Clough John Lesson 51
The
New Commandment – John
Tonight we continue our study in the Gospel
of John, the end of John 13. The section
we are studying is from John 13:31 to 14:31 and it’s entitled the New
Commandment, in which the Lord Jesus Christ gives the essence of the New
Covenant which says that Christians are to love one another after the model of
the cross. You’ll notice the command
again is given toward the end of chapter 13, John
So what is this commandment; we want to go a little deeper. This is the commandment which many cite humanistically as what is needed in the Church and therefore there are a lot of people trying to emphasize that it’s not doctrine, it’s love that counts, forcing an antinomy between the two, that one cannot have doctrine and love, it must be a choice between the two. And of course this is totally misreading the commandment. This is a commandment that depends upon doctrine; you have to have doctrine for the model, you can’t have this kind of love apart from a doctrinal understanding of what Christ has done on the cross. So the very form in verse 34 is given proves that the commandment originates and is possible only to those who have Bible doctrine and understand something of what Jesus Christ has done. No person who is a novice believer can carry out verse 34.
Now notice believers can be kind to each other, they can be polite, they can be courteous, they can emote with other believers, but they cannot love in this way. And what passes for this kind of love is not this kind of love. There is a great, great deal of sloppiness in our circles, fundamental evangelical circles, about this love business. And it’s gotten out of hand. What we have are a group of legalists who are going around and because they have some gooey personality over here that everybody else has to be a gooey personality or you don’t love Scripturally, and they try to mold, love has to have certain forms; well obviously it does have to have Scriptural forms, but they go beyond Scripture and insist that if real love is there, then you would have to satisfy all of their approbation lust, and therefore somebody with a great approbation lust completely out of it, they show up in some Christian group and say well nobody in that Christian group loves me, and sit around and whine and cry and so on, which only shows you that that person is filled with mental attitude sins of envy, of jealousy, self-pity and so on. Because we do not have five people glad-handing them at the door this means that there is no love in the congregation or some other idiot criterion of love. Next time you are around these crybabies that are always worried about no one loving them, ask them to spell out what they mean. We want specifics and we want Scriptural specifics and when you ask the question on that term all of a sudden you draw a big long silent blank because they have no idea of what they’re talking about; nothing!
So we want to clarify this kind of love, we want to ask some questions about this; in fact, we’re going to ask three questions tonight about the commandment of verse 34 by way of introduction to continuing our exegesis of the text. The first question we want to ask is: if the command says love as I have loved you, then how did Christ love? That’s obviously a key question to carry out verse 34, how did Christ love us? And when we begin to ask this we are face to face with the essence of God. Jesus Christ is true humanity, Jesus Christ is full deity, Jesus Christ is sovereign, He is righteous, He is just, He is loving, He is omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent, immutable and eternal. These are the attributes of Christ’s character. And when Christ loved these attributes are automatically involved. So if we are going to understand how it is that Christ loved us we have to go back to the doctrine of God and what He is. Now the first way, there are several ways we can answer the question, how did Christ love us, I’m going to answer it in three parts using three attributes to show you why doctrine is necessary in order to love one another according to this new commandment.
The first thing is that Jesus Christ loved out of His sovereignty; Jesus Christ chose His sheep. That was clear from John 10, so it shows that love proceeds from personal choice. Jesus Christ was not compelled to love anyone, He chose whom He wished to love and whom He did not wish to love; that was His choice. It was not the choice of the person who is being loved; that is a very critical point. Christ loved us out of His sovereignty. So the people who are the sheep, whether we like it or not, they are people whom Christ has chosen to love, and there may be some clod over here who is a sheep, and somebody else over here looking at the clod and says I can’t stand this person. Tough! Christ chose that person and Christ chose out of His sovereignty to love that person and that is to figure in the application of verse 34. Christ sovereignly has chosen clods and that means, therefore, something about our response to clods.
A second attribute of God that is involved here is that Jesus Christ gave the greatest thing that He had, which was His life, for His sheep. So out of His love, or out of, we’ll say His grace, He loves. Love, the attribute of love here, thinking in terms of the fact it’s undeserved, Jesus Christ had to become true humanity in order to have nephesh, if Jesus Christ had incarnated Himself as an angel, such as the Molek Yahweh of the Old Testament, angels don’t have nephesh, He would have nothing to give, but Jesus Christ incarnated Himself in a humanity so that He would have infinite nephesh and therefore have something in order to give and if He had something in order to give of this magnitude He can show His love. Said another way, only as a man could Jesus show love. As an angel He couldn’t; as a man He could. Why? Because by the biblical definition of life, life is spirit in a body; man is spirit in a body, an angel is pure spirit and has no body, therefore it can’t have a spirit in the body and therefore it can’t have life. So angels are not living, technically, according to Scripture, only men are. Therefore because Christ is true humanity He has something to give and He has what is the most costly thing inside creation, nephesh. And throughout the Old Testament Law there is nothing more costly than nephesh. There is so much money given for property, so much money given for virginity, so much money given for something else in the restitution laws of the Old Testament but nowhere is human life ever priced in the Mosaic Law because human life has infinite cost. Therefore Jesus Christ loved graciously, He gave the most expensive thing He had to those whom He loved. So it obviously shows you that giving is involved in love.
A third way in which Christ loved and will
also give insight into this commandment is that He loved out of His
omniscience. He knew how to express His
love toward the object of His love. And
this meant that with some He had to be rough; with others He has to be
gentle. Sometimes He has to be rough,
other times He has to be gentle with the same person. In other words, the love functions in a wise
way. How has Christ loved us? He has loved us in varying modes. Hebrews 12 says He loves us and He almost
beats us to death. That’s what the word
says, “whom God loves He chastens,” He’s a hard-nose with them. And at other times, like in John 14 He can be
extremely tender and gentle. Picture,
for example, Jesus with Mary at
Now He says “love one another,” this obviously means love believers. Verse 34 is not… repeat, is not talking about loving all men; it is only believers that are included in the new commandment. Now this has great offense to some, that the gentle Jesus would argue that you are not to love all men. That’s correct; you are to love men with discrimination. You love the believers as Christ has loved those believers. Now why? So we come to the second question; the first question was how did Christ love.
The second question is how does this love toward the brethren differ from love toward men in general. And here, I think, we come to a profound point that if you capture it should unlock the keys to verse 34 for you. We’re going to unlock the key by trying to answer this question. How does this new commandment of love toward believers only differ from the general command to love all men? There’s obviously a difference, Christ is making a big point of the difference, but what is the difference. Let’s go to “all men” and contrast. All men, saved and unsaved, Christians and non-Christian, they are to be loved in a general way because they are made in the image of God; that’s taught in James, it’s taught in various other passages of Scripture. We are to love all men in the sense we respect the imagehood of God in those men. The person may be a ranting raving atheist, the person may be a person in extreme carnality but they are still someone made in God’s image and we are ordered to respect that image in them.
Now comes the tricky part. Why cannot the kind of love that’s mentioned in verse 34 be directed to non-Christians? Here’s why; take a person on negative volition who rejects Jesus Christ; they go on through time until the point of their death. At the time of their death the go to hell. Now the kind of love that is commanded in verse 34 is a love that loves on the sweep of eternity, that loves in a permanent way. And if a person were commanded to love all men this way, after this point was reached and judgment began on the soul of the one of negative volition, the love would then turn to treachery in God’s sight. For to love those who are in final rebellion against Christ is no longer love in God’s sight; it’s treachery, it’s being a traitor because now our love, we have locked down to a love relationship with someone who is traveling in an opposite direction in all eternity. How can that be? Well, it can’t be and that’s why verse 34 limits this love to believers and believers only. It is limited to those who will be with us forever and ever and ever. That’s the principle and that’s why this love is selective. It is directed to only those who are going to wind up in God’s presence. The elect, then, are the only men we can love without compromise. That’s why this command is directed only to the elect; only the elect are the men who can be loved without compromising God’s righteousness and His justice. So that’s the answer to the second question; how does this kind of love differ from the love to the brethren, what’s the difference in the base; it’s a love that looks forward to being forever and ever with this kind of person. That should shed some light on the kind of love in verse 34. It is looking at it from eternity. We’ll amplify that point as we go on in Peter’s dialogue with Jesus here.
The third question. The first question was how did Christ love? The second question, how does this love toward the brethren differ from love toward men in general? And now the third question is why is this commandment new? Why was this commandment given before? Why, as every time John mentions it he mentions it as a “new commandment,” something that apparently was not possible until this point in history. The answer has to do with Jeremiah 31:34 and the doctrine of the New Covenant. The answer, broadly speaking, has to do with revelation. Jesus Christ is the highest most complete revelation, in fact, He is the final revelation of God. By this Christians have always indicated over the centuries that Christ is the final prophet; there is no need for a Mohammed, there is not need for Bahiullah, there is no need for Maharishi, or TM or any of the other Christ-replacements. Christ is the final revelation of God and because Christ is the final revelation of God we have something seen in God through Christ that wasn’t seen in the Old Testament, and therefore whatever it is that we see in Christ that we didn’t see in the Old Testament has something to do with the commandment being new.
What is it that we see in Jesus that we did not see in the Old Testament? The extreme love of God. Love of God is present in the Old Testament but never to the degree of dying for the sin Himself. Never to the degree we have just noticed in John 13 of stripping down to the uniform of a slave and washing the feet of believers. The God of the Old Testament, who is Jesus incidentally, is Yahweh Jesus, but He’s not yet revealed Himself because He hasn’t yet died on the cross, and therefore in the Old Testament there is no model. That’s why, there’s only a partial model in the Old Testament but with the cross and with the final redemptive act of Jesus Christ we have an adequate model so that now there can be a commandment.
This is why in Jeremiah 34:31 there is said
to happen in the future when the New Covenant comes, “They shall teach no more
every man his neighbor, and every man his brother, saying, Know the LORD: for
they shall al know Me,” now that is a rare expression in Old Testament
theology. Very rarely do you ever have
it said in the Old Testament that men know God.
That’s very interesting. Always
you have Yahweh knows men, the Lord looketh upon the heart of man, Yahweh knows
Last time I showed you later on in the discourse, what is Jesus going to say? Before you were slaves, now He says, I call you My friends. The believers are placed in a new relationship with God because God, so to speak, has exposed His heart to man and until God exposed His heart to man in the cross and what He did there, until He did this we couldn’t know Him, really. It took time in history, centuries of time in history for God to work things out to the fact that where He clearly exposed His character to the human race. Very carefully He worked, century after century, sequencing His revelation so that at one point He emphasized this, at another point He emphasized this, at another point He emphasized something until finally He got down to the cross. And then that was to be the grand finale of all revelation and with that we know God. And we’re going to see that Jesus picked the theme up of the New Covenant in John 14. Thomas, He says, you know the way. And He’s going to discuss this with Philip. That dialogue that is going on between Thomas, Philip and Jesus, is based on this New Covenant passage, based on the fact that now something new has happened, now men can really know God.
Let’s turn back and go through the dialogue that occurred in those last hours of Jesus’ life on earth, at least His life on earth in a mortal body. John 13:35, “By this shall all men now that you are My disciples, if you have lone one to another. Now please notice something; verse 35 presupposes exactly what verse 34 presupposes. Verse 35 is not saying that the average hotten-tots out in the middle of the wilderness some place is going to understand immediately the gospel because he sees somebody being nice to somebody. That’s not it at all. This passage presupposes two things: It presupposes that the observer, who is an unbeliever in this case, the observer has heard the message of the cross. So this verse, like verse 34, presupposes an adequate doctrinal exposure…it presupposes that. And then the second thing is that it sees Christians acting on the basis of doctrine; in other words, Christians are acting to other Christians as though they really believe the consequences of the cross. And so what verse 35 is arguing is that the outside external observer can put one and one together and get two, namely he sees the message of the cross and he sees men acting one to another as though that’s true.
Now I prepared you when I asked the question, how does this love differ from love to all men. And I did that because when we get to verse 35 I want you to see that there’s something scary about it, not to us, but to the non-Christian observer who’s doing this. You might think, from reading verse 35, without too much thought, that well, they would say, isn’t this wonderful. We have these people of good will one to another, this just tickles my heart and everybody is all warm and cozy because of this. Not at all; not at all! This kind of love that believers have one to another is highly disturbing to the outside observer; because he notices it, it is only to believers.
It’s discriminatory love and it’s to precipitate and put pressure on the non-Christian observer, that he feels excluded from this. How come he isn’t part of the circles of this; why is it this love isn’t directed to him, the implication being well, friend, maybe you ought to ask the question; maybe you aren’t right in the position of God loving you right now. Maybe God hates you. These people have openly identified themselves with Jesus Christ and they have proved that they are acceptable because they have received Christ and the work of the Holy Spirit is being done in their life. And therefore there is this union between them; they can have their family squabbles but there’s a basic unity between them. If you don’t have this unity it simply shows you’re excluded from the club, and you’d better, if you’re intelligent, you’d better do some questioning what this means for you in eternity. So verse 35, far from being a nice verse to create a nice feeling in unbelievers is to threaten them, unnerve them, cause them to question deeply why they are not involved in this reciprocity, this kind of love that’s going on between one believer and another.
Then we begin a series of discourses in verse 36, from John 13:36 to John 14:4, we have Peter; in verses 5-7 we have Thomas; in verses 8-10 we have Philip. So we have three disciples that are going to engage in a dialogue with Jesus on this matter of the new commandment. Now John, as he always does, remembers back to those days and pulls out some history for us, a very abbreviated version of what went on But John is so perceptive and the Holy Spirit was so great when He worked this revelation out that John, by taking one question of Peter, one question of Thomas, one question of Philip, is actually justifying the existence of the whole Church Age. He’s simply taking an innocent question and that question turns out not to be so innocent at all but sovereignly arranged by God at that moment in the last supper, so that when those disciples dropped the question it was a question that would be asked again and again and again by thousands of men, not just Peter, thousands of men would ask this same question. And so the Holy Spirit has included both the question and Jesus’ answer in the text of Scripture, so that when thousands of men later on ask this same question, all they have to do is turn to the Scripture to find the answer.
The question, John 13:36, “Simon Peter said unto Him, Lord, where are You going? Jesus answered him, Where I am going, you cannot follow Me now; but you shall follow Me afterwards. [37] Peter said unto Him, Lord, why can’t I follow You right now? I will lay down my life for Your sake. [38] Jesus answered him, Will you lay down your life for My sake? Verily, verily, I say unto you, The cock shall not crow, till you have denied me three time. [14:1] Let not your heart be troubled; ye believe in God, believe also in Me. [2] In My Father’s house are many mansions; if it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you. [3] And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again, and receive you unto Myself, that where I am, there you may be also. [4] And where I go you know, and the way you know.”
Never divide this chapter. Remember chapter breaks are not inspired; this is part of the same answer He gave to Peter. And it all flows from Peter’s original question. Don’t cut off verse 1-4 of chapter 14 as though it’s some new discourse Jesus launched out on. Not at all, it’s an answer to Peter’s question. So what then is the question? Let’s look at that question? “Lord, where are You going?” Why did Peter ask a question like that? Well obviously he’s asking why is the Messiah not going to stay around. In Jewish theology the Jew was confused at this time because it was complex. Prophecy had not been fulfilled and there were these intermingling themes in prophecy and it was all tangled together and it looked like Messiah would come, Messiah would do something, suffer?, and there was a question mark on this, and then He would go and somehow form the kingdom and there would be glory. Now there’s a question how to relate these two and you know, guess whose epistle it is in the New Testament where he says you know, the prophets had a bad time in the Old Testament, they couldn’t sort out these themes. Do you know where that’s found? 1 Peter. So Peter evidently thought this pressure of Lord, I know what the Messiah is supposed to do but it just doesn’t seem right; you know, You’ve done all this work, you’ve gathered us together here, you’ve raised Lazarus from the dead outside of the city, you’ve come into the city, we’ve had Palm Sunday, we’ve had all these things, You’re fulfilling type after type, prophecy after prophecy, and You’re going to go some place.
So what is this question really, really about? The delay or the gap between the First and Second Advent of Christ. The absentee Christ, that’s what it’s all about; why is Christ absent. Why is He gone, and men in the 20th century are asking the same question Peter is asking and it’s even more urgent, why has Jesus stayed away for 19 centuries? What’s taking Him so long? Why is this gap of time so important? And then Jesus says to probably further stimulate Peter’s question, “Where I am going you cannot follow Me now,” Peter, notice Jesus qualifies it, before when He said to the Jews He said I’m going to My place and you can’t follow Me and you won’t be able to find the way, but Jesus qualifies it, Peter, you can’t follow it now, and the Greek word “now” looks like this, nun, I point that out because there’s a little shift in the Greek that shows you something of Peter’s character. Jesus qualifies it and He says “now,” it’s the normal word for “now.” “But you will follow Me after,” so there’s a gap, “afterwards,” Peter, you’ll follow Me but there’ll be a delay.
John 13:37, “Peter said unto Him, Lord, why can’t I follow Thee now?” And the English translation has it looking like it’s the same adverb in the Greek but it’s not, arti, and this means right now. Now doesn’t that bespeak Peter’s character that we’ve seen before. Remember at the table the scene, Peter thought some hot little tidbit was going on between John and Jesus and he’s frantic, hey, hey, tell me, tell me what’s going on! And the same here, Lord, why can’t I do it right now. That’s Peter’s character, impatience. So here we have a theological problem that basically is rooted in impatience. And this is what the Holy Spirit is showing us in the text. Why do men rail at God for delaying the Second Return of Christ for 19 centuries? Because there is in us what was in Peter’s soul, we want everything right now, particularly in the American soul that we want everything right now. So Jesus, through using Peter as a model for the rest of us, He’s simply saying you see, this theological question is asked out of the impatience of your own nature, you want everything now.
And then Peter goes on to display even more of his soul and even more of his soul and even more of why this theological question gets asked. “Lord, I’ll lay down my life for Your sake.” That was very nice of Peter to offer to do that but again John the Apostle is using irony. In the light of the passion narrative and in the light of what you know is going to happen a few hours beyond this, don’t you detect almost an innocent blasphemy on Peter’s part. He uses the word for substitution, I’ll lay down my life in Your place, “for You,” in your place. If that doesn’t speak of an innocent remark of salvation by works I don’t know what does, of man with his own resources solving his own problems without Christ having to pay a price at all. Peter wants to protect Jesus from getting His feet dirty. Remember, You’re not going to wash my feet, I’m not going to have the Lord down washing my big toe; that was Peter’s attitude and it comes out again here. Lord, I’m not going to have you dying for me, I’ll die for you instead. Now that sounds to the natural man to be very majestic, very honorable and in God’s sight it stinks; it’s works, and it draws back from Jesus a rebuke so sharp that Peter is hurt for the rest of the upper room discourse and though other men talk to Jesus, Peter shuts up, which is rare. He shuts up and you never hear him again. So Jesus cut off this tendency and it’s that same tendency, the impatience; Lord, if you did it our way it would be so much more efficient. That’s what the perpetual sanctification and salvation by works does. And of course I leave it to your own imagination to apply it to the appropriate areas of your own soul.
John 13:38, “Jesus answered him,” and He rebuked him, it was very sharp, very much to the point, “oh you are, you’re going to lay down your life for My sake,” it’s sarcasm, the question is asked in sarcasm. Notice, this is Jesus loving Peter. Since we are in the context of verse 34 please notice that the Lord Jesus manifests His love to Peter in a very, what we would say, brutal way. It’s not because Jesus does not love or care for Peter; it’s just that this guy Peter is always having his mouth in high gear and you have to stop it before he can learn something. And so often times you have to just slam your fist down on the table with this kind of an individual, get their attention, shut them up so they can learn something. It’s the same principle in the classroom. This is why in the public schools they are not learning anything, nobody is shutting up. So Peter shuts up. And the cock crow three times is put in there as a specific point of observation to show later on, John will bring it up in the text, that sure enough, exactly, exactly just before the third time, it’s just kind of loading the text for a future blessing.
But now the text continues, John 14:1, “Stop letting your heart be upset,” now with this Jesus turns and not only discusses this with Peter, He’s talking to all the disciples, it’s plural, “stop letting your heart be troubled.” By this time the disciples are troubled because by this time it becomes very obvious to them that though they don’t know why or they don’t know how and what’s going on here, they do know one thing, Jesus is going to leave. And it shocked them and they’re upset. And you can imagine why they’re upset. Think of why you’d be upset if you were there; well Lord, I gave up my business, I wasted three years of my life, we had all those crowds up in Galilee and You blew it by driving them all away, and now we come to Jerusalem and now You tell us You’re going away. You’re going away and leaving us here. So the upset-ness was also coupled with resentment. This upsetting, though the Greek word doesn’t indicate one way or the other, we can infer from the text by projecting ourselves in our own imagination into the situation, we can understand that there probably was great resentment over this. Now Jesus has to clarify this resentment. Why the Church Age? Remember that’s the big question: why inject 19 centuries of time into the plan of God? He must do this because in the greater context of this discourse is verse 34, you’re going to have to love the brethren as I have loved you, so therefore we’ve got to be clear, how does Christ love us? Does He really love us if He’s left us, walked out and left us for 1900 years? Is that love? Jesus is going to argue yes, indeed it is.
So He goes on and He starts. “You believe in God,” He announces a fact,
they are trusting God, but now He makes a titanic addition, “start believing in
Me,” and here we have a claim to deity.
Nowhere in monotheistic
And then He says why, and this explains the
delay. The faith technique is to be the modus operandi of the Church Age. Why?
He says, [John 14:2] “In My Father’s house are many mansions,” now this
is an allusion, not really an allusion, it’s kind of even looser than this, but
turn to 1 Chronicles 17:9 you’ll see where this came from. It’s a passage that discusses the Davidic
Covenant, the Davidic Covenant is mentioned in 2 Samuel 7, the parallel is 1
Chronicles 17. Verse 7 to get the
context: “Now, therefore, thus shalt thou say unto My servant, David, Thus
saith Yahweh of hosts, I took thee from the sheepcote, from following the
sheep, that you should be ruler over My people, Israel. [8] And I have been with thee wherever you
have walked, and have cut off all thine enemies from before thee, and have made
thee a name like the name of the great men that are in the earth. [9] And I also will ordain a place for My
people,
Now it’s talking about ultimate final
deliverance. This will ultimately
happen. Now let’s look at some analogies
here. First let’s look at the Old
Testament situation, then we’ll look at the New Testament situation. Compare the two and see how this little
innocent remark of Jesus isn’t innocent at all.
It’s one of His dogmatic claims to His Yahweh position. In the Old Testament you have Jehovah, or
Yahweh, promising certain things to the king and therefore through the king to
the nation
Now notice the sequence of activities and how remarkable they will parallel what we have seen in John 14. First we have David and what does David want to do? He wants to build something for God. David wants to do it. What’s the second thing we notice from this context? God refuses. God refuses to accept what David will build for Him and instead God gives David the perfect gift. Now what would be the perfect gift for a king? Suppose you were invited to a party some day and you had a time machine and could project yourself back into the ancient history, what would you have on your gift list to give to a king. What would a king, any king in the ancient Near East like?
[Tape turns] … eternal progeny, a guarantee of the survival of his dynasty. That would be the thing, you can read it in various ancient texts of Amun Re and of Thutmose and so on, in Pritchard’s Ancient Near Eastern text. So the perfect gift to David would have been an eternal progeny. So God cuts off David’s effort and gives him a perfect gift.
Now let’s take the parallel and turn back to John 14. In John 14 we have just had the Lord Jesus Christ give them a new commandment. This places Jesus, as Yahweh was in the Old Testament, over the Church, through the apostles. And He is addressing the apostles, and of course, through the apostles us, but always remember through the apostles, and what do we find by parallel of action? What has Peter just said he’s going to do? I’m going to die for You Lord, I’m going to do all sorts of things for You Lord, just like David, I’m going to build something for You God. So we have the natural tendency of the Church to build itself. We are going to build it and then present it to Jesus as a finished product, all credit going to man. And what does Jesus do? He stops Peter as Yahweh stopped David, and as Yahweh gave to David the perfect gift, so Christ is going to give the perfect gift to men. What… if every person had his sin nature removed… you see the problem is the depraved creatures don’t know what they really want, we don’t know what is a perfect gift. If God said I’ll give you anything you want, what do you want, we’d come up with all sorts of stupid stuff. If God ever asks you that you ask Him, well, You define the perfect gift because I can’t, I’m a depraved creature. And if God would say okay, I’ll define the perfect gift because I know your heart because I created you, the perfect gift will be an eternal home in My presence. That’s what’s at the base every creature really would like if he were submissive, morally speaking. And so therefore Jesus is going to give the perfect gift. The perfect gift will be a home forever in the presence of God.
And so what is Jesus telling Peter? “In My Father’s house are many mansions,”
what is that house, can we specify it a little more? It’s obviously a home in God’s presence
forever, but let’s turn to Hebrews
So this is why back in John 14 He says, if I go and I “prepare a place” this is the answer for the 19 years plus of the Church Age. Why has the Church Age come in? Why is the First and Second Advent of Jesus split apart in history? Why did Jesus have to leave and why does He have to leave us alone physically speaking in history? The answer the Bible gives is here; because somehow, in some way, the work of the growth of the Church over 1900 years is related to the building up of the New Jerusalem that will come out of heaven in Revelation 21. We do not understand what is going on in the unseen realms of the universe tonight, but there is a building program going on. It’s chief architect is our Lord, and somehow that building program is in direct relationship to the Church that’s going on in this planet right now. As the Church grows that construction program proceeds. It is obviously, if we can go into detail later on some time, it’s related in some way to the angelic conflict but we don’t know exactly how, in some way. So there is a place being prepared. And so if it’s taken 1900 years it must mean that whatever the process is that Jesus is using to prepare that place it is a slow process, dependent in some way, in a human sense, upon men’s response to Christ on earth.
But Jesus said [John 14:3] “if I go and I prepare that place, I will come again, and receive you to Myself, that where I am, there you may be also.” And so He concludes the answer to Peter because Peter, back in verse 36, the main problem was Lord, we don’t want to lose You physically, and Jesus says you’re not, permanently, it’s just temporary. We’re going to be rejoined and we’re going to live together, “I go and I prepare a place for you,” and with this we have the imminent rapture, we have the idea of the rapture of the Church and we’re going to have to probably, in the interest deal with the imminent rapture in verse 3 and stop at the end of verse 4 and bypass Thomas tonight; we’ll get to Thomas and Philip next time. But let’s get to the problem of the rapture of the Church. This is new to some of you and if it is you’d better take some notes on this area.
The rapture is the resurrection of Church
Age saints. It is a technical word that
has reference to the end of the Church, just as Pentecost was the beginning the
rapture is the end. How do we know it’s
going to be the end? Well, for reasons
that the central passages that we ought to see, turn to 1 Thessalonians 4:15,
we won’t go to all the passages, we’ll just go to an abbreviated section. If you’ve been to funerals you’ve heard it
read. “For this we say unto you by the
word of the Lord, that we who are alive and remain unto the coming of the Lord
shall not go before them who are asleep.”
“Them who are asleep” are the Christian dead, so here is the time line
down to the end moment of church history and we’re going to have two categories
of believers; the living and the dead. What does it say? Verse 15, “For the Lord Himself shall descend
from heaven, with a shout, with the voice of the archangel, and with the trump
of God; and the dead in Christ shall rise first,” so category one believers,
those who are dead, the bodies will rise up out of the ground, become
resurrection, and they won’t stay on the ground, they’re not going to walk
around, they’re going to rise and it says “met the Lord in the air,” or the
atmosphere. Nothing like the resurrection
of Christ in the city of
And then it says, verse 17, “Then we who are alive and remain,” that is category two believers, who are in their natural bodies in one instant “will be caught up together with them in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air; and so shall we ever be with the Lord.” So we have category two type believers who are in their natural bodies getting into their resurrection bodies and also going to meet the Lord. Now that activity is called the rapture. That’s what the word “rapture” means, it comes from a Latin translation of this passage. And also the parallel passage which is 1 Corinthians 15:51-52. So that’s ideally what the rapture is. You say so what, what’s that got to do with it?
The problem is when the rapture occurs, and this is one of great debate in scholarly circles and Christian circles. Here’s the return of Christ to the earth at the end time. We believe that the rapture occurs ahead of that event and is not the same as that event. Other believe that the rapture occurs simultaneously with the Second Advent of Christ. The problem is three-fold, there are more details but for the sake of time we’re just limited to three differences between the rapture and the Second Advent of Christ to show that these are not strictly the same events. In the passage I just showed you it’s dealing with something that can occur at any moment; John 14:3, 1 Thessalonians 4; 1 Corinthians 15. However, in other passages, like Matthew 24 and Matthew 25 this return of Christ is preceded by certain signs. Now the question is why is it that in some passage it says just watch because the Lord can come back at any moment and yet other passages say well, don’t worry because before He comes there’s going to be certain signs. We conclude on the basis of this difference that the rapture has to be before the return of Christ. So that’s one reason we distinguish the two; one has signs and the other doesn’t.
A second reason why we distinguish the two, and that is as you saw in the passage on the rapture, at the point of the rapture there will be no believers left on the earth in natural bodies, so minus believers in natural bodies at the point of the rapture. After that rapture every believer who exists is going to be in a resurrection body. Okay; but the problem is this, since the millennial kingdom will be occupied from the very start with believers in natural bodies, where do the believers in natural bodies come from? If the rapture has occurred simultaneously with the Second Advent you all [can’t understand word] believers with natural bodies from the earth. And therefore you can’t have a millennium, literally, and therefore you’ve got to compromise and go into an amillennial position. So, if you accept the literal hermeneutic and therefore accept the premillennial position, that is that Christ is going to come before the millennium, you’re going to have to solve this problem, that the rapture removes all natural bodied believers and therefore a second reason is this, for placing the rapture before the Second Advent of Christ.
Finally, if you turn to Revelation
Now we will admit, after having said all this, that the details of the advent of Christ is very much like the details look in the Old Testament with the First Advent, all twined around, hard to sort out. Now why is that? Why is prophecy so hard to sort out ahead of time. For the reason of human volition in history, human responsibility. God allows prophecy to be written in such a way that it’s specific, you [can’t understand words] pin it down until after it’s really happened. Ultimately all eschatological controversy, that is controversies about prophecy, are only going to be settled when the prophecy is fulfilled. But when we look at various passages in the Bible we find that, as in John 14, Jesus hasn’t said a thing about when He’s going to come for believers, has He?
Go back to John 14:3, “…I will come again,
and receive you unto Myself,” now that could be taken three or four ways, it
could be taken just as the normal Second Advent, He’s going to come and [can’t
understand word] receive Him and welcome Him.
It could also be taken in that highly technical sense of 1 Thessalonians
where He calls us up and we meet Him in the air. You see, in John 14:3 in the sequence of
revelation Jesus deliberately left the rapture all tangled up because in the
progress of history it wasn’t yet certain that the nation
All right, so Jesus then tells them I will “receive you unto Myself,” and in John 14:4 He asserts, obviously to stimulate Thomas and the next question, “Where I am going ye know, and the way ye know.” That is obviously intimating that He’s going to be in the presence of God, that He knows that you want this, this is what I’m going to give you, and you surely will receive it.
Next week we will continue with the discussion of this; keep in mind that as we do this we’re developing background for verse 34 of chapter 13, this is still going back to “love one another as I have loved you.” Now what’s the application to that command, what we just learned? What the heck has the rapture got to do with loving believers? What is this business about the mansion have to do with loving believers. It’s very simple, you’d better learn to love them because you’re going to live with them for all eternity.
Father, we thank You…..