Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals

Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals: Welcome to Hear the Word of God, the online and broadcast teaching ministry of the Reverend Eric Alexander.

Eric Alexander: You will know if you’ve been with us for some time that there are four chapters in John’s Gospel which are often called the Upper Room Chapters, or even the Upper Room Discourse, although they’re scarcely a discourse in the way we would usually think of that word. They are rather the gracious and astonishing ministry of the Lord Jesus Christ to His disciples in the last hours of His own life, as He Himself is facing shortly the cruel death of crucifixion. He turns to them and begins to minister to them in all their bewilderment and fear and distress about the future.

The section begins with His exhortation, “Do not let your heart be troubled. Believe in God, believe also in Me.” Now this last chapter of these four, 14 to 17, is in a sense quite different from the others. It’s different because it is not addressed to the disciples, as you’ll realize; it is addressed to God the Father. It is sometimes called our Lord’s great high priestly prayer, where as the one who is taking the needs of His children into the presence of His Father like a high priest, He bears them and their anxieties and fears and needs far beyond what they see themselves into the presence of His Father.

Jesus is moving from instruction to intercession, from speaking with them to speaking to Him. And the amazing thing, of course, is that in the providence and goodness of God, we are allowed in some measure to overhear what Jesus is saying to His Father. That really is a very remarkable thing when you think of it. There is no more intimate area of Scripture than this in the relationship between the Son and the Father, and we are being permitted to enter into that kind of intimacy. You think of it that you yourself in your private prayer life would never like someone else to intrude probably, and yet here God in His grace allows us to hear what Jesus is praying for His disciples and for the church worldwide to the end of the age.

It is not surprising that many people have described this chapter as the Holy of Holies of the Bible. Bishop Ryle, whose expository thoughts on the Gospels I am always recommending to you, says it is the most remarkable chapter in the whole Bible. “We have no line to fathom its depth.” One of Martin Luther’s colleagues in the days of the Reformation in the 16th century, Philip Melanchthon, preached for 41 weeks on the 17th chapter of John’s Gospel. Let me encourage you just in a moment, but he did for 41 weeks and then apologized at the end that they had only scratched the surface of this great chapter.

I would certainly not be likely to be more than three weeks in it, but that says more about me than about Philip Melanchthon, I would think. It almost might just possibly say a little about you, too. And we will be spending probably something like three Sundays on this particular chapter. Now you will know, as I say, that it is often called the high priestly prayer of Jesus. And if we were to ask why it is that God permits us and arranges for us to overhear this prayer, which clearly must have been spoken aloud and was remembered and recorded for us, the answer I think is that He wants not only the disciples but us ourselves this evening to take courage and encouragement and heart from all that is involved in what our Lord Jesus Christ is here doing.

We can understand in chapters 14, 15, and 16 that He is ministering to their anxieties and seeking to calm them, that He is trying to encourage them and strengthen them about these coming years that lie before them as He is going back to His Father and is to suffer crucifixion. But you know, the ultimate sense in which Jesus cares for His own is that He brings their needs into the presence of His Father and prays for them. It is this that I think God means us most of all to be encouraged by, and indeed to be exhorted by, because our Lord’s prayer is not only an encouragement here to us, and it is in the deepest sense the Lord’s prayer.

The prayer Jesus taught His disciples is a pattern prayer, but not a prayer Jesus Himself prayed very obviously because He teaches us to pray for the forgiveness of our sins, which He Himself could never have prayed. But in this Lord’s prayer, God is giving to us not only an encouragement to be able to listen to the Lord Jesus bringing the needs of His own to the presence of His Father, but He is also providing us with an exhortation. The measure in which we truly care for others with the care of Christ will be not simply the instruction and exhortation and encouragement that we bring them, but the intercession that we engage in on their behalf at the throne of God.

Now the amazing thing is, of course, that this ministry of our Savior is a ministry that still continues this evening. It’s so easy for us to be absorbed with what the Lord Jesus Christ did in the past for us by coming and dying and rising and ascending, and what the Lord Jesus will do in the future for us when He returns in glory to wind up the affairs of a bankrupt world and hold His last assize. But the glorious thing is that our Lord Jesus Christ has a ministry in which He is engaging presently. Bishop Ryle has a chapter in one of his books which has the title “What is Jesus Doing Now?” and it’s an excellent question.

What is Jesus doing now? And what does what He is doing now have to do with our salvation? Well, now what Jesus is doing now is this: He ever lives to make intercession for us at the throne of His Father. And the reason that He is able to save us to the uttermost is that He ever lives to make intercession for us. And we need to grasp this, my Christian friends. This is what our Lord Jesus’ present ministry is in glory. He has not gone to heaven to be idle; He is engaged in the most glorious ministry for His people.

And Christian men and women lose an enormous amount of the blessing of what it means to have Jesus Christ as Savior if we ignore this. There is a pattern for it, and the reason of course that it is described as Jesus’ great high priestly prayer is that if you look back to the book of Exodus and to chapter 28, you will find there that there is a record of the high priest’s ministry and what he did and what he wore, more particularly what it was that he wore. It’s a very significant thing.

If you have your Bible at Exodus 28, if you don’t, don’t worry, you can just listen. You’ll find in verse nine that there is part of the instruction for the garments that the high priest was to wear, and they included the furnishing of a garment called an ephod. Verse six of chapter 28: “Make the ephod of gold and blue and purple and scarlet yarn.” Now Old Testament scholars have described the ephod as everything from a waistcoat to a kilt with shoulder straps. That obviously was written by an Englishman, I would think.

But what it really is is probably some kind of garment which covered the area that an apron would cover. That was probably the kind of thing. It may have been a waistcoat of some kind, nobody really knows the answer is, but it did have shoulders. And the significant thing is that on these shoulders, there were to be stones placed. Now look at Exodus 28:9: “Take two onyx stones and engrave on them the names of the sons of Israel in the order of their birth: six names on one stone and the remaining six on the other. Engrave the names of the sons of Israel on the two stones the way a gem cutter engraves a seal.

Then mount the stones in gold filigree settings and fasten them on the shoulder pieces of the ephod as memorial stones for the sons of Israel.” And then this: “Aaron, the high priest, is to bear the names on his shoulders as a memorial before the Lord.” So that he was to take the names of the people of God written on these stones on his shoulder and bear them into the presence of God. Now notice in verse 15: “Fashion a breastpiece for making decisions, the work of a skilled craftsman.” And this breastpiece was probably something of the fashion of a blouse or shirt or something of the sort, so most people think.

And then there were to be four rows of precious stones on it. In verse 21: “There are to be 12 stones, one for each of the names of the sons of Israel, each engraved like a seal with the name of one of the 12 tribes.” And then in verse 29: “Whenever Aaron enters the Holy Place, he will bear the names of the sons of Israel over his heart.” That is the significance of the breastpiece. “On the breastpiece of decision as a continuing memorial before the Lord.” Now do you see what this picture is? This is God’s illustration book.

This is God’s picture book. It is where God provides us with pictures from which we are meant to learn about things that are fulfilled in Jesus Christ. Now when Jesus goes into the presence of His Father and is bearing the needs of His people before His Father, do you see how this picture of the high priest fits exactly what He is doing? On His shoulders, He is bringing into the presence of God all the burdens and all the needs of His people, named and engraved upon His shoulders. And then lying closest to His heart, He is going to take the names and the needs of all His disciples and bring them before the Father as a memorial of them into the Father’s presence.

In the most beautiful and glorious way, that is what is fulfilled in Jesus’ high priestly prayer. This is what He is doing. And my dear friends, this is what the Lord Jesus Christ is doing this evening in heaven. He has the names of His people engraved upon His heart, and He bears them into the presence of God and pleads with Him on their behalf. There is something altogether glorious about this as a memorial. Now do you know how easy it is to forget people’s names? Do you know how easy it is to forget people’s needs, which may touch you for a moment or so, and then next week in the business of the world, they have passed out of your mind?

But here is God saying that He has so arranged that the great high priest will have the names and the needs of God’s people engraved closest to His heart, and He will bear them as it were on His shoulders into the presence of His Father. Now I think it was something like that that Jesus was saying to Peter when He recognized all Peter’s frailty and his weakness, his propensity to lie and turn back and to fail, and He said to him, “Simon, Simon, Satan has desired to have you, but I have prayed for you that your faith would not fail.” That’s a ministry, beloved, that is so glorious that we dare not ignore it or think lightly of it.

You know what a thing it is if somebody you really respect and know and can believe says to you, “Listen, I really will pray for you. You know how close you lie to my heart, and I really will pray for you.” But when the Lord Jesus Christ goes into the presence of His Father and has your name and your need engraved upon His heart, that is something of another dimension altogether, and it is altogether more glorious. Now in this prayer which our Lord Jesus prays, you will notice that He focuses on three different areas. They are set out in the NIV, if you have it, with titles or subheadings.

In the first five verses, Jesus is praying for Himself, the NIV heading says. In verses 6 to 19, He is praying for His disciples, and from verse 20 for the future church, for all believers in the world in the future. What we are going to look at particularly this evening is just that first section from verse 1 to verse 5. And what here our Lord is concerned about is the glory of the Father and the glory of the Son as a means to glorifying the Father. I’m not really too sure really if the NIV’s title is the best one, that Jesus here prays for Himself, because that could give us some impression of a self-centered prayer.

What our Lord is really doing is speaking of His own self-sacrifice in order to glorify the Father. And I want us to take particularly this theme that runs through these verses of the glory of the Father for which the Son longs and the means to that glory of the Son being glorified. “Father,” He says, “the time has come. Glorify Your Son that Your Son may glorify You.” Now, of course, the glory of God, it’s important for us to grasp first of all, is just the outshining of God’s character. If you know Exodus chapter 33, you will know that there Moses asks God to show him His glory, that’s Exodus 33:18.

When God responds to Moses, He says to him, “You cannot see My face, but if you stand there, I will make all My goodness pass before you.” And what Moses sees in this glory of God that is passing before him is a revelation of God’s character. And that really is what the glory of God in Scripture means: it is the outshining of the character of God in His grace and love and holiness and righteousness and so on. So when Jesus was revealed as God’s Son, we read that the Word became flesh and we beheld His glory, and in Jesus Christ, we see the glory of God.

Now what Jesus is speaking about in these remarkable first few verses of John 17 is how the Father is glorified in the Son. He prays, “Father, the time has come. Glorify Your Son that Your Son may glorify You.” Now I just want for the rest of our time to point out to you what our Lord is saying about how the Father is glorified in the Son, because of its great importance for our understanding of Jesus’ ministry. There are five areas particularly that you see traced for us in these verses, and I want to take them as it were in historical order.

First of all, the glory of God the Father was shared by Jesus with the Father in eternity. If you notice in verse 5, the climax of this section is Jesus’ prayer: “Now, Father, glorify Me in Your presence with the glory I had with You before the world began.” Now that’s an extraordinary thing for our Lord to pray, if you think of it. What He is saying is that before the world began, before the creation at the beginning, the Lord Jesus Christ, who here is bowing before the Father within earshot of His disciples, is asking the Father that He will restore to Him the glory which He shared with the Father before the world began.

Now that’s extraordinary for a variety of reasons. If you were to know the Old Testament well enough, you would know that in Isaiah, God has made it absolutely clear that His glory He will not share with another. In Isaiah 42, for example, and again in Isaiah 48, God says specifically, “My glory I will not share with another.” And yet here is Jesus pleading with the Father, “Give Me back the glory that I shared with You before the world began.” Now what Jesus is claiming, do you notice, is two things: He is claiming first of all equality with God.

There is absolutely no question about this. You and I could never pray such a prayer. A mere man or woman could never pray this prayer, because none of us has existed before the foundation of the world. None of us shared the glory of God the Father at any time. But Jesus says, “I am praying that You will give Me back the glory which I shared with You before the world began.” He is claiming equality with God. There is probably no clearer claim to deity from the lips of Jesus in the Gospels than this. He is also claiming eternity, of course.

The eternal coexistence of the Son with the Father is what Jesus is here speaking about. “Before time began, before creation existed, before the foundation of the world,” He said, “I shared Your glory.” Now, my dear friends, I suggest to you that if you ever have any doubts about the New Testament teaching on the deity of Christ or about what Jesus thought about His parity with the Father, you have to come to terms with this and say either Jesus was out of His mind or He is speaking sober truth. He says, “Father, glorify Me in Your presence with the glory I shared with You before the world began.”

So this glory was shared by Jesus with the Father in eternity. The second thing that we discover here is that this glory was veiled in the flesh of Jesus in the world. Look at verse 4: “I have brought You glory on earth by completing the work You gave Me to do.” So there was something of the glory of God that was manifested in the life of Jesus while He was here on the earth doing the work the Father had given Him to do. Now John acknowledges that in John 1:14 where he says, “We beheld His glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father.”

But you will realize that this glory which Jesus possessed during the days of His flesh was a glory which was veiled. So one of the Christmas hymns that we were recently singing makes us say, “veiled in flesh the Godhead see,” and that’s absolutely accurate. It is accurate in this sense that Jesus did not lose His glory when He came to earth; He veiled His glory. Now why did He veil His glory? Why was the glory of the Lord Jesus Christ, which had been burning with such brightness in heaven before He came that the very angels and archangels had to veil their faces, why did He veil it?

Well, He veiled it because poor human beings like ourselves could not bear to have looked upon Him. It was out of mercy to us that He veiled His glory in human flesh. But I tell you there were occasions when the veil wore just a little bit thin, have you noticed? On the Mount of Transfiguration, for example, when the Lord Jesus appeared there with Moses and Elijah and they began to speak about His coming decease or death or exodus or going out, offering up of Himself. Do you remember then when Peter and James and John watched, they didn’t understand what this was that was happening?

He began to shine with a glistening light like the sun, and they fell down before Him in their confusion. Do you remember on another occasion when they came to Jesus and they said to them, when Jesus asked them, “Who are you seeking?” They said, “We are seeking Jesus of Nazareth.” And immediately He identified Himself. He said, “I am He.” Now do you know what comes immediately after that? They fell back. They fell back. Now why would people fall back when somebody simply answers that?

If somebody comes to the vestry door and says, “I’m looking for Eric Alexander,” and I say, “Well, I am he,” you know, it’s not a human thing to do. But oh, my dear friends, they fell back when the Lord Jesus revealed Himself. He said, “I am He,” and He actually used the covenant name of God. “I am,” He said, and they fell back from Him because something of His glory, I think, began to break through the veil. This glory was shared by Jesus with the Father in eternity; it was veiled in His flesh in the world.

And thirdly, it was revealed in His saving work on the cross. Notice how Jesus says, “Father, the time,” it’s better, “the hour has come.” All through John’s Gospel, that’s been a phrase that has recurred where Jesus has said, “The hour has not yet come, Mine hour is not yet come,” and all the time He is referring, of course, to the hour of His offering up of Himself. And only now does He say, “Father, the hour has come,” and He is speaking of the hour of His death. And He says, “Glorify Your Son that Your Son may glorify You.”

He says, “I have brought You glory on earth by completing the work You gave Me to do.” What was that work? Well, it was the work of giving eternal life to all those the Father had given to Him. How was He to give them eternal life? He was to give them eternal life by offering Himself up in sacrificial death on the cross, and there the Father would be glorified. “Glorify Your Son that Your Son may glorify You.” Now notice what this eternal life is. This eternal life is not just life that is perpetual, that is goes on forever and ever in eternity.

It is not just eternal life as distinct from the kind of life that people have without Christ; it is quite distinctive. And the definition of this eternal life you will notice is this: “This,” verse 3, “is eternal life, that they might know You, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom You have sent.” Now the whole purpose of the Lord Jesus Christ giving Himself to all the anguish of His sin-bearing death was that He might give us life. Life through His death is the Gospel.

But that life that He gives us is to consist in our knowing God and Jesus Christ whom He has sent. That’s its essence. It is the knowledge of God that is the fabric of eternal life. So if somebody says, “I have eternal life, thank God,” I must say to them, my brother or sister, the evidence of that will be that you know God and Jesus Christ whom He has sent. And correspondingly, spiritual death is not to know God or Jesus Christ whom He has sent. That is why it is possible to be physically alive and spiritually dead, and physically dead and spiritually alive, you see.

Jesus says, “This is life eternal, that they may know You, that they may know You.” You know, further on in verse 25, our Lord Jesus allows to escape from His lips what John Calvin has cried out is the saddest cry of the whole universe that it has ever listened to: “Oh, righteous Father,” He says, “the world does not know You.” Oh, my dear friends, I often wonder, does that burden me one tiny millimeter of a fraction of the way it burdens the Lord Jesus? Does it seem to be serious to me as I walk down Buchanan Street and around this city, that the world does not know God?

I tell you, to the world outside this evening, that’s an amiable thing with which they would happily live. But to the believer, it’s the most serious thing in the universe that we could say about anyone. “Oh, righteous Father,” says Jesus, “the world does not know You.” But He says life eternal is that they might know You. Now how does He bring this life eternal? By glorifying the Father in the cross. Now let me explain this to you. We often think of the cross as a place of shame rather than of glory, don’t we?

It’s a place where our Lord is insulted and spat upon and despised and rejected by men. It is this crucifix a place of ghastly shame. But oh, I tell you, it is a place of glory as well. And the reason it is a place of glory is, if you will remember a bit back, I said that the glory of God is the display of His character. Now the reason that God is glorified in the cross of Jesus is that there is nowhere else in the universe that the goodness and love and grace and mercy and holiness and righteousness of God are manifested as in the cross of Jesus.

That’s where God has revealed Himself in all His beauty. And so when Jesus says, “Glorify Your Son that Your Son may glorify You,” He is speaking about His coming death as our Savior. John Calvin says, you must think I’ve been reading a lot of John Calvin recently, yes and no, “As in a splendid theater,” says Calvin, “the glory of God is manifested in the cross of Jesus.” Two other things. The glory of God is shared by Jesus with the Father in all eternity. The glory of God is revealed in the cross of Jesus. It is veiled in the flesh of Jesus.

But here’s the fourth thing: it is unveiled in His ascension into heaven. And what is happening, you see, when Jesus ascends into heaven and all the glory of heaven opens up, as it were, to meet Him, is that the veil that hid that glory is unveiled and taken away, so that in heaven, do you remember what the book of Revelation tells us? The center of everything in heaven is the Lamb who was slain. The Lamb is all the glory in Emmanuel’s land. But here’s the last thing. It is not only shared, this glory, by Jesus with the Father, veiled in His flesh, revealed in the cross, unveiled in His ascension, it is also displayed in the lives of believers.

If you just look on to verse 10, Jesus is praying to the Father: “All I have is Yours and all You have is Mine, and I am glorified in them.” The NIV is a little clumsy: “Glory has come to Me through them.” “I am glorified in them.” Now what He is saying is much the same as what He is saying in verse 22: “I have given them the glory that You gave Me.” Now that, if you think of it, is absolutely amazing. On second thoughts, I’m not at all surprised that Philip Melanchthon went on for 41 Sundays.

It’s quite astonishing to think that the glory which the Lord Jesus shared with the Father before the foundation of the world, and veiled in His flesh, and revealed on the cross, and unveiled in His ascension, is that very glory which He gives to the believer so that our lives may be another theater in which the glory of God may break forth in the world. Do you see what He is saying? And that’s what Paul means when he says, “We all, beholding as in a glass the glory of the Lord, are being changed into the same image from one degree of glory to another.”

That’s our destiny as God’s children. It’s all bound up with the glory of which the Lord Jesus was speaking, that we might share it and bear it in the world. What a thought. Let us pray. Dear Lord, we have no minds with which to fathom the wonders of all Your truth. We open our hearts to You this evening and pray that You would in Your great mercy bless us, not only with understanding but with openness to everything that You would say. For the glory of our Lord Jesus, we ask. Amen.

Mark Daniels: You’re listening to Hear the Word of God with the Reverend Eric Alexander, a minister in the Church of Scotland for over 50 years. To access more Bible teaching from Reverend Alexander, visit hearthewordofgod.org where your generous contribution will help us sustain and grow this ministry. That’s hearthewordofgod.org. You could choose instead to mail a check to this address: 600 Eden Road, Lancaster, Pennsylvania, 17601. Or call 1-800-488-1888. This program is a presentation of the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals. I’m Mark Daniels. Thank you for listening. Please join us again next time for Eric Alexander and Hear the Word of God.