<p>17:6 <i>I manifested Your Name to the men whom you gave me out of the world. Yours they were and You gave them to me, and they have kept Your word</i>- The manifestation of the Name has echoes of the Angel manifesting the Name to Moses; here, the Lord is as the Angel, and the disciples are likened to Moses, which was a huge challenge to a mindset which considered Moses as the untouchable pinnacle of spirituality. But His manifestation of the Name was far greater than had happened then. We note that &quot;Name&quot; effectively means 'the whole person', all they stand for, characteristics, history and essence of being. The manifestation of the Name in the person of the Lord was throughout His life, but it would come to an intense climax in His manifestation of it on the cross (:26). It was not made to the Jewish world, but to those who had come out of that world, rather like Moses going out of the congregation of Israel in order to behold the manifestation of the Name to him.</p><p>As noted on :5, the Lord is here speaking to the Father, and as such has His perspective on time and existence. He speaks of the men whom the Father had given Him, as if they had always existed. They were given to Him, just as &quot;the work&quot; was given Him (:4). That &quot;work&quot; was therefore the salvation of those given Him, those foreknown and predestined to that call. The men having been given out of the Jewish world recalls&nbsp;the Levites being &quot;given&quot; to Aaron / the priesthood out of&nbsp;Israel (Num. 3:9; 8:19; 18:6); at the time of the golden calf they &quot;observed your word, and kept your covenant&quot; (Dt. 33:9, cp. &quot;they have kept your word&quot;), as did the disciples. The relationship between Moses and the Levites was therefore that between the Lord and the disciples- a sense of thankfulness that at least a minority were faithful.</p><p>The idea of the manifestation of the Name recalls the prologue's statement in Jn. 1:14 that when the word of God was made flesh in the Son of God, we saw the glory of God. If &ldquo;The word&rdquo; which was made flesh is in fact a reference to the Name of God, then this becomes understandable. And so the <i>logos </i>of God, the Name of God, being with Him in the beginning and being Him in a sense, was revealed fully in the human person (&ldquo;flesh&rdquo;) of the Lord Jesus. The Lord said this in so many words: &ldquo;I have manifested thy name unto the men which thou gavest me&rdquo; (Jn. 17:6). John surely has this in mind when he comments that the word / Name became flesh, and we saw that glory, but others in &ldquo;the world&rdquo; didn&rsquo;t perceive it (Jn. 1:14).</p><p>&quot;They have kept your word&quot; is the Lord speaking positively to the Father about His followers, just as He does concerning us today. The Lord's High Priestly prayer of intercession in John 17 so called because of the way He speaks of 'sanctifying Himself' reveals how positively He felt about the disciples- even though He knew and foretold that they were about to betray Him, deny Him and leave Him alone in His hour of greatest human need. His grace towards them here is quite profound. He describes them to His Father as those who &quot;have kept your word&quot;- referring to His own parable of the good ground, those who keep the word and bring forth fruit with patience (Lk. 8:15). Again, He tells His Father about them: &quot;They have believed that You did send me&quot; (Jn. 17:8). But He had just upbraided them for their <i>un</i>belief in Him (Jn. 16:31), and would do so again in a few days&rsquo; time (Mk. 16:14). Yet He presents His weak followers to the Father as so much better than they really were; and this is the same Lord who mediates for us today. Likewise, the Lord assures the Father that they were not &quot;of the Jewish world&quot; (Jn. 17:14,16), even though as we have shown in these studies, they were deeply influenced by the Jewish world around them. Perhaps the Lord looked ahead to the day when they would be spiritually stronger, and yet He presents the immature disciples to the Father from the perspective of how He hoped they would one day be. Thus He says that He has already &quot;sent them into the world&quot; (Jn. 17:18)- but this was only done by Him in its fullness <i>after</i> His resurrection. He speaks of how He was glorified in them before the Jewish world (Jn. 17:10)- when He knew Peter was about to deny Him and shame His whole cause and mission. But surely the Lord looked ahead to the hope He had in Peter and all of them, that they would go out into the world and glorify Him. Indeed, the whole prayer of Jn. 17 reveals how the Lord presented them to the Father as men who in many ways they simply were not. When they say &ldquo;We believe&hellip; that you came forth from God&rdquo;, He comments: &ldquo;Do you now believe?&rdquo; and predicts their scattering. Yet in prayer to the Father, He says that they did believe &ldquo;Surely&hellip; that I came out from thee&rdquo; (Jn. 17:8,25). Their faith was anything but &ldquo;sure&rdquo;. Likewise, we have shown above that they failed to really perceive His death, and thus failed to perceive the essence of <i>Him</i>. In the face of this tragedy, this frustration and pain, the Lord could calmly tell the Father: &ldquo;I am glorified <i>in them</i>&rdquo; (Jn. 17:10)- in they who understood so little, indeed who refused to understand. Even worse, the Lord had just been telling them that they didn&rsquo;t really love Him fully (Jn. 14:15,23,28). And yet He speaks to the Father of them as if they are <i>so</i> committed to Him.&nbsp;</p><p>The Lord&rsquo;s comment to the disciples that if they loved him, then they would &lsquo;keep his word&rsquo; (Jn. 14:15,21,23) implies their love was at best imperfect. Their keeping of His word and loving Him was certainly under question in Jn. 15:10. And yet He confidently represents them to the Father as those who had kept His word (Jn. 17:6). Perhaps by this He simply means that they loved Him and thereby the Father, rather than claiming any particular level of obedience for them.</p>