The Gospel of John

The Father and the Son

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Conversations, Panels and Sermons

Lesson: 57- 70

Genre:

Track: 057

Dictation Name: RR197AF59

Location/Venue:

Year:

Let us worship God. The lord is nigh unto all them that call upon Him, to all that call upon Him in truth. He will fulfill the desire of them that fear Him, He will also hear their cry and will save them. Oh Thou who hearest prayer unto Thee shall flesh come. Let us pray.

Our Father we give thanks unto Thee that Thou hast called us to be Thine in Jesus Christ. Make us ever mindful that we have been called not only to be Thine but to serve Thee. Teach us to be faithful to our calling in Christ. To know that we are not our own but Thine and that all the days of our life we must serve Thee with all our heart, mind and being .Bless us as we serve Thee, give us joy in Thy word, faithfulness to Thy calling and an ever increasing delight in Thy kingdom. Grant us this we beseech Thee, in the name of Jesus Christ, our Savior, Amen.

Our scripture is John 17:1-5. John 17:1-5, our subject: The Father and the Son.

“These words spake Jesus, and lifted up his eyes to heaven, and said, Father, the hour is come; glorify thy Son, that thy Son also may glorify thee:

2 As thou hast given him power over all flesh, that he should give eternal life to as many as thou hast given him.

3 And this is life eternal, that they might know thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent.3

4 I have glorified thee on the earth: I have finished the work which thou gavest me to do.

5 And now, O Father, glorify thou me with thine own self with the glory which I had with thee before the world was.”

Chapter seventeen of John’s gospel is often called, and rightly, the high priestly prayer by Jesus, or the prayer of consecration. There are three main sections to this prayer, first, in verses one through five the subject is the Son and the Father. The second section is verses six through nineteen and it concerns the Son and His immediate disciples of that day. And the third section, verses twenty through twenty six, centers on the Son and the church. Sadly the first section, verses one through five which we are now to consider, is least considered in our time because people are more interested in the church and themselves than in the Father and the Son. Jesus faces the cross but the prayer is not the prayer of a victim but a victor. It is not the response of one who is being moved and governed by events but of one who determines them. Soon after this prayer in the garden of gethsemane our Lord prayed as He faced the agony of the cross ‘Father if Thou be willing remove this cup from me, nevertheless not my will but Thine be done’. As truly man Jesus knew the horror of crucifixion but He also knew the will of God. The prayer was spoken aloud and the disciples heard it. It was a prayer to God but it was also a statement about the Father and the Son which the disciples needed to hear, to arm them for their own calling in the days ahead. In verse one our Lord says:

“Father, the hour is come; glorify thy Son, that thy Son also may glorify thee:”

The statement the hour is come like so much else in scripture presupposes clearly God’s absolute predestination, His government of every moment and every hour. Paul in Ephesians 1:4 tells us that God hath chosen in Him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and without blame before Him in love.

The fact that God had ordained the cross did not eliminate its pain and agony but it made it totally a part of a glorious plan and meaning. Glorify Thy son that Thy son may glorify Thee means that the cross was the glory of Christ. God was glorified by Christ’s work because they are one God. To make God known is to glorify Him. The cross was a revelation of who and what God is and a glorification of His majesty and grace. In verse two our Lord continues:

“2 As thou hast given him power over all flesh, that he should give eternal life to as many as thou hast given him.”

Now, in Jesus Christ the power and the authority of the Godhead are one and the same, all fallen mankind is subject to Christ’s royal power, those who are given to Christ by God’s predestinating power are given eternal life with Him. In verse three we are told:

“3 And this is life eternal, that they might know thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent.”

Eternal life is defined by knowing Jesus Christ as our redeemer and lord. Not to know Him is implicitly eternal death. Because Jesus Christ is the way, the truth and the life not to know Him is a form of death. The only true God is an important statement and in antiquity and around the world since most cultures are syncretistic, syncretistic in their religious faith. Syncretism means to take different things that are not similar and just put them together because you want them together. Man’s thinking is usually syncretistic and never more so than in our time. People want snips and snatches of everything, they put them together and they call it Christianity. They insist, syncretistic people, on regarding all religions as essentially one and therefore their assimilation of other religions is easily undertaken.

A common saying of syncretistism is ‘there are many paths to God’. As we have already seen knowledge is a moral fact. We spent one Sunday recently on that premise as our Lord developed it. Knowledge is a moral fact and to know God as the only true God means to know Jesus as the one sent by the Father. The word sent again refers to God’s absolute determination of all things.

Then in verse four Jesus says:

“4 I have glorified thee on the earth: I have finished the work which thou gavest me to do.”

By speaking of all His life, ministry, death and resurrection as one work our Lord makes clear that all His life has a common pattern: the glorification of God. The glory of God is seen in all His works, notably in creation, redemption and providence. By our salvation we enter into the Lord’s kingdom and the realm of His glory whereas the ungodly go from shame to shame and into reprobation eternally. Jesus glorified God on earth by revealing the majestic grace of God. He accomplished what He was sent to do. We likewise glorify God when we do the task we are called to do in and by His grace and spirit. In verse five our Lord prays:

“5 And now, O Father, glorify thou me with thine own self with the glory which I had with thee before the world was.”

Now when my work is done as it shortly will be, He says, glorify me in heaven as I have glorified Thee on earth. According to Plumber we have in verses four and five two great declarations, namely and I quote:

“First that the Son is in person distinct form the Father and second, that the Son existing in glory with the Father from all eternity working in obedience to the Father on earth, existing in glory with the Father now is in person one and the same. “ End of quote.

The doctrine of Christology was not an invention of the church in a latter age as some modernists claim, rather it took time for the church to begin to understand the scriptures and that’s why the fully developed awareness of who Christ was took two or three centuries.

Our Lord here makes a distinction but not a separation between Himself and God. He is God the Son from all eternity and His existing as an incarnate being both God and man is what occurs in time. He speaks of His status before the world was and in Philippians 2:9-11 Paul refers to this and speaks of the exultation of Jesus Christ in heaven. But it also tells us that our Lord looked for glory in the last place that man would expect it: in the cross. The preexistence of the Son is presupposed in these verses, especially verse five. The consciousness of this by Jesus, the incarnate God, is clearly apparent. As Lange wrote a long time ago and I quote:

“The high priestly prayer is high priestly not merely because of its being the intercession of Christ for His entire kingdom of God but also an account of its consummation of the sacrifice of Christ, his offering up of Himself. At the same time however it’s also a prophetic prayer in that seizing up the principle periods and stages it sketches and announces with divine servitude the entire progress of the kingdom of God and development. None the less it is kingly, conscious of His enternal victory over the world and believing in the consequences of this victory. Christ transports Himself not the standpoint of the last day or the Ascension Day but to that of the deliverance upon Golgotha, it is finished.” Unquote.

This is fully developed in the next two sections of chapter seventeen. Our words reveal us, how much more is this true of the words of Jesus Christ. Modernists have tried to excise from history as much of the gospel as possible but even in the fragments they allow as history the deity of Jesus Christ comes through powerfully. The pitiful absurdities of unbelief cannot stand against the light and He is the light. Let us pray.

Our Father we give thanks unto Thee for Thy word. We thank Thee that Thou art our Great High Priest, that Thou dost constantly make intercession for us. We pray our Father that Thou wouldst give us a spirit of prayer that we may come to Thee and avail ourselves of the opportunity that is ours to be heard at the very throne of heaven. In Jesus’ name, Amen.

Are there any questions now? Yes?

[Unintelligible Question]

[Rushdoony] Yes. Emphatically so because it so strongly stresses the sovereignty of God, His predestinating power and His eternal purpose which circumscribes all things. It really is an ignorance of scripture or a willful neglect of it, a willful ignorance that leads to doubting these things. And I’m of the opinion and sometime perhaps I will write about it that one of our problems today is that we are no longer able to think clearly. Consider what speech is, it’s impossible to think without words, try thinking without words, it cannot be done.

A baby in the mother’s womb can hear voices, can recognize voices, so that when it is born it will turn its head towards the mother, towards the father and anyone else like another child that it hears but it cannot think until it is taught words, it has only feelings. Now, the fullness of speech comes with a religious faith. Because then all your thinking is reordered, it is clarified, it is on target, you begin with God, the triune God and everything is in place. But what happens when you have no such faith and no knowledge of the word of God and incoherence sets into society? Why is it that our youth today talk like half barbarian half savage persons? There is no clarity of speech there. Therefore there is no clarity of thinking, they don’t have the words, they keep grasping for words and they utter all kinds of things, you know, a lot of crutches to fill in the gap! They are incapable of thinking clearly and this is what happens to every age that departs from the faith, they go downhill dramatically. We spoke very recently about the fact that scholarship and scientific research is increasingly dishonest, the most recent issue of Culture Wars arrived the other day and there was an interesting article in which a very, very prominent professor who has won an award for the book that he has written about John Milton and Samson Agonisties; in which he invents all kinds of quotes from Milton’s day. Another professor pursued every footnote and found they were fraudulent!

Has that bothered anyone? No. It’s like a book that was written on Captain Cook last year which was fraudulent and the only claim the man had to any wisdom was that he happened to be a native, not Hawaiian but from [unknown] and therefore that made him, he felt, wiser than any white American professor. The book was nonsense but it won an award because we live in a time when men are both incapable of thinking and incapable of doing other than loving and creating lies. So we have a very serious problem in our time and it’s not an accident that our Lord is described by the logos, the word. That apart from Him all words begin to erode and lose their meaning and we’re going down the sinkhole of history unless we reverse our course. I was interested again this week in reading about the roman emperor Theodosius, to read as I have many times before, accounts of how queasy the people in Rome and in Constantinople felt about seeing so many Goths, various Germanic peoples, walking the streets of their cities and members of the army. They came across the border to join the army because of the better pay and a far better life style than that they had at home. They were dirty, they very often smelled and they were easily identifiable because they were the only blondes around. And the people in the Roman Empire were very, very queasy about seeing those savages walking their streets.

Well, they became the future, when they became converted they were the ones who created a civilization while the old Latin civilization went down the tubes. That may happen again; when people forsake the word they forsake their senses. Well I got a bit side tracked on that, are there any other questions? Well if not let us conclude with prayer.

Our Father Thy word is truth and Thy word enables us to see the things that are of Thee, the things of this world and all things in a clear light. We thank Thee for Thy word, we thank Thee for Thy spirit for its indwelling, its correcting, its healing, its governing power. Bless us as we serve Thee, give us growth in Thy grace and in knowledge of Thee that we may be more effective for Thy kingdom. And now go in peace, God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Ghost, bless you and keep you, guide and protect you, this day and always, Amen.