John 17:25

John 17:25. Righteous Father, both the world learned not to know thee, but I learned to know thee, and these learned to know that thou didst send me. Not in the last clause of John 17:24, but now, we have the ground upon which Jesus prays that the ‘glory ' of which He has spoken may be conferred upon His people; and it connects itself not so much with the love as with the righteousness of God. It is just and right that those who have been prepared for the glory to be beheld should at last obtain it. Hence ‘Righteous' (not as in John 17:11, ‘Holy') ‘Father.' For God as Father is not merely love, but love resting on perfect rectitude, is One who will see that what befalls His creatures corresponds to what they are. The word ‘both' here perplexes commentators, but is to be explained by what seems to be the usage of this Gospel (comp. chap. John 15:24), in which propositions subordinate to the principal statement are thus introduced; while, at the same time, like a dark background, they bring out the main thought with greater force. In the present instance this thought is contained in the last clause of the verse, and it is made more noteworthy by the fact stated in the first. The intermediate clause, again, ‘but I learned to know Thee,' appears to be designed to lead us up to the main proposition following. It was because Jesus knew the Father that He had been able to communicate that knowledge to His people. Because they had received this knowledge, therefore, it was fitting that the love into which, along with the knowledge, they had entered, should bring to them its full reward, and should shine upon them as it shone upon the Son in whom they had renounced the world and the world's ways. It may, indeed, at first sight startle us to find Jesus using such words of Himself as that He ‘learned to know' the Father. But (1) it has to be borne in mind that ‘learned to know ' is not in every respect a perfectly satisfactory translation of the original; it only approaches much more nearly to the truth than ‘knew.' The proper meaning would be ‘got knowledge,' or ‘came to know.' (2) There is nothing more startling in the statement than in that of the Epistle to the Hebrews (chap. John 5:8), ‘Yet learned He obedience by the things which He suffered.' There, indeed, we have another and a separate word for ‘learned; ' but a process, a progress, is also implied in the word of the verse before us. The writer to the Hebrews speaks of an experimental learning of obedience by One who was possessed of a truly human, as well as of a Divine nature, not the will to obey becoming more perfect, but actual obedience being practically more and more learned in the varying duties and trials of life. So here, He who was human as well as Divine ‘learned, ' practically and experimentally, ‘to know ' the Father; and it was because He so learned that He was able to communicate that knowledge His own knowledge to His people. Knowledge such as that spoken of can be acquired by us in no other way; and we have repeatedly seen, in considering this prayer, that what Jesus bestows upon His disciples is first His own.