John 17:1
I want in particular now to look at the phrase, ‘the hour is come’. My whole case is that if we fail or falter in the Christian life, either in thought or in action, if we are unhappy or defeated, if in any way we are failing to function in this world as a Christian should, and as the Christian life is portrayed so plainly in the New Testament, then such failure is ultimately due to the fact that our view of our position as Christian people in Christ Jesus is in some way or another defective.
There is no question but that the New Testament has the answer to all the problems and difficulties of the Christian life, and its object is to bring us back to the truth itself and to give us a still clearer view of it. So we are not doing something theoretical. There is nothing more fatal than the kind of dichotomy that some people seem to recognize between belief and life, faith and practice, for these are indissolubly mixed. The most practical people, who pride themselves on being so, the people who say they are not very interested in doctrine, but who believe in doing things, are the very people who will, sooner or later, find themselves in grave trouble. It is fatal only to recognize one or the other—the two things must be taken together. So we have spent some time in looking at this plan of salvation as it is unfolded here.
But now we must look at this phrase, ‘Father, the hour is come’, for the great doctrine concerning ‘this hour’ is again something that is of vital importance to us. In a sense, the whole of salvation is seen as we look at our Lord facing this hour, and the very essence of the truth is emphasized by the doctrine that is here outlined. As he points out so often, he came from heaven, and did all that we were considering earlier in order to come to this hour, for this hour was essential to the completion of that work which the Father had given him to do. There can be no doubt but that this hour is the focus and climax, at one and the same time, of everything that our Lord came to do. It is the crucial, climactic point in the whole of that mighty work that we have been looking at in general.
The best way, it seems to me, of approaching the teaching and doctrine concerning ‘this hour’ is that we should remind ourselves of some of the statements which our Lord himself made with respect to it. For instance, we are told that on the occasion of the marriage in Cana of Galilee, when his mother asked him to do something about the shortage of wine, he turned to her and said, ‘Woman, what have I to do with thee? mine hour is not yet come’ (Jn 2:4). He is already speaking of it. Again, he had to say the same thing to his brethren who upbraided him for not going to the feast at Jerusalem. He said, ‘My time is not yet come’ (Jn 7:6), and that phrase has a special meaning to it. Then we are told on another occasion that his enemies sought to take him, but that, ‘No man laid hands on him, because his hour was not yet come’ (Jn 7:30). Later on we read again that no man laid hands on him for his hour was not yet come (Jn 8:20).
Then take the statement in John 12:23, ‘And Jesus answered them, saying, The hour is come, that the Son of man should be glorified.’ And, just after that, hear him saying, ‘Now is my soul troubled; and what shall I say? Father, save me from this hour: but for this cause came I unto this hour.’ Then there is the reference in the thirteenth chapter to the same thing: ‘When Jesus knew that his hour was come . . .’ and again, later, he says, ‘Behold the hour cometh, yea, is now come, that ye shall be scattered, every man to his own, and shall leave me alone.’ Then we have the statement here, ‘Father, the hour is come. . .’ and there is also another very interesting and important statement in Luke 22:53, where we read that he turned to the authorities that were against him and hated him and said, ‘. . .but this is your hour, and the power of darkness.’
Now in order to interpret this verse in John 17 aright, we must bear all this in mind, and as we do so, I think there are certain things which can be said quite plainly. The first is that this ‘hour’ is obviously a predetermined hour. You notice that all those statements regarding it have something very special, and definite to say. When he says, ‘Mine hour is not yet come’, he is, in effect, telling them, ‘My time is not yet come; your time is always here, but there is a special time as far as I am concerned. You want me to come and declare myself; no, you do not understand it, the time for that has not yet come.’ In other words, you find our Lord always looking forward to this hour. Indeed this theme of expectation is to be found running right through the whole of Scripture.
This whole problem of time is a particularly important and fascinating one; there are some who would say that in many ways it is the biggest and most important point in the whole of theology, and the question of how to relate time, as we know it, to eternity and timelessness causes a great deal of confusion. Now if you are a philosopher, it can be a profound problem, yet, if we take the Scripture as it is, I think it becomes comparatively plain and clear. God has brought the time process into being, and, having done so, he has appointed that certain things should take place at a certain time. It is not that God is bound by time, but that he has ordered that things should happen in the realm of time, and thus you find in the Old Testament and in the New that God has appointed minutes.
Take the flood as an illustration. God had said, ‘My Spirit shall not always strive with man’ (Gen 6:3). He had focussed upon a determined point; he was able to call Noah to start building the ark 120 years before the flood came. He knew when the flood was coming—all these things are plain and open unto the eye of God. And so it was that ‘when the fullness of the time was come’—when the hour had come—’God sent forth his Son, made of a woman, made under the law, to redeem them that were under the law’ (Gal 4:3–4).
This, surely, is a thought that liberates us at once from most of the thraldom of life in this world. You look at life today, and at history, and at the whole course of the world, and if you look at it with the human eye alone, you will find it very difficult to see any meaning in it. But the moment we begin to look at it in the light of this doctrine of ‘the hour’, though we may not understand it fully with all its details, we can at once be certain that the Lord still reigns and that life in this world is not out of hand. As we read this biblical history and see the clashing of the nations, with the people opposed to God, and apparently out of control, we find that at a given point God does redeem the world in spite of man. When God’s time arrives God comes in and the whole world has to conform again to his plan and purpose.
So the great consolation for us is that though we see the Christian church and Christianity derided and apparently counting for so little in this modern world; and though we may see on the surface that the enemy opposed to the church is triumphant all along the line, and that God’s people are languishing, we nevertheless know for certain, beyond any doubt whatsoever, that God’s hand is still upon the situation, and that in a moment he can arise and confound all his enemies. ‘He that sitteth in the heavens shall laugh’ (Ps 2:4), as he sees these pigmies exalting themselves, for he knows that at a word he can destroy them, and they will perish out of sight.
But in particular for our purpose as we consider the plan of salvation, the important thing is that all the things that happened to him did not take our Lord by surprise. That has been the fatal view of our Lord, his person and his work, ever since the advent of the so called higher criticism movement. They represent our Lord as a human teacher who had his plan of teaching the people, his own nation, and converting them to his point of view, and then sending them out to spread this wonderful teaching. But, suddenly, these people tell us, after three years the whole thing came crashing to the ground. He never anticipated this rejection, they say, he never thought they had it in their hearts to do such a thing. That is the picture that is painted, and we are left feeling very sorry for this ‘pale Galilean’, this incomparable teacher, this Galilean peasant, born before his time with his exalted idealism, and so on, who saw it all brought to nothing, and broke his heart at the failure of it all, so that he died of a broken heart upon the cross.
What a travesty of this glorious gospel! My friend, he came from heaven, he laid aside his glory, as we were considering earlier, in order to come to ‘this hour’. He knew it from the beginning. He came to die, specifically to die. We have seen that, apart from that death on the cross, he cannot deliver me; that apart from the death on the cross, I say it again with reverence, even God cannot forgive man. The cross is absolutely essential, the cross was planned before the world was ever created. So the hour that produced the cross is the central, pivotal point, of history and God always knew about it, the Lord came for that hour. So we must never think of this hour as taking him by surprise, it was an hour that was appointed and determined, it was the crisis of the world itself.
But let us go on to the second point, that this hour is the crucial hour of history. There is no question about that. It was the most momentous hour since the beginning of the world, it is indeed the turning point which determines everything—it is the greatest event, the most—yes, let me use the word again—climactic event that has ever taken place in this world. Everything leads up to that hour, everything eventuates from that hour. That is the hour to which the whole of prophecy is looking forward, and to which the whole of the church, and her doctrine and history look back. It is the central, focal, point which determines and controls everything. It was the point on which everything that God had planned depended, and if there were failure at this point everything would fail. Hence our Lord’s prayer to his Father, ‘the hour is come glorify thy Son, that thy Son may glorify thee’.
If the Son had failed at this particular point, everything else would have been useless. His teaching would have been of no value whatsoever, because, though we might have tried to live it, and carry it out, yet we would have lacked the strength and the power. He would have been giving us a law even more impossible than the law given through Moses, and thereby he would have condemned us and left us under a still greater condemnation. It is the most vital hour of all, for, I say again, if he cannot bear the punishment of our sins, then he does not save us. But having borne the punishment, he does save us, so it is what happened in that hour that really holds, within itself, the entirety of our salvation.
There are people who would sometimes preach a gospel apart from this. You ask them what the gospel is, and they reply that the gospel is the Lord Jesus Christ somehow or other giving new life to men, lifting men out of their failure and giving them new life. And they sometimes present that without mentioning the cross. But, my friends, before you and I need a new life, we need forgiveness. Something has to be done about the past before we face the future. You cannot suddenly decide that you are going to live a better life, you have to deal with the problem of your past and your sin. It is this hour that deals with that, for there is no regeneration, no new life, except for those who are forgiven and justified in the sight of God. This, then, is a crucial hour.
But I must say something about what I would call the drama of the hour. There is a kind of mystery about this hour. It is very interesting as one reads the gospels to keep one’s eye on the references to it. We have been looking at our Lord coming up to this hour, but he is not the only one who is preparing for it. The forces on the other side are also interested in this same hour and you can watch the plan developing from their side as well as from his side. That is where the statement in Luke 22 comes in—‘this is your hour’. You cannot read the story of our Lord’s experiences without seeing this tremendous fight, and I am emphasizing it here because nothing is so sad to me as the failure of many people to realize the conflict that is going on in this world. We are ready to fight against certain evil tendencies, but over and above the fight against the sin that is within us, there is this cosmic fight against sin.
There is a sense in which the Bible is nothing but a great drama in which you find depicted the mighty conflict between God and the powers of hell. The background to the Bible is something that happened before human history began—the great question of the devil and the origin of the devil and of evil. We do not know everything about it—it has not pleased God to reveal everything—but he has revealed this much, that quite apart from our history there was a kind of cosmic fall. As we have seen, one of the greatest of God’s angelic beings rebelled against him. He is the devil, called Satan, and his one object is to defeat God. And what is unfolded in this great drama in the Bible is the attempt of the devil to destroy God’s works, and to defeat God. God made his world perfect—Paradise—but the devil came in and started a fight. He persuaded man that an injustice had been done against him, and the whole of humanity, and the whole universe.
And the fight continues. Read your Bible with that in view and you will find it will be a transformed book; you will see the failure in God’s own people, quite apart from the others, and it is all because the devil tried to turn them against God. You find it even when the Son of God comes into this world. The devil tried to destroy him at the beginning, the moment he was born. He took hold of King Herod and persuaded him to try to destroy this Child, this Messiah, the Saviour. Keep your eye on the malignity of the scribes and Pharisees, and the doctors of the law and the violent hatred that was manifested by them because they saw in him the representative of God. You remember how the devil said the thing explicitly on one occasion, ‘I know thee who thou art; the Holy One of God’ (Lk 4:34). They realized that they were fighting for their lives. The devil tempted him in the wilderness; the devil was fighting for his life and the whole of his forces were being marshalled for this ultimate clash when the two forces came together. And the clash takes place at this tremendous hour, when the Son of God is going to give his life a ransom for many. So we have to look at this hour from both these angles.
What, then, does our Lord mean exactly when he says in the Garden of Gethsemane, ‘This is your hour, and the power of darkness’? It seems to me that the only possible explanation must be that this hour would never have come to pass were it not for the power of darkness. What makes this hour and all that it involves necessary and essential? It is again the problem of sin and of evil, the problem of Satan and of hell. It is the kind of hour that the devil has staged and brought into being, for, in one sense, he has manipulated it, though in a much higher sense he has not. I think that this is the way to look at it—it is the work of the devil that makes the hour essential from God’s standpoint; it is because of what Satan has produced by sin and evil that God has to do this in order to overcome it.
So it is, in a sense, their hour, and it is there that we really see the essence of evil and of sin. It is such a terrible thing that nothing less than this could deal with it. It is not a question of God’s love and forgiveness, it is evil that has to be dealt with in this radical way. The devil has produced such a situation that this hour alone can deal with it.
So this hour can be described as ‘their hour’, and the hour of the glorification of the Son at the same time, and that is why he prays that his Father may glorify him. It is in going through this hour, that has been produced by Satan and hell, that our Lord really is glorified. It is there we know for certain that he is the Son of God. No one had ever before had to meet Satan and conquer him, no one had been able to destroy the power that Satan had over death—that is the way the author of the epistle to the Hebrews puts it: That through death he might destroy him that had the power of death’ (2:14) and thus he sets the children free, and Christ has done it through this, his glorification. The death and the resurrection is the proof that he is the Son of God.
But let us, if we can, try for a moment, with reverence, to look at it in this way. What did this hour mean to our Lord himself? Well, he has given us an indication. Consider the statement in John 12:27, ‘Now is my soul troubled; and what shall I say? Father, save me from this hour’—then he answers himself and says—‘but for this cause came I unto this hour.’ There I think is the right approach to any consideration of what this hour meant to him. He knew it was coming, he had known that all along, and now here he was actually facing it. But although his soul was troubled, he did not ask God, his Father, to save him from this hour. No, that was impossible, he could not do that, for ‘this hour’ was his reason for coming to the world.
‘Well,’ says someone, ‘if he always knew about this hour, if he had come from heaven in order to come to this hour, if he knew for certain, as he did, that beyond that hour he was going to rise again from the grave and go to the glory’—indeed, every time our Lord spoke to his disciples about his coming death, he always went on to speak of the resurrection. He knew he was going to rise again, and go to the glory. The author of the epistle to the Hebrews reminds us of that when he says, ‘who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross’—‘so then,’ the questioner continues, ‘if all that is true why does he say, “now is my soul troubled”? How could he know the glory that is coming, and the triumph of the resurrection? How could he know he had come to this climactic hour which was going to make salvation possible and yet say, “Now is my soul troubled,” and, “Father, save me from this hour”? What was the cause of the trouble?’
There are those who think this is quite a simple problem. They say it was nothing but his physical shrinking from death; he knew about the glory of the resurrection, but the thought of physical suffering troubled him and he shrank from it as a man. In his body, in his flesh, he shrank from the thought of this physical dissolution. But to me that very thought is insulting. It is not only insulting to our Lord as a man, it is such a tragic failure to understand what happened there. No, that is no explanation, for if you accept it, then you make our Lord a lesser person than the martyrs. The martyrs faced death without a fear because they believed the gospel of the resurrection. Their knowledge of it was nothing by contrast with our Lord’s knowledge, but it was enough to enable them to go boldly to the stake without a quiver or a fear. And so that supposition makes our Lord less than his own followers and inferior to some of his own martyrs. No, such an explanation is impossible. It is a tragic blindness that makes us try to view these things from the standpoint of human reasoning, instead of in terms of biblical doctrine.
What, then, did he shrink from? What was it that troubled his holy, righteous soul? It was the fact that he knew what was going to happen in that hour. He knew that the full, total wrath of God against sin was to be manifested and poured out against him—that was what he shrank from. If physical suffering holds no terrors to a courageous man who may not even be a Christian, it is still less to a Christian saint or martyr, and to the Son of God, it is nothing at all. There was only one thing that the Son of God shrank from, and that was to be separated from the face of his Father; he shrank from anything that could interrupt that love that had existed between them from all eternity. The one thing the Son of God shrank from was to look into his Father’s face and see there that holy wrath against sin, and he knew that that was what he would have to experience in that hour. His soul was to be made an offering for sin, he himself was to be made sin, so that at that hour God was going to look at him, and he was not going to see the Son in whom he was well pleased, but this horrible, foul, ugly thing.
And that is why the Son says, in effect, ‘Now is my soul troubled—what shall I say? Shall I ask him to save me from this hour? No, because if I do, I shall not save man from all that wrath of God which shall be poured out upon me. I have come for that hour, it is the purpose of my coming into this world. God cannot be just and the justifier of the ungodly unless I bear it, so I will bear it.’ ‘That hour’—his hour—what an hour!
The one thing, therefore, that made him speak like this was his certain clear knowledge of what was involved in this one moment, as it were, and it was the thing that broke his heart. It was the thing that killed him. In a sense, our Lord did not die of crucifixion, but because the wrath of God against sin was so poured out upon him. We are told that the soldiers, when they came, were amazed that he was dead already. Crucifixion was a slow process of death, the man who was crucified took a long time to die, but here was one who died quickly, and they were amazed. And the cause of it was a ruptured heart. So that is why his soul was troubled. It was the thought of losing the face of his Father, the thing that made him cry out on the cross. ‘My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?’ He really saw sin, and he was made sin, and all God’s holy wrath against him was poured on him. He bore it all and that is what the hour meant to him.
But I want to say a final word on the results of the hour, which are put very plainly by Jesus in John 12:31. What an hour this is! Do you not begin to see that it is the most momentous hour of all time? We talk about those pivotal points of history, but they are all nothing when you look at this. ‘Now is the judgement of this world’—the whole world, in the sense that it is the hour in which the world was really revealed for what it is. It was there that sin was revealed. There, shown plainly and clearly once and for ever, is the whole state of mankind apart from God. I do not know whether we realize this as we ought; sin is something so fiendish and so foul that it led to that terrible hour. So the next time the devil tempts you, remember that you will not merely be doing something which you should not be doing. No, you will be putting yourself into the realm of sin, opposed to God. But not only does the cross reveal sin for what it is, at one and the same time it pronounces doom on the whole world and everything that belongs to that realm. The cross of Jesus Christ makes this great proclamation. Unless I believe in him, unless I believe that his death at that hour is the only thing that reconciles me to God, I remain under the wrath of God. If I do not see that the wrath of God against my sin has been borne there by the Son of God, then the alternative is that I must live to experience the wrath of God: that is the essence of the Christian gospel. I either believe that my sins have been punished in the body of the Son of God or else they will be punished in me. It is the judgement of the world.
The world apart from him is under the wrath of God, it is doomed, it is damned and he alone can save it in that way. There was no other way, for God would never have allowed his Son to endure all that if there had been another way. It is the only way, so it is the judgement of the world. And we, all of us, either believe that the Lord Jesus Christ saved us in that hour, or else we remain in our sins, we belong to the world that is going to be condemned and finally judged. The gospel tells us that he will come back again and that this time he will return to judge. The one question that will face everybody is this: do you belong to him or do you not? The books will be opened; the names of the people who believe in Christ are in one book, the book of the Lamb of God, and if you belong to his book you are saved. But the world is damned and destroyed and cast into a lake of fire—the judgement of this world. But the judgement was pronounced at the cross. Though the nature has been postponed and is still being postponed, judgement has been pronounced, so that anyone who dies without believing on the Lord Jesus Christ belongs to the world and that has already had judgement pronounced upon it.
Likewise, the prince of this world shall be cast out. The devil has already been defeated, for Christ defeated him on the cross. The devil was working up to this hour, and when the Lord died he thought he had defeated him at last, but he did not realize the truth of the resurrection. Christ rose again and by so doing he has destroyed principalities and powers and triumphed over them by his own cross, which they thought was their masterpiece. The very death which they thought was his defeat turns out to be the greatest victory of all and by it they are finally doomed. The devil is still very active in this world, but he is already defeated. In a sense he is already cast out, and has no authority at all. Christ’s people, all who belong to Christ, all that the Father has given him, are going to be drawn to him. The devil is already defeated, and is going to be cast into that lake of fire and will be destroyed eternally.
What an hour! Oh, that the Holy Spirit would open our eyes to see and to know something of these things! We are talking about historical events, this hour belongs to time, it belongs to history. It is not an idea, it is not some wonderful theory that men have woven out of their imagination. These things have literally happened, so I am left with this fact that the Son of God has been in this world, and has passed through that hour for my sins. If I believe that, I know that that hour is the one which has saved me from everlasting destruction, but if I do not believe, I am left condemned. Our Lord puts it again in John 12: ‘I came not to judge the world . . . the word that I have spoken, the same will judge. . .’ (verses 47,48). Though he did not come to judge, yet he is giving his judgement. We cannot escape, the devil is judged by this hour, the world is judged by this hour.
Oh, may God grant us to see sin for what it really is! We cannot be indifferent to these things, for if we believe them our way of life is going to be determined. If I believe all this, how can I be indifferent to sin? No, the One who has done this for me deserves my life, my soul, my all. He must be my Lord and my Master. I say again that failure in the Christian life is the failure really to see the meaning of this hour, to see the meaning of sin, the failure to realize what he suffered for you, the failure to realize the consequences of not believing in him. May God give us grace, therefore, to meditate upon this hour, this astounding, crucial, climactic hour in which the essence of our salvation was worked out and achieved by the Son of God in his terrible agony and suffering upon the cross.