“Before the World Existed”

Isaiah chapter 40 and reading from the eighteenth verse, continuing to think along the lines that are established by the hymns that we’ve already been singing:

To whom then will you liken God,
 or what likeness compare with him?
An idol! A craftsman casts it,
 and a goldsmith overlays it with gold
 and casts for it silver chains.
He who is too impoverished for an offering
 chooses wood that will not rot;
he seeks out a skillful craftsman
 to set up an idol that will not move.

Do you not know? Do you not hear?
 Has it not been told you from the beginning?
 Have you not understood from the foundations of the earth?
It is he who sits above the circle of the earth,
 and its inhabitants are like grasshoppers;
who stretches out the heavens like a curtain,
 and spreads them like a tent to dwell in;
who brings princes to nothing,
 and makes the rulers of the earth as emptiness.

Scarcely are they planted, scarcely sown,
 scarcely has their stem taken root in the earth,
when he blows on them, and they wither,
 and the tempest carries them off like stubble.

To whom then will you compare me,
 that I should be like him? says the Holy One.
Lift up your eyes on high and see:
 who created these?
He who brings out their host by number,
 calling them all by name;
by the greatness of his might
 and because he is strong in power,
 not one is missing.

Why do you say, O Jacob,
 and speak, O Israel,
“My way is hidden from the Lord,
 and my right is disregarded by my God”?
Have you not known? Have you not heard?
The Lord is the everlasting God,
 the Creator of the ends of the earth.
He does not faint or grow weary;
 his understanding is unsearchable.
He gives power to the faint,
 and to him who has no might he increases strength.
Even youths shall faint and be weary,
 and young men shall fall exhausted;
but they who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength;
 they shall mount up with wings like eagles;
they shall run and not be weary;
 they shall walk and not faint.

Amen.

Well, I invite you to turn to John chapter 17, where my plan this morning is to look at the first five verses—in fact, just two of them—for the final time before we move on to the rest of this prayer. Let me just read verses 4 and 5: Jesus says to the Father, “I glorified you on earth, having accomplished the work that you gave me to do. And now, Father, glorify me in your own presence with the glory that I had with you before the world existed.”

Who can fathom these things, our gracious Father? We need always the enabling of the Holy Spirit, that by grace, through faith, we might behold your glory, we might wonder at your majesty and your love to us, that we might come and taste and drink and live. Help us now as we look to these verses together. And we pray in Christ’s name. Amen.

You know, as we think of Jesus here in prayer, perhaps, like me, you’ve been thinking this week we will probably never, ever know the extent to which we owe great thanks to those who have prayed for us, who do pray for us, and will pray for us. Sometimes people tell us, “I’m praying for you.” Other times we find out by other means.

And as I was pondering in this way during the week, I have a faint but a very real recollection of waking up as a child, having been put to bed and having gone to sleep. I was probably no older than eight, maybe six or seven; I don’t know when it was. But I just wakened up in my bedroom, and I could hear my parents talking. And as I listened, it just sounded strange to me, because they weren’t actually talking to one another. And I wondered, “Well, who are they talking to?” And I opened my bedroom door to peek out, and they were actually praying together before the end of the day: praying for me by name, praying for my sister Maureen by name—not Kate, because she hadn’t been born. And I remember just closing the door and crawling back into bed, not knowing just all to make of it.

But can you imagine for the disciples, who have lived with Jesus for these three years, not only being the beneficiaries of this amazing series of instructions in chapters 14, 15, and 16 but then being actually taken into the secret place with Jesus as he prays first of all for himself, in the first five verses as we have it; and then as he prays for his disciples, who are within earshot; and then in turn as he prays for those who will become believers, who will become followers of Jesus as a result of the answer to his prayers for his disciples? In other words, if you’re a believer here this morning, you are included in this prayer that we refer to as the High Priestly Prayer.

What we’ve done so far (or tried to do so far) in the first five verses is pay attention to the timeline in relationship to what Jesus says as he begins his prayer, “The hour has come”[1]—so that we’ve thought about it, if you like, within the framework of time. But here in verses 4 and 5, we actually move beyond that. And so we consider verses 4 and 5, the words that he addresses to his Father, in light of eternity. And we have this amazing phrase that closes verse 5, “before the world existed,” which comes back again in the twenty-fourth verse, when he says, “Father, I desire that they also, whom you have given me, may be with me where I am, to see my glory that you have given me because you loved me”—and here we go again—“before the foundation of the world.”

I want to make two observations from this this morning: first of all, to observe the report that Jesus gives in verse 4, to which we will come; and the request which Jesus makes in verse 5, which is where we’ll begin.

The Request Jesus Makes

His request there, of the Father, is clear: “And now, Father, glorify me in your own presence with the glory … I had with you before the world existed.” And with these words, Jesus takes us beyond the realm of time and takes us across all the years that ever existed.

When the New [City] Catechism was put together—it’s a while since we’ve gone through that together (we might come again)—when that was done, I had a very small part in a recording that was done of it, and I had to remember my lines. And one that stuck out for me, because I had part of the Genesis narrative, is a phrase that perhaps you’re familiar with because I’ve said it so often, because one of the things that I had to say in the recording was “Before there was time, before there was anything, there was God.” “Before there was time, before there was anything, there was God.”

The created world was brought into existence by God. There is God, who is the ultimate reality, and then there is everyone and everything else. It’s very, very important that we understand the way in which the Bible makes this perfectly clear: God, the Creator, and then everyone and everything else, the created.

All things bright and beautiful,
All creatures great and small,
All things wise and wonderful,
The Lord God made them all.[2]

There is a majesty in it all, whether it is the beauty of the flowers or whether it is the immensity when you decide not to lose your temper at the ants that have now decided to invade your fruit basket or whatever it might be, and in stepping back for a moment, you say to yourself, “Look at these things! How in the world are they as they are? How do they do what they do? How do they…” All of this, God in charge of it all.

In fact, here: God creates, God sustains, God orders, God directs the entire cosmos at the macro level and at the micro level. That is why it is such a staggering thing that you read—and we read last time in verse 3—“And this is eternal life, that they know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent,” and, in verse 2—which is what I meant to say—“[and] you have given him authority over all flesh.” “Over all flesh.”

When we read our Bibles, we immediately are made aware of the fact that there is only one true God.

Now, this may sound sort of very theoretical, very theological, very far out, and it is a stretcher—that’s for sure. But let me just remind you of how vastly different the things that we’re just affirming to begin this morning are from common mentality in relationship to our world and to the things that people say about God.

David Wells, in one of his books, addresses this in just a sentence or two, where he says contemporary spiritualities—spiritualities (and he says, for example, of many different forms: Hinduism, or New Age things, or kabbalah, the crossbreed of Judaism and other New Age nonsense, included with that radical environmentalism)—all of these are “self-made spiritualities.” And “what they … have in common … is a view of reality that is pantheistic.” So, in other words, completely antithetical to what we have just said: there is God, and then there is everyone and everything else. From a pantheistic point of view, all of them assume in one way or another “that nature encloses and contains” God. The assumption is “that the way we make contact,” then, “with God is [by] find[ing] him” within—within nature or within ourselves. “To declare,” however, “one’s belief in the Christian God is, at one and the same time, to reject this cultural spirituality …. God is indeed one in his being, but he is not one with nature.”[3] “One in his being, but he is not one with nature.

Now, Jesus’ request here takes us into the very heart not only of the fact of the immensity of God, but it takes us into the heart of the Bible’s teaching of the Trinity or the doctrine of the Trinity. And when we read our Bibles, we immediately are made aware of the fact that there is only one true God. There’s only one true God. “I am God, and there is no other; I am God, and there is none like me,”[4] he says through the prophet Isaiah—Isaiah 46. In the material that we often refer to in Deuteronomy 6—which we will again this morning, all being well, in the second hour as we share in a baby dedication—“Hear, O Israel: The Lord [your] God, the Lord is one. [And] you shall love the Lord your God,”[5] and so on. Paul, who grew up as a monotheistic Jew, by the time he is writing to the Corinthians—1 Corinthians 8—he says to them, “[Though] there may be [many] so-called gods in heaven or on earth … there is one God, the Father, from whom … all things [are] and for whom we exist.”[6]

Now, we don’t need to say more on that, because where it becomes particularly demanding of our thinking is that the one true and living God exists eternally in Trinity. We sang this morning—you sang it (I heard you; it was well sung)—“God in three persons, blessed Trinity.”[7] So the one true and living God is in three persons. The Father is not the Son, nor is the Father the Holy Spirit, nor is the Son the Holy Spirit. Each person in the Godhead is distinct from the other persons but not separable, because they are interwoven with one another in essence. No person in the Godhead, no person in the Trinity, exists without the presence of the others.

Now, you’re just sitting there looking at me, and I’m glad you’re looking at me. I hope you’re thinking as well. But the fact of the matter is, at best, when we consider the doctrine of the Trinity, we don’t go to our Bibles and find an explanation. There is no paragraph. There is no consecutive teaching on the subject. We do not have, ultimately, an explanation, but we have a formulation, if you like, as we consider the way the progressive story, the unfolding story of the Bible, is given to us. And we acknowledge the fact that the Trinity is a mystery.

I mean, John begins here… Mark’s Gospel begins, “The beginning of the gospel [about] Jesus,”[8] and straight into John the Baptist and the baptism of Jesus. John starts way back: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was [with him] in the beginning.”[9] To what is he referring here? “In him was life, … [that] life was the light of men.”[10] “There was nothing made except that it was made through him.”[11] It’s mystery, isn’t it?

John chapter 14, it comes across—the whole idea of them being in the presence of one another. Jesus says to his disciples, “I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Helper, to be with you forever, even the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees him nor knows him.”[12] You go to your friends at work and say, “You know, there’s only one true and living God.” That’ll get you off to a good start. And when you have tried to push your way through that, let them know that this one God exists in three persons—that he is one in essence and in substance, that every part of the Trinity is distinct from one another, without confusion and in collusion with one another, co-inherence with one another, without any kind of loss of the distinction.

Now, let me just pause here for a minute and say that while all of this was going on in my own mind in preparation, for a different reason I turned to a book that I’ve had for a long time, written by John Stott, called Christ the Controversialist. And as I often do, I just distracted myself. But it was a happy distraction. I enjoyed it very much. And I happened to focus on… You know how sometimes, you’re flipping through a book, and just a sentence stands out. And Stott is talking about the nature of what it means to be converted—to move from unbelief to belief, to move from darkness to light, to move from simply an intellectual awareness of God to a personal assent and trust in God. And then he talks about whether a person has been “intellectually converted.”[13] “Intellectually converted.” And I thought about that. I wonder: Have we really had our intellects totally converted? Or are we a bit like…

I remember years ago going to church on a Sunday morning in Buckinghamshire, and I took with me my Bible and also a book that I just bought. It was published in ’72. It was called Arguing with God, and it was about the consideration of evil in the world. And I had my Bible, and I had Arguing with God. And as I was saying goodbye to the pastor as I left, he looked at the book, and he says, “That’s the trouble with people like you. You’re not supposed to be arguing with God.”

Have you been converted? Jesus says to his disciples, “You call me Teacher and Lord, and this is what I am.”[14] That was not simply a polite way of referring to the rabbi. What Jesus was saying is that “I am your Teacher, and you have no right to disagree with my instruction. And I am your Lord, and therefore, you have no right to disregard my directions.” Converted intellectually. Converted morally. Intellectually, I submit my mind to the truth of God, not in a mindless way but in a humble way, and I commit my life to seek not to disobey him.

“Oh,” you say, “that was an aside. Let’s get back to the main business.” All right. God exists eternally as a Trinity. And that mystery is actually fully understandable by God. Here’s one for you: God understands everything. God is the ultimate reality. God is the ultimate beauty. God is the ultimate truth. God is the ultimate justice. And everything else is derived from God himself, so that when you remove yourself in your mind from the realm of God’s jurisdiction, you end up with the chaos that is represented in our world, whether it is in Eastern mysticism or whether it’s in contemporary expressions that are part and parcel of our Western culture.

God is the ultimate reality. God is the ultimate beauty. God is the ultimate truth. God is the ultimate justice. And everything else is derived from God himself.

If you remember—and I hope you do—our studies in Romans chapter 1 (the second half of Romans chapter 1), we considered there the fact that God’s Word says that he has given enough of himself in the disclosure of his world to render us accountable, but he has not provided in nature enough for us to know him savingly.[15] He has given us not only the external reality of nature, but he has given us also the internal reality of our conscience.

Well then, what has happened to us? Our consciences are distorted by a rebellion against God—which is why in 600 BC, God speaks through the prophet Isaiah, and he pronounces woe on the people. This is what he says:

Woe [upon] those who call evil good
 and good evil,
who put darkness for light
 and light for darkness, …
… who are wise in their own eyes,
 and shrewd in their own sight![16]

You see, the Bible’s explanation of our world, which starts with God and goes from there through our rebellion and so on—you may not like it, but it certainly coheres. Jesus is, in that context, asking his Father, “I want you, Father, to glorify me again in your presence with the glory that I had with you before the world existed”—the glory of the coequal, undivided Godhead, the Trinity, enjoying one another. God created the world, but he didn’t have to create it. God did not create the world because he needed a world. God created the world out of the depth of his own being. In the reality of the Trinity, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit live within the mutuality of perfect love. Everything else is an extrapolation from that.

And in the incarnation, it involved in some measure Jesus laying aside that shared glory of eternity. When we sing about it in—I think we sang the hymn last week—Wesley’s hymn, “Emptied himself of all but love,”[17] it’s a very difficult line there, and I sympathize with Wesley, because he wasn’t sure just how to say that, because he wanted to say more than that. Because Jesus, in taking to himself humanity, emptied something of himself. And so Jesus now says, “Father, I’m looking forward to the glory. I’m looking forward to being back with you.”

If Jesus were a mere man, this is ludicrous. Have you considered that? I mean, if Jesus is a Galilean carpenter—somehow or another, the world has hung on to his recollection, and some crazy people throughout the world still revere his memory, and so on—if that is all we’re dealing with, it is actually a measure of the incapacity of our minds to worship, to follow, and to obey him.

And that is why, you see, when we talk with our friends and neighbors, if a person is going to come to know God—to know God—they’re not going to know God as a result of rationalism, nor are they going to come to know God as a result of a kind of irrational mysticism—so, “Ohm” down in the park with your yoga mat or whatever else it is, feeling very much and understanding what people are saying: “I’m intuitively engaged in this kind of thing.” Fine. That’s okay. But what we’re discovering here in the Bible is something very, very different.

It is as we consider the words and the works of the one who is here praying to his Father that we then are made to understand that God has made himself known finally, unmistakably, savingly in a real, historical man—not in a mantra, not in a philosophy, not in a scheme, but in a man. “And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us,”[18] tired, hungry, sad, joyful, whatever. “And we,” say his friends, “we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father, … full of grace and truth.”[19]

Only those who have faith see the glory of God in his Word and in his works. If you do not see something of the glory of God, if you do not marvel at the wonder of all that he has given you, if you do not give thanks for your food from a genuine sense of the awareness of his provision, if you do not see God’s glory, the chances are it is because you are unconverted—interested, engaged, from time to time emotionally stirred, but unconverted.

The Report Jesus Gives

The second observation concerns verse 4, and that is from the request that he makes—“I want, Father, to be back with you and see this glory”—to the report that he gives in verse 4. (You say, “Why do you call it a report?” Well, I just wanted another r; that was all.) “I glorified you on earth, having accomplished the work that you gave me to do.”

So, it’s as though he is returning to headquarters, having completed the assignment that he’s been given, and he is reporting once again to the Father. The work that the Father has planned he, the Son, has now procured, and it will be the work of the Holy Spirit then to apply the reality of that to all who believe. It’s as though God had said from eternity to his Son, “Go and accomplish the work of salvation.”

And when we read the Bible, we realize this: that it is out of love for the world that the Father sends the Son, and it is out of love for the world that the Son lays down his life. Love for the world! “For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son, so that whoever believes in him should not perish”—which is our eternal destiny as sinners—“should not perish but have eternal life.”[20] That’s John 3. First John 4:10… The John who wrote the Gospel writes three letters, and he drives it home—1 John 4:10: “In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins,” to provide a sacrifice that bears the wrath of God, turning it to the favor of God in the lives of those who believe.

Now, when you think about that, surely it is the preacher’s responsibility, the preacher’s privilege, to persuade men and women of that love of God—to persuade men and women that God loves them, and that he loves you so much that he has taken this action in order that, despite us having turned our backs upon him, he is the one who pursues us. “In this is love, not that we … loved God but that he loved us”—the immensity of the divine love of God for sinners.

It is out of love for the world that the Father sends the Son, and it is out of love for the world that the Son lays down his life.

I’m not sure this always comes across as clearly as it should. Hymn writers help us. We’re very familiar with, you know, “Could we with ink the ocean fill,”[21] and so on, which is a great lyric. But one that I don’t ever remember singing here goes like this:

There is no love like the love of Jesus,
Never to fade or fall,
Till into the fold of the peace of God
He has gathered us all.

Jesus’ love! Precious love!
Boundless and pure and free!
Oh, turn to that love, weary, wand’ring soul!
Jesus [calls now to] thee.[22]

Did you ever write a love letter to somebody, and they never even replied? Did you ever send a valentine, and apparently, she didn’t even care, or he didn’t care? They didn’t tell you. One of their friends told you. They said, “You know that valentine you sent her? She thought it was funny. She couldn’t believe it. She has no interest in you.” Unrequited love, at a far deeper level, is a painful reality. The supreme love of God for sinners in many cases remains unrequited.

This is not sentimentalism, incidentally. This is not… How does that go? “Don’t go changing …. I love you just the way you are,”[23] you know? Oh, give me a break! Okay. So people think, as soon as somebody starts about the love of God—“Oh, the love of God: he loves, loves, loves, loves, loves”—and so they say, “Oh, well, that’s how it is. I’m glad of that: he loves me just the way I am.” No, he doesn’t. He loves me despite the way I am. That’s the difference: not because I’m an attractive proposition but because I’m a sinner in need of a Savior.

And from the very beginning of his life, when we read the Gospels—and we must wrap this up—but when we read the Gospels, Jesus was unreservedly committed to doing what the Father had given him to do. “I glorified you on earth, having accomplished the work that you gave me to do.” Twelve years of age, remember, and there he is in Jerusalem, separated from Mary and Joseph. They finally find him: “What do you think you’re doing? We’ve been looking for you everywhere.” And, in the words of the King James Version—which is how I learned this at Sunday school—he looks at Mary and Joseph, and he says, “Wist ye not that I must be about my Father’s business?”[24] “Don’t you know that I have a commission to be fulfilled?” And you follow the line, fast-forwarding to thirty years of age and then summarized by the writer to the Hebrews: “For the joy that was set before Jesus, he endured the cross; he despised the shame; he’s seated at the right hand of the throne of God.”[25]

But if you look carefully at this, Jesus is speaking here as if this event has already happened: “I glorified you on earth, having accomplished the work that you gave me to do.” But this is in prospect of the cross. Well, he’s actually speaking proleptically. He is speaking of an event that as yet has not taken place as if it was already accomplished. His death and his resurrection and his ascension are so about to happen that there’s no question that they won’t happen. In other words, “Consider it done.” What he’s saying actually is “Mission accomplished.”

The word that is used here for “accomplished” is the same root word that he uses on the cross when he declares from the cross, “It is finished.”[26] “It is accomplished.” And here in the prayer… And the disciples listen in on the prayer, and no doubt they would have said, “Wow! That was what he was talking about when he says, ‘I have accomplished…’” What a contrast to “mission impossible”! “Mission accomplished” versus “mission impossible.” “Mission impossible”: the attempt to save ourselves. It’s an impossible task.

And again, when we studied in Romans, we realized that when we turn away from the true God, we don’t go for nothing. We go for invented gods. We go for little idols of our own invention, exchanging the glory of an immortal God for things that creep and crawl and fly, for images of birds and men, and so on.[27]

Isaiah 46. I was going to read that instead of 40. But, for example, listen to what God says:

To whom will you liken me and make me equal,
 and compare me, that we may be alike?
Those who lavish gold from the purse,
 … weigh out silver in the scales,
hire a goldsmith, … he makes it into a god;
 then they fall down and worship!
[Then] they lift it to their shoulders, [and] they carry it [around],
 [and then] they set it in its place, and it stands there;
 it cannot move from its place.
If one cries to it, it [doesn’t] answer[,]
 [it doesn’t] save him from his trouble.[28]

Because substitute gods are self-depleting. What they promise they can’t provide.

Did I quote from “Mr. Businessman” last Sunday morning when I was preaching? Did I? Which service? The first? Okay. Refer to it yourselves on your own at home. “Spending counterfeit incentive” and “wasting precious time and health.”[29] What a picture Isaiah gives us of people overburdened by the idols that they’ve invented! And there’s only one word that sounds out from the dumb mouths of these crazy inventions of our own: defeat, defeat, defeat.

That doesn’t mean that we don’t make it through our lives, but it does mean that if we’re going to be able to stand before God and face the bar of his judgment, it will not be on the basis of our own attempted cleanups or endeavors, but it will only be on the strength of he who completed the work that his Father gave him to do. Because only in Jesus is there that triumph. And as Paul says, he constantly leads us in a triumphant procession,[30] so that, facing all the challenges of the day—the parts and the pieces of our lives, all the things that we deal with as men and women—Jesus does actually make a huge difference. And I commend Christ to you today.

Let us pray:

God our Father, thank you for sending Jesus. Thank you, Lord Jesus, that you came. Holy Spirit, won’t you teach us more about his lovely name? For we pray in his name. Amen.

[1] John 17:1 (ESV).

[2] Cecil Frances Alexander, “All Things Bright and Beautiful” (1848).

[3] David F. Wells, What Is the Trinity? (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R, 2012), 11.

[4] Isaiah 46:9 (ESV).

[5] Deuteronomy 6:4–5 (ESV).

[6] 1 Corinthians 8:5–6 (ESV).

[7] Reginald Heber, “Holy, Holy, Holy” (1826).

[8] Mark 1:1 (ESV).

[9] John 1:1–2 (ESV).

[10] John 1:4 (ESV).

[11] John 1:3 (paraphrased).

[12] John 14:16–17 (ESV).

[13] John R. W. Stott, Christ the Controversialist: A Study in Some Essentials of Evangelical Religion (Downers Grove, IL: Inter-Varsity, 1970), 212.

[14] John 13:13 (paraphrased).

[15] See Romans 1:19–20.

[16] Isaiah 5:20–21 (ESV).

[17] Charles Wesley, “And Can It Be That I Should Gain?” (1738).

[18] John 1:14 (ESV).

[19] John 1:14 (KJV).

[20] John 3:16 (paraphrased).

[21] Frederick Martin Lehman, “The Love of God” (1917).

[22] William Edensor Littlewood, “There Is No Love like the Love of Jesus.”

[23] Billy Joel, “Just the Way You Are” (1978).

[24] Luke 2:49 (KJV).

[25] Hebrews 12:2 (paraphrased).

[26] John 19:30 (ESV).

[27] See Romans 1:23.

[28] Isaiah 46:5–7 (ESV).

[29] Ray Stevens, “Mr. Businessman” (1968).

[30] See 2 Corinthians 2:14.