John 17:6 Commentary and Bible Study

Christ is able to use a strong word – ‘I have manifested thy name.’ The word translated ‘manifested’ in the Greek is the verb to shine. I have shined or shown thy name. This is different. This has a different quality. They have not merely learned about the existence of a God who they fear and who they revere and they learn something about him. He has been shined to them. They grasp more – he is alive and living, and they may approach him, and he will bless them, and they may walk with him and be his own. It is a different quality of belief and it will be developed. When you read of ‘thy name’, the name of God or of Christ, you may read your attributes, your characteristics. I have shined the characteristics of God, the attributes of God, his love and his mercy and his knowledge and his power right into their minds and into their hearts. Now remember the disciples were Jews and they were trained in the ways of the Jewish religion. They should have had more light than they did have, but unfortunately the clergy of those times in the Jewish church were dead spiritually, and so while people were taught to revere God and to respect him, they were not really shown a sight of him, that he is a personal God, that he is an active God in lives, and that he is a holy God. He needs to be sought, and you need to have communion with him, and then he owns you and forgives you and works with you. They did not see him as a living God, a God who is personally at work in the lives of each one of his children.Previously, they were in the world. By world in this prayer mostly the Lord refers to the unbelieving world – the chief priests, the scribes, the Pharisees, his enemies, his opponents. They have been saved out of that. They were in that position. They were people of the world. They loved it, they lived for it. All their ambitions were in it, all their hopes and pleasures were in it, but they have been saved out of dependence upon the world, and they have been brought into a living relationship with God. So something has been accomplished in the lives of the disciples. They have been given living faith and a relationship with God. They never saw him before, they never realised how true and how great he was. They have moved from nominal to true believers. They have watched thy word, keeping it like a sentry, who watches it and respects it. They have guarded the word, they have watched it, held it as precious, as something to be defended, never violated, not disobeyed. The word of God has taken on a new importance to them which it never had before. It now makes moral demands upon them. It is the great authority in their life. So this is about characteristics of Christians as well as about the prayers of the Lord.