Commentary on the Gospel of John

                                Chapter Seventeen

                                                                                                                                              Verses 22-26 continued

Jesus admitted to His Father that most of the human race would not know Him so that they could be saved by His grace. But Jesus knew that His Father knew Him, and He expressed gratitude to His Father that His followers, at that time, believed that God had sent Him to the world on a mission that they did not quite understand. They would understand it much better after the Holy Spirit had inspired some of them to write the New Testament. But Jesus knew that they loved Him and that was all the faith they needed to be saved by grace. A person can experience something without understanding it. Many living humans saved by grace do not quite understand what Jesus did for them, but they love their Lord, and that happens to be all the faith that they need to be saved by grace. Matthew 16:13-18; I John 4:7.

Jesus declared that He had given His followers His Father's name. His Father's name is Love, and that same Love that His Father gives to Him, He gives to His believers saved by His grace. John 14:18; Hebrews 13:5. God's Love can never fail, which means that Christ will never lose a single one of His believers saved by grace. I Corinthians 13:8; Romans 8:35-39. Faith works because of Love which means every believer who loves Jesus will be saved by His grace. I John 4:7-8; Galatians 5:6. Many humans saved by grace will not even be able to understand how Jesus saved them, especially those who become saved by a direct witness of the Holy Spirit, and who have never even heard about Jesus. Colossians 1:23. Even the Apostle Paul did not begin to understand what Jesus had done for him until after three years of prayer and study of the scriptures and meditation in Arabia. Galatians 1:15-18.

Doubt about the power of God's Love entered into His creations when Lucifer rebelled. Some of God's angels followed Lucifer because of this doubt. Isaiah 14:12-17; Ezekiel 28:13-19. God had to prove that His Love was valid and real. God could not just declare His Love to be valid and real by a summary judgment because in order to do that He would have to program His creations to love Him and that would still leave His Love in doubt. In order to do this, God would also have to have abrogated free will which He created. God can never annul anything He has ever created. Ecclesiastes 3:14. For God to annul free will would also cast doubt on the reality of His Love because such an event would weaken the Almighty Power of God's Intellect.

Because of God's Almighty Love and Intellect, he devised a plan whereby He would create an intelligent human race in His image with His gift of free will and the goodness of His faith and His Love. Genesis 1:27; Genesis 1:31; Romans 12:3. God knew that the free will of humans would cause them to choose to fall into sin which would weaken them to the point that the Devil would be able to inject spiritual death into their inner beings. Genesis 2:17. That event would put them into danger of being lost from God's Love forever. But God also knew that He could prove the validity and the reality of His Love by taking all of the sins, evil, and spiritual deaths of all humans on Himself in an act of self-sacrifice on a cross and suffer it all Himself in the place of all humans. I Peter 3:18; Hebrews 2:9-15. Then, by His resurrection from the dead, He would be able to give eternal life to all humans who chose to believe that He has the power to accomplish their salvation, and God knows exactly how to cause all living humans to choose to repent and believe. John 5:24; Revelation 5:11-14. God will use His gift of free will to prove the validity and reality of His Love by causing all living humans to choose to return to faith in Him and love for Him that He puts into every one of them when He creates them in His image. Love that is freely chosen can only be real. I Corinthians 15:1-4; Ecclesiastes 3:14; I Corinthians 13:8. No human will ever be able to understand how Christ was able to save all living humans from eternal death in a finite period of time which was three days. He was somehow able to do that because His love is Infinite, and any part of the Infinite equals the whole of the Infinite. Psalm 147:5.