Clough John Lesson 58

Believers and the World – John 16:12-31

John chapters 15-19 is the portion of this Gospel that is devoted to the passion of Christ; that is, this section of Scripture will deal with all the details of Christ’s last words to the disciples just before He died and then His death. The importance of this section of Scripture as far as you as a Christian are concerned is that this portion shows you what Christ most wanted the disciples to remember about Him. The last words represent, obviously, the last thing that He wanted on their minds before He was to die. Besides the fact of the obvious, that these words intended plain meaning, there is another case in this section that, like with John frequently, there is a double and sometimes triple meaning to these words, all of which are true, but with John different levels so that the most diligent believer would persist until he digs down through and sees even the deeper lessons that John the Apostle has. So we have to be alert as we read the text for these little deeper pearls that only emerge on a diligent search.

Now there’s been a sequence of events as we’ve gone through this section. First, remember before it began, in chapter 13 Jesus Christ purged the Church of its, at that point the narrow band of disciples, of the last unbeliever in their midst, Judas Iscariot. He was a traitor, and Jesus Christ loved him out of the way. And then in chapter 14 we found that Jesus Christ started the new ethic, that is, He began the fact that from this point forward the disciples were to follow the commandment, ye shall “love one another as I have loved you,” and you can’t love another Christians as Christ has loved you unless you know how Christ loved you. So this new ethic that He’s teaches is dependent upon the content of what He is about to do. And in chapter 15, the first part of it we dealt with the vine and we showed how Christ used the vine to describe the structure of the new body that would be shortly forming. In the last part of chapter 15 and now into chapter 16 we have Jesus Christ dealing with the world system, what that world system teaches, where and why it is hostile to the Christian, and where the points of collision lie.

Remember last time that when we dealt with how the Holy Spirit operates in the world system we said the Holy Spirit stresses in our day three great truths; the truth of righteousness, the truth of sin and the truth of judgment. All these are things that the Holy Spirit stresses, not necessarily what men stress. And there’s always the problem, particularly with evangelism, of trying to maintain our accuracy and trying to stress what the Holy Spirit stresses, and try to minor on what the Holy Spirit minors on. But over and over, particularly within our own circles, we constantly have people and it’s very hard to avoid this, of majoring on minors and minoring on majors. It takes a certain degree of growth and spiritual maturity to understand the things that you have to come down hard on and the things that you can kind of let slide and let pass.

And these three issues, you remember he said of sin, he is going to emphasize sin “because they believe not on Me.” That means that the Holy Spirit is not going to trot out some long sin list that every gross thing that you have ever done, talked about or thought about. What the Holy Spirit will emphasize is the rebellion that we have toward the authority of Jesus Christ and that He will make the central sin and He will always concentrate on that because that is the most blatant and most obvious form of sin. And since Christ has now come we no longer live under the Old Testament dispensation of having to look forward, guessing what it’s going to be like when Christ comes. We now know exactly what it was like when Christ came and since that’s the case then men can respond in a full orbed submission to Christ or rebellion against Him. Sin, then, becomes obvious after Christ has been revealed; becomes more obvious.

Then we said righteousness; righteousness is emphasized because He said “I go to My Father, and ye see Me no more.” What does this mean? It means that Christ’s righteousness is what He has that makes Him acceptable in the presence of God the Father, and this comes down in the gospel message as imputed righteousness, a theme that is very rarely stressed in our day by some of our leading evangelists who dwell constantly on forgiveness of sin but dwell very infrequently upon the imputation of Christ’s righteousness. “Impute” means to credit; Jesus Christ’s right-ness or righteousness is credited to your account at the point you become a Christian. And therefore your security does not depend upon anything you do, it does not depend on good works, lack thereof, your personality, your education, your lack of education, your culture or lack thereof. It depends upon Jesus Christ’s righteousness and only upon His righteousness. That and that alone credited t our account is our security. And Jesus Christ says that the Holy Spirit in this age is going to emphasize righteousness. So you can tell where the Holy Spirit’s working today—where those two things are being emphasized, it’s very simple.

And the Holy Spirit is also going to emphasize a third thing and that is judgment. He is going to emphasize judgment, Jesus says, “because the prince of this world has been judged,” past tense. That means that Satan, who represents the hierarchy of evil, has met his match historically at the cross; no longer promissory but actual reality, Satan has been judged; Christ got to the cross without once committing a sin and since He did, He qualified perfectly, secured the basis of salvation and therefore Satan has lost all hope whatsoever of stopping the plan of salvation. And Satan therefore, from this point forward in time, has to shift his tactic, as he has, and he’s been very effect if the shift of his tactic, from one of physically blocking Christ by trying to annihilate the Messianic line and the Messianic people, to one of trying to hinder the gospel, of trying to get people to major on minors and minor on majors, of trying to obscure the gospel message, of trying to introduce prejudice in people’s minds so they will not give the gospel a proper hearing. Satan, in other words, will misrepresent the work of Christ now, since can no longer stop the work of Christ. It will, therefore, mainly be a communication’s battle between Satan and Christ, not a physical battle of what, in fact, he wants to do in history.

These are the three emphases of the Holy Spirit during the Church Age. Now we left off with verse 12 and we’ll continue this. John 16:12, Jesus said, “I have yet many things to say unto you, but you are not able to carry them [cannot bear them now].” That means that Jesus Christ teaches revelation progressively in history, pedagogically in history. And this is the basis for why I have said over and over and over, you have to know something like the divine viewpoint framework because you have got to train yourself to learn doctrine in the order it was given. Christ has certain things He talks about first and then He has many things He leaves for a later time. And since Christ is the perfect creature because Christ designed our brains and He know how they absorb and He knows how they learn, He has the perfect learning theory, He therefore has a perfect curriculum. And the curriculum is the revelation of God in history and that is the vindication of why we set up the divine viewpoint framework the way we do. And this is why we go over it and over and over it, review, review, review, repeat, repeat, repeat until at any point in time you can know this framework backwards and forwards, you will know all basic doctrines associated with the framework and know the things that Jesus Christ wants you to know.

Now the Lord Jesus Christ in reserving a certain amount of doctrine for the “many things” He has to say in verse 12, refers to doctrinal truths. This he is going to do in verse 13; verse 13 tells us the means, verse 12 tells us the postponement to the future. In verse 13 he says, “Howbeit when He, the Spirit of truth, is come, He will guide you into all truth,” now that doesn’t mean, and let’s learn that very quickly, that does not mean that the Holy Spirit is going to make us omniscient, that means all knowing. The Holy Spirit is not going to make you all knowing. So one interpretation to be knocked out right away from verse 13, you know without any further thought, any further discussion, that the one interpretation it cannot possibly mean is to know all truth absolutely, for then you would be God and then you would be incorporated within the Trinity. So that can’t be the means.

Well, then, it must be qualified. What does it mean to say that the “Holy Spirit will guide you into all truth?” In the context and judging from the way subsequent history flowed, the “all truth” refers not to us becoming omniscient but to us becoming informed with the New Testament canon. A beginning of revelation started on the day of Pentecost, went through the book of Acts, through the New Testament epistles, some written during the period of Acts, some written after the period of Acts, on down to the last book of the New Testament, which was Revelation, written around 90 AD. So all the time from Pentecost, around 30 AD on down to 90 AD you had 60 years when these “all truths” were being revealed to the Church. After 90 AD the Holy Spirit shut His mouth and He has not opened His mouth since 90 AD, in spite of charismatic claims to the contrary. The Holy Spirit has done it once and for all, this is shown by the aorist tense in Ephesians 2:20, it is shown by the aorist contrasted with the present in Hebrews 2:1-4.

And it is also show in a key passage, 1 Corinthians 13:8. Turn there. This is talking about various gifts, it is talking about the fact that every believer has a spiritual gift and it tells us a lot about spiritual gifts. The gifts are divided into two classes, those that are permanent and those that are temporary. Now every once in a while you’ll hear someone get bent out of shape because somebody raises the question of the fact that some gifts were temporary. Now I have no idea why people get bent out of shape with this distinction being made between permanent gifts and special or temporal gifts. You know, if you’re a Protestant you’ve got to believe in some temporal gifts. If you’re a Protestant you believe in at least one temporal gift, the gift of apostleship, don’t you. Isn’t that the axiom of Protestantism, is the gift of apostleship was temporary. Well obviously, then, any Protestant has to agree in principle to temporary spiritual gifts. So if you agree in principle to temporary spiritual gifts, why have a hang-up with adding to the list of temporary gifts then, especially when the New Testament suggests this.

Here we have some of those temporary gifts, three in fact, listed in verse 8. “Charity never fails,” that’s the filling of the Holy Spirit, the work of the Spirit in the human heart, “but where there be prophecies, they shall fail; where there be tongues, they shall cease in and of themselves, and where there be knowledge it shall vanish away.” So three gifts are listed; the gift of prophesy is going to be cut off; the gift of tongues is going to phase out and the gift of knowledge shall be cut off. So three gifts and there are all three of them temporary. They are temporary until something in the future happens. Paul says in verse 9, “For we know in part, and we prophesy in part. [10] But when that which is perfect is come, then that which is in part shall be done away. [11] When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child; but when I became a man, I put away childish things. [12] For now we see through a glass darkly, but then face to face; now I know in part, but then I shall know even as I am known.” Now most people read this very quickly and they think what this is talking about is John going to be with the Lord or the rapture of the Church; they particularly look at verse 12 and they say verse 12 could only mean that, why when we get to heaven we’ll know all things, is their argument that verse 12 must refer to the rapture. Is that really true? In heaven do we become omniscient? Do we suddenly lose our creature status and assume a divine attribute. No, that can’t be.

So however you interpret verse 12 it cannot mean that we know all things. It’s the same kind of thing that we have in John 16; it must be qualified, it must be limited by other Scriptures. And of course, the hint of the thing is in verse 9, “we now know in part” and the Greek verb “know in part” means we know bit by bit, that means we know a little bit here, we add on a little bit here, we add on a little bit here, and Paul is saying that this whole New Testament canon is coming into existence piece by piece. Corinthians was written very early in the apostle’s career. Even the Apostle Paul had not decided on certain doctrines yet. The Holy Spirit had not yet guided him into all truth but He was in the process of guiding him into all truth. And you would have a believer over here, another believer over here, another believer over there, another believer here, another believer here, all around the eastern end of the Mediterranean, wherever there were local church’s, believers who had the gift of prophecy would begin to speak and not in an unknown language but in their native Koine Greek, they would begin to speak divine truths that were not in the Old Testament canon. And so then one would speak a little bit and then they, maybe would talk about what the baptism of the Holy Spirit is, so here we’d have a little piece of doctrine, baptism of the Holy Spirit. And then another believer somewhere else would say hey, I got a revelation, it’s the revelation of the rapture of the church, and so another believer would have the rapture of the church, that’s not in the Old Testament. Another would have the co-status or the equality between the Jew and the Gentile, that as far as God is concerned in the Church the Jew is equal to the Gentile in status and therefore that would be a piece of revelation. Someone else might have the revelation of the difference of the universal church from the local church, that’s more about ecclesiology and that’s not in the Old Testament and so on and so on, a little piece here and a little piece there. That’s what verse 9 is talking about. And during those 60 years this knowledge was gaining part by part by part.

But verse 10, “But when that which is perfect is come, then that which is in part shall be done away.” “That which is in part” is verse 9, the bit by bit gradually acquisition of Bible doctrine. “That which is perfect” must therefore be the total body of Bible doctrine, and “that which is perfect” is a neuter noun, it’s telion, it’s used many times in Scripture but when it’s used like this it refers to the canon of Scripture. So here we have, then, the complete corpus of the New Testament books. And that is what is meant, and when the New Testament finally was written into existence, these gifts died out. There was no need for them. There is no need for the gift of prophecy today. There is no need for the gift of tongues today. There is no need for the gift of knowledge today; there is absolutely no need for those gifts because we’ve got the New Testament canon. There’s plenty of doctrine to keep you busy for the rest of your life, in case you happen to be bored with the New Testament and you want a little more. There’s no reason for this and most people who are always looking for new revelation are people who have been very sloppy about their understanding of the New Testament. There are men who will give 40 years of their life just to one book of the New Testament and at the end of those 40 years say that they really haven’t cut it as far as getting to the deeper things of that book. Now if that is the verdict of born again Christian scholars who specialize in one book, obviously the application is as far as the average Christian, we who do not have time to specialize in one book for 40 years of our lives are not going to exhaust its meaning, and there is plenty of doctrine to know, plenty of unplowed fields to work in. You do not need the gift of prophesy.

It’s very interesting that of all the gifts, of all the gifts that are listed in the New Testament, the one that doesn’t put any demand on you is precisely the one that is glorified in the charismatic movement; the gift of tongues. Now let’s just suppose… there are other gifts like the gift of giving, now isn’t it interesting that we don’t have a revival of the gift of giving, or the gift of helps. Why don’t we have everybody saying oh, I’ve got the gift of helps. Or why don’t we have something else, I’ve got the gift of faith or I’ve got the gift of administration and management. I don’t know one local church that couldn’t use about a dozen more gift of helps and a gift of management. Why don’t we see those? Isn’t it strange that the one gift that is absolutely useless is the one that is being elevated to a semi-divine status in the charismatic movement. You notice that and you think about that for a while. Who arranged that little juxtaposition of facts?

Now let’s turn back to John 16 for the passage where Christ is talking what the Holy Spirit is going to do. The Spirit, He says, “will guide you into all truth;” the word “guide” has emphasis to the fact that the Holy Spirit is not going to directly dictate. This morning we studied Jesus Christ talking to Saul on the Damascus Road, and while Jesus Christ talked to Saul on the Damascus Road there was verbal revelation in Aramaic. If Paul had his little cassette player he could have come out with the most fantastic best selling tape of the Church Age. But the rest of the guiding of the Holy Spirit is not going to be by direct dictation. Now it’s as though he dictated as far as authority is concerned but one method is dictation. We saw that, and that would be Acts 9 and also the book of Revelation was dictated entirely. But apart from these areas of Scripture there are also areas that are used by an indirect approach. That is, the Holy Spirit guides men.

Let’s take Luke for example, Luke is an M.D. Luke happened to become a Christian, we don’t know how, maybe He was led to Christ by Paul and as Luke progressed in his Christian life he decided to go with Paul. By the way, it shows you that Paul lost his gift of healing or why would he ask an M.D. to come along on all his journeys with him? Paul had a private physician; Paul could not heal everyone who came to him and this is recorded in 2 Timothy. So Paul lost the gift, which was another temporary spiritual gift, the gift of healing, Paul lost it and he had Luke as his traveling companion precisely for the reason to take care of his physical health, as well as to write the memoirs of the missionary journeys of the early church. Luke, of all the authors except possibly the author to the Hebrews, was the most educated man as far as literature was concerned of all the writers of the New Testament. So Luke went down, he got some from Paul, as far as we know God the Holy Spirit never spoke directly to Dr. Luke. Luke got some from Paul, he listened to Paul preach, He talked with Paul, he said hey Paul, how was it like this and that, and what about that Damascus Road experience, so he had direct data from Paul. But Luke also had, probably interviewed Mary, he is the only writer of the Gospels who describes Mary from the woman’s point of view while she’s pregnant. And you would think, as a medical doctor he obviously would be interested in this and this is why he alone speaks of the baby leaping in the womb. Now who would have known that the baby leaped in the womb except the mother, at this point, this particular kind of leaping that’s described. And Luke obviously went back and talked with Mary or must have talked with someone in Jesus’ family who had talked with Mary.

So Luke’s system of generating the document was through interviews with human beings. And although this was a human means, the doctrine of inerrancy says that the Holy Spirit guided Luke in all of his interviews, such that when the final product was written it would be as though the Holy Spirit had dictated it. That’s what we mean by inerrancy; inerrancy says nothing about how the New Testament documents were generated, it says only what is the final result of the process of the generation of the New Testament documents. As far as we are concerned it could have taken a rocket ship to Mars and come back again with the New Testament; we don’t care about the means, the result is inerrant.

Now, the Holy Spirit is going to guide means the Holy Spirit will not directly reveal, the verb is larger than just dictation. A lot of things are going to be involved in this guiding. “…for He shall not speak of himself,” said Jesus, “but whatsoever He shall hear, that shall He speak: and He will show you things to come.” So the Holy Spirit is going to get His orders from the Father and the Son. The Trinity looks like this, the Son is under the command of the Father, by volunteer choice, it is a subordination of role, not a subordination of essence. And the Holy Spirit is subordinate in role to the Son, not subordinate to the Son in essence and the Holy Spirit is also under the Father. That’s the command chain that operates within the Trinity.

Now as the Holy Spirit begins His operation He is going to funnel truth to the body of Christ on earth, because so far in chapter 16 we have read what the Holy Spirit is doing in the world and we said the Holy Spirit can’t emphasize sin, righteousness and judgment unless He first teaches the Church about sin, righteousness and judgment, so that the Church can go out and do its witnessing, having been first taught by the Spirit. So conclusion, the Holy Spirit obviously has to come and teach us. So this is what it’s all about. “…He shall hear,” that means the Father will tell Him what He wants the Church to know, and He will speak it. And “He will show you things to come” means that the Holy Spirit will also tell the Church, and He did in the book of Revelation, He will arrange a final interview in history with the apostles so that the apostolic base of the Church, the apostolic writings on which everything else is built, will contain within them the complete outline of future history as far as we need to know.

John 16:14, “He shall glorify Me,” said Jesus, “for He shall receive from Me,” from My things, that is from the doctrines that Jesus Christ wants passed on, “and He will show it unto you.” Now notice verse 14, that is another thing that is being distorted by the charismatic movement of our day, the Holy Spirit is not glorifying Christ, He’s glorifying the Holy Spirit. And that’s another thing that should strike a wrong note to you when you hear this, the Holy Spirit teaching mission, Holy Spirit this, Holy Spirit that, we have the baptism of the Holy Spirit, Holy Spirit blah, blah, blah. Do you read in verse 14 that He shall glorify Himself? You do not! You read that He is going to glorify the Second Person of the Trinity. And therefore the person who will receive the attention will be the Lord Jesus Christ. It will be Christological in content; that means it will not be Holy Spirit in content; it will not be human experience in content. Look at the quote on the bulletin, because that’s coming up again in this passage, and read again the underlying portion of this Lutheran scholar’s statement, that the Reformers insisted upon God first and man second. Revelation first, response second; gospel first, faith second; justification first, sanctification second. In other words, the Bible in first position and man’s religious experience secondarily related to it. That is what the Reformers taught and that’s why we had a powerful change in European history as a result of the Reformation and we’re never going to see it again until Christians put these priorities together again. Now you go through this list and think; think of the average Christian bookstore, look at the titles of the books. Walk into the Christian bookstore and what do you see? Do you see God emphasized or do you see man… oh you don’t see books emphasizing man directly but indirectly very subtly you do, don’t you. Oh here is so and so’s big glorying testimony; here’s so and so, he was a great football player, and here’s my experience this and my experience that. That is glorifying man before God. That’s what this means.

Now remember, the Reformers thought with the kind religion that in their day was using the same pious words; Catholics weren’t going around saying we exalt man, we exalt man; it wasn’t that blatant, it was more subtle than that. It was the subtlety of exalting man’s religious experience and the Reformers said NO! man’s religious experience is not the gospel; God and His character and His work is the gospel, not your religious experience. Notice the second word pair, revelation first the response second, and again think of what you usually get in fundamental circles; oh, our great response to the Word of God and what I did for God and after I studied this portion of Scripture I had this great illumination and here’s what happened. It’s always response instead of revelation. Look at the third word pair, the gospel first, faith second. And in witnessing and evangelism what do you see? We talk a little bit about doctrine, and then we spend half the time with Just As I Am about 45 times to try to stimulate faith. Now look, it’s going to be one way or the other, either you’re exalting faith and man’s response or you’re exalting the message to which you are responding and you just leave the response up to the Holy Spirit. Now that’s what the Reformers did, they didn’t mess around with singing Just As… thank God they didn’t have the thing; besides being a stupid set of lyrics it is used in an ignorant way. It was written by a woman.

The next thing, justification and sanctification; so what’s the emphasis? The emphasis here again is sanctification today, the secret of the Christian life, what the Holy Spirit can do for you if you’ve learned a little secret I’ve got in my book for $6.50. You see, what is the emphasis? It’s not on justification; justification is complicated, you’ve got to into imputed righteousness, you’ve got to go into what it means when the Father decrees righteousness, you’ve got to go into the work of Christ, you’ve got to go into Christ’s high priesthood, you can’t go into all that doctrine stuff, let’s keep it simple to the Christian life. And so every one of these word pairs is turned on its head and then we wonder why we’ve got, percent wise, more Christians today than they had in the Puritan days. Do you realize that? There are more Christians in America today than when she was founded and just compare our relative influence today compared to their influence then. Now obviously something is wrong; there’s something we’re not doing right because it can’t be that the world has changed that differently. It is something we are systematically doing wrong and if we’re going to be corrected and teachable by the Holy Spirit we’d better get on with it and change what it is that we’re doing wrong. And what we’re doing wrong is we’re turning all of these priorities completely upside down.

So let’s go back to John. In John 16:14, the Holy Spirit “will glorify Me,” so we are going to, if we are going to remain teachable, if we are going to follow the Lord and we’re going to be submissive to His Word, then we are going to concentrate on the person of Christ. Now practical application: We are heading into a year, in the fall of this year, when we will have unprecedented, in the history of Lubbock Bible Church, a heavy, heavy dose of Christology. Arnold’s conference on the life of Christ from a Jewish perspective will start it off and then we’ll go into a detailed study of Christology. This is the culmination to which we’ve been building for four or five years. Those of you who have been in basic doctrine, who have got your Old Testament categories together, who have studied the Old Testament events and got your basic pictures together, now it’s going to pay off because all of this doctrine is going to be concentrated in one person, in a very complex person, the person who is at the same time can be limited finite creature and the unlimited Creator. He can be a man who does not know everything and at the same time He’s the Creator who knows everything. He is the limited man who is so weak that at some times He’s starving and yet at the other time He is the omnipotent Creator who can make bread out of stone. And so all of this is the riches that we should perceive as born again Christians, as people who supposedly have the indwelling Spirit who is going to glorify Christ, we ought to know the Lord, because you can’t love the Lord unless you know His character. This loving the Lord business is ridiculous also because the people who usually go around parading this “I love the Lord” business are the last people you ever want to talk about as far as knowing who Christ is. They don’t know Him, they do not know what the word love means and frankly most of them are incapable of loving the Lord in their present state. They just simply do not know enough about Him to love Him in a mature way.

As we go on, He says that the Holy Spirit will show it to you, that is to the apostles, He is talking to the apostles here. John 16:15, “All things that the Father has are Mine: therefore said I, that He shall take of Mine, and shall show it unto you.” That’s the internal workings of the divine Trinity and he is simply saying that everything in the Trinity the Holy Spirit will show, there’s no separation, no one member of the Trinity competing against another.

Now in John 16:16 through the end of this chapter we go on to the last phase of Jesus Christ’s briefing. In verse 16, He says, and He begins the dialogue which you remember was dropped way back in chapter 13. Remember after Judas Iscariot left the room, the disciples… He’d teach something, the disciple would ask one thing, Peter asked Him something and Philip asked Him something, and Thomas asked Him something, and Judas, not Iscariot asked Him something. Remember there was a series of questions and then after each question Jesus would respond, He’d go into doctrine and answer the question. And then somehow along about chapter 15 they started to walk in the Garden of Gethsemane. So they began to walk down the valley of the Kidron and then up the slope that goes up to the Mount of Olives, and while He did this He began to talk to them, and they gathered around as He began to walk and talk at the same time, and it wasn’t the place to ask questions any longer. And it’s supposed by scholars that by the time of verse 16, at that time they had arrived at the top and began to sit down, and now was the time for the students to ask their rabbi questions. For about 15 or 20 minutes, or half an hour, however long it took to cross the Kidron Valley they had been listening quietly as the rabbi taught and now was the time to ask more questions.

Jesus wanted to open a question answer session in these last hours of His life and so He took the initiative in opening it. John 16:16, “A little while, and ye shall not see Me: and again, a little while, and ye shall see Me, because I go to the Father. [17] Then said some of his disciples among themselves, What is this that He saith unto us, A little while, and ye shall not see Me: and again, a little while, and ye shall see Me: and, Because I go to the Father? [18] They said therefore, What is this that He saith, A little while? we can’t tell what He is saying. [19] Now Jesus knew that they were desirous to ask Him, and said unto them, Do ye inquire among yourselves of that I said, A little while, and ye shall not see Me: and again, a little while, and ye shall see Me? [20] Truly, truly, I say unto you, That ye shall weep and lament, but the world shall rejoice: and ye shall be sorrowful, but your sorrow shall be turned into joy. [21] A woman when she is in travail hath sorrow, because her hour is come: but as soon as she is delivered of the child, she remembers no more the anguish, for joy that a man” that is a person here, not a male, “a person is born into the world. [22] And ye now therefore have sorrow: but I will see you again, and your heart shall rejoice, and your joy no man takes from you.”

Now we have to go through this and see why it is that Christ brings this last absentee thing up again. You see, all during the Gospels, this is something that is hard to appreciate from the Gentile point of view because we don’t have that Old Testament background, what Messiah should have done. But from the Jew’s point there was a great mystery of the absentee Messiah. This is just not recognized in Judaism. Once the Messiah has come He’s supposed to stay here and set up His kingdom, not take off some place. And the fact that Jesus was going to take off and be an absentee Messiah deeply disturbed, and Christ knew this would deeply disturb. Now the truth of the absentee Messiah isn’t against the Old Testament, it’s just unrecognized in the Old Testament, that is, the Old Testament allowed for it as a logical option but nobody ever thought, until Christ pointed this out, that there would be a period of the absentee Messiah.

And therefore Christ wants to be… the last thing He teaches, because remember, when we finish this chapter that’s the end, as far as the briefing is concerned. From there we go into chapter 17, it’s the high priestly prayer and then in chapter 18 He’s arrested. So we wind up this briefing, and this is the last thing that He wants, He wants to straighten people out on why He is leaving and what’s going on here. So He says the whole thing in parable deliberately to provoke questions. Notice how it’s worded in the last part of verse 16, “you will see Me again, because I go to My Father.” That at first doesn’t make much sense, does it? You’re not going to see Me because I’m going away, but then you will see Me because I’m going away. Obviously something has to do with this going to the Father that enables Him, in fact, to be physically seen again. And this of course refers to the resurrection and ultimately to the ascension.

He stimulated the questions, and in verse 19 He “knew that they were desirous,” whether He knew this from His omniscience or whether He just simply heard them talking, probably He just heard them talking at this point, “He asked them.” And in verse 20-21 He begins to take up the narrative of His passion. Here is the period in the life of Christ that’s under discussion. Christ is shortly to be arrested and go to the cross. He will die, He will stay in Sheol for three days; during the time He’s in Sheol, according to 1 Peter 3 He is going to preach to the fallen angels that were down on the earth during the days of Noah. Then He is going to rise and for 40 days teach doctrine and then ascend to the Father. It is this period of His life, actually from His death to His resurrection, this interval of three days, that He’s talking about on the surface, and in truth He is talking about it but as we’re going to see shortly that’s not the only thing He’s talking about. We know that there’s some deep truth hidden here by the way He talks about it. Up to now He’s never spoken this way about His death.

Let’s look at it carefully in John 16:20-21, “…you shall weep and you shall lament,” the words “weeping” and “lamenting” are funeral terms, and obviously refer to the death of a loved one. “You will weep and you will lament but the world shall rejoice,” now if nothing else when you read that you can obviously see contrast. He’s contrasting what the Christians are doing from what the world is doing. So far Jesus Christ has built, He has purged Judas Iscariot in chapter 13, in chapter 14 He has said the ethic of the Christian is different from the ethic of the world; in chapter 15 He says the Christian body is a new body separate from the world. In chapter 16 so far He’s said the world is going to hate you; you love the brethren, the world hates you. So there’s always this tremendous difference between the body of Christ and the world system and this difference even gets sharper and sharper and sharper as we go deeper into this passage. They act totally different ways toward the death of Christ, “the world rejoices” because it thinks it’s solved its problem; God invaded and they excluded God from their closed system. And so they rejoiced that they were apparently successful. “…and ye shall be sorrowful,” but then, “your sorrow shall be turned,” passive voice, it will “be turned into joy.” And that refers to what is going to happen when Jesus Christ rises from the dead. So, the resurrection of Jesus Christ is going to change; these disciples are going to be identified with Christ in His death and in His resurrection; they are going to live, respond and so on in a different way, on a different frequency, to a different beat than the world system.

Now He employs a loaded terminology, because in verse 21 when He goes again to describe it, of all of the symbols that He could possibly have picked, He picks the symbol of the pregnant woman delivering her baby. This is a symbol that is deeply rooted in Scripture and we’ll go to the deep roots of that symbol and what it means and how it is used over and over and over and over again very consistently in Scripture. Verse 21, if it just means the death of Christ and His resurrection does not fit the theme of this motif of the pregnant woman delivering her child. In every other reference it means something else than this. In every reference in the Old Testament, in every reference in the New Testament it refers to something utterly different than the death and resurrection of Christ. Now we have no doubts that here it refers to the death and resurrection of Christ, but the fact that this is so strange and so new suggests that it’s not been emptied of its usual meaning either. What Jesus has done, He has taken the woman delivering her child, kept its basic meaning, and added onto it the meaning of His death and His resurrection. So we know from the surface interpretation that verse 20 obviously at least refers to the death of Christ and His resurrection again. But we also should be forewarned that it must refer to something else.

Let’s go back and look at a chain of references of the woman delivering her child. Start back in Isaiah 26:16, this is called the little apocalypse. In the context this is talking about the final return of the Messiah to Israel; it’s referring to the great day of judgment of Yahweh. And in 26:16, “Yahweh, in trouble have they visited Thee; they poured out a prayer when thy chastening was upon them. [17] Like as a woman with child, that draws near the time of her delivery, is in pain, and cries out in her pangs, so have we been in Thy sight, O LORD. [18] We have been with child, we have been in pain, we have, as it were brought forth wind; we have not wrought any deliverance in the earth, neither have the inhabitants of the world fallen.” And then Yahweh sings back to Israel the words, [19] “Thy dead shall live, today with my dead body shall they arise. Awake and sing, ye that dwell in dust; for thy dew is like the dew of the herbs, and the earth shall cast out the dead. [20] Come, My people, enter into thy chambers, and shut thy doors about thee; hide thyself as it were for a moment, until the indignation be ever past. [21] For, behold, Yahweh comes out of His place to punish the inhabitants of the earth for their iniquity; the earth also shall disclose her blood, and shall no more cover her slain. [27:1] In that day Yahweh with His sore and great and strong sword shall punish leviathan, the piercing serpent, leviathan, that crooked serpent; and He shall slay the dragon that is in the sea.”

Now obviously that passage is talking about the final day of judgment; the return of Christ in history. That is referring to that great day before Christ, or before Yahweh sets up His kingdom, during the time prior to that kingdom we have the time of great tribulation. And the time of great tribulation is looked upon as the delivery process that a pregnant woman goes through in bringing her son forth into the world.

Now let’s look at how consistent the Bible is to this theme. Let there be no question that this theme is always related to this context. Turn to Isaiah 66:6, “A voice of noise from the city, a voice from the temple, a voice of the LORD that renders recompense to His enemies. [7] Before she travailed, she brought forth; before her pain came, she was delivered of a man-child. [8] Who has heard of such a thing? Who has seen such things? Shall the earth be made to bring forth in one day? Or shall a nation be born at once? For as soon as Zion travailed, she brought forth her children.” Again, the reference is to Zion redeemed, bringing forth the millennial generation that will live on the earth forever; the context is the return of Christ and Yahweh’s judgment upon the nations.

Let’s look at Hosea 13:13, this is talking about judgment on the northern kingdom of Ephraim, “The sorrows of a travailing woman shall come upon him. He is an unwise son; for he should not stay long…. [14] I will ransom them from the power of the grave; I will redeem them from death, O death, where is thy plagues, O grave, where is thy destruction,” now you know where that comes from in the New Testament don’t you? That’s quoted by Paul in 1 Corinthians 15 of the resurrection. And it again refers to this time of tribulational judgment the end of which will see the resurrection of the Old Testament saints out of their grave. So again we have the theme of a woman in travail delivering her child and it’s made to be those days of judgment just before the dawn of the kingdom on earth.

Now let’s see in the New Testament whether that theme has been carried over, or whether like this John passage it’s been shifted. Turn to Matthew 24:8, Jesus is speaking here of things just prior to His return to this planet, and before Christ comes back to this planet there are certain geophysical phenomenon that are going to happen, earthquakes, plagues, kingdom shall rise against kingdom, and then in verse 8 He says, “These are beginning of birth pangs [sorrows].” In other words, Christ likens the entire physical creation to a womb. The earth is seen as the womb, as the mother, who will bring forth out of her womb resurrection saints. And the earth wracks in pain to do this and this imagery is consistent throughout both Old Testament and New Testament.

Let’s turn to even one of Paul’s writing, 1 Thessalonians 5:3, this is talking about the future day of the Lord and the return of Christ, and it says, “When they shall say, Peace and safety, then sudden destruction comes upon them, as travail upon a woman with child, and they shall not escape.” What’s that talking about in context? In context it’s talking about the return of Christ and this period of time.

Now let’s go back to our John passage and see if, as we have seen so frequently in this Gospel there’s not a little jewel, a little surprise in here, a little blessing for those who will persist in seeking out and demanding a meaning from the text. Jesus has employed this word, then, out of its usual context. If you had been a disciple and schooled in that chain of references we just showed you, and you were walking up through the Garden of Gethsemane and your rabbi told you something about this judgment that’s coming and the fact that you shall weep and lament, and the woman when she is in sorrow, He brings that up in context with His death, in context something’s going on, it should jar you to wait a minute, that’s an unusual place to be talking about that. Now here, apparently, is what Jesus is doing. Christ is identified with the suffering servant in the Old Testament who in turn is identified with the nation Israel. And what is happening is that Jesus Christ assumes on His own person the shape that history gives to Israel. And so just as Israel must pass through a time of judgment before her kingdom, so the suffering servant Himself must pass through a time of judgment before He can bring forth His kingdom. And just as Israel receives judgment from God against her in the tribulation, so the Messiah during the time of His death will receive judgment of God against Him, not for His own personal sin but because your sin and my sin were credited to His account and when our sin was identified with Jesus Christ it brought down the wrath of the Father and so therefore Christ is going to experience the tribulation that the nation Israel is going to experience on our behalf. This is grace.

But there’s something more than just this too because as He walks up the Garden of Gethsemane He speaks, “A woman, when she is in travail, has sorrow, because her hour is come,” and then she is delivered, and He is talking about, we know His death and resurrection in context, but isn’t it interesting, His disciples are not going to participate in His death and in His resurrection. His disciples are going to be identified separately from this death and resurrection of Christ because they’re going to survive, nobody is going to kill them, none of them are going to be crucified, so there’s a separate unique destiny to Christ as this point in history. Christ alone is going to undergo this death and this resurrection. Christ will die, not his disciples and it will be Christ who rises again, not His disciples. In other words, what we’re saying is this hints at the difference between the Church and Israel; this body of Christ that is coming into existence will not have to undergo this; they are separate, they are spectators to this work. They are separated from this. They are sorrowful but they do not actually participate in this judgment of Christ; it’s not a full-fledged statement as so often happens in John’s Gospel but it’s a strong hint that Christ and the Church and Israel are three distinct entities.

Now the fact that this is not just a guess is also shown by the structure of John’s Gospel. I started the lesson tonight deliberately by reviewing chapters 13-16 and I didn’t mention 17. I’m going to do now what I did at the end of chapter 2, when after we had studied John chapter 1 and 2 you remember the days of Christ’s life and you remember when after we studied each day of His life we started looking at them one after another and we discovered the most amazing thing, that those days stood for various ages in church history. They matched parallel. Watch what happens here.

In John 13, 14 and 15 you have the formation of the body of Christ, you have the purging of Judas Iscariot, the vine is there, all the emphasis is on this new body of Christ. And then we have the hostility of the body in the first part of chapter 16, we have the witnessing of that body of Christ down through history and the Holy Spirit working in evangelism and generation of the New Testament canon. All of that is what the Church is going to do in its history and then the last part of 16 is the Church will be a spectator to the tribulation and after the tribulation the Church will be united forever with Jesus Christ with the glory that He had with His Father before the world, and in John 17 the entire theme is the glory of Christ, that He had before the foundation of the world. That’s why He prays, Father, let them see the glory which I had for all eternity past. And you again have the Church now absorbed, not ontologically and metaphysically into the Trinity but in relationship, in resurrection into the Trinity. So there’s this gentle design to the Gospel of John that appears every now and then that seems to outline history for us.

Let’s return to this discussion. We’ve shown upon the reflection, and John the Apostle we’ve learned is a very reflective kind of writer, we’ve learned upon reflection what that little interruption was when he started introducing the pregnant woman delivering her child. And now in verse 22 he goes on to the theme of prayer and he introduces a most marvelous truth about prayer, something that should give encouragement to many of you because no matter how much we talk about grace, no matter how much we talk about imputed righteousness, in a congregation of this size there are always some people who think because of something they have done in the past, something that is so, in their minds morally reprehensible, something that is offensive to them personally, that somehow they will never be able quite to share just the status of other Christians sitting in the pew in front of them or the pew in back of them who never did that, or never thought that, or never engaged in that practice. And so finally and quietly there’s a heresy that’s born of depravity in the heart that says no, I know God is gracious but He’s more gracious to them than He is to me, there’s that attitude. I want you to watch how Christ deals with that very problem in these next few verses. He’s talking about having a hearing, having an audience with the Father.

John 16:22, “And ye now therefore have sorrow: but I will see you again, and your heart shall rejoice,” see, He’s going to be the baby, “and your joy shall no man take from you.” Why? Because it’s permanent; it’s permanent because Christ has secured it forever. When you are regenerated we don’t have a super X-ray machine that can kind of look through your body and say hey, look at that, right there I see the regenerate nature, it sort of grows on the film. We can’t see that; we have to take it by faith but there is, if you tonight have personally trusted Christ there is in your soul a regenerate nature, a new spirit born miraculously at a point in time and that spirit will remain with you forever and ever and ever and become the seed around which will grow your resurrection body; you have something indestructible. You could go out here and the Russians could zap us tonight with an IBCM, they could wipe the place out, they could drop a 20 megaton nuke right on your head and vaporize you but they could not destroy the regenerate nature; no man, no circumstance, nothing can take this from you.

John 16:23, “And in that day ye shall ask Me nothing.” Now this sounds interesting but he develops it far more in a few verses, so keep with it. “In that day you will ask Me nothing,” that means after the resurrection, after the Church Age gets started. “Verily, verily, I say unto you,” remember ever time you see “verily, verily” in John something important is coming up, “Truly, truly, I say to you, Whatsoever ye shall ask the Father in My name, He will give it you. [24]

Hitherto have ye asked nothing in My name: ask, and ye shall receive, that your joy might become,” passive perfect tense, “full. [25] These things have I spoken unto you in proverbs: but the time comes, when I shall no more speak unto you in proverbs, but I shall show you plainly of the Father. [26] At that day ye shall ask in My name: and I say not unto you, that I will pray the Father for you: [27] For the Father Himself loves you, because ye have loved Me, and have believed that I came out from God. [28] I came forth from the Father,” and he goes on.

The thing I want you to look at is verse 26, 27 and verse 23 and 24, skipping for a moment verse 25. He is talking about something that’s going to shift in praise. Now there are some Christians down through church history, in fact there’s a sizeable group of Christians down through church history that never got this message because this group of Christians has insisted that what prayer is, is that I am petition up a vast chain, I’ve got to petition to the saints and the saints have to petition to Mary and Mary has to petition to Jesus and finally Jesus petitions to the Father, that prayer is a system and that ultimate inside the Trinity amounts to the fact that I ask the Son to ask the Father. There’s this intermediate link and that is expressly denied in this passage. Jesus says when the Church Age begins My body is formed, you people are regenerated and baptized into Me, I will not pray for you at that point. Now He’s praying for us in an intercessory sense but He’s talking about normal praying here, not intercessing high priestly prayer of keeping our salvation, that kind of thing, high priest operation.

Here He is talking about daily prayer and here He is talking about the startling truth that you will not need any intermediate intercessor, you go direct to the Father. You do not pray to Jesus, you do not pray to Mary, you do not pray to some saint, you pray directly to the Father. Now that’s the statement, it carries a lot of weight in a moment but that’s the simple statement. That’s what Jesus says, that’s why He says in verse 23, “in that day you’re going to ask Me nothing.” It doesn’t mean we don’t have to ask, it means we’re not going to ask Him anything, we’re going to ask the Father something. There will be a shift in the object of the disciple’s praying. Up to this point every time they wanted something they went to Jesus, and Jesus says that’s going to stop, I’m not going to be here and what’s more you’re not going to even talk to Me in heaven, you’re going to talk to the Father who is in heaven. And you’re going to ask on My basis, “in My name,” you will ask.

That means the merit or the pull or the influence that you have with the Father is not based on your character; it is based on Christ’s character. That’s in verse 27, He explains, “the Father Himself loves you,” why, because you have been a good little boy, or you have been a good little girl, you’ve got so many brownie points worked up in the Christian life that the Father can’t help but ooh and aah at my little sheep that’s coming home. Now that is not the basis for your acceptability with the Father. This is one of the clearest passages that should blast out from any of your souls, this residuals hesitancy to put away grace in a practical everyday sense, that somehow I’m unclean in the Father’s eyes. Not if Christ has died for your sins are you unclean. If you have a sense of uncleanness examine your conscience and see if there’s any unconfessed sin, that should be the only reason for a sensation of uncleanness.

But if you persistently have a sense of not really being heard, of not really being acceptable in the Father’s presence, of always thinking gee, you know, if I’d gone back and lived my life over I could have made this different I could have made that different, I wouldn’t have done it this way I would have done it that way, and the first thing you know by the time you get 60 or 70 years old you’re going to have such a tremendous battle of guilt hang-ups over what you should have done and what you could have done and what you didn’t do that you progressively separate yourself from grace, because very subtly, it’s amazing how subtle Satan can be at intruding this works system into our souls. If you’re a new Christian you’ve automatically got the problem, I don’t even have to talk to you because I know this from my own personal experience, I know it from counseling of watching people who have done this or done that or done something else and they come to the Father and they still have this hesitancy about being bold with the Father. Somehow He’s going to get mad at me, or He doesn’t really like me because I’m this and all the other saints, they’re up there and I’m the little midget, I’m the pygmy Christian, I can’t even see over other people’s heads that are standing up in front of me in the prayer line. The Father can’t see me, gosh, I’m standing in the shadow of 15 other people. Now that’s a sensation that is heretical; that is not only pathetic that’s an error and that is a heresy. It denies the fact that you are coming to the Father on the merit of Christ alone in the first place. That’s why you’re feeling this way; that’s a signal, a warning sign to your soul that you are basing your acceptability with God, in spite of what you say with your mouth, in practice you are basing your acceptability with God on something other than the merits of Jesus Christ.

Again verse 27, My Father loves you because of two things, really one thing, He’s described love and believe the same way in this passage, “you have loved Me,” and you have “believed.” That’s the only thing, and there’s not one person here who can’t qualify for that; there are some people who may not want to qualify for that, but there’s no one here who can’t qualify for that. That is strictly a matter of your response…strictly a matter. It does not depend on what you have done in the past. It does not depend on anything that you have thought in the past. It depends completely on what you are going to do with what Christ offers you tonight. Christ says that He is the God-man and when the Father therefore looks down and you’re coming up in prayer, if you come into the basis of the Father with the Son’s merit, He looks you and He sees Christ and He is satisfied. And that’s the acceptability and it’s a very uneasy feeling because many of us, in fact I guess all of us, have this hesitancy to accept grace. Oftentimes people have a hesitancy to accept grace from other people. Somebody graces you out by doing something and you just kind of feel uneasy that people have graced you out so much, and it’s magnified 10 or 15 or 100 times when the Father… when you read something like this it is so gracious that you can’t quite believe that this could possibly apply to little old me, but that’s the struggle you’re going to have to face in your own soul, whether you can buy this, whether you can really be a grace oriented believer and accept the fact that He has so fantastically graced you out.

Listen to what Calvin said about this because it was this Reformation truth that launched him: “When Christ is said to intercede with the Father for us, let us not imagine anything fleshly about Him, as if He were on His knees before the Father offering humble supplications, but the power of His sacrifice by which He once pacified God toward us is always powerful and efficacious. The blood by which He atoned for our sins, the obedience which He rendered is a continual intercession for us. This is a remarkable passage by which we are taught that we have the heart of God as soon as we place before Him the name of His Son.” Now listen to that last sentence, “that we have the heart of God as soon as we place before Him,” not our merits, but “as we place before Him the name of His Son.” That’s the basis of man’s acceptance with the Father.

Jesus goes on to say in this closing section of John 16, He has a very sobering lesson for over-anxious Christians. Over and again in this Gospel He’s done this kind of thing, it’s sort of what I call Jesus’ deflation system where He kind of says whoa, He pulls in the reigns on believers really anxious to move out. He says in verse 25, “These things have I spoken to you in proverbs,” but I’m going to make it clear t you someday. That “someday” is the day of the New Testament canon, shortly to happen when the apostles begin to write. [26] At that day,” this prayer system will go into effect. Now in John 16:29 the disciples make a very hasty wrong and immature conclusion. “ His disciples said unto him, Lo, now speak thou plainly, and speak no proverb.

[30] Now are we sure that thou know all things, and don’t need that any man should ask Thee: by this we believe that thou came forth from God.” And they say, this is a confession of their faith, why Jesus is not necessary to go to any more, we know it all and we’ve got enough basis for our faith to take us through any trial that’s coming. They don’t know what kind of a trial is shortly to transgress in about three or four hours.

So Jesus, in verse 31, does what we have seen so often, “Jesus answered them, Do ye now believe?” This is a skeptical question, you don’t do you, you don’t really believe; you may think you believe, you guys may think you’ve got enough grasp on the Word to hack it through these next horrible days, but you don’t. And then He goes on, verse 32, “Behold, the hour cometh, yea, is now come, that you,” all of you, plural, “shall be scattered, every man to his own, and you’re going to leave Me alone: and yet I am not alone, because the Father is with Me. [33] These things I have spoken unto you, that in Me ye might have peace. In the world ye shall have tribulation: but be of good cheer; I have” perfect tense, “overcome the world.”

Now what is Christ getting at? What He’s got at several times, we met this in chapter 2, we met this in chapter 6, we met this in chapter 13 and we meet it again in chapter 16. Men say we believe Lord, and He looks back and He says do you? Remember He said to the disciples, you all believe that I have chosen you, but I know there’s one here that hasn’t even believed on Me for salvation leave alone the deeper things of sanctification. So Jesus quells premature faith.

Now what’s the importance of all this? When I had you read that bulletin insert and I had you read all those pairs of words and we went through every one of those words, there was a word pair that involved this very word of faith. What did it says, it said the gospel first and faith second. We could say the same thing by doing this, grace first, faith second. What is this last few verse…section in John 16, the very last words that Christ leaves us with before now the whole attention leaves the scene, He is now going to talk to the Father, He’s going to get arrested and He’s going to die on the cross, what is the last thing He has made clear to the disciples? His dying words—men, don’t ever, ever, ever make the mistake as believers in thinking that even your faith sustains you because it doesn’t.

Your faith is insufficient to meet the greatest trials on earth. Your security isn’t dependent on even the regenerate caused faith in your heart; it is due to My grace, it is I who sustain you, not our faith that sustains you. This comes out, time and time again you hear somebody say well, you know if we believed a little bit more so and so could have gotten healed or something like that, making it totally dependent on what man believes. Now you and I do not believe perfectly. All of us have great, great gaps in our soul where we cannot trust the Lord, where time and again we have the discouraging scene of meeting an adversity and then collapsing in our use of the faith technique. There’s not one Christian that hasn’t had… by the way, if you’ve had that happen to you recently join the club, it’s a quite regular occurrence. So you have this adversity and you know by the very nature of the way you responded in that adversity that your faith really isn’t what it should be. Now doesn’t that teach you a very valuable lesson, that surely your security with the Father can’t be dependent on this faith that can’t even hack an adversity. You can’t ground the security of your life on the act of believing. You have to secure it on something bigger, more perfect than that. And the only perfect thing you have is the Father and the Son at His right hand in heaven sustaining you. And in the other Gospels that are parallel to this account He goes on to add, And I will pray for you, and you will recover and you’ll come back. So the last words of Christ, the last words are remember the word grace and My work, not faith and your work. With our heads bowed.