Synoptic Gospels John 17:6

17, once again, not making overly fast progress, but I guess that's how it works. And Brother Callaghan will be up for the next few weeks. I will be in Fredericksburg, Virginia next Sunday. The Sunday after that I'll be in Kiev, Ukraine.

And then I'll, Lord willing, be back if there's anything left of me. Whether it's that March 1st or 2nd or Sunday in Marches. I might want to talk to the pastor about having a backup sermon prepared just in case.

It would not be the first time I've come back from a long trip with some friends that I did not invite to come with me, if you know what I mean. Known as bacteria or viri or whatever else. But we will see.

We will see. I made it through South Africa and all that without bringing anybody home with me. So I'm going to do everything I did then, plus even some more stuff. So we'll see. But I'm a little bit more concerned just about all the reports I'm hearing about Ukraine anyway.

So my friends there say it's no big deal. It's just a bunch of ne 'er-do-wells in a three-block area. So OK. All right. Well, we'll hope that's the case. Knowing my luck, I'll get there and then all of a sudden all international travel will be canceled.

And I'll be living in Ukraine for a few months or something. But anyway, as a fact, I heard you're not allowed to have toothpaste on the plane going to Russia right now. So thankfully, Ukraine is not Russia.

So I'm hoping that's not going to be an issue. We'll find out. We'll find out. Anyhow, John Chapter 17, we have been looking at this text. And official keeper of the notes, how deeply did we go into Verse 5?

Because here's my problem. I've had to deal with this text since we last did. So I dealt with it with somebody else. And so that becomes confusing for me as to how deeply we covered it. On Verse 6. Oh, so we did finish Verse 5.

OK. I just wanted to make sure because, again, just simply on a functional level, being prepared to deal with John 17, 3, especially by properly handling Verse 5, I think is very, very important, especially when those folks show up at your door on a Saturday morning or whoever else it might be.

I think it's important that you have that information available to you. So I would not want you to be able to say, well, I went through an entire class on John 17 with James White, and he didn't bother to tell us about how to really handle this text.

I would not want that to be said. Again, just to make sure, the most important thing from my mind in Verse 5 is that you be able to recognize the use of the personal pronouns. Here is one person using first person pronoun glorify me, second person pronoun your own presence with the glory that I, first person, had with you, second person, before the world existed.

These are standard words that we would utilize in conversation with another person, and these are being spoken by the Son to the Father about a time before the Incarnation where the Son was in the presence of the Father and had a glorious existence.

Why is that so important? Because again, there is an entire group of people called Oneness Pentecostals, Jesus-only folks, who deny that Jesus as a divine person existed prior to his birth in Bethlehem.

He was an idea in the mind of the Father. Ideas do not talk to the mind that created them back when I was an idea using personal pronouns. It is too much of a torture of the language to come up with that kind of an idea.

So, very important. Just in passing, I mentioned three particular texts that I have utilized to demonstrate the fact of the existence of the Son as a divine person. And John 17 .5 was one of the three.

What are the other two? Philippians chapter 2, specifically the statement where, speaking of the Son, he did not consider equality with the Father-Son to be grasped, but instead he emptied himself. This is in regards to the Incarnation, therefore this is the actions of a person prior to the Incarnation who was equal with the Father, hence a divine person.

So, there you have the second, and the other was John 1 .1. In the beginning was the Word, the Word was God, and the Word was God. The Word was in the presence of the Father eternally as a divine person, who is distinguished from the Father in John 1 .18.

He is described as the monogamist, theos, the unique God. So, if you've got those down, it's not like the one of the Pentecostals generally go door-to-door, but you'll be ready to go in that situation.

The Woven Tapestry of John’s Gospel

Okay, now, next what we see, that again is so important, this is so much in chapter 17 that I almost think it's as bad as that time years ago when I was in a Southern Baptist church. We were asked to cover, as master teachers, Romans 9, 10, and 11 in 22 minutes.

And I just felt that was just utter blasphemy, so I sort of took a little more time. But anyways, going through John 17 quickly is just a difficult, difficult thing to do, because there are so many incredible themes here where, in essence, John wraps up in the prayer of Jesus.

He brings all these things together that he has emphasized in his Gospel. And you can find so many connections that go back to John 6, to John 5, 8, 10, and they come together in a beautiful tapestry in this high priestly prayer.

Jesus says, I have manifested your name to the people whom you gave me out of the world. It's literally to the men on Thropois. That, obviously, there's this, I'm not going to get into it right now, but just very briefly, there's a tremendous amount of controversy in Christian scholarship today in regards to the proper translation methodology of the Bible due to the changes in the English language.

A number of years ago, wow, 10 years ago now, when I got the first galley proofs of my book, The God Who Justifies, it came out in 2004, as I recall, I remember I started reading through it, and I kept, all of a sudden I ran into this sentence that said something along the lines of how, it was just using a pronoun in just a generic sense, and it said, she.

Why would she think this? And I stopped, and I started looking back into the context for where I had referred to a woman. And I go along a little farther, and a couple of pages later, there's another her, and then a she.

And I'm like, and then I realized that the publishing house had followed the new standard, which will probably become very accustomed to people after a while, I imagine, of randomizing pronouns. So instead of always using he as the generic pronoun, he, she, her, back and forth, back and forth.

Now, I'm an old dude, so I immediately think there's something important about this, and start looking for the feminine antecedent to the pronoun, and there isn't one. It's just the new way of doing things.

And I wrote back and said, and they said, okay. And so it went back to the way I'd written it, because I couldn't read it, though. It was just like, but I guess if that's what you end up being raised with, that's going to become customary.

In the same way, the term anthropos means, you know, anthropos, man. Men can refer in a given context to just men. If you use that in the context of an NFL football team, at least as of this year, the context would always be of the male gender.

But then there are times it just simply means humanity. And while the closest antecedent here in verse 6 is going to be the apostles themselves, who were all men, could it not be said that, in a sense, Mary and Martha and the women who are at the foot of the cross, and the women who supported the apostolic band, and these people, they likewise had had a manifestation of the Father's name in a special way?

I think you could. So there are places where, though it's a masculine noun, it's referring to just humanity as a whole, or to a specific group of men and women together, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

And this has led to all sorts of sometimes important, sometimes not important vilification, argumentation, and everything else amongst Bible translators. If someone wants to say the people rather than the men, I don't have a problem with that.

If you want to say God, the Father, Mother, I have a problem with that. That's going beyond the obvious use of language and trying to introduce a whole new concept. And it's generally based upon women's studies programs at local universities, which are in themselves scary things.

So, just looking at this, I have manifest or made known your name to the anthropois, the men literally, but the people, whom you gave me. Now, where have we seen this terminology before? Again, here, John, in the prayer of Jesus, is tying together all these, when I use the term thread, we seem to think of that as, you know, frayed threads or something.

No, I'm thinking of a woven fabric. And if you've watched something woven, like on a loom, for example, when I went to Scotland a number of years ago, we visited a particular place where you could buy some of that incredible Scottish fabric that they make, and they had a loom going.

And you could see how it was done in the olden days and things like that, and you could see the weaving. But, of course, at the edge where the weaving was being done, it wasn't very pretty there. I mean, you couldn't really tell what the pattern necessarily was, and there's threads going in which direction.

But then, of course, as it comes off and is finished, then it's, you know, all that stuff is taken care of. It's very, very beautiful. Well, what you have here are so many of the themes that have been developed in particular, primarily, often, context of conflict in the previous chapters, now being brought together so you can see how they're related to one another.

So, what's the conflict in John chapter 5? The conflict in John chapter 5, you know, the healing at the Pool of Bethesda, and then Jesus says, I'm doing what my Father did, and the people understand that's a claim to deity because only the Father works on the Sabbath.

He maintains the world, so on and so forth. Then you have the discussion of the unity of the Father and the Son. Then in chapter 6, the people come across after the feeding of 5 ,000. They're in the synagogue, and they want the food.

And Jesus says, you're not believers, and this is why you're not believers. You haven't been given to me by the Father. And by the end of the conversation, they walk away. John chapter 7, the unbelieving brothers.

John chapter 8, the unbelieving believers. Remember, John chapter 8. They hear Jesus talking to the Pharisees, and they go, that sounds pretty good. I like that. But they have a point-action faith, not a continuous-action faith.

And so, by the end of the chapter, once Jesus says, oh, they believed in him, Jesus says to them, if you continue in my word, then you're my disciples. Indeed, you shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.

And as soon as Jesus says, make you free, sets you free, there's a fence. We're not slaves to anyone. We've never been slaves to anyone. These are people that would have to jump if any Roman soldier said to jump.

But we've never been slaves to anybody. As soon as that message of freedom is announced to them, they are offended. By the end of the chapter, what are they doing? They're picking up stones to stone Jesus.

And so, you have that conflict. John chapter 9, the blind man who is healed. John chapter 10, the Pharisees in the temple. You're not of my sheep. My sheep hear my voice. You're not of my sheep. John chapter 11, the raising of Lazarus.

Over and over again, all these conflicts, all these themes that have been developed in part, now come together. And in Jesus' prayer to the Father, you see how it's all of one cloth. Very, very often, my friends, the richness of our faith is lost upon us because we focus upon threads rather than upon the cloth.

Do you understand what I'm saying? Do you hear me? The Western mindset wants to individualize everything. Often, we wish that the Bible was like many of our textbooks in college, where there is a big, huge subject index, and you just go here, and you look it up, and you read it, and you've got it all.

That's not how God has revealed his word. As much as we'd like it to be that way, there are lots of other people in the world that wouldn't like it that way, wouldn't make a lick of sense to them, and God's just as concerned about them as he is us.

And so, given the, from our perspective, messy way that God has done his revelation, he deals with these stiff-necked people, and they go into apostasy all the time, and there's this continuous cycle of apostasy and degradation, and coming under the control of others, and then raising up a redeemer, and then there's a repentance, and there's a restoration, and then it happens again, and again, and again, and again, over, and over, and over, and over again.

Very messy. Not how we would have done it if we were doing an organizational flowchart. Because we have that mindset, we bring that mindset to the text, and because of the conflicts that we have in our days, and so what do we do?

We focus upon stuff that's relevant to where the conflicts are for us. We're surrounded by a secular society. It's becoming more and more and more focused upon suppressing our particular perspective. There's a law that looks like it's about to be passed in Scotland right now.

The Scottish government is going to assign a civil protector to every Scottish child that is born. A government protector to each child that is born. And that government protector's rights will trump the parent's rights.

And it will be that protector's job to make sure that child is raised as a good secularist. It's amazing. The totalitarianism is arising all around us, and it's a secular totalitarianism. So it's very easy for us to then, by necessity, because it's the attention, it's what our minds are focused upon, to focus upon those particular things.

It just makes sense. There's no mystery about it. In the same way, at the time of the Reformation, if you read the reformers, what are they constantly focused on? They're constantly focused upon the places of conflict they had with Rome at that particular time.

I mean, when your life is hanging in the balance, you cross one border, and all of a sudden you're going to be tied to a stake and turned into a crispy critter, that's going to impact where your balance point is and what you see and so on and so forth.

So we're all influenced by these things. We need to recognize that. So keeping all that stuff in mind, though, there's still just the Western tendency to pull the fabric apart and go, Look at this pretty yellow grass.

And it's not seeing the forest for the trees, is the terminology that we use. Oh, look at this beautiful tree. Well, you know, that's nice, but it's part of a forest. And it's related to the other trees.

And its well-being is related to the spatial relationship it has to other trees. And all the rest of this kind of stuff, we tend to miss that stuff. And it's more comfortable for us to get really familiar with this thread and this thread and this thread.

But then when you put them all together into a cloth, that requires us to have a little level of consistency that can be uncomfortable. Very uncomfortable. It's the whole issue with election and predestination.

Everyone wants to have, I'm going to put that over there and not think about it too much. But then I've got this over here. I'm happy with these threads. You can't examine biblical truth in that way. It is a cloth.

It is a one. When you bring it together and see how it's been woven together by the Spirit of God himself, that's where the truth is most gloriously seen. But it's also what requires the most of us. We have to study the parts that we're not all that excited necessarily about.

I mean, some of you have probably been sitting in a Sunday evening service recently going, you're really going to read all those names? Okay, and how many thousands from the tribe of this? Are we done with the scripture reading now?

It just doesn't seem all that exciting. But then how often, as we've been going through Hebrews, has there been this one little phrase, and we had to go all the way back and find the whole context to get what it really meant in the argument that was being presented.

It's part of the fabric. It's part of that beautiful tapestry that God has given to us in scripture. And I am convinced, as I march boldly onward in my sixth decade of life now, figure that out. Some people struggle with that.

No, you're only 51. That means I'm in my sixth decade. Remember that zero to ten thing? That was the first decade. Anyway, people really struggle with that around Y2K, too. They're like, you're 2000. Is that the end?

Whatever. And the same thing here. I have now got enough perspective to start seeing. I'm watching a situation right now, for example, where I'm very concerned about what's going on in a certain spectrum of Christianity and an imbalance there.

And I've got enough perspective to see where the danger is and to see people's lives that they've just gone pshh. Those of you listening don't know what pshh means, but that is the problem with listening and not necessarily watching.

You'll see someone start off strong and seem to be well-grounded, and then all of a sudden they just... It's like I drive this 2007 Versa out there, and if you ever notice, if you ever watch Versa's on the road, any of them that are the age of mine, and they haven't changed in five years, they pretty much look the same, but a lot of them have no wheel covers on them.

If you ever notice, they just have bare, ugly wheels. The reason being, Nissan won't admit this, but the wheel covers designed for the Versa, at least for the first four or five years, were all defective.

And all of mine went flying off my car at one point or another. I mean, I bought three of them before I finally got the clue and bit the bullet and bought actual rims and just replaced them, because obviously...

And Nissan made some good money out of it, like 50 bucks a pop. But they're these plastic things. And I saw one of them come off. Most of the time I wouldn't notice it. People around me while I was driving probably did, but I remember I heard this rattle-rattle, and I see in my rear-view mirror, ping, ping, going off into the next lane of traffic.

Like, oh no, am I accountable for that? I think Nissan is. But anyways, you know, it was going this direction. And it didn't take much to where it went way off that direction into place. And I've seen people like that.

They look like they were going right on down the road with the other four wheels and then all of a sudden, off into no-man's land. And I've seen that happen. And normally, what explains it, was they had a thread view of God's truth, not a fabric view of God's truth.

So what happens is, an atheist comes along, Bill Nye comes along this past week, and pokes at a thread. And because they don't see, you know, breaking a thread isn't too tough. But what is it, here's a test, here's a test, here's a test.

What's the proverb about this? What's the proverb? We've all listened to it. Well, those of us who show up for the opening ceremonies, for the Sunday school in the other room, have heard Proverbs, Song of Songs, Ecclesiastes, and James read, over and over and over again.

And what's the biblical proverb about this that I'm referring to? It's real simple, don't overthink it. Where's Jim? Oh, he's not in here. Not ringing a bell, huh? A three-cord strand is not easily broken, remember?

One strand, easy to break. Wrap three together, tough. That's why ropes are not made out of one strand. You twist a number of them together, and it greatly increases its strength. It's not just tripling it.

It actually increases it more than that, because of the cooperation of those strands. In the same way, the Christian faith, it concerns me when I see people who hear a challenge to one element of it, and all of a sudden they're ready to just throw the whole thing overboard, because they don't see the balance, they don't see the interconnectedness of it.

And, unfortunately, they have very little patience. I don't know why I'm preaching this sermon, but I am preaching this sermon. They have very little patience. I listened to a book yesterday. It was Calvin's book on Divine Providence, where he responded to a guy named Castelio, who had written a 14-part, 14-thesis attack on Calvin's theology.

It was fascinating. It was fascinating to me, because I'm going to be doing a debate in London on the 27th, on the unbelievable radio broadcast, so you should be able to hear this. A new book just came out.

It's the number one in Calvin books on Amazon right now, called Young, Restless, and No Longer Reformed. And it's from this guy, who has rejected Calvinism for what he calls free will theism. And so, on Friday, I read that book on a ride, and said, nothing new here.

I mean, if you've read Jerry Walls or Roger Olson, any of these folks, standard fair stuff. But it was sort of in the first person. I was reformed, and I encountered this. What was interesting, as I listened to it, I all of a sudden realized what this guy's story actually was.

And I need to confirm it with him. I'd like to write to him. But from what his book said, he had become reformed in high school, and abandoned it in college. So, it's not like this was a minister, or someone who had held to reform.

He could have held to reform theology for as little as 18 months, as a teenager. And then in college, ran into a philosophy professor that made him rethink it all. Okay, well, if that's the best you can come up with, all right.

We'll still debate the subject. But, that issue aside, I listened to that, and then I listened to Castelio's stuff. Exact same thing. Now, I didn't hear any references in the new book to Castelio. And I'm going to ask the guy, have you read what Castelio wrote to Calvin?

Oh, I don't know, 500 years ago? Not quite, but 450? I don't get the feeling he probably did, but it's the same argument sometimes in the same language. Same language. And what was interesting, all of that background information was just for this.

As I listened to the introduction of the book, yeah, I even read the introduction, sometimes a year or more would pass between these exchanges on these topics. How is that different today? If you don't come up with a response like that, I gotcha, I gotcha, I tweeted my rebuttal of you two hours ago, you said nothing, I gotcha.

Isn't that how it is? Isn't that how it is now? Instantaneous response is indicative of being truthful. And yet, normally, the instantaneous response is normally a knee-jerk, shallow reaction that has no meaning to it all.

We have become so accustomed to that, that the idea of someone responding a year later, hey, everyone's already made up their mind. All this eternal stuff, we need to, we need to have it all down right now.

Patience, the willingness to go, I wonder if, you know, I wonder if anyone's going to have a real good response to this particular argument. Today, it's, well, I'm not sure if I can be a cliche anymore, because I googled, I looked for a response on Google and couldn't find one, so that means there's nothing.

In-depth reflection on texts such as these, and the fabric of divine revelation. Well, I think it's something the Holy Spirit brings to us, but it's not something that's very common today, let's put it that way.

The Father Gives a People to the Son

So, I have manifested your name to the people whom you gave me out of the world. So we have the, a group of people here, and we have a transaction between the Father and the Son. Now, if all we had was John 17, if we didn't have John 10, if we did not have what John 10 tells us about we are in Jesus' hand, and we are in the Father's hand, and no one can snatch them out of the Father's hand, I and the Father are one, and bring about the salvation of God's people.

If we didn't have that, and if we didn't have John 6, I've come down out of heaven not through my own will, but the will of Him who sent me. And it was the will of Him who sent me, that of all He's given me, I lose nothing, but raise it up on the last day.

If we didn't have all that stuff beforehand, then we might be left wondering a little bit as to what the point here is, but we do have all of that before this. And so, we have a specific people, and always the order is whom the Father gives to the Son.

Now, there are many who seek to undercut this divine order by saying that the Father does this based upon some kind of poor knowledge of what human beings will do so that human beings remain in control of the final outcome of this entire process.

John has already closed the door on that. Where does John close the door on the idea that the giving of the Father to the Son is based upon a foreseen act of faith on the part of those who are so given?

Stop talking. What did he ask? One of them. John 6, 37 specifically. John 6, 37. And why does that close the door? What does John 6, 37 say? All the Father gives me will come to me. And the one coming to me, I will never cast out.

What's the point there? How does that absolutely close the door on the idea that as popular as it is, as popular as it is from friends of mine who repeated it in a debate against me in Spain two weekends ago, it is simply impossible logically and linguistically in John 6, 37 to avoid this.

All that the Father gives me will come to me. What's the relationship between the Father's giving and the person's coming? Well, all that I give a ticket to will be able to enter into the concert. Which comes first?

Entering into the concert or being given the ticket? Obviously being given the ticket. And linguistically, the description of those who are coming to the Son, the description comes before their action.

It's the action of the giving of the Father to the Son that determines their coming to the Son. The synergistic Arminian perspective is all that the Father foresees coming to me, He gives to the Son. But how can you now say so that they will come to me?

They're already going to come to you. That's a foreseen reality outside of God's decree. So, the synergistic, the cooperative model has God looking down the corridors of time, seeing who is going to accept Jesus.

And on the basis of that acceptance, then they are given to the Son. For what purpose? The point in John 6 is all that the Father gives me, pre-existing condition, will come to me. The result of being given is coming, in the synergistic perspective, it's the opposite of that.

And so there are a number of texts. There's another text in John chapter 8 that you have to turn literally backwards in a synergistic system. In John chapter 8, why do you not hear what I am saying to you?

It is because you are not of God. And yet the synergist says, why do you not hear what I am saying to you? Because you have not chosen to hear. If you would choose, then you would hear, and then you would belong to God.

But Jesus' statement is, if you belong to God, you will hear what I am saying. But that's what synergism does. It turns those texts upside down. And we have many fellow believers. Don't become a hyper-Calvinist, my Calvinist friends.

We have many fellow believers who have been mistaught and given traditions on this issue. And many of you have been there. You were there. You didn't think about it. You weren't challenged to think about it.

Then somebody came along and challenged you to think about it. For some of you, you're looking at the person who challenged you to think about it. And sometimes that is a painful thing to see. So you have this people whom you gave me, and then, now don't worry, I'm not forgetting names.

We'll get there. We're not getting there today, so you might want to put down the notes because I've got a lot of stuff to do. So, believe me, this trip is going to be insane and it's half, again, longer than I'm comfortable even being gone, but I want to talk about I have manifested your name.

So make a note. Make sure he talks about I have manifested your name because that's important. But, verse 6, very, very important to Cosimo. Out of the world. We've talked about it before, but we always have visitors and it's always good to see it in context.

Many different ways of understanding the term world. I think that's John's purpose. Again, not like how we would do in the West where specificity of terminology and limiting the range of meaning of a word is what we want in technical manuals and things like that, printer manuals, computer manuals, whatever else it might be.

The New Testament was not meant to be read in that way. I think the reason that scholars have identified between 10 and 14 identifiably discernible uses of the term cosmos just in the Johannine literature, just in the Gospel, the Epistles, and Revelation is because John wants us to give real consideration to what this term means in each one of its uses.

And that's why he will even crowd different uses into a single sentence as he does in John 3, 17. The Son did not come to judge the world, but that the world to him might be saved. Two different nuances of world.

Even after the previous verse, John 3, 16, God so loved the world. And here you have, he gives people out of the world. So, the natural tendency on our part is to try to come up with a teared down meaning of world that can fit in all of these things.

No. That's not how you do it. You have to allow the text to be the text. You have to allow the use of cosmos to be the use of cosmos in this particular text, and not force it to be the use of cosmos in another particular text where it's being used differently.

We don't do that in our own language. There's all sorts of words we never even realize we're using that have different meanings and different contexts, and because we put it in context, we expect everybody to understand it, and most of the time they do.

Some of the funniest jokes are when we start picking it, how often we use ambiguities in the English language. So, we need to be very careful. These are people whom the Father gave the Son out of the world.

Yours they were, and you gave them to me, and they have kept your words. So, there is a sovereign ownership on the part of the Father of these individuals. Now, there are some people who would actually tell us, well, there's nothing specifically personal about them.

God owns everybody, and once he foresees that someone's going to believe in him, then he just gives them to Christ. But it's all dependent upon their action, not God's. I don't see that. Yours they were, and the very first word of that phrase is yours.

So, there is a sovereignty in the relationship of the Father to these individuals. Later on in this chapter, you're going to have the terminology that Jesus is going to use. I do not pray for the world.

I pray for those you've given me out of the world. Now, you've got to realize that's there, and realize that John 3 .16 is there for God's love of the world. He gave his only begotten son. That, whosoever, all those believing, literally.

So, there's a delimitation even in John 3 .16 that is very clearly brought out in this text as well. In this text as well. So, we've only gotten through the first sentence of verse 6, and we didn't get to name yet.

So, we will get to that. Lord willing. I need you to remember that for me. Duly noted. Good. How about Sean? You've got backup notes? Very good. Very good. I'm feeling confident about how we're going to do here.

Assuming that I do not disappear into the wild woods of Ukraine. So, all right. Let's close our time. Heavenly Father, we do thank you once again for your word, and we thank you for your preservation of it.

We thank you that by your spirit you cause us to love it and to desire to honor it and to hear it. We know this is the work of your spirit within our hearts. We ask for that work, the spirit, in this next hour as we seek to honor and glorify you in the proclamation of your truth and the worship of your name.

We pray in Christ's name. Amen.