In this interval, and while the Holy Ghost is dwelling with us, chapter 15 shows the Vine and its branches, with the clusters of fruit whereby the Father is glorified. The producing powers are in the two preceding chapters which have mainly occupied us; and plants of such planting, branches in such a vine, cannot but yield fruit of the quality which is to the eye and heart of the husbandman. Indeed this chapter of responsibility naturally follows the others which declare our portion with the Son in the Father's habitation, and stands in relation to us as the Book of Deuteronomy did to Israel and their Exodus—a book which, though given by Moses on this side Jordan, has much to do with the other side, when the people had come into the land and had crossed over, to whom he taught the manners and customs and behavior that suited the nation, when in the midst of idolatrous countries that knew not the God of Israel, as His people were called out to know and to obey Him. This John 15 is really a continuation of that same love which, having carried His own upward, when Jesus departed out of this world, desires to associate us with Himself as the true Vine on the earth, and that we may have part with Him in bringing forth fruit whereby His Father may be glorified, down here in the place of true discipleship. What can be plainer or more inviting than the ground He states? “As the Father hath loved me, so have I loved you: continue ye in my love. If ye keep my commandments, ye shall abide in my love; even as I have kept my Father's commandments, and abide in his love.” The Lord only knows one path for Himself as for us, and with the same result to both. “These things have I spoken unto you, that my joy might remain in you, and that your joy might be full.” Part, and place, and position, with Him everywhere and in everything, in heaven and on earth, are His only rule towards us, and He has planted us with Himself in life and blessing above, where He is gone, that we may bring forth fruit below, where He is not!
Again, in chapter 16 He spake of His absence to them: “A little while and ye shall not see me; and again a little while and ye shall see me, because I go to the Father.” But this little while was as much a parable to them as when He spoke in chapter 14 and said, “I am the way, the truth, and the life,” by whom they could alone come to the Father. Indeed Jesus Himself said, “These things have I spoken to you in proverbs, but the time cometh when I shall no more speak to you in proverbs, but I shall show you plainly of the Father.” What a time was this for the disciples! The Father revealed, but not known; the Holy Ghost not yet given, because the Son of man was not yet glorified; and the Lord whom they had known and loved and who loved them, separated from them first by His death, and then by resurrection from the dead. “Sorrow had filled their hearts.” Was this what He had chosen them for? Was it for this they had left all and followed Him? to be carried outside the fold of Israel and left homeless in a world which was about to cast Him out, and in which they would be houseless and fatherless, orphans and without a hope! They said, therefore, “What is this that he saith, A little while? We cannot tell what he saith.” Jesus knew they were desirous to ask Him, and said, “Verily, verily, I say unto you, that ye shall weep and lament, but the world shall rejoice: and ye shall be sorrowful, but your sorrow shall be turned into joy.” But all this was a darkening parable to their minds, till the womb of death gave forth the dawn of the third day. They would then rejoice “that a man was born into the world” by resurrection, and remember no more the anguish. Ye now therefore have sorrow, “but I will see you again, and your heart shall rejoice, and your joy no man taketh from you, and in that day ye shall ask me nothing.” This day-time, bright with their risen Lord, chased away the shadows, and turned their night into day. In “that day ye shall ask in my name: and I say not unto you, that I will pray the Father for you for the Father himself loveth you, because ye have loved me, and have believed that I came out from God.” He now reveals Himself to them, in the light of His own personal glory, a light inscrutable to the natural mind and in language unintelligible to the human understanding, but nevertheless received and held by the simplest faith, in the confidence of a love which does not doubt Him, in word or deed. “I came forth from the Father, and am come into the world: again I leave the world, and go to the Father. His disciples said unto him, Lo, now speakest thou plainly, and speakest no proverb. Now are we sure that thou knowest all things, and needest not that any man should ask thee,” &c.
It seems at first sight disappointing, when their thoughts are at rest about Him and themselves, and just beginning to embrace Him in the light of that day of resurrection which was to follow this night of sorrow, to be thrown into yet deeper darkness and distress by their own failure. Hitherto He had spoken of His leaving them but now He says “the hour cometh, yea, is now come that ye shall be scattered every man to his own, and shall leave me alone, and yet I am not alone, because the Father is with me.” It is this unchanging and unbroken link which is now to be manifested and to take the place of every other, for all else had gone or were about to give way, and “leave him alone.” In view of this, and to take their own thoughts away from themselves, He said, “These things have I spoken unto you, that in me ye might have peace.” This is what He was to them; and they would prove all creature-cisterns to be just what they were to Him. If they could receive it, the associations which He had formed for them with Himself and His Father were of such a nature as to have completely changed their relations to all former things, and even to the world itself. “In the world ye shall have tribulation; but be of good cheer, I have overcome the world;” and is with Himself and upon His own ground of victory and triumph that He puts them, that His own may have part with Him everywhere and in everything. His work is complete, His path trodden, the next step is before Him, and the very last: and having to do with Him who sees the end from the beginning, and who calls things that are not as though they were, He passes into His own solitudes with His Father.
The wonderful chapter 17 opens this intercourse to us, and lets us in where angels' feet had never stood. It is as the overcomer of the world, that He enters it, and “lifted up his eyes to heaven, And said, Father, glorify thy Son, that thy Son also may glorify thee.” He holds His place too, as “the glorifier of the Father upon the earth,” and the finisher of “the work that was given him to do.” Power had also been given him over all flesh, that he should give eternal life to as many as had been given him; “and this is life eternal that they might know thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom thou hast sent.” It is such an One, in righteousness upon the earth, and in righteous title as the fulfiller of all that had been entrusted to Him, who can lay claim to His own essential glory; “and now, O Father, glorify thou me with thine own self, with the glory which I had with thee before the world was.” God hears man upon the earth speaking these words: righteousness is with this Second man, and joined with perfect obedience, so that God can come back again into the habitable parts of the world and begin His delight with the sons of men. “The glory which thou hast given me, I have given them, that they may be one, even as we are one.”
The Word made flesh has prepared this earth for God by redemption, and God has found a place for the Son of man in heaven by resurrection; nor have these changes, mighty as they are, either shut us out, or left us orphans; for Jesus said, “I go to prepare a place for you; and if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again, and receive you unto myself; that where I am, there ye may be also.” Blessed portion, one with the departed where He now is, in the unseen but well-known fellowship with the Father; sealed by the Spirit of adoption—part with the coming One, in all the glory of which this unparalleled chapter witnesses. “That the world may know that thou hast sent me, and hast loved them, as thou hast loved me.” Nor is this blessedness known only as the fruit to us of accomplished redemption while unmanifested to the world, nor of glory and power by resurrection to the Son of man, who is to be manifested in the glory of the Father, and in His own glory, and the glory of the holy angels, when He sits upon the throne of His glory; but witnessed as perfectly before God, when in the veiled perfection of His incarnation. “Being in the form of God, he thought it not robbery to be equal with God: but made himself of no reputation, and took upon him the form of a servant, and was made in the likeness of men: and being found in fashion as a man, he humbled himself, and became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross.” As the anti-type of the Hebrew servant, who loved his master, and his wife, and his children, and would not go out free; faithful to Him that appointed Him, with the ear bored, or the ear digged, as in the Psalms; as the ear opened, morning by morning as in the Prophet Isaiah; till, passing all that the type could betoken, He gave His back to the smiters, and His cheeks to them that plucked off the hair, and hid not His face from shame and spitting; “Made sin for us, who knew no sin, that we might be made the righteousness of God in him.” He was wounded for our transgressions, He was bruised for our iniquities; the chastisement of our peace was upon Him, and with His stripes we are healed; and He made His grave with the wicked, and with the rich in His death, because He had done no violence, neither was any deceit in His mouth. By such steps as these has God been glorified by the Son of man. Finally, by the perfectness of His loving obedience unto death, He brought back the righteousness of God in company with Himself into the same descending path in which lay our deliverance; till at the grave's mouth the glory waited on Him who lay there to vindicate and claim Him on the third day by taking Him up, “Raised from the dead by the glory of the Father.” The Second man began another history, as seated in the heavens, after that God had been first brought back into the earth, through the intrinsic righteousness of the righteous One, on whom the Spirit of God rested in the form of a dove, and who was anointed by the Holy Ghost. The heavens were first drawn aside as a curtain to look down upon this Man whom they have since received, and who now sits there on the right hand of God.
John 18; 19 give us in fact and in detail what we have been considering in full accomplishment. Led as a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep before His shearers, dumb, so He opened not His mouth. Judas, who dipped his hand with his master in the dish, betrayed Him with a kiss. Caiaphas the high priest condemned Him, and Caesar crucified Him. Collective and concentrated human enmity, instigated by Satan, got their vent on the person of the Lord, and found their complete outlet at the cross where He was hung—nailed to the accursed tree by wicked hands.
The descent of the Holy Ghost as the glorifier of Christ, the teaching of the apostles in the various Epistles, and our own anointing and unction from the Holy One, have made this Gospel (and especially the part which is so peculiarly characteristic of this present period since the departure of Jesus) plain and intelligible to us who have part and place with Him where He is. It is on this account perhaps that we are so little able to understand, much less to enter into, the difficulties and disappointments that filled the disciples' hearts.
Trouble and fear took possession of them at the announcement of Jesus “departing out of this world to the Father,” as we have seen; but an additional fact or two may serve to make their dilemma plain and intelligible to us who were never in it. The example of Mary in chapter 20 shows the bewilderment of mind in which she stood at the sepulcher weeping, and said to the angels, “they have taken away my Lord, and I know not where they have laid him.” What was she for the moment, but a disappointed, homeless, forlorn woman, in truth an orphan in her destitution? But He who said to them, “I will not leave you comfortless [orphans]; I will come to you,” appeared to her, though she supposed Him to be the gardener, and knew not that it was Jesus.
As the risen One, alive again from the dead, He made Himself known to her, first of all, and then bade her, go tell my brethren, “I ascend unto my Father, and your Father; and to my God and your God.” He has made true His own promise by coming to Mary, and thus He put them into relationship with Himself in life and union, and as sons with the Father in heaven. Moreover “He breathed on them and said, Receive ye the Holy Ghost” bringing them thus into closer association with Himself in the power of life, as the risen man, the Son of God, and Lord.
The two disciples on their road to Emmaus who talked together, not of His decease or burial but of the empty sepulcher, were in the same perplexity and sorrow as to their Lord as was Mary when she found Him not. The narrative in Luke shows their disappointment and how to their own thoughts they were cast upon the world, friendless and fatherless, orphans in very deed. “We trusted that it had been he which should have redeemed Israel; and beside all this to-day is the third day since these things were done.” The words of the women too, who told the apostles of the empty sepulcher and of the missing body of the Lord Jesus, “seemed to them as idle tales, and they believed them not.” In fact, if Christ in resurrection was not their hope nor even upon their minds as bound up with His own testimony to them before His betrayal, what must have been their desolation? They had lost Him, and were in this sense of all men most miserable. Personally He had attached Mary to Himself in resurrection, and in this same character He joined these disciples who communed together and were sad. Mary mistook Him for the gardener, and these suppose Him to be a stranger in Israel: yea, so little had the third day brought the light of His resurrection-morn to their thoughts, that they only mention the fact to Himself as the then measure of their desertion by His death. “To-day, is the third day since these things were done.” Then He said unto them, “O fools, and slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have spoken, ought not Christ to have suffered these things, and to enter into His glory? And beginning at Moses, and all the prophets, he expounded unto them in all the scriptures, the things concerning himself.”
Thus by personal intercourse with one and another, and by opening the scriptures and opening their understandings at one time, or else by coming into their midst when the doors were shut, and saying, Peace be unto you, and showing them His hands and His side, He re-established their confidence. “Then were the disciples glad when they saw the Lord.”
But neither this redemption nor His own reappearance in their midst and intercourse for forty days had served to disconnect their minds from the world, so as to have part and portion with Him in His departure to the Father; and what the Holy Ghost would come down to bring to their remembrance or to reveal. When they were come together in Acts 1, they asked of Him, “Lord, wilt thou at this time restore again the kingdom to Israel?” And He said unto them, “It is not for you to know the times and the seasons, which the Father hath put in his own power.” Perplexity, if not disappointment, had still hold of them, and especially now that the resurrection which had just given Him back to them must be superseded by an ascension that would take Him away again where He was before. What were these hundred and twenty disciples to do, shut out from the world in an upper room where they continued in prayer and supplication; no longer any hopes of the kingdom glory, or of the nation's blessing as a present thing; shut up to the heavens in the new-born expectations of what “the promise of the Father” should mean, and “the baptism of the Holy Ghost” could be, which they had heard from their again departed Lord?
Further, He had said, “Ye shall receive power after that the Holy Ghost is come upon you; and ye shall be witnesses to me both in Jerusalem,” &c. And when He had spoken these things, while they beheld, He was taken up, and a cloud received Him out of their sight. But these were the necessary paths for Him to take, that they might pass out of their orphanage into the adoption of children by Jesus Christ to the Father, according to the good pleasure of His will. Their confidence was restored and unshaken, as they saw the cloud receive Him, and angels waiting on Him, and the heavens claiming the rejected One of the earth.
Judas and a band of soldiers had come out against Him with lanterns and torches, as against a thief—the high priest had condemned Him as a blasphemer—Pilate had crucified Him—and the grave had shut its mouth upon Him. It was this dark and dreary path downward into the lowest parts of the earth that had awakened their fears. He was in the region and shadow of death and dead! But now “they look steadfastly into heaven,” and see the risen One, the glorified Son of man by ascension, going up to God in the power of life to be crowned with glory and honor, and to be set over all the works of His hands. And behold two men stood by them in white apparel, which also said, Ye men of Galilee, why stand ye gazing up into heaven? this same Jesus whom ye have seen taken up from you into heaven shall so come in like manner,” &c. Then returned they to Jerusalem from the mount called Olivet, “and when the day of Pentecost was fully come, there was a sound from heaven as of a rushing mighty wind, and filled all the house where they were sitting.” They are no longer forlorn or destitute. All fear of being left orphans is at an end, for there appeared to them cloven tongues, like as of fire, which sat upon each of them; and they were all filled with the Holy Ghost, and began to speak with other tongues as the Spirit gave them utterance. By this baptism of the Holy Ghost the disciples were united to the risen Lord and Head of His body, the Church, and had part and portion with Him in all that the Father hath made Him to be and put into his hands. We are heirs of God, and joint-heirs with Jesus Christ. “All things are yours,” the world, or life, or death, or things present, or things to come, all things are yours, for ye are Christ's and Christ is God's. And whom He did foreknow, He also did predestinate to be conformed to the image of His Son, that He might be the firstborn among many brethren.
(To be continued)