Bible Commentaries
John 16

Verse 7

An Expedient Departure

Nevertheless I tell you the truth; It is expedient for you that I go away: for if I go not away, the Comforter will not come unto you; but if I go, I will send him unto you.— John 16:7.

One of the most distinctive things in the story of Christ’s earthly ministry is the perfect calmness which He manifested in regard to the future course and fate of the disciples He had gathered round Him and of the work He had begun. He has a clear gaze forward: no weight of disappointment for His own career cut short is permitted to dull His apprehension of what lies beyond the time of His departure: no overwhelming heaviness or consuming fever of regret possesses Him so strongly as to cloud His vision of what would happen when the Cross had brought His earthly labours to a close; and His thought leaps over Calvary’s torture and the sepulchre’s darkness to the wondrous processes of spiritual development which would begin with His death.

So untroubled are the clear depths of Christ’s soul, so unruffled is His sacred quietude—even here as He is almost entering upon the last experience of pain and lifting the cup of bitterness to His lips—that He can discern the actual relation between His departure from His disciples and the future Divine visitations which His disciples would know; and He can see that for their perfecting in grace it is expedient that He should go away. Truly, this was the Son of God; for man’s thought grows feeble and his face grows pale and his heart beats so loudly as to drown all whispers of hope, when he stands before the great crisis of his life: only to the Christ was it given to preserve the perfect serenity of His soul when the supreme moment came and the last dark shadows stretched themselves across His way.

1. “I tell you the truth.”—One does not wonder that our Lord should feel it needful, for the second time, to assure His bewildered and astounded disciples that He is telling them the simple truth. He had told them of the many mansions of the Father’s house, that He might still the trouble of their hearts at His departure. “If it were not so, I would have told you.” They would feel the force of His appeal to what they knew of His veracity, exactness, and love. And now again: “I tell you the truth. Notwithstanding the sorrow with which My going away has filled your hearts, it is better for you that I should go”—an assertion more difficult to believe than even that about the many mansions.

2. “It is expedient for you that I go away.”—Is not the expression used by the Lord something stronger than we should venture to use if we had not His own authority for it? Literally, “It is profitable for you.” There is no ambiguity in the word. It is found several times in the Gospels, and always with the same meaning. “It is expedient for thee that one of thy members should perish, and not thy whole body be cast into hell.” “If the case is so, … it is not expedient to marry.” “Whoso shall cause a little one to stumble, it is expedient for him that he should be drowned in the sea.” “It is expedient for you that one man should die for the people.” Of two possible alternatives, that one is preferable which is introduced by the word, “it is expedient.” And in the phrase before us, the two alternatives are the departure and the visible presence of the Lord. “It is expedient for you that I go away.” It is better for you that I should go and send the Comforter than that I should stay with you in closest earthly fellowship for ever. Better for the world that Jesus should be removed from the eyes of men than that He should lead them to Himself by the magic of His words and the wonder of His works!

Why did Jesus go away? We all remember a time when we could not answer that question. We wished He had stayed, and had been here now. The children’s hymn expresses a real human feeling, and our hearts burn still as we read it:—

I think, when I read that sweet story of old,

When Jesus was here among men,

How He called little children as lambs to His fold

I should like to have been with them then;

I wish that His hands had been placed on my head,

That His arms had been thrown around me,

And that I might have seen His kind look when He said,

“Let the little ones come unto Me.”

Jesus must have had reasons for disappointing a human feeling so deep, so universal, and so sacred. We may be sure, too, that these reasons intimately concern us. He did not go away because He was tired. It was quite true that He was despised and rejected of men; it was quite true that the pitiless world hated and spurned and trod on Him. But that did not drive Him away. It was quite true that He longed for His Father’s house and pined and yearned for His love. But that did not draw Him away. No. He never thought of Himself. It is expedient for you, He says, not for Me, that I go. 1 [Note: H. Drummond, The Ideal Life, 63.]

I

The Departure of Jesus

Christ has to recall His disciples from the contemplation of their own impending loss to the great gift which should follow upon that “going” which they deplored, but which they so little understood. He had shielded them hitherto, and the thought that that shelter was to be removed filled their hearts with sorrow. So full were they of their loss that no one asked how this departure affected Him, and thus they were in danger of missing the abiding significance of His departure for themselves. There are three words for “going away” used over and over again in these chapters, and there is a fruitful study to be found in the changes rung on these “bells of sweet accord.” Let it suffice to say that departure from the point of view of mere separation passes into the idea of a journey, and thence into that of a goal to be reached, a “going home.”

1. It was that parting hour of mysterious thoughts, of agonized affections, which is sometimes experienced when we are sure that death stands at the door and waits; when but a few minutes are given for parting words and loving reciprocations. Only, their Master was in the fulness of life and health. But for this mysterious assurance they could not have thought of His death. He reiterated it in their incredulous ears, and poured out mysterious and lofty consolations—greater thoughts, more spiritual sanctities, more loving sympathies than had ever fallen from His lips before. They were awed and perplexed as well as sorrowful.

2. Then His departure was the disappointment of their greatest hopes. Upon their Jewish standing-ground all their hopes of His Messianic Kingdom were frustrated—they “trusted that it had been he who should have redeemed Israel”; and now He tells them that, instead of sitting upon the throne of His father David, He is about to die. Not only were they losing more than affection ever lost before, but the fabric of their most cherished hopes lay in ruins at their feet. And it seems to have produced in them a stupor of feeling almost approaching to paralysis. “Does none of you even ask Me whither I go? Hath sorrow so entirely filled your heart because I have spoken these things? Nevertheless, I tell you the truth. Whatever sorrow My going away may cause you, it will be to you a transcendent blessing. If I go not away, the Comforter will not come to you, but if I depart I will send Him unto you; and when He is come He will work mightily in men, convincing them of sin, of righteousness, and of judgment. You cannot understand now the things that I have to say to you concerning this great mission of the Holy Spirit. I can only assure you of its truth and greatness and blessing. It will be to you more than even My personal presence with you.”

3. Why, then, was it expedient for them that He should go away?

(1) Absence is better than presence under certain conditions.—The influence of the absent is not only sometimes stronger in its degree, it is always purer in its kind, than the influence exerted by presence. Sometimes, dimly, we have been conscious of the truth enshrined in these words. We have recognized the fact that the influence of absence leaves its spirit; and the more we think why we are here, the more we understand it. We are made to be tried, proved, tested, and the conditions of our trial are, or seem to be, whether we will do what is right when we are left to ourselves.

When was it that this or that man began to be so increasingly enterprising and energetic, to take a higher range, to produce his best, to be so wonderfully useful? When, perhaps, the outward support, the soothing praise, the popularity he had enjoyed, ceased to be his; when this and that pleasant prop upon which he had rested was removed. How it set free and drew out the forces latent in him, and made him thenceforth the braver, better, more efficient workman that he was capable of being! Many are the instances—more than we know, doubtless—in which greater and higher achieving, or beautiful developments of character and gift, have been largely due to some painful loss. Not seldom has such loss helped to promote superior performance, to give us noble labours and famous accomplishings with which otherwise the world might never have been blessed. And all that we want often, in order to our becoming more useful or more successful, in order to our attaining the heights that remain afar off, and that we vainly wish we could reach—all that we want often, is not that something should be added to us which we have not, but that we should just lose something. While we are crying fretfully, “Oh that such and such things were mine of which others are possessed! then would I conquer and do grandly,” the hindrance is not in what is withheld from us, but in what cleaves to us—in some little indulged weakness, in some infirmity or false habit of ours, simply to get rid of which would be our transformation into new creatures; would leave us armed and equipped for speedy triumph. Have we not known men concerning whom we have thought, What might they not be and do, if only they could lose a little, here and there?

As the wind extinguishes a taper but kindles the fire, so absence is the death of an ordinary passion, but lends strength to the greater. 1 [Note: Maxims of La Rochefoucauld, 54.]

Even the holiest influences may deaden spiritual activity. St. Paul himself finds it necessary to detach himself, and though he had known Christ after the flesh, henceforth to know Him so no more. So for those disciples it was worth while to lose Jesus, if they might find for themselves the way into that spiritual world in which they had seen Him moving. For He did not come to be adored by men who could never reach His secret. It was His will that those who had been given Him should be with Him where He was. 1 [Note: J. Kelman, Ephemera Eternitatis, 140.]

(2) But Jesus would be with them still, though not in bodily form.—If we would feel the full force and singularity of this saying of our Lord’s, let us put side by side with it that other one, “I have a desire to depart and to be with Christ, which is far better. Nevertheless, to abide in the flesh is more needful for you.” Why is it that the Apostle says, “Though I want to go, I am bound to stay”? and why is it that the Master says, “It is for your good that I am going,” but because of the essential difference in the relation of the two to the people who are to be left, and in the continuance of the work of the two after they had departed? St. Paul knew that when he went, whatever befell those whom he loved and would fain help, he could not stretch a hand to do anything for them. He knew that death dropped the portcullis between him and them, and, whatever their sore need on the one side of the iron gate, he on the other could not succour or save. Jesus Christ said, “It is better for you that I should go,” because He knew that all His influences would flow through the grated door unchecked, and that, departed, He would still be the life of them that trusted in Him; and, having left them, would come near them by the very act of leaving them.

When Christ went up to Heaven the Apostles stayed

Gazing at Heaven with souls and wills on fire,

Their hearts on flight along the track He made,

Winged by desire.

Their silence spake: “Lord, why not follow Thee?

Home is not home without Thy Blessed Face,

Life is not life. Remember, Lord, and see,

Look back, embrace.

Earth is one desert waste of banishment,

Life is one long-drawn anguish of decay.

Where Thou wert wont to go we also went:

Why not to-day?”

Nevertheless a cloud cut off their gaze:

They tarry to build up Jerusalem,

Watching for Him, while thro’ the appointed days

He watches them.

They do His Will and doing it rejoice,

Patiently glad to spend and to be spent:

Still He speaks to them, still they hear His Voice

And are content. 1 [Note: C. G. Rossetti, Poems, 170.]

(3) He would be nearer than before.—Our first thought may perhaps be, Who can be so near Jesus now as the Apostles were during all the time that He went in and out among them? Yet these same men found themselves far nearer Him after He had gone away. In the days of His flesh He had sat with them; but after His ascension He not only seemed to hover round them, and brood over them, but He sent His Spirit to dwell within them. And thus believers now, seeing that they possess the indwelling Spirit, are really much nearer the Lord Jesus Christ than Peter and James and John were during the time from the baptism of John, unto that same day that He was taken up from them.

But God is never so far off

As even to be near;

He is within: our spirit is

The home He holds most dear.

To think of Him as by our side

Is almost as untrue

As to remove His throne beyond

Those skies of starry blue.

So all the while I thought myself

Homeless, forlorn, and weary,

Missing my joy, I walked the earth,

Myself God’s sanctuary. 2 [Note: F. W. Faber.]

(4) And He would be nearer, not to them only, but to all.—Upon Wesley’s tablet in Westminster Abbey may be read that proud word of his: “I look upon all the world as my parish.” The qualifying words have no place on the tablet: “Thus far I mean, that, in whatever part of it I am, I judge it meet, right, and my bounden duty to declare, unto all that are willing to hear, the glad tidings of salvation.” Wesley’s heart was as big as the world, but he could only be in one little corner of it at once; even there he could speak only to those that were “willing to hear.” What limitations are these! The Spirit’s parish is the world. Every corner of it, every soul in it, owns His presence, and none can fence himself off from His approach or shut up the avenues by which conviction may come home. 1 [Note: J. Telford, The Story of the Upper Room, 184.]

Suppose Jesus were still in the Holy Land, at Jerusalem. Every ship that started for the East would be crowded with Christian pilgrims. Every train flying through Europe would be thronged with people going to see Jesus. Every mail-bag would be full of letters from those in difficulty and trial, and gifts of homage to manifest men’s gratitude and love. You yourself, let us say, are in one of those ships. The port, when you arrive after the long voyage, is blocked with vessels of every flag. With much difficulty you land, and join one of the long trains starting for Jerusalem. Far as the eye can reach, the caravans move over the desert in an endless stream. You do not mind the scorching sun, the choking dust, the elbowing crowds, the burning sands. You are in the Holy Land, and you will see Jesus! Yonder, at last, in the far distance, are the glittering spires of the Holy Hill, above all the burnished Temple dome beneath which He sits. But what is that dark seething mass stretching for leagues and leagues between you and the Holy City? They have come from the north and from the south, and from the east and from the west, as you have, to look upon their Lord. They wish

That His hands might be placed on their head;

That His arms might be thrown around them.

But it cannot be. You have come to see Jesus, but you will not see Him. They have been there weeks, months, years, and have not seen Him. They are a yard or two nearer, and that is all. The thing is impossible. It is an anti-climax, an absurdity. It would be a social outrage; it would be a physical impossibility. 2 [Note: H. Drummond, The Ideal Life, 66.]

(5) But again, it was expedient that He should go away in order that they might he weaned from thoughts of earthly greatness.—For Christ in heaven is and must be infinitely greater to the soul and heart of men than even He could be, seen by us with our bodily eyes on earth, living with us, and belonging to this earthly state of things which is for the present life—infinitely greater even than if He had been with us in the glorified body which He had after His resurrection, and in which He appeared and conversed with His disciples during the forty days before He ascended. It is because His Kingdom is not of this world—it is because He came to open and draw up men’s hearts to what is infinitely above this world, and anything that ever belonged to it—it is because He came to teach, and to give them what “eye hath not seen, nor ear heard,” of the good things “which God hath prepared for them that love him”—it was for this that, having shown Himself in the world, He did not stay in it. If He had stayed in it, our thoughts would have been towards Him, as still belonging to this world. We see how difficult it was to wean the thoughts of His own disciples from hopes and expectations of earthly greatness. “Wilt thou at this time restore again the kingdom to Israel?” was their question when He had risen. How much more difficult it would have been if He had still continued with them, in human form, even though glorified! How could that lifting up of their minds to what was spiritual and eternal have been accomplished? How could they have been taught those great lessons of inner and spiritual religion, if the great Object of their faith was still visibly present with them, and as one of them? How could they have been made to feel as they did, that the Kingdom of God was within them, that man has to deal and commune with his God in the secret reality and truth of his heart and spirit—how could they have been made to unlearn all that was outward and visible in their religious thoughts, and have had the eyes of their understanding opened to eternal truths, and to a religion that was all of heaven and in heaven—if they still could find, and see, and hear on earth the form and voice of the greatest of their teachers?

Many of us must recall the parable of an Alpine sunset. We gaze on the vast bare rocks and snow-slopes transfigured in a flood of burning light. In a moment there falls over them an ashy paleness as of death, cold and chilling. While we strive to measure our loss a deepening flush spreads slowly over the mountain sides, pure and calm and tender, and we know that the glory which has passed away is not lost even when it fades again from our sight. So it is with the noblest revelations which God makes to us. They fill us at first with their splendid beauty. Then for a time we find ourselves, as it were, left desolate while we face the sadnesses of an unintelligible world. But as we gaze the truth comes back with a softer and more spiritual grace to be the spring of perpetual benediction. 1 [Note: B. F. Westcott, Lessons from Work, 110.]

(6) He went away that henceforth we may walk by faith, not by sight.—In that one word “faith” we get at the root of the whole matter. If His Presence were not unseen, if we had certainty as to action and a fixed rule with no possibility of deviation, faith would not, it could not, even exist on its higher side, for faith is realization of things hoped for and insight into things invisible; it sees what is out of sight as though it were here—it sees Him in His invisible Presence, and it brings a far greater blessing than sight: “Blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed.”

Faith is the one characteristic which raises man above the animal, above the natural—without which he cannot “please God” or be of any use to men. It sees in darkness, it believes without evidence, it is certain of the impossible, it is the highest reflection of Divine power within men. Faith as a moral faculty puts you face to face with the treasures of the universe; and where others see nothing, you see everything; where others see only bands of Syrians, you see the angels of God; where others see a blind force, you see the workings of a right loving Will, overruling all things. And you are rich for the sight; you grow, you increase, you become more and more conscious of the possibilities of your own life and of the universe, and you grow into the possibilities which you see. But without faith, you grovel through a purblind, naked, starved, diseased existence, seeing emptiness everywhere, because you are so empty; seeing darkness in every noble deed, because you are so dark; seeing all things dead or dying, because you have no life in you, with no soul for greatness in man or in the history of your race, with no enthusiasm, no stirring within you at great and enthralling sights, but dull, barren, poor, weak, and that because you have no faith, no insight, and therefore no goodness. 2 [Note: R. Eyton, The True Life, 67.]

(7) Last of all, He must go that the Spirit may come.—And the Spirit could not come until Christ was glorified. In a comment upon our Lord’s words about the fountains of “living water,” which were to spring up in those who believed on Him, St. John says: “This spake he of the Spirit, which they that believed on him were to receive: for the Spirit was not yet given; because Jesus was not yet glorified”; and this comment is but a brief and explicit statement of a truth which is wrought into the very substance of the New Testament. That a new and higher form of spiritual life has appeared in Christian times than appeared in the times before our Lord, is certain. This life is attributed to the “coming” of the Holy Spirit. Can we discover why it is that the Spirit did not—could not—come, till Christ was “glorified”?

What is meant by our Lord being “glorified”? It means infinitely more than we can know; but at least it means this, that when our Lord returned to the Father, His human nature, in all its capacities and powers, was wonderfully expanded and exalted. Even while He was on earth His human life, as it was gradually developed and as it rose, through righteousness and patient suffering, to a higher and still higher perfection, was more and more completely penetrated with the Divine life of the Eternal Word. It still remained human; but, in it and through it, that “eternal life, which was with the Father, was manifested” to men. When He returned to the Father He did not cease to be man, but it would appear that His human life was wholly transfigured by the life of the Eternal Son, who was in the beginning with God and who was God.

“It is expedient for you that I go away.” Yes! we understand Him now. It is expedient that perfect humanity should thus be associated on the Throne of Heaven with the Infinite and the Eternal. If we are to give our hearts and wills to the Author and End of our existence, if Christian worship is to be not a coldly calculated compliment, but the outcome of a pure and soul-consuming passion, it is well that on the heights of heaven there should throb to all eternity a human heart—the Sacred Heart of Jesus; and that in the adoration which we pay Him we should know that we are expending the inmost resources of our natures at the feet of the One Being who has upon them the claim, if I may dare speak thus, of relationship as well as the claim of Deity. And thus in the worship of the Church, inspired on the one hand by an awful sense of the inaccessible majesty of God, and on the other by a trustful, tender passion which has its roots in the consciousness of a human fellowship with its awful Object, we find that which we find nowhere else on earth, and understand the words, “It is expedient for you that I go away.” 1 [Note: H. P. Liddon, Sermons on Some Words of Christ, 336.]

II

The Coming of the Spirit

Christ’s going away was a provision for the future life. The absent Lord prepares a place there; the absent Object of faith educates the souls of the faithful to possess and enjoy it. But He provides for the life that now is. And His going away has to do with the present as much as with the life to come.

One day when Jesus was in Peræa, a message came to Him that a very dear friend was sick. He lived in a distant village with his two sisters. They were greatly concerned about their brother’s illness, and had sent in haste for Jesus. Now Jesus loved Mary and Martha and Lazarus their brother; but He was so situated at the time that He could not go. Perhaps He was too busy, perhaps He had other similar cases on hand; at all events, He could not go. When He went ultimately, it was too late. Hour after hour the sisters waited for Him. They could not believe He would not come; but the slow hours dragged themselves along by the dying man’s couch, and he was dead and laid in the grave before Jesus arrived. You can imagine one of His thoughts, at least, as He stands and weeps by that grave with the inconsolable sisters,—“It is expedient that I go away. I should have been present at his death-bed scene if I had been away. I will depart and send the Comforter. There will be no summons of sorrow which He will not be able to answer. He will abide with men for ever. Everywhere He will come and go. He will be like the noiseless invisible wind, blowing all over the world wheresoever He listeth.” 1 [Note: H. Drummond, The Ideal Life, 72.]

1. The Spirit comes to continue Christ’s ministry. The spiritual and distinctive ministry of the Holy Spirit follows the personal and Messianic ministry of the Christ. The gifts of the Holy Spirit are represented as conditioned upon the mediatorial work of the Christ. The Father purposes human redemption; the Son, by His atoning work, enables the righteous forgiveness of sin; and the Holy Spirit quickens spiritual life in forgiven men. The dispensation of the Father is followed by the dispensation of the Son; the dispensation of the Son by the dispensation of the Spirit.

The development of Christian experience, throughout all its changes, depends upon one unchanging personality. The Christ was to depart and the Comforter was to come, but the Comforter was to come as the messenger of the departing Christ. “If I go, I will send him unto you.” There is no real brokenness in spiritual experience, in spite of what seem to us to be variations in its intensity or gaps in its record or occasional hours in which its life has lain in trance: behind it all has been and is to-day the power of the ever-living Christ. And this is the one great fact to which we must come back for security when our faith in Divine things is like to fail because we do not always see them with the same clear sight, and because they do not always thrill us with the same sweeping currents of joy—the fact that in whatever way holy things may touch us, it is Christ who brings them near, that whether they rouse a passion of holy rapture or draw out the quieter sensibilities lying hidden in our souls, it is Christ who orders their attendance upon us; that the outward spiritual ministries which excited the earliest stirrings of our faith, and the inward spiritual ministries by which we live to-day, have all been under Christ’s control. 1 [Note: H. W. Clark, Laws of the Inner Kingdom, 68.]

2. The outward is changed to the inward. The Divine presence and teaching, and redeeming death of the Son were, so to speak, outside the man. Hence but little spiritual result followed Christ’s personal ministry. He made but few disciples: “the Spirit was not yet given.” Though He had done so many mighty works among them, yet did they not believe on Him. He promised, therefore, a still greater ministry than His own—a life-giving Power, who should quicken religious feeling within them, who should be, not an outward teacher, but an indwelling life-giver and sanctifier; and who should do His mighty spiritual work by taking the things of Christ and showing them unto us. Henceforth the Spirit would work in the hearts of men, not through the partial and imperfect truths of the old Jewish dispensation, but through the new and transcendent truths of Christ’s incarnation and atonement.

The Day of Pentecost was simply the special manifestation, the formal inauguration of the dispensation of the Spirit. Henceforth, men were to be taught by purely spiritual ideas, and were to be made holy by purely spiritual forces. Miracles and prophesyings were to cease; the personal teaching and example of Christ were withdrawn; the atoning death was accomplished; and Christ ascended to heaven. The revelation of God’s truth and love was completed; and henceforth only spiritual forces were to work in the hearts of men.

At first the inner life depends largely upon stimulus from without: the soul lies to a great extent inactive unless some external influence rouses it from its sleep; and, in the early days of our Christian discipleship, it is often the more public, the more outward, channels through which Christ’s influence comes down that best satisfy our heart’s need and most perfectly fill our craving for consciousness of the Master’s presence. We go back in memory to the far-off time and the distant land which He blest by His benignant life, and we seem to walk with Him then and there, to hear the word of healing or forgiveness coming upon the sufferers who saw His human face; we enter into converse about Him with those who are like-minded, and in that friendly interchange of thought we find our joy quickened and our peace made deeper; and by many outward helps such as these the things of Christ are made more real to us and set into contact with our inner life. But slowly the soul reaches its own vision; the necessity for any outward aids to realize the presence of Christ grows less, because in the new strength of the inward sight we behold Him companying with us; and while the external means which formerly assisted us to a consciousness of His nearness are still there and still to a certain extent useful in their place, yet we no longer depend upon them to wake our spiritual apprehension or to raise our Christian emotion to its needed heat. The old things go away, and it is expedient that they should: the ministry of the Divine works directly upon our deepest lives, without the interposition of any intermediate agencies. We look for our Christ, not to any memories of far-off years, not to any words that others speak, not to any light that breaks upon others’ faces like the out-shining of His glory—not, at any rate, primarily to these things; we find and touch Christ by the immediate out-reaching of the soul. 1 [Note: H. W. Clark, Laws of the Inner Kingdom, 64.]

3. The work of the Spirit is not only to continue Christ’s work; it is to commend Christ.

(1) The disciples did not know Christ till the Spirit came. It is a law of our nature that we lose in the breadth and accuracy of our knowledge by too close and continuous physical proximity to the object of knowledge. This is true as regards both things and persons. We cannot see the beauties of a great painting by

standing close to the canvas. The tourist enjoys best the sights which he has seen during his tour as memory and imagination recall them after he has returned home. We learn to appraise our greatest blessings at their proper value—such blessings as health, youth, gospel privileges—only after they have been withdrawn from us.

Now, in like manner, the Lord’s absence has brought to His Church the gain of better knowledge of Him. The Apostles knew their Master better, and appreciated Him more, after His departure than they had done during all the time that He went in and out among them. As a vehicle of Christian teaching His presence with them did not after all accomplish very much. For they saw the Son of Man in His personal poverty, in His human weakness, in His extreme humiliation. It was too hard for them to realize that that wayworn and weary Man, who clung to them for sympathy even when He inspired and attracted, was indeed the Mighty God. So long as He was among them, they really did not know Him. They could not understand the simplest truths about Himself which He taught them—for instance, the fact that He was to die as a martyr, and to rise again from the dead.

But how different these same men became after their Master had gone away! The Comforter came to them at Pentecost, and all their dulness passed from them. The scales fell from their eyes; or rather, they became full of eyes within. Their language now is: “Though we have known Christ after the flesh, yet now henceforth know we him no more.” They knew Him not now in the carnal aspect of Him, but in His new life-giving power.

You know that the mother always loves best the child that is dead. It is not because the child that is dead was better than all the children that are living, but because death brings the loved ones nearer to us than life ever brings them. You will never know your wife till she has gone from you. We never realize the meaning of Good-morning until we have said Good-bye. The hand-shake and the sad farewell bring hearts nearest to one another. So the world never knows its great men while they live. We have many illustrations of this. While he lived, Abraham Lincoln was the most hated man of all Americans throughout the South. The moment that man who counted himself Abraham Lincoln’s enemy, but proved unwittingly a friend to his memory, shot him, that moment the South began to recover its reason, and to-day the martyred President is honoured South as well as North. 1 [Note: L. Abbott, Signs of Promise, 44.]

(2) They did not understand His teaching till the Spirit came and interpreted it. When He went away, the blessing that He promised as more than compensation for His presence was that they should enter into the significance of His past companionship with them, that the Spirit should bring to their remembrance whatsoever He had said unto them, and, in the light of His death and exaltation, become the Interpreter of all the deeper things which in their natural intercourse with Him their eyes had not been open to perceive.

When the Comforter came, all things were brought back to their remembrance. Old truths and perplexing memories received their true solution. Words they had mused upon in doubt were interpreted; sayings they had thought already clear were seen to have profounder meanings; a fountain of light sprang up within them, an illumination cast from an unseen teacher unfolded to their consciousness the deep things of God and of His Christ. Their very faculties were enlarged: they were no longer pent up by narrow senses and by the succession of time, but were lifted into a light where all things are boundless and eternal. A new power of insight was implanted in their spiritual being, and a new world rose up before it; for the Spirit of truth dwelt in them, and the world unseen was revealed.

The great truths are never apprehended while the great teachers of those truths are living to expound them. The death of a great teacher deepens and disseminates the knowledge of the truth. It was so with the death of Christ. It has been so with the death of every great teacher since Christ died. For the truth is always greater than the individual expounder of it—deeper, higher, broader, larger. The death of the teacher deepens the knowledge of the truth. While he lives, multitudes of men are attracted by his own personality, by the peculiar form in which he puts the truth, by the amplitude of illustration, by the vehemence of utterance and strength of conviction, by qualities that are in himself; and those qualities, while in one sense they interpret, in another sense they obscure, the truth. No man realizes this like the man who is trying to interpret a great truth to mankind. In him it dwells; in him it burns as a fire. He seeks to fling open the doors of his heart that men may look in and see, not him, but the truth that is the power within himself; and he is perplexed and humiliated and distraught and sorrow-stricken that men will not see the truth, but will look only at him, at his words, at his figures, at his illustrations, at his genius, at his gestures. But when he has gone, and these outward interpretations and semblances begin to fade from their memory, that which they really obscured, but which they seemed to interpret,—or for the time did really though imperfectly and obscurely interpret,—that begins to dawn upon them. The truth grows larger, deeper, in their apprehension; they look beyond the man to feel that the utterance was made eloquent by the truth within him; that the truth was the real inspiration. 1 [Note: L. Abbott, Signs of Promise, 45.]

4. The Spirit conies to make us able to witness for Christ. The work of the Spirit is wrought through Christians. His work is our work; and because He works through us, and not in ourselves only, our work becomes possible. We are called upon to make known in act and word that men are made for fellowship with God; that even in the tumults and disorders of life the Divine law can be fulfilled and alone brings rest; that Christ and not the Evil One is the rightful sovereign of all. This is the interpretation of Christ’s life which the Spirit gives through the Church, through us.

Is not the trouble with most of our witnessing for God that it is inconstant and inconsistent, lacking unity as well as continuity? What is our hope but the indwelling Spirit of Christ, to bring every thought into captivity to the obedience of Christ, to inspire every word and deed by His love? Then will “broken lights” blend in steady shining, the fractional be summed up in the integral, and life, unified and beautified by the central Christ, radiate God’s glory, and shine with Divine effulgence. 2 [Note: M. D. Babcock, Thoughts for Every-Day Living, 9.]

An Expedient Departure

Literature

Abbott (L.), Signs of Promise, 41.

Allon (H.), The Indwelling Christ, 187.

Bernard (J. H.), Via Domini, 199.

Church (R. W.), Village Sermons, 3rd Ser., 163.

Clark (H. W.), Laws of the Inner Kingdom, 57.

Dale (R. W.), Christian Doctrine, 124.

Davies (J. P.), The Same Things, 126.

Drummond (H.), The Ideal Life, 61.

Eyton (R.), The Glory of the Lord, 36.

Eyton (R.), The True Life, 61.

Holdsworth (W. W.), The Life of Faith, 71.

Jerdan (C.), For the Lord’s Table, 323, 333.

Kelman (J.), Ephemera Eternitatis, 138.

Liddon (H. P.), Sermons on Some Words of Christ, 325.

Maclaren (A.), The Holy of Holies, 267.

Manning (H. E.), The Teaching of Christ, 181.

Murphy (J. B. C.), The Journey of the Soul, 100.

Telford (J.), The Story of the Upper Room, 181.

Thom (J. H.), Laws of Life after the Mind of Christ, 2nd Ser., 380.

Tipple (S. A.), Sunday Mornings at Norwood, 284.

Westcott (B. F.), Lessons from Work, 96.

Westcott (B. F.), Peterborough Sermons, 85.

Wilmot-Buxton (H. J.), Mission Sermons for a Year, 235.

Verses 8-11

The Spirit and the World

And he, when he is come, will convict the world in respect of sin, and of righteousness, and of judgment: of sin, because they believe not on me; of righteousness, because I go to the Father, and ye behold me no more; of judgment, because the prince of this world hath been judged.— John 16:8-11.

1. Sin, righteousness, judgment, are three of the greatest terms in the vocabulary of men. And they stand for tremendous spiritual realities by which our state is conditioned and our destiny determined. The words that stand for these realities are to be found in all languages; and in some languages (and particularly in the language of the New Testament) the terms are characterized by intellectual precision and beauty. Yet in the time of Christ they had come to stand for lost ideas. The terms were there, but the meaning had faded out of them. They had been lowered and belittled; they had suffered deterioration generation after generation; they had received into themselves foreign and alien significations by which their meaning had been still more obscured and perverted; and though they were still in the speech they failed to convey to the understanding and to the conscience of men the tremendous realities for which they stood. And nothing could have arrested the decline of these terms; nothing could have prevented their gravitating into the region of dead speech, speech from which true vitality had gone; nothing could have prevented that consummated deterioration but the coming of the Lord Jesus Christ and the mission of the Holy Ghost. It was by Christ that sin was reproved and righteousness revealed and judgment assured; and it is by the Holy Ghost that sin, righteousness, and judgment are continually revealed, attested, and brought home to the hearts and consciences of men.

2. Did Jesus Christ, then, come to give the world a new thought about sin? Did He come to reveal to men a different pattern of righteousness? Did He come to say a new thing concerning judgment? No. It is remarkable that Jesus said very little that was new. Every truth He uttered we may find in the Old Covenant; but He picked up the truths that were partially seen and imperfectly understood, shrouded in the mists and mysteries of man’s finite conception. He put them into simplicity, into plainness, into proportion and perspective, and He gave us a fair and perfect temple of truth. This is what He has done for the race concerning these three great thoughts which break in upon a man when he is awakening to spiritual being. The message of Christianity to the world is this: that sin has now a new centre, righteousness a new possibility, and that judgment is wholly altered by this new sin centre and this new possibility of righteousness: “of sin, because they believe not on me; of righteousness, because I go to the Father.”

3. Let us take the three together before we examine them singly.

(1) To know what sin is we must know what righteousness is. To be quite sure of righteousness, we must be sure how it will stand at the end in relation to sin. It must stand over sin, and judge it, and destroy it. Judgment is not primarily punishment, nor is it a mere declaration of the state of the law, but it is the actual final establishment of righteousness upon the wreck of sin. The stroke of sin upon sanctity can only evoke judgment, which by the grace of Christ becomes salvation. In the world it is sin that judges righteousness, and does with it what it will. In the Kingdom of God it is righteousness that judges sin, and does with it the will of God—it destroys it.

(2) With the awakening of the spiritual consciousness in man there always comes a threefold conviction, conviction concerning sin, concerning righteousness, and concerning judgment. When the earliest consciousness of a man’s spiritual nature breaks in upon him, the three facts that he faces, immediately and necessarily, are those referred to in the text,—sin, righteousness, judgment,—and the consciousness concerning each is a double consciousness of the spiritual realm that lies beyond, and of his own personal relationship to that spiritual realm.

The words suggest to us the three moral ingredients of healthy public opinion in a Christian country. Every society, every nation, has its public opinion, its common stock of hopes, fears, prejudices, likings, enthusiasms, repugnances, tastes, points of view,—the common stock to which all contribute something, and by which in turn all are influenced. The old-world cities, each of them had a public opinion of its own—Rome, and Athens, and Jerusalem; and now too, wherever men meet and exchange thoughts, and know themselves to be bound to each other by the ties of race, or of common interests, or of historical associations, there grows up inevitably a common fund of thoughts and phrases which may be barbarous or enlightened, as the case may be, but which is always influential. Like the smoke and vapours which hang visibly in the air over every large centre of human life, to which every hearth contributes something, and by which every window is more or less shaded, so in the world of public thought and feeling there is a like common product of all the minds which think and feel at all, which in turn influences more or less all the contributors to it. And what I am now insisting upon is, that this inevitable product and accompaniment of human society,—public opinion,—if it is Christian, must contain a recognition of the three solemn facts—sin, righteousness, judgment. 1 [Note: H. P. Liddon, Sermons on Some Words of Christ, 351.]

I

Sin

“He will convict the world in respect of sin.” Now the world as such knows nothing of sin; and yet it is the root of all that from which it suffers. It is the root, it is the explanation of all the numberless forms of damage and deterioration that human character suffers. Sin is the source whence all the ills of human life and human society arise. Many terms are needed to describe the manifestations or results of sin. The world is well aware, for example, of defects of human character, and it can describe them in detail. It says of a man that he is unjust, or that he is cruel, or proud, or sensual, or covetous; and yet these are but minor terms to specify this or the other manifestation of a deep, central, fundamental evil of the world, the very existence of which, as a fundamental evil, the world has never understood. It is very touching and very pathetic to observe that while the world had large, immense experience of sin it had little or no sense of sin.

Mr. Gladstone once spoke of the absence of the sense of sin as perhaps the greatest peril of modern society. And I think it is not too much to say that, apart from the person of Christ and the mission of the Holy Ghost, we not only have no guarantee that the sense of sin would be maintained, but we have every reason to believe that it would again die out; and that while men would be irritated and angered by this and the other evil and wrong in society, their conscience concerning the mystic and root evil would as before show itself utterly inadequate to the exigencies of the case. 1 [Note: F. W. Macdonald.]

1. The world must be convinced of sin. Let us take due account of the fact that conviction of sin is a profoundly intelligent matter, and worthy, in that view, to engage the counsel of God in the gift of His Son. If we have any such thought as that what is called conviction of sin is only a blind torment, or crisis of excited fear, technically prescribed as a matter to be suffered in the way of conversion, we cannot too soon rid ourselves of the mistake. It is neither more nor less than a due self-knowledge—not a knowledge of the mere understanding, or such as may be obtained by philosophic reflection, but a more certain, more immediate sensing of ourselves by consciousness; just the same as that which the criminal has, when he hides himself away from justice; fleeing, it may be, when no man pursueth. He has a most invincible, most real, knowledge of himself; not by any cognitive process of reflection, but by his immediate consciousness—he is consciously a guilty man. All men are consciously guilty before God, and the standards of God, in the same manner. They do not approve, but invariably condemn themselves; only they become so used to the fact that they make nothing of it, but take it even as the normal condition of their life.

(1) It is not easy to convince men of sin.—Confucius is said to have once exclaimed, in an outburst of despondency, “It is all over! I have not yet seen one who could perceive his fault and inwardly accuse himself.” Confucius is not alone in that verdict upon human nature. The lament is suggestive. It implies the enormous difficulty of bringing an average man to admit his fault. It implies also that, with his many virtues and excellences, Confucius did not achieve a character of such ideal perfection that his contemporaries felt themselves smitten with shame by his transcendent example. And it implies that the common conscience needs to be reinforced with supernatural influence and vitality before it can assert itself and compel confession and repentance.

A friend told me this tale, a few years ago, as we paced together the deck of a steamship on the Mediterranean, and talked of the things unseen. The chaplain of a prison, intimate with the narrator, had to deal with a man condemned to death. He found the man anxious, as he well might be—nay, he seemed more than anxious; convicted, spiritually alarmed. The chaplain’s instructions all bore upon the power of the Redeemer to save to the uttermost; and it seemed as if the message were received, and the man were a believer. Meanwhile, behind the scenes, the chaplain had come to think that there was ground for appeal from the death-sentence; he placed the matter before the proper authorities, and with success. On his next visit, very cautiously and by way of mere suggestions and surmises, he led the apparently resigned criminal towards the possibility of a commutation. What would he say, how would his repentance stand, if his life were granted him? The answer soon came. Instantly the prisoner divined the position; asked a few decisive questions; then threw his Bible across the cell, and, civilly thanking the chaplain for his attentions, told him that he had no further need of him, nor of his Book. 1 [Note: Bishop Moule, From Sunday to Sunday, 190.]

(2) Conviction of sin is necessary.—“He shall convince the world of sin.” The first outstanding characteristic of the whole Gospel message is the new gravity which it attaches to the fact of sin, the deeper meaning which it gives to the word, and the larger scope which it shows its blighting influences to have had in humanity. Apart from the conviction of sin by the Spirit using the Word proclaimed by disciples, the world has scarcely a notion of what sin is, its inwardness, its universality, the awfulness of it as a fact affecting man’s whole being and all his relations to God. All these conceptions are especially the product of Christian truth. Without it, what does the world know about the poison of sin? And what does it care about the poison until the conviction has been driven home to the reluctant consciousness of mankind by the Spirit wielding the Word? This conviction comes first in the Divine order.

I do not say that the process of turning a man of the world into a member of Christ’s Church always begins, as a matter of fact, with the conviction of sin. I believe it most generally does; but without insisting upon a pedantic adherence to a sequence, and without saying a word about the depth and intensity of such a conviction, I am ready to assert that a Christianity which is not based upon the conviction of sin is an impotent Christianity, and will be of very little use to the men who profess it, and have no power to propagate itself in the world. 1 [Note: A. Maclaren, The Holy of Holies, 274.]

I remember seeing, in my early childhood, the dear and beautiful subject of the following incident, the aged widow of a farmer in my father’s parish. My mother took me to visit Mrs. E. one day in her farm-kitchen. It was, I think, in 1849. I still see the brightness, the sweet radiance, of that venerable face; it shone, as I now know, with Jesus Christ. At the age of about eighty-one, after a life of blameless kindliness, so that to say she had “never done harm to any one” was from her no unmeaning utterance, she was, through the Holy Scriptures, convinced of sin. “I have lived eighty years in the world,” was her cry, “and never done anything for God.” Deep went the Divine work in the still active nature, and long was the spiritual darkness. Then “the word of the Cross” found its own way in her soul, and “believing, she rejoiced with joy unspeakable.” Three or four years of life were yet given her. They were illuminated by faith, hope, and love in a wonderful degree. To every visitor she bore witness of her Lord. Nights, wakeful with pain, were spent in living over the beloved scenes of His earthly ministry: “I was at the well of Samaria last night”; “Ah, I was all last night upon Mount Calvary.” In extreme suffering an opiate was offered, and she declined it; for “when I lose the pain I lose the thought of my Saviour too.” At last she slept in the Lord, gently murmuring, almost singing, “Rock of Ages,” with her latest breath. 2 [Note: Bishop Moule, From Sunday to Sunday, 191.]

2. The sin of which the world has to be convinced is the sin of unbelief. The Spirit convinces men of sin “because they believe not on me.” He shows them that unbelief is sin. It is the root of sin. The greatest sin that men can commit is the rejection of Christ. The message of the Gospel is so framed that no apology shall be able to extenuate the act of refusing it. Men shall never say that it is too hard to be understood; for its sublimest revelations have in them a simplicity that makes them intelligible even to illiterate persons, and appreciated by children. They shall never say that the doctrines of the Gospel are unreasonable; for the light which it throws upon intricate social problems, the complete and unanswerable replies that it gives to questions unsettled before, the plain and sober goodness and the eminent reasonableness that lie at the root of its laws, all of which qualities men can understand, shall prove to them that they ought to accept those supernatural features which are beyond their comprehension. They shall never say that its purpose is unnecessary; their own hearts and life shall tell them, and the condition of the world around shall cry aloud in their ears, that sin is an unconquerable power; that the sources of crime, disorder, and social debility are as prevailing as they are pestilent; that no remedy of human preparation has ever succeeded in effectually checking them; and that it is the business of all men, unitedly, personally, and constantly, to endeavour to remove them; when, therefore, the Gospel of Jesus presents itself to a despairing world as another hope of deliverance, a last hope, men shall never be able to object to it as unnecessary. Finally, they shall not decline to accept it because it can point to no witnesses or examples of its power. These shall always be at hand, comprising a mighty and ever-accumulating argument, a vast “cloud of witnesses,” spreading themselves over the world, not like distinct and eccentric meteors to dazzle and perplex, but like a dawn coming from that quarter of the horizon where men expect the day—a mild, genial, useful glory, the luminous ordinance of God Himself. So convincing did the Holy Ghost make the Gospel, and does still make it, defending it by every proof that can tell upon the convictions of men. Wherever Christ is preached, hearers shall be condemned because they believe not on Him. Possibly they may not be convinced, certainly they shall be convicted.

Men say they understand that cruelty, treachery, and lust bring their punishment sooner or later. But what they cannot understand is that the mere fact of refusing to believe is the sin of sins. A typical writer of the period says: “Science is but a new way of applying the mind to everything. It has affirmed the right and duty of investigation and verification. It has set up a new kind of intellectual morality, which has substituted the duty of inquiry for the duty of belief. The immediate result has been in England a sudden and amazing diminution of intolerance, a wonderful and wholly unexpected increase of mental freedom.” In other words, conscience may speak about other sin, but in the case of unbelief the thing forbidden does not appear to be in its own nature wrong, and “Don Worm” refuses to bite.

The appeal must be to what is elemental in human nature and experience. Content to be judged by that appeal, we maintain that the conscience bears witness that unbelief is the sin of sins. If ever conscience speaks out it is when this sin is committed on the levels of human life. As Bunyan puts it, they shut up Mr. Conscience, they blind his windows, they barricade his door, they cut the rope of the great bell on the housetop which he is wont to ring, that the town of Mansoul may not be disturbed. But sometimes Mr. Conscience escapes and rings his bell. For the sin of all sins to which the conscience bears witness is the sin of mistrusting and despising love. There is so little love in this world, and there is such a hard need of it. Multitudes have to go through life famished for lack of love. Even the most favoured have very few really to love them. If we have no love, human or Divine, then indeed life ceases to be worth living. “I would rather,” said one, “be condemned to be led out and hung if I knew one human soul would love me for a week beforehand and honour me afterwards, than live half a century and be nothing to any living creature.” 1 [Note: W. Robertson Nicoll, Sunday Evening, 21.]

3. Unbelief is always seen at last to be want of belief in Christ. The Spirit, says Jesus, will convince the world of sin, “in that they believe not on me.” He will show the real nature of sin. “How shall we work the works of God?” it was asked; and it was answered by Christ, “This is the work of God, to believe on him whom he hath sent.” Sin is not measured by a law, or a nation, or a society of any kind, but by a Person. The righteousness of God was not in a requirement, system, book, or Church, but in a Person, and sin is defined by relation to Him. He came to reveal not only God but sin. The essence of sin is exposed by the touchstone of His presence, by our attitude to Him. He makes explicit what the sinfulness of sin is; He even aggravates it. He rouses the worst as well as the best of human nature. There is nothing that human nature hates like holy God. All the world’s sin receives its sharpest expression when in contact with Christ; when, in face of His moral beauty, goodness, power, and claim, He is first ignored, then discarded, denounced, called the agent of Beelzebub, and hustled out of the world in the name of God.

What is the belief that saves? We are asking the question in order that we may discover the unbelief that is sin. The belief that saves is that conviction which produces the abandonment of the whole life to the King. When I have believed that He is able to do all that I want, and I have ceded to Him all my life, then have I believed. A man does not believe the truth he holds, to borrow a very popular phrase, but he believes the truth that holds him. You have never yet believed on Jesus until you have abandoned your whole life to His Lordship, and trusted your soul to His Saviourhood, and never a man so believed but He “broke the power of cancelled sin, and set the prisoner free.” 1 [Note: G. Campbell Morgan.]

4. What means does the Holy Spirit use in order to convince the world of the sin of unbelief in Christ?

(1) He puts an environment of new ideals before the mind.—He testifies of Christ, and in so doing makes us see how in His humanity all Divine excellences have come down into the midst of men and made themselves a new law to the conscience. We are not, after all, in a universe dominated by avarice, envy, falsehood, animalism, but by unselfishness, sanctity, truth, spiritual principle.

Some little time ago I was passing through a country lane, and saw a flock of sheep feeding on the hillside. They seemed to be milk-white, justifying the Scriptural metaphor, “He scattereth the hoarfrost like wool,” and fit to be welcomed as pets into a drawing-room. In comparison with the green pastures in which they were feeding, their fleeces seemed bleached into spotlessness. Not long after, a snowstorm came, and I had occasion to pass by the same field. But the sheep did not seem to be the same creatures at all. The background had changed as if by magic, and they were in a new world, the conditions of which served to bring out their griminess. They looked speckled, dingy, piebald, and anything but clean in comparison with the glittering snows in which they were nestling. The collier, rising out of the pit into the sunshine after a night of toil, scarcely looked grimier than those spotless sheep of yesterday. The stainless and dazzling snow served to bring into view all the dust from the roadside, all the bits of blackthorn from the hedges, all the carbon flakes ejected from the chimneys of the adjoining town that had been caught in their fleeces. 1 [Note: T. G. Selby, The Holy Spirit and Christian Privilege, 53.]

(2) The Spirit comes with a new atmosphere of sympathy and graciousness, unlike that which exists in the world and provokes to ingenuous self-justification. He who comes under this ministry feels almost instinctively His right to search the heart and bring every delinquency before a Divine tribunal. It is useless to attempt concealment, for the Spirit knows us more thoroughly than we know ourselves, and can constrain the most reluctant natures into a consciousness of their own evil. Indeed, the desire to cloak or dissemble silently disappears, for we instinctively recognize that His revelations, however unwelcome, are benevolent in motive. Whilst the full revelation of Divine love cannot be vouchsafed at this stage, we see at once that the attempt to convict us is not that of some competitor who is trying to smite us down. He acts upon us, not like the angry storm which leads men to bar their doors and close their shutters, but like the soft south wind, which opens every labyrinth of the heart and life to the light. It is no treachery or ill-will or unrelenting antagonism that is bringing home to us the unwelcome facts of the past, but helping and healing beneficence. In the most vivid revival of the half-forgotten sin there is no malicious exaggeration. His enforcement of the fact of our guilt is recognized as a gentle and tender effort to teach us those forgotten realities of law with which we have to reckon, and to put us into a better position for dealing with them. Whatever pain He inflicts, it is inseparable from the cure of a dire disease, and from the process of arousing faculties marked hitherto by ominous numbness and dormancy. He brings the hard rebel world, ever on the alert to justify itself, into an atmosphere that is something more wonderful than even the essence of compassionate fatherhood.

(3) A new power of moral discernment is aroused.—In what is called Christendom, there has been a manifest uplifting of the moral standards, and a correspondent quickening of the moral sensibilities, both of individual men and of whole races and peoples. In the people of the old dispensation and of the great pagan empires long ago converted to the Cross, moral ideas have now taken the place, to a great extent, of force; the coarse blank apathy of sin is broken up; the sense of duty is more piercing; and it is even as if a new conscience had been given respecting the soul in its relations to God. It is as if men had seen their state of sin glassed before them, and made visible in the rejection of Christ and His cross. Jews and pagans had before been made conscious at times of particular sins; we are made conscious, in a deeper and more appalling way, of the state of sin itself, the damning evil that infects our humanity at the root—that which rejected and crucified the Son of God, and is in fact the general madness and lost condition of the race.

Immediately after the departure of Christ from the world, that is, on the day of Pentecost, there broke out a new demonstration of sensibility to sin, such as was never before seen. In the days of the Law, men had their visitations of guilt and remorse, respecting this or that wrong act; but I do not recollect, even under the prophets, those great preachers of the Law and sharpest and most terrible sifters of transgression, a single instance where a soul is so broken or distressed by the conviction of its own bad state under sin as to ask what it must do to be saved—the very thing which many thousands did, on the day of Pentecost, and in the weeks that followed, and have been doing even till now. 1 [Note: Horace Bushnell, Christ and His Salvation, 115.]

II

Righteousness

“He will convict the world in respect of righteousness.” The Gospel of the Son of God is not the Gospel of forgiveness merely. It is also the Gospel of life and power, a great message, declaring that to the man who believes on Him, the living Lord, there comes new life-force, a new dynamic of virtue; and therefore the sin that ruins is the sin of unbelief. Merging into that first statement is necessarily the second statement of the text. “Of righteousness,” said Jesus, “because I go to the Father.” Who else could have uttered these words? If we can say that we shall go to the Father, our going is through the merit and for the sake of another, but none introduced the Man of Nazareth to the Father. He asked no mercy; when He ascended on high He did not appear in Heaven’s court in virtue of what another had done, but stood unafraid in Heaven’s light, in the perfect light of His victorious manhood. He says, “I go to the Father,” and in His going to the Father He has vindicated the possibility of the perfection of righteousness as an ideal life. And yet He did infinitely more by going to the Father. He received that Spirit which, poured out, becomes the life-force for others.

1. The Spirit convinces the world of the existence of righteousness.—The world as a world has but dim and inadequate conceptions of what righteousness is. A Pharisee is its type, or a man that keeps a clean life in respect of great transgressions—a whited sepulchre of some sort or other. The world apart from Christ has but languid desires after even the poor righteousness that it understands, and the world apart from Christ is afflicted by a despairing scepticism as to the possibility of ever being righteous at all.

Those who know this earth only can make nothing of righteousness. They try various definitions of it, such as equality of exchange or of condition and what is good for the greater number; but these accounts, besides failing to satisfy the idea of justice, carry no constraining authority to the individual conscience. In the New Testament age, whilst there was a strong tradition amongst the Romans in favour of orderly administration, thinking men were at a loss how to understand justice or righteousness in itself, and the general mind was not dominated by any clear conception of its nature or its authority. What was justice? What was a just man? Why was any one bound to be just? To such questions no answer was found. Our Lord says, the Spirit will bring the world to the knowledge of righteousness, because I go to the Father, and ye behold Me no more. 1 [Note: J. Ll. Davies, Spiritual Apprehension, 47.]

2. The Spirit convinces the world of the righteousness of Christ.—Jesus Christ, the Son of God, took on Him our flesh, and in the flesh condemned sin. Every thought, and word, and deed of His life was, in the highest sense, right. He lived amidst the ordinary surroundings of men, exposed to the same temptations, corruption, and weakness, a thoroughly Divine life, which could not fail to heighten the standard of the world. He was God manifest in the flesh. Of Him, alone, of all those born of woman, it could be said in the fullest meaning of the words: “He hath done all things well.” Here, then, was the world’s need supplied by the living Model of a perfectly holy life. But the world was by no means willing to receive and act upon the heaven-sent Light which penetrated its darkness. Just as a person long accustomed to the foul atmosphere of a dirty, unhealthy room, will resent with indignation any attempt to let in a breath of purifying air, so the degraded human race arose with one accord to reject the example of righteousness God had sent into their midst. This was the condemnation that light had come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil. Jesus Christ never thought of Himself: their whole thoughts were centred on self. His heart was set on things above: theirs on the gratification of their own needs, desires, and pleasures. They were covetous and filled with worldliness: He had no earthly possessions, not even a place where to lay His head. They were proud and self-willed: He was meek and lowly, and His daily endeavour was to do His Father’s will. So, because it was clear that one or other of these standards must be wrong, it seemed an easier plan for mankind, instead of reforming its own habits, to determine that the Lord Jesus was an impostor.

Accordingly, they banded themselves together and agreed that He was blaspheming God when He declared that He was the Divine Life—that He, the friend of publicans and sinners, was indeed the Son of the Most High, the heaven-sent Pattern of eternal righteousness. On this pretext they condemned Him to death, and nailed Him to the Cross; and then, when they had laid a great stone at the mouth of the sepulchre, sealed it, and set a watch, they trusted His witness was silenced for ever. But God’s voice is not so easily silenced as sinful men desire. Jesus Christ was content to be led as a lamb to the slaughter because it was part of the eternal counsel that His blood must thus be shed for the sins of the world; but He declared most clearly, alike to friend and to foe, that His life was the only one with which God was well pleased. He set forth also most emphatically the test to which His words were to be subjected: “If I rise from the dead on the third day, and after showing unmistakable proofs of having been nailed to the cross, I ascend into heaven, then you must acknowledge that My record is true. If I thus go to My Father and you see Me no more, then you will be compelled to admit that I have spoken truth, that you have failed in convincing Me of sin, and that I am indeed the Holy One of God.”

The world that had slain Christ as unrighteous would own His righteousness when He had gone to the Father and they had seen Him no more. In all the literature of love and sorrow—and the two are never disjoined—we have this interpreted to us. It is in the withdrawal, in the departure to eternity, in the time of the lost vision that we know the righteousness we denied, or imperfectly recognized, when it was with us in its human dress. In Browning’s great poem he tells us how the murderer and ruffian husband, Guido, whose cruelty and malignity to the pure and trustful Pompilia passed all bounds, discerned her at last when she was with God. The procession entered his cell to lead him away to death, and he called out in an agony of fear—

Abate—Cardinal—Christ—Maria—God …

Pompilia! Will you let them murder me?

Pompilia, the sweet child, saint, martyr, was, in the man’s thought, exalted even above God in the power to save. In all the paths of life, even the highest, the same holds true. The background of death is needed to bring out the full meaning and force of life. The highest we have known may indeed shine upon us through the semi-opaque routine of daily duties. But we feel as if we had never known them when they go to the Father, and the thought clutches the heart that we shall see them no more. One illustration is in every reader’s mind. Queen Victoria was loved and reverenced as perhaps no monarch ever was before her death, with a love and reverence that grew with time. But how infinitely the devotion of her people was enhanced when she went to the Father and they saw her no more! In what a new way the nation perceived how she had given them all her strength and tenderness through these long, brave, faithful, constant years! 1 [Note: W. Robertson Nicoll, Sunday Evening, 208.]

3. The Spirit convinces the world that only in Christ is righteousness to be found.—There are three requisites which must be fulfilled before man, as a sinner, can feel the possibility of his righteousness. The sins of the past haunt and terrify him; they bind him with cords of fear and self-condemnation, which prevent his rising;—here, then, the sense of forgiveness is the first requisite. But the sense of sin awakens the sense of immortality, and clothes it with fear. He dare not look onward, for his sin has peopled the worlds of the future with terrors, and for his justification he needs a Deliverer who shall have explored the future worlds, and illuminated their mystery; here is the second requisite. But he needs yet more. It is not enough for the past to be forgiven, and the future brightened; he himself must possess the germ of a new, righteous, God-like life; he must be a new man, rising into that revealed immortality. These three necessities: the assurance of forgiveness of the past; the removal of the terrors of the future; the creation of a new manhood in the present, are all met by the truth that Christ has gone to the Father; and when that is revealed by the Comforter, we have the conviction of righteousness.

Newman, in a very remarkable passage, says of the saints that their lingering imperfections surely make us love them more without leading us to reverence them less, and act as a relief to the discouragement and despondency which may come over those who in the midst of error and sin are striving to imitate them. That is to say, if their lives were beautiful before God we do not ask that they should be stainless, for even the stains show us that we, too, though we fall, may rise again. But let us ask how it would have been if any speck had fallen on the life of our Lord Jesus? How would it have been with us if He had spoken one rash word, if He had cherished in His mind one single unjust thought, if one arrow of the enemy had pierced His armour? If that had been, the prince of this world would be still in power, and all our hope were dead. But He kept innocency and took heed to the thing that was right from the beginning to the end. Wherefore God hath highly exalted Him and given Him a Name which is above every name, even the saving Name. By His righteousness so dearly wrought out, we too may be made righteous. His righteousness is our beauty, our glorious dress, proof against the fires of the Last Day. We are redeemed by that voluntary substitution of the Innocent for the guilty with which the Father is well pleased. 1 [Note: W. Robertson Nicoll, Sunday Evening, 214.]

(1) “Because I go to my Father.” What is the meaning of “because”? It is this: If He had not been right in the claims He made He could not have gone to the Father when He died. If He went to the Father, if His Spirit convinced men that He was there and was acting from there, then He had been right in the claims He made about His relations to the Father and about His judgment of the world, and especially of Israel’s sin. The apostolic fact of His resurrection was proof that Israel’s God confirmed the claim of Christ, and gave judgment for Him against Israel. That was what settled the matter for St. Paul. As soon as He was convinced that God had raised up Christ and set Him at His right hand in glory, the whole fabric of his Judaism gave way. God would not raise a fanatic, impostor, or blasphemer. The Spirit convinced St. Paul that Jesus was the Holy One and the Just—nay, the very Righteousness of God; that the sin of sins lay with the people who thought themselves the best of the good.

(2) “And ye see me no more.” We are often like His disciples among these deep mysteries—we cannot tell what He saith. And yet the Holy Spirit makes the meaning as clear as it can be made to mortals. We are to lose the earthly vision that we may gain the heavenly. We are to lose the vision after the flesh that we may win the vision after the Spirit. Even in the highways of earthly love this may be understood—the more excellent glory of the spiritual love. “Love,” says our greatest poet, “is not time’s fool,” and perhaps the finest love-line in our language was written by another poet, hardly less great, to his wife:—

To you who are seventy-seven.

III

Judgment

“He will convict the world in respect of judgment.” We miss the note of judgment in our day. Our convictions do not start from a sense that we are convicted. We want to be convinced by evidence where we should be convicted by the Spirit. This is an element that has dropped out of our view of the Cross, and therefore out of much Christian life; Christ crucified, we think, took the pain of sin but not its penalty, its sorrow but not its curse. We have of late done justice to the idea of sacrifice in connexion with the Cross; but in the same proportion we have lost the idea of judgment. We have revived the ethical idea of the Kingdom of God, but we have not grasped the idea, which fills both Old Testament and New Testament, that it could be set up only by a decisive act of holy judgment upon the kingdom of the world. The Cross was indeed the Divine sacrifice, but sacrifice is not a final idea without judgment. It is not an end in itself,—except to the ascetics,—it is a means. But judgment is an end, it is final in its nature, because it is the actual vindication of holiness and the establishment of righteousness, and beyond holiness and its victory we cannot go.

1. He will convince the world that there is judgment in the earth.—It is evident that if by the enlightening operation of the Holy Spirit sin is known, and righteousness is known, the ground is then laid for judgment, because judgment is only the just, and proper, and true estimate of righteous men and wicked men. The Holy Spirit, therefore, convinces the world of judgment—that is to say, He brings out in prominent and living characters the whole idea of judgment; of there being a division in the world; of there being two kinds of people in the world, good and bad, righteous and wicked.

There stands up everywhere in Scripture the pillar of fire and of cloud, and it comes between the camp of Israel and the camp of the Egyptians, and gives light by night to the one, but cloud and darkness to the other. The Gospel is especially penetrated by this idea of judgment; it declares the enmity of the world to God, and distinguishes between the world and those who are not of the world; it separates the followers of Christ from the world; it announces that Christ will manifest Himself to His disciples and not unto the world. It says, “Woe unto the world because of offences”; it says that “we cannot serve two masters”; that we cannot have the treasure of our heart in earth and in heaven at the same time. Our Lord Jesus Christ is Himself described as the Judge who thus separates between the righteous and the wicked, who places the sheep on the right hand, and the goats on the left; “Whose fan is in his hand, and he will throughly purge his floor, and gather his wheat into the garner; but he will burn up the chaff with unquenchable fire.” 1 [Note: J. B. Mozley, Sermons, Parochial and Occasional, 164.]

(1) Judgment is yet to come.—It is very hard on the lower planes of life to convince the world of judgment, to persuade men that there is an infallible reckoning for all transgression, that no sin can be permanently concealed, that in the end the hidden things of darkness will come to light, and will receive their just reward. It is hard to bring this home even in the case of offences that come within the province of criminal law. A man will commit a murder and believe that he will never be found out, that the blood will not speak. He will cover over the body with sand, not thinking that one day the skeleton arm will push itself through and appeal to the sky. And yet the vast majority of people have been so convinced of judgment in the realm of criminal law that they never put themselves within its reach. How are they convinced of judgment? There is only one way. They are convinced by the judgment of an actual transgressor, by the manifested sin of a criminal. People read in the newspapers day by day of the strange ways in which the dead are avenged, and they are convinced of judgment. And yet there is always an obstinate remnant that fixes its eyes on the crimes not yet expiated, and thinks that it may sin and escape.

(2) Judgment is now.—It is evident that Christ referred to a judgment that had then and there commenced, for the words have a present meaning. “The prince of this world has been judged.” We can most easily understand this by referring to a precisely similar utterance in the 31st verse of the 12th chapter: “Now is the judgment of this world; now shall the prince of this world be cast out.” The Saviour had just declared that by His death He should give life to the world. He had just glanced into the awful struggle that was approaching, and His soul was troubled. He had just received from heaven the assurance of final victory, and then He declared, with the glory of the triumph already brightening, “Now is the judgment of this world; now shall the prince of this world be cast out.” The judgment, therefore, to which He pointed was that conquest which He had already commenced of the dominion of evil, and the final victory over it which He should gain on His Cross. And the same meaning must be attached to the word “world” here, so that the verse may be rendered thus: “He shall convince the world that evil is conquered, overthrown, and shall finally pass away.”

“The last judgment” is a phrase which we have almost robbed of its effect because we have used it chiefly for a remote and pictorial future. We have dwelt on the final date of judgment, and lost sense of a state of judgment, a judgment always there, and always final in its nature. We have pictured it in ways which have emptied it of spiritual awe, and reduced it to little more than physical terror and moral impotence. We do not realize that the prince of this world has been finally judged, and that we live in a saved world only because we live in a judged world. Either with the orthodox we have made judgment a cosmic catastrophe (and astronomy is full of them, and geology has made them too familiar), or we have reduced it, with the liberals, to the historic process on its ethical side, with its moral crises, and jail-deliveries, and fresh starts, from time to time. We have lost the note of judgment from the Cross, and so from our moral world. And we have lost it, with the orthodox, in a distant judgment scene, or with the liberals, who made it the mere Nemesis of history, which is too slow and subtle to curb the pushing hour. “The world’s history is the world’s judgment,” says Schiller. He wished to recall the last judgment from its remoteness to be a power in the heart of present things and living conduct. But there is something more true than Schiller’s famous phrase. It is not the world’s history, but Christ’s history that is the world’s judgment. And especially is it Christ’s Cross. 1 [Note: P. T. Forsyth, Missions in State and Church, 72.]

2. “Because the prince of this world hath been judged.” Who is the prince of this world? The phrase “this world” is frequently used in the New Testament to express the collective forces that are on this earth opposed to God; and in speaking of a Prince, Christ manifestly implies that evil forces are not separated, but combined and connected things; that they form a great living power, a kingdom of wrong. But the phrase means more than this; it points to a personal Evil Spirit as lord of that evil kingdom. Not in the sense that he is the cause of it all, but that he is representative of it, as being the greatest and the first. According to the teaching of Christ and the Apostles, evil began far back in the spiritual world, and came from thence to man. Interpreting the phrase thus, we have the idea of evil as a power mysteriously connected with the invisible world, and of an Evil Spirit as its representative.

Do you think of the prince of this world as one who holds in his tyranny a world of victims who are miserable because they struggle in his yoke? That is not the conception here at all. He represents here all that is most congenial to the world’s way. He is the personalized spirit of a willing and admiring world. He is the organ of a world proud of its representative. He has its confidence. He is the agent of methods which the world thinks essential to its prosperity and stability, which make its notion of eternal life. The world he represents has no idea that its moral methods can be bettered or its principles overthrown. To its mind the moral is an impertinence and the spiritual is a superstition—feeble, but capable of becoming dangerous. It must therefore be fought. And its antagonist is just as sensible of the antagonism. There is no compromise possible. They were destined to meet in a struggle which is inevitable and a judgment which is final—and that meeting was in the Cross. 1 [Note: P. T. Forsyth, Missions in State and Church, 71.]

(1) The Spirit will convince the world that the prince of this world has been judged by showing that Christ has conquered sin through obedience to the will of God. And where was this so perfectly accomplished as in His life and death? All forces were in action to turn Him from submission. From first to last He was perpetually tempted to forsake Him chosen path of obedience. The cold, the hunger, and the lonely temptation of the wilderness formed but the prelude to the long struggle with the Evil One, which culminated on Calvary. It was the same temptation throughout to assert His own will against His Father’s will. It opened with the challenge in the wilderness, “If thou be the Son of God, command that these stones be made bread”; “If thou be the Son of God, cast thyself down”; and closed with the last taunt, “If thou be the Son of God, come down from the cross.” But the cry, “It is finished,” was the herald of conquest—the proclamation to the world that one Man had stemmed the tide of evil and broken its force. The moment of seeming defeat was the moment of mightiest victory.

(2) The Spirit will show that by this victory the perpetuity of evil is shattered. The darkest lie of the Evil One is this—that evil is an eternal power. Before the advent of the Gospel, the world was beginning to believe in the omnipotence of wrong. The slavery wrought by sin was so complete that men were losing faith in anything that could conquer evil, and were sinking into a dreary and hopeless fatalism. Just note the two great facts which, as the results of sin, lay at the root of this state: ( a) Suffering. Men felt the pressure of its mystery. It seemed to belie the goodness of God, to darken the heaven of His love, and prove sin to be irresistible. Its shadow rested on the ages of the past, and projected itself with a grim certainty into the future. Now suffering, in all its deepest dreadfulness, Christ endured. He became the High Priest of sorrow. He grew glorious through it. “He was perfected through sufferings,” and thus revealed it to man as the education of a Father. ( b) Death. The great mystery, the spoiler of human hopes, the divider of friend from friend, the sign-manual of sin’s dominion. He became subject to its power. It seemed to conquer Him. It seemed to divide Him from the Father, but really it was the pledge of their eternal union. Rising from the grave, He ascended to the heavens, thus consecrating death for all men as a pathway to the Father’s home. Such was Christ’s conquest. It was the crisis of earth’s history, the judgment and overthrow of the “prince of this world.”

All hail! dear Conqueror! all hail!

Oh what a victory is Thine!

How beautiful Thy strength appears!

Thy crimson wounds, how bright they shine!

Thou camest at the dawn of day;

Armies of souls around Thee were,

Blest spirits, thronging to adore

Thy flesh, so marvellous, so fair.

Ye heavens, how sang they in your courts,

How sang the angelic choirs that day,

When from His tomb the imprisoned God,

Like the strong sunrise, broke away! 1 [Note: F. W. Faber.]

The Spirit and the World

Literature

Bushnell (H.), Christ and His Salvation, 98.

Davies (J. Ll.), Spiritual Apprehension, 40.

Forsyth (P. T.), Missions in State and Church, 51.

Hull (E. L.), Sermons preached at King’s Lynn, 2nd Ser., 14, 29.

Jenkins (E. E.), Life and Christ, 143.

Liddon (H. P.), Sermons on Some Words of Christ, 342.

Maclaren (A.), The Holy of Holies, 279.

Moule (H. C. G.), From Sunday to Sunday, 188.

Mozley (J. B.), Sermons Parochial and Occasional, 160.

Nicoll (W. R.), Sunday Evening, 3, 21.

Selby (T. G.), The Holy Spirit and Christian Privilege, 43.

Wilkinson (G. H.), The Invisible Glory, 233.

Christian World Pulpit, lvi. 120 (Macdonald); lxii. 395 (Campbell Morgan).

Verse 23

The Day of Knowledge and Power

And in that day ye shall ask me nothing. Verily, verily, I say unto you, If ye shall ask anything of the Father, he will give it you in my name.— John 16:23.

1. Our Lord here sums up the prerogatives and privileges of His servants in the day that was about to dawn and to last till He came again. There is nothing absolutely new in the words; substantially the promises contained in them have appeared in former parts of these discourses under somewhat different aspects and connexions. Many such promises there are in the Bible: “Ask and ye shall receive”; “All things, whatsoever ye shall ask in prayer, believing, ye shall receive”; “If ye abide in me, and my words abide in you, ye shall ask what ye will, and it shall be done unto you”; “If two of you shall agree on earth as touching anything that they shall ask, it shall be done for them of my Father which is in heaven.” Many such promises there are, but our Lord brings them together here, in this condensed repetition, in order that the scattered rays, being thus focused, may have more power to illuminate with certitude, and to warm into hope.

2. Now it is to be noticed that the two askings which are spoken of here are expressed by different words in the Greek. Our English word “ask” means two things, either “to question” or “to request”; to ask in the sense of interrogating, in order to get information and teaching, or in the sense of beseeching, in order to get gifts. In the former sense the word is employed in the first clause of our text, and in the second sense it is employed in the central portion of it. Christ does not distinguish between two epochs in Christian experience; in the earlier and more imperfect one, prayer being offered to Christ, in the later and perfected one, prayer being offered directly to the Father. There is not in this verse a contrast drawn between asking the Son, which shall cease, and asking the Father, which shall begin; but the first half of the verse closes the declaration of one blessing, namely, that hereafter they shall be so taught by the Spirit as to have nothing further to inquire; the second half of the verse begins the declaration of a new blessing, that whatsoever they shall seek from the Father, He will give it them in the Son’s name.

There are then two things here as the marks of the Christian life all through the ages: the cessation of the ignorant questions addressed to a present Christ, and the satisfaction of desires. These may be conveniently studied under the headings given by Godet:—

I. Fulness of Knowledge.

II. Fulness of Power.

I

Fulness of Knowledge

“And in that day ye shall ask me nothing.”

When our Lord went in and out among His disciples, He was their Prophet and Teacher in this way, that, if they wanted to know anything, the meaning of a place in Scripture, the right and wrong of what was being done, or the like—anything, in short, concerning their duty—they might go straight to Him and ask Him a question about it, as the Jews of old asked the prophets who were among them. And so in the Gospel history we find them continually doing this. Now what a great and unspeakable privilege this was, we all in some sort understand and feel at once. We know what a loss it is, when we are forced to part from some parent or friend, a frail mortal like ourselves, only a little better and wiser. How much more, when they had to part from Him who is perfect and infinite Goodness and Wisdom.

The state of things which was passing was the old familiar intercourse, the questions and the answers of the daily life. The relation of the Lord to His followers, as that of teacher and disciples, made the asking of questions the most natural thing in the world. As a matter of fact, we find in the Gospels that this is what the disciples were constantly doing. It might be a question of failure on their part: “Lord, why could not we cast it out?” It might be a moment of danger, as on the lake, when the disciples did not fall to prayer, but awoke their sleeping Lord: “Master, carest thou not that we perish?” It might be some far-reaching question: “Lord, are there few that be saved?” It might be some suggested limitation of their loyalty: “Lord, why cannot I follow thee now?” Especially in the last discourses recorded by St. John do we find such questions, implied or expressed. There was the question of St. Thomas, who wanted to tie our Lord down to definiteness of statement: “Lord, we know not whither thou goest; how know we the way?” There was the implied question of Philip, echoing the world-wide difficulty that besets the government of the world: “Lord, shew us the Father, and it sufficeth us.” There was the question of the other Judas, with its shadow of the agelong perplexity, as to election and predestination: “Lord, how is it that thou wilt manifest thyself unto us, and not unto the world?” And even as our Lord was speaking there was a question, as to the meaning of certain words of His, which was in the hearts, and almost on; the lips, of the whole body of the Apostles: “Jesus perceived that they were desirous to ask him, and he said unto them, Do ye inquire among yourselves concerning this, that I said, A little I while, and ye behold me not; and again a little while, and ye shall see me?” And then the Lord gave them for answer the assurance that though they should be sorrowful, their sorrow should be turned into joy. Thus were the disciples constantly in the habit, as was natural, of asking questions. Often the Lord’s answers seem to be purposely indirect and even evasive, but they always had reference to the particular difficulty that had been expressed. Now, the old privileged state of things, the easy, natural intercourse, was to cease. No longer would the disciples be able to turn to a present Master in time of perplexity or moment of danger. No longer would they hear the familiar accents speaking in answer to their questionings. It would be strange if the passing away of the old intercourse did not seem to the disciples to be all loss. For what condition of things could possibly seem to them better than the old? 1 [Note: A. E. Coulthard, in The Record, 1908, p. 508.]

It is under these circumstances that Christ pronounces the words: “In that day ye shall ask me nothing.” Are we, then, to understand the words as words of discouragement to the already depressed disciples, or may we take them as words of the deepest comfort: “In that day ye shall ask me nothing, because everything will be revealed to you”?

1. “ In that day.”—That day broke at the Resurrection and attained its settled light at Pentecost. Then “the hour came” from which things would be as they are here described. In the occasional intercourse of the forty days the disciples did ask something and hear something as of old, yet the former day of living and conversing together was over, and the new day had begun. Only there was granted an intervening period of twilight in which the Presence, shown at unexpected moments and vanishing from sight, and sometimes rather felt than seen, prepared them for that other kind of seeing and for that other kind of intercourse which were to ensue and to endure.

Christ would no longer be with the faithful as a personal earthly Teacher. He had been with the Apostles, but He could teach them only in proverbs. The spiritual meaning of His words lay hidden from them. They had brought to Him many a question which He had to set aside, because they were incapable of receiving the answer. When He was risen from the dead, He would open their understanding to understand the Scriptures. They should not look to Him then for details of accidental difficulty, but would recognize the illumination of Divine Sonship, the power of the Holy Ghost, speaking within their hearts. Then would the prophet’s word be fulfilled: “They shall be all taught of God.”

The day of the new dispensation is while Christ is with the Father. It begins to dawn when the heavens open to receive Him. It has no ending. It is the day which is as the light of seven days, the perfect illumination of grace. Christ is with the Father. The Father’s Wisdom is the Head of the Church. The Spirit of Wisdom is the Life of the Church. The supernatural consciousness is the light which fills the souls of the regenerate as “the children of the day.” It is a light which is at once moral, intellectual, spiritual. That day is a day of moral power, such as the world has never known before. Christ is Himself the Light of the conscience, shining within the heart, lifting up the faithful to delight in that which is worthy of man. No civilization previously had elevated mankind as the brightness of this light elevates. It elevates all of every class, for all are invited to walk in the light of the Lord. It is a day of intellectual light. Earlier ages witnessed the brute strength of human nature, leaving monuments behind which should endure for ages. The day of Christ would see man raised to a mastery of mind over matter. The secrets of nature would be unfolded. The elements of science were to be learnt as never before, under the discipline of the Christian Church. The spiritual light of the coming day would, however, be its true glory. God would be known in His personal Sovereignty, and in His relation to the world as Creator, Redeemer, Sanctifier. Man would be conscious of himself as belonging to a higher order of existence than could find a home within this present world. The faithful would find their true joy in that God lifted up upon them the light of His countenance. 1 [Note: R. M. Benson, The Final Passover, ii. (pt. ii.) 276.]

2. “ Ye shall ask me nothing.”—Christ’s promise to His disciples in this place is that a time shall come to them when they shall no longer be questioners; when they shall have no necessity to be questioners; when they shall know all things, and not need any man to teach them. Christ was proclaiming progress and not retrogression when He said: “In that day ye shall ask me no more questions.”

It is better for a boy to puzzle out the meaning of a Latin book by his own brains and the help of a dictionary than lazily to use an interlinear translation. And, though we do not always feel it, and are often tempted to think how blessed it would be if we had an infallible Teacher visible here at our sides, it is a great deal better for us that we have not, and it is a step in advance that He has gone away. Many eager and honest Christian souls, hungering after certainty and rest, have cast themselves in these latter days into the arms of an infallible Church. I doubt whether any such questioning mind has found what it sought; and I am sure that it has taken a step downwards, in passing from the spiritual guidance realized by our own honest industry and earnest use of the materials supplied to us in Christ’s word, to any external authority which comes to us to save us the trouble of thinking, and to confirm to us truth which we have not made our own by search and effort. 2 [Note: A. Maclaren.]

(1) In place of the former questioning, we have a completed revelation.—Great and wonderful and unspeakably precious as were and are the words of Jesus Christ, His deeds are far more so. The death of Christ has told us things that Christ before His death could not tell. The resurrection of Christ has cast light upon all the darkest places of man’s destiny which Christ, before His resurrection, could not by any words so illuminate. The ascension of Christ has opened doors for thought, for faith, for hope, which were fast closed, notwithstanding all His teachings, until He had burst them asunder and passed to His throne.

Breezes of spring, all earth to life awaking,—

Birds swiftly soaring through the sunny sky,—

The butterfly its lonely prison breaking,—

The seed upspringing, which had seemed to die,—

Types such as these a word of hope have spoken,

Have shed a gleam of light around the tomb;

But weary hearts longed for a surer token,

A clearer ray, to dissipate its gloom.

And this was granted! See the Lord ascending,

On crimson clouds of evening calmly borne,

With hands outstretched, and looks of love still bending

On His bereaved ones, who no longer mourn.

“I am the Resurrection,” hear Him saying;

“I am the Life; he who believes in Me

Shall never die,—the souls My call obeying,

Soon, where I am, for evermore shall be.”

Sing Hallelujah! light from Heaven appearing,

The mystery of life and death is plain;

Now to the grave we can descend unfearing,

In sure and certain hope to rise again! 1 [Note: Jane Borthwick.]

(2) We have an inward Teacher.—We have a Divine Spirit who will come to us if we will, and teach us, blessing the exercise of our own faculties, and guiding us, not, indeed, into the uniform perception of the intellectual aspects of Christian truth, but into the apprehension and the loving possession, as a power in our lives, of all the truth that we need to mould our characters and to raise us to the likeness of Himself. Only, let us remember what such a method of teaching demands from us. It requires that we honestly use the revelation that is given us; it requires that we loyally, lovingly, trustfully, submit ourselves to the teaching of that Spirit who will dwell in us; it requires that we bring our lives up to the height of our present knowledge, and make everything that we know a factor in shaping what we do and what we are.

If we would know truth, we must not expect to advance by intellectual certainty, but by spiritual power. The truth must be a life. As we live true to His ascended Being, we find the power of that life. The Spirit of Truth is the Spirit of Life, so that, as we live by His inspirations, we are taught the fulness of His mysteries. 1 [Note: R. M. Benson, The Final Passover, ii. (pt. ii.) 280.]

Up, and away!

Thy Saviour’s gone before,

Why dost thou stay,

Dull soul? Behold, the door

Is open, and His precepts bid thee rise,

Whose power hath vanquished all thine enemies.

In vain thou say’st

Thou art buried with thy Saviour,

If thou delay’st

To show by thy behaviour,

That thou art risen with Him. Till thou shine

Like Him, how canst thou say His light is thine?

Open thine eyes,

Sin-seized soul, and see

What cobweb ties

They are that trammel thee;

Not profit, pleasure, honours, as thou thinkest,

But loss, pain, shame, at which thou vainly winkest.

All that is good

Thy Saviour dearly bought

With His heart’s blood,

And it must then be sought,

Where He keeps residence, who rose this day;

Linger no longer then; up, and away! 2 [Note: G. Herbert.]

II

Fulness of Power

“Verily, verily, I say unto you, If ye shall ask anything of the Father, he will give it you in my name.”

The second feature of the apostolic illumination mentioned by Jesus in the text is unlimited influence with God through prayer. The Apostles were to have at command the whole power of God; the power of miracles, to heal diseases; of prophecy, to foretell things to come bearing on the Church’s interest, which it was desirable that believers should know; of providence, to make all events subservient to their well-being, and that of the cause in which they laboured. Except the miraculous elements, which most Protestants agree in regarding as peculiar to the apostolic age, this magnificent promise of Jesus is made to all who aspire to Christian manhood, and is fulfilled to all who reach it.

1. The security of the promise.—It has been remarked, and with much truth, that whenever our Lord would declare some very important fact or doctrine, such as might be considered a fundamental truth of Christianity, or a law of His spiritual kingdom, He invariably prefaced His declaration with the emphatic words, “Verily, verily.” If, when we read the New Testament, we note the passages in which these reiterated words occur, we see that they are always in connexion with some important Christian truth. In point of fact, it is no exaggeration to say that we might condense the distinctive teaching of Christianity in the few verses which are prefaced with these particles of speech, and draw up from them a succinct summary of those essential verities of the Christian creed which we hold to be necessary to our salvation. 1 [Note: Dean F. Pigon, Faith and Practice, 246.]

Shortly before His ascension to glory, when He would comfort His disciples in their sorrow at the prospect of His near departure, when He would encourage them to brave all the tribulation through which they must pass for His sake, Christ, in revealing to them the truth of His mighty intercession for them at the Throne of Grace, and for all prayerful Christians in all ages, emphasizes His declaration concerning prayer, and thus seems to give it a prominent place in the system of Christianity. He confirms His promise by an oath, that by these two immutable things which cannot be broken, His promise and His oath, we might have the strong consolation that our prayers penetrate through the clouds into the ears of the Lord of hosts. We are to pray, building our heart’s trust on the word and oath of the Lord, and not doubting that our prayers are heard. To doubt Christ’s words, spoken with so much solemnity, as the culminating word of admonition before He returned to the Father, is to plunge into a miserable unbelief from which nothing can extricate us.

There was that about Christ’s “Verily, verily I say unto you” which seemed to carry conviction and allay the spirit of controversy. The way in which the early Church used to “remember the words of the Lord Jesus” speaks volumes for the vividness of the impression which those words made on those who first heard them. We cannot now reproduce that impression or even imagine it with any great success; but if we wish to do full justice to the situation, we must allow for the result produced, and give to it the weight which it deserves. 1 [Note: W. B. Selbie, Aspects of Christ, 163.]

2. The comprehensiveness of the promise.—Christ’s words are: “If ye shall ask anything of the Father, he will give it you in my name.”

(1) God is not only able but willing to give all that is asked of Him. It is nothing for Him to give. He delights to give. It is the joy of the Divine life to be giving all the while.

The most delightsome day in the life of the Empress Josephine, as she wrote in one of her letters, was when, coming through the Alps with her husband, she was left for a little while to rest in a humble cottage. She saw that the eyes of the lonely woman there were stained with tears and asked her trouble. The woman said it was poverty. “How much,” asked Josephine, “would relieve it?” “Oh,” she said, “there is no relieving it; it would require four hundred francs to save our little vineyard and our goats.” Josephine counted out of her purse the four hundred francs into the woman’s lap, who gathered them together, and fell down and kissed her feet. 2 [Note: D. J. Burrell, The Verilies of Jesus, 141.]

(2) The promise to prayer is not limited to any special class of subjects. It includes all things, both temporal and eternal, material and spiritual. The objects of the outer creation are not unworthy to be the gifts of God, for they are the creatures of God. He created them for us. He created us and them for His only begotten Son. No created object has any end short of the glory of Christ. Consequently there is nothing that is beyond the circle of legitimate prayer. We are too apt to doubt whether we may pray for temporal mercies. The real reason is that we doubt whether all created things are really worthy of God as their Creator. He who created them with a purpose can use them for the highest of all purposes. The universe is one, but manifold. It has unity of purpose, from God in Christ. It has unity of purpose, for God in Christ. We must be careful to remember that we cannot take anything out of its place in creation. It will work for the glory of Christ; and if we will use it for Christ’s glory, we shall share in its blessing. If, however, we suppose that these meaner things are just created for our indulgence, and use them for the purposes of our sin, then we set them apart from the dispensation of God’s love, and must get them how and whence we can; and instead of finding a blessing if we do acquire them, we shall find that they have turned to be to us a curse. If only the necessities of earth drove us to live more conscientiously for the glory of God, we should find that the weariness of earth, instead of dragging us down, would urge us to efforts more worthy of heaven.

A prayer of the Athenians: “Rain, rain, O dear Zeus, down on the ploughed fields of the Athenians, and on the plains.” In truth we ought not to pray at all, or we ought to pray in this simple and noble fashion. 1 [Note: Marcos Aurelius.]

Prayer can obtain everything; it can open the windows of heaven, and shut the gates of hell; it can put a holy constraint upon God, and detain an angel till he leave a blessing; it can open the treasures of rain, and soften the iron ribs of rocks, till they melt into tears and a flowing river: prayer can unclasp the girdles of the North, saying to a mountain of ice, “Be thou removed thence, and cast into the bottom of the sea”; it can arrest the sun in the midst of his course, and send the swift-winged winds upon our errand; and all those strange things, and secret decrees, and unrevealed transactions which are above the clouds and far beyond the regions of the stars, shall combine in ministry and advantages for the praying Man_1:1 [Note: Jeremy Taylor.]

3. The conditions of the promise.—There are no absolute conditions laid down in the text, but there are two conditions implied.

(1) It is by the next word in His promise that Christ brings us to the full meaning and the very heart of prayer. God will give those things which we really ask of Him as God: “Whatsoever things ye ask the Father.” If prayer be, as the Intercessor of our race always teaches, nothing but the going of the children to the Father to ask of Him what they need, it is an action of faith and self-sacrifice. “Our Father” must be the beginning of it. “Thy will be done” must be its centre. In the Divine relationship of the members of a family to one another we have the standing parable of prayer.

Could there be any character attributed to God in which we would rather approach Him? What attribute would so well imply His love and regard for our interests as His paternal relation to us? Earthly fathers give not their sons stones when they ask for bread, or a serpent instead of a fish; if, then, they “being evil know how to give good gifts unto their children, how much more shall our heavenly Father give good gifts to them that ask him?”

From Him all Fatherhood in heaven and earth gets its name. And fatherhood at its best, as we know it, is but a faint adumbration of what it means in its perfection in God of love and solicitude, will and power to help the children who are His own. And that is what men and women are, not mere intricate inventions, mechanical toys playing their little part in this great machine, the world, but God’s children with points of affinity in their nature with His own, and capable of fellowship with Him. And so to understand the relations of God to man and man to God, you have not to go to the models in the pattern shop, or to the factory with its operatives, or to the court-house with its laws, or even to the palace with its rooms of state and subjects in obeisance before their monarch. But go to the home, go to the nursery; see a father with his children, ay, better still, a mother with her prattling little ones with a thousand requests a day, and learn there what God is. 2 [Note: R. J. Drummond, Faith’s Perplexities, 183.]

Our soul is so specially loved of Him that is highest, that it overpasseth the knowing of all creatures—that is to say, there is no creature that is made that may fully know how much and how sweetly and how tenderly our Maker loveth us. And therefore we may with grace and His help stand in spiritual beholding, with everlasting marvel of this high, overpassing, inestimable love that Almighty God hath to us of His goodness. And therefore we may ask of our Lover with reverence all that we will. 1 [Note: Julian the Anchoress.]

(2) Our petitions are answered “in the name of Christ.” The reading, “He will give it you in my name,” is preferable to the reading of the Authorized Version, “Whatsoever ye shall ask in my name.”

We could make no claim to the smallest gift of God if Christ had not died, if Christ had not risen again—died for our sins, risen again for our justification; if Christ had not ascended to the right hand of the Father; if He were not there even now, our Mediator, our Intercessor, our Advocate, our High Priest. We must recognize that in Christ, and only in Christ, God is perfectly well pleased; and in us only so far as we are found in Him; that all our acceptance with God, all our right to be heard by God, rests solely and exclusively on the work for sinners which Christ once accomplished on Calvary, and is evermore pleading in heaven.

But the fact that the Father gives in the name of Christ, by whom He made, sustains, and governs the world, and through whom all His redeeming love is manifested to His earthly children, presupposes that they present their requests through Him as their Mediator—that is, in His name. Our prayer goes up through the same channel through which God’s gifts come down. He who would receive from God in Christ’s name must pray Christ’s prayer, “Not my will, but thine be done.” And then, though many wishes may be unanswered, and many weak petitions unfulfilled, and many desires unsatisfied, the essential spirit of the prayer will be answered, and, His will being done in us and on us, our wishes will acquiesce in it and desire nothing besides. To him who can thus pray in Christ’s name in the deepest sense, and after Christ’s pattern, every door in God’s treasure-house flies open, and he may take as much of the treasure as he desires. The Master bends lovingly over such a soul, and with outstretched hand says, “What wilt thou that I should do unto thee? Be it unto thee even as thou wilt.”

We all know with what confidence the clerk of a business house goes to a bank with a draft “in the name” of his firm. If he were to present it in his own name, that would be a very different affair. The demand made on behalf of the firm is instantly honoured. We can see that there is all the difference in this instance between acting in a private, and acting in a public capacity. To ask as belonging to a business corporation for the purposes of that corporation is one thing. To ask as a private individual, with merely personal ends in view, is quite another thing. 1 [Note: A. W. Robinson, The Voice of Joy and Health, 68.]

The Day of Knowledge and Power

Literature

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