Or, Why Jesus Does Not Pray for the World
Scripture: John 17:6-11
Date: March 23, 2014
Speaker: Sean Higgins
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God loves God. God loves God’s glory. God loves fellowshipping with God. God shares God’s life. We who know God benefit from all the above, our very life comes from God’s commitment to Himself. The Father and the Son work for our good in knowing their glory.
We are listening in on Jesus’ prayer to His Father. That means that we are not being told anything that we need to do, not directly. There are implications for our obedience, but the applications and take-aways from these messages begin with our submissive rejoicing before our submissive resolutions. You will know that you are receiving the truths of this paragraph if first, by the end, you are more humbled by God’s eternal election. Second, if you are more comforted by God’s incarnate revelation. And third, if you are more gladdened by God’s Triune love. To know His name is to have our pride, our panic, and our pessimism put right, even if the process is slow. As we know Him we glorify Him.
Chapter 17 in John is often labeled as Jesus’ High Priestly prayer. There are certainly elements of priestly work in the passage. Prayer itself is part of a priest’s work for his people. So far, through verse 5, Jesus prayed for Himself. He asked the Father to give Him glory (verses 1 and 5), the glory He had in the presence of the Father before the world began. Through the rest of the chapter, though, He prays for others. Just as a priest had a particular people he ministered to and for, so does Christ. Christ does not pray for the world.
In verses 6-19 Jesus prays for His disciples, for the eleven men who were with Him listening to Him pray. In verses 20-26 Jesus prays for all His future disciples, for those who would believe through the word of eleven. Jesus prays particularly for those for whom He was about to die particularly. He prays for those the Father gave Him.
Jesus referred to this Group of the Given in verse 2. The Father gave Him authority over all flesh (over all the world), and Jesus said that His authority included the charge of giving “eternal life to all whom you have given him.” He gives eternal life to these given-ones, which means that He makes known God to those ones. As He prepares to make petition for these ones (verses 11b-19), He gives reasons for His praying (verses 6-11a). The two petitions (11b-16, 17-19) depend on His relationship with these given-ones.
In this paragraph we see three parts of Jesus’ priestly ministry to the given-ones.
These verses bridge from His prayer for glory from the Father (verses 1 and 5) to His prayer for the disciples who glorify Him (verses 9-10).
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. Now they know that everything that you have given me is from you. For I have given them the words that you gave me, and they have received them and have come to know in truth that I came from you; and they have believed that you sent me. (John 17:6–8, ESV)
This is why Jesus came: to make God known (remember John 1:18). That’s how He glorified the Father on earth, that’s the work the Father gave Him to do (17:4). He summarizes when He says, I have manifested your name. To “manifest” is to reveal publicly, to make known the previously unidentified. The name refers to all that comes to mind about a person. The name is character in concentrate.
O God, save me by your name,
and vindicate me by your might.
(Psalms 54:1, ESV)
May the LORD answer you in the day of trouble!
May the name of the God of Jacob protect you!
(Psalms 20:1, ESV)
The name of the LORD is a strong tower;
the righteous man runs into it and is safe.
(Proverbs 18:10, ESV)
God’s name goes with all who God is. Jesus manifested that name.
He did it by “giving the words that you gave me” (verse 8), by giving them “truth” (verse 9). There is content about and contours to God. Jesus manifested God so that men could “know you the only true God and Jesus Christ whom you have sent” (verse 3).
Many believers (let alone those who don’t believe) assume that Jesus shows God to the world and that some care and some don’t. But according to Jesus, He did not reveal God to everyone. Jesus said, I have manifested your name to the people whom you gave me out of the world. This belongs with the doctrine of election.
Jesus goes out of His way in verse 9 to limit His prayer for “those whom you have given me.” Note how many things can be said about the group of the given-ones.
First, the given-ones were given to Jesus. “The people whom you gave me” (verse 6). “You gave them to me” (verse 6). “Those who have given me” (verse 9).
Second, the given-ones were given out of the world. “The people whom you gave me out of the world” (verse 6). They started as part of the world, but are no longer of it (verse 16).
Third, the given-ones were the Father’s and given by the Father. “Yours they were and you gave them” (verse 6). “Those you have given me, for they are yours” (verse 9).
Fourth, the given-ones have the Father’s word and keep the Father’s word. Jesus gave them “the words…and they received them” (verse 8). “They have kept your word” (verse 6). The singular (“word”) and plural (“words”) refer to revelation as a whole and the revelation in details.
Fifth, the given-ones know the relationship between Jesus and the Father. They know that the Father gave everything to the Son (verse 7), that Jesus came to earth because He was sent (verse 8). Jesus didn’t act on His own. He didn’t speak on His own. He didn’t commission Himself.
These things describe the eleven disciples and apply to every true disciple. Election belongs to God. He chooses, that’s why a distinction exists between those who are His and the world. The Father selected a people for His Son, a Bride, and gifted the Son with them through the Son’s ministry for them. The final part of the prayer makes it clear that this is a love gift. “I made known to them your name, and I will continue to make it known, that the love with which you have loved me may be in them, and I in them” (17:26). The given love from Father to Son is seen in the given-ones from Father to Son.
And what great things are given to the given-ones! Given-ones know God. That means that the given-ones are given eternal life. Given-ones are given truth. Given-ones are given God’s Word. Given-ones are loved. Given-ones are chosen to glorify God by being loved by God into life. It is undeserved. It is not the will of man or of blood (John 1:13). Those who believe in His name were born of God. Jesus manifests the name of God to them.
With startling and comforting restriction, Jesus identifies the only ones He prays for.
I am praying for them. I am not praying for the world but for those whom you have given me, for they are yours. All mine are yours, and yours are mine, and I am glorified in them. (John 17:9-10, ESV)
The ones who have the word, the ones who know the truth, the ones who believe that Jesus gets from the Father and came from the Father and speaks from the Father, these and these only are the subject of Jesus’ prayer in 11b-19. I am praying for them.
To avoid confusion He adds, I am not praying for the world. The world is key in the rest of the prayer. Jesus is leaving the world and leaving the disciples in the world (verses 11, 13, 15). Though Jesus wanted joy for His men in the world, He knew that the world would hate His men (verses 13-14). He had changed the disciples’ relation to the world, they were in it but not of it (verses 15-16). They were being sent by Jesus into the world as witnesses (verse 18). But the antithesis between the seed of the woman and the seed of the serpent would not be blurred.
So Jesus repeats His subject and celebrates the given-ones. He and the Father could not be more unified in their purpose for this group. Those whom you have given me, for they are yours. One divine Person gives to another divine Person and yet possession doesn’t change. All mine are yours, and yours are mine. This only works because of the Trinity (similar to when when Jesus said, “I and the Father are one,” John 10:30).
Jesus cares about this group because they are the Father’s, His Father gives them to Him, and because I am glorified in them. Not only is He glorified by them, as when they say great things about Him, but in them, because of their very existence. A sculpture honors the sculptor by its existence. The fact that a group of men who know God exists glorifies Christ because a group such as that could only exists because Jesus manifested God to them. “Christ never will cease to care for our salvation, since he is glorified in us” (Calvin, 176).
As He’s been saying for a while to the disciples, Jesus prays about His departure.
And I am no longer in the world, but they are in the world, and I am coming to you. (John 17:11a, ESV)
The last reason Jesus gives for praying for the disciples before He petitions is that He’s leaving them. It’s so close, so certain that Jesus puts it in the past tense. I am no longer in the world, but they are in the world, and I am coming to you. He had been protecting them, but now He wouldn’t be around.
He had come to manifest God’s name. Now He was headed back to God’s presence. That’s where His own glory was unveiled. He knows what is in the world. He knows He’s leaving His men in the world. He’s about ready to ask for two things for them in the world.
Jesus came on a mission to manifest God’s name. Do you know it? Do you love His name? Then you are a given-one. The Father gave you to His Son.
We consciously identify with the theology that recognizes God’s gracious and glorious sovereignty in the world. Joel Beeke, president of Puritan Reformed Theological Seminary in Grand Rapids, MI, wrote in his book, Living for God’s Glory.
[T]o be Reformed means to be theocentric. The primary interest of Reformed theology is the triune God, for the transcendent-immanent, fatherly God in Jesus Christ is God Himself…To be Reformed is to stress the comprehensive, sovereign, fatherly lordship of God over everything: every area of creation, every creature’s endeavors, and every aspect of the believer’s life…To be Reformed, then, is to be concerned with the complete character of the Creator-creature relationship. (40-41)
Jesus has been given much, including authority over all flesh, everything, and the elect to eternal life. Day by day He is giving them eternal life as His glory spreads. He prayed for it, for us to hear it, all the way back the night before He was crucified. We are fulfillment of our High Priest’s prayer.