John 14
It is of importance that we should note the cause of the sorrow to which the Lord Jesus addresses Himself in these precious words for the comfort of the troubled ones; for, as I am persuaded, they will lose their deepest significance and blessing for any who have not known as their own the sorrow that is the occasion of them. For it is no ordinary sorrow that is here, such as abounds for every child of God in his path through this evil world. It is not any and every sorrow that here finds itself in the presence of the Lord for sympathy, whose heart has still upon the throne of God its kindred throb for every throb of ours, and comfort too to the full; but it is the very special sorrow of any who know Jesus well enough to miss Him in a scene out of which He has been cast by the unanimous consent of man. Brighter and more blessed things, it is true, have resulted to us from the cross of Christ, in the wondrous grace of God, that could make this culminating point of man's hatred the moment and place of the brightest display of that grace. But this does not lessen the guilt of the world in putting Him there, nor the sense of His rejection by it in our hearts as we pass through it. And so it is that Paul can say, By "the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by whom the world is crucified unto me, and I unto the world."
Beloved, let us put it to our hearts—Do we miss Him? We have known His work for salvation, but have we gone on to know Himself for love? Has His work, with all its known results in our blessing, served in any feeble measure to attach us to Him who has accomplished it, do we not miss Him in this world? Impossible that it should not be so! For us, as for Mary, if He is gone, then all is gone that was of any value for our hearts here; and henceforth, in all this world's scene, there is a blank that nothing can fill. The world is stained with the blood of our murdered Lord; His cross blights it in our eyes; our hearts can never dissociate the world from His cross that judged it, and we only live to show forth His death in it, while, as strangers and pilgrims, we pass on to our home above. Beloved, do our hearts know enough of Jesus to be desolate in a place where He is not? Ah, then, we know the disciples' sorrow, and to us as well as them belongs the comfort of the words of Jesus.
And see how He counts upon the disciples' love and consequent sorrow; for He has no sooner broken it to them in gentle words, that only "yet a little while" He can be with them, than He adds, "Let not your heart be troubled." Precious fruit of His own love that, wherever it is known, detaches hearts from the world without Him, by attaching them to Himself. Yes; He whom they had known and loved and followed on earth, in such precious intimacy, was about to return to the Father; and they would now no longer know Him after the flesh. Yet He was only going to take the same place as the unseen God, where He would still be known by faith, and in all the deeper revelations of the glory of His Person that would result from that place. So that He will even prove that it is expedient for them that He go away: "Ye believe in God, believe also in Me." And as we shall see, these deeper revelations of Himself will form the very staple of the comfort ministered to us in His words. Where else could comfort be found for hearts that have known Him ever so feebly? All joy is treasured up for us in the knowledge of Christ. There can be no different joy, but only deeper measures of the same joy; and this is just what He brings us into by going away.
But will He enter alone into His joy, and leave us in our wilderness desolation? No; He only goes to prepare a place for us there too, and to wait for the moment when He can come and fetch us into it. Beloved, He speaks to us of home; and if you say it is of His home, I answer, Not more His than yours with Him now; for He has never left us until He has accomplished a work in the world on the ground of which He has introduced us into the very same relationship that He Himself stands in to God. "Go to My brethren," says He, from the mouth of His open and empty grave, "and say unto them, I ascend unto My Father, and your Father; and to My God, and your God." Henceforth, His Father is our Father—His God, our God—His home, our home.
But observe well where it is He gives us our home—"In My Father's house." Oh, beloved, have our hearts entered into the blessedness of this? The Jewish hopes of the disciples were filled with the displayed glory of the kingdom, as was natural, from prophecy; but the time for that display, depending as it did upon the presence of the Messiah, was not come yet, as was evident from Jesus' words, "Yet a little while I am with you." And when all seemed lost to their disappointed expectations in His going away, He unfolds to their faith what prophecy never thought of—the Father's house—and gives them and us our home there, in a love that is beyond all the glory, for the glory can be displayed—the love, never. What rich comfort for our hearts, troubled in this world at the absence of Jesus!
But there is more; and more there must be to meet the necessities of those to whom, by these very revelations, Jesus is becoming more precious every day. Is this separation to last forever? No; He could not bear it any more than we. And, coupled with the home presented to our faith to enjoy,
He gives us just what He knows hearts that truly love Him could not do without—the promise, "I will come again, and receive you unto Myself"; precious hope for us, beloved, till hope shall be lost in the consummation of it, and we shall see Him face to face. Nor is it only that we shall all be with Him; for "to be absent from the body" is "to be present with the Lord," and thus in death we go to Him (but this is not His coming for us). His word is, "I will come again, and receive you unto Myself," and the promise is as sure today for our hearts as when first He gave it to us. Beloved brethren, is the coming of our Lord more than a doctrine among us? Is it a deep spring of joy even in hope? Is it a living power in our souls? But the promise goes on, "that where I am, there ye may be also"; and this tells us that the necessity of our hearts is His own; that, not for our joy only, but for His, we must be where He is. And, beloved, that is the heaven of the Christian's hope. Man's imagination has a heaven of its own, well suited to it, no doubt, but not the least suited to the desires of Christ for us. Scripture has but little about heaven, for all desire, all joy, all hope, is summed lip for any who know Jesus ever so feebly, in that "where / am" of His. His presence is the very heaven of heaven to us.