We will notice, as we continue to go on here, that Jesus was conscious of what was going on through every part of the final act of the drama of His death that, despite the pains that He endured, He was conscious of every act that was unfolding before Him. Nothing happened to Him personally except that which He permitted them to do.
Now what He did, brethren, is that He laid His life down step-by-step. While this whole drama was going on, He was fully aware of what was going on and He was starting and stopping things to allow all Scripture pertaining to His death to be fulfilled. Not one thing got past Him that pertained to His death. You see pictures of Him in movies (and I have) with His head hanging down. It was not that way. I do not mean that He was not in pain. He was in tremendous pain, but He was also in control of everything that was going on! Nobody did a thing until He permitted it. He laid it down step-by-step to make sure that He suffered as the Father had demanded that He suffer for us, that we really be impressed about what He did.
I just wanted you to see a couple of them to show that there were times when He had to escape crowds that were angry at Him for one thing and another, usually accusing Him of blasphemy from the things that He said, but also to see that He used abilities that He had, and the help of God as well, to escape each and every one of those occasions. That is why I read John 17:1, where Jesus finally stated, The time has come. It was time for Him to die. Until then, He was in command regarding escaping the persecutors.
In contrast, Jesus is never selfish, nor are His prayers selfish. It is true however that he prayed for Himself. In His prayer, recorded in John 17, He begins by praying for what concerns Himself.
Even here the request is never for Jesus' interests as opposed to those of others. He asked to be glorified in order that He might, in turn, glorify the Father. These requests are not improper or even especially magnified.
We have a record of one petition concerning Himself, but for others. There are five verses in the first section of this prayer where Jesus is praying on His own behalf, but there are twenty-one verses in the next two sections in which Jesus prays for His disciples and for all who would inevitably follow them in faith.
Glory is, or should be, reflective and we could say reflexive as well. After Nebuchadnezzar's humiliation, God re-glorified him, but this time the king glorified God in return. Glory is one of those many examples of our reciprocal relationship with God. Turn to John 17 and we will see that Christ mentions this reciprocity. I will read this from the Amplified Version for emphasis:
We have already seen that God is the source of all our glory, but we are to reflect that glory and not hide it in a veil or, as we will see, under a basket. I want to read II Corinthians 3:18 again, but this time from the Phillips Paraphrase just to pick up the emphasis that he provides:
We are familiar with this as being the real Lord's Prayer. The prayer that Jesus prayed just before He was taken by the Romans, put through the trial, and then crucified.
