In pondering the prayer of Jesus in John 17, I am amazed anew that Jesus would ask the Father anything. Why does Jesus ask? Does He need to ask, or is He just doing it for our benefit, so that we can grasp a proper pattern for living? It is tempting to think that the Father is so dominant, that the Son is the passive slave, only. I find myself wondering why I should pray for a certain result, when God already has His purposes, and can see all sides of every situation that are hidden from me? God is God, and I’m not, and I’m learning to be contented with Him, no matter the circumstances. But if I think of myself as a passive slave, and let God do what He will through me, then my feelings, opinions, and desires don’t really matter, and my prayer adds nothing of value.
Since Jesus asked for certain results, there is something deeper going on than a master-to-slave relationship. When the Son asks the Father something in prayer, or when He talks about asking, He expresses a proper Father/Son relationship. Remember Matthew 26:53, when the soldiers came to arrest Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane, and Peter struck Malchus with his sword? “Do you think I cannot call on my Father, and he will at once put at my disposal more than twelve legions of angels?” NIV 1984. As mentioned before, Jesus operated from within His humanity in constant surrender to the Father. But there is another aspect to this asking that must come to light.
Jesus is here indicating that, in the case of a momentary inclination to do something spontaneous, His protocol is to call on His Father—that He would engage the Father—and be given something in response… in this case, twelve legions of angels. We marveled before that Jesus would even “stoop” to using angels rather than the power of the Spirit.
(Perhaps mention of the large number of angels is something that is easier for man to understand, in terms of raw power, than something more difficult to quantify, such as the power of the Holy Spirit. Maybe Jesus used angels in the example to show that God the Father could overawe any force that man could muster).
Jesus is saying that if He wanted something, He would ask the Father. This is the pattern He upheld in His prayer at Gethsamane, where he asked if there could be another way than the imminent cup of suffering and crucifixion. This pattern is upheld when Jesus asked for the Father to unify all who would come to believe in Him, in John 17.
The Devil himself recognized and challenged this pattern in his temptation of Jesus in the wilderness. If you review Matthew 4:1-11, you will see that Satan wanted Jesus to act on His own volition apart from asking the Father.
In recognizing this pattern of asking, we are not merely trying to pick out principles and procedures to follow so that we can “do what Jesus did.” Instead, we are trying to understand why Jesus did this or that so that our own actions and intentions can be informed from a fuller knowledge of what our Savior is like, and what God is calling us to do in the moment.
The biggest message from this is that the Son engaged the Father, and there was fellowship and a sense of doing things together. Satan does not want us to engage the Lord, but to reason our way out of our situations.
Remember that “the Son can do nothing by Himself…” John 5:19. The Son can ask the Father to accomplish something that He wants done, however. In doing so, in asking, Jesus brings glory to the Father, confirming His pre-eminence, power, and authority, and He looks to the Father for everything. When Jesus asks the Father, He is perfectly willing for the Father to say “No,” when Jesus would prefer a “Yes,” and has set His heart to honor His Father by submitting to the decision of the Father. (Gethsemane).
I believe this is why Jesus asks, because He is bringing the Father glory and properly counting all things as proceeding from the Father. Ephesians 4:6… “one God and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all.”
If we do not engage God by asking Him, are we not robbing Him of the glory that is His alone? If we say, “God will do as He pleases,” and so we do not bother to ask, are we not discounting the pleasure He takes in us, and downplaying God’s attentiveness to our needs or desires? Inasmuch as there is glory in our acknowledgment that God is in sovereign control, there is somehow more glory in our engaging God Himself in conversation. And God loves to give answers to those who seek Him and love His company.
An angel from the Lord was sent to Daniel, in response to his prayer, in Daniel 9:23. “As soon as you began to pray, an answer was given, which I have come to tell you, for you are highly esteemed…”
Asking is the exercise and action of our faith. If we don’t ask, our faith will atrophy. If we don’t ask, we will not look for Him to move, which reveals sinful beliefs in our hearts that God is hard of hearing, hard-hearted, or too weak to act. If we don’t ask, we declare to the world that we doubt the worth of asking God for anything.
James 4: 2,3. “You desire but do not have, so you kill. You covet but you cannot get what you want, so you quarrel and fight. You do not have because you do not ask God. When you ask, you do not receive, because you ask with wrong motives, that you may spend what you get on your pleasures.”
Let us then not fail to ask, but also, with hearts of thanksgiving, consider that God values our thoughts, and loves it when we ask Him, because it shows our orientation toward Him, and dependence on Him for everything. We may not get the answers we are looking for, in the way that we expect, but the glory of the King is acknowledged in the asking. God’s people will demonstrate their reliance on Him in everything, by asking Him to do the work that we know is only possible through Him.