8. A Glory Before the World Was; John 17:5

And now, glorify Me, Thou Father, with Thyself, with the glory that I had with Thee before the world was.

In the above text from the so-called ‘high priestly prayer’, Jesus refers to the glory that He had with His Father before the world was. The common interpretation is that Jesus here prays for a return to the glory He remembers from His pre-existence. But this interpretation faces the insurmountable difficulty that the glory for which Jesus prays here is an entirely new glory. In His resurrection, after all, He was crowned with glory and honour on account of His prior suffering (Heb. 2:7–9). For God highly exalted Him because He humbled Himself unto the death of the cross (Phil. 2:5–11). The glory with which Jesus was glorified by God was not a return to a glory He had already possessed (or even could have possessed), but the granting of an entirely new glory.

But if the glory that Jesus was to receive was entirely new to Him, how then could He ask to be glorified with a glory that He already had with God “before the world was”?
The answer is: for Himself, this glory would indeed be new—but with God, He had that glory already long before. As Peter states: He was foreknown, before the foundation of the world (1 Pet. 1:20). The glory that was to be given to the Son had already been determined by God before the world existed and had also been recorded beforehand in the Scriptures (Luke 24:26,27).

Delen: