BUT there is more than life, blessed as it is, living because Christ lives, Himself their life, not as Son simply but as risen and gone to heaven. The Spirit is power to see and know, in contrast with flesh and world. And here He is supposed to be given, known, abiding with them and in them. A most solemn thing is His power, where Christ is not the life: unspeakably blessed, where we live of His life.
“In that day ye shall know that I [am] in my Father, and ye in me, and I in you.” (Ver. 20.) It is not here simply the glory of His person as in verses 10, 11. This was true and an object of faith then. “Believed thou not,” said the Lord to Philip, “that I [am] in the Father and the Father is in me?” Words and works both attested it. “Believe me,” He said to all, “that I [am] in the Father and the Father in me.” His being man in no way hindered or lowered His dignity, nor His essential oneness with the Father; and it was and is of all moment to believers unwaveringly to hold it and adoringly. The Son is God, even as the Father. But now more was to be, and to be known, impossible without His personal glory, but dependent on His work and the gift of the Spirit. This we have now, for that day is come. It is not the future glory, but present grace putting us in the closest vital association with Him who has gone into heavenly glory, and yet is one with us here, as we with Him there, by the Spirit given that we might know it all.
In this knowledge saints, true saints of God, are painfully dull, not merely to their privation in countless ways of the utmost moment, but to His dishonor who cannot be duly served or worshipped now but in Spirit and in truth. The day of forms and shadows is closed; the true light now shines in Christ only, of whom His saints are the responsible light-bearers as they hold forth the word of life. But there is more here, though all is bound up with Him. It is not Christ present in the world, and reigning over the land or even all the earth. He is here the despised and rejected of men, but glorified on high. “In that day ye shall know that I [am] in my Father” —a relationship and sphere incomparably more glorious than the throne of His father David. It is not only heavenly, but also expressive of infinite nearness to the Father; and this gives its character to Christianity. All its blessedness turns on who and what and where Christ is. Unbelief in saints, walking with the world and numbed by tradition, treats all as lifeless fact, not as truth which by the Spirit forms and guides the soul; unbelief in men learns fast to deny and deride even the fact. So much the more urgent call is there on those who believe by grace, to walk in the heavenly light; and the more so, as we know not only that He is in the Father, but that we are in Him and He in us, as the Lord proceeded to say.
There can scarce be conceived a more striking contrast in position and relationship than of Christ and His own as here described with the Messiah and His people, as those then present had gathered, not from the tradition of the elders, but from the ancient oracles of God. But God is sovereign, though ever wise and never arbitrary. All His ways are good and glorious, as they all turn on Christ His image and their center, the prime object before Him for heaven and earth. On earth government was and will be the aim; for heaven grace reigns, first however suffering to His glory, yet morally and infinitely superior to evil, by-and-by supreme when evil is dealt with and disappears by divine judgment. Between the humiliation of the cross and the coming again is the place of the Son as now known in the Father, as of us in Him and of Aim in us. No Old Testament saint knew or could speak thus; nor did an expectation of it even dawn on a single heart of old! No millennial saint will ever know such a relationship of Christ or of those then on earth. It is wholly and necessarily a part of what God is now intermediately working for the glory of the Lord; and as faith beholds Him in such a height of divine intimacy, so it owns the incomparable grace which has put us in Christ, and gives us to feel the grave responsibility of Christ in us. What can tell out our nearness more than such an identification of new life and nature, and this in power by the Spirit? Truly “he that is joined to the Lord is one spirit;” and the union is just so much more seal and permanent than natural oneness, as the Spirit is mightier and closer and more abiding than the flesh. But if thus one with Him and in Him by the Spirit, He is in us by the same Spirit. There is thus alike the highest privilege and the strongest obligation; and we must beware of sundering what the Lord there joins together. If we have life in the Son, we need to remind our souls that Christ lives in us, and that we are to show out Him, not ourselves. Doubtless this demands true and deep and constant self judgment, and the faith that always bears about in the body the dying of Jesus; and God helps us by trials of all sorts, that the life also of Jesus may be manifest in our mortal flesh. Thus only does Christian practice flow from Christian principle and privilege; and all is of Christ by the Holy Ghost in us. How comforting that our duty as Christians supposes our blessedness! How humbling that the gift of the Spirit makes our failure inexcusable!
But there is meanwhile, and especially connected with Christ being in us, not yet government of the earth by Christ reigning righteously and in power, but moral government of our souls in obedience, which assumes a twofold shape. “He that hath my commandments and keepeth them, he it is that loveth me; but he that loveth me shall be loved of my Father, and I will love him and will manifest myself to him.” (Ver. 21.) To the superficial mind of man it may seem strange that our Lord should speak of having His commandments, not observing them only, as a proof of loving Him; but it is profoundly true. The wicked, the disobedient, the careless do not understand, but the wise, even those whose wisdom ends not, though it begins, with the fear of the Lord. The single eye is full of light. The desire to do His will finds and knows what it is. Thus the loving heart has and keeps His commandments; and loving Him draws down His Father's love, who honors the Son and will not be exalted at His expense. Obedience springing from love is thus the condition of the disciples which ensures the love of Jesus and the manifestation of Himself to us here below.
Such a manifestation took the disciples by surprise; and one of them, Jude, carefully distinguished from the betrayer, could not but ask for explanation. “Judas, not the Iscariot, saith to him, Lord, [and] how is it that thou wilt manifest thyself to us and not to the world? Jesus answered and said to him, If any one love me, he will keep my word, and my Father will love him, and we will come unto him, and make an abode with him. He that loveth me not keepeth not my word; and the word which ye have is not mine, but the Father's that sent me.” (Vers. 21-24.) When Messiah manifests Himself to the world as He will, when the world-kingdom of our Lord and of His anointed is come, there will be a feigned obedience rendered by many kept in check by the display of His power and glory. Obedience now that He is absent must be more put to the proof, and is precious to Him as being real; and it should grow as being of life in: the Spirit, as the knowledge of His will becomes better known. Compare Col. 1:9, 109For this cause we also, since the day we heard it, do not cease to pray for you, and to desire that ye might be filled with the knowledge of his will in all wisdom and spiritual understanding; 10That ye might walk worthy of the Lord unto all pleasing, being fruitful in every good work, and increasing in the knowledge of God; (Colossians 1:9‑10). Hence it deepens from His commandments to His word. His commandments were not grievous, His word is treasured, because He Himself is loved; and so the Lord counts it; and fuller manifestation is enjoyed of the Father and the Son, and more abidingly.
It will be noticed that in verse 28 it is “My word,” not, as in the Authorized Version, “My words.” He that loves the Lord will keep His word as one whole, because it is His; as He adds in verse 24, that he who loves Him not does not keep His words, or sayings. It is not his habit or way to keep any of them in detail. Disobedience betrays absence of love for Jesus; and this is the more serious, because it is not simply the Son who is in question, but the Father that sent Him, whose word is slighted. There is nothing so characteristic of a saint now as obedience. It was so perfectly with our Lord Himself. He came to do the will of God; He did, and suffered it to the uttermost. Thus only is God known growingly by His children, and most intimately as the Lord here declares. We must know Him to do His will, which can only be through knowing Jesus Christ whom He sent; but keeping His word, (as the expression not of His authority alone, though this is dear to us from the first, but of His will,) we grow by the knowledge of God, and this indefinitely while here below, though ever in unsparing judgment of ourselves, and in confiding dependence on Him. And how cheering to the heart the abiding sense of the presence of the Father and the Son with us as thus walking! Would that we knew it better! A manifestation is much, an abode is more.