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178 How Can We Know the Christian Scriptures Are True?
have truly seen the holiness of God through the Scriptures—the pure,
transcendent, supreme worth and beauty of God through his word—
this sight will hold you during embattled seasons. There is an infinite
qualitative difference between the witness of God through his word
and the witness of clouded darkness. The battle may be so severe that
in your own mind you cannot, at a given time, distinguish between the
divine light and human darkness. But God has promised to hold on to
those who are born of God, and who possess the Holy Spirit, and have
seen his glory (1 Cor. 1:8–9; 1 Thess. 3:13; Jude 24–25). He will assert
himself in due time and break through the clouds so that you see clearly
again (Ps. 42:5).
Jesus taught us through his prayer in John 17 that while he was on
the earth, he had begun a ministry of illumination in the minds of his
disciples that he intended for his Father to preserve when Jesus was no
longer in the world. He had revealed the Father’s glory to his disciples:
“I glorified you on earth. . . . The glory that you have given me I have
given to them” (John 17:4, 22). Jesus’s point was that he had revealed
to his disciples the glory of the Father so that they could know that he
is real. And now, as he prepares for his absence, he asks the Father to
preserve that illumination in the disciples:
I have manifested your name to the people whom you gave me out
of the world. . . . Holy Father, keep them in your name, which you
have given me. . . . While I was with them, I kept them in your name,
which you have given me. I have guarded them, and not one of them
has been lost except the son of destruction, that the Scripture might
be fulfilled. . . . I do not ask that you take them out of the world,
but that you keep them from the evil one. . . . Sanctify them in the
truth; your word is truth. (John 17:6–17)
The aim of this prayer is to give us the joyful confidence (v. 13) that the
manifestation of the Father’s glory, once it is given, will never be lost.
And we may be sure of this: Jesus was not praying for those disciples
only, but, as he says, for twenty-first-century believers as well: “I do not
ask for these only, but also for those who will believe in me through
their word” (John 17:20).
So, even though the supernatural gift of seeing God’s glory in the