More Glory

Father, I desire that they also, whom You have given Me, be with Me where I am, so that they may see My glory which You have given Me, for You loved Me before the foundation of the world. (John 17:24)

Glory is one of those words that I have an insatiable appetite to better understand – and experience. Like Moses, I find myself incessantly pestering God to show me His glory. I don't think He has any problem with that, for that is what we were meant to be, reflectors of His glory. So if I don't reflect His glory very well, then the problem just may be at least partly that I don't yet see it very well, or even know what I am looking for.

Over recent years my awareness of what glory actually is has improved dramatically, at least I hope it has. But I still feel like I have so much more to grasp about just what it really is and how much I should hunger for it. Jesus talked about it a number of times, particularly in this prayer to His Father for His disciples. So I believe that if we consider ourselves to be disciples of Jesus we should be much more interested in His glory like He seemed to be.

As I read this verse this morning, something caught my attention I had never noticed before. I always like that, for I immediately know that He has something exciting to reveal to me when that happens. Jesus closely links glory here to love, particularly the love that the Father and He had shared a very long time ago. In fact, as I think about it this key phrase that shows up several times, before the foundation of the world, usually refers to what I am starting to sense as a time before sin became an issue in the universe or at least somewhere around that time.

(I just did a word/phrase study on this idea of foundation and found an enormous resource of material to explore with exciting potential benefits. But right now I want to meditate on other aspects I am seeing in this passage.)

Not only is love closely connected to glory here, but Jesus says that the Father is the one who gave Jesus this glory. As soon as He refers to this glory He links it to the love they shared from long ago. I find this very significant and something I fear has been overlooked far too long. I suspect it is because our own priorities blind us to what is truly important while at the same time putting too much emphasis on things that are peripheral, things too much influenced by our selfish outlook.

The very essence of agape love, the kind of love that Jesus shared with His Father before the foundation of the world, is the polar opposite of the selfishness that so permeates and influences our thinking and reasoning processes and affects what we assume is important. Yet this is the very condition that Jesus came to redress. Jesus came with the glory of God, a revelation of the real truth about love itself – which is just another way of describing God – into a world of concentrated darkness where there was the greatest absence of love.

Darkness is simply the absence of light. In the same way selfishness is the absence of true love. Love itself is yet another one of those words that has been so misused and perverted that it is difficult to even use in without introducing many inherited misconceptions. I suspect that all of the important terms that we need to understand in coming to know the kind of life Jesus came to give us have been so distorted that we need a great deal of remedial instruction and mentoring before we can begin to grasp the truth as Jesus came to reveal it to us. The truth as it is in Jesus is a heart-based truth, not just a redefinition of terms. Yet when we have our terms so confused it becomes very difficult to even perceive what God is trying to tell us. It is like listening to a foreign language, only with the added confusion of thinking we know what the sounds mean because they seem familiar to us as words we have been using all along. But in reality, though they sound like the same words they actually are intended to convey meanings strikingly different or even opposite at times to what we have come to assume they mean.

There is much to discern in just this verse alone, and even more when I begin taking into account the surrounding verses. Jesus notes here that part of seeing this glory He is so excited about involves being with Him where He is. Evidently it appears that if I am not with Jesus personally it may be difficult at best if not impossible, to see the real truth about God's glory.

Just previous to this Jesus said that He had given to His disciples this same glory so that they could be one even as Jesus and the Father are one. It is starting to sound a lot like this glory might be composed of the love shared within the three beings of the Godhead. That would certainly make sense, but it is starting to really challenge typical assumptions about what the word glory might mean.

His very next words introduce another dimension into the understanding of glory.

"O righteous Father, although the world has not known You, yet I have known You; and these have known that You sent Me; and I have made Your name known to them, and will make it known, so that the love with which You loved Me may be in them, and I in them." (John 17:25-26)

I notice here that Jesus cannot yet say that His disciples actually know Him or the Father. But He does say that they have at least come to know that the Father is the one who sent Jesus into the world. I wonder if this was a very recent development in the minds of the disciples that Jesus was seeking to cement more securely. Their growing awareness that Jesus was much more connected to God than they had ever dared to think previously was something that Jesus very much wanted to anchor firmly in their thinking before all hell broke loose in their lives in just a few hours from then.

Jesus mentions that He had made the Father's name known to them and would continue to do it even more. I believe this refers primarily to the grand revelation of the ultimate truth about God's character that was about to be exposed in the way the Son would reveal the how God reacts when exposed to the most intense violence and abuse at the cross. This is when the true glory of God, the very essence of the real truth about how God's character responded to a full onslaught of evil. This is also when and how the name of God was made known, showing in real life how God feels and reacts to evil when He makes Himself fully vulnerable to its vileness up close and personal.

In the rest of this last verse Jesus says that in making the Father's name known, the result would be an awakening within the disciples of the same kind of love that the Father and Son had always shared with each other before the foundation of the world.

In bringing back the focus here to really knowing God, Jesus also brings His prayer full circle around to the stunning statement He had made at the beginning of His prayer.

This is eternal life, that they may know You, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom You have sent. (John 17:3)