The Disciples are Loved
Published by Stanley Pouw in 2022 · 13 February 2022
This is early on Friday morning of Passion Week. Our Lord has around Him the eleven disciples. Judas has already left. Our Lord has spent the whole evening giving promises that are recorded in John 13, 14, 15, and 16. But the greatest promise of all is that He will send the Holy Spirit to provide the fulfillment of all His promises, and to be the power they need to serve Him and witness for Him.
This is actually the Lord’s Prayer. He stops on the way toward the garden of Gethsemane, still surrounded by the eleven disciples, and He prays this prayer in which He asks the Father on behalf of the disciples and all who will ever believe, to bring them to the fullness of the promised salvation. It is the only glimpse of the intercessory work of Christ, where He mediates for His own.
It is an example of what our Lord is doing now. Paul says in Romans 8:27 and 34, “Christ died for us, providing the sacrifice for sin in which He paid the penalty for our sins. But much more, He lives for us. He lives before the Father, ever-living to make intercession for us, so that nothing overpowers us, overcomes us, and we all are brought to eternal glory according to the will of God.”
You have a glimpse of the work of Christ here. We are brought into the heavenly Holy of Holies where the Son comes before His Father on behalf of His own. Let me explain. Remember the exodus from Egypt in the history of Israel, where they came out and lived in the wilderness for forty years? They would be arranged around a large tent that was God’s tent. It represented the presence of God.
In the middle of that tent, called also the tabernacle, there was a small tent which was the Holy of Holies. And in there was the ark of the covenant; and on top of it, the mercy seat. That was not accessible, except for once a year, on the Day of Atonement, Yom Kippur; where the high priest could enter. He would take the blood of the animal sacrifice to be poured out on the altar, and incense symbolizing prayer.
His responsibility was to provide the sacrifice of atonement, and to offer incense as prayer of forgiveness for the twelve tribes of Israel. This is a picture of what we find in John 17. Here we have the great High Priest entering into the Holy of Holies of the presence of God, and He has on His shoulders all His people. He has offered His own blood on the mercy seat as the true atonement for sin.
Atonement has been made, and prayer is now offered. The high priest went in, did this, turned around and came out. When Jesus ascended to heaven, He went into the Holy of Holies and He is still there. He will be there until all believers are finally gathered into eternal glory. Hebrews says, “He is ever-living to make intercession for us.” As our great High Priest, He carries us into the presence of God.
What is on His heart? His love. John 13:1 says, “Having loved His own who were in the world, He loved them to the max.” Why does He offer His atoning blood for us? Why does He live to make intercession for us in the presence of God? Because He loves us infinitely. He loves us to the same degree that God can love anyone. When He is there in the presence of the Father, we are there in Him.
We are loved by the Father the same way the Father loves the Son. Look at verse 23 of this prayer, “I in them and You in Me, that they may be perfected in unity, so that the world may know that You sent Me, and loved them, even as You have loved Me. ” And in verse 26, “so that the love with which You loved Me may be in them.” We are loved as the Son because we are in the Son.
“We are in Christ.” What that means is exactly what it says. We are in Him loved as He is loved. We are in Him righteous as He is righteous. We are in Him blessed as He is blessed with all spiritual blessings in heaven in Christ. The Father loves the Son infinitely and eternally; and because we are in the Son, He loves us infinitely and eternally. We are as accepted as the Son is accepted.
That is our justification, that is our sanctification, and that is our glorification. How amazing is it to be loved by God as He loves His own Holy Son. And let me say something about Christianity. The Trinity is absolutely foundational to everything that is true about God. 1 John says, “God is love.” If God was only a solitary person, that could not be true, because there would be no one to love.
There is a big difference between God and the Moslem Allah. Their Allah is a solitary deity, invented by men and demons, who is all judgment, fear, and terror. And so would any singular god be, and people would only exist to do what he wanted them to do. But the triune God is eternal love, and has loved eternally within the Trinity. Jesus is the eternal Son, and God loves us like He loves His Son.
This is a love beyond anything that any creature will ever experience. This is blessing and this is glory. So when Christ goes into the heavenly Holy of Holies and comes before the Father, as He does continually, we are there in the throne room with Him. Hebrews 4:14 -16 says, “We have a great high priest who has passed through the heavens, Jesus the Son of God, let us hold fast our confession.”
15 We do not have a high priest who cannot sympathize with our weaknesses, but One who has been tempted in all things as we are, yet without sin. 16 Therefore, let us draw near with confidence to the throne of grace, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need.” We have a great high priest, who not only loves us as only God can love, but having been man, understands us.
God loves His Son. God loves because it’s His nature to love. And God’s love is so infinite that God determined He wanted many more sons to love. So He set in motion creation, and filled that creation with a wondrous universe, that those on earth could see and read His love by what He has provided, even in a temporal way. Because of this love, He chose many children and places them in His Son.
This is what the intercessory work of our Lord is. It is bringing many children to glory to satisfy the loving heart of God. He is interceding for the disciples. But not just for them, because in verse 20 He says, “I do not ask on behalf of these eleven alone, but for those who also believe in Me through their word.” And He prays for us out of an incomprehensible infinite love.
Verses 11-12, “Now I am no longer in the world, but these are in the world, and I come to You. Holy Father, keep through Your name those whom You have given Me, that they may be one as We are. 12 While I was with them in the world, I kept them in Your name. Those whom You gave Me I have kept; and none of them is lost except the son of perdition, that the Scripture might be fulfilled.”
Jesus is anticipating His exodus. He would ascend into heaven in just a few hours, He would be under the wrath of God. “I’m out of the world; they’re in it.” The world is the system of sin that dominates this realm. It’s the corruption, the demonic power, the human power of sin that literally controls the world, under the leadership of Satan and his demons. That’s the world.
Jesus already told them in John 15:18, that the world would hate them because it hated Him. He told them in verse 20, that the world would persecute them. He told them in verse 23 that they would be hated because the world hates Him and hates the Father. In John 16:2 they would become outcasts and they would become martyrs; they would lose their lives. They can’t survive without divine support.
So our Lord then, beginning in verse 11, starts to ask for some specific things for our protection. One, Spiritual security. “They’re in the world and I come to You.” And He’s talking about His ascension. This is the Holy Son, praying to the Holy Father. It is the desire of the Holy Son and the desire of the Holy Father to protect the unholy sinners. That’s what’s happening here.
Why would the Holy Father care about unholy sinners? Answer: Because they are in His Son. When Christ comes into His presence, we come in Him. He says, “Father, Holy Father, keep them in Your name, consistent with who You are, and even beyond that, not because they deserve it, but because they belong to You. They are Yours. They are Your sons and daughters.
Back in John 10:27, there’s a reminder of this in some of the most familiar words of our Lord: “My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow Me; and I give eternal life to them, and they will never perish; and no one will snatch them out of My hand. My Father, who has given them to Me, is greater than all; and no one is able to snatch them out of the Father’s hand.”
We’re going to see an illustration of that in John 18 that may be the most remarkable illustration of that promise or that purpose of Christ in the whole gospel. When they come to arrest Jesus, they want also to arrest the disciples. The Lord never lets that happen; He protects them from that, because it could have destroyed their faith. He will never let anything that could do that happen.
He is about to suffer. He is about to come under the weight and burden of sin, and take His hands away from His disciples; and the Father needs to guard them for those hours. And then when He comes back to heaven, the Father needs to continue to guard them, which He promises to do through the Holy Spirit, whom He gives to every believer. “I guarded them,” He says in verse 12.
Now, if the sentence ended there, we’d have a problem: “None of them perished.” We’d all be saying, “Wait, there’s only eleven here. What about Judas? Isn’t Judas proof that a disciple, a visible associate of Jesus, a preacher for God, can be lost? Isn’t Judas the prototype of a believer who is saved and then loses salvation because he turns and rejects the Lord he once confessed?”
If our Lord didn’t say anything here about Judas, we would have a serious dilemma. So to make sure that never happens, He injects into this magnificent prayer, this one dark note, “I guarded them, and not one of them is lost, except the son of perdition, that the Scripture might be fulfilled.” Judas was never a son of God, he was always a son of perdition. Perdition is the word for “destruction, ruin.”
Back in John 6, Jesus was with the disciples, and Peter says, “‘Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life. We have believed and have come to know that You are the Holy One of God.’ Jesus answered them, ‘Did I Myself not choose you, the twelve, and one of you is a devil?’ He meant Judas, the son of Simon Iscariot, for he was one of the twelve that was going to betray Him.”
That same night in the upper room, Satan entered into Judas. Judas was nonetheless treated with love by the Lord that same night. In John 13 Judas was treated as the honored guest, given the first piece of bread to dip in the sop, as they called it, the meal. The fact that Scripture prophesied he would do this is not a determinism, he did what he chose to do. Judas is guilty on his own.
Matthew 26:24 says, “The Son of Man is to go, just as it is written of Him; but woe to that man by whom the Son of Man is betrayed! It would have been good for that man if had not been born.’ And Judas, who betrayed Him said, ‘Surely it is not I, Rabbi?’ Jesus said to him, ‘You have said it yourself.’” So Jesus says, “None of them has been lost, but the son of perdition, so that Scripture would be fulfilled.”
Does the Father hear that prayer to keep and guard His own? He does, and we have testimony to that. In Romans 8:38 it says, “I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor any other created thing, will be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.”
God will get us to heaven, because we are in His Son, and He loves His Son perfectly. 1 Peter 1:3-4 says, “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who according to His great mercy, has caused us to be born again to a living hope, through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead. 4 to obtain an inheritance imperishable and undefiled that will not fade away, reserved in heaven for you.”
Our Lord prays for our spiritual security. It’s a stunning thing to realize that what secures our salvation is eternal love, which is behind eternal election, which is behind eternal justification and eternal glorification. He secondly prays for our spiritual unity. This is stated in verse 11, “Keep them in Your name, the name which You have given Me, that they may be one even as We are.”
It is that we may be one even as the Trinity is one. Salvation is not just forgiveness of sins. It is not just escape from punishment. It is God, pulling us into the eternal life of the Trinity. All of us who are justified literally are pulled into the life of the Trinity. We are in the Father; we are in the Son and we are in the Spirit. The Father is in us; the Son is in us and the Spirit is in us.
What does it mean to be a believer? It means that God loves us with such an infinite love, that He loves us the same as He loves His own Son, and with that love pulls us into the very Trinity. Paul writes in Philippians and Ephesians about a practical unity. This is a prayer from Christ for invisible unity, for the reality of the life of God to be sustained in our souls forever. Let us pray.