God’s glory is a major theme in the Gospel of John. John shows us that God reveals his glory most clearly in Jesus’ life and, surprisingly, also in his death (John 17:1).
How does God reveal his glory through the life of Christ? Through love and, according to John, specifically through the love of friendship. New Testament scholar Richard Bauckham notes that Jesus’ love for his friends “is probably the most theologically important way in which [John’s] Gospel depicts Jesus as God incarnate in humanity.”[1] He writes, “It is in this thoroughly human love of Jesus for his friends that the divine love for the world takes human form.”[2] The radiant glory of God’s love takes human expression in Jesus’ love for his friends.
John also shows us that God reveals his glory most clearly (and counterintuitively) through Jesus’ death. The Romans reserved the spectacle of crucifixion for their worst criminals. But John says that Jesus’ crucifixion displayed glory. How? As the greatest conceivable act of love. Nothing reveals God’s glory more than the dying love of Christ. That is the place where his glory shone most radiantly in all of world history. John shows us that we will not behold its full luster unless we understand it as an act of friendship. God displays his glory through Christ’s love, and Jesus says there is no greater love than laying down one’s life for friends (John 15:13).
Some people think of God’s glory mainly as his greatness. They think of God’s glory in terms of his power, his vastness. They think of God’s glory reflected in the sunsets and stars. That’s right, but when John shows us the blazing center of God’s glory, he doesn’t point to the sky. He points to the cross, where the Son of God laid his life down for his friends. This is love. This is beauty. This is his greatest glory.
If you want to know God’s glory, look at Christ’s love. And if you want to look at Christ’s love, look at the cross, where he died for his friends. Jesus’ sacrifice—for you and me, if we’ll have him—is the resplendent radiance of God’s glory.
How, then, do we see the greatness of God’s heart? We see it in the great length he goes to befriend us.
Jesus Saves Us by a Heroic Act of Friendship
The cross is a heroic act of friendship because it is the greatest act of sacrifice. Jesus received the opposite of what he deserved to save us from exactly what we deserve. And what is that? The hellish experience of abject loneliness. He cried out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Matthew 27:46; Mark 15:34 ESV). Jesus is the only one who didn’t deserve this cosmic isolation. Yet he took our hell and judgment so that we could receive his hand in friendship. Jesus was locked out so we could be let in.
Jesus was profoundly separated so that we could be permanently befriended.
Here’s how the apostle Paul put it: “In Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them” (2 Corinthians 5:19 ESV). This verse brings three key ideas together. First, reconciliation, which means, “to restore a relationship, to renew a friendship.”[3] God created the world in friendship, but we became his enemies. God could have disregarded us and started over, but he didn’t—because his love is too great for that. Second, justification. God restores friendship by not counting our sins against us. He forgives us and declares us righteous. Third, substitution. God accepts us as righteous because Jesus died on the cross, in our place, for our sins. He took the punishment we deserve so that we could get the blessing only he deserves. “For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God” (2 Corinthians 5:21 ESV). This is the great cost of our salvation. The cross shows us how bad we are (we deserve that!), but it also shows us just how much God loves us. This is the truth at the center of the universe: God wanted us to become his friends more than he wanted his Son to avoid hell.
The central message of the New Testament is reconciliation through justification because of substitution. God made us his friends (reconciliation) by not counting our sins against us (justification) because Jesus died for us (substitution).
God saves us to befriend us.
Christians love the truth of our justification in Christ. But we treasure this because it brings us to God. And it’s not that God has justified us, so now he’s stuck with us—our friendship is his idea. He decisively justifies us because he decidedly wants us. As Puritan Walter Marshall put it, “Justification is God’s way of taking you into friendship with himself.”[4]
Jesus Invites Us Into a Community of Friends
The cross is also God’s way of bringing us into deep friendship with others. Eden was originally the place of divine and human friendship. And the treacherous sin in Eden didn’t just result in broken friendship with God; it also unleashed the dynamics that make friendship so challenging in our own lives. But now, as we find ourselves reconciled to God, we also receive our welcome into a new community.
Jesus taught us to live and love as a community of friends. He gave us a new-covenant “new commandment” (John 13:34). He said, “This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you” (John 15:12 ESV). At first glance, this doesn’t sound very new—the Old Testament commanded Israel to love their neighbors, as themselves. So what is actually new here? This: the standard is ratcheted up and defined in terms of friendship. We must now love one another as Jesus loved us. And how did he love us? He clarifies this with his very next statement: “Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends” (John 15:13 ESV). Jesus makes the great love command even greater—by clothing it with sacrificial friendship. We are not just to “love our neighbor as ourselves” (Leviticus 19:18); we are to love one another sacrificially as friends. We are to love one another with the same kind of befriending love that Jesus showed us at the cross.
The newness of the new commandment is all about friendship. Jesus loved us as friends; now we love his friends as our own.
The New Testament repeatedly portrays the church as a community of friends. For example, Acts 4:32 says, “The full number of those who believed were of one heart and soul, and no one said that any of the things that belonged to him was his own, but they had everything in common” (ESV). This reflects the Roman ideals of friendship in which two people share “one soul” and “have all things in common.”[5] What the Romans held out as an ideal, the early church practiced as normal, even across ethnic and socio-economic divides.
Where did Peter and John go after being released from prison? “They went to their friends” (Acts 4:23 ESV). John later referred to a local church as, simply, “the friends” (3 John 1:15 ESV). He longed to see them “face to face,” as one friend speaks to another (2 John 1:12; 3 John 1:14 ESV). He wanted them to “have fellowship with us; and indeed our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son Jesus Christ” (1 John 1:3 ESV).
New Testament scholar Gordon Fee has called Paul’s letter to the Philippians a letter of friendship.[6] He notes, “Friendship in particular is radically transformed from a two-way to a three-way bond—between [Paul], the Philippians, and Christ.”[7] So it is with all Christian friendship.
While a local church is a community of friends, each one of us will still only experience the marks of true friendship with a few people. The “one anothers” of the New Testament—forgive one another, bear one another’s burdens, and so forth—these are marks of friendship, and we only fulfill them in close relationships. Each local church is a true “community of friends” when it is filled with many smaller, overlapping networks of deep friendships.
According to the New Testament, true friendship is not optional. Hebrews 3:13–14 urges Christians to “exhort one another every day…that none of you may be hardened by the deceitfulness of sin. For we have come to share in Christ, if indeed we hold our original confidence firm to the end” (ESV). We will only be saved in the end if we hold fast to Christ, and this requires friendship. This assumes Christians know each other deeply, contact one another frequently, and speak to one another frankly. Perseverance in the faith is the fruit of friendship.
The church is also a befriending community, inviting others into friendship with Jesus and his people. Christians are not only reconciled to God; they are also entrusted with the ministry of reconciliation (2 Corinthians 5:18–20). In other words, the church, as a community of Jesus’ friends, welcomes others into this great friendship.
The missional church is a befriending church.
Jesus Promises Us Friendship that Lasts Forever
Jesus said there will be no marriage in the new creation (Matthew 22:30). In this sense, we will all end up single. But single does not mean solitary. Christian marriages will give way to the greater marriage between Christ and the church, but the best part of every marriage will remain, which is friendship.
This means that for all who know Christ, whether single or married, the joys of friendship begin in this age and will never end. Apart from Christ, every relationship will end. But in Christ, every friendship only gets better and continues forever.
Scripture concludes with a symbolic vision of the new creation. The final chapters of Revelation highlight two aspects of our future. First, the new creation will be a happy world of human friendship. Revelation describes it as a city, filled with God’s people. Friendship is not a temporary luxury for this age alone; it is also a permanent fixture of our eternal home. In other words, it never was, nor will it ever be, good for us to be alone. Second, God will be our great Friend. Revelation describes the city as a perfect cube, which is a symbolic reminder of the other cube in Scripture: the temple’s Most Holy Place, which symbolized God’s presence back in Eden. God’s presence will fill every corner of the new creation. Revelation 22 portrays the new creation as a new and better Eden where we will walk in friendship with God again.
All of God’s people will “see his face, and his name will be on their foreheads” (Revelation 22:4 ESV). Moses spoke with God “face to face,” but he never actually saw God (Exodus 33:20 ESV). Israel’s high priest had God’s name written on his forehead, allowing him alone to enter the Most Holy Place. These were each symbols, pointing backward to the lost fellowship in Eden and looking forward to the restored fellowship to come. In the new creation every believer will enter God’s presence and see his face.
Many people think that eternal life will be boring. But think about your most joyful moments with friends. Now take that joy, multiply it by ten thousand, and project it into your eternal future. The whole of that happiness merely gestures in the direction of the joys to come. History ends with neither a bang nor a whimper, but with the laughter of friends.
History tells the drama of friendship created, lost, and then restored.
God loves his people with an everlasting and befriending love. He has loved us from eternity past and every moment of our lives. And so it will be forever, for all who trust him. God is our everlasting Friend, and our future is a world of friendship.
What if we could know this great Friend, personally, even now—this very moment?
Content taken from Made for Friendship by Drew Hunter, ©2018. Used by permission of Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers.
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Sources
[1] Richard Bauckham, The Gospel of Glory: Major Themes in Johannine Theology (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2015), 69.
[2] Bauckham, Gospel of Glory, 69.
[3] John Stott, The Cross of Christ (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1986), 192.
[4] Walter Marshall, The Gospel Mystery of Sanctification: Growing in Holiness by Living in Union with Christ, ed. Bruce H. McRae (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2005), 261.
[5] On the widespread use of these two phrases in Greek thought, see Carolinne White, Christian Friendship in the Fourth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 44; and Brian Edgar, God Is Friendship (Wilmore, KY: Seedbed Publishing, 2013), 141.
[6] Gordon Fee, Paul’s Letter to the Philippians (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1995), 12.
[7] Fee, Paul’s Letter to the Philippians, 13.