Or, The Doctrine That Drives Hope in Jesus' Prayer
Scripture: John 17:1-26
Date: April 27, 2014
Speaker: Sean Higgins
John 17 is one of the great chapters in all the Bible let alone in the Fourth Gospel. It is the longest recorded prayer of Jesus, and He prayed it during an actual life-and-death time, an hour or so from betrayal and scam trials and crucifixion, that revealed what He desired most for His disciples. Every disciple who heard Him that night or who has read His prayer since should be greatly comforted.
But what is this comfort dependent on? What drives our comfort in Jesus’ prayer? If we say that it comforts us simply to know that Jesus thinks about us, that’s true, and we could state it as doctrine: Jesus thinks about His people. That is encouraging. And that is not specific enough. What does He think about His people and why?
Let’s ask it again. What doctrine drives our comfort in Jesus’ prayer? What do we learn about God that is so encouraging? If we came across a copy of God’s Word with all the pages burned or marred except for these twenty-six verses, what would we learn that would build our peace, our hope, our oneness, our joy?
It might be the doctrine of God’s Tri-unity. The Holy Spirit isn’t mentioned by name in the prayer itself, but for this exercise we could borrow from earlier in the evening when Jesus mentioned and promised the coming of the Spirit multiple times in the upper room (chapters 14 and 16). Even if we didn’t remember His previous instruction, the prayer makes no sense if there are not at least two Persons: the Son speaking and the Father hearing. It would be a silly soliloquy for Jesus to speak to Himself. As we consider the Tri-unity of God we can learn something more about what sort of God He is and what sort of desires He has for His people. But this doctrine by itself is not the most comforting. What if the Triune God was happy within Himself and decided to just stay home, so to speak?
It might be the doctrine of God’s sovereignty. Nothing is explicitly argued or illustrated about the power of God in John 17. Yet if God, especially the Father, does not have the authority and the ability to answer the Son’s petitions then the prayer is in vain. The expectant, even victorious tone of Jesus depends on God’s sovereignty. Our comfort is only as sure as that doctrine. But again, by itself, God’s sovereignty is not only comforting. What if He turned His sovereignty against us? And what about those in the world that Jesus does not pray for?
It might be the doctrine of God’s love. A couple times Jesus describes the making-known of the love of the Father, not only for His Son, but also for the Son’s disciples. Oneness shows that Jesus was sent and that disciples are loved (verse 23). Jesus makes known the Father’s name to His disciples so that the Father-to-Son love may be in the disciples. What great news it is that God loves His people! And yet, what about those who are not a part of this group? What hope did the eleven have that their witness to the love of God would be received by any in the world?
While God’s Tri-unity, His sovereignty, and His love are necessary parts to our comfort, the doctrine in which all three of the previous doctrines converge to drive our comfort is the doctrine of God’s election. Our comfort sits settled on election like a three legged-stool. Our comfort in this prayer comes from God’s choice of persons to give to His Son along with the Son’s ministry and promises for them.
In John 17 the elect are known as the given-ones. We observed them described multiple times in the prayer:
Everything petitioned, everything good, everything comforting depends on the Father’s election of a people for His Son, a chosen people that the Son comes for and is glorified in. “All mine are yours, and yours are mine, and I am glorified in them” (verse 10).
In this chapter we observe three comforting affirmations about election along with three denials that clarify common misunderstandings about election. We will see the doctrine shine after dragging it through the text. It will not be lost.
The words “elect,” “election,” and “chosen,” aren’t found in John 17 but the truth of the doctrine is.
The state of the world, that is, of the persons in the world, is not good. Not only does the world not initiate anything good, their reaction to revealed truth is negative. On their own, apart from Jesus, the world does not know God’s name. Jesus summarized the wholesale ignorance: “O righteous Father,…the world does not know you” (verse 25). That’s why Jesus came: to manifest the name of God (verse 6).
The world is ignorant about God and therefore isolated from Him. Their natural state is one of being separated from His life and divided from one another. This is part of the reason why the prayer for divine-like unity (verses 11, 21), along with unity with God Himself through Jesus (verse 26), is such good news. It fixes the problem.
In ignorance and isolation the world rejects Jesus and His word. Even when Jesus gave the word to His disciples “the world hated them because they are not of the world, just as I am not of the world” (verse 14).
How does anyone go from being “of the world,” characterized by failure to understand, failure to relate, failure to believe, to knowing, fellowshipping, and loving God? According to Jesus’ prayer, it depends on being given from the Father to the Son. Nothing in any person of the world makes him or her desirable by God. But God elects to take some who are “in and of” and make them “in but not of.” That’s election.
Jesus was doing just fine when there were no other persons other than He, the Father, and the Spirit. Before the foundation of the world He had divine glory in the presence of His Father. He prays for His return to glory (verses 1 and 5), and recognized the forever-long love His Father had for Him (verse 24). Why create? He created for the same reason He came. Why come? He came for the same reason He prayed. Why pray? He prayed for the same reason He sacrificed. Why sacrifice?
Taking on flesh in order to reveal God involved being rejected, hated, and crucified in order to show God and save men into eternal life. He endured it all for the sake of the given-ones. He narrowed His prayer list: “I am not praying for the world but for those whom you have given me” (verse 9). He wanted their sanctification, that is, He desired that they be set apart for Him. For that reason He said, “For their sake I consecrate myself that they also may be sanctified in truth” (verse 19). His prayer and His entire life of obedience, culminating in His sacrificial offering was particular. A priest’s ministry was defined, so was Jesus’. The Son worked on behalf of those the Father elected.
As Jesus prays we are protected. Not one of the given-ones was lost. Judas appeared to be one of His; he wasn’t (verse 12). The The Son prays for the Father to protect us here for the sake of later. For later, He wants us to be with Him where He is to see the glory that He had with the Father (verse 24).
The protection (verse 11), the sanctification (verse 17), the knowledge of love (verse 26), and the unity with the Son (“I in them” verse 26) is not temporal and earthly only, nor is it temporary or uncertain. The electing work of the Father starts an eternity-future of blessing for the given-ones.
The guarding from the evil-one can be a comfort to us because it depends on the Father’s power and His eternal purpose. He uses His power toward the fulfillment of His plan. He will guard the ones He gives. He gives those He elected. The elected will be with Him eternally.
The doctrine of election has endured a variety of distortions and misrepresentations. But even within this prayer, a prayer that is driven by election, a few clarifications can be made.
If God’s choice depended on finding holiness in the world, the world has no hope at all. If God’s choice depended on locating someone who knew His name, He would not need to look long, because He’s omniscient, not because anyone knows Him. But this does not mean that God doesn’t care about us knowing Him or being holy as He is holy. Election means that He chooses whom to save and what He saves them to.
God elects, the Son sacrifices, the Spirit regenerates so that we will believe, so that we will obey, so what we will be changed. He doesn’t choose the changed, He changes the chosen. We cannot make our calling and election sure (as Peter exhorts in one of his letters) apart from examining the fruit of being a given-one, namely, being a sanctified one. We cannot claim that God predestined us in eternity past without experiencing His sanctifying in real time.
Jonathan Edwards put it this way in his book, The Freedom of the Will.
We are not merely passive, nor yet does God do some, and we do the rest. But God does all, and we do all. God produces all, and we act all. For that is what he produces, viz. our own acts. God is the only proper author and fountain; we only are the proper actors. We are, in different respects, wholly passive and wholly active. (“Concerning Efficacious Grace,” in The Works of Jonathan Edwards, Vol. 2, 557).
When Jesus identifies the chosen, He says that He gave them the words His Father gave Him (verse 8). When He identifies the following generation of believers, He says they will believe the word of the eleven (verse 20). What makes the difference between those who receive the word and those who hate the ones who have it? How can the hated word become a haved word? It happens by the invisible work of the Spirit who uses the external word.
The same thing is true about our oneness as witness. Some will hate it, some will be drawn to want it. How can the same thing do different things? Why does any of that matter if God chooses who will receive it? Because God also chooses how they will receive it. It does not follow for someone to choose the destination without also determining to choose the vehicle to get there. It is reasonable to choose the tools to work and finish the project.
A surgeon uses a scalpel, a carpenter carries his hammer, a poet scribbles with a pen, a gardener uses all sorts of tools to tend the ground. So God uses the witness of His people to draw His people.
Of all those who know the triumph, of all those who know the plan and who know God’s power, Jesus did. And no man prayerfully petitioned the Father more. As with witness, so God does plan to work through supplication. He accomplishes His eternal desires through spiritual work.
Here is more comfort for us. We do not pray to an unhearing, or incapable, God. We are not going through the motions. We are His chosen instruments. So we have greater confidence, not less, that God sovereignly loves for us, like His Son, to pray in accord with His will. Prayer is His will. J.I. Packer put it like this in his classic book, Evangelism and the Sovereignty of God.
You pray for the conversion of others. In what terms, now, do you intercede for them? Do you limit yourself to asking that God will bring them to a point where they can save themselves, independently of Him? I do not think you do. I think that what you do is pray in categorical terms that God will, quite simply and decisively, save them: that He will open the eyes of their understanding, soften their hard hearts, renew their natures, and move their wills to receive the Savior. (15)
A few pages later Packer summarizes:
What is true is that all Christians believe in divine sovereignty, but some are not aware that they do, and mistakenly imagine and insist they they reject it…The irony of the situation, however, is that when we ask how the two sides pray, it becomes apparent that those who profess to deny God’s sovereignty really believe in it just as strongly as those who affirm it. (16-17)
The eternal doctrine that drives comfort in Jesus’ prayer is the Father’s election of a people, given to His Son, whom the Son came and laid down His life, and whom the Spirit causes to be born again and protects for eternal life. It is a comfort when we’re hated, it is a comfort when we evangelize, it is a comfort when we pray. Comfort comes because:
Election deals with the depravity of man, it aims the atonement of Christ, and leads to the preservation/perseverance of the saints. These are Calvinist doctrines, Reformed doctrines, working together with the doctrine of unconditional election.
While we are happy and comforted by these doctrines, and we are not hyper in our Calvinism. We also believe that God exerts control over the process, not merely plans the end of the process. God uses means (impersonal action or system to bring about a desired result), agents (persons that takes an active role in producing a desired result), and instruments (tools or implements used to accomplish a desired result).
Getting to be a given-one is not something we deserved or earn. It was not something we could even desire apart from grace. The doctrine of God’s election is a comfort not a cruelty. Election stimulates our faith in God, it does not drive us to a fatalistic despair apart from Him.