Find a quiet place and wrap your soul around Jesus in the Upper Room that glorious night. Watch Him lift His eyes upward and pray … (read John 17).

The start of this prayer has taken me years to digest. It is the language of one Eternal Being talking to Another. God the Son on His 30-year earth-mission is asking the Father for something that is, in human terms, incomprehensible. “Father, the time has come. Glorify the Son, that the Son may glorify You.” What is Jesus asking here? What do these words even mean? From a human perspective, I simply cannot picture a human son asking his human father for something like this! Somehow the Apostle John was able to remember this prayer and more importantly the soul of this prayer as he pens these words. John, who was intensely close to Jesus, must have understood something that has taken my mind years to approximate. I must humbly confess that I still have little confidence in my grasp of the truths spoken here.

God lives in unapproachable light, unbound by both time and space simply because He made them. Before the universe existed, God enjoyed community with Himself. The Three who self-identify as the Father, Son and Spirit, have loved, respected and worshiped each other in an eternally perfect and beautiful dance that is thoroughly unimaginable. They are and always will be perfectly creative, naturally other-focused and loving without a hint of jealousy toward each other. In their counsels, the decision to create beings — creatures who can also relate to Them — is both profound and a direct reflection of their creative and loving nature. There is the creation of a realm (known in Scripture as the Third Heaven), then the development of not only creatures who autonomously think and interact with the Three in One but are also given the freedom to not interact if they so choose. Angels, Cherubim and Seraphim, living in a realm where they can know and appreciate the Godhead — growing and knowing in a realm of time and some type of space — all the attributes of God. We see glimpses in the shadow play of prophetic literature (Isaiah 14:12-14, Ezekiel 28:12-18) this unfolding in eternity past, possibly before the creation of earth, and certainly before the creation of mankind.

The Godhead decided that it would put on display, for all the angelic realms, the greatness of Their love, by creating beings (mankind) who would have the capacity to relate and know Him, but who would of their own choice, walk away from Him. Humans, who were designed to rule the earth and multiply God’s image on it, went rogue. Why would God let this happen? And why would He let rogue angels initiate the rebellion of mankind against God? I believe the inklings of these eternally important questions help us understand Jesus’s prayer. Read John 1:29 and Revelation 13:8 before continuing.

How loving is God? How great is God? To what lengths will God go to restore rogue creatures and invite them back into fellowship with Himself? How will He restore their purpose on the earth? “… the time has come.” Jesus’s prayer IS what all of eternity has been waiting for. The angels who sang above the hills of Bethlehem knew what we are only beginning to catch up to (glory to God in the highest). This loving God sent His Son in the form of a human, to rightfully restore humans by putting on display all His relational attributes in human form within the person of Jesus. Then He signed this covenant promise by paying the ultimate price to display to the angelic realms that THERE IS NO ONE LIKE OUR GOD!

Unpack Jesus’s request: “Glorify the Son … .” Is He not asking the Father to put on display the beauty of His love? Jesus will be hanging on a Roman cross in 12 hours. He created the tree, the land, the earth and the people who would execute Him. He could, with a single word, make it all vanish and make the pain go away (Hebrews 1:3). Instead, He would bear in His physical body, the full penalty of human rebellion against God, and speak into the eternal present the good news, “Father, forgive them, for they have no idea what they are doing.” Never has there been such a purposeful alignment of wills on the earth. Satan wanted Jesus dead. The Jewish leaders wanted Him dead. The Roman leadership agreed that He should die, and every human on the earth at some point in their existence, has contributed to the death of the God-Man. God commended His love for us. God so loved the world. God put His heart into the wide-open universe and declared: “THIS IS HOW FAR I WILL GO TO LOVE AND RESTORE CREATURES WHO GO ROGUE.”

God showed the world how much He loves it by putting on display His attributes — His glory. Jesus showed the angels how much He loves the Father, and how much He loves His creation. God the Father, and God the Son, always pointing to each other the glory of their Being.