Do turn your Bible to John's Gospel, chapter 17. John, chapter 17. We're going to read the first five verses. Let's hear the Word of God. When Jesus had spoken these words, he lifted up his eyes to heaven and said, Father, the hour has come. Glorify your Son that your Son may glorify you. Since you have given him authority over all flesh, to give eternal life to all whom you have given him. And this is eternal life, that they know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent. I glorified you on earth, having accomplished the work that you gave me to do. And now Father, glorify me in your own presence with the glory that I had with you before the world existed. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Over these Advent Sunday mornings, when I'm preaching, we're looking at the eternal Son. Last week we looked at his eternity. Today we're going to look at his temporality. And I'm reminded of a book that I read many years ago in the early 80s, I think. A book by Thomas Howard, who was the brother of Elizabeth Elliot, the famous missionary. His book is called Christ the Tiger. It's kind of autobiographical in places. And he tells the story of his growing up. His parents were missionaries somewhere in the Amazon region. He grew up in a little village there. The village boys and girls, he knew them as his friends and playmates for the years that they spent there. And his memory of that time of making canoes out of trees and of swimming in pools and exploring the jungle and of climbing very, very, very tall trees and so on, it was an idyllic childhood. And then it came time, his parents decided he needed to go to a college or a school, rather, in America, back in America. So he was to go all the way back to the States and live in a boarding school. And he remembers that their little tiny plane landed in their little airstrip And he got into the plane, and as the plane made its slow taxi down this little strip of a runway and then began to gain height, he saw all his friends, the only friends he'd ever had in his life, the friends who were close to him, near to him, dear to him. running alongside the plane. And as he tells that story, he reminds us of how life works. You grow up one place, you make friends there, you go off to college, you make friends there, you leave college, you go on to work somewhere, or live somewhere else, you make friends there. And he makes this statement, Time keeps turning the pages, even the pages on which there is a picture of Eden. Time keeps turning the pages, even the pages on which there is a picture of Eden. To him as a boy, his time in South America was like an Edenic experience. And that was gone. And as we sit in this room this morning, time's been turning the pages. We'll go back for a few days to London, and we try to avoid seeing people we knew because when you see them, they tell you, time keeps turning the pages. And it's a reality. Now we began, that's one of the reasons why I think at Christmas it's good to reflect then on what it means by the advent of Jesus. Last week we looked at His eternity as God. We saw then that eternity is an aspect of God's infinity, that there is no place where God is not. in the entire universe. Not only is He every place, He's every place in the fullness of who He is. So, space does not define Him or bind Him. Similarly, time does not define Him or bind Him. God's eternity is His timelessness. Listen to these words by a Christian philosopher, very early Christian philosopher called Botheus. Whatever lives in time is a present proceeding from a past to a future. And there is nothing set in time which can embrace the whole space of that altogether. Tomorrow's state, it grasps not yet, while it has already lost yesterday's. Even in the life of today, we live no longer than one brief transitory moment. We're alive at this moment. We don't have what's just passed, it's gone. We don't have what's coming, it's not here yet. We may not get there. That's the reality. On the other hand, eternity, he could add, is that which includes and possesses the whole fullness of unending time all at once, or life all at once, from which nothing future is absent, from which nothing that's past has escaped, and this is rightly called eternity. So the story of eternity really isn't a story at all. There were many books written in the latter part of the 20th century by evangelicals, of course, who had lost the doctrine of God for a little while, and some of those stories actually were called the story of God. You can't tell the story of God. There is no story, there is no beginning, no middle, no end. There are no chapters, and there is no movement. In eternity, there is simply the Holy Trinity. Simply the Holy Trinity. In the simplicity of His life. Who inhabits everywhere in creation and beyond and all time all creatures are in his glance every moment of time for every one of his creatures which include the rocks and the planets as well as the spider and the human all time all creatures are in his glance There's no present to God because God doesn't have anything that is present to Him. He has everything that there is. God is eternally always present only to Himself. That's the only unchanging thing. He knows everything in knowing Himself. And so when we talk about the Lord Jesus Christ, we have to put him in that category. He is the one who possesses and expresses fully the entire truth of who God is and who the Father is, because no one knows the Father except the Son. All truth about God is found in him. I am the truth, he said. In him are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge, says the apostle. And so the names that we use of Jesus designate the fullness that there is in him. Thomas Aquinas puts it like this, to show that he is of the same nature as the father, he's called the son. To show that he is co-eternal with the father, he's called the radiance. To show that he's altogether like the father, he's called the image. to show that He is begotten, or generated, immaterially, like He is called the Word. You see, you're hearing what I say. I'm speaking words, or a word to you. There's nothing you can see coming out of my mouth. There's nothing connecting me to you. So it's invisible, so it's a picture of the fact that the son comes from the father, is begotten by the father, not as a material thing, or as a physical thing, but as a spiritual thing. For those of you who, We want to know what the Reformed think about these things. In the synopsis of a pure theology, the Dutch boys, at the time of the Reformation, put it like this, when they're talking about the generation of the Son, the Son coming from the Father eternally. This active generation is the internal, personal action of God the Father, whereby in a spiritual and indescribable manner, He has, from eternity and from Himself, begotten His own Son in the same essence as His own image. And through that generation, He made the Son share in the same infinite essence entirely. That's what we're saying as we recited the Nicene Creed today. And so there is no beginning or end to the Son. We can call him born of the Father before all words, but not born the way a child is in our world, that has a beginning. The Son is eternally born of the Father. And eternity means all at once, without any limit. Eternity is the complete, simultaneously, perfect possession of unending life. But among the creatures that God has made, especially with humans, beginning with Adam and Eve, there is a massive problem that needs to be addressed. God made us with free will. He made us out of his love. God created the universe as his word, and in the Holy Spirit, the Spirit being the love of the Father for the Son and the Son for the Father, God made the universe in love. But we soon forgot that, that love was not reciprocated. Human beings, because became estranged from God by their own free will, they chose to be estranged from God. And we can summarize the four-fold effect of the entrance of sin into the world. Let me put it like this. I'll use these four that I've kind of stolen from somebody else. You can ask me at the door if you want to know who it is and I'll tell you. First of all, humanity is alienated from the all-holy God as found when we find Adam and Eve in the garden hiding from God. They didn't hide from God before they fell. God becomes a stranger to them, an alien, and they feel alienated from him. Secondly, human relationships are impaired by sin. You see that witnessed in Adam and Eve, realizing they were naked. They were shamed. Why were they shamed? They had always been naked, but now they're naked and ashamed. You can see it in the woman's proper desire for her husband, and yet that is met by her husband's desire simply to rule over her or overwrite her. Thirdly, there's the primordial sin, put in motion, the proliferation of sin in the world. As human beings are now prone to sin and enjoy sin, as was first found when Cain killed Abel. The whole morally compromised heart and mind of men and women, boys and girls, is no longer focused in doing good, but in focused on doing evil. And then fourthly, creation itself was marred. Women would bear their children in pain, Moreover, unlike in Eden, the garden of paradise, wherein there was an abundance of food, men and women would from now on till the cursed ground amid thorns and thistles and eat their bread by the sweat of their brow. Humankind will experience or do all this until it returns to dust and dust we shall be. The apostle Paul puts it like this. Just as sin came into the world through one man and death through sin, so death spread to all men because all sinned. Now none of this caught God off guard, of course. All of these human choices, he knew. All of the contingent factors, he factored in. All of the seeming infinite perambulations of effects over time were all in the one thought of God. Now you take this one thought, that human beings are created in the image and likeness of God, the Son. You take the human nature of Jesus that he has when he's born of the Virgin Mary and growing up in time. All of us had our human nature based on the human nature of Jesus Christ. Think of that, Adam and Eve in the garden as they're made, are made in the likeness of Jesus Christ. That's where eternity comes into play. In eternity, there's no before, no after. No middle. In eternity, it's all one thing to God. And so we are made, or have, were made originally in the image of Jesus Christ. Even our body is made in the image of Christ. And the whole work of salvation is to renew and restore the image of the Son in human beings. To bring us back to where we were. Sin has defaced the image in humanity. Not destroyed it altogether. That's why some of us can be quite nice, generous, kind, good, heroic sometimes. Self-giving, serving others. But the image of God is defaced in humanity. And in its being defaced, prevents us from knowing and loving the truth. by knowing and loving God. And it's for this reason, then, that the Trinity ordained that the Son should come to us bearing our human nature, that the one who inhabits eternity should inhabit temporality, that is, could come into time and space for us and our salvation, as the Nicene Creed puts it. This one who is the image of the invisible God. This is the one in whom in time you and I will put on a new self, being renewed in knowledge after the image of our Creator. That's what the difference that knowing Jesus makes in the life of us, of people like us. So in eternity then, the Trinity, especially the Father, chose us in Christ before the foundation of the world. The word before there doesn't tell us anything about God doing something before something else, but it does speak our language because that's where we are. We're at a particular point in time. There's been thousands of years and way longer since God created the heavens and the earth. And people have been on the world for a long, long time. Before any of this, before there was anything, God had chosen us in Christ before the foundation of the world. And he chose us so that we might be redeemed through his blood. So that we might be adopted as his children. steps in a plan for the fullness of time to unite all things in Christ, things in heaven and things on earth. And now why did Jesus have to come into the world? Let's think again about how the Trinity works. There's the Father who is the fountainhead of the Trinity. The Father who from all eternity has given All that He is, everything that He is, all of His deity, all of His Godhead to the Son. Everything the Father has, He has given to the Son. Jesus told us that. Eternally. Father has life in Himself. The Son has life in Himself. The Father is the source of wisdom. The Son is the wisdom of God incarnate. So the Father has life in himself. He gives all of this to the Son. He is God from God, as we said in the creed. Lord, he is very God of very God. And so therefore it's fitting that the one who came from God, eternally, should come from God into time for us and our salvation. And so the Word became flesh and dwelt amongst us. The Word who had given the law to Moses is born of a woman and made under the law. He who gave the law is made under the law. The one who is eternally rich because of the glory he shared with the Father and with the Spirit eternally for our sakes became poor. Or he who was by very nature God, takes on the form of a servant and is found in fashion as a man. Why did he take human nature? Why was he born as he was? To be a kind of recapitulation of Adam, the first man. He is now the second, the last Adam. And so in his human nature, he learns obedience through the things that he suffers, the temptations that come his way. In his human nature, he interacts with us. He who as God in the Trinity is without any change or any diminution of his divine nature assumes a fully human nature so that it's a fully human being that people meet when they meet Jesus. It's a human voice they hear when Jesus speaks. It's a human individual that they see when Jesus acts in the routine human actions of walking, sitting, eating, sleeping, and so on. But they see more, because the one they see is the invisible God, visible. The one they hear is the eternal Word of God, now audible. The one they see in action, as He heals the sick, raises the dead, and casts out demons, is the one who does divine acts in a human way. When Jesus touched someone, when someone touched Him, who was doing the human touching, who was being humanly touched, was none other than the eternal divine Son, equal to God. So in the incarnation then, the eternal Son comes to exist as a human being within space and time. That's why we come to this idea of his temporality, his state of existing within time. This is a straightforward, this word means a straightforward procession of past, present, future. He who by nature is God knows nothing about this temporal thing, but now in human nature, he knows what it's like for you and I to be in a time-bound existence. So his human nature, in a sense, becomes a kind of instrument to accomplish our salvation. Of course, it's not an instrument like an organ or a guitar or a tuba, something external to himself that he picks up and uses, no. The son's earthly body is his own body. It's his own body that is hung in the tree, we're told. It was his own body and soul that was nursed by Mary, who grew in wisdom and stature, that learned obedience, that resisted Satan, that received blow upon blow from his enemies who experienced pain and shame and suffered death for us. As the second and last Adam, his obedience was a human obedience. It is His human obedience that is credited to our account when we believe in Him. So that the debit on our account with God is removed and credit is placed in our account of full righteousness, the righteousness of the human Lord Jesus. His sacrifice for our sins on the cross. when He acts as a priest and He offers the victim that is Himself as a sacrifice for our sins, a sin offering. He does that on our behalf as a human priest. In His humanity, He both reveals the Father in His glory, and in His humanity, He pays the penalty for His people's sin. And He does this in time, at a specific moment in time. We say in the Apostles' Creed and we say in the Nicene Creed, He suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified dead and buried. The eternal Son did not die on the cross, but the Son died and His human nature died on the cross. And His human nature was raised from the dead as a firstfruits of them that sleep. When He rose, it was His human body that rose. When He ascended, He took His human body and soul with Him from the earthly realm in which we live right now into the heavenly realm of eternity. And of course, as soon as I say that, I have to add in brackets, this is incomprehensible and inexplicable to us. I cannot explain it, and I haven't read a theologian who can explain this. Why? Because this is a creator job, not a creature job. He, for our sakes, in his human nature, preserved the marks of his passion. You in your resurrection body will not bear the marks of the struggles and sufferings that you have gone through in your earthly life. There'll be no remainders, marks of an operation that you've had to encounter during your life. All those will have gone. Stretch marks gone. I mean, it just gets better and better. You'll be absolutely perfect in every respect physically. But Jesus bears on his resurrection body the marks of his passion for our sake. Now this brings us to our text. Deep sighs, I think, oh, the sermon's only beginning. Well, our text tells us what Jesus prays hours before His arrest and within hours of His crucifixion. He's speaking to His Father. Notice He's lifting His eyes to heaven. He's here amongst us. He's in the place of time and space. He's lifting His eyes to that which is not in time or space. To heaven, where the Father is. He says, the hour has come. Yes, in all of history, everything has been moving forward to this particular point of time. Within time, this is a particularly important point of time. The hour has come. And He asked the Father to glorify the Son that the Son may glorify Him. That is in His death and in His resurrection. Praying that the Father might do this. And why does He pray like this? Why does He pray that He might finish the course? He came and He took human nature, He entered into time, now He wants to be faithful unto death, the death of the cross. Why? So that He might give eternal life to you, to me. Now what implications does this have for us? I think there are only two, actually. First of all, that believers right now, in a spiritual way, already possess eternal life. You are composed of two aspects to your human nature. You have your body and all of the various functions of your body and your brain and everything. We hope they're working okay this morning. But there's another part of you You have a spirit or a soul. You have a spiritual dimension that gives you your identity. That's beyond the reach of science to trace. It's not a material thing. And that soul, that spirit, has already, if you're a child of God, been made alive. It was dead. But it's been made alive. It has already received something of eternal life. And it is in communication with heaven. Because that eternal life that you have makes you a member of the body of Christ on earth. The head is in heaven. The body is on earth, but the head is not decapitated from the body. There is one whole Christ, head and members. And when we gather for worship on the Lord's day, the members of the body get together. And it's not only those who are still in flesh here and now, But we join, when we join in worship, we don't just worship with the archangels and the angels and the cherubim and the seraphim, we do, they're all here joining us. We worship with the spirits of righteous men and women already made perfect. We are in communion with the saints in glory as well as the saints around the world. Your spirits are engaged. In fact, Paul can say that you are already seated with Christ in the heavenly realms, already. You belong and inhabit that. That's implication number one, but number two is even greater. Hereafter, in a physical way, we will enjoy eternal life. In 1 Corinthians 15, Paul teases this out. I'm not going to read it all to you, but he teases this out. He talks about a grain, a grain of wheat. Some of you haven't seen grains of wheat. They've never been out of the city. You don't know that bread comes from them, but there they are, and they're planted in the ground. That's the soil that's been turned over by the farmers and so on. They plant that little grain of wheat. A grain looks like one thing, And then, in due course, late summer, the wheat will grow, and you'll look, and there will be the wheat growing, standing tall. There's no similarity at all between the wheat growing and the grain that was sown. Paul talks about the difference between that, and he says that's the difference between this physical body that is sown, put into the ground, buried. The body is buried when you die. Well, it was in the ancient world. Sometimes it's burnt when you die, but the effect is the same. You're left with stuff, powder, dust. Paul says, the relationship between the body now and the body of the resurrection is the difference between temporality and eternity. Something bound by space, bound by time, and something unbound by space and time. He gives some illustrations. He talks about many forms of bodies, human, animal, birds and fish. He says there are celestial bodies and terrestrial bodies. But he says the glory of the one is different from the glory of the other. And then in 1 Corinthians, reading at verse 42, he says this, so it is with the resurrection of the dead. Listen to this catalog. What is sown, that is your physical body now, is perishable. What is raised is imperishable. What is sown in dishonor is raised in glory. What is sown in weakness is raised in power. What is sown in a natural body is raised a spiritual body. If there is a natural body, there is also a spiritual body. Thus it is written, the first man Adam became a living being. The last Adam, Christ, became a life-giving spirit. You see, he's contrasting life now in time and life in the resurrection, eternity. Feebleness here, glory there. Perishableness here, imperishable there. Dishonorable here, glorious there. Weak here, powerful there. There isn't Jesus promises eternity to his people. He promises that we will enter into the fullness of it at that time of his return. That's what it says at the end of 1 Corinthians 15. I tell you brothers, flesh and blood as it is now cannot inherit the kingdom of God. Nor does the perishable inherit the imperishable. Behold, I tell you a mystery. When Jesus Christ comes back, we shall not all sleep. That is, we won't all be lying in the ground, our bodies lying in the ground, or whatever, dissolved into dust or whatever. We shall all, however, be changed in a moment. In a nanosecond, the twinkling of an eye. At the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound. The dead shall be raised imperishable. And we shall be changed. For this perishable body must put on the imperishable. This mortal body must put on immortality. And when this perishable puts on the imperishable, and this mortal puts on immortality, then shall come to pass the saying that is written, death is swallowed up in victory. Oh death, where is your victory? Oh death, where is your sting? The gift of God is eternal life. Something we can't conceive of. That's why these are all negatives. Did you know this? This is negative. Perishable will be imperishable. The mortal will be immortal. We shall be changed. And my question to you is this morning going back to the reading that I read from John chapter 17. Do you know God through Jesus Christ? If so then you have eternal life. Part one and part two is coming. Let's pray. Lord, we thank you that our Lord Jesus came right into where we are and took on a fully human life on this side of the sun, even dying, and then raising it from the dead as a firstfruits of we who are his people. Help us, Lord, at this Advent season when we look back to look forward to that great event. And Lord Jesus, will you come quickly, we pray. Amen.