THAT THEY MAY KNOW HIM #1

Jn.17:3- And this is eternal life, that they may know You, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom You have sent.

In Jesus’ final prayer He sums up the whole purpose of our existence, that we may know Him. It is out of knowing Him that everything else finds its purpose and place. In knowing Him I experience forgiveness, acceptance, and love. This is the place of healing and transformation. This also connects to God’s purpose for doing everything that He does, to display His glory. His glory is seen in creation, in the life and ministry of His Son, in His resurrection and glorification, and in His redemptive work in your life. Your wholeness and happiness is shouting God’s glory everywhere you go. This prayer that Jesus prayed the night He was arrested says it all. In this prayer He reveals the intimacy that He has enjoyed from eternity with the Father and declares that this is why He came, that you and I, part of a fallen race can also experience this incredible fellowship with this eternal God. Here is how Bullinger describes this prayer.

“Why, then, does he connect “only” with the Father here? In order to exclude the multitude of gods and lords; instead, he indicates that the true faith of those who will be saved acknowledges that there is only one true God, who is the holy and supremely blessed Trinity, one God, not three gods, but three distinct persons of one and the same divine essence and nature… Through the sending of the Son, then, the Father is truly known along with the ineffable divine majesty. Nor is the Holy Spirit excluded from this mutual embrace of the Father and the Son, even though his name is not expressed here, but it is to be understood as implied, because he is the Spirit of the Father and of the Son, as the substantial and consubstantial charity (love) of them both, as Augustine says.”

The secret key to all of this is found in the end of this paragraph where Augustine is quoted. Augustine says that the Holy Spirit is the mutual love of the Father and the Son. This is absolutely stunning to me. The love between the Father and the Son is eternal and infinite in nature and is a person, the Holy Spirit. This is the love that we have been brought into. This is what Jesus came for, that we would know Him, He came so that we would know and experience this supernatural love.