John 17:2–3
We have been seeing together that the ultimate purpose of our salvation is that we might have the gift of eternal life; and we have seen that that is the grand object and the final explanation of everything that was planned by the blessed Trinity. So this is obviously the most important thing we can ever consider together, and we began our consideration of it by realizing that it is something which, as we are by nature as the result of sin, we all lack, because we are ‘dead in trespasses and sins’ (Eph 2:1). And furthermore we saw that it is something which we have to receive as a gift because however wonderful our morality and conduct may be, they will never rise to the level of the eternal life.
The difference between being a Christian and not being a Christian is not one of degree, it is one of essence and quality, so that the most unworthy Christian is in a better position that the best man outside Christianity. Perhaps the best way of understanding all this is to think of it in terms of relationship. It is a question of blood, if you like; the humblest and the most unworthy member of the royal family is in a more advantageous position from the standpoint of social arrangements in most countries than the greatest and most able person outside that family. A man outside the royal family may be much more cultured, may be a finer specimen of humanity in every respect, yet on all state occasions and great occasions, he has to follow after the humblest and the least worthy member of the royal family. How do you assess his position? You do not assess it in terms of ability and achievement, you assess it in terms of blood relationship. Now that is precisely what the New Testament says about the Christian. He is one who had become a partaker of the divine nature; he is in an entirely new relationship; he has a new nature and quality; a new order of life has entered into him.
Furthermore, we found that it is our Lord alone who can give it to us, and that is what he is emphasizing here. He asks God to glorify him because, he says, in effect, ‘If you do not glorify me by enabling me to do this last bit of work which I have to do, if you do not enable me to be a Sin-Bearer of the whole guilt and sin of the world, then the whole of mankind will remain dead in trespasses and sins.’ He pleads with and urges his Father to glorify him so that he can give eternal life. So any attempt, as we have seen, to arrive at God, and have communion and fellowship with him, except in and through Christ and all his work, is a snare and delusion.
We now come on to deal with some practical questions. We saw that by definition a Christian is one who has eternal life, so what is this life, and how can one obtain it? I want to take that second question first because it seems to me to be the one that is dealt with first of all in these verses that we are considering. Verse 3 says, ‘And this is life eternal, that they might know thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent.’ What does that mean exactly? Is it a definition of what is meant by eternal life, or is it a description of the way in which eternal life is to be obtained? Those are the two possible explanations and expositions.
I suppose that in an ultimate sense it is right to say that both are true, and yet I find myself, on the whole, agreeing with those who think that it is probably a description of the way in which etrnal life is to be obtained. Now John has his own style of writing and you will find he always puts things in this particular way. Let me give you an illustration of this same thing from John 3:19 where he says, ‘And this is the condemnation, that light is come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light. . .’ Notice what an exact parallel that is with this statement: ‘And this is life eternal, that they might know thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent.’ It is the same form of expression so that John 3:19 is probably a safe guide to follow in the interpretation of this verse.
Let me explain. When John says, ‘this is the condemnation’, he is not giving us a definition of the condemnation; rather he is telling us the cause of it, which is ‘that light is come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light’. Surely, therefore, this verse can be interpreted in the same way. This is the thing that causes, or leads to life eternal—‘that they might know thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent’. I can give you further examples and illustrations of the same thing. John says in his first epistle, ‘This is the true God and eternal life’ (1 Jn 5:20) by which he means, ‘This is the true God, and the cause of eternal life’—referring again to the Lord Jesus Christ. So we have here primarily an account of the way, or the means, by which eternal life is to be obtained. Or, if you prefer it, we have here a description of the origin of eternal life rather than a definition of its essence. Yet, as I have said, it is very difficult to separate these two things from each other: that which gives me eternal life is the eternal life itself, for as I receive and enjoy the means of obtaining eternal life, I am obtaining it at the same time. However, we should hold these things as separate ideas in our mind.
Let us look therefore at the mechanism by which eternal life comes to us. As we do so, God grant that we all may realize that this is not only our greatest need, but also the most wonderful privilege that can ever come to us men and women. By giving us his eternal life God is saying that we can have the right and the authority to become sons of God, that we may indeed and in truth become partakers of the divine nature, and that we may have, here, at this moment, a true reminder in our earthly course of this relationship to God that is going to make us heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ. God has given us his nature, and not even death and the grave can rob us of our heritage. It not only means a transformed life while we are still here in this world, it is a guarantee of such great things.
How, then, are we to get eternal life? Well, the essential thing we are told here is that it is ultimately a question of knowing God, and that is of course the great question that is held before us everywhere in the Bible. God is Someone who is to be known by us, and there is no possibility of eternal life apart from this knowledge of him. John says this in his first epistle. He has become an old man and is at the point of death, and he tells the people to whom he is writing that he wants them to be happy, and to be sharing the same joy that fills his heart. There is a joy possible in this life, he says. Your joy can be full in this world, and it is a joy that is based upon fellowship with God. We have a wonderful fellowship to share, and truly ‘our fellowship is with the Father, and with his Son Jesus Christ’ (1 Jn 1:3). You notice how these New Testament writers repeat themselves, and they do this because they are always talking about this wonderful fact; a man who knows anything about this intimate fellowship with God cannot stop speaking about it. We can all speak about the things that interest us, we go on talking about them, and here is the greatest thing of all, eternal life, knowing God and having fellowship with him—it is no wonder that they keep repeating themselves!
How then do we know God? The Lord Jesus Christ divides it up into two main headings, and I merely want to consider them briefly now. He says, ‘This is eternal life, that they might know thee the only true God’, and he puts it like this because he is issuing a warning, or, if you like, he is stating this truth in the form of a contrast. He is emphasizing that we must be absolutely certain that the God in whom we believe, the God whom we claim to know, is the only true God. Now by using these words ‘only’ and ‘true’ he is clearly presenting God to our consideration as over and against something else, and it is obvious that he is warning against idols and false gods.
You find a great deal about that in the New Testament. John, again, ends his first epistle with these words, ‘Little children, keep yourselves from idols.’ That is the last word of this old man as he writes his farewell letter to the infant churches. He starts by saying that nothing matters but that we have fellowship with God the Father and with his Son Jesus Christ; he then goes on to warn them against certain heresies, and he sums it all up by saying, ‘Keep yourselves from idols.’ And the warning is as necessary today as it was in the first century. We must be absolutely certain that the God we worship is the only true and living God. Paul, also, in writing to the Thessalonians reminds them of how, when he first preached the gospel to them, they ‘turned from idols to serve the living and true God’ (1 Thess 1:9)—that is it. Again, the account in Acts 17 of Paul’s visit to Athens tells us how that cultured city was full of temples to the various gods. The people of Athens were too ‘religious’ in a sense, worshipping all these gods, Mercury, Jupiter, Mars and then, lest any should be left out, there was a curious temple ‘To the unknown God’. And yet the whole time they were ignorant of God himself. ‘Whom, therefore,’ says Paul, ‘ye ignorantly worship, him declare I unto you’ (Acts 17:23). That is the great business of the Bible, to hold before us the only true and living God.
And, let me repeat, this is as essential today as it was in the first century. It is not, perhaps, that we worship those old pagan deities, but we have a tendency today to worship philosophic abstractions in the same way as they did. You find people today writing in very learned terms about the Absolute or the Ultimate, or the Source of all being, or the life in the universe. God, to so many people, is nothing but a sheer abstraction, nothing but a philosophical concept, and when they speak of God it is of some kind of philosophical ‘X’: God is to so many some great force or energy. The Bible is constantly warning us against all that, and, as in the words of our Lord here to his Father, the Bible is always calling us to realize that there is only one true God.
Then there are certain things we must know about him before we can possibly have fellowship with him, and before we can receive life from him. First, obviously, we must believe he is a person. That is a very difficult concept, and yet it is vital and essential. God says, ‘I AM that I AM’; God is God, and God, therefore, is a person. The author of Hebrews puts it like this in a very important passage in his epistle. He is talking about the life of faith, and about the secret of men like Moses and others who went through the world as great heroes, mastering their circumstances, and standing out above all the average men in this life—what, he asks, was their secret? And the answer he gives is that their secret was faith, and their relationship to God. Yes, but if you want to be in that full relationship to God, there is one absolute condition—‘He that cometh to God must believe that he is, and that he is a rewarder of them that diligently seek him’ (Heb 11:6).
You see, when you come to God, you must not come in the wrong way. There was a poem which was very popular and often quoted some years ago, which ran:
Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods there be
For my unconquerable soul.
W. E. Henley
Rubbish! That is the very kind of nonsense against which the Bible warns us. If you come to God and really want to know and please him, you do not come in this mood of ‘whatever gods there be’. No, ‘He that cometh to God must believe that he is, and that he is a rewarder of them that diligently seek him.’ That is inevitably our starting point. God is a living God, not a concept or abstraction or term in a philosophical category. If you want a perfect exposition of that, you should read the accounts which are given in the Old Testament of some of the false gods that people worshipped. I commend to your study Isaiah 46, where the prophet mocks at the false god Baal that the foolish children of Israel had been worshipping. They had to carry him from one place to another because he could not walk! Why worship such a god when you have a God who will carry you? asks Isaiah. Or what about the description of false gods in Psalm 115? ‘Eyes have they, but they see not: they have ears, but they hear not: noses have they, but they smell not . . . they that make them are like unto them’ (verses 6–8).
There you have one of the most glorious bits of sarcasm in the whole of Scripture.
And the verse which we are considering here is urging us to start by a preliminary realization of this same tremendous truth—that he is the living God, he is the Creator. In all our preoccupation with God the Saviour, we must never forget God the Creator. God is our Saviour but he is also the Lord of the universe. He is the One who said, ‘Let there be light: and there was light.’ He has brought everything into being. He is in the heavens and everything is at his feet. So we must remember that we start with the Lord of the universe, the Creator, the Instigator of everything that is.
And then we must come on to a consideration of his character. ‘God is light,’ says John in his first epistle, ‘and in him is no darkness at all’ (1 Jn 1:5). Before you drop on your knees next time and begin to speak to God, before you seek him and his face and this life he has come to give, never fail to remind yourself of these things. Try to remember his greatness and his majesty and his might, and then go on to remember that he is life, that he is holy, that he is righteous, that he is just, and that he is of such a pure countenance that he cannot even look upon evil. Remember that you are speaking to the Judge of the whole world. All these things are emphasized by this little phrase ‘the only true God’. He is not like those false gods, those abstractions. You are going into the presence of the eternal God, a living God, One who is, who always has been, the Great I AM from eternity to eternity. That is the essential starting point and, I repeat, until we have that clear in our minds and in our understanding our prayer to God is probably nothing but a mere crying out to him in desperation. God, if I may so put it, has taken the trouble to reveal himself to us—that is the whole point of the Old Testament—so we have no right to go to God in ignorance, we must make use of the knowledge he has given us. He says that he is a jealous God, emphasizing his personal quality, and that he will not allow us to have any other gods beside him: ‘Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God, and him only shalt thou serve’ (Lk 4:8). We must, therefore, take the trouble to get hold of this knowledge and information. We must really wrestle with this revelation and then, in the light of that, come to God believing that he is. It is not that we understand his absolute qualities, but we realize that we are speaking to One who has called himself, Father, and who wants us to come to him in that way.
But we do not stop at that. ‘He that cometh to God must believe that he is’, yes, but he must also believe that ‘he is a rewarder of them that deligently seek him’ (Heb 11:6)—which is put here in John 17 in this way: ‘And this is life eternal, that they might know thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent.’ This is obviously crucial, and in its essence it means that we must not only know him as the only true God, we must also know him as the God of our salvation, because unless we know him in this second sense, we will never obtain eternal life from him. I can put it like this. We have seen that our Lord’s first warning is against the false gods, a warning to the Gentiles, and this second warning is a warning to the Jews, to people who only think of God in terms of the Old Testament, and who still go to God as if the New Testament had never been given to us. They come to God only in terms of law and have never come into the relationship of grace, and because of that, they are going to rob themselves of the greatest and the chief blessing of salvation.
That is the glory of our Bible, we have the Old and New Testaments, and may I emphasize again the vital importance of taking both. It is quite wrong to take the Old Testament alone, and there is a sense in which it is almost equally wrong to take the New Testament alone. It was the Holy Spirit that guided the early church to interpret the two together. We must remember that God is the Creator, and also the Saviour; and, too, we must remember that he is not only the Saviour he is the sole Creator—we worship a blessed triune God.
But here the emphasis is upon God as life, God not only as he is in and of himself, but in his relationship to the world and especially in his relationship to man. We must realize as we approach God that his ultimate, gracious purpose with regard to man has been revealed to us, and it is a purpose of love and mercy, and of kindness and compassion. And, as we have seen, this is something that is only known fully and finally in and through the Lord Jesus Christ. That is why this statement must be put like this, ‘This is life eternal that they may know thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent.’ This truth is an absolute necessity. That is why our Lord said, ‘I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father but by me’ (Jn 14:6). He is the way to God, he is the truth about God, and apart from the life he gives us, we will never share or know the life of God. So there is no knowledge of God apart from him, through him comes this ultimate true and saving knowledge, the saving relationship.
Of course, every word in this statement has supreme significance. You notice what this verse tells us about the Lord Jesus Christ—‘That they might know thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ. . .’ At once we are told there that he is equal with God, for immediately this man, Christ Jesus, is put into the same category as the only true and living God. Here is One who is on the face of this earth but who can be bracketed with God the Father. Some foolish people, such as the Unitarians, have often tried to use this phrase in order to prove their particular theory. They say that there is only one God and that Jesus Christ was not God, and they try to prove is by saying that Christ himself, while he was in the world, said that there is only one true God. But they stop at that point and forget this vital thing, that the One who says those words, ‘the only true God, and Jesus Christ. . .’, immediately puts himself into the same position as God. Here is One who is co-equal with God and co-eternal with God. Here is One who is God himself, God the Son, ever eternally in the bosom of the Father—‘and Jesus Christ. . .’ Thus we are fully entitled to make this statement that God is not only eternal and true but cannot be fully and finally known except in and through One who thus adds himself, as it were, to him.
Then here is the name, Jesus, which reminds us of the truth of the incarnation that this eternal Son of God was made man—the man Jesus. But the man Jesus is One who is God and who is co-equal with him and whom, therefore, you think of in terms of God and with God—‘and Jesus’.
But he is also Jesus Christ, and ‘the Christ’ means the Messiah, the One who has been anointed to do this special work of bringing men to God and of giving God’s life to man. You see how all this mighty doctrine is put here as it were in a nutshell for us—‘and Jesus Christ’. It is all there—the ultimate object is to know this only true God; yes, and the way to know him is to know Jesus Christ.
Our Lord goes on to say, ‘O righteous Father, the world hath not known thee: but I have known thee, these [disciples] have known that thou hast sent me’ (verse 25). And because they know that thou hast sent me, they know the Father and they have eternal life.
So we must realize that Jesus Christ gives us the revelation of God as no one else can give it. ‘No man hath seen God at any time; the only begotten Son, which is in the bosom of the Father, he hath declared him’ (Jn 1:18). He has manifested and revealed him, he has taught us about him. Yes, but you see he has gone further, as we have already seen. He has not only declared him, he has also taken out of the way the things that prevented our being in communion with him, he has removed the barrier of sin. If he had not done that, the knowledge and the revelation would avail us nothing.
But I just want to take one final step before we end this study. So far we have found that the knowledge of God is based upon these statements. It is based first upon the Old Testament revelation of God, the God who has differentiated himself from all the pagan gods and idols, the only true God who has revealed himself in the Ten Commandments and the moral law and the prophets. We then go on to the revelation of the Lord Jesus Christ and all that he has revealed, which makes him say, ‘He that hath seen me hath seen the Father’ (Jn 14:9). We have seen that he also removes the barrier of sin, the thing that comes between us and God and blinds our eyes and minds to the vision of God.
But he even goes a step beyond that. The Lord Jesus Christ gives us eternal life in a still deeper way. He gives us eternal life not only by giving us a knowledge about God, but by giving us the very life of God himself. This, says John, is the true God, the eternal life. We have seen, too, how Paul puts it: ‘As in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive’ (1 Cor 15:22). Of course, this is a profound doctrine. We have all fallen because we are all ‘in Adam’. Adam was the first man, the father of the human race, and the entire human race and the whole of humanity was in him. The result was that when Adam fell the whole race of man fell. He was not only the representative, we were in him, in his line, and death has come upon us all because we are in Adam, and because of what we have inherited from him.
Now over and against that, the New Testament puts the Lord Jesus Christ, and its amazing doctrine is that every true Christian is related to Christ, as every natural man was related to Adam. In other words, it means that if we are Christian, if we believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, we are incorporated into him, we become part of him, we share his life, and we are born of him. We are in him in exactly the same way as we were in Adam. This is the special work of the Holy Spirit. It is he who quickens us and brings about our regeneration. It is he who unites us to Christ and makes us a part of the life of Christ, and it is in that way, by sharing the life of Christ himself, that we receive the gift of eternal life. That is why he is so absolutely vital and essential. It is not something outside him, he gives us eternal life by giving us himself, and by this mystic union with Christ, by this relationship to him, we become participators of his own life. We are partakers of the divine nature, we have fellowship with God and the life of God enters into our souls.
So this is eternal life, this is the means of eternal life, ‘that they might know thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent.’
If we know this Christ, if we believe on him, we have eternal life, we have already become the sons of God.