Your letter, of May 5, came to hand safely. Your interesting question involves a very lovely feature of John 17; not only in v. 24, but in the whole chapter. It is a wonderful portion of the word of God. There is a holy solemnity about it that deters the heart from making too free use of it, I think, fearing to make it common by familiarity, if I may so say. It is not God compelling Satan to tell his thoughts about His people (Num. 22; 24). Nor is it the Spirit’s reasoning through an apostle of their clearance and blessing as in the epistles. It is the sacred, blessed, mutual feelings of the Father and the Son, in communion about those who had been given of the Father to the Son, and yet who were ever the mutual possession of both. “All mine are thine and thine are mine.” It unfolds in the presence of His people those sacred thoughts, the result of that work for them whom He presents to the Father now as taking His place on earth in His sight and love; and as a consequence their position before the world. It looks on to the day of glory when they will have His place, by and by, and be with Him in it, who placed them there. These results flow from the Son having become a man, and as man receiving back all that He possessed as Eternal Son of God—Son of the Father, in order that He might share with His people what He thus receives, which they could not possess had He not become a man, and by redemption brought them into the place where they might share with Him, as man, all that He possessed.
I have thought that it is an enlargement of His word in John 14, “Not as the world giveth give I unto you.” The world gives largely to its own, but it deprives itself of what it gives. It gives away. Not so the Lord. When He gives, He brings the recipient into joint possession with Himself of all that He has.
Verse 24 is an example of this, as indeed the whole chapter. He becomes a man; as man He is the Son of the Father—what He was before the world, He is now as man. “The words” (τὰ ρἠματα), i.e., the divine communications in detail, which the Father of such a Son gave to Him, He has given them—passed on for their comfort what was His own on earth. “Thy word (τὰ λογος σου) I have given them.” He was the person who was the perfect expression in Himself of the whole mind of God—“The Word” —the Word of God in testimony on earth. This He gives them, putting them into His own place on earth, therefore the world hateth them. So “the glory which thou hast given me, I have given them.” So also v. 24, which after all puts Him in His true place: He the Giver, they the receivers—all that they receive, and the more that they receive, only serving to prove the divine glory of the giver, and rendering them capable of seeing it: His own essential glory given up, as it were, for a moment (although never given up), to be received back as man, and because of this it is said, “My glory, which thou hast given me,” as thus received.
I would not say that v. 22 was the public manifestation of the glory of the Son of man. In all this chapter it is the Son of the Father. Son of man is judicial and displayed glory; the lordship of the second Adam over all, not necessarily so that of Son of the Father.
I was glad to make your acquaintance, even through a letter. Perhaps we may meet “face to face” on earth someday, if the Lord will. Thankful, too, of the news from; you have man to deal with, and man is the same everywhere, and in all ages. If Paul would cite Epamenides as to the Cretians—κρπητες ἀεὶ ψεῦσται, etc., which you quote, David could also say (truly, although “in haste “) πᾶς ἀνθρωπος ψεὺστης.