A Prayer for Protection
John 17:15
17:15 The prayer of Jesus was not for God to send something like “rescue planes” to evacuate the disciples from their hostile setting in the world. Such a plan would destroy God’s mission through them. Nor was it to wrap them in some plastic, danger-free safety casing where they would never encounter evil. But the prayer of Jesus was to protect them from succumbing to the onslaught of evil or the evil one.
Jesus was not under any delusion concerning the power of evil or of the enemy. John was clear that Jesus understood the nature of the battle, which Paul elsewhere explained is not merely against flesh and blood but is at the core of a spiritual battle (Eph 6:12). This battle requires not merely spiritual weapons (6:13–17), for both texts recognize the crucial nature of prayer in this hostile world setting (John 17:15; Eph 6:18).
The Greek ek tou ponērou can be translated as “from evil” in the abstract sense of a force in the world, but probably here it should be rendered “from the evil one” as a reference to the devil (John 8:34; 13:2), Satan (13:27), or the prince of the world (12:31; 14:30; 16:11), who stands behind the evil activities of humans. To understand the hostility of the world from the perspective of a personal power set against God, the work of Jesus, and the mission of Christians is both sobering and yet much closer to the view of Jesus and the early disciples than contemporary ideas that demythologize evil into some vague natural set of counter forces in the world. The devil was not some medieval imp dressed in red or black with a pitchfork and tail. The devil in the New Testament is a powerful force like a roaring lion (1 Pet 5:8) bent on destroying both God’s work and God’s people.
In 1 John this confrontation with the evil one in the life of Christian followers is further emphasized. The world in which the disciples live and work is both theologically and sociologically an alien place for Christians, one set against or oriented quite counter to the followers of Jesus (cf. 1 John 2:15–17). It is dominated by antichrist perspectives that are also enfleshed in humans (2:18–22; 4:3) and evidenced in the works of the children of the devil. These devil people like Judas imitate their Devil master, p 201 who has been opposed to the way of God from the beginning (3:8–10). There is to be no compromise with such works and perspectives because Jesus came to call a people who would overcome the evil one (2:14) and gain victory through faith over the ways of the world (5:4).375
Borchert, Gerald L. John 12–21. Vol. 25B. Nashville: Broadman & Holman Publishers, 2002. Print. The New American Commentary.
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