Introduction

This week on Hope Diary, we will dive into the High Priestley prayer of our Lord as indicated in John 17

The Bible’s Chapter 17 in John is unsurpassed. It stands out from the rest of the Bible because it contains the Papal prayer of our Lord, the Son of God. It demands considerable consideration. In all honesty, this chapter could leave one completely lost. It’s nearly impossible to pull yourself away from the chapter, from any stanza, or even from any sentence because its realities are so profound, expansive, exalted, wide-ranging, deep, and high. Although the language is clear and straightforward, the truths are actually incomprehensible. The most we can manage is to barely scrape the surface of these immense truths described in this chapter.

It would be wise to spend a lifetime on this chapter if one were to approach it without having read the rest of the Bible. From there, one may travel back and forth in the revelation of God. However, for us, this serves as the culmination of chapters 13, 14, 15, and 16. Those chapters contain the words that our Lord spoke to His followers on the Passover night, which was Thursday of Passion Week and the night before He would be crucified. He stayed up all night talking to His followers. Judas was expelled after the Passover feast. At that point, he started the Lord’s Supper. He kept instructing them.

They departed the upstairs room. They traveled on foot to Jerusalem. While they are moving, He continues to give them instructions that are chock-full of assurances, commitments, cautions, and threats. He informs them that He is departing, that He will perish and rise again, and that He will return to the Father. He assures them that they will have everything they require. Through prayer, they will have access to all the treasures of heaven. Because He will send the Holy Spirit to reveal the truth to them, they will be able to know it.

He assures them of joy, love, tranquility, and all other virtues. But as He approaches death, the disciples are terrified, concerned, uncertain, and apprehensive. They find it impossible to picture life without the Lord they spent three years with. Their concerns grow as they travel further into the night. Our Lord made all the promises found in verses 13, 14, 15, and 16 in an effort to calm their concerns and even offer them joy. However, they find it difficult to embrace them because all they can focus on is Him departing and dying.

The prayer is now broken up into three sections. Jesus supplicates for Himself in the opening five lines. Then, beginning in verse 6, He offers prayers for the apostles present that night. He ends the chapter by offering a prayer for all followers of Christ in the years to come. But starting in verse 6, He begins to pray for all of His people throughout all of history in addition to the eleven. He therefore begins by praying for His own glory before moving on to His own people’s glory.

It is an act of worship. It is a request that the Father grant glory to Him, glory to the disciples, and glory to all of us. That fervent prayer on our behalf keeps us going until we face Him in heaven. Nothing can ever take away from us the love of God, which is ours in Christ Jesus, because of his intercession.

John 17:1

“He lifts up His eyes to heaven.” That’s a familiar gesture on the part of one who’s praying biblically, a common one, as He looks toward heaven, toward the God to whom He prays, His own God and Father. It’s a magnificent gesture; one that He made without hesitation – unlike the publican in Luke 18 who was so burdened with His own sin that it says in Luke 18, “He wouldn’t lift his eyes up to look at heaven, but he looked down and pounded his breast and said, ‘God, be merciful to me, a sinner.’” He didn’t feel even worthy to look heavenward. Well, there’s no unworthiness in Christ. There’s no sin in Christ; He lifts His eyes.

Somebody might say, “Well, praying for Himself?” Yes. He said, “Father, the hour has come; glorify Your Son, that the Son may glorify You, even as You gave Him authority over all flesh, that to all whom You have given Him, He may give eternal life. This is eternal life, that they may know You, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom You have sent. I glorified You on the earth, having accomplished the work which You have given Me to do. Now, Father, glorify Me together with Yourself, with the glory which I had with You before the world was.” That’s the nature of His prayer. It is a prayer, first of all, for His own glory. So that, having been glorified, He can then bring many sons to glory.

Perhaps someone will say that this is selfish. Because we are sinful, fallen beings with no right to ask for glory on our own merit, we understand that Jesus’ prayer for Himself appears self-seeking. Christ, however, did not demand anything that He was not entitled to. He even cries out, “Father, glorify You Son.” Just praise Me with the glory I shared with You before the world existed, verse 5 further states. Just return me to the grandeur that is mine by right forever. It is a prayer for Him to receive the inherent glory that is rightfully His because of who He is. He begins by saying, “Father, Father.” And He repeats that down in verse 5, verse 21, and verse 24: “Father, Father.”

Understanding that God, who could have used any type of human comparison, any type of metaphor, or any type of word picture, chose to represent the relationship between God, the first person in the Trinity, and the Lord Jesus Christ, the second person in the Trinity, is interesting to me. However, God choose the Father and Son.

Why? Of course, as a means of emphasizing shared nature. But it goes beyond that. It is deep familiarity, not merely shared nature. It indicates that He had a loving, caring connection with God in addition to the fact that they were one in nature.

He is the father who is personally holy, personally faithful, and personally kind. Nothing less than all that term’s lovely and loving connotations and implications can be said of him as the Father. He is the Father of both the needy sinner who repents and our Lord Jesus Christ, who comes first. He is our Father because He created us and is the Living Author of our individual lives. He is also our Father because He created us in His likeness and because He has regenerated us into a living hope. Since He is our Father, He values us infinitely more than even the products of His labor.

We are His lovely and priceless possession and the object of His eternal affection. The sons of men are the objects of His delight. He feels the kind of fatherly compassion for this mortal family’s child that only a celestial heart could understand. The Lord addresses the Father as “Father, Holy Father, Righteous Father, Loving Father.” And we also celebrate that parenthood. God has adopted us, making Him both our parent and our child in every sense.

Grace to you.

Day 2, John 17:1 Continues

Jesus spoke these things; and lifting up His eyes to heaven, He said, “Father, the hour has come; glorify Your Son, that the Son may glorify You,
— John 17:1

We picked up from where we ended yesterday with that introduction of Father, He then makes this statement – very important: “The hour has come.” He’s been saying for a long time, going all the way back to the 2nd chapter of John, “The hour has not come.” Now, “The hour has come.”

It’s a remarkable assertion. It’s a fascinating viewpoint that I believe you should be aware of. Christ is aware of this. God has a plan for every condition, day, instant, and hour of the unfolding drama of divine redemption in human history. Everything operates on a divine schedule and according to divine appointment. Jesus was aware of that.

What time? What time did the redeeming clock say it was? The crux of history—literally, the crux of eternity—was the hour. It was the crossroads, the event that would last forever, and the event that would shape time. Eternity past and eternity future were going to come together, and the crucifixion would be the place where they did. The time had come for the Son of Man and the Son of God to put an end to His suffering and His toil, and He would accomplish this by offering Himself as the sin offering. And the effects of that sacrifice would be felt by everyone who had ever believed throughout all of human history as well as by everyone who would believe in the future.

He would at that point turn into sin for us so that through Him, we may turn into God’s righteousness. It was the moment that the divine plan came to fruition. Before the world was created, God had decreed that Christ would be crucified, and He had also recorded the names of those for whom His death would serve as a vicarious sacrifice leading to their salvation. All of God’s pre-time, pre-creation, and divine intentions culminated at that time.

In the 12th chapter of John, verse 23, Jesus says, “The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified.” In verse 27: “Now My soul has become troubled. What shall I say, ‘Father, save Me from this hour? But for this purpose, I came to this hour. Father, glorify Your name. Then a voice came out of heaven: ‘I have both glorified it, and will glorify it again.’”

This is that hour, the hour of the cross. He anticipated it almost a week earlier. He was revolted by the prospect of knowing the wrath of God, the judgment of God: sin-bearing, being punished for all the sins of all the people through human history who would ever be redeemed. It troubled Him profoundly beyond anything we can imagine. But what was He going to say: “Save Me from this hour”? Of course not. “For this hour I came into the world.”

Here it is—the culmination, the hour of glory—when the power of the curse will be destroyed, atonement for sin will be made, and the hidden spiritual kingdom will be revealed. The time is now. From all of eternity, God had prepared that moment. “This has all happened by the predeterminate counsel and foreknowledge of God,” Peter remarked on the Day of Pentecost. God had something in mind from the beginning.

Gty.

Day 3

Return to Isaiah 53; it is all described in great detail there, hundreds of years before it occurred. What does He mean when He says, “The hour has come”? He refers to the cross, the resurrection that followed, the ascension, and the coronation that followed. He will be made sin for His cherished people and nailed to a crucifixion as the King of Glory to take the brunt of God’s anger. It was during such a time that the sun refused to shine, and darkness ruled. It was an event that caused the earth to tremble and rock. It was at such a time that graves opened and the dead emerged. It was a unique moment that would never occur again.

The disciples’ perception of the Lord’s death was that it was the worst imaginable scenario—an unthinkable nightmare. An instrument of shame, the crucifixion represented full and unadulterated praise to Christ. Then He continues, “The time has arrived; magnify Your Son. Glory in Him at the cross as the One who comes to fulfill all the prophecies, the One who comes to fulfill all the sacrifice pictures, the Mediator, the Representative, the Substitute, the Anointed One, and the Lamb of God. Jesus perceived the cross’s grandeur. In the cross, he saw grandeur. We agree. Even more, we sing , Glory in the Cross of Christ.

It is interesting to me that you see Him say, “Glorify Your Son,” because that is not something any of us could ever say. We could never go before God and say, “God, I deserve to be glorified.” If Pharisees had been around when He said that, they would have torn their clothes at the blasphemy, they would have assumed. But it was glory that belonged to Him, as verse 5 says. It was the glory that He had before creation. He desires full and due glory, the glory that comes to one who has been perfectly obedient to the Father throughout His life, the glory of being the perfect Lamb of God and doing the will of God, even on the cross when He prayed in the garden, “Let this cup pass from Me.”

We should anticipate a prayer like that. One who is totally holy should have a strong dislike to carrying out judgment for sin, according to logic. Yet He soon follows up by saying, “Nevertheless, not My will, but Yours be done.” He desires glory via obedience. He asks the Father to carry Him to the cross, through the cross, and out of the grave; to carry Him to heaven, where He will sit at the right hand of the Father; and to crown Him with a wreath of glory.

Gty.

Day 4

Good morning, family

We thank God for his renewed mercies towards us 🙏

We continue with our series.

“The Lord Jesus – ” according to Hebrews 7:25 “ – ever-lives to make intercession for us.” He is praying for us for the purpose of bringing many sons to glory. And that is exactly what we are hearing in the 17th chapter of John. This chapter is the sole biblical illustration of the Lord Jesus and His mediatorial intercessory ministry as our Great High Priest, praying us into heaven, praying us into heaven. He ever-lives to make intercession for us. It goes on all the time, throughout all of redemptive history, until all the sons of God are brought to glory.

Paul in Romans 5 calls it “much more.” It is a much more work. Much more than what? Much more than the cross, much more than the resurrection. Not more important, but more extensive. Christ paid the penalty for our sins in a moment on the cross, if you will. In a few hours, He suffered the wrath of God. Christ came out of the grave in a moment and He was alive from being dead. Those were rapid accomplishments by the Lord. But now the much more work that goes on continually evermore is this work of securing us for eternal glory, praying for us, to bring us home to God.

John 17 then is a pre-ascension, pre-exaltation example of our Lord’s mediatorial intercessory ministry as the Great High Priest. He has passed through the curtains of the three heavens.He has entered into the heavenly Holy of Holies, and He has sat down in the Holy of Holies in the Old Testament, in the temple. Even in the old testament, there was no place to sit because the priests came and went.

Our Great High Priest has gone into the heavenly Holy of Holies, sprinkled His own blood as an atonement for our sins, and sat down in the Father’s presence to constantly plead for His people to bring them to eternal glory. Against all of our failures, against all of our iniquities, all of our transgressions, all of our sins; against all the accusations brought against us by men and demons and Satan himself – the Lord prays us into heaven. No one is lost. This is His prayer.

Gty.