17:24 may behold my glory. God will surely answer this prayer of His beloved Son. Thus we can be absolutely sure that, if we truly belong to Christ through faith in him, we shall one day “see the king in His beauty,” and “shall behold the land that is very far off” (Isaiah 33:17). And then, “when He shall appear, we shall be like Him; for we shall see Him as He is” (I John 3:2).

17:24 lovedst me before. The Father loved the Son long before there was ever any other kind of love, for this eternal love in the bosom of the Father existed before He created the universe. All other loves—marital love, parental love, filial love, brotherly love, love of country, any kind of love—have their source in the love of the Father for the Son (and, indeed, the love within all the Persons of the Godhead). It is significant in this connection that the Gospel of John uses the word “love” more than any other book of the Bible, and the first Epistle of John has its second most frequent usage. The first one of all these, significantly, is John 3:16, telling us that the Father gave the Son because of His love for those He had created! See also the notes on Genesis 22:2.