'I will ask and He will give' seems a strange drop from the lofty
claims with which we have become familiar in the earlier verses of this
chapter. 'Believe in God, believe also in Me'; 'He that hath seen Me
hath seen the Father'; 'If ye shall ask anything in My name I will do
it'; 'Keep My commandments.' All these distinctly express, or
necessarily imply, divine nature, prerogatives, and authority. But here
the voice that spake the perfect revelation of God, and gave utterance
authoritatively to the perfect law of life, softens and lowers its
tones in petition; and Jesus Christ joins the rank of the suppliants.
Now common sense tells us that apparently diverse views lying so close
together in one continuous stream of speech cannot have seemed to the
utterer of them to be contradictory; and I venture to affirm that there
is no explanation which does justice to these two sides of Christ's
consciousness—the one all divine and authoritative and lofty, and the
other all lowly and identifying Himself with petitioners and suppliants
everywhere—except the old-fashioned and to-day discredited belief that
He is 'God manifest in the flesh,' who prays in His Manhood and hears
prayer in His Divinity. The bare humanistic view which emphasises such
utterances as these of my text does not, for the life of it, know what
to do with the other ones, and cannot manage to unite these two images
into a stereoscopic solid. That is reserved for the faith which
believes in the Manhood and in the Deity of our Lord and Saviour.
His intercession is the great hope of the Christian heart. His
intercession is the great activity of His present exalted and glorious
state. His intercession is no mere verbal utterance, nor the
representation to the Father of an alien or a diverse will, but His
intercession, mysterious as it is, and unfathomable to our poor, short
lines and light plummets, must mean this at all events—His continual
activity in presenting before the divine Father, as the motive and
condition of His petition being granted, His own great work upon the
Cross. The High Priest passes within the veil, bearing in His hand the
offering which He has made, and by reason of that offering, and of His
powerful presence before the mercy-seat, all the spiritual gifts which
redeem and regenerate and sanctify humanity are for ever coming forth.
'I will pray, and He will give,' is but one way of saying, 'Seeing
then, that we have a great High Priest over the House of God who is
entered within the veil, let us draw near.'
But I would have you notice how, as is always the case in all
utterances of Jesus Christ which express the lowest humiliation and
completest identification of Himself with humanity, there is ever
present some touch of obscured glory, some all but suppressed flash of
brightness which will not be wholly concealed. Note two things in this
great utterance; one, Christ's quiet assumption that all through the
ages, and today, nineteen centuries after He died, He knows, at the
moment of their being done, His servants' deeds. 'Keep my commandments,
and, knowing that you keep them, I will then and there pray for you.'
He claims in the lowly words an altogether supernatural, abnormal,
divine cognisance of all the acts of men down the ages and across the
gulf between earth and heaven.
And the other signature of divinity stamped on the prayer of Christ is
His certitude of the answer. 'I will ask and He will give': He puts, as
it were, the Father's act in pledge to us, and assures us, in a tone of
certainty, which is not merely the assurance of faith, but the
certitude of One who is 'one with the Father,' that His prayer brings
ever its answer. 'Father! I will that they whom Thou hast given Me be
with Me.' How strange! How far beyond the warrantable language of man!
And how impossible for a fisherman of Bethsaida to imagine, if he had
not heard, that strange blending of submission and of authority which
speaks in such words!
Then, remember what I have already said, that, according to the
teaching of this verse, taken in connection with its context, that
which put in motion Christ's Intercessory activity, as represented in
my text, is the obedience of a Christian man. If you obey He will pray,
and the Father will send. So the reward of imperfect obedience is the
larger measure given to us of that divine Spirit by whose indwelling
obedience becomes possible, and self-surrender a joy and a power. And
that is not merely because of the natural operation by which any kind
of conduct tends to repeat itself in more complete measure, nor is it
merely a case of 'to him that hath shall be given'; as a man's arm is
strengthened by exercise, and any faculty becomes more assured, and
swift, and at the command of its owner, by use. But there is a distinct
supernatural impartation to every obedient heart of divine gifts which
come straight through Jesus Christ to it. He Himself, in this immediate
context, says, 'If I depart I will send Him unto you,' and the true
conception is that in that Spirit's gift, which is a reality waiting as
its crown and reward upon our poor stained obedience, the whole Godhead
is present; the Father the Source, the Son the Channel, the Spirit the
Gift.