ways as we have seen earlier. The Spirit is the “glory” behind all of these elements.

It’s crucial to know that these elements are all interdependent upon one another.  Think about it—we know from verse 17 that the truth of the Word of God is necessary to make a person holy—Jesus prays for the truth of God’s Word to sanctify the disciples.  But we also saw in verse 11 that holiness is necessary for unity.  “^{11 “}… Holy Father, keep them in your name, which you have given me, that they may be one, even as we are one.”

He’s praying that the Father would keep them saved so they would continue to manifest God’s holy character so that they could be one.  But we also know that in order for a believer to be holy, we must have unity or “community.”  Personal holiness can never be produced in a vacuum apart from the fellowship of the church.  It’s only as we speak the truth in love to one another and encourage one another and confess our sins to one another and pray for each other and practice dozens of other “one-another’s” that we grow in holiness.

Personal holiness is accomplished ONLY within a group, it’s never seen in isolation from the church.  One reason why believers don’t grow in holiness is because they don’t have any holiness-inducing relationships with the church.  The church is the main venue for relationships where “iron sharpens iron.” We must never believe the lie that we can be holy by simply going to church and listening to sermons.

If we aren’t in community as we hope to see in community groups—if we aren’t as Ephesians four says, “speaking the truth in love” to one another, then there’s no sandpaper of other redeemed sinners to rub up against us to reveal our sin and smooth out our rough edges and show us our need for repentance.  Also, the church can’t be united, preach the truth, live in loving unity or holiness if the church is left unprotected from the enemy as we saw last week.

Finally, Christ’s joy that overcomes the trials of life in the individual believer is rooted in the truth what God has done for us in the gospel and is only produced when we are living holy, obedient lives driven by the truth and reinforced by the community.

Again, we come back to the truth that the reason Jesus prays for all these elements is so the church would accomplish its mission of revealing Christ to the world.  That means-if you want to have holiness and truth and loving unity and protection and joy as a witness for the world, you must be intentional about revealing Jesus in the world because that is why Jesus prays for these qualities.   If that is why he prays for these things for us, do we have any business expecting them if we’re not on a mission to reveal Jesus to the world?

Show me a church where majority of the membership is seeking to reveal Jesus to a lost world through the gospel and I will show you a church growing in holiness.  Show me a church where the membership is intensely concerned with revealing Christ to the world and I will show you a church growing in unity.  Too many churches are divided because instead of seeking to reveal Jesus to the world, they get hung up on the color of the sanctuary carpet.  Churches on mission don’t have time or inclination to argue about things that don’t matter and so easily divide us.

Show me a church that is on a mission to reveal Jesus to the world and I will show you—a protected church, and a truth-driven church.  In the West, we tend to want to divide things up into segments.  “This year as a church we’re going to focus on holiness and next we are going to work on loving each other and unity.”  That’s so wrong because the mistaken implication is that you can have one without the others.

These elements Jesus prays for are not like Lego blocks you can add just one at a time. They’re more like ingredients in a cake.  They all combine together to form a mixture.  If you don’t have all the ingredients, you don’t have a cake—at least not a very appealing one.  Every local church has some elements of grace more manifest than others, but the implication of this mission-focused prayer of Jesus is that we need them all.  And you can’t get any of them in any measure unless you’re serious about reaching lost people because Jesus repeatedly says that’s the reason he gives them to the church.

Where are we?  Are we serious about revealing Jesus to our world?  Are we fulfilling the ultimate reason Jesus prayed in John 17?  The only way we can get serious about revealing Jesus to this world and therefore begin to more intensely manifest these elements of grace is to go back to the cross.

We must repent of our sin first, by admitting that you’ve lived much of your life without much of this sense of purpose or mission.  That you have too many times expected to come to church, get a bottle of inspiration and then go back to the privacy of your own home and live a holy, loving, joyful, protected, truth-driven life in unity with the brethren.  That’s fiction.

Come to the cross and admit your sin here—admit that you don’t have God’s heart for the lost here or for the nations.  Confess your sin and receive forgiveness and cleansing and empowerment and a new desire to be faithful to God in this area and in so doing, show these elements of grace in ways you have never shown them before.

May God give us the grace to get serious about revealing Christ to the world, here and to the nations so that by God’s grace, we will honor Christ by seeing his prayer in John 17 answered for his glory and our joy.

[1] Carson, Pillar Commentary on John 17:23, electronic edition.

[2] http://www.earlychurch.com/unconditional-love.php

[3] Tim Keller, sermon, “Love Beyond the World,” preached April 5, 1992 at Redeemer Presbyterian Church, Manhattan, NY.

This week, we continue with Jesus’ prayer in the 17^th chapter of John’s gospel.  We saw last week from the section of Jesus’ prayer that Bill read, he is praying for the original 12 disciples.  We saw that Jesus’ main request of his Father for these disciples (and by extension—us) is that God would keep the disciples faithful to manifest his character so they would be able to know the same unity Jesus and his Father share.  (more on this unity, later)

This week, we move on to three more petitions or requests from Jesus for the 12.  Actually, there are two explicit petitions and one implicit petition as he expresses his desire for his disciples.  This desire is in verse 13.  Jesus prays to his Father, “¹³ But now I am coming to you, and these things [the entirety of his teaching in this discourse] I speak in the world, that they may have my joy fulfilled in themselves.”

This first implied petition is a prayer that his disciples might experience and express his joy.  We’ve seen this before in this discourse–in chapter 15.  Jesus is teaching on the believer’s union with Christ using the metaphor of the vine and the branches.  You may recall from the vine and branches teaching that Jesus wants his disciples to bear much fruit.  That includes BOTH– that they would have many converts AND that they would faithfully live out the character of Christ.  They will only bear this fruit however, as they “abide” (which includes doing what he says), in the vine.

At the conclusion of that teaching on the vine and the branches he says in 15:11, “¹¹These things I have spoken to you, that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be full.”  Abiding in Jesus— (which implies doing what he says) brings a wonderful blessing.  That is, it–brings us great joy and not just any joy.  This is the very joy of Jesus—HIS joy that he gives us by the Holy Spirit.  Jesus says, “THAT is why he has given them this teaching”—that they might have the fullest expression of his joy.

That means that in this prayer in chapter 17, Jesus is simply asking his Father to give to his disciples what he has already told in chapter 15 will be there’s as they do what he says.  In the context, Jesus is praying, “Father, give them my joy as I promised them.”  Jesus sees no inconsistency in, on the one hand, promising the disciples his joy and on the other, praying that the Father would give them his joy.

There is a frequent pattern in the New Testament of God promising something and his people praying, or being encouraged to pray, for what he has promised.  The promise does NOT negate the need for prayer—it motivates us to pray!  We must regularly remind ourselves this truth about having the joy of Jesus as we do what he says if, for no other reason, because it dispels a common and very destructive lie of the devil.

That lie sounds something like this: “Because obeying Christ can be very demanding and implies that you to live sacrificially, therefore, this will kill your happiness or even make you miserable.”  Ok, that’s a lie.  Obeying Christ (as the bible teaches that) will not bring misery or despair.  No—it brings JOY!  Jesus wants his disciples to have joy—HIS joy—and one way they get that is to do what he says–abide in him.  Jesus says in Matthew chapter 11, “…my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.”  John himself says in his first epistle chapter five, “³ For this is the love of God, that we keep his commandments. And his commandments are not burdensome.”  If you love God and are seeking him as your greatest treasure, then doing what he says in faith is no burden.

If we in the church would understand and believe this, we would spare ourselves much frustration.  We tend to resist God’s will at times because that lazy, self-indulgent part of us that Paul calls “the flesh” HATES God, doesn’t trust him and never wants to do what he says.  Jesus is saying in John—resist the temptations of this world …for joy!  Love your enemy …for joy!  Share your faith …for joy!  Sacrificially love your wife …for joy!  Submit to your husband …for joy–the joy of Jesus he wants us to experience and express.  Jesus’ prayer that we would know his joy as we obey him should encourage us to place our trust in God and DO those difficult things in anticipation of his joy!

A second petition to the Father (and this is not expressed as a desire) Jesus makes is in verses 14-16.  He prays, “¹⁴ I have given them your word, and the world has hated them because they are not of the world, just as I am not of the world. ¹⁵I do not ask that you take them out of the world, but that you keep them from the evil one. ¹⁶ They are not of the world, just as I am not of the world.”  Christ’s request here tells us that this is a prayer that his disciples will be protected by God in this hostile world.  Jesus speaks of “the world” nine times in the seven verses we’re looking at today.

The “world,” as the New Testament speaks of it, is not this physical or material world—it’s not planet earth. The “world” is a technical term the New Testament uses for the fallen, dark and hostile spiritual kingdom that God has temporarily allowed to hold sway over this planet.  The spiritual kingdom of this world is ruthlessly ruled by Satan who has been given temporary authority over this dark, world system.  He exercises that authority through his demonic powers and principalities.  This world system is what shapes the self-centered, self-oriented worldview, value systems and priorities that are expressed in every culture.

In our culture, this false worldview propagated by “this world” is expressed in one of a million lies like, “Your value is in what you do and in what other people think of you.”  Or, “All truth claims are relative—there is no absolute truth and to believe otherwise is naïve and idiotic.”  Or, “We find meaning in life by pursuing our personal happiness.”  Or, “God approves of all religions as long as a person is sincere in their practice of it.”  Or, “Real freedom that will make us flourish is the freedom to be yourself—who you really are inside.”  Those are all lies propagated by this world system, often transmitted through the media and popular culture in the west.  “The world” is the cosmic reality behind our material world.  It hates God and anything or anyone that bears or reflects his light.

God invaded this dark world by sending to it–the darkness-dispelling, radiant light of his Son and this dark world supremely hates the Jesus revealed in the bible. Jesus says in verse 14 of his disciples, “I have given them your word, and the world has hated them…”  One reason that Jesus cites here as to why the world hated the original disciples and continues to hate the real, biblical church is because Jesus has given his word to the church and the entrance of his word brings light into the darkness [Psalm 119:130]. Jesus says in John 3:19, “¹⁹ And this is the judgment: the light has come into the world, and people loved the darkness rather than the light because their works were evil.”  The probing light of the truth of the gospel exposes sinners for what they are–lost, deceived and loving the darkness and the world rails against that truth.

The gospel message pronounces that those in the world are condemned apart from saving faith in Christ.  Their response is—hatred for those that faithfully bear the light of the gospel and, through their godly lives, act as a beacon of that light.  Jesus says in verse 14 of the disciples, “…they are not of the world, just as I am not of the world.”  Then he repeats it verbatim in verse 16.  The fact that Jesus repeats this truth absolutely verbatim in the span of two consecutive verses in a prayer to his Father means this truth MUST be of profound importance.

Jesus is saying that his followers, present and future, have not simply adopted a different worldview.  Or, that his followers simply believe in him.  Those things are true, but the change that God brings about in a person when he/she becomes a follower of Christ is MUCH, MUCH more profound than that.  When you become a Christian, you are forcefully extracted from the kingdom of darkness and are newly born—you experience a new spiritual birth into the kingdom of light.

Disciples of Jesus are now part of that kingdom.  That means that—as it relates to this world, they are, as all believers are called to be—other-worldly.  They’re citizenship is in heaven.  They are aliens, strangers, sojourners, pilgrims on a journey in a land that is not their own.  One author calls believers “resident aliens” because, though this world is where we reside, we’re not from here and are stationed here only temporarily.  Followers of Christ are in the world, but not of the world.  Believers no longer belong to the kingdom of this world, but are stationed here with our mission being–bringing into this dark world, the light of Christ through the gospel.

We’re called to be light in this dark world.  That is—to integrate or to “embed” into the world while not compromising with it by 1. becoming like it or, 2. disengaging from it in isolation.  It’s no accident that John’s gospel calls Jesus “the light of the world” and Jesus in Matthew chapter five refers to his disciples as the “light of the world.”  Because the darkness hates the word-bearing followers of Jesus and Satan is the ruler of this world and—he also hates us and he’s much stronger than us.  THAT’S why Jesus in verse 15 calls on the Father.  “¹⁵ I do not ask that you take them out of the world, but that you keep them from the evil one…”

Jesus does NOT want to remove us from the world—we have a mission to complete.  Neither does he seek to shield us from ALL the opposition because—our willingness to suffer for him reveals how valuable and how deeply, profoundly we treasure him.  But he does pray for protection from the evil one.  This is consistent with how he taught the disciples to pray in Matthew 6:13, “¹³ And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.”  The word “evil” is also translated “the evil one.”

Satan is defeated and has been stripped of his most potent weapon against us—our unforgiven sins.  That is HALF of the New Testament teaching on Satan.  The other half is seen in the many warnings that, though Satan IS defeated, believers must still be wary of him.  Peter tells us in First Peter 5:8, “⁸ Be sober-minded; be watchful. Your adversary the devil prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour.”  The adversary is formidable.  He’s not to be taken lightly.  We are to be sober-minded—serious (it’s a real war and he can, through his deception, take unwary believers captive and, through unrepentant sin, he can make us discouraged and miserable and greatly compromise our testimony.)

If ours is a typical church, some of us—this day—are, through our inattention to their spiritual health, being held in ruthless captivity by Satan and his lies and you are miserable as you struggle to be free.  Others here have been so blinded by Satan in certain areas, that you’re unknowingly living in blindness, believing the lies he has disseminated through the popular culture and you don’t even realize that you’re entrapped in sinful attitudes, desires and actions.  Jesus prays that we will be joyful AND protected in a hostile world and the first step in his protection is warning us of the enemy’s desire to steal, kill and destroy us.

Jesus makes a third and final petition of his Father in verse 17.  “Sanctify them in the truth; your word is truth?”  We’re going to spend much of the rest of our time this morning trying to understand what Jesus means when he says, “Sanctify them in the truth; your word is truth.”  To “sanctify” means to make us holy—to set us apart–primarily in a moral or ethical sense so that our lives increasingly display the holiness of Christ.  A third petition in this section is a prayer that God would cause his disciples live to holy lives.  When Jesus asks the Father to sanctify the disciples, he’s asking the Father to make them holy and the process of God making a believer holy is called sanctification.

In order to really know and understand the process of sanctification, we must be careful not to make a very common mistake believers make.  That is—we can easily fail to distinguish between or confuse our sanctification with our justification.  That sounds a bit complicated, but it’s really not.  When a believer through faith receives Christ, God gives us a once-for-all-time experience—he declares us legally righteous—justified before God.

We’re pardoned of our sin and made acceptable to God because we’re united with Christ.  That means that we share the perfect righteousness of Jesus—his righteousness has been transferred or copied and pasted onto our spiritual account. Once justified, there is nothing a believer can do to become more acceptable to God, nothing.  If you’re a believer, you will never be more justified than you are today.

Sanctification is different.  Sanctification is rooted and grows out of the soil of our justification—that new legal standing with God.  Sanctification is a life-long process—it’s NOT a one-time, legal declaration like justification.  This is the process wherein believers, by trusting in the gospel, gradually and over the course of their lives, in their attitudes, desires and actions increasingly grow into the righteous people God has declared them to be in their justification.

Did you hear how our sanctification is rooted in our justification?  Many believers wrongly work to earn God’s acceptance by trying to live a more holy life.  That’s backwards.  The order is actually—first, knowing God’s unconditional, unchanging acceptance in justification and from that place of profound gratitude and love, second, doing good works for God, living in grateful holiness to him.  Unfortunately, too many believers base their justification—their right standing with God on their sanctification—how they live.  THAT will make you miserable and cause you to live in perpetual defeat.  That’s why phrases like “become who you are” are great summaries of the relationship between our justification and our sanctification.

Our sanctification is a slow, gradual transformation where the believer becomes less and less conformed by the lies of Satan and this dark world system and, as our minds are renewed by the truth of the gospel, we become more and more like Jesus.  All of that to say that we MUST distinguish between what happens at conversion in our justification when God declares us legally righteous and what he does the rest of our lives in our sanctification as he gradually transforms us into morally righteous or holy people.

WHY does Jesus ask that his Father sanctify his disciples “in the truth” which he clarifies with the statement, “your word is truth?”  How does the truth of God’s word sanctify us or make us holy?  Here are two ways.  First, the word of God is a revelation of God.  That’s what the Bible does—it reveals God to us who was perfectly manifested or revealed to this world in Jesus Christ.  The Bible reveals God to us more clearly than anything else and causes us to see his glory.  Paul says it this way in Second Corinthians 3:18, “¹⁸ And we all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another. For this comes from the Lord who is the Spirit.”

The first way the word of God sanctifies us is—by the Holy Spirit, it supernaturally reveals Christ’s glory to us in the gospel and, as we behold him in that glory, we’re transformed more into his likeness.  As we’ve said before, a shorthand way of expressing this transformation process is, we become like what we behold and in the word of God we behold Christ.  We become increasingly holy—increasingly different from the world just as Christ is different from this world.

A second way the word sanctifies us we talked about before.  When Jesus says “…your word is truth” he is mainly talking about the gospel.  The gospel sanctifies us or makes us like Jesus.  This is what Paul says in Romans 1:16-17, “¹⁶ For I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first and also to the Greek. ¹⁷ For in it the righteousness of God is revealed from faith for faith, as it is written, “The righteous shall live by faith.”

The gospel is the power of God to save us and part of that saving work is sanctifying the believer to live differently than the world—to live holy lives.  That means it’s the gospel that is the power for our sanctification as we by faith increasingly internalize the gospel and it increasingly controls how we think and feel and act.

HOW does faith in the gospel cause us to live more obedient, holy lives?  One answer lies in what we’ll call the two “looks of faith.”  Here’s what I mean.  First, as we’re tempted to sin in some way, we draw on the gospel’s power to make us holy by looking back 2000 years at the cross.  This is the “backward” look of faith.

For instance, my sinful flesh tempts me to sin in some way, but I come against that by looking back 2000 years when Jesus died for me.  I’m reminded that he loves me that much—he suffered an excruciating death for me, taking the punishment I deserve for my sin.  Because he did that in the past, he is no longer just my Judge, but a friend whose Father is now MY Father through adoption.  As I believe those gospel truths—as I internalize them and they become part of me, my love for Christ grows.

That love motivates me to increasingly resist temptation and by God’s grace overcome it because–I don’t want to grieve this One who I know by faith has done so much for me.  So, there is first look of faith, a look back at the cross that stokes our faith with his great love for us and ignites a grateful, love-induced obedience.

A second look of faith is the forward look of faith to what some have called “future grace.”  This is a look ahead to our future that also motivates us to holiness.  An example of this future grace is in Luke 14:13 where Jesus says, “¹³ But when you give a feast, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, the blind, ¹⁴ and you will be blessed, because they cannot repay you. For you will be repaid at the resurrection of the just.”  Notice the motivation for inviting those who can’t invite you back—it’s the fact that in the future judgment, we will be repaid whatever we might have given to the poor, the crippled, the lame and the blind.

Another example of this is in Hebrews 11:24.  ²⁴“By faith Moses, when he was grown up, refused to be called the son of Pharaoh’s daughter,²⁵   choosing rather to be mistreated with the people of God than to enjoy the fleeting pleasures of sin.  ^26” He considered the reproach of Christ greater wealth than the treasures of Egypt, for he was looking to the reward.” ²⁷ By faith he left Egypt, not being afraid of the anger of the king, for he endured as seeing him who is invisible.^”

The reason Moses gave up his privileged life with Pharaoh and instead chose to suffer with God’s people is because, by faith, he considered the benefits of living with Pharaoh to be “fleeting pleasures” compared to his future reward in God.  He trusted in the promised future grace of God in the next life.  That faith in future grace is what compelled him to make this huge sacrifice in this life.

This pattern is all over the Bible.  These two looks of faith are related to each other like two ends of a tree saw.  They work with each other to cut through our tendency to be disobedient.  We see this in Romans 8:32. “³² He who did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all, [in the past] how will he not also with him graciously give [in the future] us all things?”  Do you see the relationship between the cross and the future promises?  If God in the past was willing to send his own Son, raining down his wrath upon him—crushing him to redeem us from our sin, then we can surely trust him for the promised future rewards for our obedience. Those future promises should be incentives for our present obedience because in the past, God has invincibly and supremely proved his trustworthiness by sending his Son to the cross.

In John 17, Jesus teaches that we are sanctified by the truth in God’s word.  We know the truth sanctifies because it reveals the glory of Christ and we become like what we behold.  Second, the truth sanctifies us because the word reveals God’s great redeeming love for us in the gospel that was worked out by Jesus on the cross 2000 years ago.  That love rooted in what God has done for us in Jesus serves as a ground for us to believe God’s promises of future grace that serve as another incentive for us to live as holy people.

Verse 17 is the application to all these truths.  Jesus prays, “As you sent me into the world, so I have sent them into the world.”  This is very similar to a statement Jesus makes to the disciples three chapters later.  In 20:21 “As the Father has sent me, even so I am sending you.”  This statement is totally tied to these earlier petitions.  How?  Jesus has prayed that the disciples would be Christ-like so there could be profound unity in the church.  He has expressed his desire that the disciples would share and express his joy.  He’s prayed that the church would be protected from Satan and that the church would be holy—not living like this world.  Here, he tells us one huge reason for all of these requests.

Jesus wants his church to have profound unity, to express his joy—to be protected from the evil one and be holy.  Why? —in order to accomplish his mission for them.  This only makes sense.  A church that is fighting and divided is a terrible witness to the world.  To the world, a believer who is joyless is a terrible misrepresentation of Christ and the good news of the gospel.  A church or believer that’s not living in holiness has lost its light.  It’s lost its distinctiveness from the world and therefore loses its impact on an unholy world.  This because, in spite of the way certain corners of the North American church do evangelism, the church does NOT reach the world by becoming like the world, but by being strikingly different than the world.

We must see that—though there are many reasons for all these petitions—God’s glory, the satisfaction of the saints, etc.… in this prayer—the main reason Jesus prays these prayers for his disciples is absolutely tied to their mission—that is—these prayers are ultimately directed to help them make disciples of all nations.  If we miss this, we misunderstand Jesus’ heart here.  When Jesus prays for his disciples, he prays that they would be different than a divided, joyless, satanically deceived and unholy world.

The most powerful witness of the church is NOT found in being like the world.  We have been taken OUT of this world—that’s central to this prayer—in part because we’ve been called, by God’s grace, to live differently than the world.  That we would live and minister in unity, that we would exhibit extravagant, Christ-like joy and live out a moral purity or holiness.  ALL of that points the world to Christ and a kingdom that is very different from the dark, morally debauched kingdom of this world.

By way of application, when we pray for things like unity and joy and holiness—do we pray for those so that we’ll be a more powerful witness to this world into which we have been sent?  Jesus is so mission-focused in this prayer and we must be too. These qualities he prays for are NOT fundamentally for us.  They’re for a watching world that—even though it hates us—desperately needs to see Christ manifest on earth through his church.  We know this mission is Jesus’ priority because a few hours after this prayer, he suffered and died for this church so we, by his grace, could be united, joyful and holy—a city set on a hill—a light that cannot be hidden as we supernaturally shine his light into a dark and dying world.

Given that this mission is a big motivation for Jesus’ prayer for these things, it makes sense that one reason God sometimes doesn’t answer our prayers for things like unity and joy and holiness is because we want them only for ourselves.  We want to be united because we have a real need for community and because unity is much more pleasant than fighting with one another.  We want joy because it’s a big improvement over sadness.  We want to be holy so we can feel better about ourselves or make a good impression on others.

GET THIS–Christ won’t honor those self-centered motives because they are not for his glory.  It’s when our hearts are broken by the ease at which people can now go to hell in this area—it’s as the worldliness of the church breaks our hearts—it’s when we’re aching for the world to see the light of Christ in his church—that we’ll pray with the right motivation and will find powerful answers to our prayers for unity, joy and holiness.  We must never forget how mission-driven Jesus is for his church.  This prayer is an implicit call by Jesus to be praying with the mission to reach the lost as a big part of our motivation.

May God give us the grace to live as a united, joyous and holy people for the glory of God and our joy as we seek to reach those who desperately need to see in his church the light of Christ in this dark world.

This week, we return to the 17^th chapter of John’s gospel where John records this prayer of Jesus to his Father only a few hours before his crucifixion.  We saw last time that Jesus begins his prayer with God’s highest priority because he repeatedly asks that he and the Father would be glorified—receive glory. We also saw (as we will see in this week’s section as well) that Jesus’ prayer reveals and celebrates the glory that God receives from his sovereign role in the salvation of sinners.

That is—that eternal life for sinners is something Jesus alone can give, but those to whom he can give eternal life is limited by those sinners the Father gives him to be saved.  God’s complete control over who is saved glorifies both the Father and the Son.  Finally, Jesus defines eternal life in an absolutely God-centered, God-glorifying way.  Verse three says, ³ And this is eternal life, that they know you the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent.”  That implies that we should not think about eternal life in terms of going to heaven or being spared hell.  What makes eternal life so astonishingly glorious is that—eternal life is about knowing the Father and the Son.

After the first five verses where Jesus prays for God to be glorified, in verses six through 19–Jesus prays for those who had been with him during his three years of ministry.  Part of what makes this section a challenge to understand is that leading up to the first petition in verse 11 is a kind of self-evaluation from Jesus as to his ministry to his disciples as he looks back on his ministry to the 12.   As Jesus is reflecting on his ministry to these disciples, he focusses on that fact that he had his faithfully completed doing the one thing that mattered most to him and is a huge part of him bringing glory to the Father.  That is—he manifested or revealed the Father to his disciples.  This was the driving passion of his life and ministry and this prayer reveals that he had perfectly accomplished this.

This is what he is saying in verse six when he says, “I have manifested your name to the people whom you gave me out of the world.”  The word “manifest” literally means “made visible.”  When he says that he had manifested “your name” that phrase in the Bible is synonymous with “your Person”—who you are.  So, Jesus is affirming that in his incarnation he manifested or made the invisible God visible which is another way of saying that he “revealed” his Father.  The best way to bring glory to the Father is to in some way allow others to see his glory and Jesus continually did that in his ministry to the 12.

This theme of Jesus as the Revealer of his Father runs throughout the gospel of John.  In chapter one, John spends the first 18 verses introducing Jesus and what he is about as he previews the major themes in the book.  The conclusion of this introduction is in verse 18 where John says, “¹⁸ No one has ever seen God; the only God, who is at the Father’s side, he has made him known.”  The fact that John concludes the introduction to this book with Jesus’ mission to reveal his Father tells us it is central to how Jesus sees his life and ministry.

In chapter 14, as part of Jesus’ final teaching before his crucifixion, a bewildered Philip asks Jesus, “⁸ “…Lord, show us the Father, and it is enough for us.” ⁹  Jesus said to him, “Have I been with you so long, and you still do not know me, Philip? Whoever has seen me has seen the Father. How can you say, ‘Show us the Father’?”  Jesus is amazed that, after three years of ministry alongside Philip, he (and the other apostles) doesn’t know the most basic truth about the identity of Jesus.  That is—that Jesus is the revelation of God the Father in human form. 

Finally, at the end of this prayer in John 17, notice what is Jesus’ concluding request in verses 25-26. “²⁵ O righteous Father, even though the world does not know you, I know you, and these know that you have sent me. ²⁶ I made known to them your name, and I will continue to make it known...”  It is clear that John presents Jesus as the Son of God sent to glorify God and he did that by manifesting him/revealing him to his followers.

In the next few verses in his self-evaluation of his ministry to the 12 Jesus gives three proofs/ways to show that he had revealed the Father to his disciples.  The first proof Jesus cites to show that he faithfully revealed his Father to the disciples is in verse seven.  He says, “Now they know that everything you have given me is from you.” That seems unnecessarily redundant.  Why does he say, “Everything you have given me is from you?”  What’s he’s saying is something like, “I know that everything I have comes from you and I have been careful to communicate that I have nothing of my own, but I have only what I received from you.

This is one of the major themes of Jesus’ ministry to his disciples in John’s gospel.  In 5:19, Jesus says to them, “Truly, truly, I say to you, the Son can do nothing of his own accord, but only what he sees the Father doing. For whatever the Father does, that the Son does likewise.”  He says much the same thing just 11 verses later in 5:30. “³⁰I can do nothing on my own. As I hear, I judge, and my judgment is just, because I seek not my own will but the will of him who sent me.”  Again, in John 8:28, Jesus says, “… “When you have lifted up the Son of Man, then you will know that I am he, and that I do nothing on my own authority, but speak just as the Father taught me.”

Finally, in 14:10 he says, “¹⁰ Do you not believe that I am in the Father and the Father is in me? The words that I say to you I do not speak on my own authority, but the Father who dwells in me does his works.”  Jesus had been very intentional in revealing that all that he gave out was what the Father had given to him.  He intended his ministry to point to the Father more than to himself.

A second proof that Jesus had fulfilled his mission to reveal or make his Father manifest is in verse eight.  He says, “…they…have come to know in truth that I came from you…”  Jesus reveals or manifests the Father by affirming that he had come from the Father.  This is yet another repeated theme of Jesus’ ministry in John’s gospel.  In chapter eight Jesus is in a heated dialogue with the Pharisees and says in verse 42, “…If God were your Father, you would love me, for I came from God and I am here...” 

Jesus tells his disciples in 16:27, “²⁷…the Father himself loves you, because you have loved me and have believed that I came from God.”  Three verses later, the apostles tell Jesus, “³⁰ Now we know that you know all things and do not need anyone to question you; this is why we believe that you came from God.”

A third proof/way that Jesus had faithfully manifested or revealed the Father is in the next phrase in verse eight when he says about the disciples, “they believe that you sent me.”  This is a bit different than saying that he came from God.  The point here is that Jesus not only came from God, he came at GOD’S initiative, not his own. He was sent from the Father—he was on a mission from his Father to reveal him.  Again, Jesus emphasizes this truth throughout John’s gospel.  In 11:4, Jesus is praying for the resurrection of Lazarus as he is standing outside his tomb and prays, “…Father, I thank you that you have heard me. ⁴² I knew that you always hear me, but I said this on account of the people standing around, that they may believe that you sent me.”

Jesus raising a man from the dead in response to his prayer to his Father was a clear indication that he was on his Father’s mission.  In John 3:17, Jesus teaches this again.  He says, “¹⁷ For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.”  Finally, later in this prayer he prays for the unity of the church.  He prays about the church and says in verse 21, “²¹ that they may all be one, just as you, Father, are in me, and I in you, that they also may be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me.”   The Father not only wanted Jesus’ disciples to know that he sent him—he wanted the world to know that Jesus had been sent by him.

Those are three proofs Jesus cites that he had been faithful to manifest the Father to his disciples.  But HOW did Jesus manifest the Father?  We’ve seen from some of these other references in John’s gospel that he did this in part through signs and wonders and in the Father answering his prayers, but Jesus tells us in verse eight the main way he has explicitly revealed the Father to his disciples.  “For I have given them the words that you gave me and they have received them…”  Jesus manifested the Father to his disciples by teaching them the Word of the Father in the Old Testament.  The fact that Jesus makes a point to reference this as the main way he revealed the Father tells us that the best way for us to receive a clear revelation of God is to dig deeply into his word because he has given his word to us for the purpose of revealing himself.

We’ve said repeatedly that the Bible is a book about God.  When we read it—is that our motivation—to know him?  Do we pray as we read the Bible, “Father, I want to see you and your Son, Jesus in the pages of this book?  Reveal yourself to me—show me your glory through what I read of your mercy and patience and power and love.”  That should be our motivation in reading the Bible because that is the main reason God has given us his word—to reveal himself to us and in so doing bring glory to himself.

So, we’ve seen three proofs that Jesus had been faithful to manifest the Father to his disciples.  We’ve seen HOW Jesus manifested the Father to the disciples—through his word.  But a third question is, Why?  Why was the Father so intent on Jesus revealing him to the disciples and why did Jesus do that?  We get the answer in verse six.  Jesus says, “⁶ I have manifested your name to the people whom you gave me out of the world. Yours they were, and you gave them to me, and they have kept your word.”

That makes sense.  Jesus manifested the Father to his disciples because HE HAD GIVEN these people, HIS people to Jesus for that purpose.  Again, we mentioned this last time in reference to verse two where Jesus says, “…You [the Father] have given him [Jesus] the authority over all flesh, to give eternal life to all whom you have given him.”  The Father has given authority to Jesus to give eternal life to people, but only those people who he had given Jesus.  We saw last time that the Father determines who will receive eternal life based on who HE gives to Jesus to save.

Jesus expands on that here in verse six.  He says that, not only are these people God has given to Jesus, these people personally belonged to the Father. Likewise, in verse nine Jesus says, “…I am not praying for the world but for those you have given me, for they are yours.”  The fact that this is the third time that Jesus asserts that those who will receive eternal life are those the Father gives him and who personally belonged to him before he gave them to Jesus means its important.  This is a powerful testimony as to how important it is to God for all to know that HE is sovereign in the salvation of sinners.  That is—HE determines who he will save. Theologians call this election.  God’s people are his own elect people.

When Jesus says to the Father about these people, “yours they were, and you gave them to me” its meaning is clear enough.  One scholar says this about this truth.  “Let this be personal.  How is it that you came to belong to Jesus…Jesus says it is because the Father “gave” you to Jesus.  And how is it that the Father could give you to this Son?  Jesus answers…” because you already belonged to the Father…Why does it include you?  Why are you among those who belonged to the Father before he gave you to the Son?  Was it because you had some quality, and God saw this and chose you to be in the group that he would give to Jesus?  Did he see that you were willing to come to Jesus or willing to believe on Jesus, and for that reason counted you to be part of those who were his?”

“No.  Because in John 6:44, Jesus said, “No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him.”  In other words, being willing to come to Jesus was not something God saw in you, but something God worked in you.  No one is willing to come to Jesus on his own.  Only those who are drawn by the Father can come…Because we belonged to the Father, we listened to the truth; and because we belonged to the Father, we believed; and because we belonged to the Father, we were draw by him to Jesus; and because we belonged to the Father we were willing to believe.”[1]

This becomes even more clear when we think about someone who Jesus says did NOT belong to the Father and therefore did not listen to the truth or believe in him.  This was a man the Father did NOT draw to Jesus.  That is–Judas.  Jesus says in verse 12, “I have guarded them, and not one of them has been lost except the son of destruction, that the Scripture might be fulfilled.”  Jesus gives Judas the title the “son of destruction.”  The title “the son of destruction” means that Judas was not simply a disciple who decided Jesus wasn’t who he thought he was, so he chose to betray him to the authorities.

No—this title speaks of a person who was destined to betray Jesus as the son of destruction. That’s why Jesus didn’t guard him.   This word translated “destruction” in the New Testament always speaks of eternal condemnation.  The antichrist who is to come is called the “son of destruction” in Second Thessalonians 2:3. “³ Let no one deceive you in any way. For that day will not come, unless the rebellion comes first, and the man of lawlessness is revealed, the son of destruction,” Judas is placed in the same category as the antichrist.  The antichrist does NOT belong to the Father.  He belongs to Satan.  He is destined for condemnation—just like Judas.

The response that some have had toward this truth about Judas being destined for destruction is to feel sorry for him because he “had no chance.”  The way that Jesus speaks of Judas during his ministry however was not that AT ALL!  Several times in Jesus’ ministry he acknowledges that one of the 12 would betray him.  John 6:70 says, “…Did I not choose you, the Twelve?  And yet one of you is a devil.”  Many people have wrongly pitied Judas as some kind of victim, but that doesn’t in the least reflect Jesus’ attitude toward him.  Jesus calls him “a devil” and he very much holds him responsible for his actions.  He said of Judas in Luke 22:22,” …woe to the many by whom the Son of man is betrayed.”

For our discussion, the point is that Judas had not belonged to the Father and according to Jesus’ prayer here, THAT’S why he did not receive eternal life.  If we’re genuinely in Christ, we must always remember to see ourselves within this utterly God-centered perspective.  What I mean by that is this.  If you are in Christ, it’s because, from eternity past, God chose you to belong to him and HE placed you into Christ.  If you are part of Christ’s church, you are part of the Father’s gift to the Son. The emphasis is on the Father’s proactive role in owning us and the Son’s role in receiving us as his gift.

This is not just a doctrine explaining the eternal workings of God in our salvation.  This has some glorious implications.  For instance–THIS is where we find our worth…that God, for his own sovereign purposes would choose us and present us as a gift to his Son—a gift we know he purchased with his own blood and which he deeply cherishes.  Do we see ourselves that way?  Does that truth frame our sense of who we are?

To the degree that it does, it’s so liberating because we tend to place ourselves at the center of our universe and then experience the great pressure and stress that comes from that.  As we’re so busy running around–feeling responsible to run the world and manage our lives and rescue those around us and fix all our problems, it would do us all a world of good to regularly pause and, in a mid-course correction remember that— “You know—I’m not fundamentally a manager or a rescuer or a problem-solver.”  Here’s what I am—I’m part of the gift the Father has given to the Son (deep sigh of relief).  I’ve been taken OUT of that performance-based, world system where I had to achieve something in order to feel worthy and good about myself.” 

It’s just not about me and what I can do for God—it’s what he has done for me in Christ.  The Father gave these disciples as a gift to his Son before they’d done anything all that spectacular.  And up to this point, they had (in human terms) been a fairly high-maintenance gift!

Think about these incredibly sinful attitudes these disciples had manifested.  “I want to be the greatest, most renown disciple.”  “Jesus, we would like for ourselves the position of highest honor next to you in heaven.”  “Master, I must rebuke you for thinking you’re going to die a criminal’s death in Jerusalem—you’re quite wrong about that.”  “Hey Jesus, how’s about we call down fire from heaven on these lousy Samaritans.”  “Jesus, would you just show us the Father?” 

Only a gracious and loving Jesus could see these disciples (or us) as a gift when we so often seem more like a curse.   Yet, Jesus is thrilled to receive us as a precious gift from his Father and in verse six, Jesus says of these disciples, “…they have kept your word.”

In the second half of verse 11 is the first real petition he asks of the Father about his disciples.  “Holy Father, keep them in your name, which you have given me, that they may be one, even as we are one.”  When people familiar with this prayer think of it, they probably think of Jesus’ prayer for the unity of the church.  That’s fair because he prays for it three times in this chapter and we’ll look more closely at that request, later.  But Jesus ties verse 12 with verse 11 by citing another truth.  In verse 12, Jesus cites a ministry he had been performing for the disciples and asks his Father that, in his absence from them, he would continue.  In verse 12 Jesus says, “While I was with them, I kept them in your name which you have given me.”

Whether it’s the Father or the Son doing it, what does it mean to “keep” the disciples?  What Jesus is praying for here is that the Father would keep the disciples faithful to expressing the Father’s character just as HE had kept them faithful to express God’s character.

But what does Jesus mean by referring to the Father’s name as the name “which you have given to me?”  He’s asking the Father that he will keep the disciples faithful to display his character—which he had perfectly manifested to them.  We know that part of what he’s asking for in this “keep them in your name” prayer is for the disciples’ spiritual protection because Jesus says in verse 12, “I guarded them, and not one of them has been lost…”  The implication is—if the 12 are to display God’s character-most fully revealed in Christ—then the Father will need to guard them as Jesus guarded them as the Good Shepherd.

This is crucial.  We cannot manifest the character of Christ unless God keeps us faithful to do that and part of what is involved in that is his protection of us.  God not only saves us; he KEEPS us saved.  This is a common theme in the New Testament.  Paul writes in First Corinthians 1:8, “[The Lord] will sustain you (keep you) to the end, guiltless in the day of our Lord Jesus Christ. God is faithful, by whom you were called into the fellowship of his Son, Jesus Christ our Lord.”

He says to the Thessalonians, “May the God of peace himself sanctify you completely, and may your whole spirit and soul and body be kept blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. He who calls you is faithful; he will surely do it” [1 Thessalonians 5:23–24)].  Jude begins his letter with “Jude, a servant of Jesus Christ and brother of James, to those who are called, beloved in God the Father and kept for Jesus Christ: May mercy, peace, and love be multiplied to you” [Jude 1–2]. In each of those verses we see that the God who calls us to himself in Christ is also committed to keeping us in Christ.

Just as Jesus says the reason that none of the disciples were lost—none of them fell away, so also– no genuine believers will fall away because the Father is keeping us from walking away from him just as Jesus kept the disciples from falling away.  The assurance we have is powerful.  As God keeps us faithful to express his character—as he protects us from the world, the flesh and the devil, none of God’s people will be lost.  None of the 12 were lost and no genuine believer will be lost.

No, if you’re genuinely in Christ, Jesus has prayed that the Father would keep you faithful to manifest God’s name, his character.  We know from the disciples’ checkered performance that this doesn’t mean sinless perfectionism on our part, but it speaks to the general pattern of our lives. The Father will keep us faithful and protect us from anything or anyone that could cause us to shipwreck our faith.

Jesus’ prayer for his disciples is riddled with reassuring gospel truth.  The gospel is sufficient to keep people saved so we can manifest the character of God.  THE GOSPEL is the power of God for salvation—our past salvation, our ongoing salvation and our future salvation.  The gospel should form our sense of identity–not our appearance or our age or our gifts or our gender or what others think of us or what honors we have been given.  All that is shifting sand—it can be here one moment and gone the next.  What enables me to be both humble and confident is the fact that I am part of the gift of the Father to the Son who died for me—my identity is wrapped totally up in God.

Listen to some implications Tim Keller gives for a person whose sense of identity is totally wrapped up in God and what he has done for them in the gospel.  He says, “When circumstances in my life go wrong, I struggle but I know all my punishment fell on Jesus and that, while he may allow this for my training, he will exercise his Fatherly love within my trial. When I am criticized, I struggle, but it is not critical for me to think of myself as a ‘good person.’”

“My identity is not built on my record or my performance but on God’s love for me in Christ. I can take criticism.  My self-view is not based on a view of myself as a moral achiever.  In Christ I am …simultaneously sinful and yet accepted in Christ. I am so bad he had to die for me, and I am so loved he was glad to die for me. This leads me to deeper and deeper humility and confidence at the same time. Neither swaggering nor sniveling.”

Do we hear the security in that?  We are SAVED by God as a cherished gift—a cherished BRIDE the Father has given to his Son.  We are KEPT by God so that will glorify him by manifesting his name even when we would otherwise walk away from him.  We must bask in that security and allow it to soak into our souls and give us the peace and rest we’ve been given in Jesus.  May God give us the confidence to know that we belong to him—that he will keep us faithful and that our identity is rooted not in what we can do for God, but in what God has done for us in Christ for his glory and our joy.

[1] https://www.desirisimply nggod.org/articles/before-you-believed-you-belonged

This week, we move into the 17^th chapter of John’s gospel.  This prayer is often called “Jesus’ high priestly prayer” and today we want to look at just the first five verses.  This is a uniquely helpful section of Scripture because it gives us a unique opportunity to see Jesus the Son speaking privately to his Father about his redemptive work and his much-anticipated return to his former glory in heaven.  This prayer actually gives us the opportunity to eavesdrop on an extended communication between one member of the Trinity and another.

First, let’s give a bit of context here.   John writes, “After he had spoken these words, he lifted up his eyes to heaven and said, Father, the hour has come…”  That introduction is there to show us that the chapter of Jesus’ earthly teaching ministry with his disciples is closed and now he’s focusing on the great work of redemption the Father has called him to do.  That’s what he means when he says, “The hour has come…” The hour is the hour of his passion and throughout John’s gospel, Jesus has said at various points in his ministry, “my hour has not yet come.”

Here, the hour HAS now come, and we must read everything in this prayer and especially these first five verses with his impending crucifixion in mind.  It hangs over this prayer and everything in here is colored by it.  When he begins this prayer asking for the Father to glorify him, that he may glorify the Father, he’s talking about the glory he will receive by dying for his church and purchasing her with his blood and how that will glorify the Father.

In these first five verses of Jesus’ prayer, he reveals his great passion–what is most important to him.  We know that because this is what he begins with. This is the starting point for Jesus as he thinks about the cross.  We know that what he begins with is most important to him because when he teaches the disciples to pray in the Lord’s Prayer, he tells them to begin with the most important petition and it’s basically the same petition. When he tells his disciples to begin praying with, “…hallowed be your name” he’s asking them to begin their prayer asking that God—his name—would be hallowed, set apart…glorified.

So, the central truth revealed in these verses is: God’s supreme passion is for his own glory.  His main petition here is this one in the second half of verse one.  “Father, the hour has come; glorify your Son that the Son may glorify you.”  That is his laser-beam focus here because everything else is simply an extension of Jesus’ request for him and his Father to be glorified.  Today, when so many believers read the bible, NOT as a book about God, but as a manual for solving life’s problems or to help them grow spiritually, biblical texts like this one that speak about the glory of God can sound strange or at least, not all that practical.

You’re going to have to really focus on God today to get the most out of these five verses.  Because they are so focused on the glory of God, for many believers, they can seem so high and exalted that they’re a bit out of reach.  Even though the glory of God is arguably the CENTRAL truth in the bible, many believers simply don’t think much about it and what it means to them.  For many believers, when they think about God and what is really important to him, their answer is “love,” or something strongly related to love and that’s in some ways understandable.

First John chapter four says, “God is love” [1 John 4:16].  It’s hard for God to identify more closely with one of his attributes than equate himself with it.  Also, Jesus tells us the two great commandments are “You shall love the Lord you God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind” [Matt. 22:37] and “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” [Matt. 22:39].  When you see the incredible value God places on love, it’s easy to understand why, for many believers, love would seem to be his highest priority.

When you start talking about God and “his glory,” it gets a bit fuzzy for many believers.  In this very superficial world we all live in, “glory” isn’t nearly as accessible to us as love is and many believers aren’t sure of all that the glory of God embraces.  That’s why–before we look at this text, we need to see how Jesus’ burden for his glory and his Father’s glory is all over the bible.

The Scripture—from Genesis to Revelation consistently teaches that God’s highest priority is in receiving glory and glorifying himself.  We see this first in why he created the world.  In Numbers 14:21 God says, “²¹ But truly, as I live,… all the earth shall be filled with the glory of the LORD,” His glory is God’s ultimate purpose for this planet—that it would be a staging area for his glory to be manifested and seen by all people and all the heavenly beings.  In Isaiah 43:6-7 God commands, “…Do not withhold; bring my sons from afar and my daughters from the end of the earth, that God’s children are those who have been called by my name, whom I created for my glory, whom I formed and made.”

The human race—every sector of it—was created for the primary purpose of displaying God’s glory.  In the Old Testament, if you examine all of God’s saving works as he related to his covenant people, you will see that his ultimate purpose for each and every one of them is the same–his own glory.  This is also true of his greatest work—the rescue of his people from the penalty and power of sin through his Son, Jesus.  When Jesus in John chapter 12 looks at his impending crucifixion, his burden is exactly what it is here in John 17. “27Now is my soul troubled. And what shall I say? ‘Father, save me from this hour’? But for this purpose I have come to this hour. 28  Father, glorify your name.” Then a voice came from heaven: “I have glorified it, and I will glorify it again.”

Jesus’ main redemptive purpose for dying on the cross, what drives him to persevere through the profound agony and torment of his passion is …the glory of God.  It should be no surprise that he has this identical motivation for his second coming in Second Thessalonians 1:10.  “¹⁰ when he comes on that day to be glorified in his saints, and to be marveled at among all who have believed, because our testimony to you was believed.”  Jesus is returning to this earth to rule, to reign, to destroy all evil and bring justice.  But ALL of those will be done for the same purpose we see throughout Scripture–that he will “be glorified in his saints.”

This is the beating pulse of the bible, and we must never forget this.  It also begs a question.  That is—If God’s highest priority—if his greatest passion and ultimate motivation for doing all that he does is receiving glory, how can that NOT be self-centered?   Or, to put it a different way–how can God be good if he ultimately seeks his own glory?  After all, he calls us to continually deflect all personal glory away from ourselves.  Why doesn’t that ethic apply to him?

Think hard with me about this question as John Piper tells us why these rules of humility do not apply to God… “Because God is unique.  As an all-glorious, totally self-sufficient Being, he must be for himself if he is to be for us.  The rules of humility that belong to the creature cannot apply in the same way to its Creator.  If God should turn away from himself as the Source of infinite joy, he would cease to be God.  He would deny the infinite worth of his own glory.  He would imply that there is something more valuable outside himself.  He would commit idolatry.”[1]

Some of you haven’t thought much about this so hang with me here.  In other words, because God is the highest, most glorious, most praiseworthy Being in the universe and God always does or pursues what is best, then he absolutely MUST have as his greatest pursuit—the praise of his own glory.   If the glory of God is the highest possible good, then God, who, as God, always pursues the highest possible good, could do nothing less than to seek after his glory.

The reason our pursuit of personal glory is evil is because we’re not seeking after the glory of the most glorious, most praiseworthy, being in the universe.  We’re seeking to glorify a human creature instead of the infinite Creator.  This is why living for our glory or recognition always ends up ultimately making us feel empty and miserable.  We’re simply not wired by our Creator to live for ourselves and our own glory.  It’s our sin that warps us to want to do that.  For us, seeking after our own glory is an empty pursuit because we’re giving our passion to a pursuit that cannot possibly bring satisfaction.

This is NOT light thinking, but it’s intensely important to understanding God and the bible.  Piper concludes, “God is the one Being in all the universe for whom seeking his own praise is the ultimately loving act.  For him, self-exaltation is the highest virtue.  [Here’s the reason for that] When he does all things “for the praise of his glory,” he preserves for us and offers to us the only thing in all the world which can satisfy our longings. ”[2]  To put all that in shorthand as Piper says, “God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in him.”

The more glory we seek to give to God, the more joy and satisfaction we receive.  The bible teaches that God’s glory and our joy run on the same set of tracks.  Unless we’re running on the tracks that lead to God’s glory, we can never know our highest joy because the only tracks that lead to our highest joy are the tracks that terminate in God being glorified.

The bible teaches that God’s glory is at the heart of every believer’s conversion.  In Second Corinthians 4:4-6.  Paul is speaking of those who do NOT know Christ and are perishing in their sin and says,  “⁴ In their case the god of this world has blinded the minds of the unbelievers, to keep them from seeing [What is it unbelievers have been blinded from seeing but MUST see in order to be saved?  They must see…] the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God.”  Don’t miss this!  His glory is so central to who Jesus is that his gospel—the message of his sin-atoning death and his resurrection is called “the gospel of the glory of Christ.” The one theme that unites the entire bible which is—God’s redemption of fallen humanity has at its very center—God’s motivation to bring glory to himself and his Son.

Paul continues in verse five, “⁵ For what we proclaim is not ourselves, but Jesus Christ as Lord, with ourselves as your servants for Jesus’ sake. ⁶ For God, who said, “Let light shine out of darkness,” has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.” Stay with me now because this is important.  In verse four, Paul tells us that Satan has blinded in the minds of unbelievers from seeing “…the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God.”  He has blinded them from seeing the glory or, the all-satisfying beauty of Christ revealed in the gospel.  According to verse six, that means that what happens in our conversion is this–We are given by God the capacity to know or see his glory–the all-satisfying beauty of God in the face of Jesus Christ as he reveals that in the gospel—his death and resurrection.

One scholar explains that, as a result of this sight-restoring work of God in our conversion “Christ is no longer boring.  Christ is no longer mythological.  Christ is no longer a mere tradition.  Christ is the …all glorious, all-satisfying Savior, and the Lord and treasure of the universe.”[3]  That is at the heart of what happens to us in our conversion—we are awakened out of spiritual death so that we can, for the first time, see the glory of God in the perfect life, sin-atoning death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.  Salvation is not fundamentally about getting us to heaven or losing our bad habits or discovering the wonders of the bible.  Those are simply echoes of what is at the center.  The salvation of sinners is the most powerful way God reveals his glory by means of his self-sacrificing, saving gospel.

If you’re not used to thinking about God’s glory as his highest priority, this might take a while to sink in, but once you’ve embraced this, it will cause the Bible and God himself to come alive for you in a new way.  It will also give you a greater passion to make, as the purpose for your life, bringing glory to God because you will know that, as you do—you will find your highest joy and satisfaction because you will be fulfilling God’s  purpose in creating you!  Now that we’ve set the table for this prayer, let’s look at three ways Jesus expresses in this prayer that God’s greatest passion is for his glory.

The first way we see God’s ultimate passion for his glory is the most obvious.  That is Jesus repeatedly asks for glory for the purpose of glorifying his Father.  He makes this explicit request in two of the five verses–verses one and five.  Again, verse one says, “1When Jesus had spoken these words, he lifted up his eyes to heaven, and said, “Father, the hour has come; glorify your Son that the Son may glorify you,”  What does Jesus mean by asking the Father to “glorify” him?  As we’ll see from verse five, the word “glorify” in this instance means, “To clothe with splendor.”[4]  Jesus is asking the Father to clothe him with splendor and that will in turn, glorify him.  Why is it that—when Jesus is glorified, the Father is glorified?  On one level, this is just one more example in John’s gospel of Jesus’ repeated teaching on the profound unity he and the Father share.  “If you have seen me, you have seen the Father.”  We also see in other Scriptures WHY when Jesus is glorified, that also glorifies the Father.  In Hebrews 1:3, the author says of Jesus, “He is the radiance of the glory of God…”

That means that Jesus is “the outshining of the brightness of God’s glory, or…the reflection of that glory.^[5]”  When you look at the sun, you see this blinding yellow orb, but blazing out from the sun in all directions, you see dazzling light radiating out from the sun—you see its outshining. When you see Jesus—you are seeing the outshining of the blinding glory of the Father.  Think about the time in Jesus’ ministry when God revealed just a small part of the glory of Jesus in his transfiguration.  Matthew describes this in 17:2. “² And he was transfigured before them, and his face shone like the sun, and his clothes became white as light.”

As in his transfiguration when the man Christ Jesus was glorified, here in his prayer for the Father to glorify him, Jesus is not asking the Father to remove his humanity so that his deity can be seen.  No.  He’s asking that his own eternal, infinite glory as the Second Person of the Trinity would shine through his sinless, glorified humanity as it did in a very limited way in his transfiguration.   The reason the Father is glorified when the Son is glorified is because—the outshining of the glory points back to the glory of the Father that it shines out.

In verse five, Jesus repeats this request. “5 And now, Father, glorify me in your own presence with the glory that I had with you before the world existed.”  The fact that this request to be glorified is repeated means that Jesus intensely longs for this—he deeply yearns for his pre-incarnate glory.  There are however two additional elements of his request here in verse five NOT found in verse one.  One is that he will be glorified “in your own presence.”  That is—he wants to be glorified in the presence of his Father.

He clearly yearns to once again be in the manifest presence of his Father which he had experienced for all eternity past.  Second, Jesus communicates the eternal nature of his own glory when he says, “I had [it—this glory] with you before the world existed.”  This pre-incarnate glory was something the Son had radiated for unfathomable eons before God created the universe.  Here, Jesus is just expressing what we’ve already seen–God’s supreme passion is for his glory because this is his very first request and he prays twice that the Father would glorify him and thereby, glorify himself.

We also see God’s passionate desire for glory in verses two and three.  Let’s get the context by citing part of verse one as well.  Jesus prays, “Father, the hour has come; glorify your Son that the Son may glorify you, since you have given him authority over all flesh, to give eternal life to all whom you have given him.”  Again, we see the truth that when the glory of the Son is manifested, that will also bring glory to the Father.  But as Jesus is thinking about his great saving work on the cross, he specifically alludes to his work on the cross as it relates to his and the Father’s glory.  “…since you have given him authority over all flesh, to give eternal life to all whom you have given him.”  The second way God’s ultimate passion for his glory is seen has to do with the cooperative relationship between the Father and the Son in giving eternal life to sinners.

This is important because what Jesus says here tells us that the decision as to those who receive eternal life is not a matter ultimately left up to the sinner— even though the sinner must make a decision to receive Christ.  Jesus says here that his authority over all people that the Father has given him includes his unique authority to give eternal life to them.  The question of who gets eternal life is a matter under the authority of Jesus.  But he tells us something else very important about this authority he’s been given.  That is–he tells us that his authority to give eternal life to people is limited—it’s restricted by something.  He can’t use his authority to save people– to give eternal life– to just anyone.  He tells us that he can use it to save ONLY those people God has given to him to save.

So, the second way we see God’s ultimate passion for his glory is:  Jesus’ sovereign authority over humanity and their salvation brings glory to the Father and the Son.  The question is: how specifically does that authority the Father gives the Son to give eternal life to certain people—how is that related to Jesus asking his Father to glorify him?  Because that’s what it says— “glorify your Son…since you have given him authority…”

Here’s how.  Again, it has to do with this cooperation between the Father and the Son in saving sinners.  Jesus asks the Father to glorify him by showing in his passion that HE is the one who has authority to give eternal life to sinners.  Because he alone as the Son has that awesome authority, that glorifies him.  And when he is glorified by showing that authority to save certain sinners, that brings glory to the Father.  It glorifies the Father because when Jesus shows his authority to give eternal life to certain people, those people are determined by the Father.  The Father is glorified because HE uniquely is the one who determines who will receive eternal life through the authority of Jesus.

The salvation of sinners is an expression of God’s sovereign authority because if the Father has not sovereignly given a person to his Son to be saved, the Son cannot give him/her eternal life.  Notice who it is who sovereignly initiates this giving of eternal life.  Notice the role of the believer is minimized—he/she is ultimately the beloved gift the Father gives to the Son based on the Father’s pre-selection of that gift/person.  It’s the Father who personally chooses the bride for his Son and both the Father and the Son are glorified in that.  This is nothing new to John’s gospel.

Jesus has said this before in John 6:37. He says, “All that the Father gives me will come to me, and whoever comes to me I will never cast out.”  ALL those whom the Father gives WILL—no doubt about it–come to Jesus—but ONLY those he gives to Jesus.  This coming to Jesus is absolutely and sovereignly determined by who it is the Father gives to Jesus.  God’s sovereign control over every aspect of the salvation of sinners is part of what brings glory to both the Father and the Son. 

A third and final way we see God’s ultimate passion for his glory is:  He defines eternal life in a way that puts him [God] in the absolute center.  God does many things in the people he saves.  He forgives them, he makes them legally right with him, he adopts them as his children, they’re brought from darkness to light—from slavery to freedom and from death to life and ALL those things are important.

But when Jesus is talking to the Father about eternal life, notice in verse three where he places the emphasis.  “³ And this is eternal life, that they know you the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent.”  Jesus places the focus of eternal life NOT on going to heaven or being spared from hell or being liberated from sin and the devil or living forever.  Jesus defines eternal life in terms of the relationship—the sinner comes to know God!  Eternal life is knowing God.  That’s utterly God-centered.  It couldn’t be any more God-centered.

This is so important because sadly—as we’ve said before–so many professed believers today think about eternal life too much in terms of pearly gates and streets of gold and reuniting with departed loved ones.  That’s so wrong because eternal life is about knowing God, fundamentally—it’s not about us!  This verse proves that all or most of the books written by people who’ve claimed to have gone to heaven in a near-death experience must of necessity be fiction.  Whether the authors are perpetrating a fraud or whether they have been deceived, I cannot say, but what most of them write cannot possibly be the experience of one who has truly visited heaven.

The reason we can know that is because—from what I know, the primary emphasis in those stories is always placed on the opulence of heaven and reuniting with departed loved ones. Jesus here declares that THAT is NOT fundamentally what eternal life is about.  “And this is eternal life, that they may know you the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent.”  That means that anyone who might have temporarily visited heaven, in their account of that experience, will write on page one, line one something like— “I cannot possibly hope to convey to you what I witnessed in seeing Jesus Christ in all his glory.”

By an immeasurable distance, that’s the most powerful appeal of heaven for the genuine believer—everything else is little more than window dressing compared to that.  The reason heaven is glorious is because GOD dwells there.  The glory of heaven comes from HIM and points to HIM.  The glory of heaven is a reflection of HIS glory!

Knowing God is, throughout Scripture, the ultimate goal in God’s plan of redemption. The Old Testament prophet Jeremiah speaks of the New Covenant relationship God will establish with his people.  In 31:34 he says, “³⁴ And no longer shall each one teach his neighbor and each his brother, saying, ‘Know the LORD,’ for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, declares the LORD. For I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more.”  The reason God forgives sin is not fundamentally to get us to heaven, but so that we will be able to know the LORD.

That’s the message of this first five verses of John 17.  But what difference does any of this make to us?  So what? — if God’s ultimate desire is for his glory and he demonstrated his glory by sending his Son and giving him authority to save those he has given him—so what?  So what?–that Jesus repeatedly asks for glory—the glory he had before he came to earth?  So what?–that God defines eternal life by knowing him and not simply ending up in heaven?

One answer to those “so what” questions is—because we were created to glorify God—that—his glory—should therefore be THE focal point of our lives.  Remember that Isaiah 43:7, speaking of God’s children says, “7 everyone who is called by my name, whom I created for my glory, whom I formed and made.”   Revelation 4:11 says, “11 “Worthy are you, our Lord and God, to receive glory and honor and power, for you created all things, and by your will they existed and were created.”  God is worthy to receive glory and honor and power because he created all things.  That’s why he created all things.

We were saved from our sin fundamentally for his glory.  Psalm 79:9 says, “⁹ Help us, O God of our salvation, for the glory of your name; deliver us, and atone for our sins, for your name’s sake!”  We can so easily make our faith about all the wrong things—good things perhaps, but not ultimate things.  We must regularly remind ourselves that Christianity is not mainly about getting to heaven and avoiding hell.  It’s not about living a morally excellent life.  It’s not about loving and helping others.  It’s not about fulfilling religious responsibilities like attending church.  It’s about living for the purpose of bringing glory to God within the context of a relationship where we are constantly striving to better know God and his Son Jesus as well as we can.  All those other things—as important as they are, fall far below this.

God has given us the most powerful incentive imaginable for living for his glory because when, we live for the glory of God—we will know our highest and deepest joy and satisfaction.  This is because–when we live for the glory of God, we are fulfilling the purpose for which he created us.  If a believer seeks anything other than this highest goal—to glorify God—that’s the ultimate shoving of a square peg into a round hole.

Flowing from that truth is a second one.  For the believer–pursuing our ultimate joy and pursuing God and his glory should look exactly the same because the one leads to the other.  Pursuing our highest joy means pursuing the glory of God and pursuing the glory of God means pursuing our highest joy.  If we’re pursuing joy, we’ll look for it in its ultimate source and the ultimate source of joy is knowing and delighting in God.   “4 Delight yourself in the LORD, and he will give you the desires of your heart.”   May God give us the grace to see God’s passion for his glory and to make his glory our ultimate pursuit–for his glory and our ultimate joy.

[1] Piper, John, (1996), Desiring God—Meditations of a Christian Hedonist, Multnomah Books, pp. 47-48.

[2] Piper, John, Desiring God…p. 49-50.

[3] From a message found here: https://www.desiringgod.org/messages/the-gospel-shaped-mouth

[4] Carson, Pillar, Gospel of John, Electronic version.

^[5] Morris, L. (1981). Hebrews. In F. E. Gaebelein (Ed.), The Expositor’s Bible Commentary: Hebrews through Revelation (Vol. 12, p. 14). Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan Publishing House.