John 17:12 - Exposition

While I was with them (in the world £ ). He speaks of the earthly ministry as completed, and reviews the whole of his influence over them. I kept them in thy Name which thou hast given me . The very process that I can no longer pursue, and the cessation of which becomes the ground of the plea for the Father's τηρήσις . This an earthly father might say, without irreverence, of children whom he was about to leave, but the quality of the keeping is characterized by the Divine Name which was given him, and that manifested the Sonship which carried with it all the revelation of the Father. £ And I guarded (them)— ἐτήρουν signifies watchful observation; ἐφύλαξα , guardianship as behind the walls of a fortress— and not one perished —went to destruction— except that the son of perdition (has perished). Christ does not say that the son of perdition was given him by the Father and guarded from the evil one, and yet had gone to his own place; the exception refers simply to the "not one perished." εἰ μὴ has occasionally a meaning not exactly equal to ἀλλὰ , but expresses an exception which does not cover the whole of the ideas involved in the previous clause (see Matthew 12:4 ; Luke 4:26 , Luke 4:27 ; Galatians 1:19 , etc.). This awful Hebraistic phrase is used by St. Paul ( 2 Thessalonians 2:3 ; cf. 2 Samuel 12:5 ) for antichrist, and numerous phrases of the kind show how a genitive following υἱὸς or τέκνον expresses the full characteristic or the chief feature of certain persons (thus cf. υἱὸς γεένης τέκνα φῶτος κατάρας , etc.). This victim of perdition, this child of hell, has completed his course; even now he has laid his plans for my destruction and his own. He has so perished in order that the Scripture might be fulfilled. Even if the full telic force of ἵνα is preserved here, he does not free the "son of perdition" from the responsibility of his own destruction. The Scripture portraiture of Messiah has been realized. Psalms 41:9 , which has already been quoted by our Lord in John 13:18 , is probably still in his mind (cf. also Isaiah 57:12 , Isaiah 57:13 ). Some commentators—Arch-deacon Watkins, Dean Alford—press the fact that the "son of perdition" must have been among those who were given to Christ by the Father, who were watched, guarded, taught by God; but that Judas nevertheless took his own way and went to his own place. Thoma compares the lost disciple with the lost sheep of the synoptists, as though we had a reference to a true reprobate, a son of Belial, Apollyon, and the like. Moulton justly protests against any countenance being found here for the irrevocable decree. But if the interpretation of the εἰ μὴ given above is sound, there is no inclusion of the traitor among those who are "of the truth," etc.; but he was one who, notwithstanding boundless opportunity, went to his own place in the perversity of his own will.