The Only True God: What Jesus Prays in John 17:1-5
Short answer: John 17:1-5 records Jesus lifting his eyes to heaven and addressing the Father directly, asking to be glorified so that he may glorify the Father. The passage establishes that the one true God is a personal Father, not an abstract force, and that Jesus shares the divine glory that belongs to God alone. The prayer's opening words in John 17:1 read, "Father, the time has come. Glorify your Son, that your Son may also glorify you;". Against Israel's confession in Deuteronomy 6:4 that "Yahweh is our God. Yahweh is one.", Jesus places himself in a unique, eternal relationship to the Father. This is not a denial of God's oneness but the New Testament's own way of explaining who the one true God is: Father, Son, and Spirit, one God.
Why Jesus Prays Instead of Teaching
John 17 is often called the high priestly prayer, and the setting explains a great deal. Chapters 13 through 16 record Jesus instructing his disciples in the upper room on the night he was betrayed. He washes their feet, predicts his departure, promises the Spirit, and speaks of abiding in him. Then, at the end of the discourse, the evangelist turns from instruction to prayer. Jesus does not stop teaching because he has run out of material; he stops because the hour has arrived. The prayer is the hinge between the farewell discourse and the arrest that follows in chapter 18. It reads as a man turning from his friends to his Father.
That turn reveals something about how Jesus understood his own mission. He had spoken of the Father throughout his ministry, but now he addresses him face to face. This is not a rhetorical device or a public pronouncement for the crowd's benefit. The text says he lifted his eyes to heaven and spoke. The posture itself is an act of dependence. The one who had said that he and the Father are one now stands as a Son who receives, asks, and waits. The prayer does not diminish his deity; it displays the relationship within the one Godhead. He addresses the Father as Father and asks from him, exactly as the eternal Son does.
Some readers stumble here, wondering how the only true God can pray. The answer lies in recognizing that the passage never presents Jesus as a creature petitioning a distant deity. It presents the Son who has been with the Father before the world existed, speaking in the intimacy of that eternal relationship. The prayer is not evidence that Jesus is less than God; it is evidence that God is not a solitary monad. Within the one divine being there is a Father who loves and a Son who is loved, and the Son speaks to the Father in that love. The prayer is the inside of that relationship made audible to us.
For the reader, the practical edge is this: prayer is not a technique for extracting things from an impersonal force. It is speech addressed to a Father who hears. Jesus models the posture that the Psalms and prophets assumed, eyes lifted, heart directed, words offered without pretense. When we pray, we are not initiating contact with a silent universe. We are answering the invitation of the true God who has already spoken, and who has given us the Son as both the pattern of our praying and the one who brings our praying to the Father.
The Hour Has Come: Timing in John 17
John's Gospel is built around the theme of the hour. Early in the ministry, Jesus repeatedly says that his hour has not yet come. At the wedding of Cana he tells his mother that his hour has not yet arrived. Later, when his brothers urge him to go to Judea publicly, he again says his time has not yet come. But in John 12:23 the language shifts: the hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified. By the time we reach John 17:1, the waiting is over. The hour that has been approaching throughout the book has finally arrived, and Jesus names it in prayer.
What makes this hour so significant is that John identifies it with the cross, the resurrection, and the ascension as a single movement of glorification. In ordinary human reckoning, the cross is shame and defeat. In John's Gospel, it is the lifting up by which Jesus draws all people to himself. So when Jesus asks the Father to glorify him, he is not asking for a display of power that avoids suffering. He is asking that the Father accomplish the work through which glory will come, precisely through the path of obedience unto death. The hour is the appointed time when the eternal plan reaches its goal.
Notice also that Jesus prays as one who is not surprised. There is no panic in the prayer, no bargaining, no attempt to have the cup removed. He says the time has come, not the time has overtaken me. Throughout the Gospel he has acted on the Father's timing, and he continues to do so here. This steadiness does not mean the hour was easy. The Gospels make clear that Gethsemane and the events that followed were agonizing. But even the agony is placed inside a settled confidence that the Father's purposes are good. The prayer holds both together: real weight and real trust.
The application is not that believers should expect to know the exact hour of their own trials. It is that God has an hour for his purposes, and it is never late. The one true God is the Lord of time, and he brings his purposes to fulfillment in his own way. The disciples were confused; the crowds were divided; the authorities were plotting. But in the middle of all of it, the Son who knows the Father prays with the calm of someone who has already entrusted the outcome to him. That is the confidence we are invited to share, not because we can see the future, but because we know the One who holds it.
Glorify Your Son: What Glory Means Here
Glory in Scripture is not mere brightness or reputation. It is the weight and worth of God's own character made known. When Moses asks to see God's glory, God proclaims his name and his mercy. When Isaiah sees the Lord high and lifted up, the glory fills the temple and exposes the prophet's sin. So when Jesus asks to be glorified, he is asking that the truth about who he is might be displayed. The request is not for applause but for revelation, that the world might see what the Father has always known about the Son.
At the same time, the glory runs in both directions. Jesus asks to be glorified so that he may also glorify the Father. The relationship is mutual and reciprocal, which is exactly what we would expect if Father and Son share one divine life. It is worth noting how the Old Testament insists that God will not give his glory to another. In Isaiah 44:6, God says through the prophet, "I am the first, and I am the last; and besides me there is no God." If that is true, then a mere creature could not say what Jesus says here. The mutual glorification of Father and Son is itself a claim about who Jesus is.
Some well-meaning readers assume that asking to be glorified was a moment of ambition or self-focus. But the prayer defeats that reading immediately: the glory is requested so that the Father may be glorified. Jesus is not seeking a private platform. He is asking that the Father's name be honored through the completion of the work he was sent to do. The cross, which looks like the opposite of glory, becomes the place where God's love and justice and faithfulness are most clearly seen. In John's Gospel, the glorification of the Son is not despite the cross; it is through it.
That reframes how we think about our own lives. We naturally measure glory by visibility, influence, or praise from others. The prayer teaches a different measure: glory is God's character displayed through faithful obedience, even when that obedience looks like loss. The Son glorified the Father by finishing the work given him. We glorify God not by manufacturing impressive results but by walking in the obedience he has set before us, trusting him to display his worth through it however he chooses.
The Only True God in the Old Testament Witness
The New Testament does not introduce a new God. It identifies the God of Israel as the Father of Jesus, and it does so by echoing the Old Testament's own claims. Deuteronomy 6:4 stands at the heart of Israel's confession: "Hear, Israel: Yahweh is our God. Yahweh is one." This was recited daily, taught to children, and written on doorposts. It was the boundary marker that distinguished Israel from every surrounding nation with its pantheon of local deities. When Jesus prays to the Father, he prays to this God, the one who spoke to Moses and made covenant with Israel.
Isaiah presses the same claim with unusual force. In Isaiah 44, God mocks the foolishness of idols made from the same tree used for firewood, and then declares in Isaiah 44:6, "This is what Yahweh, the King of Israel, and his Redeemer, Yahweh of Armies, says:". The God who speaks is both King and Redeemer, and he says there is no God besides him. The nations and their gods are nothing. Israel's hope is not a matter of picking the strongest deity from a crowded field. It is the recognition that only one God exists, and he has made himself known.
Jeremiah makes the contrast even sharper. In Jeremiah 10:10 the prophet declares, "But Yahweh is the true God. He is the living God, and an everlasting King." The surrounding verses describe idols as scarecrows in a cucumber field, unable to speak or walk or do anything. The living God, by contrast, is active, ruling, and worthy of awe. The word true here does not simply mean accurate. It means real, genuine, the one who actually is. Where idols are nothings dressed up as gods, Yahweh is the living reality behind all that exists.
This Old Testament background matters for reading John 17 because it shows the continuity of revelation. Jesus is not a rival to the God of Israel, nor a second deity added alongside him. The one true God of Deuteronomy, Isaiah, and Jeremiah is the Father to whom Jesus prays. The New Testament's later language about Father, Son, and Spirit is the church's attempt to say faithfully what these texts together require: that the one God is not isolated, but eternally Father, Son, and Spirit. The prayer of John 17 assumes that whole framework without ever arguing for it.
Eternal Life and Knowing the Only True God
In the very next verse, John 17:3, Jesus defines eternal life in relational terms: knowing the Father and the Son whom he sent. This is a striking definition. Many people think of eternal life as unending duration, a quantity of time. Jesus describes it as a kind of knowing, a shared life with the only true God. Duration matters, but it is not the center. The center is communion with the God who is real. Heaven is not primarily a place we go; it is a Person we come to know, and the knowing begins now.
The word know in Scripture is not mere information. It carries the sense of relationship, recognition, and personal acquaintance. To know God in this sense is not to have mastered a doctrine about him but to be known by him and to live in that relationship. That is why Jesus can pray for his disciples in the same breath as he prays for himself. The goal of his glorification is that people might come into this knowledge. The cross is not an end in itself; it opens the way for sinners to know the holy God without being destroyed.
This also explains why the Bible is so severe about idolatry. If the only true God is a personal Father who gives himself to be known, then replacing him with anything else is not a minor mistake. It is a betrayal of the very relationship for which we were made. Paul makes this plain in 1 Thessalonians 1:9, where he describes how the Thessalonians "turned to God from idols, to serve a living and true God". Conversion is a turning, a reorientation from dead substitutes to the living reality. The gospel is not an add-on to a life already full of gods; it is a change of allegiance.
So the prayer of John 17 reaches all the way down to ordinary Christian experience. To be a Christian is not to hold a correct opinion about a distant deity but to know the only true God through Jesus Christ. That knowledge grows through Scripture, prayer, obedience, and the fellowship of the church. It is not gained once and then forgotten; it is cultivated across a lifetime. And it is eternal, because the God who is known is eternal and everlasting, as Jeremiah says. The life that begins in knowing him does not end.
One God, No Rivals: Paul's Argument for the Corinthians
The early church lived in a world crowded with gods. Corinth was full of temples, festivals, and guild meals tied to the worship of idols. In 1 Corinthians 8, Paul addresses whether believers may eat food sacrificed to idols. His answer rests on a doctrinal foundation, and he states it plainly in 1 Corinthians 8:4, "we know that no idol is anything in the world, and that there is no other God but one." The idols are not lesser deities to be feared. They are nothing. The one God alone is real.
Paul then draws a line between the many so-called gods of the pagans and the one God Christians confess. He does not deny that there are beings called gods in the world's vocabulary, but he denies them any real divine status. His reasoning is not philosophical speculation; it is the confession of Israel carried into a Greek city. The Shema is assumed, not argued. The one true God is the God who made all things, and the one Lord Jesus Christ is the one through whom all things exist. Paul holds the two together without embarrassment.
What makes the passage pastorally interesting is that Paul does not stop with doctrine. He goes on to warn that knowledge can puff up while love builds up. A believer may be theologically correct about idols being nothing and still damage a weaker brother by exercising freedom carelessly. The truth about the only true God does not release us from responsibility toward one another. It obliges us to love. Knowing that there is one God should produce humility, not swagger, because the God we know is the God who stooped to save us.
This is the practical shape of monotheism in the New Testament. Because there is one God, there is one loyalty. Because he is the living and true God, he deserves the whole heart. And because he is the Father of the Lord Jesus, our loyalty is expressed in love for the people Jesus died to save. The doctrine of the one true God is not a cold abstraction to be filed away among other beliefs. It is the truth that reorders our affections, our worship, and our treatment of others. The Corinthians needed that reminder, and so do we.
Why the Oneness of God Still Matters Today
Modern readers may feel that the question of one God versus many is settled and no longer live. But the world has not stopped making gods. We manufacture them from career, money, family, nation, self-image, and pleasure. Anything that commands our ultimate trust and shapes our identity functions as a god, whether or not we use the word. The old idols were statues; the new ones are more subtle, but the dynamic is the same. We look to something other than the living God to give us security, meaning, and worth.
The Bible's insistence that there is only one true God is therefore not a museum piece. It is a diagnostic tool and a rescue. It tells us that our ultimate loyalty must rest somewhere, and that only the living God can bear the weight. Every other god will eventually fail us, because every other god is either a creature or a projection. The God of Israel, by contrast, is the everlasting King whose rule does not end. Jeremiah's description of him as living and true is meant to be contrasted with dead substitutes that cannot save.
There is also a unity to reality that flows from the unity of God. Because there is one Creator, there is one truth, one moral order, and one story in which human lives find their meaning. The fragmentation we experience, where different areas of life answer to different authorities, is a symptom of divided worship. When the one true God is acknowledged as God over all, life gains coherence. Work, family, money, and time are no longer rival gods but gifts entrusted by the one Lord.
Finally, the oneness of God undergirds the church's unity. Paul appeals to the one body and one Spirit and one hope because there is one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all. Divisions among believers are not merely organizational problems; they are a contradiction of the confession that there is one God. The doctrine that Jesus prays in John 17 and that Moses confessed in Deuteronomy is meant to produce a people who visibly belong to one another, because they belong to one Lord.
The Love Between Father and Son
In John 17:4-5, Jesus says he glorified the Father by finishing the work given him, and then asks to be restored to the glory he had with the Father before the world existed. This is one of the clearest statements in the Gospels about the Son's preexistence. He is not a man who became divine; he is the eternal Son who took on flesh. The glory he asks for is not a new award but a return to what he shared with the Father before creation. The prayer assumes an eternity of shared life between the two.
That shared life is characterized by love, not mere coexistence. In the verses that follow, Jesus will speak repeatedly of the love the Father has for him and that he has for the disciples. The mutual glorification of John 17:1 and 17:4 arises from this love. The Father glorifies the Son because he loves him; the Son glorifies the Father because he loves him. Within the one God, there is not loneliness but communion. That is part of what it means to say that God is love: love requires an object, and the eternal Father and Son have always been that for one another.
The practical comfort here is that the God we worship is not emotionally cold. He is not a philosophical first cause or an unmoved mover. He is a Father who loves his Son, and who has loved us in him. The prayer Jesus prays in the hour of his suffering is not addressed to a stranger. It is addressed to a Father who has known him and loved him from before the world began. When we come to God through Christ, we come into that same circle of love, adopted as sons and daughters by the Father whom Jesus addresses here.
This also shapes how we understand prayer itself. Jesus prays with confidence because he knows the Father's character. He asks for what aligns with the Father's purpose. He is not trying to persuade a reluctant deity; he is expressing the desires of his heart to the one who shares his heart. That is the pattern for us. Prayer is not manipulation and not performance. It is the honest speech of children to a Father who already knows and already loves, and who invites us to ask in the name of the Son who prays here.
Biblical fidelity check
What John 17:1-5 establishes is this: Jesus prays to the Father, identifies the hour as a moment of mutual glorification, and speaks of glory he shared with the Father before the world existed. It establishes the personal, relational nature of God, the preexistence of the Son, and the deep continuity between Jesus and the God of the Old Testament. What it does not do is spell out the full doctrine of the Trinity in technical terms. The word Trinity does not appear, and the prayer does not explain the mechanics of the Godhead. The church's later creeds are faithful summaries of texts like this, not additions to them, but readers should be honest that the passage assumes more than it explains.
A common misreading is to treat Jesus's prayer as proof that he is merely a creature distinct from God, a lesser being appealing to a greater one. That reading fails because the same prayer claims that Jesus shared glory with the Father before the world existed and that he is to be glorified as the Father is. No creature can claim pre-creation glory. Another misreading flattens the distinction and says the Father and the Son are simply two names for the same person. That fails because Jesus addresses the Father as another, and the prayer is genuine conversation. Faithful Christians have debated how to phrase the mystery, but the text itself rules out both easy collapses.
Other passages that speak to John 17:1-5
The themes of this prayer run through the whole Bible. The one God Jesus addresses is the God Paul teaches the divided Corinthians to serve together, a theme explored in What Does 1 Corinthians 1:10 Mean? Context, Theology, and Application. The calling that brings people into fellowship with the Son is the subject of What Does 1 Corinthians 1:9 Mean? Context, Theology, and Application. The opening of that same letter, with its emphasis on the one Lord and one body, is surveyed in 1 Corinthians 1: Called, United, and Boasting in the Lord. And the practical question of how believers relate to the many gods of their culture is handled carefully in 1 Corinthians 10: Warnings and Freedom. Together these passages show how the confession of the only true God shapes worship, unity, and daily conduct.
Frequently asked questions
Does John 17 teach that Jesus is God?
The passage strongly implies it without using the later creeds' vocabulary. Jesus asks to be glorified by the Father, says he shared glory with the Father before the world existed, and defines eternal life as knowing both the Father and himself. Throughout the Gospels, glory belongs to God alone. Taken together with the rest of John's Gospel, where Jesus says he and the Father are one, it can only be read to indicate that the Son shares the divine nature. The prayer presents him as far more than a prophet or teacher.
What does it mean to know the only true God?
In John 17:3, Jesus defines eternal life as knowing the Father and the Son whom he sent. This knowing is relational, not merely intellectual. It means being brought into a living relationship with God through Christ, a relationship that begins in this life and continues forever. It involves trust, loyalty, and growing familiarity with God's character through Scripture and prayer. The opposite of knowing God in this sense is not ignorance but idolatry, giving ultimate loyalty to something other than him.
How can there be one God and also Father and Son?
The Bible presents one God who exists eternally as Father, Son, and Spirit. John 17 shows the Son praying to the Father and speaking of shared glory before creation, so the distinction is real and not a disguise. At the same time, Israel's confession that Yahweh is one remains fully intact. The church has expressed this as one God in three persons, a summary rather than an explanation. The mystery is genuine, and faithful Christians hold it while admitting they cannot fully comprehend it.
