Many times in John’s Gospel we read that Jesus’ “hour had not yet come.” We know, of course, that He was speaking about His death on the cross, and now, in the opening verse of His High Priestly Prayer, Jesus says, “Father, the hour has come.”
There is some debate as to the setting of this prayer. Some believe that Jesus and His disciples were still in the upper room, but at the end of chapter 14, Jesus called His disciples to rise and depart, and it is likely that Jesus told them the parable of the vine while actually moving through a vineyard in chapter 15, so He was probably about to enter the Garden of Gethsemane as we reach chapter 17. These though, are minor details.
The High Priestly Prayer recorded in John 17 is incredibly deep and its importance cannot be over-emphasised, which is why it will take us many weeks to work our way through this prayer. Warren Wiersbe writes in his commentary, “It is the greatest prayer ever prayed on earth and the greatest prayer recorded anywhere in Scripture. John 17 is certainly the ‘holy of holies’ of the Gospel record, and we must approach this chapter in a spirit of humility and worship. To think that we are privileged to listen in as God the Son converses with His Father just as He is about to give His life as a ransom for sinners.”
In His final teaching to His disciples, Jesus had told them they would face tribulation and trouble in the world, but now He stands on the brink of His own tribulation: the hour has come for Him to go to the cross.
The prayer itself can be divided into 3 sections. In the first 5 verses Jesus prays for Himself, from verse 6 to 19 He prays for His disciples. From verse 20 to the end of the chapter He prays for all who would believe in Him as the Gospel is shared all over the world.
In Matthew 6 and Luke 11 Jesus taught His disciples what is commonly known as the Lord’s Prayer. Most of us first learned to recite this model prayer as children, and it is still widely used 2000 years after Jesus taught it to His disciples. I don’t want to sound pedantic or legalistic, but we should actually call it the disciples’ prayer. The true Lord’s Prayer is the one Jesus prayed in John 17.
Ancient writings suggest that it was first called the High Priestly Prayer in the 5th century. The reformer Martin Luther wrote of John 17, “This is truly, beyond measure, a warm and hearty prayer. He opens the depths of His heart, both in reference to us and to His Father, and He pours them all out. It is so deep, so rich, so wide, no one can fathom it.”
The Scottish reformer John Knox loved this prayer so much, that he had it read to him over and over as he lay on his deathbed.
So it is with more than a little trepidation that we will somehow try and plumb the depths of this wonderful prayer in the weeks to come. The main point of the High Priestly Prayer is the glory God receives as He gives assurance of salvation of lost sinners through the redeeming work of Jesus Christ on the cross.
It is a prayer which God answered through the cross and the resurrection of His Son, and it is a prayer He continues to answer today as He saves His own. This is just one of many reasons for us to study John 17 in some detail, because as God answers this prayer, we are reminded of the certainty of our salvation through faith in Christ.
In the first part of Jesus’ High Priestly Prayer, He asks the Father to glorify Him so that He might glorify the Father in return, and we are looking at just the first two verses of John 17 today.
John 17:1–2
1 When 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, 2 since you have given Him authority over all flesh, to give eternal life to all whom you have given Him.”
The hour that Jesus had spoken about many times before had come, and Jesus prays that the Father would glorify Him through His death on the cross. It’s appropriate that we begin our study on this prayer so soon after Easter, because each year we are reminded of the reality that in and through such a seemingly tragic miscarriage of justice, lost sinners can be saved and reconciled to God. It is because of this that Jesus is glorified.
The glory of Christ is one of the main themes of John’s Gospel. John uses the words glory or glorify 42 times, the first in his prologue in chapter 1: “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.” (John 1:14)
When we speak or think about the glory of God, we tend to think of the beauty of His creation, or His majestic splendour and power, as much as our limited, finite minds are able to understand these things. David wrote in Psalm 8:1, “O LORD, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth! You have set your glory above the heavens.” And in Psalm 19:1, “The heavens declare the glory of God, and the sky above proclaims His handiwork.”
The glory revealed through the cross though, was quite different. At the cross we see the glory of Christ in His humble, sacrificial death for sinners. Five times in the first part of this prayer Jesus uses the words glory or glorified. During His earthly life Jesus brought glory to the Father through His teaching and His miracles, but He brought the greatest glory to God through His suffering and death.
The cross of Calvary stands in judgment of our sin. It is a stark and disgusting reminder to us of just how depraved we are, yet when we consider what Jesus achieved on the cross, we are reminded of the grace and glory of God.
Jesus had spoken about this many times. He said in John 12:23 and 32, “The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified. And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself.”
In John 17:2 Jesus says of the Father, “you have given Him authority over all flesh.” Notice that this is in the past tense. What Jesus is referring to here is the divine and eternal authority He has always had as God the Son. As we have seen often in our study on the Gospel of John, Jesus remained in full control throughout His earthly life. Even as He allowed Himself to be arrested, beaten and executed by human beings, those very people remained under His absolute authority.
One of the most loved Christmas carols which we sing each year proclaims His sovereignty. “Joy to the world, the Lord has come. Let earth receive her King.” Jesus is worthy of our praise because He always has been and always will be the King of Glory, because the Father has given Him authority over all flesh. Not everyone worships Him now, but they will one day. For many it will be too late, but they will acknowledge that He is the eternal King of glory as Paul writes in Philippians 2, where he says that Jesus “emptied Himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, He humbled Himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. Therefore God has highly exalted Him and bestowed on Him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.” (Philippians 2:7-11)
There are no atheists in hell. Everyone who is or will be there knows or will know that Jesus is Lord and King over all.
Jesus continues in His prayer in verse 2 by saying, “All whom you have given Him.” Not for the first time, Jesus refers to the doctrine of election, which teaches that God has sovereignly chosen those who belong to Him through His Son, and will be saved. Jesus said in John 6:37-39, “All that the Father gives me will come to me, and whoever comes to me I will never cast out. For I have come down from heaven, not to do my own will but the will of Him who sent me. And this is the will of Him who sent me, that I should lose nothing of all that He has given me, but raise it up on the last day.” And in John 10:27-29 He says, “My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me. I give them eternal life, and they will never perish, and no one will snatch them out of my hand. My Father, who has given them to me, is greater than all, and no one is able to snatch them out of the Father’s hand.”
Many people, including confessing Christians, deny the doctrine of election, but it is Biblical, and in fact, it can be traced all the way back to eternity past, as Paul teaches in Ephesians 1:3-6. “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places, even as He chose us in Him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before Him. In love He predestined us for adoption to Himself as sons through Jesus Christ, according to the purpose of His will, to the praise of his glorious grace, with which He has blessed us in the Beloved.”
John 3:16 says, “For God so loved the world, that He gave His only Son,” which means that the saving work of Jesus is available to all. All are invited, but in the second half of this verse we learn that salvation is applied effectually to only the elect. “Whoever believes in Him should not perish but have eternal life.” These are the ones Jesus prays about in John 17:2 - “Whom you have given Him.” We’ll come back to this point in a moment.
What were they given to the Son for? Verse 2 has the answer. “You have given Him authority over all flesh, to give eternal life to all whom you have given Him.” The reason Jesus was appointed as sovereign over all was so that He could give eternal life to those given to Him by the Father.
We will consider the concept of eternal life and what it really is in more detail next week when we look at verse 3, but Jesus spoke about eternal life many times in John’s Gospel. The reason that the redeemed will live forever is that salvation in Christ frees us from the curse of God’s judgment and wrath at our sins.
John the Baptist said in John 3:36, “Whoever believes in the Son has eternal life; whoever does not obey the Son shall not see life, but the wrath of God remains on him,” and Jesus said in John 5:24, “Truly, truly, I say to you, whoever hears my word and believes Him who sent me has eternal life. He does not come into judgment, but has passed from death to life.”
We receive this gift of eternal life through faith in Jesus Christ alone. Paul said to the Philippian jailer in Acts 16:31, “Believe in the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved,” and in Romans 10:9 he wrote, “If you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, you will be saved.”
In a world where it is drummed into us that you get out of life what you put into it, how can we possibly be saved for all of eternity simply by believing in Jesus?
The answer is that eternal life is God’s free gift to those who belong to Him through Christ who respond to the Gospel in saving faith. The commentator Leon Morris wrote, “Eternal life is not something that we achieve by our earnest endeavours, our good works, our devotional exercises, or the like. If we are to have eternal life, it will be because it has been given to us freely.”
In the NIV translation, Jesus says that the Father has given Him authority over all people, while most other English translations, such as the ESV, NASB and NKJV use the word flesh, instead of people, which is a better translation of the original Greek word meaning flesh or carnality. When Jesus talks about His having authority over all flesh, He is speaking about the fallen nature of man, rather than just our physical bodies. Jesus is referring to our sinful nature, so when God the Father gave Him authority over all flesh, Jesus now has Lordship over the human race which is unable to save itself because of the guilt and corrupting power of sin.
Most people would agree that there is something seriously wrong with the world. No-one is perfect, and you don’t need to be a Bible-believing Christian to know that. The problem with the non-believing world is that they think they can fix the problem themselves. If we all just tried to get along and were a bit nicer to one another, we can make the world a better place. This idea is flawed because the Bible doesn’t teach that we are spiritually sick - the wrongs of the world can’t be remedied with education and self-help improvement programmes.
No, the Bible teaches that we are spiritually dead, which means there is nothing we can do to fix the problems we see in the world, and more importantly the greater problem of our sinful hearts.
Paul wrote in Ephesians 2:1-3, “You were dead in the trespasses and sins in which you once walked, following the course of this world, following the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience - among whom we all once lived in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the body and the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, like the rest of mankind.”
That’s a true picture of the state of the world, due to our sinful, evil nature, and the only way that can be remedied is by the free gift of salvation in Christ, which Paul writes about in the next 5 verses.
“But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which He loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ - by grace you have been saved - and raised us up with Him and seated us with Him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, so that in the coming ages He might show the immeasurable riches of His grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus. For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God.” (Ephesians 2:4-8)
The Bible promises eternal life to all those given to Jesus Christ and to all who respond to the Gospel in faith. Those who trust Christ and receive His Gospel are the elect people whom God has given to His Son, which brings us back to a point we looked at earlier.
So many people stumble over the Biblical doctrine of election. The most common objection is that it is somehow unfair, but the Bible, when teaching about election, doesn’t call us to question whether we are among the elect or not. Instead, we are told to believe in Jesus Christ to receive eternal life, and then we are told that believers are those chosen in eternity by God to be given to His Son.
Do you believe in Jesus Christ? Have you repented of your sin and turned to Him in faith? Then you are among the elect. It really is that simple, and that glorious.
In the opening sentence of Jesus’ High Priestly Prayer we learn that the primary goal of our salvation is the glory of God the Father. In this prayer Jesus refers to God’s sovereign plan for our salvation, which brings eternal life for those given to Him as the basis of the glory that He brings to the Father. “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.” (John 17:1–2)
We tend to think of ourselves as the prime beneficiaries of salvation. After all, Paul wrote in 1 Corinthians 2:9, “No eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the heart of man imagined, what God has prepared for those who love Him.” So yes, absolutely - our salvation and the free gift of eternal life it brings is a blessing we will probably never fully appreciate, even in eternity, but we are ultimately saved for the glory of God.
The salvation of sinners, which was about to be accomplished by Jesus’ saving and redemptive work on the cross brings glory to God.
Because of our sinful and selfish nature, the tendency is to look at how we would benefit from our salvation. Many make a confession of faith, thinking that God will now have no choice but to bless them. This is the lie taught by prosperity preachers like Kenneth Copeland, Joel Osteen, Joseph Prince and many others. Sow a seed of faith (in other words, give us your money) and you will be healthy and wealthy. But when those things don’t happen and people face trials and suffering, and they don’t receive physical healing, their faith is shipwrecked, because they have little or no understanding of Biblical Christianity.
The point is that when we carefully read Jesus’ teachings, and His High Priestly Prayer in particular, we soon learn that our understanding of the Christian faith is often very different to how Jesus sees it. It’s not about us, and it never was about us. It is about the glory of Christ and the glory of God.
In this prayer, Jesus makes only two requests for Himself, and we find them both in verse 1: “Glorify your Son that the Son may glorify you.” George Campbell Morgan wrote in his commentary, “The deepest passion of the heart of Jesus was not the saving of men, but the glory of God; and then the saving of men, because that is for the glory of God.”
So instead of dreaming about how wonderful and trouble-free our lives will be in heaven, we need to recognise that the greatest benefit and the greatest joy of being a Christian is that you and I are no longer enemies of God. We used to be, but because we are saved by Christ, we are set free from the condemnation our sins deserve, and because of this, God receives the glory, not us.
When we learn that we are saved for the glory of God, we begin to understand that Christ is Lord of our lives, not ourselves. This also helps us to make sense of the trials we continue to face, even though we are saved. We don’t need to be reminded that faith in Jesus Christ does not guarantee us a trouble-free life. This is why James wrote, “Count it all joy, my brothers, when you meet trials of various kinds, for you know that the testing of your faith produces steadfastness.” (James 1:2–3)
Of course, none of us welcome trials of any kind, but as we grow in grace and God deepens our faith in Him, we find it easier to understand just what James was talking about.
Again, as we are saved by faith in Jesus, we undoubtedly benefit in ways that we simply can’t understand and possibly never will, but the primary goal of Jesus going to the cross was so that His Father would receive the glory.
Martyn Lloyd-Jones wrote, “Here He is, just before the cross, the crucial moment is at hand. He knows something about the agony and the sweat of Gethsemane, and His one desire is this: ‘Father enable me to go on, give me strength to bear, give me all I need to do this, in order that your great glory in this matter of salvation can be revealed and made manifest. I have come to do that, enable me to do it that your name may be glorified.’”
As Jesus went to the cross and suffered and died that we might receive grace and forgiveness, God received the glory, and He continues to be glorified today. Our role as Bible believing Christians is to bring glory to Jesus Christ as we reflect His character in our lives, and we do this in practical ways, by obeying His commandments and applying Biblical standards to our lives.
We don’t do these things to gain His favour or to try and earn our salvation. We do these things because we are saved, and out of gratitude to God for who He is and what He has done for us.
It was on the cross where God was glorified the most, and this is why we must consistently and faithfully point the lost to Jesus’ atoning death on the cross for their salvation. In doing so, God receives the glory which is rightfully His.
Galatians 6:14 in the KJV says, “God forbid that I should glory, save in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by whom the world is crucified unto me, and I unto the world.”