In His High Priestly Prayer, recorded in John 17, Jesus prayed for Himself and all His followers—including believers today. In the sermon “Before the World Existed,” Alistair Begg examines the eternal nature of Jesus’ request for glory and the victorious report He shared as He prayed to the Father. Because of His immense love for sinners, God the Father planned the work of salvation, God the Son accomplished it on the cross, and God the Spirit applies the reality of redemption to all who believe and trust in Christ. In the following excerpt, Alistair reminds us that these realities are folly until our eyes have been opened to behold God’s glory.
The Bible’s explanation of our world, which starts with God and goes from there through our rebellion and so on—you may not like it, but it certainly coheres. Jesus is, in that context, asking his Father, “I want you, Father, to glorify me again in your presence with the glory that I had with you before the world existed”—the glory of the coequal, undivided Godhead, the Trinity, enjoying one another. God created the world, but he didn’t have to create it. God did not create the world because he needed a world. God created the world out of the depth of his own being. In the reality of the Trinity, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit live within the mutuality of perfect love. Everything else is an extrapolation from that.
And in the incarnation, it involved in some measure Jesus laying aside that shared glory of eternity. When we sing about it in—I think we sang the hymn last week—Wesley’s hymn, “Emptied himself of all but love,” it’s a very difficult line there, and I sympathize with Wesley, because he wasn’t sure just how to say that, because he wanted to say more than that. Because Jesus, in taking to himself humanity, emptied something of himself. And so Jesus now says, “Father, I’m looking forward to the glory. I’m looking forward to being back with you.”
If Jesus were a mere man, this is ludicrous. Have you considered that? I mean, if Jesus is a Galilean carpenter—somehow or another, the world has hung on to his recollection, and some crazy people throughout the world still revere his memory, and so on—if that is all we’re dealing with, it is actually a measure of the incapacity of our minds to worship, to follow, and to obey him.
And that is why, you see, when we talk with our friends and neighbors, if a person is going to come to know God—to know God—they’re not going to know God as a result of rationalism, nor are they going to come to know God as a result of a kind of irrational mysticism—so, “Ohm” down in the park with your yoga mat or whatever else it is, feeling very much and understanding what people are saying: “I’m intuitively engaged in this kind of thing.” Fine. That’s okay. But what we’re discovering here in the Bible is something very, very different.
It is as we consider the words and the works of the one who is here praying to his Father that we then are made to understand that God has made himself known finally, unmistakably, savingly in a real, historical man—not in a mantra, not in a philosophy, not in a scheme, but in a man. “And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us,” tired, hungry, sad, joyful, whatever. “And we,” say his friends, “we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father, … full of grace and truth.”
Only those who have faith see the glory of God in his Word and in his works. If you do not see something of the glory of God, if you do not marvel at the wonder of all that he has given you, if you do not give thanks for your food from a genuine sense of the awareness of his provision, if you do not see God’s glory, the chances are it is because you are unconverted—interested, engaged, from time to time emotionally stirred, but unconverted.
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