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)