Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit · Sermon No. 566
Delivered on Sunday Morning, April 24, 1864, by the Rev. C, H. Spurgeon, at the Metropolitan Tabernacle, Newington
“You have given Him power o ver all flesh, that He should give eternal life to as many as You have given Him.” John 17:2.
THIS was used by our Savior as an argument why the Father should glorify Him in His dread hour of conflict. Our Lord did as much as say, “You have already given Me what I now ask. Therefore, since You have virtually bestowed it upon me in the Covenant, give it Me now in very deed.” So the Believer, when he prays, asks for what is already his own. And when we come before the Lord in prayer this should encourage us much, that our heavenly Father has already given us all things in giving us His Son, so that we ask for what is virtually our own.
The text itself we will try to open up briefly. It contains two statements—first, that Christ, as a Mediator, has received from God universal authority over all flesh. And secondly, that the object of this is special and peculiar, that He may give eternal life to as many as the Father has given to Him. You have universal power, but you have within it a special purpose. We know that our Lord Jesus Christ has all power given to Him in Heaven and in earth—“Angels and men before Him fall and devils fear and fly.” All things, whether animate or inanimate, confess the majesty of Him who is King of kings and Lord of lords.
Our text, however, mentions the most stubborn thing in all the world—“flesh.” Jesus has power over all flesh. That willful, wicked, disobedient thing called flesh Christ knows how to govern. He has power over all men as fallen men, for such the term, flesh, describes. I understand, then, that Christ has power over all men, to pardon all whom He wills. Christ has this day as Mediator, power to convict of sin every living soul by His Spirit, if so He wills. And power to bring all men to the footstool of His Grace and to give them pardon if so it seems good in His sight. We do not believe that there is any exception to this rule—Christ has power over every man born of Adam, to give to him the Grace of conviction and the Grace of pardon, if so it should please Him to do.
He has power also to make those who are not convicted of sin and who are not pardoned, subservient to His purpose. He has power to restrain their evil passions from running to an excess of riot. He can use them as His drudges to effect His purposes even when they proudly rebel against Him—so that though they boast themselves in their own free will—they shall really be working out His own eternal purpose. He has a bit often in the mouth of His fiercest enemy and a hook in the jaw of the bloodiest persecutor.
Over all flesh He has authority whether it is crowned with royalty or wrapped in rags! Whether it curses with profanity or bows down with reverent adoration. There is not a mortal man from the equator to the poles, of any rank or any language, or bearing any hue upon his skin who is not subject to this universal mediatorial power of the Lord Jesus Christ. If I understand my text and Scriptures parallel with it, it was ordained in order to the salvation of the chosen, that the whole world of man should be taken from under the immediate rule of God as absolute God and placed under a new form of government of which the Mediator should be King and Head.
As the result of this gracious arrangement a fallen race is permitted to exist—a sinful world coming into contact with an absolute God must have been instantaneously doomed to Hell. Man, while yet a rebel, lives on in virtue of the mediatorial power of Jesus! He has stepped in between avenging Justice and the sinner and so the sinner is spared. I trace to Christ’s Atonement the continued life of the most obdurate. All the long-suffering mercy of God seems to me to flow through the channel of the Savior’s authority over all flesh.
It is in virtue of this power that the Gospel is preached to all men—“All power is given unto Me in Heaven and in earth. Go you, therefore, and teach all nations.” Hence the command to believe receives its Divine sanction and those are condemned who believe not in His name. On account of this universal dispensation of mediatorship, an honest, gracious, and sincere invitation is given to whomever will, to drink of the Water of Life freely. It is, I say, on account of this universal mediatorial power of Christ that I can stand upon this platform and say in the broadest possible terms, that whoever believes on the Lord Jesus shall never perish, but have eternal life! And I can preach a Gospel which, in its proclamation, is as wide as the ruin and as extensive as the Fall.
But why all this? The text tells us that the object and design of all this was not universal, but special—that the intention of God in thus putting all men under the power of Christ was not that all men might receive eternal life, but that He might give eternal life to as many as had been given to Him. So that in all this universal dealing there is the special and peculiar design that the chosen may receive life—that the elect may be filled with spiritual life on earth and afterwards enter into the Glory life above.