Tits end which God has proposed to Himself from the beginning, is unity. At the close, there will be a perfect and immutable harmony in all His works. God has created all things with a view to Himself, and to those who shall be partakers of His happiness; and it is by the principle of unity with God that we participate in His happiness, according to the measure and the position that He will have made for each. Those of His creatures who shall have despised this participation in the happiness of God, shall be rejected for ever, outside the sphere where God inhabits, and with Him shall dwell all the intelligences who shall have their part in this unity of happiness, where God shall be all in all.
In this chain of unity, according to God and in God, the Church occupies the first rank of glory, being the body of Jesus Christ, head of all things, the tabernacle of God by the Spirit. She becomes the center by means of which God has regulated His relations with all those who have part in this unity.
Jesus speaks of this unity of His own with Him and His Father (John 17.), and of the present and future consequences of this unity, in the twenty-first verse, as being the most powerful way of calling the world to the faith of Jesus, the sent one from the Father; in verses 21, 23, as manifesting to the world that the Father loves the Church with the same love with which He loves His Son. The testimony, mighty for the world, of the unity of the Church in its actual position, had place but for a moment—the Church failed therein: such is the consequence of all that is placed in the hands of man under responsibility. Nevertheless, God abandons not His purposes. He accomplishes that which He proposed to Himself—He is the Almighty.
Meanwhile, God realizes His unity for His own, in taking out of the introduced evil; and the further one is separated from all evil, the nearer one is brought to God; and the further also one escapes from the fatal effects of the corruption of what ought to have been his powerful blessing in this world, namely, Jesus reproduced in the world by the unity of His own, one with Him, as He is one with the Father. In a general point of view, by the fall of the Church, the corruption of this blessing becomes more and more the principle the most opposed to this unity, namely, Babylon, a unity according to men, which is but confusion in the judgment of God.
This unity has then failed respecting us as a Church here below, but it is accomplished as respects God and us in His Son; this is what shall be seen by the world to come, of which it is spoken, I think, in verse 29. Jesus had presented God to the world in perfectness in His own person; there was perfect unity between the Father and Jesus, but the world hated and rejected Him. If the Church had persevered in presenting the unity of the Father and of the Son, that would have been the most powerful means of call. Those also who would have formed parts of this union and communion with the Father and the Son by the Spirit, having kept the commandments of God, would have remained in His love; as a body, they would not have lost the enjoyment of His love. The presence of God in every way would have been the blessing within its happy precincts. Such is, I believe, in this point of view, the thing that has failed. But what is said in verses 22, 23, will take place when the Church shall appear in the same glory as Jesus; the world shall then know (it is not believe, as in verse 21, but know), because it will see the counsel of God concerning the Church. It will be the unity of the Father and the Son manifested to the world by the power of the Holy Spirit, in the Church and by the Church, the body of Christ. Blessed they who shall have part in this height, depth, length, and breadth of His love; who will be the objects of it for all eternity, being filled with all the fullness of God.
When the things which are in heaven and which are on earth shall be gathered together in Christ, it will be the commencement of visible blessing by unity. From the heavenly places to mount Zion, there will be many links in this chain of the beloved of the Lord; and from the throne of Christ, according to David, at Jerusalem, to the most remote worshippers from this terrestrial center, there are also diverse positions and capacities, but unity from one extremity to the other.—(Translated from "Le Témoignage.")