There is a remarkable connection between the thirteenth and fourteenth chapters of John, and a remarkable separation too between them and what goes before. In chapter 13 we find the blessed Lord with the doors shut, and about to keep that last passover, in which He was to take the place Himself, in His amazing grace and love, of being the true Pascal lamb. But if you study this chapter attentively, you will find that He takes the place there of being the Man that knew everything in principle that would befall His people, all through the wilderness; and He gives a most graphic sketch of all the principles of evil found in the company, and describes it all in the most searching way. He not only knew what man was, what Peter was, what John was, and what Judas was, but He puts Himself forward in contrast as the Man who could not fall, and, having loved His own who were in the world, would love them unto the end. Remarkably brought out, because Peter, in warm-heartedness, will not condescend to have his feet washed, and the Lord insists upon it—He cannot give up what was put on Him by the Father in heaven. “Why cannot I follow thee now?” says Peter. Ah! says Christ, I have no confidence-no faith in you at all. “The cock shall not crow, till you shall deny me thrice.” You must have faith in Me, “believe also in me.” And then the promise about His coming again, included Peter as much as any of us, and has not been fulfilled to Peter nor to us yet. It was a promise put forth to confirm the heart of Peter to have confidence in Him as the object of faith.
In chap. 14 I find another thing—not putting Himself forward and saying, everything and everybody will break down but Myself, and I shall certainly come and pick you up and take you to the Father’s house; but I find Him as the Man! it is a wonderful thing to me—who knew all about the Father. The only-begotten Son of the Father, the only one who could declare Him. I see Him hiding Himself all along, I am nobody, I present the Father. In My words do you not hear My Father’s voice? In My works do you see Me merely and not My Father? All through He is presenting how He was the exegesis of the Father; the one thought of His heart was that they should read the Father in Him.
I want to look with you at the fourteenth chapter—the other picture and the other side is in the thirteenth. There is a great deal more in the fourteenth to confirm and establish the heart in connection with the Father, and our connection with Him, than most of us abidingly carry in our minds. It is very remarkable the way in which He introduces it. Do not be troubled—I have told you man will fail—ye believe in God, believe in Me. You must be satisfied to have Me as the object of faith. If you do not see Me, you must believe in Me. He introduces in a pitiful way, “In my Father’s house are many mansions.” My mind is on Him, but I speak of His house first to you. I go to prepare a place for you—I will come again. The house was always His place, but would have been no home to them, nor to any intelligent Christian, if not able to connect it with Him as the Head of the new creation. He makes the place a home scene, enables the heart to follow out the glory of the Father and of Him the Son, become Head of the new creation—a house that all His redeemed, when they come to consider, find prepared for themselves.
I have been struck by the way persons turn from passages connected with glory. If you ask them they say, I cannot look forward and rejoice in it. Nay, it is redemption—glory that is spoken of in Romans 5:22By whom also we have access by faith into this grace wherein we stand, and rejoice in hope of the glory of God. (Romans 5:2). Does not the thought of redemption-glory make your heart at home, as His redeemed ones? Oh yes, if that is the thought I can rejoice—so with the Father’s house. Then in the fourth verse He takes a step onward—goes from place to person. He will try their faith, how far they will recognize the union between Him and the Father. “Whither I go ye know, and the way ye know.” Three disciples were not up to the mark. Thomas, Philip, and afterward Judas, cannot travel with him at all. “Whither I go ye know.” How can we? We know not where you are going, and how can we know the way Then the Lord puts out the thought in His mind, “I am the way, the truth, and the life; no man cometh unto the Father but by me;” not Himself, as the expression of the Father—that comes afterward—but the way to the Father. Think of his having come into the world, knowing there was no separation between Him and the Father, that He was dwelling in Him; every word He spoke the expression of His Father’s heart, and every work He wrought, He wrought it by power committed to Him as the servant by the Father. He was continually calling attention to the fact that He was not working out His own will, but that through grace He had taken the place of dependence. In the eleventh chapter, at the tomb of Lazarus when giving thanks, in all He brings His Father in, and asks His Father to display Himself through Him, He just takes completely the place of being the exponent of the Father, whose work was to show by words and deeds, as well as by person, the Father whom He had come to declare. Philip says, “Show us the Father, and it sufficeth us.” I often think, in reading these portions in connection with the seventeenth chapter, where the blessed Lord gives His servants such a character for having received the words, how could they be on one side and He on the other? They spoke according to their intelligence, He according to the Spirit; their understandings were unprofitable. There is such a difference whether I can bow to the word. Take any word you please, can you bow to it in simplicity? Take such a word as, “He that heareth my word, and believeth in him that sent me, hath everlasting life, and shall not come into condemnation, but is passed from death unto life.” What does faith say simply? He knows all about eternal life, and He says, I have it. What a blessed person I am! Sense and unbelief say, I do not feel it. How can these things be? Faith says, He is master of the subject; every word He speaks is sure and steadfast. He says, “Is passed from death unto life.” What would faith have done here on the part of Thomas and Philip? Not have bandied words with Him surely—something than intelligence could lay hold of—but have found a fund of blessedness, in that he who saw Him saw the Father. They would have said, Well, I have more to learn on that than I apprehended. I should not have shut the Lord up in a corner as I did. The Lord answers in gentle patience, “Have I been so long time with you, and yet hast thou not known me, Philip? He that hath seen me hath seen the Father; and how sayest thou, Show us the Father”?
What was it to the heart of the Lord to see the blindness and unbelief of their hearts, and their unwillingness to take a word unless they could gauge and measure it? What did He not feel at their calling in question the wonderful union between Himself and His Father that was so dear to His heart, and of such value to the work He had come to do? He seemed as it were hurt at their touching upon a thought on which His heart was so sensitive.
Could they trace the hypostatic union between Him and the Father and the Holy Ghost? Why, I cannot trace the relationship between body, soul, and spirit, in myself; am I surprised, then, that I cannot understand the union of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost? I am no judge of Godhead surely. I am a creature. I cannot rise in judgment as to the relationship between them. Do I disbelieve it? Most certainly not. I receive it in all simplicity of heart, not understanding it, not able to measure it, but it gives such rest to the heart, making room for understanding redemption and all the plans of the Father.
Just where the creature failed He sent in the Son of His love, as “seed of the woman,” to take up conflict with the power of darkness, till He had brought in the new heavens and the new earth, wherein dwelleth righteousness.
With regard to every question which touches our own souls, it is that relationship which I cannot trace, which gives full rest to the heart. In connection with adoption, righteousness, &c.; and it is just this perfect, unhindered fellowship with His thoughts that gives my heart full and simple rest, when I receive that on the testimony of God. Unless I could rise higher than God I cannot form a judgment as to God’s being. What do I think of a Being who never bad a beginning? It is beyond the human mind. It is because I have lived so many years that I can understand living forever; but He never had a beginning. I am a creature, and my capacity as a creature is checked to what a creature can know.
Let me call attention to what is so beautiful in the way the character comes out. How did the Lord reveal the Father? He became the One that drew forth all that He wanted your hearts to know about the Father, all that enables you to feel that when the door of the Father’s house is shut behind you, you will be no stranger to His presence—no stranger to Himself—no stranger to Himself! You must study the Lord Jesus Christ in His character if you are to have scriptural warrant for saying that you know the Father.
People that do not know about the Father, their knowledge does not go beyond “As an (earthly) father pitieth his children, so the Lord pitieth them that fear him.” To be sure He does. He follows every child through all the predicaments through which he may pass. Any of us would pick up a child who had fallen into the gutter and put it on its feet again. Is that all we knew about the Father? What is the word that answers to the Father of the only-begotten Son? A perfect transcript of Himself. In the seventeenth of John I have a great deal about it. There I have the skilled way in which the Son knew all His Father’s thoughts. I learn there something about the Father. When I turn to Him here I find the same thing. He hears my prayer, sends the loaf to the poor and needy; but that is not the expression of the heart of the Father of the Lord Jesus Christ and our Father. Just turn to the fourth chapter of this Gospel with me. He finds a poor, lonely, sinful woman, and sits down beside her to talk to her, and shows how He hungered after the souls of sinners, and how He thirsted—not for a draft of water—He was thirsty to get the soul under the power of the grace He had brought. He knew He could succeed in bringing to her heart this grace, so that she should become a worshipper in Spirit and in truth. He is able to tell her, “My Father seeks these worshippers.” He was showing her that He had one mind with the Father. He goes on patiently, letting her show out her stupidity, folly, and darkness, until we find her as it were saying, You may go away, for Messiah cometh. He said, “I that speak with thee am he.” Then her heart gets open, and she goes away with one thought in harmony with the Father in heaven about His Son. I see what you are after, you are looking after poor Samaritans; now can serve you. “Come see a man that told me all that ever I did.” Her whole heart has gone after Him who wants poor Samaritans to know the Father. Grace does its work with them, and they correct her. She had said, “A man that told me all that ever I did.” No, they say, it is the “Saviour of the world.”
Thus we see all the ways of His character; we see Him and learn of Him, and can say, Like Father like Son. If He that sat on the well revealed the Father in heaven, when I come to the house of the Father I shall find I know His character thoroughly from studying the character of the Son down here. O how the grace and mercy of the Father’s heart are presented in the words that dropped from Him in His course down here! Whether breaking the bread, or healing the sick—any of these things that commend the message. He does them as the servant connected with the Father, not to be seen in the abundance of bread that He gives for their perishing bodies, but what the Father sent from heaven to them.
Just two things in connection with the place He has now. He says, Whatsoever ye ask in My name I will do, when I am gone on high. Bring all your wants, and bring them with boldness, you will find I am there, ready to give the answer, and give it in order that the Father may be glorified in Me.
“I will pray the Father, and He shall give you another Paraclete.” It was quite an understood thing, that instead of being on earth trying to reconcile the world to God, He had taken the place of sin-bearer on the cross, to reconcile the heart estranged from God—gathering to Him not twelve or seventy disciples, but all His people, to the right hand of the Father on high. Change the word Comforter to Paraclete; the former is much too narrow. When He was here He charged Himself with all the responsibilities of His company, and really was their guardian. He rebuked them, fed them, watched over them. He charged Himself with all the responsibility that He had taken. Now He takes the place of Paraclete. “If any man sin, we have the Paraclete on high”—Advocate, I am sure; but more—He bears the responsibilities of those who are here. He is there as bearing our responsibilities before God. He is in absolute power for the people, able to meet every exigence. Christ there, the Holy Ghost is here. He says, I will send another Paraclete. The world would not know Me; it cannot recognize Him. You recognize Him. He is in you. If that is true of the person of the Lord, what is my connection with Him? It is of that character that should make me search how far I am intimate with it. The Lord Himself is in heaven; the Holy Ghost dwelling as the Spirit of truth in you, and connecting you with that Son, so that we are able to joy and rejoice in the unceasing love He is ever pouring down on Him. It ought to be a searching thing at the present time the character of our relationship with the Lord in heaven, and we one with Him.
Then He goes on in connection with life just the same thing, a character of intimacy which could not be higher. “Because I live, ye shall live also.” The world cannot understand that about the child of God. The run-a-gate sheep could not escape the Good Shepherd, when He went after it. The child who has the Spirit, and knows himself vitally one with Christ, how can you avoid it? Friends down here we know, when faithful to us in distress. How often does the Lord speak to you words not addressed to sense? I am bold to say speak. Sometimes words of Scripture are ready to start out from the page in substantive reality, so that you say-That, in the verse, I never saw it before! It is by the Holy Ghost that the word is made effectual. “Because I live ye shall live also.” In what sense? I remember the time—many of you do too—when one single thought that was correct about God you cannot recall as having had. You thought Him one that would catch you some day at unawares, and then it would be all up with you! Not one correct thought about Him whom you now know as One who looks in mercy on a world that had turned its back on Him—One who said, My son will go down, and I will bless the sinner in fellowship with Him. Such a thought never crossed your mind, until spiritual sight was given you.. Oh, think of the moment with Israel dancing at the bottom of the hill round a calf, and God saying, “I will have mercy,” at the top! Now I know He is altogether another to what I thought.
“At that day ye shall know,” Sze., (v. 20). We often say, you will never get peace till you see Christ where He is—the One that was crucified, and was buried. The Lord says, “Ye shall know that I am in my Father,” on the throne, in the bosom of the Father, in His divine glory more than divine glory—His relationship stands confessed. We have often to learn the relationship by the place. He tried how far the Father’s house would make us familiar with Him. Many a heart never got a thought as to the identity between the Father and the Son. He has taken His seat on the Father’s throne.
It is more than a blessing put into one’s hand. He is in the Father. “ I am in my Father, and ye in me, and I in you.” Ye in me All, let me ask, Do you abide in Him? Do you know the thoughts of the Father to you resting on that Son, and on you in Him? He has graced us in the Beloved. What manner of love is that? Do you know it? As the expression of the unhindered love came down on Him in the world, so surely does His unhindered love come down on us, seen by the Father in Him. It reaches you as that which the Son is worthy of. I want, not knowledge, but the practical abiding in Him, to say, I do not know myself save as being in Him! If you and I see how far we are skilled in the enjoyment of it, we shall find how little of what is heavenly is practically ours. It must be ours really, for He is there, in the Father, and we in Him; and we must know it is ours, because His Spirit is in us.
Pick out the most remarkable Christian you can find, do not blind your eyes, and you will see in them weakness and poverty; not as to finding fault with it, but you will see it, and see how grace triumphs over all. All the love of the Father to the Son of His love comes down on that man who is in the Son and the Spirit of the Son in Him. Is not that Abba’s love? Is not that different from—If we want bread He will give it to us? All providences show His gracious love, to be sure; but we want to know Abba’s love.
You and I never saw Abba’s house—but we know Abba’s heart. I have Abba’s heart, and I enjoy it. Am I walking worthy of it—passing through this evil world, on the road to Abba’s house, because the Spirit of His son dwells in me?
O that we may be wholly and undividedly devoted to Him that made us thus His own!