Glorify God
Published by Stanley Pouw in 2021 · 5 September 2021
We have come to a unique section in the New Testament. In John 13 through John 17, we come to a text that is unique because that entire section all takes place in one night. It is Thursday night of Passion Week. It is the night in which our Lord celebrated the Passover, which then was transformed into the Lord’s Supper. It is the night in which He went to the garden and Judas betrayed Him.
The uniqueness is that He gives His legacy to His own. Not only to His true disciples, the true believers who surrounded Him that evening in the upper room, but to all believers who would come after them. That is all believers of all time. We know that because everything He promised to them in John 13 through 16, He then prays for in John 17, and extends it to all who will ever believe.
So, whatever Christ gave to them that evening, He gave to us, and to all believers before us and after us. It is His final will and testament to His own. And it’s all activated by the exodus of Judas. After the Lord had identified Judas as the betrayer, Satan entered into him. It was now time to activate the betrayal which would bring about the crucifixion at exactly the moment when the Passover lambs were being slaughtered.
All Judas was looking for was a time and a place away from the crowds to pick Jesus out so that the authorities could arrest Him. He had to do the final act of the betrayal, and bring the forces that wanted Jesus arrested to the place where He was. Once Judas was gone, only the true disciples were left. And it is then in verse 31 that our Lord begins His words exclusively to His own.
Verses 31 - 33, “As soon as Judas left the room, Jesus said, “The time has come for the Son of Man to enter into His glory, and God will be glorified because of Him. 32 And since God receives glory because of the Son, He will give his own glory to the Son, and He will do so at once. 33 Dear children, I will be with you only a little longer. You will search for me, but you can’t come where I am going.”
What marks a true believer is something that happens in the heart, because a true believer has been born again, regenerated, gone through a complete metamorphosis. We are known by our character, by our affection, by the things that are important to us, precious to us. In a word, we are known by what we love. It is the fruit of the Spirit in Galatians 5, the evidence of the Spirit’s presence.
The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, gentleness, long suffering, patience and self-control. Those are all dominating attitudes that flow out of love. After Judas left, Jesus is there to address the true disciples. And the first thing He does is have a conversation with them that hits at the reality of their salvation. And to those who are genuinely His, He makes personal promises to all of them.
John 13:1 says at the end of verse 1 that He loved His own who were in the world, and He loved them to the fullness of His divine capacity. So it is a love that knows no qualitative limit and it knows no quantitative limit. And to the degree that He is eternal, and we are eternal, His love is eternal. It is the most magnanimous, limitless statement about His love in Scripture.
There are no words that can come close to the promises that our Lord gives. The purest mind, the purest heart, the grandest capacity to love, divine love pours out its affections in a series of promises to every believer. They are at once sweet and powerful. They are supercharged with divine passion and yet tender with concern, and everything is bathed in this expression of divine love.
We can be known for our doctrine. We can be known for our theology. But what we believe is supposed to transform our lives so that the final test is who we are, how we live. Non-believing people have certain levels of affection in marriage and in families, and certain levels of romantic love. But there is a kind of love that belongs only to those people with transformed lives.
Let us look at the directions this love takes. There are three directions that are laid out here explicitly or implicitly. First of all, we are marked by love that seeks His glory. Secondly, we are marked by love for one another. And thirdly, we are marked by loving loyalty, to prove His love personally by being loyal and faithful. This is developed in these few verses.
Our Lord says that a true disciple has love for his Lord’s glory. In other words, he loves the Lord. That’s what love pursues. That’s what love desires. Our Lord is even called the Lord of Glory because glory is so consistent with who He is. The doxologies in Ephesians 3 and in end of Jude, are demonstrating what is in their heart. It is all about the glory of the Lord.
Well, this is new to the disciples. Yes, they had all affirmed: You are the Christ, the Son of the living God. But their lives were not directed to the glory of their Lord. Three of them had been to the Mount of Transfiguration and seen His glory, but still, they were preoccupied with themselves. And that argument had gone on for months, and it was still going on at this very time during Passion Week.
So verse 31, “As soon as Judas left the room, Jesus said, “The time has come for the Son of Man to enter into his glory, and God will be glorified because of Him.” Since God is glorified in Him, God will also glorify Him in Himself immediately.’” Now that Judas is gone, everything is in motion, the betrayal will be consummated, the arrest will occur, and the execution the next day.
And the first thing Jesus wants them to know is that this is all about His glory. Why is that so important? Because they are consumed with their own glory and they were having a hard time dealing with this. Every time our Lord said, “I’m going to die,” they would say, “No Lord. It can’t be.” Once Jesus said to Peter, “Get behind me, Satan.” And here Peter says, “Lord, why can’t I come with You now?”
For 33 years, Jesus condescended to become incarnate in human flesh, lived as a child, as a young boy and as a man. He had humbled Himself, restricted the full manifestation of His glory, and He had taken a terrible amount of abuse. That brief time in the midst of eternity is now over and He knows it. And so, He says now finally, I’m here. He is on the brink of being glorified.
There are three distinct statements pertaining to His glory. Number one: “Now the Son of Man will enter His glory.” Why does He say now? This statement has to do with the cross and His death and all those subsequent events, like His resurrection, ascension, exaltation and coronation. But it’s all triggered by His death, and the action of Judas, the traitor, being sent out to do his betrayal.
Jesus did not say that when He was baptized by John the Baptist, and the Holy Spirit came down like a dove, and there were words of the Father coming out of heaven. He didn’t say that when He was on the Mount of Transfiguration when Moses and Elijah showed up and the Lord was transfigured before them. Our Lord is referring to His death by which He would be glorified.
But here before the pit of His humiliation, as He stands on the brink of false accusations, lying witnesses, relentless insults, infamy, mockery, shame and nakedness, surrounded by wretched evil men, in the midst of an agonizing death, now is the Son of Man glorified. And He is saying to the disciples: this is for My glory. How can the death of Christ on the cross glorify Christ?
Christ is glorified because God has chosen Him to be the sacrificial lamb who takes away the sins of the world. He is God’s chosen one. He is the only one God could ever ask to do that work. He is most righteous, most holy, most blameless, most spotless, most pure, and that shows His glory. He will provide on the cross salvation for all who have ever believed through all of human history.
He will validate the covenant of God, and He will provide salvation for damned sinners. That deserves glory. He will destroy the power of sin and the power of death, and that deserves glory. He will destroy the devil who had the power of death and He will punish him to hell forever, and that deserves glory. He will satisfy God, propitiating God by paying the price that God has deemed necessary.
He will bear in His body all the sins of all the elect of God through all of human history, and He will offer Himself as a sweet smelling aroma to God, better than any sacrifice ever offered. He will fully satisfy divine justice and the broken law of God. He says, “It is finished,” and that deserves glory. So there is no act so worthy of full glory as this act of Jesus Christ on the cross.
At the same time the cross glorifies Christ, it also glorifies the Father. God is glorified when His attributes are on display. Look at Exodus 33 and 34. Moses says, “Show me Your glory.” God says, “I will let My mercy, My compassion, My loving-kindness, My truth and righteousness pass before you.” God’s glory is the realities of His nature. God has intrinsic glory. His attributes are His glory.
But nowhere in all of history do the attributes of God come together in a clearer, bolder and grander way than at the cross. At the cross, you see the power of God displayed. It was there at the cross, Isaiah 53 says that the kings of the earth and the rulers took council together against God and against His anointed. And it was there that God shattered them and defeated them.
It was there that all of the terrible hatred, enmity, depravity of wretched human hearts did the worst that the human heart is capable of, and God overruled the worst that they could do and accomplish the best that could ever be done out of it. It was there that Satan and the forces of hell came and unleashed the darkness against Him in a hatred outburst, and Jesus handled it all.
He overpowered the evil of men’s hearts. He overpowered Satan. He overpowered demons. He overpowered the strength of sin. Jesus was able to survive it all, and come out the other side triumphant. Mankind loses, nations lose, demons lose, Satan loses and Christ wins. He is triumphant, and that gives God glory. God triumphs at the cross in unleashing His power.
And His justice is demonstrated at the cross. It is God who said the soul that sins must die. It is God who says the wages of sin is death. And justice prevails at the cross. God is so just that He will even take the life of His own beloved Son. If the sins of the world are to be laid on His Son, then His Son must take the death that they deserve. There is no greater illustration of the justice of God.
God looked in Genesis and saw that there was only evil continually in the world. And as a just God, He determined to drown the entire human race with the exception of eight people who had been established as true believers in Him, and to whom He imputed righteousness. But God’s justice takes on another dimension at the cross because God will crush the life out of a sinless one to do justice.
Justice was satisfied in the sacrifice of Christ. That kind of justice gives God glory. At the cross, God can’t look on iniquity, says Habakkuk, the prophet. And when Christ was made a curse, God turned His back. We hear Jesus say, “My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?” Never did God so manifest His hatred for sin as when He caused His only begotten Son to suffer.
Nothing can be compared with the offering of Christ Himself as a necessary requirement of God’s holiness. At the cross, we see God’s faithfulness. He promised a Savior. He promised in Genesis 3 a seed to the woman where He shall bruise the serpent’s head, while the serpent will bruise His heel. He promised a substitute who would take the place of a sacrifice, a ram was provided in Genesis 22.
He promised in Isaiah 53, a sacrifice. Every animal sacrifice in the Old Testament pointed toward the one final lamb who would take away sin. And when Christ came, He offered His life as the full final sacrifice for sin. God showed to all beings that He would rather spill the blood of His Son than not fulfill His promises. He is a faithful God. And seeing His faithfulness is seeing His glory.
But really, His love is seen at the cross because God did it all for us. God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son. This is love. Not that we loved God, says John, but that He loved us and sent His Son to be the satisfaction for our sins. When we were enemies, He loved us. We could say His grace and mercy is displayed there. And His wisdom is displayed there.
Then another statement in verse 32, “and He will do so at once.” God will glorify Him immediately. What does that mean? He is going to be glorified at the cross. So what’s coming after the cross? Resurrection, ascension, exaltation and coronation. Philippians 2:10 says, “God has highly exalted Him and given Him a name which is above every name, that at the name of Jesus, every knee should bow.”
A true believer is completely consumed with the Lord’s glory. Whatever happens to me, whether I live or whether I die, may Christ be glorified. The passionate, consuming love for His glory just wasn’t in their thinking. Do they love Him? Sure. Did they believe in Him? Of course. But they were not consumed with His glory. Let Him be glorified. And when He comes back, He will come back in full glory, Amen? Let us pray.