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A Gift to the Son: John 17:6-8

~ pjwenzel ~ 3 Comments

John 17:6-8

Jesus has manifested the name of the Father to the Disciples and to us – His love-gift from the Father of a people called out of the world, a people who are called according to purpose and a plan

17:6 “I have manifested your name to the people whom you gave me out of the world. Yours they were, and you gave them to me, and they have kept your word.

Verse six is a transition verse. Jesus has been talking about His own glory and his petition has been focused on Himself and His work – which is about to be consummated, and yet in His mind the work was all but certainly fulfilled (vs.4).

Now He turns His attention to those that God has given Him, His disciples. And there are several points worth stopping and meditating upon before we go any further. The key points are these:

  • Jesus Manifested the Father’s Name
  • The Elect are a Gift to Christ from the Father
  • The Elect are ‘Out of the World’ and therefore no better off than any other intrinsically
  • The Elect were the Father’s Before Even Being Called to Salvation/Given to Christ
  • The Disciples ‘Kept the Word’ of Christ

Manifesting the Father’s Name

The word “manifest” is phaneroō in the Greek, which means “to reveal” or “to make known” (MacArthur). What does it mean to “reveal” or “make known” the name of the Lord? Certainly it’s more than just shouting “Yahweh! Yahweh! Yahweh!” on every street corner in Galilee and Jerusalem!

The idea here is that the sum total of God’s character and attributes are bound up in His name. So that when Jesus is declaring “the name” of the Father, He is declaring who the Father is in His essential being, and what He is all about – MacArthur says, “God’s name encompasses all that He is: His character, nature, and attributes.”

Hendricksen says something profound here: “The Son is the Father’s Exegete. Apart from him no one ever gets to know spiritual matters in their real, inner essence and value. The Father’s name – that is, the Father himself, as he displays his glorious attributes in the realm of redemption – is not apart from the words and words of the Son. This knowledge concerning the Father means everlasting life (vs. 3).”

When Hendriksen says that Jesus is the Father’s “Exegete”, what he’s saying is the Jesus, as the Son of God, is best qualified to explain to us who the Father is – what He’s like and so forth.

Today we have the word of God in the Scripture – it is living and active (Hebrews 4) and it is “God’s own divine interpretation, through human authors, of his own redemptive acts (Steven Wellum).” Jesus is the Word of God incarnate and here has declared (in the aorist, and therefore finished sense) that He has completed His mission of telling the world – especially those whom God has given Him – about who God is.

Carson says it well, “That the revelation Jesus simultaneously is and delivers can be briefly summed up as your word is not surprising, for all of Jesus’ words are God’s words (5:19-30), and Jesus himself is God’s self-expression, God’s Word incarnate (1:1,14).”

The Elect are a Gift to Christ

Next we see that those whom He declared the name of God unto are none other than those whom God “gave” Christ. What this means is that God the Father has given His Son a gift for the work He completed, that gift is us, His church, His bride, the elect of God.

This week as Chloe and I were riding back home from Good Friday service we were talking about the plan of God in the macro sense of things – I didn’t use theological terms like “metanarrative” or “predestination” and I didn’t have to. After a few questions about giving God praise, and some clever deduction, Chloe figured it out on her own and finally answered (in the form of a question) the question every man and every woman eventually asks: why are we here on earth? She phrased it in stutters, and shifted the words about a few times, but she basically said, “so we are just made by God so that Jesus can have us and control us?” Her answer sounded like the Arminian caricature of a puppet master-God. Once I clarified with her what she was getting at she said again, “well, so, God made us so that He could love us and give us to Jesus so that we could make Him happy?” (I paraphrase) and I said, “yup, that’s exactly right!” Of course, Augustine’s ‘Confessions’ came to mind, but I didn’t sport with her intellect on that score! It didn’t take much for her to figure out quickly what the “chief end of man” was, even though she’s only seven years old.

The reason I point this out though and bring it up today is because all people were made to praise God. Those who don’t are still in their fallen sinful darkened ways. Their minds are darkened to this purpose – to their purpose. Christians have a purpose – we exist for His glory. And here Christ expresses this truth in a unique way: we are a gift from the Father to the Son.

This isn’t a new idea though for us who’ve studied John together.

Earlier in John 6 we read this:

All that the Father gives me will come to me, and whoever comes to me I will never cast out. For I have come down from heaven, not to do my own will but the will of him who sent me. And this is the will of him who sent me, that I should lose nothing of all that he has given me, but raise it up on the last day. For this is the will of my Father, that everyone who looks on the Son and believes in him should have eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day.” (John 6:37-40)

If you think of this in Easter terms, for it is Easter week as I write this, it is a remarkable thing that the ransom was us, and that He died for us, and that the rescue mission was to free us.

The bottom line is that He rose from the grave and brought us along with Him. United to Him (Rom. 6) we have assurance that we will live forever with him. There are many points of assurance to consider, but this particular verse reminds us of another one, namely that if the Father had in His heart the desire or plan to give His Son a gift of a certain group of people whom He died to save, do you think that there is anything in the world or universe that can thwart that objective (Romans 8:31-39)? To ask the question is to answer it. God always – always – get’s His way. And His way here is to give His Son a gift and that gift is us.

Not because of anything about or in us particularly, which leads to the next point…

The Elect are ‘Out of the World’

Jesus says that those whom the Father is giving Him are “out of the world” – that necessarily means that we were of the world before being rescued. And that means that we needed a Rescuer. Which, in turn, means that we were doomed to hell unless He intervened. There was nothing in us that made us more worthy or more desirable than other men. God simply loves to save, and He does so of His own prerogative and according to His own good pleasure.

In other words, you don’t get to choose ahead of time to be part of the gift from the Father to the Son. The Father doesn’t leave something that important in your hands – sorry. Why? Well, because He actually wants to give His Son a gift, and if it was up to you, He would have nothing to give His Son! Why?   Because if it was up to you, you would never choose to be Christ’s, you would never choose to surrender your life to God, you would never choose on your own to believe in the Son of God made flesh. The story of the resurrection would seem like foolishness to you, but guess what, if you’re a Christian today you are rejoicing in the resurrection of Christ because God has shined the light of knowledge into your darkened, depraved and broken soul and has done a work of resurrection in you! For as Paul says:

For while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly. For one will scarcely die for a righteous person—though perhaps for a good person one would dare even to die—but God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. (Romans 5:6-8)

The Canons of Dort express this well, “…chosen out of the whole human race, fallen by its own fault from its primeval integrity into sin and destruction, a certain number of persons, neither better nor more deserving than others but with them involved in a common misery, unto salvation in Christ; whom even from eternity he had appointed Mediator and Head of all the elect and the foundation of salvation. The elect number, though by nature neither better nor more deserving than others, but with them involved in one common misery, God had decreed to give to Christ to be save by Him, and effectually to call and draw them to His communion by His Word and Spirit, to bestow upon them true faith, justification and sanctification…”

And as Paul says:

But our citizenship is in heaven, and from it we await a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ, who will transform our lowly body to be like his glorious body, by the power that enables him even to subject all things to himself. (Philippians 3:20-21)

Let us not leave this verse without realizing that He has called us “out of the world” and that had it not been for His mercy, His initiating grace, His prerogative, we would be bound for hell and eternal torment. Praise God for His mercy.

The Elect were the Father’s Before Even Being Called to Salvation

Now for the mystery: Jesus says that the elect were the Father’s even before being given to Christ – “yours they were.” Jesus is thinking most particularly about the disciples, but the truth extends to us as well.

Now, we know that everything belongs to God. As He says through the Psalmist, “…every beast of the forest is mine, the cattle on a thousand hills” (Ps. 50:10). But Jesus is speaking more specifically here. He is saying that in the eternal mind of God, we – specific people, not an amorphous unknown to be determined group – were His in a special way before being called to come to Christ.

As Hendriksen says that this happened, “in order that this eternal counsel might become effective in their lives, they had been given to Jesus so that he by means of his atoning sacrifice might save them.”

So it wasn’t just enough for God to “know” these people (you and me) he has taken the extra step in “giving” us to Christ. And Christ calls us to Himself through the drawing power of the Spirit. He calls us to the cross. He calls us to repentance and to eternal life – life only He can give through His mediatorial role.

That’s why D.A. Carson says, “The ones for whom Jesus prays, then, antecedently belonged to God, who took them out of the world and gave them to his Son, who manifested God’s name to them.”

From before the foundation of the world (Eph. 1:4-14) God had us in His minds eye that He would save us and that Christ would atone for our sins. This is a great and mysterious truth, and today we stand back in awe of all He has done for us before we could do anything at all. Before we drew breath, before our parents drew breath, before our ancestors came to this nation, before Noah, before Adam, before time, He had a plan to save you and me and give us to His Son as a gift!

The Disciples ‘Kept the Word’ of Christ

The last thing we learn in this verse is that the Disciples “kept the word” of Jesus.

In order to understand what Jesus is saying we must first affirm what He is not saying.

Jesus is not saying that because they were good people who obeyed God they’re going to go to heaven. That is far from what Christ is saying. In fact, the antecedent declaration that the Father had given them to Christ serves us as a prerequisite for their belonging to Christ.

Furthermore, Jesus is not saying that they were born again by the Spirit and therefore were obedient to the commands of Christ in a new covenant sense. For this is pre-Pentecost and no one had yet been given the gift of the Divine Helper — as is evident from the previous four chapters where the Helper is promised to come later.

What Jesus is saying is that in the pre-resurrection, pre-Pentecost sense that when you look at all the people Jesus preached the gospel to, these disciples of his were the only ones who “kept” his word. In this case, “keeping the word” of Christ means believing that He is the Messiah.

D.A. Carson explains why:

…a good case can be made that when in the Fourth Gospel Jesus refers to his words (plural) he is talking about the precepts he lays down, almost equivalent to his ‘commands’ (entolai, as in 14:21; 15:10), but when he refers to his word (singular) he is talking about his message as a whole, almost equivalent to ‘gospel’. The disciples had not displayed mature conformity to the details of Jesus’ teaching, but they had committed themselves unreservedly to Jesus as the Messiah, the one who truly reveals the Father.

And so what this means is that “they have kept the revelatory ‘word’ that Jesus has mediated to them from the Father” but that doesn’t mean that they are “’Christians in the full post-Pentecostal, Antiochian sense (Acts 11:25). It simply means that, as compared with the world, they have been drawn out of it (vs. 6)…” (Carson).

All of this will come into focus in verse 7 and 8, but first…

…let us consider the crux of all of this…

The thrust of this verse is that God had a plan for a specific group of people from before time began, that these people would be given as a love-gift to the Son from the Father. Because the Father delights in giving the elect to the Son, and because the Son has sacrificed His own body on the cross for the sins of His elect, there is therefore no power in heaven or on earth that can separate us from the mission and love of God in Christ.

What God has joined together, no man may separate – and such is the case of the bride (the Church) and the bridegroom (Christ). For as Paul aptly and joyously states:

What then shall we say to these things? If God is for us, who can be against us? He who did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all, how will he not also with him graciously give us all things? Who shall bring any charge against God’s elect? It is God who justifies. Who is to condemn? Christ Jesus is the one who died—more than that, who was raised—who is at the right hand of God, who indeed is interceding for us. Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or danger, or sword? As it is written,

     “For your sake we are being killed all the day long;

     we are regarded as sheep to be slaughtered.”

No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am sure that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. (Romans 8:31-39)

17:7-8 Now they know that everything that you have given me is from you. [8] For I have given them the words that you gave me, and they have received them and have come to know in truth that I came from you; and they have believed that you sent me.

In verse seven Jesus says that he has told the disciples “everything” that “you” meaning “the Father” had given him. This is tantamount to saying “I’ve fulfilled this part of my mission.”

Stop for a moment and consider the weightiness of the fact that the words that sprang forth from the lips of this man Jesus were words made known to Him before the dirt under your feet existed…it is an awesome thing to think that the words we read here in Scripture came from the mind of God Himself.

Now verse eight says that the disciples “received” the words from Jesus. Earlier in verse six Jesus said the disciples “kept your word”, and I labored a little to show how this “keeping” was really having to do with accepting Jesus as the Messiah, and accepting the gospel message that He was proclaiming. It was believing that He was who He said He was. That is the same here I believe, because Jesus speaks in a sort of parallelism when He says:

They have received them
(They have) come to know in truth that I came from you
They have believed that you sent me
 

All three of these are basically saying the same thing – they believe that what I’m saying is true and that I am the Messiah sent directly from you.

This is remarkable, especially when you consider that others who have delivered messages from God were not always believed. One need only think of Luke 1 and Zachariah:

And the angel answered him, “I am Gabriel. I stand in the presence of God, and I was sent to speak to you and to bring you this good news. And behold, you will be silent and unable to speak until the day that these things take place, because you did not believe my words, which will be fulfilled in their time.” (Luke 1:19-20)

Zachariah was described as a righteous man not many verses earlier, and yet he did not have the faith to accept a message sent directly from God’s throne room. You can sort of hear the indignity in Gabriel’s voice! “Listen, I just came from the presence of the ALMIGHTY! Don’t you get it? Don’t you understand? I heard this with my own ears not a few minutes ago from God HIMSELF!”

So we must not sell the disciples short. They are not yet indwelt with the Spirit, but they believe the message from Jesus.

What we ought to really take away from this is that the heart of the message that Jesus had proclaimed had to do with the salvation of mankind from their bondage to sin. And the chief remedy to this is to “believe” that Jesus is who He says He is. To believe He came from heaven. That is what we must do. I’ll just end this thought by turning your attention back again to the sixth chapter of John’s gospel where another crowd wanted to know how to please God:

Then they said to him, “What must we do, to be doing the works of God?” Jesus answered them, “This is the work of God, that you believe in him whom he has sent.” (John 6:28-29)

Study Notes for 10-27-13, John 14:15-24

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Below are study notes for John 14:15-24

14:15-17 “If you love me, you will keep my commandments. [16] And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Helper, to be with you forever, [17] even the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees him nor knows him. You know him, for he dwells with you and will be in you.

“If” You Love Me

Here we see that the prerequisite for obedience to Christ’s commands is a love for Him.  That makes perfect sense, doesn’t it?  I mean, if we are in love with the Lord Jesus, then of course we will want to obey Him!

But the next thing that should come to mind is that we can’t obey the law even if we do love Jesus.  The disciples don’t even get a chance to ask the question, which should be: How are we supposed to follow all of your commands, or even want to do that all of the time? Instead, Jesus anticipates the problem and promises the Holy Spirit to them.  Until now they have had Him as their helper – that is why Jesus says “another” helper.  The first “helper” was Jesus, and the second is the Spirit (later I will explain the term “paraklētos” which is the Greek term translated “helper” here).

If we examine the passage closely, we’ll notice that all the way from verse 15 or so through about verse 26 there is a theme that Jesus develops for the disciples, namely, that the Holy Spirit will come to represent Himself.  Jesus is going away, and He wants to comfort the disciples and prepare them for that absence by explaining not only what they will need to do, but how they are going to do it.

Now the Holy Spirit’s role is obvious from the verses we read here, and what we’ll read below. Here the Spirit is said to help us by causing us to love Christ. You might not see that immediately, but that is the clear implication.  For those who love Christ obey His commands, and because its clear that Jesus knows we need help to obey commands, we must also need help to love Him.  John would write about this in his epistles:

Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God abides in us and his love is perfected in us.
By this we know that we abide in him and he in us, because he has given us of his Spirit. (1 John 4:11-13)
 
We love because he first loved us. (1 John 4:19)
 

And so it is that the Spirit is the one who creates in us a love for God. He softens our hearts, and speaks softly to us, explaining the great truths of God’s gospel.  Without His initiative, we would still be dead in our trespasses.

Jesus explains here also that “the world cannot receive Him”, that is to say that on our own we cannot receive the Spirit of God. It isn’t up to us who receives the gift of the Spirit. God is the one who sovereignly chooses who He will to abide with. We’ll address this in more depth in just a moment…

You know Him Already

The last thing Jesus says in these three verses is that the disciples already know the Spirit. This is a mysterious thing.  Pastor Scotty Smith writes:

As Jesus continues instructing his disciples in advance of his ascension we enter the most profound teaching about the Trinity to be found anywhere in the Bible. There is much mystery here, but let us affirm what is clearly in the text. The better we know Jesus, the more Trinitarian we will become. The gospel is the means by which we enter the fellowship, love, and joy shared by the Father, Son and Holy Spirit throughout eternity – a staggering thought indeed.
 

Therefore, we should look closely here at what Jesus is saying and marvel a bit…Jesus can say, “You know him” Because, “he dwells with you and will be in you.” Let’s not miss this, because I think it’s a really important statement. What Jesus is saying is that even though they don’t yet have the Spirit living inside of them, they have been with Jesus, and that is tantamount to knowing the Spirit already. For not only is Jesus filled with the Spirit, but when the Spirit comes it will be as if they have Jesus right there with them – only now instead of having Jesus walking the hills of Judea with them, they will have Him in their hearts.

Why is this important?  Because you have that same Spirit, Christian! You have the Lord Jesus’ Spirit living within you, you are the temple of the living God. His mind, His will, His love for you is embodied in the fact that He sent His Spirit to you.  What I mean by this is that He has a plan and a love for you, and He is working that out through the power and person of the Holy Spirit.

To have the Spirit is to have Jesus, and to have Jesus is to have the Father, as we shall soon see…

This is why it is vital to understand that our God is a triune God, and that He is three persons, each with different roles.

14:18-20 “I will not leave you as orphans; I will come to you. [19] Yet a little while and the world will see me no more, but you will see me. Because I live, you also will live. [20] In that day you will know that I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you.

First, I want to note that at the end of verse 18 we see here that Jesus says, “I will come to you.” This just further shows what I mention above about how Jesus Himself is coming to us in the form of His Spirit.  They are not one in the same person, rather, they are so alike in their mind and purpose that we cannot tell them apart.  They are on the same mission, and they are both part of the One Godhead. Having the Spirit is tantamount to having Jesus live within us – that is what Jesus is saying here.

The entire idea is tied up together in verse 20, “I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you.” That is the whole idea!  This is DEEP water we’ve just wandered into.  But what an amazing thing.  Jesus is teaching us something about the Trinity here, and about how role in the Kingdom. He is saying that His bride, that’s us, will be “in Him” and He will be “in us” just as He is “in” the Father. Don’t miss this. Cherish this. This is such profound, such wonderful truth that you can’t forget it.

What are the consequences?  Well I can think of several, but especially one: if we are that close to Christ and that “in” the Trinity, then surely there is nothing (as Paul writes in Romans 8) that can separate us from His love!  In other words, to separate us from the love of Christ would be like separating Jesus from the Father, or the Spirit from Jesus.  It is unthinkable, in fact, it is impossible.

Adoption and Love

Now, secondly, since we have seen and laid the foundation for understanding how Jesus will be with us, and how it is that we will do those greater works (in and because of the Spirit), we see that there is a side-benefit to having Christ go away…we are adopted into His family!

I think that verses 18 and 20 are closely tied to 21 and 15.  What I mean by that is that Jesus is saying that by loving Him, it shows that you are part of His family. Love is a by-product of family membership. Love happens for two reasons: First, because the Spirit has adopted us into the family by regenerating us to everlasting life and enabled us to love as Christ loves, and secondly, because of His work we have a desire to love. So there is His initiating action here, and our obedient response.  Jerry Bridges calls this “dependent responsibility” because not only to re require Him to start us off on the path, but we rely on His help to stay on the path.

So we see here that love is a mark of family membership.  We love because we are adopted!

Lastly, and more particularly to this passage, I want to note how Jesus says, “because I live, you also will live.”  What He means here is to signify the importance of the resurrection. Because we are “in” Him, that means that when He conquered death, when He arose from the grace, when He ascended into heaven, that we, too, arose and are guaranteed heaven.  Why? Because, again, we are “in” Him.  To be “in” the Lord is to be guaranteed all of the promises that He has earned for us.

Listen to how Paul describes the Spirit’s interaction with our spirit in reminding us of this great promised adoption:

For you did not receive the spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received the Spirit of adoption as sons, by whom we cry, “Abba! Father!” 16 The Spirit himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God, 17 and if children, then heirs—heirs of God and fellow heirs with Christ, provided we suffer with him in order that we may also be glorified with him. (Romans 8:15-17, ESV)
 

Therefore, because He earned life, we get life. Because He was perfectly righteous, we are made perfectly righteous in the eyes of God. Because He broke the bonds of sin and death, we too have been loosed from sin, and will never taste spiritual death.

Think about the significance that the resurrection now has in your mind and your life. If Jesus never rose from the grave, then all of this is moot (1 Corinthians 15:12-19). We’d still be dead in our sins. But Jesus is here saying (ahead of all of this even occurring, mind you) that when He rises from the dead, we too will walk in “newness of life.”  This is what Paul was saying in Romans 6:

We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death, in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life. 5 For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we shall certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his. 6 We know that our old self was crucified with him in order that the body of sin might be brought to nothing, so that we would no longer be enslaved to sin. 7 For one who has died has been set free from sin. 8 Now if we have died with Christ, we believe that we will also live with him. 9 We know that Christ, being raised from the dead, will never die again; death no longer has dominion over him. 10 For the death he died he died to sin, once for all, but the life he lives he lives to God. 11 So you also must consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus. (Romans 6:4-11)
 

Later Paul adds:

You, however, are not in the flesh but in the Spirit, if in fact the Spirit of God dwells in you. Anyone who does not have the Spirit of Christ does not belong to him. 10 But if Christ is in you, although the body is dead because of sin, the Spirit is life because of righteousness. 11 If the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, he who raised Christ Jesus from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through his Spirit who dwells in you. (Romans 8:9-11, ESV)
 

14:21-24 Whoever has my commandments and keeps them, he it is who loves me. And he who loves me will be loved by my Father, and I will love him and manifest myself to him.” [22] Judas (not Iscariot) said to him, “Lord, how is it that you will manifest yourself to us, and not to the world?” [23] Jesus answered him, “If anyone loves me, he will keep my word, and my Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our home with him. [24] Whoever does not love me does not keep my words. And the word that you hear is not mine but the Father’s who sent me.

Here we have once again the reiteration of what Jesus said earlier.  Verse 21 and verse 15 are almost identical. If we love Him we keep His commands.  It harkens us back to the sermon on the mount where Jesus said that those who bare fruit are those who are His.

“Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing but inwardly are ravenous wolves. 16 You will recognize them by their fruits. Are grapes gathered from thornbushes, or figs from thistles? 17 So, every healthy tree bears good fruit, but the diseased tree bears bad fruit. 18 A healthy tree cannot bear bad fruit, nor can a diseased tree bear good fruit. 19 Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. 20 Thus you will recognize them by their fruits. (Matthew 7:15-20)
 

The second thing that Jesus says here is that, “my Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our home with him.”  This is very much like verse 20 when He said, “I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you.”  The idea here is that not only is Jesus in us, but that the Father is also in us.  This would have been enough to blow the minds of the disciples.

NOTE: this passage, along with others, has been historically used to support to filioque insertion in the Nicene Creed which states that the Spirit proceeds from both the Father and the Son. It is this addition that eventually helped create a schism between the Eastern (Greek) and Western (Latin/Catholic) church (the major historically recognized year of this is 1054, even though the problems and disagreements started well prior to this). 
 

We read earlier how Philip said ‘just show us the Father and that is enough for us Jesus!’  And I explained how the Jews thought of seeking the face of the Lord, and the face of God, and how Aaron’s benediction embodied this idea of being blessed by the revealing of God’s face to us one day. The idea derives from the time when Moses learned that no man can see God and live, but was allowed to view God’s “hindquarters” (in anthropomorphic language).  The idea being that God’s face is so glorious and so bright and resplendent that to view it would be too much for a finite creature to handle – we would die instantly.

Now here we begin to see the sweetness of the revelation we have in NT times. Not only has God sent His Son to us in the incarnation, not only did He die for our sins and impute to us His own righteousness, but He has gone a step further still.  He is going to live within us – His Spirit abiding in us! Meaning, as Jesus says here, that the Father and the Son will essentially be using us as their temple on earth.  They will be manifesting their presence on earth through us!

Have you stopped to consider the ramifications of this? We have become to used to the idea of the immanence of God, that we forget who it is we’re talking about here. We forget so easily in our day that this Being who inhabits the believer is the same one who spoke the universe into existence!

If that doesn’t lend some sobriety to your walk with Christ I don’t know what will.  Because Jesus is reminding us here that if we really love Him, you will pursue Him, you will obey Him, you will understand the reality that the God of heaven and earth has deigned to come down and live – in you!

D.A. Carson is right to mention that, in a very strong way, this passage builds on antecedent passages about the Spirit, the one that I want to mention most particularly is in 4:23-24 where Jesus (speaking to the Samaritan woman) says:

But the hour is coming, and is now here, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for the Father is seeking such people to worship him. 24 God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth.” (John 4:23-24, ESV)
 

Oh the sweetness, oh the condescension, oh the love of God in this! Can you not see how crucial this is to understand?  God has sought out those who will worship Him in “spirit and in truth” – He is doing this by putting His Spirit within us. He wants us to know Him properly, and for our minds to do this He must be the first to act.  He must take the initiative, and He must powerfully work within us. As we read earlier:

It is the Spirit who gives life; the flesh is no help at all. The words that I have spoken to you are spirit and life. (John 6:63, ESV)
 

Jesus is urging us on here to think DEEPLY about the reality of what is going on here. You must take this seriously and understand the privileges and responsibilities associated with being a Christian. This is a call to loving, awe-filled obedience to your Lord.

Not to the World

Lastly, I didn’t want to skip over what Judas says here because he has a good question. He has heard Jesus say already, “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.”  So if God loved the “world”, why is it that He won’t manifest Himself to the world?

The answer is that while God loves His creation, He has a special and specific plan of redemption for His chosen sheep. We start with the prerequisite understanding that the world cannot receive Him because the world does not want Him.

And contrary to the rejection of Christ, the world will not have a “choice” to accept the Spirit in the same way they saw the incarnate Christ and rejected Him. For the Spirit’s mission, though a continuation of Christ’s, has different objectives, that is to say that Christ is working to accomplish something new through the Spirit (the next phrase of His redemptive plan), namely the quickening of all those whom the Father has predestined to life and the reside within them, fashioning them after His image, and keeping them (preserving them) until the day Jesus Christ returns or we die and join Him in Heaven.

Be sure of one thing: Jesus knows who will believe and who won’t (see John 6:64), and He will not cast pearls before swine. He will not reveal His glory to all. Those who receive the Lord Jesus and the joy of eternal life are those whom He has chosen, those whom His Spirit has softened and called to Himself.  This is, of course, the work of the Spirit. He is the one doing the softening and calling and regenerating.

The world cannot receive the Spirit, not because the Spirit isn’t the one doing the work, not because the Spirit can’t soften the hearts of men. But simply because the Spirit isn’t going to soften the hearts of all men. He isn’t going to be sent to the whole “world”, but rather to those for whom Christ died.