Father, I will that they also, whom thou hast given me, be with me where I am; that they may behold my glory, which thou hast given me: for thou lovedst me before the foundation of the world (John 17:24).
We come here, in verse 24, to a consideration of the last great petition of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ for his followers and disciples. It is actually the last of the petitions which he offered, and, in many ways, the end of the prayer; in the final two verses he again just reminds his Father of the character of these people for whom he is praying: ‘O righteous Father, the world hath not known thee: but I have known thee, and these have known that thou hast sent me. And I have declared unto them thy name, and will declare it; that the love wherewith thou hast loved me may be in them, and I in them’ (vv.25 and 26). It is, then, the last of the great petitions, and, at the same time, in a remarkable and extraordinary way, it sums up in itself the entire prayer, so that as we look at it, we shall not only be considering the special new request, we shall also be reminding ourselves of certain things which we have been considering regularly as we have worked our way through this glorious and tremendous chapter.
Now as we come to look at verse 24, we must all surely agree that the main trouble with us (I am speaking of Christian people) is that we will not realise the truth about ourselves. In this Christian life there are many problems and difficulties, but more and more it seems to me that most of our problems, indeed, if not all of them, arise simply from the fact that we fail to realise, and to understand and to appreciate as we ought, what is the real truth about us as Christian people. In the Scriptures we have great words such as these in this verse, these exceeding great and precious promises, and they are all for us. They are meant for us, they were spoken for us; many of them are descriptions of us, and yet how little do we grasp this fact, how little do we seem to realise the truth that is enshrined in them and how slow we are to apply these things to ourselves! I have increasingly come to the conclusion that somehow or other our trouble lies in the fact that we do not read our Scriptures properly; that is, we tend to read them without meditating upon them, without taking a firm grip of them and grasping them for ourselves, and realising that these truths are truths about us. It seems perfectly clear that if only we did that our entire lives would be revolutionised, indeed our whole demeanour would be entirely changed. You cannot read the New Testament without coming to the conclusion that God’s people are meant to be full of the spirit of joy and rejoicing. One of our Lord’s last words with respect to them was that they might know his joy and peace, that seemed to be his supreme concern, as it is here in this verse. And yet how slow we are to realise these things. We are content to think of ourselves in ways that are far removed from the New Testament description of the Christian, and our experiences are correspondingly far removed from what our Lord has depicted here.
I wonder how many of us can truthfully say that we are rejoicing with ‘joy unspeakable and full of glory’ (1 Pet 1:8) in the Lord Jesus Christ? We are exhorted to ‘rejoice in the Lord alway: and again,’ says the great Apostle in Philippians 4:4, ‘again I say, Rejoice.’ I suppose the final charge which will be brought against us all is the way we have so misinterpreted our blessed Lord by giving the impression that we are living a weary and laborious life, struggling hard against difficulties and obstacles. Indeed, far too often the impression is given that those who are right outside Christianity and the church seem to be very much happier. Now we know that that is merely a matter of appearance, and that in reality such people are not happy at all but profoundly miserable, but by appearance alone you might often gain the impression that they are happier than many of God’s people. And the answer to all that is to realise the truth about ourselves, to realise who we are, to realise what we are, to realise everything that the New Testament tells us about ourselves.
In working through this chapter we have been doing that constantly, and now we are going to look at one of the most extraordinary and glorious things of all. Here is our Lord’s last petition for his people: ‘Father, I will that they also, whom thou hast given me, be with me where I am; that they may behold my glory which thou hast given me: for thou lovedst me before the foundation of the world.’ He is about to leave these followers of his; he is going to the cross, to its agony and its shame; he is going to death and to burial, to the Resurrection and to the Ascension, but his concern is about them, and that is what he prays for. So let us look together at this summary of the main teaching of the entire chapter.
First of all, let us look at the One who prays for us. This is the first thing always, the thing we need to grasp before everything else. Here is someone praying to God for us; we people are being prayed for. So who is this who is praying for us? Well, the very terms that he himself uses in this verse tell us who he is. He does not hesitate to address the almighty and eternal God as ‘Father’, suggesting at once an intimate relationship. In the first verse also he begins by saying, ‘Father, the hour is come; glorify thy Son, that thy Son also may glorify Thee.’ ‘Father’: he is indeed none other than the Son of God.
The next word we must look at is the word ‘will’. ‘Father,’ he says, ‘I will’ – a most astounding word. He does not say, ‘I request’ or ‘I petition’ or ‘I desire’, and it is unfortunate that the Revised Standard Version has translated it as ‘desire’, for that is not the word, it is much stronger. He says, ‘Father, I will,’ and we must not reduce that. In other words, here is someone who can come into the presence of the eternal God and say, ‘Father, I will, that these may be with me where I am,’ at once suggesting, of course, an equality with God; with reverence, he says ‘I will’ to the almighty Father.
And then, of course, the other phrase that tells us exactly the same thing about him is this phrase ‘before the foundation of the world’: ‘For thou lovedst me before the foundation of the world.’ He has said that before, earlier in this prayer: ‘And now, O Father,’ he says in verse 5, ‘glorify thou me with thine own self, with the glory which I had with thee before the world was.’ We must not stay with this now, but unless we grasp it, we shall not be able to learn the great lessons of this phrase. He is praying there for us, because, remember, he is not only praying for his immediate followers – ‘Neither pray I for these alone, but for them also which shall believe on me through their word’ (v. 20). He is praying for Christians in all places and at all times, everywhere; and the One who is praying there for us is none other than the eternal Son of God. That is the whole basis of our standing and our position; we are Christians today because he came from heaven to earth and took upon himself the likeness of sinful flesh and did all that is recorded of him in these Gospels. A Christian, therefore, primarily, by definition, is one who is being prayed for by the eternal Son of God.
Furthermore, at the same time you cannot help noticing at the same time his concern for us. If only we realised that, when besieged and attacked by the devil and sin and temptation! As we face certain difficulties in the Christian life which trouble and perplex us, and, too, the difficulties which we have with ourselves and with other people, our tendency is to feel that we are quite alone and that no one understands. But to all that the answer is that here is the Son of God under the very shadow of the cross, knowing what is before him, and yet his great concern, his primary concern, is for his people. You would have thought he would be spending all his time praying for himself, but if you look at this prayer you will notice that the first five verses only are devoted to himself, the remainder are devoted entirely to this intercession of his on behalf of his followers. There is nothing that is more important for us to grasp than the fact that our Saviour is the eternal Son of God, that he prayed for us on earth and that at this moment he is interceding for us at the right hand of God’s glory and power in heaven.
What, then, does he say about us? We have seen the truth about the One who prays, so the second thing we must ask is, what is true of us? Once more we find the answer in this phrase which our Lord has used frequently in this prayer: we are described as ‘those whom thou hast given me’. ‘Father, I will that they also, whom thou hast given me, be with me where I am.’ Christian people are those whom God the Father has given to his Son. You remember how he puts it earlier on where he says in verse 6, ‘Thine they were, and thou gavest them me; and they have kept thy word.’ I do not know of anything more comforting than this. I, as a Christian, am one of God’s chosen people. It is the great doctrine of the Scriptures, you find it everywhere; and our Lord actually repeats it seven times in this last prayer to his Father. These are the people whom God had chosen before the foundation of the world, people belonging to God, and he has given them to his Son, the Lord Jesus Christ. Is there anything more wonderful than this?
Then you note that we are the special object of God’s interest and concern. He knew us even before we were born, before he ever made man or created the world, he had these people whom he had chosen, and there he gave them to the Son. As we have seen, there was a great meeting of the Trinity in eternity, and the Father gave these people to the Son and he sent him on this great mission of preparing them for the eternal enjoyment of God.1 That is what Christianity means, just that; that is why the Son of God ever came into this world. All mankind had sinned and had fallen away from God, and were outside God’s life and love. God sent his Son into the world to do certain things for these people whom he had given him, and everything that the Son did in this world he did for these people, he did for us. God sent him for that purpose. As our Lord himself has already pointed out, ‘... thou hast given him power over all flesh, that he should give eternal life to as many as thou hast given him’ (v. 2). So he is able to turn to his Father and say, ‘I have glorified thee on the earth: I have finished the work which thou gavest me to do’ (v. 4), and now he says he is going back to the Father.
Now if you are a Christian, that is what is true of you. All along you have been the special object of God’s interest and concern; he has loved you to the extent that he even sent his Son from heaven to earth for you, even to the death of the cross that you might be truly one of his people, that you might have a new nature, a new life, that you might be fitted for standing before him and enjoying him throughout eternity. ‘They whom thou hast given me.’ Then you notice that negatively we are contrasted with the world. Our Lord has done this throughout the prayer: ‘I pray for them: I pray not for the world, but for them which thou hast given me [out of the world]; for they are thine’ (v.9), and now he goes on in verse 25, ‘O righteous Father, the world hath not known thee’ – so he is not concerned about them at this point – ‘but I have known thee, and these have known that thou hast sent me.’ ‘These’ – who are they? They are obviously not of the world, they are separated, taken out of this present evil world, and given to our Lord, as God’s chosen and special people.
Now the aspect of this that I would stress at this point is the comfort of it all; the comfort of knowing for certain that we are in this wonderful and blessed relationship to God. Do we meditate upon this truth? Do we think about it, do we rejoice in it as we should rejoice? Let me repeat, we see here the very Son of God just before the end, and this is the thing that is uppermost in his mind; these ‘people whom thou hast given me’, these people for whom I am going to die, these people I am going to save by giving my life a ransom for them. ‘Father,’ he says, ‘I will’ this thing concerning them. But the question is, do we recognise ourselves? Do we know ourselves in these terms? Is it not the case that far too often we think of ourselves as men and women who decide to be righteous, or to be Christian; we have taken it up, and we are going to do this? But before you and I were ever born we were chosen of God and given to the Lord Jesus Christ. He came into the world because the Father had given you and all other Christians to the Son, in order that he might rescue and redeem them; and he has come and has done that and you are one of his people purchased by his precious blood. Oh the tragedy of failing to realise these things! The tragedy of trusting to ourselves and our own activities so much that we lose sight of the most precious truth of all!
We have considered, then, the One who prays, and the people for whom he prays and so now our third question must be: what does he pray for us? You will remember that in going through this chapter, we have seen certain petitions: he prays that we may be kept from the evil that is in this world, and the Evil One at the back of it all; that we may be kept from the devil and his machinations, that we may be kept from his subtle power and jealousy and everything that he would do to separate us from God. Our Lord prays that we may be kept from that; and then, positively, he prays that we may be sanctified, that we may be made more and more fit for God. And that is the way to look at our lives in this world as Christians. This world is a preparation for the next, we are being prepared for glory – that is sanctification. We are being separated from the world and sin, we have been separated to God and brought more and more into fellowship and communion with him: ‘Holy Father, sanctify them through thy truth.’ And then he prays that we may maintain the spiritual unity into which he has brought us by the rebirth and the gift of the Holy Spirit. This is not a mechanical external unity but an inner, spiritual, vital, organic unity and he prays that it may be preserved. And having prayed all that, he comes to this last and most glorious prayer of all in which he expresses his will.
In other words, in this prayer our Lord has dealt with our past, he prays for our present, and he also deals with our future. The Christian life is a life that is catered for in its entirety, that is the great glory of it:
The past shall be forgotten,
A present joy be given,
A future grace be promised,
A glorious crown in heaven.
So says the hymn, and here our Lord is now, looking into the future, looking in through the veil, and giving us a glimpse of what awaits us. You see how in every respect he has catered for us. He has interceded on our behalf while we are still alive in this world, but he does not stop at that, he goes on; and as he wills this for his followers, he incidentally teaches us with respect to our own glorious and wondrous future.
What, then, is the future that awaits us as Christians? Let me remind you again of our tragic failure to realise the truth about ourselves. What is it that awaits us when we come to die? I want to put this message to you by way of contrast at this point. As contrast at this point. As I was preparing this very message I happened to read a passage in a daily newspaper, under the heading ‘These great words’. And the ‘great words’ were these:
I love to consider a place which I have never yet seen, but which I shall reach at last, full of repose, and marking the end of these voyages, and security from the tumble of the sea. This place will be a cove set round with high hills on which there shall be no house or sign of men, and it shall be enfolded by quite deserted land; but the westering sun will shine pleasantly upon it under a warm air. It will be a proper place for sleep. The fairway into that haven shall lie behind a pleasant little beach of shingle, which shall run out aslant into the sea from the steep hillside, and shall be a breakwater made by God. The tide shall run up behind it smoothly, and in a silent way, filling the quiet hollow of the hills, brimming it all up like a cup – a cup of refreshment and of quiet, a cup of ending. Then with what pleasure shall I put my small boat round, just round the point of that shingle beach, noting the shallow water by the eddies, and the deeps by the blue colour of them, where the channel runs from the main into the fairway. Up that fairway shall I go, up into the cove, and the gates of it shall shut behind me, headland against headland, so that I shall not see the open sea any more, though I shall still hear its distant noise. But all around me, save for that distant echo of the surf from the high hills, will be silence; and the evening will be gathering already. Under that falling light, all alone in such a place, I shall let go the anchor chain, and let it rattle for the last time. My anchor will go down into the clear salt water with a run, and when it touches I shall play out four lengths or more, so that she may swing easily and not drag, and then I shall tie up my canvas and fasten all for the night, and get me ready for sleep. And that will be the end of my sailing.
‘These great words’! Thank God they are not from the Scriptures. They are what the world calls great words and I suppose they are very beautiful in a literary sense, but I thank God that I am not called to preach literature. I will grant, if you like, the beauty of the language, but I cannot think of anything that produces such a striking contrast to the text we are considering together now. Is that the end? Is that what death means for the Christian, to be alone – no man, or anybody – alone, turning a little boat round the corner of the headland from the mighty ocean into this little eddy and there alone you fall asleep and end the voyage? Oh, how I thank God for the Christian gospel! I cannot imagine anything more terrible than that, that is pessimism, that is despair, this desire to be alone. My friend, if you are a Christian, that is not what awaits you, it is this: ‘Father, I will that they also, whom thou hast given me, be with me where I am.’ You see the contrast – the Christian desire is not to be alone, regarding that as supreme bliss, it is to be where Christ is – ‘... where I am.’
Where are we going? Are we going into some silent place surrounded by wonderful hills and the shimmer of the light upon the waves? No, that is not the gospel! We are going where Christ is:’... to be with Christ; which is far better’ (Phil 1:23). To the Christian death does not mean being alone, it means going on to be with him. That is what he said, you remember, to the thief dying by his side upon the cross: ‘Today,’ he said. You are not going into some little eddy, and there be alone and put down the anchor, and fall asleep – ‘Today shalt thou be with me in paradise’ (Lk 23:43)’... to be with Christ; which is far better.’
And you notice that our Lord is very concerned here to impress upon us that not only shall we be with him but that we shall all be with him: ‘Father, I will that they also, whom thou hast given me, shall be with me where I am’ – I believe it actually means the total aggregate of Christians, the whole company of the redeemed, all of us together will be with him; we do not look forward to being alone at last, no longer buffeted by other people, and thinking, ‘Thank God, at last I’m alone!’ – not a bit of it. That is a travesty of the gospel which merely appeals to the natural mind because of the beauty of its language. What the Christian looks forward to is this:
Ten thousand times ten thousand
In sparkling raiment white,
The armies of the ransomed hosts,
Throng up the steeps of light,
‘Tis finished, all is finished,
Their fight with death and sin,
Fling open wide the golden gates,
And let the victors in.
Henry Alford (1810–71)
The very essence of the Christian position is that Christians want everybody to share what they have, and they look forward to heaven and to being with all the ten thousand times ten thousand. That is heaven; not to be alone, thank God, but to be among this ransomed throng of the redeemed, safely gathered in, all who have been with us here on earth sharing Christian fellowship, joining with us in song – the saints who have gone before us, the saints who come after us, we all will be there together. What a wonderful vista, what a vision of glory! That is what he wills, ‘... that they’ – all of them – ‘may be with me where I am.’
And what shall we be doing there? Well, this is what he says, ‘Father, I will that they also, whom thou hast given me, be with me where I am; that they may behold my glory, which thou hast given me.’ It is a great word, this word ‘behold’; to behold means to gaze upon as a spectator, but it also means to gaze upon some extraordinary sight, something quite exceptional and unusual. We often have that kind of experience, do we not? Maybe we are out walking and suddenly we turn a corner and see some marvellous sight; we behold, we gaze, we stand and look – it is there, in our Lord’s phrase, multiplied by infinity. But this word goes even further than that. It is a continuous word – ‘that they may continually behold my glory’; we go on beholding! That is not the whole of heaven, of course, but it is perfectly clear from the Scriptures, and especially from the book of Revelation, that this is one of the main things in heaven: to look at the Lord Jesus Christ, to gaze and gaze upon him, to behold him, yes, and very specially, he says, to behold his glory.
Now this is very important. He says, ‘... that they may behold my glory, which thou hast given me.’ We must understand this clearly. Again, as we saw in our last study, it obviously cannot mean his inherent eternal glory as the Son of God, because that was not given to him. He is from eternity the eternal Son of God, co-equal with his Father in glory and in everything else, so it cannot mean the glory which is inherent in the Son of God, as the Son of God. The glory of which he speaks here must be that glory which was given to him after he returned from earth into heaven with his human nature. You see, he came out of heaven and took on him human nature. He went back into heaven God-Man. He did not leave human nature behind when he went back to heaven, he took it with him, so that one who is truly human is at the right hand of God’s authority and power in heaven. He went back as God-Man, and a special glory was given to him as the God-Man and the Saviour of his people.
Paul deals with that in Philippians 2, in his great statement about the Incarnation. You remember how he tells us that our Lord had gone back to heaven, and then he says, ‘Wherefore God also hath highly exalted him.’ Paul has talked about how our Lord ‘made himself of no reputation’, as Man, he humbled himself, wherefore, because of this, ‘God hath also highly exalted him and given him a name that is above every name that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow of things in heaven, and things in earth ...’ That is the glory, this peculiar glory that God has given to his Son because of what he has done for us men and women and for our salvation.
And what our Lord wills here is this: he speaks to his Father and he says in effect, ‘Father, I am looking forward to this.’ As the author of the epistle to the Hebrews puts it, ‘Who for the joy that was set before him ...’ (Heb 12:2) he saw it, he knew what was coming. So here he turns to his Father and says, ‘Father, I will...’ They have seen me here in the flesh, they have seen me as a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief; they have seen me as one who had ‘no place to lay his head’; they will see me with the crown of thorns upon my brow and they are going to look upon me with blood oozing out of my hands and my side. They have seen me in the days of my humiliation and have believed on me, Father, and I would that they should see me thus also, see me in my glory and gaze and gaze upon me as I truly am, and as I shall be. That is what is awaiting you and me.
But let me go on and complete this, for I find in 1 John 3:2 that to see this glory of his also means to share it: ‘It doth not yet appear what we shall be: but we know that, when he shall appear, we shall be like him; for we shall see him as he is.’ In other words, you cannot look at this glory without its being reflected in you; to look at it means to be like it, to be transformed. Paul says the same thing when he says, ‘We look for the Saviour, the Lord Jesus Christ: who shall change our vile body that it may be fashioned like unto his glorious body according to the working whereby he is able even to subdue all things unto himself (Phil 3:20–21). In other words, we look forward not only to seeing and beholding him and looking at his glory, but also to being changed into the likeness and image of his glory.
And still more wonderful of all is the very fact that our Lord wills this for us, which means that it is going to happen to us for certain. You see, it is at this point that we do not understand ourselves; how can we be what we are as Christians? Do you know that you, a humble child, an ignorant Christian, who may feel you are more of a failure than anything else, buffeted by the devil, tossed here and there, do you know that I can tell you this now – you are destined to experience these things, of which we have been thinking. When you come to die, you will be with Christ; you will see his glory, you will behold it, and will become like him, and enjoy the glory for ever and ever. Paul puts it in this way in Romans 8:29–30: ‘For whom he did foreknow, he also did predestinate to be conformed to the image of his Son, that he might be the firstborn among many brethren. Moreover whom he did predestinate, them he also called: and whom he called, them he also justified: and whom he justified, them he also glorified.’ In the council of God it has already happened, it is as certain as that. You and I, wherever we are at this moment, are going to look into the face of Jesus Christ in all his glory and be made like him and enjoy him through all eternity. That is his will for us, and because he wills it, it is absolutely certain.
The conclusions we draw from this are quite inevitable, are they not? If we all realised these things, would we go on living as we do? Would we be as concerned as we are about this world and its passing pleasures and its glories, its states and pomp and positions? Would we give the time we do give to such worldly things, and so little to this? If we really realised what we are told here, would we be apologetic, sometimes almost afraid for people to know we are Christians? Would we be like that if we believed this; if we knew it was going to happen? But if we are Christians this is going to happen; it is absolutely certain, it is more certain than anything under the sun today that we shall behold him and his glory and become like him.
Whatever, then, you may be doing, put this at the forefront of your mind; think about it in a way that you have never done before; never let a day pass but that you remind yourself of who and what you are. You are one of God’s people – ‘thine thy were, and thou gavest them me’ – and I have done for them the work that thou gavest me to do, and I am coming back to thee. ‘Father, I will that they also whom thou hast given me, be with me where I am, that they may behold my glory, which thou hast given me’ – hold that before yourself day by day, start your day with it, remind yourself of it constantly, ‘Set your affection on things above, not on things on the earth’ (Col 3:2), for ‘our light affliction, which is but for a moment, worketh for us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory, while we look’ – we gaze steadfastly – ‘not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen: for the things which are seen are temporal; but the things which are not seen are eternal. For we know that if our earthly house of this tabernacle were dissolved, we have a building of God, an house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens’ (2 Cor 4:17—5:1).
So let us always ‘nightly pitch our moving tents, a day’s march nearer home’. Oh, do not think of the end of your life in this world as sliding out of the ocean into some little eddy where at last you can be alone. Rather, think of it as going to be with him and with all the ransomed saints, to see and meet people again who were pilgrims with you in this world, and to join with them in singing praises unto him who loved you to the extent of dying for you, and rising again to save you. Think of yourself among the ransomed hosts, the ten thousand times ten thousand, singing for ever and ever the praises of the Lamb who once was slain and who has redeemed us. What a heritage! What a promise! What a hope! What a glory! Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. Amen.
1 See Volume 1, Saved in Eternity (Crossway Books, 1988).