John 17:12

John 17:12. When I was with them, I kept them in thy name which thou hast given me, and I guarded them, and not one of them perished, but the son of perdition, that the scripture might be fulfilled. It is out of the fulness of His heart that Jesus continues to speak. The sad change that is to take place in the condition of His disciples after He has ‘gone away' presses on His mind; He recalls tenderly the care with which He had hitherto watched over them in an evil world; and now that He can no longer show that care, He commends them with longing earnestness to the Father. He does this all the more because it was in the Father's name given to Himself that He had kept them, in the revelation of the Father, in the unity of His own relation to the Father, in the consciousness that God was their Father as well as His; so that the Father as well as He shall keep them, and, in keeping them, shall only continue the work that He had Himself begun. The word ‘I' is very emphatic, ‘I kept them: now do Thou.' The distinction between ‘kept' and ‘guarded' is not to be found in the thought of different spheres, such as inward and outward, to which it may be supposed that the words apply; but in the fact that the latter word points to the watchfulness by which the former is attained (comp. on chap. John 12:47). At the same time the difference of tense in the original is worthy of notice, the first verb expressing continued care, the second the completeness of the security afforded. Yet one dark cloud rested on the bright past, and the eyes of the disciples might at that moment be directed to it. Judas had not been kept: how was that? To this Jesus gives an answer in these words. The wonderful fact itself, when rightly viewed, affords evidence that He has fulfilled His promise that He will keep His own. It was in carrying out the Father's will that not one of the Eleven had been lost: it was in carrying out the same will that Judas had met his fate. He was ‘the son of perdition,' one who had freely chosen to move in that sphere of perishing, and therefore he perished. A scripture, too, or word of God (Psalms 41:9, already quoted in chap. John 13:18), had declared God's will, and that will could not fail to be accomplished. To suppose that Judas is now brought before us as one originally doomed to perdition, and that his character was but the evolving of his doom, would contradict not only the meaning of the Hebraic expression ‘son of' (which always takes for granted moral choice), but the whole teaching of this Gospel. In no book of the New Testament is the idea of will, of choice on the part of man, brought forward so repeatedly and with so great an emphasis. The history of man is taken up at that point when God's previous dealings with him have prepared him for the exercise of a choice in which his responsibility shall appear. How far this previous discipline is the result of absolute decree is not said; but the very fact that it is discipline implies that the result might have been other than it is. They in whom the Father's object is attained are those ‘given' to the Son, and Judas, therefore, was not one so ‘given.' (On the construction here compare what was said on chap. John 3:13 .)