Kingdom's Keys Fellowship
Where God's Kingdom Meets Man's Heart.
When 13 Becomes a Blessed Number
Three articles will begin today that show the number 13 to be a blessed number. It’s because John 13 is a blessed Gospel Chapter. The way it starts and continues on with Jesus teaching His disciples what it means to be truly human. It takes place in an upper room where He takes the disicples to eat the Passover meal in preparation for the Cross. The first two verses give us a fresh look. They take us into time, place and purpose. Today we take on the idea of time. Let the verses sink in. The Spirit is ready.
First, the context of time. “It was just before the Passover Feast. Jesus knew the time had come for Him to leave this world and go to the Father (13:1)”
Second, the context of place. “The evening meal was being served (13:2)”
Third, the context of purpose. “Having loved His own who were in the world, He now showed them the full extent of His love. (13:2)”
1. Time
“Jesus knew the time had come for Him to leave…”
As far as time is concerned Jesus deals with two dimensions. First, there is the time of the Passover Feast. This kind of time points to the horizontal dimension, the temporary, time as man knows it in history and culture. It is man’s daily existence in its self-conscious life-to-death phase. Second, the Feast itself, among a number of other feasts, is commanded by God in His Word to bring His people together in order to remain corporately conscious of the higher dimension which is His eternal presence, the vertical dimension. All of the feasts, but especially the Passover Feast, bring us into this vertical awareness of His existence and presence. They are designed to lift us into His presence, into the vertical dimension.
The Passover was an annual festal occasion celebrating God’s deliverance of the Jews from Egypt, its Pharaoh and its idolatry. The Passover becomes of course, the mode through which we see Jesus as the Passover Lamb who takes away the sin of the world and is the Savior of all mankind, to ‘pass over’ from death to life, death in the world to life in the Spirit. It sets the pattern for the Lord’s Supper, which is the primary structural model for corporate worship among the majority of Christians in the world. Thus you might say that there is time in its material sense and time in its spiritual sense. One is about history the other is about God. One is locked into the mind, emotion and body of each person and the other is an eternal personal and interpersonal spiritual reality beyond the physical universe but very presently real and accessible.
Having come to be an example of these two dimensions at work (13:15) we see here that Jesus is making us aware of two kinds of time, the world’s time (Gk.-chronos) which is temporary and God’s time (Gk.-xairos), or timelessness, which is permanent. Time, as we know it in its temporary state, points to timelessness as God lives it in eternity. What is incomplete and temporary in this world is complete and permanent in God’s Kingdom.
In essence what we know as time is man’s term for his living experience while God’s presence is timeless eternity. Just what does that mean? Man experiences a past, a present and a future. God, however, is always in the present simply because He always is. As Jesus rightly points out God is a God of the living not the dead (Mt.22:32) and to Moses He identifies Himself as I AM. What Jesus is doing in this passage is describing Himself as the example of what one does with both of these times. He is the one who is the junction, the link, the only link, between temporary time and the eternal timeless presence of God. He is the one who brings the timeless (thus immeasurable) qualities of God and His presence into our midst. Convincingly stated by the way, when He declares, “Before Abraham was born, I am (John 8:58).”
So when John writes, “Jesus knew that the time had come for Him to leave this world and go to the Father” it was His historical earthly consciousness as a man recognizing and illustrating the birth-to-death existence that signifies and defines time in the world sense. But when He says He is going to the Father He is identifying and defining the spiritual reality of God’s ‘time’, which has no beginning and no end. Further, He is identifying and defining Himself as God the Son, which means He is the key to understanding everything about spiritual reality. Carry this thought on. If God is always ‘present’ and is a Father then spiritual reality is all about children’s relationships with their Father and with brothers and sisters. These are relationships in a continual state of growth under the loving care, nurture and guidance of an elder brother, the Lord Jesus, who has bound us to His Father as we spiritually breathe in the atmosphere of the Holy Spirit.
First, the context of time. “It was just before the Passover Feast. Jesus knew the time had come for Him to leave this world and go to the Father (13:1)”
Second, the context of place. “The evening meal was being served (13:2)”
Third, the context of purpose. “Having loved His own who were in the world, He now showed them the full extent of His love. (13:2)”
1. Time
“Jesus knew the time had come for Him to leave…”
As far as time is concerned Jesus deals with two dimensions. First, there is the time of the Passover Feast. This kind of time points to the horizontal dimension, the temporary, time as man knows it in history and culture. It is man’s daily existence in its self-conscious life-to-death phase. Second, the Feast itself, among a number of other feasts, is commanded by God in His Word to bring His people together in order to remain corporately conscious of the higher dimension which is His eternal presence, the vertical dimension. All of the feasts, but especially the Passover Feast, bring us into this vertical awareness of His existence and presence. They are designed to lift us into His presence, into the vertical dimension.
The Passover was an annual festal occasion celebrating God’s deliverance of the Jews from Egypt, its Pharaoh and its idolatry. The Passover becomes of course, the mode through which we see Jesus as the Passover Lamb who takes away the sin of the world and is the Savior of all mankind, to ‘pass over’ from death to life, death in the world to life in the Spirit. It sets the pattern for the Lord’s Supper, which is the primary structural model for corporate worship among the majority of Christians in the world. Thus you might say that there is time in its material sense and time in its spiritual sense. One is about history the other is about God. One is locked into the mind, emotion and body of each person and the other is an eternal personal and interpersonal spiritual reality beyond the physical universe but very presently real and accessible.
Having come to be an example of these two dimensions at work (13:15) we see here that Jesus is making us aware of two kinds of time, the world’s time (Gk.-chronos) which is temporary and God’s time (Gk.-xairos), or timelessness, which is permanent. Time, as we know it in its temporary state, points to timelessness as God lives it in eternity. What is incomplete and temporary in this world is complete and permanent in God’s Kingdom.
In essence what we know as time is man’s term for his living experience while God’s presence is timeless eternity. Just what does that mean? Man experiences a past, a present and a future. God, however, is always in the present simply because He always is. As Jesus rightly points out God is a God of the living not the dead (Mt.22:32) and to Moses He identifies Himself as I AM. What Jesus is doing in this passage is describing Himself as the example of what one does with both of these times. He is the one who is the junction, the link, the only link, between temporary time and the eternal timeless presence of God. He is the one who brings the timeless (thus immeasurable) qualities of God and His presence into our midst. Convincingly stated by the way, when He declares, “Before Abraham was born, I am (John 8:58).”
So when John writes, “Jesus knew that the time had come for Him to leave this world and go to the Father” it was His historical earthly consciousness as a man recognizing and illustrating the birth-to-death existence that signifies and defines time in the world sense. But when He says He is going to the Father He is identifying and defining the spiritual reality of God’s ‘time’, which has no beginning and no end. Further, He is identifying and defining Himself as God the Son, which means He is the key to understanding everything about spiritual reality. Carry this thought on. If God is always ‘present’ and is a Father then spiritual reality is all about children’s relationships with their Father and with brothers and sisters. These are relationships in a continual state of growth under the loving care, nurture and guidance of an elder brother, the Lord Jesus, who has bound us to His Father as we spiritually breathe in the atmosphere of the Holy Spirit.
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