5

The Lord Jesus Christ, the Lord of Glory

John 17:1–5

We have been considering the way in which we see in these five verses the particular glory of the Father being revealed in salvation, and now we take a step forward and come on to consider the way in which our salvation has actually been produced. We have looked at it in the eternal Council and as God planned it, and as he set aside and separated his Son for the work. We now look at something of the detail of the way in which this was planned and conceived and was put into practice, so that we are looking especially at the glory of God in salvation as it is revealed in the person of the Son. And again, the same thing will strike us, namely, this emphasis upon the glory. It all has to do with the glory of the eternal Godhead. We have seen the glory of the Father, and we are now looking at the glory of the Son, and here again in an extraordinary manner we have before us this wondrous panorama, as it were, of the whole movement of salvation with regard to the Son himself.

Now this is something which is staggering not only to the mind but even to the imagination. The whole sweep of salvation is unfolded here and displayed before us from glory back to glory and it is all in the compass of these few verses. So we approach a subject like this with a sense of awe and wonder and adoration.

And as we do so, shall we not honestly admit that perhaps one of the greatest lacks in our modern Christianity—and here I speak not only of the church in general, but also, if we are to be quite honest, even of many of us who claim to be evangelical—that perhaps the greatest lack in our worship and practice of the Christian faith is the absence of a sense of wonder, a sense of adoration and a sense of worship. I have no doubt at all that this is very largely to be explained by the fact that we are so subjective. I have said this ever since we started considering this chapter, and I propose to go on saying it, because it seems to me to be one of the great lessons which we do need to learn especially at this present time. We are all too interested in our own moods and states and conditions; we are all too psychological and introspective, and too concerned, therefore, about the benefits that the Christian gospel and salvation have to give to us. And the result of this is that we miss something of these great glories of the gospel as it is unfolded in the New Testament itself. This comes out very clearly if we listen to one another; have you not noticed how there is a tendency to be talking about ourselves? We are always telling people what has happened to us. ‘Testimony’ today generally means what we have experienced, or what has happened to us. How rarely do we speak about him!

Now there is the lack and the need. If you read the lives of the saints who have gone before us in this world, you will find that they spent most of their time in talking together about Jesus Christ. Their testimony was a testimony to him, and to his praise. Their emphasis was upon him. They spoke about this wonderful Christ and the glory of his person, whereas we always tend to talk about ourselves, the things that we have found, the happiness that we have discovered, or some experience that we have had. And I think if we are honest we will find that the emphasis is always more or less centered upon self.

We have deviated very far indeed from what was so true of the saints of the centuries. Take, too, your hymn books and read the great hymns, especially, perhaps, the hymns that were written before the middle of the last century. (The subjective element seems to have come in just about then.) Start with Isaac Watts and come down the great succession and you will find they have this glorious objectivity. They rejoiced in their experiences, yes, but the note you find outstanding in their hymns is always their praise of the Lord, their glorying in him. With Isaac Watts they surveyed the wondrous cross on which the Prince of glory died. That is the predominant thought. They always spent their time in worship and adoration and in the glorification of him.

It seems to me that this is the note that we must recapture, and that there is no real hope for revival and true awakening until we come back to this. And the way to do that is to study the Scriptures, to spend our time in reading and meditating upon them and then in humbling ourselves in worship and in adoration before such a marvellous truth. Now I am saying this not merely in a theoretical manner for I am anxious to be extremely practical. No, I advocate this because, apart from anything else, the real cure for most of our subjective ills is ultimately to be so enraptured by the beauty and the glory of Christ that we will forget ourselves and will not have time to think about ourselves at all. Now that is a good bit of psychology. The trouble with our generation, and let us not be too hard on ourselves, is that we are living in a very difficult age. We have had to face problems which mankind has scarcely ever had to face in such an acute form, and such an age always tends to produce morbidity, a concern about oneself. We are living such a ridiculous type of life that our nerves are tired and frayed, and as a result we are all of us concerned about self, and the great problem is how to get away from it. The high road to that is to be so absorbed by someone else, something outside oneself, which is so glorious and wonderful that, without knowing it, we forget all about ourselves. This can happen as you look at some marvellous scenery, or fall in love and forget yourself; well, multiply that by infinity and look into the face of Jesus Christ and catch something of his glory, and I assure you that most of the ‘mumps and measles of the soul’ will automatically be cured, and you will find yourself in a healthy condition, mentally, spiritually and even psychologically.

But even more important than that is the fact that God has caused these Scriptures to be written in order that we may know something about this great salvation, ‘so great salvation’, as the New Testament describes it in Hebrews 2. I wonder whether we modern Christians realize the greatness of this Christian salvation as we ought, because if we do not, the way to do so is to learn something about the greatness of the glory of the person of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. That is the way to measure the greatness of the salvation, not just by something that happens to us. Let us deliver ourselves from that! For if we are going to measure our salvation by what has happened to us, I suggest that finally we have no answer at all to give to the Christian Scientists, nor to the psychologists. If you make it subjective, you are still in the past. No, the way to measure the greatness of this salvation is to look at the greatness of the person and his glory and to realize something of what he has done.

Now this is the very thing that is shown to us in these verses. Look at the movement, beginning at verse 5: ‘And now, O Father,’ he says at the end of his earthly life, ‘glorify thou me with thine own self with the glory which I had with thee before the world was.’ That is the starting point. You just try to consider and contemplate this amazing and glorious person before he ever came to earth. You do not start with the babe in Bethlehem, that was not the beginning of his life. He came into this world, he was not born into it in the way that everybody else has been born into it. He came from the glory. He entered into this world from another world, and what he himself says here is precisely what is said everywhere else in Scripture, that he came out of the eternal, everlasting glory of the Godhead. He also says here that he shared that essential glory of the eternal God from all eternity—‘Glorify thou me now with thine own self with the glory which I had with thee before the world was.’

Once again we must admit that we are trying to look at something which transcends the reason and the grasp of our finite minds. But it is the teaching of the Scriptures—the eternal triune God, the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, yet but one God, and this Son of God, the Second Person in the Trinity is sharing in all the fullness of that glory. As the author of the epistle to the Hebrews puts it, ‘Who being the brightness of his glory, and the express image of his person’—that is the description of the Lord Jesus Christ. He is the effulgence of the glory of the Father, the express image of his person. Paul, in Philippians 2, expresses the same truth when he says, ‘Who, being in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God.’ He is, to use an old phrase, self-substantial, co-equal, co-eternal with the Father. He is the eternal Son in the eternal bosom of the Father, one with God, the Second Person in the blessed, holy Trinity. ‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God’—that is it. He shared in full the ineffable, indescribable glory of the eternal Godhead. That is the way you start thinking about the Lord Jesus Christ.

So, then, the next step, obviously, is this: he prays that God the Father will glorify him again with that glory which he had with him before the world was, the implication being that something has happened to that glory. And that is precisely the teaching of the New Testament. In order to become man he laid aside this eternal glory which he had with the Father in heaven. Let us be careful here, and let us be quite sure that we know exactly what we are saying. I am not saying that he laid aside his deity, because he did not. What he did lay aside was the glory of his deity. He did not cease to be God, but he ceased to manifest the glory of God.

Perhaps the best way of understanding this is to consider what happened on the Mount of Transfiguration when he was transfigured before Peter and James and John. A kind of radiance came upon him, surpassing anything that had ever been seen before by those disciples. Now contrast that with what he normally appeared to be. Or again, take the case of Saul of Tarsus going down to Damascus. He suddenly saw a light in the heavens brighter than the shining of the sun itself, and he saw it came from a face, that of this glorified Jesus of Nazareth (Acts 9). Now you see exactly what is described here.

Again, contrast that glory with what we are told about him when he was here on earth: There is no beauty that we should desire him ... a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief (Is 53:2–3). People would look at him and say, Who is this fellow? ‘Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary?’ (Mk 6:3). He had laid aside the glory, he had not laid aside anything of his essential being or person or of his essential deity. But neither had he held on to it, he had not clutched at the manifestation of his glory, he had laid that aside as one would a cloak and had come in the likeness of man. Indeed, I must go much further than this, because this is the wonder of it all. He decided that his glory should be veiled by flesh. Think of it like this: the glory is there still shining in all its power, but a veil of flesh has come over it so that mankind cannot see it. Take an Old Testament illustration. In the wilderness Moses went on to the Mount and spoke with God, and when he came down his face was shining. The people saw the glory and it was so bright that he had to put a veil over his face; the glory was still there but it was hidden from them. Something like that happened to our Lord. Yes, but he not only came as man, nor is it only true to say that his glory was veiled by flesh. It is not true to say simply that the eternal Son of God was made flesh. We are told that he was made ‘in the likeness of sinful flesh’ (Rom 8:3). Indeed, he not only came into this world as a man, he took on him the ‘form of a servant’ (Phil 2:7). It would have been a wonderful and astounding thing if this eternal King and Prince of glory had come on earth and lived in a palace as a human king with all the pomp and glory of an earthly kingship—but not at all! He was born as a babe in very poor circumstances. Mary and Joseph did not have the money to offer the usual offering. They could only offer two turtle doves when he was born. He worked as a carpenter and he had to earn his living. He did not have a home he could claim for himself, or a place to lay down his head. He took upon himself the form of a servant and was dismissed and derided by the so-called great ones of this world of time; he stooped as low as that from the height of the glory from which he had come. Thus here on earth, in a sense, he had not that glory and he asked his Father to restore that glory to him.

There is no better way of saying all this than to put it in the words of Charles Wesley’s hymn—and how foolish we are to think that such hymns were only meant for special seasons of the year!

Veiled in flesh the Godhead see!

Hail, the Incarnate Deity.

or again:

Mild, He lays His glory by;

Born, that man no more may die.

Look at these paradoxes, these tremendous contrasts, but it is all the simple and literal truth. He thus mildly lays aside his glory and comes right down to earth, takes on human nature, lives as man in the likeness of sinful flesh and in the form of a servant. In these things we behold the amazing descent from the glory.

The next thing we are told is that we must look at his work here on earth, which really is that of glorifying the Father. He did this in many ways. He says here, ‘I have glorified thee on the earth,’ and in doing that, of course, he, in a sense, manifested his own glory, veiled in flesh. He revealed and declared the Father by just being what he was. He said on one occasion, ‘He that hath seen me hath seen the Father’ (Jn 14:9); look at him and you see something of the glorious God, the Father himself You see the eye of compassion, the understanding, the readiness to help and to bless.

If only we could see the Father, said Philip on one occasion: ‘Lord, shew us the Father, and it sufficeth us.’

And the Lord turned to him and said, ‘Have I been so long time with you, and yet hast thou not known me, Philip? he that hath seen me hath seen the Father . . .’ (Jn 14:8–9). In other words, he manifested the Father and the glory of the Father in his life and all his activities and in being what he was.

But then he also does the same thing, of course, in his teaching. There was never such teaching concerning God the Father as fell from the lips of our blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. Man’s ideas of God are always incomplete and imperfect, even the Old Testament revelation was not enough. As the author of the epistle to the Hebrews puts it, God has revealed this truth concerning himself in parts here and there—‘in time past unto the Fathers by the prophets’—but now he has revealed it in his Son, perfect, final, full and complete. It is all there in this wonderful person, the blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ—and in all his teaching and all his references concerning the Father we find all this revealed.

But then he did it in a still more striking way by doing the work which the Father had sent him to do—‘I have finished the work which thou gavest me to do’—and what was the work? First and foremost, he kept the law himself. God had given his law to mankind and he had told them to keep it, in order to glorify him. The whole spirit of the law is that we should glorify God; it is not merely to keep a number of rules and regulations, doing this and not doing that. The real object of the law is that mankind might be taught and shown how to glorify God. But mankind had failed, and so the first thing the Son was sent to do was to honour and keep the law, and thus to glorify God, and he did it perfectly. It was an essential part of his work.

Not only that, he came in order that he might be a perfect High Priest to represent those redeemed people whom God the Father had given to him. In Hebrews 5 we are told a very remarkable thing about our blessed Lord in that respect. We are told that ‘learned he obedience by the things which he suffered’. The Lord Jesus Christ, the Lord of glory, had to be taught certain things before he could become a perfect High Priest and to represent us in the presence of God. He came into this world in order to be the Captain of our salvation, our Leader, and he had to be prepared for that work and to go through this process. He had to be tempted in all points even as we are in order that he might succour us when we are tempted and be a sympathetic and understanding High Priest. He came down from the realms of glory and submitted himself to all that, and as he was doing it, he was not only showing something of his own glory, he was showing us the glory of the Father who had ever planned such a way of salvation.

What an amazing and astounding thing this is! Oh, my friends, as we read these gospels we must always be reminding ourselves of that. Look at it in detail, look at the life of our Lord Jesus Christ and remember that this is the Lord of glory. Remember that this is the One who is the brightness of the Father’s glory, the express image of his person. But look at him in the manger, or upon the Mount, suffering hunger and thirst; the Lord of glory, mildly laying by his glory and thus living life in this world as a man, being prepared to be the Captain of our salvation.

But now we come to one of the most remarkable things of all. In the first verse we read, ‘Father, the hour is come; glorify thy Son, that thy Son also may glorify thee.’ Is this the same petition as that in verse 5: ‘And now, O Father, glorify thou me with thine own self with the glory which I had with thee before the world was’?

I suggest to you that it is not the same thing, and that the two petitions do not have reference to precisely the same matter. I think that the petition in verse 1 means that the hour is come, he is about to die, about to face the greatest crisis of all. Oh, it was a mighty thing, transcending thought and imagination, for him to leave that glory, to be born as a babe and to take unto himself human nature. It was a tremendous thing for the eternal Son of God to be lying in the womb of a woman. All his trials and difficulties are something that we will never grasp and never understand in this world. And deeper and greater and beyond it all was this trial that he was now about to endure, the cross and all that it meant. So here, living life as a man, he prays to the Father, ‘Father, glorify thy Son’, by which he means, Strengthen me, enable me to show and to give proof of the fact that I am your Son. Again, in Hebrews 5, we are told that he prayed with crying and strong tears unto God to hold him and strengthen him, and we are also told there that he was heard because of his reverence and godly fear, and his beautiful piety.

And this means that he realized what he was about to do. He realized that the moment was coming when the weight of the world’s sins were to be put upon him, when he was to bear the staggering load of the guilt of the whole of mankind, that the Father had placed upon him, and it was an overwhelming thought. Would his human nature, as it were, crack and break under it? Could he stand this load, could he stand the thought of losing sight of his Father’s face as he was made sin for man, and as he bore the sin and punishment of man? Father, he says, strengthen me, hold me, prove to the world that I am your Son, glorify your Son in this world. That is the meaning of the petition in the first verse, and the prayer was answered. Oh yes, he came from the highest heaven of glory, and, as I have reminded you, was born as man, made flesh, made in the likeness of sinful flesh. He took on him the form of a servant. He endured the contradiction of sinners against himself. And, as Paul says in Philippians 2, he became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross. He was crucified and nailed upon a tree, there is no deeper death than that—

From the highest realms of glory

To the Cross of deepest woe.

He asked that the Father would enable and strengthen him and his Father heard his prayer. He was glorified, he was strengthened and he was enabled, so that at the end he was able to say, It is finished.’ He had borne it all; it had not crushed him; the body had not cracked under it. The work was done, he had accomplished everything: ‘Father,’ he said, ‘into thy hands I commend my spirit.’

Then, secondly, comes the petition in verse 5. The Lord is still looking to what is before him, and this is his prayer. Having completed all the work, having done everything which the Father had appointed him to do, he asks, as it were: Has not the time now arrived when I can come back to you, exactly where I was before? I have done the work. ‘Father, glorify thou me with thine own self with the glory which I had with thee before the world was.’ But the astonishing thing for us to remember at this point is that he goes back as God-Man! In eternity he was God the Son, pure deity, and he shared the glory, but now he goes back as God-Man. And as God-Man, and our representative, the glory which he momentarily laid aside at the request of the Father is restored to him, and thus as God-Man and Mediator he again shares this ineffable glory of the eternal God.

And so this prayer, too, was answered. It began to be answered at the resurrection, the event which finally convinced even the disciples that he was the Son of God. They did not quite understand it before, but, as Paul puts it in writing to the Romans, our Lord was, ‘declared to be the Son of God with power, according to the spirit of holiness, by the resurrection from the dead’ (Rom 1:4). Who is this who has conquered death and the grave? He must be, he is, the Son of God. Consider the appearances after the resurrection. You find the disciples in Jerusalem behind locked doors because they were afraid of the Jews, and suddenly he came in without the door being opened. They thought it was a ghost. But he showed that he was not by asking them to give him something to eat. So they gave him ‘a piece of a broiled fish and of an honeycomb’. ‘You see who I am,’ he says in effect, ‘I have flesh and bones, and I can eat’—the glorious person of this risen Lord.

Then perhaps still more strikingly we see it in the ascension. Many of us do not observe Ascension Day, do we? We are a little inconsistent in this; we observe Christmas, Good Friday, and Easter Sunday! We observe Whit Sunday, but we do not observe Ascension Day, and it is a very essential part in all this movement of God’s plan. His disciples were with him on the Mount and while he was speaking, he was lifted up and he ascended into heaven. His glory was manifested in a most amazing manner there. And then he manifested it still more by sending the gift of his Holy Spirit on the Day of Pentecost. It is a proof that he is the Son of God, the Messiah, this glorious being. And there he is now, sitting at the right hand of God in the glory, reigning until all his enemies shall be made his footstool.

And so I have tried to hold before you something of the glory which is depicted in these five verses, from the glory, down to the depths of the cross and to Hades, and back again via the ascension to that ineffable glory once more, and he now takes human nature with him. But why has he done all this? I can imagine someone saying, ‘My dear Sir, this is all very well, you know. If we were living in a leisurely world and had no business and no cares and no worries and trials perhaps we could take all these remarks objectively. But we want something that will help us now, here and now in the immediate present, have you not something to say to us?’

I hope nobody feels like that after what we have just been considering? I have just been reminding you of what the eternal Son of God has done for you, that you might be saved from the wrath of God and from hell, and from sin, and from yourself He has done it that you might become a son of God, that you might begin to enjoy ‘a joy unspeakable and full of glory’, and that you might receive the Holy Spirit with all his power and might. That is what it is all about. If you feel that all I have been saying is something theoretical and remote, it is because you do not understand, because you are not related to it, and because you do not realize it has all been done for you. That is the greatness of the glory; he has done all this for us.

From the highest realms of glory,

To the Cross of deepest woe,

All to ransom guilty captives

Flow my praise, for ever flow.

And then I turn to him and say—

Go, return, Immortal Saviour,

Leave Thy footstool, take Thy throne,

Thence return and reign for ever,

Be the Kingdom all Thine own.

That is the true reaction to the things we have been considering together. He did it all to ransom guilty captives, and if you realize that he has done that for you, you will agree with Robert Robinson when he wrote these words: ‘Is your praise flowing? Do you praise the Lord Jesus Christ? Do you praise him to other people; do you talk to them about him?’ People talk today about those whom they like and admire. I read of them praising actors and actresses and all sorts of politicians and people; you see it in the newspapers, and you have to listen to them when you are trying to read in a railway compartment. But do we praise the Lord Jesus Christ? If we do not it is because we do not realize what he has done for us. Again, I would agree with Robert Robinson when he says—‘Break my tongue, such guilty silence.’

Oh, my dear friends, if you do not realize the glory of these things, hasten to God and confess it. Ask him so to give you his Holy Spirit that your eyes will be opened to these precious, glorious truths. The Holy Spirit was sent in order to make these things real to us. If we but realized these things then we would inevitably be praising with the whole of our being, and our whole life would be to his praise. The Holy Spirit will enable us to realize these glorious things. He will so imprint and impress them upon mind and heart and understanding that they will be real to us, so real that finally we shall be able to join Paul in saying, To me to live is Christ.’