I Have Manifested Your Name

Had already done that. But what's so unusual about that? I think we're pretty close to, well, I think we're fairly close to, I'd have to look it up, but I know the first hundred's in March, so as far as records, so I think we're pretty close to when we've had our first hundred degree day anyways.

I mean, the average is May 13th, but it's coming. It's coming. I can assure you that there will be hot days during June, July, and August here in Phoenix. How's that? There's a prophecy that no one's gonna question.

That'll get me on TVN sometime. I did. Okay, I wrote down, you wrote down the exact location for me, just wanna verify things here, because I, it's been a long, long time. It's been, when was it? February, February 9th?

That's what the official big keeper of the notes over here has. Man, are you like a court stenographer or something? I mean, wow, that's pretty interesting. So I have manifested your name as verse six, though.

This is, yes, to its fullness. Thank you very much. So John chapter 17, verse six. Yes, I was, I have been here since then. I just was preaching that morning, so that's why it's been so very, very long since we were together last, and because then the first weekend I was in Fredericksburg, Virginia.

The next weekend I was in Kiev. Next weekend I preached, and then the next weekend I was in Southern California in Escondido with Brother Renahan and the Institute of Reformed Baptist Studies and Grace Reformed Baptist Church over there, and so, yeah, it has been a while.

It was good to be over there and see the young men at the IRBS, and there's a beard thing going on over there. I need to warn you all ahead of time if you ever go over there. It's, they're trying to do the mid -1800s Reformed theologian look thing.

Somewhat, yeah, it reminds me a little bit more of the beards in Gettysburg, the movie, or something like that, you know? Yeah, they're just, yeah. Except for Jim himself, he doesn't do that, but so, and we're working on them with the bow ties.

We're making progress there. They're moving toward complete sanctification, and so, but it was good to meet with them and talk with them, and they had lots of good questions, and so that was exciting, so.

Anyway, so it has been a while. If I recall correctly, somewhere, somewhere in my travels since then, I did cover this. I think I threw a John 17 study in somewhere in the East Coast or overseas, or I don't remember where it was, but maybe I brought it up in the unbelievable radio debate I did with, and it's not unbelievable, that's the name of the program, the radio debate with the fellow who wrote Young, Restless, and No Longer Reformed.

Maybe that's where it came up. I don't recall, but as it may, we have been looking at John chapter 17, and as mentioned rather fully by the notes there that Sean took, we didn't get an opportunity, really, to look as carefully as I'd like to at verse six, because once again, this morning, for example, I noticed an article from one of the better-known Armenian writers in the U .S., a fellow by the name of Roger Olson, and he was arguing that high Calvinism is impossible for anyone who actually believes the Bible.

It's the same argument that the young fellow I debated makes. I'm pretty sure he pretty much lifted it from Olson, and that is that in light of what we believe and the decretum horrible, the horrible decree, as Calvin described it, that we cannot affirm the goodness of God, and if you can't affirm the goodness of God, then you cannot affirm the trustworthiness of God, and therefore, you can't trust the Bible.

Now, it's interesting to me to note that in watching Olson's writings, he tends to be rather liberal on biblical issues in the first place, at least from our perspective, and I don't think he even uses the inerrancy term, so it's a little bit strange to me for someone in that position to be saying, well, we're the only ones that have real reason to believe in God's promises and his word, but that's the argument that's being put out there.

I don't really see how the one's connected to the other in the sense that they say, well, if you can't define the goodness of God, and of course, I say, well, you can, but they want to limit that to show me examples, give me parallels in human experience of the entirety of the character of God, and I say, well, there is no such thing.

We're all creatures, we're all left in God, we're all time-bound, we're all ignorant of the future, none of us are working our will, we're not working all things according to the counsel of our will, reminds me a little bit of the Muslims who demand that I give them examples from nature of the Trinity or the incarnation of Christ, and I say, I reject the question.

It requires me to fundamentally deny what I believe because the doctrine of the Trinity says God's nature is absolutely unique, and so there is no parallel in creation. In the same way the incarnation is unique, so there's no parallel incarnation.

And to say that I must find a creaturely parallel, not just in the sense of, well, here's an example. Jesus says, if you being evil know how to give good gifts, then God knows how to do the same thing.

Okay, but that's only one aspect of God's character that's illustrated there. There is nothing in creation that can fully capture God's relationship to his creation, and so what they're basically saying is I need to limit my assertions to that which can be applicable to the best of humanity, and God is not the best of humanity.

To even put him in that category is downright blasphemous, but it also leaves you utterly incapable of dealing with the entire biblical canon in regards to God's actions. That's why most of these folks end up throwing out entire sections of the Old Testament.

They're extremely uncomfortable with dealing with God's judgment in the Old Testament. They come up with some really unique ways of trying to sever the loving God of Jesus from the judgmental God of the Old Testament, so on and so forth.

And so the real issue is where are we deriving our doctrine of God? Are we deriving it from philosophical statements and conundrums, or are we going, well, here's what the word of God reveals. God did this in this situation.

He did this in this situation. We bring all that together, and we derive our doctrine of God from that. That's not where Arminian is coming from. There are certain overriding philosophical concepts that give rise to his position, and so I think it is important in looking at texts like this that we don't rush past the undeniable particularity that is found in the biblical text itself.

I mean, we take it for granted, but there are many who do not. I think that's why I wanted to remind us of what was said in verse six, I've manifested your name to the men whom you gave me out of the world.

They were yours, and you gave them to me, and they have kept your word, and so last time, we did mention the particularity that is found here. That is, you have the relationship, the father and the son, you whom you gave me out of the world.

The men whom you gave me out of the world. Now, the initial application here is clearly to the apostles themselves, to the disciples themselves. We, as in those who will believe because their testimony will come into the picture at a later point, but the initial application is to the disciples.

Some might say, well, and that means that's all there is. There's nothing more here, but the reality is that the only way to take John 17 as a whole is to see that Jesus is uttering this prior to the cross.

The cross is envisioned as a completed act. I have finished the work that you have given to me, but it's also before the gathering of the people of God into the body of Christ, into the church, so on and so forth.

And so, while we can see that initial application, all the rest is gonna be said about unity and oneness and being in him and in the father. It's in reference to all believers. And this high priestly prayer, Christ is functioning as high priest for all whom the father is going to give him.

And if we didn't have John 6, we didn't have John 8, we didn't have John 10 and John 12, coming before this, then I suppose you could just sort of limit it to the apostles and try to keep it at hand's length because of that, but you can't.

Not again, if your real intention is to read John 17, 6 as a part of all that John wrote. And again, I've said this before, but we always have visitors and new people coming. It's extremely wonderful to have the division of the Bible into chapters and verses so we can find stuff faster.

Can you imagine what it'd be like to have scrolls, and we'd all still be sitting here at 10 after trying to get to that particular point. All of our wrists would be this big around and it'd be great, but it would take forever.

It's wonderful to have that kind of thing, but it's a modern invention. And while it's wonderful to be able to get to a text, the problem is that it creates in our minds divisions that were not there originally.

And much of the theological difficulty we have today is because people chop the Bible up in little pieces and refuse to recognize that John 17, 6 is a part of John and needs to be read as a part of John, first and foremost.

And it is a problem that we deal with in talking with others all the time. So, notice you have the men whom you gave me out of the world. We emphasize the fact that you have individuals here. And the men are known, they are specific individuals.

This is not a nameless, faceless group. And if this is not a nameless, faceless group, and I would submit to you later on when Jesus says, I pray for those who will believe because of their word, that that's not a nameless, faceless group either.

And notice in what Brother Broil's read this morning from the Synod of Dort, if you listened carefully to what was said, one of the things that was mentioned was that the whole of God's election was basically simply to save a people, but not a particular people.

That the whole of election is that whoever believes will be saved, but who that is is not a part of God's electing decree. This is the essence of Arminianism that basically what God has done is he's chosen to save a nameless, faceless group.

And it's up to you whether you're gonna be in that group or not. That's totally into your control and not God's. And so, the men whom you gave me, the father is someone other than the son. The son, however, has to be a divine person because the very people of God are being given to him for salvation.

I mention that again because there are those who will say that Jesus is two persons. He's the father and the son. So, the divine side's the father, the human side's the son. And so, if that's the case, then here the divine side is giving to the human side a particular people for salvation, which makes absolutely no sense whatsoever.

The men whom you gave me out of the world. So, the world, the cosmos, has not been given to the son in the sense of salvation. And what does it mean to be given to Christ? What does it mean to be owned by the father so as to be able to be given to the son?

There's nothing, absolutely nothing here about I have foreseen who will accept you and therefore I give them to you or something along these lines. This is eisegesis. This is adding into the text something that is not to be found anywhere.

And yet, that is exactly how people assume the text should be read. The men whom you gave me out of the world. Follow the meaning of cosmos through this text and you'll see that it bears a number of different meanings.

They were yours and you gave them to me and they have kept your word. What's the order here? It's not I have foreseen that they would keep your word and therefore the father gave them to me or something along those lines.

The order is they were yours, you gave them to me and as a result of all that they have kept your word. Again, Arminianism turns it on its head. They have kept your word, therefore the father gave them to the son.

Just absolutely backwards which we've seen so many other places in John that again we see John 17 as a real tie-in point where many of the threads that have been woven in the previous chapters are brought together at this particular juncture right before the cross which I think is rather significant.

So, with that in mind and we had already said pretty much all that last time but that was a long time ago. I have manifested your name to the men whom you gave me out of the world. Now, what does that mean?

There will be people who will come knocking at your door on a Saturday morning and they're pretty certain they know what God's name is and they're also pretty certain that nobody else knows what God's name is and that they're the only people who actually use God's name.

Any one of them would be shocked if they did bother to attend one of our services which they would never do at how often we actually, especially we, I'll admit, there are a lot of churches, a lot of evangelical churches and Baptist churches where it is a mistake of putting the bulletin together that you would sing a hymn that had the name Jehovah in it.

Oh, you want 313? No, I put 339 or something like that and everybody's sitting there muddling along because they don't know what the hymn is. Sort of like when we do new hymns. Amen, amen, amen. We all get done, amen.

All look at each other like, oh boy, that was bad, wasn't it? Yeah, it was terrible. Everybody knows exactly what I'm talking about but that's what happens in a lot of churches when you actually happen to run into a hymn that has the name Jehovah in it.

We have all sorts of hymns that we all know and our kids know that use that, unfortunately, Germanic form that could not possibly be the way the divine name was actually pronounced but that's what we do to it anyways.

But they would be very surprised that we use the divine name in our hymnology and so on and so forth like that. But those particular individuals would tell us that they're the ones who are continuing Jesus' work of manifesting God's name to the world which is proclaiming Jehovah's kingdom in the world.

And, of course, the name Jehovah for them is a Unitarian name. It is a name for one person, not just the one being that is God, but one person. The father, they would deny that the son is appropriately identified as Jehovah.

He's Jehovah's representative and the better read of them will say, well, there are times that he uses the name just like the angel of the Lord is called the Lord but still the angel and so they're better apologists sort of shrink down the target and recognize that we've got to admit there are times when Jesus is identified as Jehovah which is why when we talk about Jesus being identified as Jehovah we have to emphasize those texts where he is identified as Jehovah not merely as a representative but in bearing and manifesting the nature and attributes that only Jehovah can have.

That's why I like to really emphasize Psalm 102, 25 to 27 in comparison to Hebrews chapter one verses 10 through 12 because in that you can't possibly have Jesus as a mere representative of Yahweh. He truly is the immutable and unchangeable one and hence is identified as Yahweh in that way.

So they look at this manifestation of your name and say this is just simply a specific name Yahweh but the disciples would have already known what God's name was even though it was the name which would not be pronounced or we're not sure when that really started.

Whether it started after this time period, whether there would have been a pronunciation of the divine name, it's evident that by some point the Jews stopped pronouncing the divine name though they knew what the divine name was and even to this day when the Jews read the Hebrew scriptures, when they encounter the Tetragrammaton, Yod-Heh-Wau-Heh, they put the wrong vowels under it as a warning so that you do not pronounce the divine name.

They put the vowels for Adonai which means my Lord and so they'll, when reading the Hebrew, either say Hashem, the name, or they will say Adonai in the place of Yahweh. So an Orthodox Jew is offended when you say Yahweh and that is a now longstanding tradition but we don't know exactly really when it began and so it is possible that it began after this time period but it's also possible that it had already begun before it.

It was just an attempt to honor the name by not pronouncing the name. It's too holy to be taken upon the lips of man. So with all that having been said, I have manifested your name, the man whom you gave me.

So what does that mean? Well, I think again, seeing John 17 as this terminus point, I mean, I think of it like if you're, I certainly am familiar with air routes, with airline routes and there are certain big hubs.

As you know, the airline that my wife works for is merging, they're becoming the largest airline in the world, the New American, and one of the things that she has lamented is the fact that they're gonna have so many hubs now with American, they're gonna have Phoenix, they're gonna have Dallas, they're gonna have Charlotte, they're gonna have Philadelphia.

I forget where the other American, Dallas is one of America's big hubs but I forget where some of the other ones are but the point is, I think Chicago, that no matter what weather system goes across the United States, they're so big that they're going to be impacted.

They're gonna have flights impacted by that weather system. And so it's just always gonna be hard for them because of having canceled flights and stuff like that. Well, when you think about, well, Atlanta, Atlanta's a huge hub, it's a big Delta hub and a lot of people come into Atlanta.

And Charlotte, so you know I had a really rough trip this last trip, flight-wise, and took off on a Thursday and landed in Charlotte. Once we got off the main runway, it was like, there's just so much snow.

And I'm figuring, oh great, I know what's gonna happen now. We're gonna be sitting out here for four hours stuck in the snow. And there were a few times they had to rev the engines to get to the next little drift that hadn't been properly plowed.

And we sat out there for how long? Well, they plowed a place for us into our gate. And of course, we're all sitting there on our phones because we turned our phones on and all of us got the same thing.

You see the phones come on, deet, deet, deet, deet, and about 30 seconds later, everybody's dialing. Okay, so my flight's canceled. And so, you know, because as soon as we landed, they closed the airport.

And so it was an ugly, ugly thing. Well, what I see is all these lines coming into these centers, into Charlotte, into Atlanta, places like that. And what we have going on here is all these lines of truth are coming together.

And one of the lines of truth, I have manifested your name, goes all the way back to the prologue of John. And what do you have in the prologue of John? What do you have at the end of the prologue of John?

No one, no one has seen God in any time. The monogamous theos, the unique God, He has manifested Him. He has made Him known. He has exegeted Him. He has explained Him. And so the unique role of the Son as the revealer of the Father, which interestingly enough, it comes up in what's called the Gospel of John in Matthew.

Matthew chapter 11, where no one knows the Son, but the Father, nobody knows the Father, but the Son. And those to whom the Son wills to reveal Him. There is again a particularity on the part of the Son, those whom He wills to reveal the Father, which would be somewhat of a tautology if He's just revealing the Father to everybody.

Instead, He makes this revelation in a very specific, effective, and powerful way. But this is a clear element of the Gospel of John that here finds a very important expression. I have manifested Your name to the men whom You gave me out of the world.

So in other words, what all this, the reason I wanted to mention all this is very often we get trapped into a discussion of the freedom of God and salvation on a very one-dimensional, shallow level. Just really the argument as to whether the Bible teaches this type of particularity, this type of specificity in regards to salvation.

And sometimes, since that's what we are so often having to deal with, with loved ones and friends, and we've had relationships that have been disrupted because of it and all the rest of that stuff, we tend to focus our thinking upon that particular area.

And the danger is that we don't see the real riches and the depth and the fact this is not a one-dimensional thing at all. For many people, the whole dialogue about God's freedom and salvation is about whether man's just a puppet on a string, a robot, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

God's just a big nasty dude up in the sky forcing people to do bad things, all these other silly, shallow types of arguments. What we should see here, in the midst of clear particularity, sovereignty of God giving a people to the sun, the sun saves them, the result is that they keep Your word and all the rest of these things is the intensely personal nature of this act of election.

I think it's important, especially for us to keep this in mind, and always have at the back of our mind, because it will very frequently allow us to stop someone and to point out that they're tilting at windmills, they're trying to burn straw men, whatever the terminology is you wanna use, they're not really addressing the issue, and my own belief.

I have manifested Your name, there is a revelation of the father by means of the son, to all of those that are given by the father to the son. This thread is very clearly seen in John 6. Everybody knows John 6, 44, right?

Everybody knows John 6, 44. You're going, yeah, sure, yeah, right, okay, sure. Just make sure that, I know we all know, but take a look at, excuse me, John 6, 44 we know because it says, no one can come to me unless the father who sent me draws him and I will raise him up in the last day.

And we've gone through that a million times before, no one can come to me unless the father who sent me draws him and I will raise him up. Everyone who is raised up in the last day are those who have been drawn by the father to the son, there's no way of inserting the entire Arminian system in between, into one Greek word there, it's just not there, it's very clear.

But, notice the next verse, it is written in the prophets, and they shall all be taught of God, everyone who has heard and learned from the father comes to me. Now, when we hear has heard and learned, we tend to view that in the concept of human action, things that we choose to do, that's not what you have here.

When you look at the text, everyone hearing from the father, the hearing one, the one who hears the father, what's passive? That's passive, that's something, when I hear something, somebody else has to make a sufficiently loud sound for me to hear that.

I had some idiot kids decide to rob me of sleep last night, I had been asleep for exactly nine minutes, when I hear this huge crash on my front door, and then running footsteps through my rock lawn and then a revving engine, I'm like, oh great, so I get up and I go out there and I'm looking for what in the world they did, and did they break a window, was it the door, was it the window, was it the car?

Thankfully, I have video cameras on my house, and so I eventually just went in and looked at the video and here's these kids, and what they think is fun to do on a Saturday night is to drive around neighborhoods and stop, and they jump out and sneak up to somebody's door and hit it as hard as they can, and run off and jump in the back of the truck and head off to the next street.

And an hour later, they came back, it's one of my neighbors, almost caught him, but robbed me of a number of hours of sleep in the process. But I heard them because they wanted to be heard, but man, it was passive on my part, because I was asleep, and it was horrible.

Those of you who are younger understand this, but those who are older understand, once you fall asleep, if you're all of a sudden woken up right at that time, forget getting back to sleep for a while, it ain't gonna happen, at least for me anyways, and that's, of course, what took place.

So I heard something, and it prompted me into rather fast action for obvious reasons, but it's passive. I didn't cause those guys to do that, it was completely passive on my part. Same thing with learning.

And learning, kai mathon, a mathete, a disciple, we again, you have to put a lot of effort into learning. No, this is taking in knowledge. This is taking in knowledge. I'm not the one that is, if I have the knowledge out there and I'm reaching out and grabbing it, in both these situations, the idea is they shall be taught of God.

God's the one doing all of this, everyone who has heard and learned from the Father comes to me. So the nature of this drawing in this text is the Father reveals the Son. Now we go back to John chapter 17 and we get this complimentary aspect, and that is, I have manifested your name, the man whom you gave me out of the world.

Now, what we have here is that in the act of election, regeneration, union with Christ, everything that God does in saving His people, it is intensely personal. It is intensely personal. Just as in John six, the Father draws men to the Son, in John 17, the Son manifests the Father's name as the only one who can truly represent the Father perfectly.

He makes revelation of the Father to all those that the Father gives to him. Now, I emphasize this partly because it is rarely emphasized. It might be touched here, it might be touched there, but even amongst most reformed writers, it's sort of set in passing as a given.

But I think it's extremely important because the false idea that many people have of what we're saying is that this is sort of a impersonal mechanical marionette robot type of a situation when what we need to realize is it is the Arminian concept, the synergistic concept.

It is highly in-person. It's highly in-person. I remember last November, I was at a church down in Tucson and I had them, we had sung a hymn, which I'll be perfectly honest with you, I think should be part of the Trinity Hymnal, but it was written only a few decades ago.

I hope I don't get kicked out for that, but one of the lines, beautiful, beautiful hymn, my name was written on his hands. Now, all sorts of churches today sing that, but all sorts of churches sing that, don't actually believe that.

And I actually had them put it back up on the screen because I was in Hebrews. And I said, now, here's my question for you. Do you really believe that? Because if your name was written on his hand in the context in the crucifixion, then the intention and the audience of Christ's death was very, very specific.

And it was very personal, very personal. And very often the debate goes on without light being shed on the fact that from the synergistic perspective, what Jesus does is he makes salvation a possibility.

And while he knows by mere foreknowledge, who's going to take advantage of that as long as he's not an open theist, it is impersonal in the sense that the object of his death is a group that he does not determine.

He does not determine. From the biblical perspective, the people who are given to him, whom he manifests the name of the Father to. So he reveals the Father perfectly to them, completely to them. If you want to know who the Father is, you can see him perfectly in the Son.

And vice versa, the other side of that thread, if you like to call that, is that all who hear and learn from the Father, who are taught by the Father, come to the Son. There is a revelation of who Christ is, who the Son is, through the drawing of the Father, which is accomplished by whom?

The Spirit of God, seeing the triune nature here. This is intensely personal. And we sometimes, I think, fail to use, well, put it this way, fail to use all the resources that have been provided to us because if we do not challenge that presupposition on the part of our synergistic brothers and sisters, they may not even consciously recognize that element of the argument, but it's there.

We may not have consciously recognized that particular element of the argument, but it's there. And I think when you do have those opportunities, and I've certainly had them, I hope many of the rest of you have had them as well.

When you do have that opportunity to really sit down with someone and open the Word of God and really discuss this, and they really ask you, why have you made the choices you have? Why do you go where you go?

Why do you feel this is important enough to take a stand? When you really have that opportunity, being able to clear away the debris that's in the field, the stumbling blocks that really shouldn't be there, that are really misrepresentations, they're smoldering straw men, they may not even know where all those stumbling blocks are.

But we need to recognize where they are and to emphasize the very personal nature of election. That also helps us to avoid the error of equal ultimacy. The idea that, well, God elects some people for heaven and some people for hell.

Election to heaven is a completely different thing from the justice of God coming upon someone. The extension of personal mercy and grace to the elect is a completely different thing than the just bringing of punishment upon those who love their sin.

And unfortunately, that is another very common error that needs to be challenged and needs to be swept from the field as well. So I think that's why I wanted to do that, but I only got through verse six.

So at least we know where we'll be next time around because I don't have any over-the-weekend trips between now and at least the third week of April. Ooh. So I'm glad there might be one or two new TSA agents at Sky Harbor I'll get to know between now and then because I've pretty much got everybody else's names memorized, so.

Anyway, so let's close our time with the word of prayer. Father, we do thank you that the Son has indeed manifested your name, your character, your purposes to us with perfection so that we can truly know you and know your mercy and your love that you are the fount of all blessings.

We ask that by your spirit, you would be with us in power this day that we might hear your word, might be conformed ever closer to the image of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. In his name we pray.