Exegetical and Hermeneutical Commentary of John 14:2
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.
2. In my Father’s house ] Heaven. Comp. ‘The Lord’s throne is in heaven,’ Psa 11:4; ‘Our Father, Which art in heaven’ (Mat 6:9), &c.
are many mansions ] Nothing is said about mansions differing in dignity and beauty. There may be degrees of happiness hereafter, but such are neither expressed nor implied here. What is said is that there are ‘ many mansions;’ there is room enough for all. The word for ‘mansions,’ common in classical Greek, occurs in the N.T. only here and Joh 14:23. It is a substantive from the verb of which S. John is so fond, ‘to abide, dwell, remain’ (see note on Joh 1:33), which occurs Joh 14:10 ; Joh 14:16-17 ; Joh 14:25, and twelve times in the next chapter. This substantive, therefore, means ‘an abode, dwelling, place to remain in.’ ‘Mansion,’ Scotch ‘manse,’ and French ‘maison,’ are all from the Latin form of the same root.
if it were not so, I would have told you ] The Greek may have more than one meaning, but our version is best. Christ appeals to His fairness: would He have invited them to a place in which there was not room for all? Others connect this with the next verse; ‘should I have said to you, I go to prepare a place for you?’ or, ‘I would have said to you, I go, &c.’ The latter cannot be right. Christ had already said, and says again, that He is going to shew them the way and to prepare for them (Joh 13:36, Joh 14:3).
I go to prepare ] We must insert ‘for’ on overwhelming authority; ‘for I go to prepare.’ This proves that there will be room for all.
Fuente: The Cambridge Bible for Schools and Colleges
In my Fathers house – Most interpreters understand this of heaven, as the special dwelling-place or palace of God; but it may include the universe, as the abode of the omnipresent God.
Are many mansions – The word rendered mansions means either the act of dwelling in any place (Joh 14:23, we will make our abode with him), or it means the place where one dwells. It is taken from the verb to remain, and signifies the place where one dwells or remains. It is applied by the Greek writers to the tents or temporary habitations which soldiers pitch in their marches. It denotes a dwelling of less permanency than the word house. It is commonly understood as affirming that in heaven there is ample room to receive all who will come; that therefore the disciples might be sure that they would not be excluded. Some have understood it as affirming that there will be different grades in the joys of heaven; that some of the mansions of the saints will be nearer to God than others, agreeably to 1Co 15:40-41. But perhaps this passage may have a meaning which has not occurred to interpreters.
Jesus was consoling his disciples, who were affected with grief at the idea of his separation. To comfort them he addresses them in this language: The universe is the dwelling-place of my Father. All is his house. Whether on earth or in heaven, we are still in his habitation. In that vast abode of God there are many mansions. The earth is one of them, heaven is another. Whether here or there, we are still in the house, in one of the mansions of our Father, in one of the apartments of his vast abode. This we ought continually to feel, and to rejoice that we are permitted to occupy any part of his dwelling-place. Nor does it differ much whether we are in this mansion or another. It should not be a matter of grief when we are called to pass from one part of this vast habitation of God to another. I am indeed about to leave you, but I am going only to another part of the vast dwelling-place of God. I shall still be in the same universal habitation with you; still in the house of the same God; and am going for an important purpose – to fit up another abode for your eternal dwelling. If this be the meaning, then there is in the discourse true consolation. We see that the death of a Christian is not to be dreaded, nor is it an event over which we should immoderately weep. It is but removing from one apartment of Gods universal dwelling-place to another – one where we shall still be in his house, and still feel the same interest in all that pertains to his kingdom. And especially the removal of the Saviour from the earth was an event over which Christians should rejoice, for he is still in the house of God, and still preparing mansions of rest for His people.
If it were not so … – I have concealed from you no truth. You have been cherishing this hope of a future abode with God. Had it been ill founded I would have told you plainly, as I have told you other things. Had any of you been deceived, as Judas was, I would have made it known to you, as I did to him.
I go to prepare a place for you – By his going is meant his death and ascent to heaven. The figure here is taken from one who is on a journey, who goes before his companions to provide a place to lodge in, and to make the necessary preparations for their entertainment. It evidently means that he, by the work he was yet to perform in heaven, would secure their admission there, and obtain for them the blessings of eternal life. That work would consist mainly in his intercession, Heb 10:12-13, Heb 10:19-22; Heb 7:25-27; Heb 4:14, Heb 4:16.
That where I am – This language could be used by no one who was not then in the place of which he was speaking, and it is just such language as one would naturally use who was both God and man – in reference to his human nature, speaking of his going to his Father; and in reference to his divine nature, speaking as if he was then with God.
Ye may be also – This was language eminently fitted to comfort them. Though about to leave them, yet he would not always be absent. He would come again at the day of judgment and gather all his friends to himself, and they should be ever with him, Heb 9:28. So shall all Christians be with him. And so, when we part with a beloved Christian friend by death, we may feel assured that the separation will not be eternal. We shall meet again, and dwell in a place where there shall be no more separation and no more tears.
Fuente: Albert Barnes’ Notes on the Bible
Verse 2. In my Fathers house, c.] The kingdom of glory.
Many mansions] Though I have said before that whither I am going ye cannot come now, yet do not think that we shall be for ever separated. I am going to that state of glory where there is not only a place of supreme eminence for myself, but also places for all my disciples – various degrees of glory, suited to the various capacities and attainments of my followers.
Our Lord alludes here to the temple, which was called the house of God, in the precincts of which there were a great number of chambers, 1Kg 6:5; Ezr 8:29; Jer 35:2; Jer 35:4; Jer 36:10.
If-not-I would have told you.] If your places were not prepared in the kingdom of God, I would not have permitted you to have indulged a vain hope concerning future blessedness.
Fuente: Adam Clarke’s Commentary and Critical Notes on the Bible
Our Lords first argument brought to comfort them, from the place whither he was going, and the end of his going thither. The place whither he was going was his
Fathers house, so as they needed not to be troubled for him, he was but going home; nor was God his Father only, but theirs also, as he afterwards saith, I go to my Father, and your Father. And here he tells them, that in his Fathers house there was not only a mansion, that is, an abiding place for him, but for many others also.
Our days on the earth (saith David, 1Ch 29:15) are as a shadow, and there is no abiding; but in heaven there are , abiding places. We shall (saith the apostle, 1Th 4:17) be ever with the Lord. And the mansions there are many; there is room enough for all believers. I would not have deceived you; if there had been no place in heaven but for me, I would have told you of it; but there are many mansions there.
I go to prepare a place for you: the place was prepared of old; those who shall be saved, were of old ordained unto life. That kingdom was prepared for them before the foundation of the world; that is, in the counsels and immutable purpose of God. These mansions for believers in heaven were to be sprinkled with blood: the sprinkling of the tabernacle, and all the vessels of the ministry, were typical of it; but the heaven things themselves with better sacrifices than these, saith the apostle, Heb 9:21,23. By his resurrection from the dead, and becoming the first fruits of those that sleep; by his ascension into heaven, as our forerunner, Heb 6:20; by his sitting at the right hand of God, and making intercession for us; he prepares for us a place in heaven. And thus he comforteth his disciples, (as to the want of his bodily presence), as from the consideration of the place whither he went, so from the end of his going thither, which was, to do those acts which were necessary in order to His disciples inheriting those blessed mansions which were prepared for them from before the foundation of the world.
Fuente: English Annotations on the Holy Bible by Matthew Poole
2. In my Father’s house are manymansionsand so room for all, and a place for each.
if not, I would have toldyouthat is, I would tell you so at once; I would not deceiveyou.
I go to prepare a place foryouto obtain for you a right to be there, and to possess your”place.”
Fuente: Jamieson, Fausset and Brown’s Commentary Critical and Explanatory on the Whole Bible
In my Father’s house are many mansions,…. This he says to draw off their minds from an earthly kingdom to an heavenly one; to point out the place to them whither he was going, and to support them with the views and hopes of glory under all their troubles. By his “Father’s house” is meant heaven; see 2Co 5:1; which is of his Father’s building, where he has, and will have all his family. This Christ says partly to reconcile the minds of his disciples to his departure from them, and partly to strengthen their hope of following him thither; since it was his Father’s, and their Father’s house whither he was going, and in which “are many mansions”; abiding or dwelling places; mansions of love, peace, joy, and rest, which always remain: and there are “many” of them, which does not design different degrees of glory; for since the saints are all loved with the same love, bought with the same price, justified with the same righteousness, and are equally the sons of God, their glory will be the same. But, it denotes fulness and sufficiency of room for all his people; for the many ordained to eternal life, for whom Christ gave his life a ransom, and whose blood is shed for the remission of their sins, whose sins he bore, and whom he justifies by his knowledge; who receive him by faith, and are the many sons he will bring to glory. And this is said for the comfort of the disciples who might be assured from hence, that there would be room not only for himself and Peter, whom he had promised should follow him hereafter, but for them all. Very agreeable to this way of speaking are many things in the Jewish writings:
“says R. Isaack o, how many , “mansions upon mansions”, are there for the righteous in that world? and the uppermost mansion of them all is the love of their Lord.”
Moreover, they say p, that
“in the world to come every righteous man shall have , “a mansion”, to himself.”
Sometimes they q speak of “seven mansions” (a number of perfection) being prepared for the righteous in the other world, though entirely ignorant of the person by whom these mansions are prepared: who here says,
if it were not so, I, would have told you, I go to prepare a place for you. This expresses the certainty of it, that his Father had a house, and in it were many mansions, room enough for all his people, or he would have informed them otherwise, who must needs know the truth of these things, since he came from thence; and who never deceives with vain hopes of glory; and whatever he says is truth, and to be depended on; everything he here delivers; both what he said before, and also what follows: “I go to prepare a place for you”; heaven is a kingdom prepared by the Father for his saints, from the foundation of the world; and again, by the presence and intercession of Christ, who is gone before, and is as a forerunner entered into it, and has took possession of it in the name of his people; and by his own appearance there for them with his blood, righteousness, and sacrifice, he is, as it were, fitting up these mansions for their reception, whilst they are by his Spirit and grace fitting and preparing for the enjoyment of them.
o Zohar in Deut. fol. 113. 1. p Praefat ad Sepher Raziel, fol. 2. 1. Nishmat Chayim, fol. 26. 2. & 27. 1. q T. Bab. Bava Bathra, fol. 75. 1. Nishmat Chayim, fol. 32. 2. Midrash Tillim in Galatin. l. 12. c. 6.
Fuente: John Gill’s Exposition of the Entire Bible
Mansions (). Old word from , to abide, abiding places, in N.T. only here and verse 23. There are many resting-places in the Father’s house (). Christ’s picture of heaven here is the most precious one that we possess. It is our heavenly home with the Father and with Jesus.
If it were not so ( ). Ellipsis of the verb (Mark 2:21; Rev 2:5; Rev 2:16; John 14:11). Here a suppressed condition of the second class (determined as unfulfilled) as the conclusion shows.
I would have told you ( ). Regular construction for this apodosis ( and aorist–second active–indicative).
For I go ( ). Reason for the consolation given, futuristic present middle indicative, and explanation of his words in 13:33 that puzzled Peter so (13:36f.).
To prepare a place for you ( ). First aorist active infinitive of purpose of , to make ready, old verb from . Here only in John, but in Mr 10:40 (Mt 20:23). It was customary to send one forward for such a purpose (Nu 10:33). So Jesus had sent Peter and John to make ready (this very verb) for the passover meal (Mark 14:12; Matt 26:17). Jesus is thus our Forerunner () in heaven (Heb 6:20).
Fuente: Robertson’s Word Pictures in the New Testament
House [] . The dwelling – place. Used primarily of the edifice (Mt 7:24; Mt 8:14; Mt 9:10; Act 4:34). Of the family or all the persons inhabiting the house (Mt 12:25; Joh 4:53; 1Co 16:15; Mt 10:13). Of property (Mt 23:14; Mr 12:40). Here meaning heaven.
Mansions [] . Only here and ver. 23. From menw to stay or abide. Originally a staying or abiding or delay. Thus Thucydides, of Pausanias : “He settled at Colonae in Troas, and was reported to the Ephors to be negotiating with the Barbarians, and to be staying there (thn monhn poioumenov, Literally, making a stay) for no good purpose” (i. 131). Thence, a staying or abiding – place; an abode. The word mansion has a similar etymology and follows the same course of development, being derived from manere, to remain. Mansio is thus, first, a staying, and then a dwelling – place. A later meaning of both mansio and monh is a halting – place or station on a journey. Some expositors, as Trench and Westcott, explain the word here according to this later meaning, as indicating the combination of the contrasted notions of progress and repose in the vision of the future. 47 This is quite untenable. The word means here abodes. Compare Homer’s description of Priam’s palace :
“A palace built with graceful porticoes, And fifty chambers near each other, walled With polished stone, the rooms of Priam’s sons And of their wives; and opposite to these Twelve chambers for his daughters, also near Each other; and, with polished marble walls, The sleeping – rooms of Priam’s sons – in – law And their unblemished consorts.” ” Iliad, ” 6, 242 – 250.
Godet remarks : “The image is derived from those vast oriental palaces, in which there is an abode not only for the sovereign and the heir to the throne, but also for all the sons of the king, however numerous they may be.”
If it were not so, I would have told you [ ] . Wyc., If anything less, I had said to you.
I go to prepare, etc. Many earlier interpreters refer I would have told you to these words, and render I would have told you that I go to prepare a place for you. But this is inadmissible, because Jesus says (ver. 3) that He is actually going to prepare a place. The better rendering regards if it were not so, I would have told you, as parenthetical, and connects the following sentence with are many mansions, by means of oti, for or because, which the best texts insert. “In my Father ‘s house are many mansions (if it were not so, I would have told you), for I go to prepare a place for you.”
I go to prepare. Compare Num 10:33. Also Heb 6:20, “whither the forerunner is for us entered, even Jesus.”
A place [] . See on 11 48. The heavenly dwelling is thus described by three words : house, abode, place.
Fuente: Vincent’s Word Studies in the New Testament
1) “In my Father’s house are many mansions,” (en te oikia tou patros mou monai pollai eisin) “in my Father’s residence (house) many abodes exist,” in the upper temple of my Father, in heaven itself. Or there are many abiding places, in this continuing city, Heb 13:14. The picture is that of a Royal dwelling place that provides shelter and care both for the King and his sons.
2) “If it were not so, I would have told you.” (ei de me eipon an humin) “Otherwise I would have told you,” or if it were not true I would have advised you all, disclosed it to you, instead of telling you that you would follow me, to my house to live with me, after I am gone.
3) “I go to prepare a place for you.” (hoti proseuomai hetoimasi topon humin) “Because I go away to prepare a place for you all,” to make ready to welcome you all home when you come, Joh 14:16. As my spirit, and that Holy Spirit which the Father shall send you when I am gone, leads and prepares you to come to be with me, as a joint heir in my Father’s estate, forever! Glorious thought! Divine assurance! 1Co 2:9; Rom 8:16-17; 2Ti 4:7-8. See also Heb 6:20; Heb 9:24, Rev 21:2.
Fuente: Garner-Howes Baptist Commentary
2. In my Father’s house are many dwellings. As the absence of Christ was a cause of grief, he declares that he does not, go away in such a. manner as to remain separate from them, since there is room for them also in the heavenly kingdom. For it was proper that he should remove the suspicion from their minds, that, when Christ ascended to the Father, he left his disciples on earth without taking any farther notice of them. This passage has been erroneously interpreted in another sense, as if Christ taught that’ there are various degrees of honor in the heavenly kingdom; for he says, that the mansions are many, not that they are different or unlike, but that there are enough of them for a great number of persons; as if he had said, that there is room not only for himself, but also for all his disciples.
And if it were not so, I would have told you. Here commentators differ. Some read these words as closely connected with what goes before: “If the dwellings had not been already prepared, I would have said that I go before you to prepare them.” But I rather agree with those who render it thus: “If the heavenly glory had awaited me only, I would not have deceived you. I would have told you that there was no room for any one but myself in my Father’s house. But the case is widely different; for I go before, to prepare a place for you.” The context, in my opinion, demands that we read it in this manner; for it follows immediately afterwards, If I go to prepare a place for you. By these words Christ intimates that the design of his departure is, to prepare a place for his disciples. In a word, Christ did not ascend to heaven in a private capacity, to dwell there alone, but rather that it might be the common inheritance of all the godly, and that in this way the Head might be united to his members.
But a question arises, What was the condition of the fathers after death, before Christ ascended to heaven? For the conclusion usually drawn is, that believing souls were shut up in an intermediate state or prison, because Christ says that, by his ascension into heaven, the place will be prepared. But the answer is easy. This place is said to be prepared for the day of the resurrection; for by nature mankind are banished from the kingdom of God, but the Son, who is the only heir of heaven, took possession of it in their name, that through him we may be permitted to enter; for in his person we already possess heaven by hope, as Paul informs us, (Eph 1:3.) Still we will not enjoy this great blessing, until he come from heaven the second time. The condition of the fathers after death, therefore, is not here distinguished from ours; because Christ has prepared both for them and for us a place, into which he will receive us all at the last day. Before reconciliation had been made, believing souls were, as it were, placed on a watch-tower, looking for the promised redemption, and now they enjoy a blessed rest, until the redemption be finished.
Fuente: Calvin’s Complete Commentary
(2) In my Fathers house are many mansions.The Greek word used for house here is slightly different from that used of the material temple on earth in Joh. 2:16. The exact meaning will be at once seen from a comparison of 2Co. 5:1, the only other passage in the New Testament where it is used metaphorically. The Jews were accustomed to the thought of heaven as the habitation of God; and the disciples had been taught to pray, Our Father, which art in heaven. (Comp. Psa. 23:6; Isa. 63:15; Mat. 6:9; Act. 7:49; and especially Hebrews 9)
The Greek word for mansions occurs again in the New Testament only in Joh. 14:23, where it is rendered abode. Wiclif and the Geneva version read dwellings. It is found in the Greek of the Old Testament only in 1Ma. 7:38 (Suffer them not to continue any longergive them not an abode). Our translators here followed the Vulgate, which has mansiones with the exact meaning of the Greek, that is; resting-places, dwellings. In Elizabethan English the word meant no more than this, and it now means no more in French or in the English of the North. A maison or a manse, is not necessarily a modern English mansion. It should also be noted that the Greek word is the substantive answering to the verb which is rendered dwelleth in Joh. 14:10, and abide in Joh. 15:4-10. (see Note there).
Many is not to be understood, as it often has been, simply or chiefly of different degrees of happiness in heaven. Happiness depends upon the mind which receives it, and must always exist, therefore, in varying degrees, but this is not the prominent thought expressed here, though it may be implied. The words refer rather to the extent of the Fathers house, in which there should be abiding-places for all. There would be no risk of that house being overcrowded like the caravanserai at Bethlehem, or like those in which the Passover pilgrims, as at this very time, found shelter at Jerusalem. Though Peter could not follow Him now, he should hereafter (Joh. 13:36); and for all who shall follow Him there shall be homes.
If it were not so, I would have told you.These words are not without difficulty, but the simplest, and probably truest, meaning is obtained by reading them as our version does. They become then an appeal to our Lords perfect candour in dealing with the disciples. He had revealed to them a Father and a house. That revelation implies a home for all. Were there not many mansions the fulness of His teaching could have had no place. Had there been limitations He must have marked them out.
I go to prepare a place for you.The better MSS. read, For I . . , connecting the clause with the earlier part of the verse. He is going away to prepare a place for them; and this also proves the existence of the home. There is to be then no separation; He is to enter within the veil, but it is to be as Forerunner on our behalf (Heb. 6:20). When Thou hadst overcome the sharpness of death, Thou didst open the kingdom of heaven to all believers.
Fuente: Ellicott’s Commentary for English Readers (Old and New Testaments)
2. My Father’s house By this is meant, not the universe, as some suppose; though the universe be the house of God and its mansions many. But it is the house not made with hands, the heavenly world.
Many mansions Many abodes or residences. This implies not merely that there is room enough for every one in heaven; nor simply that there are various grades and degrees of glory suited to the various grades of human moral character. It means these and more. We understand it to mean, that there is a great variety of compartments in the heavenly world for the various species and orders of heavenly existences. There are angels, principalities, and powers; there are angels and archangels; there are those who have never fallen from their holy estate; and Jesus now goes to prepare the heavenly apartment for the fallen but redeemed of men, by them to be occupied beyond the resurrection and the judgment-day. By his atoning death and his resurrection, he has won this right to place his redeemed, clothed in his merits, and crowned with his glory, in a high place in the heavenly world.
If it were not so If all were limited to this world alone and to this life; if I had but a glorious Messianic kingdom here on earth and no glory in the world of glory.
I would have told you I would do what I never have done, limit your views to an earthly glorification.
I go to prepare a place Through whatever agonies and humiliations you see me pass, my destination is to go to the heavenly world and prepare your heavenly abode.
Fuente: Whedon’s Commentary on the Old and New Testaments
“In my Father’s house are plenty of dwelling places. If it were not so I would have told you. I am going in order to prepare a place for you. And if I go and prepare a place for you, I am coming again, and will receive you face to face with myself, that where I am, you may be as well.”
Jesus then links Himself closely with the Father speaking of Him as ‘MY Father’ (something which, as we have already seen, John sees as indicating equality with God – Joh 5:18), and points out that He Himself has full authority as to who enters His eternal dwelling. Consequently it is their confidence in Him that can also result in their confidence in their future, because, as He explains, He is going to His Father’s house, and there is ample room for them there too. The Greek ‘mone’ can mean a room, a dwelling place, and the latter would seem to be the emphasis here. His ‘Father’s house’ probably contains the thought more of a family estate with a number of buildings, the place where the wider ‘household’ dwells, or of a large dwelling with an abundance of living quarters, built round a courtyard like the house of the High Priest. The emphasis is on their being family and on there being plenty of room. They are coming to His Father’s house, the new Jerusalem.
What is more they can be sure of this more than anything else on earth, that He, when He goes, will Himself prepare a place for them. There, in His Father’s family home, there will always be a welcome for them. Their destiny is sure. So whatever happens now they can be confident for the future.
And He knew that this confidence would be necessary. For He knew that in the future they would be rejected, tortured, beaten, and even martyred. It was therefore necessary for them to have the assurance in their hearts that all would be well.
Nor were they to think that they were being left to look to someone else, for He stresses, “I am returning (for you)”. The emphasis here is not so much on the second coming as on the fact that He will come back for them. He will return and take them to His Father’s home, where they will share the joy of His presence, being ‘face to face’ with Him (pros with the accusative). This both refers to His welcoming arms to those of His own who die, and to His second coming when He comes for His own (see 1Th 4:14-17). For the Christian hope is a dual hope, a certainty if death comes, and yet a longing rather for His coming. But either way they should be looking forward to His return in glory in order to finalise God’s purposes and to receive them into His presence.
He wants them not only to be sure that they have a home to go to, but also to enjoy a confidence in the successful culmination of God’s purposes, and a certainty that He will continually have their interests at heart. Thus His going will not mean that He is deserting them. Nor will it mean that He has been helplessly forced to leave them. It will rather mean that He is going in order to personally look after their interests and the eternal future for His own.
Fuente: Commentary Series on the Bible by Peter Pett
Joh 14:2. In my Father’s house, &c. Our Lord here has been thought by some to allude to the various apartments in the temple, and the vast numbers of people lodged there. Perhaps the allusion may be more general to the palaces of kings, and the various apartments there. The word signifies quiet and continued abodes, and therefore seems happily expressed by our English word mansion, the etymology and import of which is just the same. Our Saviour here intends the encouragement and comfort of his disciples, by assuring them, that in the place whereto he was going before them, there was ample room to receive them, and every thing to accommodate them in the most delightful manner. When the glory of heaven is spoken of as prepared before the foundation of the world, (Mat 25:34.) this only refers to the divine purpose; but as that was founded in Christ’s mediatorial undertaking, (Eph 1:4-6.) it might properly be said, that when Christ went into heaven, as our high-priest, to present, as it were, his own blood before the Father on our account, and as our fore-runner to take possession of it, he did thereby, prepare a place for us: which the apostle to the Heb 9:23-24 expresses by his purifying or consecrating the heavenly places,in which the faithful are to dwell; as the tabernacle of Moses, when new made; on which account an atonement for the altar itself, which was considered as most holy, was the first act performed in it when it was opened. (Exo 29:36-37.) It may not be improper to observe, that the word is often translated room, as in Luk 2:7; Luk 14:10; Luk 14:22. 1Co 14:16. And thus the signification here may be, that Christ went to heaven to make room for them, or to remove those things out of the way which obstructed their entrance. This may at least be included; though the word may express still more. It is the same term which is used of John the Baptist, the fore-runner of our Lord. See Mat 3:3; Mat 3:17.
Fuente: Commentary on the Holy Bible by Thomas Coke
Joh 14:2-3 serve to arouse the demanded in Joh 14:1 , to which a prospect so blessed lies open. In the house of my Father are many places of sojourn , many shall find their abiding-place ( only here and in Joh 14:23 in the N. T.; frequent in the classics, comp. also 1Ma 7:38 ), so that such therefore is not wanting to you also; but if this were not the case I would have told you (“ademissem vobis spem inanem,” Grotius). After a full stop must be placed, and with (see critical notes) a new sentence begins. So, first Valla, then Beza, Calvin, Casaubon, Aretius, Grotius, Jansen, and many others, including Kuinoel, Lcke, Tholuck, Olshausen, B. Crusius, De Wette, [140] Maier, Hengstenberg, Godet, Lachmann, Tischendorf. But the Fathers of the church, Erasmus, Luther, Castalio, Wolf, Maldonatus, Bengel, and many others, including Hofmann, Schriftbew . II. 2, p. 464, and Ebrard, refer to what follows: if it were not so, then I would have said to you : I go , etc. Against this Joh 14:3 is decisive, according to which Jesus actually says that He is going away, and is preparing a place. [141] Others take it as a question , where, however, we are not, on account of the aorist , to explain: would I indeed say to you : I go, etc. (Mosheim, Ernesti, Beck in the Stud. u. Krit . 1831, p. 130 ff.)? but: would I indeed have said to you, etc.? In this way there would neither be intended an earlier saying not preserved in the Gospel (Ewald), [142] possibly with the stamp of a gloss on it (Weizscker), or a reference to the earlier sayings regarding the passage into the heavenly world (Lange). But for the latter explanation the saying in the present passage is too definite and peculiar; while the former amounts simply to an hypothesis which is neither necessary nor capable of support on other grounds.
The is not heaven generally , but the peculiar dwelling-place of the divine in heaven, the place of His glorious throne (Psa 2:4 ; Psa 33:13-14 ; Isa 63:15 , et al. ), viewed, after the analogy of the temple in Jerusalem, this earthly (Joh 2:16 ), as a heavenly sanctuary (Isa 57:15 ). Comp. Heb 9
] , Euth. Zigabenus. The conception of different degrees of blessedness (Augustine and several others) lies entirely remote from the meaning here; for many the house of God is destined and established , and that already , Mat 25:34 .
, . . . ] for I go , etc., assigns the reason of the assurance: , so that , is to be regarded as logically inserted. The , . . . , however, is an actual proof of the existence of the in the heavenly house of God (not of the , as Luthardt thinks, placing only a colon after ), because otherwise Jesus could not go away with the design of getting prepared for them in those a place on which they are thereafter to enter, a place for them. This presupposes , in which the dwelling-place to be provided must exist. The idea is, further (comp. the idea of the , Heb 6:20 ), that He having attained by His death to the fellowship of the divine , purposes to prepare the way for their future with God (comp. Joh 17:24 ); but “therefore He speaks with them in the simplest possible, as it were, childlike fashion, according to their thoughts, as is necessary to attract and allure simple people,” Luther.
Joh 14:3 . ] Emphatic repetition of the consolatory words, with which the still more consolatory promise is united: I will come again, and will (then) receive you to myself . Jesus says, , not . , for He will not mention the point of time of His return, but what consequences (namely, the , . . .) will be connected with this departure of His, and preparation of a place of which He had just given them assurance. The . , . . ., is the conditioning fact which, if it shall take place, has the , . . ., as its happy consequence. Comp. Joh 12:32 . The nearness or remoteness of the appearance of this result remains undefined by . Comp. Dsterdieck on 1Jn 2:28 , where the reading is an alteration proceeding from clumsy copyists.
By Jesus means, and that not indefinitely, or with any approach to a spiritual signification (De Wette), but distinctly and clearly, His Parousia at the last day (Joh 6:39-40 , Joh 11:24 ), and not His resurrection (Ebrard), to which the following . ., . . ., is not appropriate. That in John also (comp. 1Jn 2:28 ), and in Jesus, according to John (comp. Joh 21:22 , Joh 5:28-29 ), as in the whole apostolic church, the conception existed of the Parousia as near at hand, [143] although, on account of its spiritual character in the Gospel, it steps less into the foreground, see in Kaeuffer, de . not . p. 131 f., comp. also Frommann, p. 479 f.; Lechler, Apost. und Nachapost. Zeit . p. 224 ff.; Wittichen in the Jahrb.f. D. Th . 1862, p. 357 f.; Weiss, Lehrbegr . p. 181. On this His glorious return He will receive the disciples into His personal fellowship (as raised from the dead or transformed respectively), and that as partakers of His divine in the heavenly sanctuary which has descended with Him to the earth, in which a place will be already prepared for them. He comes in the glory of His Father, and they enter into fellowship with Him in this in the Messianic kingdom. Comp. Origen and several others, including Calvin, Lampe, Luthardt, Hofmann, Schriftbew . I. p. 194, Hilgenfeld, Brckner, Ewald. The explanation of a coming, only regarded as such more or less improperly , in order to receive the disciples by a blessed death into heaven (Grotius, Kuinoel, B. Crusius, Reuss, Tholuck, Lange, Hengstenberg, and several others), is opposed to the words (comp. Joh 21:22 ) and to the mode of expression elsewhere employed in the N. T. respecting the coming of Christ, since death does indeed translate the apostles and martyrs to Christ (2Co 5:8 ; Phi 1:23 ; Act 7:59 ; see on Phi 1:26 , note); but it is nowhere said of Christ that He comes (in order to be personally present at their dying bed, so Hengstenberg, indeed, thinks) and fetches them to Himself. Except in the Paraclete, Christ first comes in His glory at the Parousia. The interpretation, however (according to Joh 14:18 ff.), that here “only the spiritual return of Christ to His own, and their reception into the full sacred fellowship of the Spirit of the glorified Christ” (Lcke, Neander, Godet) can be intended (comp. Olshausen, Ebrard), is not to be approved, for the reason that Jesus Himself, Joh 14:2 , has decisively provided beforehand for the words being understood of His actual return, and of local fellowship with Him (in Joh 14:18 ff. the entire context is different).
] spoken in the consciousness of the great value which the love of the disciples placed on fellowship with His own person . Only with Himself have faith and love the final object of hope, and their blessed reward [144] in the Father’s house.
[140] He terms the assertion “somewhat nave .” But it has rather its full weight in the faith presupposed in the disciples, that He cannot leave them uninstructed on any essential point of their hope. Comp. Kstlin, Lehrbegr. p. 163.
[141] This reason is valid, whether we read now in ver. 3 , or with Lachmann merely : Hofmann follows the latter, and connects therewith, as well as with , artificial and laboured departures from the simple sense of the words. Ebrard also adopts a forced and artificial view, according to which is said to be objective : bring about your presence ; but (without ) must point to the making accessible for the disciples . How could a listener hit upon this difference of idea in the same word?
[142] He would also place within a parenthesis, and finds here either a saying out of a now unknown gospel, or rather out of the fragment supposed to have been lost before chap. 6.
[143] However decidedly this is still denied by Scholten, who finds in John only a spiritual coming, in the sense, namely, that the Spirit of Jesus remains . According to Keim ( Geschichtl. Chr. p. 45, Exo 3 ), the fourth Gospel has, “in sufficiently modern fashion, relegated the future kingdom to heaven,” and “broken off the head” of the expectation of the Parousia. But the head is exactly in the present passage.
[144] It is incorrect to maintain that in John the notion of reward is entirely wanting (so Weiss in the Deutsch. ZeitzsChr. 1853, pp. 325, 338, and in his Petr. Lehrbegr. p. 55 f.). As Christ seeks in prayer eternal glory for Himself as a reward, Joh 17:4-5 , so He assigns it to the disciples also as a reward. See Joh 17:24 , Joh 12:25-26 , Joh 11:26 . Here applies also the promise of . , Joh 3:3 ; Joh 3:5 , and the resurrection at the last day, Joh 5:28-29 , Joh 6:40 ; Joh 6:54 . Comp. 1Jn 3:2-3 , where the future transfiguration and union with Christ is expressly designated as the object of , as well as Joh 8 where even the expression is employed, and is to be understood of eternal blessedness (see Dsterdieck, II. p. 505).
Fuente: Heinrich August Wilhelm Meyer’s New Testament Commentary
DISCOURSE: 1683
THE COMFORT TO BE DERIVED FROM CHRISTS ASCENSION
Joh 14:2-3. In my Fathers house are many mansions: if it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you. And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again, and receive you unto myself; that where I am, there ye may be also.
A HOPE of future happiness affords strong consolation under present trials. The children of God, if destitute of this, would be of all men most miserable; but this renders them incomparably more happy, even under the most afflictive dispensations, than the greatest fulness of earthly things could make them. Our Lord opened these springs of comfort to his disconsolate Disciples. Being about to leave them, he not only told them whither, and for what purpose, he was going, but that he would assuredly return to recompense all which they might endure for his sakeIn my Fathers house, &c.
We shall consider,
I.
Our Lords description of heaven
We are taught to conceive of heaven as a place of unspeakable felicity. The description given of it by St. John is intended to elevate our thoughts, and enlarge our conceptions to the uttermost [Note: Rev 21:19; Rev 21:21.]; but a spiritual mind, which is dead to earthly things, may perhaps see no less beauty in our Lords description.
Our Lord thus describes it; My Fathers house with many mansions
[Here seems to be an allusion to the temple at Jerusalem: God dwelt there in a more especial manner [Note: 1Ki 8:10-11.]; around it were chambers for the priests and Levites. Thus in heaven God dwells, and displays his glory [Note: Isa 57:15.]; there also are mansions where his redeemed people see him as he is.]
This description may be depended upon
[The Disciples had left all in expectation of a future recommence: our Lord had taught them to look for it, not on earth, but in heaven. Had no such recompence awaited them, he would have told them so. Thus he pledges, as it were, his love and faithfulness for the truth of what he had told them.]
Our Lord further acquaints them with the reason of his ascending thither:
II.
The end of his ascension thither
All which our Lord did on earth was for the good of his people. He consulted their good also in his ascension to heaven: he went to prepare a place for them, which he does,
1.
By purging heaven itself with his own blood
[Heaven would have been defiled, as it were, by the admission of sinners into it; he therefore entered into heaven to sanctify it by his blood. This was typified by the atonement made for the altar and the tabernacle [Note: Lev 16:15-20.]. The type is thus explained and applied [Note: Heb 9:21-24. Here is a parallel drawn not only between the Holy of holies and heaven, but also between the purifying of the Holy of holies by the high-priest, and the purifying of heaven itself by Christ with his own blood: and both are declared to have been necessary; the one as a type, and the other as the anti-type.]]
2.
By taking possession of it as their Head and Representative
[He is the head, and his people are his members [Note: Eph 4:15-16.]. His ascension to heaven is a pledge and earnest of theirs [Note: 1Co 15:20.]. In this view he is expressly called our forerunner [Note: Heb 6:20.].]
3.
By maintaining their title to it
[They would continually forfeit their title to it by their sins: but he maintains their peace with God by his intercession. Hence his power to bring them finally to that place is represented as depending on his living in heaven to intercede for them [Note: Heb 7:25.].]
By these means every obstacle to his peoples happiness is removed.
III.
The prospects which his ascension affords us
His ascension is the foundation of all our hope: as it proves his mission, so also it assures us,
1.
That he shall come again
[The high-priest, after offering incense within the vail, was to come out and bless the people. This was a type of our Lords return from heaven when he shall have finished his work of intercession there [Note: Heb 9:28.].]
2.
That he shall take his people to dwell with him
[He had promised this as a condition of their engaging in his service [Note: Joh 12:26.]. He declared it to be his fixed determination just before his departure [Note: Joh 17:24.]. It may even be inferred from his ascension; seeing that his ascension would have been utterly in vain without it [Note: 1Co 15:14.].]
What a bright and blessed prospect is this! What an effectual antidote against their approaching troubles!
Infer
1.
How wonderful are the condescension and grace of Christ!
[We cannot conceive any thing more tender than the whole of this address. Such is still his conduct towards all his people Let us admire and adore this compassionate high-priest.]
2.
How highly privileged are they that believe in Christ!
[How different was our Lords address to unbelievers [Note: Joh 8:21.]; but to believers he says, Where I am, ye shall be also. Let this inestimable privilege have its due effect upon us; let it stimulate our desires after heaven; let it reconcile us to the thoughts of death; let it engage us more earnestly to serve God [Note: 1Th 1:9-10.].]
Fuente: Charles Simeon’s Horae Homileticae (Old and New Testaments)
The Prepared Place
Joh 14:2
There are two remarkable things about this statement. First of all, that the master should prepare for the servant. This upsets the ordinary course of procedure. You are expecting to entertain some chosen friends. All your appointments are made; you have sent before your face servants in whom you have confidence, and have told them to do as you have commanded, that all things may be in readiness for the invited guests. This is customary; this is considered right. But Jesus Christ says to his servants such poor, incomplete, and blundering servants too “I, your Lord and Master, go to prepare a place for you.” This is quite in keeping with the method which Jesus Christ adopted in his ministry. This is no exceptional instance of condescension, self-ignoring, self-humiliation. “He took a towel, girded himself, and began to wash his disciples’ feet.” And having finished this lowly exhibition, he said, “If I, then, your Lord and Master, have washed your feet, ye ought also to wash one another’s feet. I have given you an example.” So his whole life was a humiliation. Wherever he was on earth he was, so to speak, out of place; if his method be measured by his original and essential dignity, his whole life was a stoop, his whole ministry a Godlike condescension. So, why did we begin our discourse by saying it was a remarkable thing that the servant should be prepared for by the Master? Only remarkable when looked at in the light of our little standards and false relations; but quite in keeping, perfectly and purely in harmony, with that divine condescension which marked, ruled, and glorified our dear Christ’s ministry.
The second remarkable thing about the text is, That the divine Being, God the Son, should ever have occasion to “prepare” anything. To prepare may signify to get ready, to put things in order, to look after arrangements, appointments, and the like, so as to have all things in due proportion and relation, that the eye may be pleased, that the ear may be satisfied, and that all our desires may be met and fulfilled. Why, Jesus Christ talks in the text as if there was a great deal of work for him to do somewhere, and he must make haste and get it done. Go to prepare? Can he who fills infinitude and breathes eternity have anything to do in the way of arranging and ordering and getting things ready for his servants? He accommodates himself to our modes of thinking. He does not always throw the infinite at us. He often steps out of his tabernacle of glory and talks our own speech, makes a child of himself that he may be understood in this little rickety nursery of a world. He knows we are all in the cradle still; that the mightiest speaker amongst us is only a lisping babbler, and that he must continually break up his words and turn himself downwards, in order that he may convey the very dimmest hint of his unutterable meaning!
There are some things which the Master only can do. Will you go and prepare summer for us? You might try. You have seen half a hundred summers: now you go, and try to make the fifty-first! Come! You are an artificer; you have the organ of form largely developed; you have an eye for beauty; you can buy oils and paints and colours and canvas and brushes of all kinds. Why do you not go and prepare summer for us? The great Master, looking down upon this little under-world of his this basement story of his great building says, “I am going to prepare the summer for you.” And he makes no noise, he makes no mistake in his colours, never gets things into discord. He continually renews the face of the earth, and not a man in all the busy boastful world can do it! If the servant cannot prepare the summer, how could he prepare heaven? If the saint exhausts himself when he lights a candle, how could ho fill the great heavens with the morning that should never melt into sunset?
Observe, therefore, that always the servant has to wait for the master. He can only go as he has example set before him. The servant has no original ideas. The servant is not a voice, only an echo, muddled, indistinct. I would that we could reflect very deeply on that point, that every now and then in life we have to stand back, and let the Master go out before us. We can do a hundred and fifty little things, and multiply the hundred and fifty by ten, and double that number, and we actually get into the notion at last that we can do anything. When you have made one little rosebud, advertise it, and we will come and look at it. When you have made one new plant, let us hear where it is to be seen, and we shall examine it. “Canst thou command the morning?” “Canst loose the bands of Orion?” Art thou known by the Pleiades? Canst thou open the gate of the Milky Way? What art thou?
This text gives three intensely gratifying, comforting, and inspiring views of the Christian believer’s position and destiny. The Christian believer is the object of Jesus Christ’s zealous and tender care. When Jesus Christ was going away he said to his wondering disciples, “It is expedient for you that I go.” When he addressed them on the occasion of the text he said, “I go to prepare a place for myself”? No! “For you.” And the Apostle Paul, catching his Master’s sublime tone, said, “All things are yours.” And Peter, thunder-tongued, cried out, “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, which according to his abundant mercy hath begotten us again unto a lively hope by the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, to an inheritance incorruptible and undefiled, and that fadeth not away, reserved in heaven for you!” Yet we hang our heads, and moan and cry and fret and chafe as if we had nothing, not knowing that a man’s life consisteth not in the abundance of the things which he possesseth.
Wherever you find Jesus Christ you find him working for his people, doing something for those who believe in him and love him. “He ever liveth to make intercession for us.” There is a beautiful necessity of love about this arrangement. For if he were to fail here, fail in training, educating, sanctifying the Church, he would fail altogether. What if he has made countless millions of stars: can the stars talk to him? Can he get back the idea which he gave? Can he have sympathy with form, substance, glory, majesty, as found in mere matter? If he does not get us poor, broken things right into his blue, glad heaven, he has failed! That is the one work which he set himself to do. If he drops one poor little child out of his great arms because he has not capacity and strength, he could never be happy in his heaven. Think of this: Christ always thinking for us, caring for us, going out in all the passion of his love after us, and then say whether the Church ought always to have tears in her eyes and never to have peace in her heart?
Not only are Christian believers constant objects of Jesus Christ’s most zealous and tender care, but they are to be eternally his joy. “I go to prepare a place for you.” The plain meaning of that is, Fellowship, residence together in common. He said afterwards, “And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again, and receive you unto myself; that where I am, there ye may be also” giving us the idea of permanence, continuity of residence, and fellowship. We do some things for the moment. It is enough for God if he limits April to thirty days; he does not want it on the thirty-first day; it ceases, and goes back into his great heaven, and May begins. He does not bring back any one year that has passed, and say, “There, I have brushed it up for you, and made the best of it I can: you must try it again.” No. He takes the years, blows them away; creates new ones; never gives you an old leaf, or tells you to put a faded flower into water and try to restore its colours and its fragrance again. “He is able to do exceeding abundantly above all that we ask or think.” “He fainteth not, neither is weary.” As for these heavens, he will one day dismiss them. He will create a new heaven and a new earth. He will burn up and utterly destroy what he has made. He makes some things for the time being; but wherever we read of the place prepared for Christian believers, we have the idea of continuous, enduring time never-ending fellowship. All true life is in the heart. Love alone is immortal. “God is love.” We shall drop argument, logic, controversy, letters, technicalities, pedantries of all sorts, tongues, prophecies, hope, faith itself, and only Love shall live for ever!
The world is made poor whenever it loses pathos. Whenever the emotional goes down, man goes down. Logic is but intermediate help; it is but a poor ladder compared to heart, love, pathos, sensibility. Love must endure as God endureth. This is it which binds Christ and Christians love. Love is knowledge. Love hath the key of interpretation. Love can explain what learning can never fathom. Love knoweth the Lord afar off, beyond the stormy deep, in the far-away desert, in the night-time dark and cold. Love can see the invisible, and touch the distant. Do we love Christ, or are we still in the beggarly region of mere controversy and cold intellectual inquiry? If we love him we shall be with him for ever.
Seeing that Christ makes the Christian believer the object of his constant and zealous care, and that the Christian believer shall be for ever with his Lord, the Christian is entitled to look at the present through the medium of the future. The more we can bring the power of this love to bear upon the passing moments, we can look into the things which are seen and at the things which are not seen, and step out of eternity morning by morning, do our little paltry day’s work, and go back again into God’s pavilion. If in this life only we have hope, we are of all men most miserable. For we know that if our earthly house of this tabernacle were dissolved, we have a building of God, an house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens. Moses endured as seeing the invisible. Jesus Christ teaches this most beautiful doctrine: That the Christian heart is not to be troubled, because in his Father’s house are many mansions. So he brings down heaven to help up earth. He says, “When you are weary of the present, look forward to the future; when the road is steep and difficult and tortuous, think of the end and be thankful and glad.” It is by this power we draw ourselves onward. We lay the hands of our expectant love on the golden bars of heaven and draw ourselves forward thereby. Some will know what I mean by that expression. You who have been in sickness and sorrow and loss you who have been tired of looking downwards, and feel the very heart dying within you, when you saw nothing but this earth’s narrow circumference, and then have had sudden visions of God’s eternity and Christ’s blessed immortality, you draw on yourself through all the care and sorrow and bitterness and unrest of time by loving, intelligent anticipation of eternity.
Now, if Christ has gone to prepare a place for the Christian believer what then? The place will be worthy of himself. Send a poor creature to prepare a place for you against to-morrow, and the place will be prepared according to the capacity and resources of the messenger. It is a poor person who has gone to prepare a place for you, therefore you will not see gold and silver, you will not have a sumptuous reception; but if the poor person has done all that she could, it is enough. You will see the intent of the preparation everywhere; every speck of dust that has been removed means, “I would put down gold there if I could.” Every little thing, even a wild flower out of the hedgerow, put into a little glass that can hardly stand, means, “I would give you paradise, if I could.” Every little deed that is done ought to be amplified by your grateful love, because it means so much more than it looks. But Jesus Christ says, ‘”I go to prepare a place for you. I have made worlds, stars, planets, comets; I have sent forth the lightning and uttered the thunder. Now I am going to do my greatest deed of all. I am going to get a place ready for those whom I have bought with my blood and glorified by my Spirit.” What kind of place will he get ready for us, who has all things at command, when the silver and the gold are his, when he can speak light and command worlds to fashion themselves and shine upon his children? What kind of place will he get ready? You like to be prepared for. If the person preparing for you is poor, you take every little deed as a great deed. If the person preparing for you has ample resources and receives you as if “Really, well, you have come after all; but, at the same time, it would have been quite as well if you had lost your way,” you naturally feel indignant, dissatisfied, resentful, because it might have been done nobly. Jesus Christ has gone to prepare a place. We judge men by the capacity of their resources. We have seen what he has done. If he has loved us with unutterable love, he will enrich us with inconceivable glory. The riches which he has are called “the unsearchable riches of Christ.” “Eye hath not seen, ear hath not heard, nor hath it entered into the heart of man to conceive, what God hath prepared.” “Come, ye blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you.”
Preparation implies an interest in us, an expectation of us. He is waiting for his guests; he will open the door presently, and we shall go straight in. God has prepared nothing for the bad man. There is a place, the pit of damnation, the worm that dieth not, and the fire that is not quenched! But it was not prepared for him. It was prepared, Christ says, for “the devil and his angels.” That is the only place he has for the bad man! He made no preparation for him, thought, perhaps, that at the very last moment he might turn and say, “God be merciful to me a sinner!” Christ did not get anything ready for you! All that there is is the devil’s pit never, never got ready for man man who was redeemed by the precious blood of Christ!
Fuente: The People’s Bible by Joseph Parker
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.
Ver. 2. I would have told you ] And not have fed you with false hopes of a Utopian happiness, as the devil deals by his, whom he brings into a fool’s paradise; as Mahomet by his, to whom he promises in paradise delicious fare, pleasant gardens, and other sensual delights eternally to be enjoyed, &c. Christ is no such impostor.
Fuente: John Trapp’s Complete Commentary (Old and New Testaments)
2. ] This comfort of being reunited to their Lord is administered to them as , in forms of speech simple, and adapted to their powers of apprehension of spiritual things. The is Heaven: Psa 33:13-14 ; Isa 63:15 . In it are many (in number not in degree of dignity, as Clem. Alex [185] , Basil., Theod., Chrys., Theophylact, Tert [186] , Hil [187] , Aug [188] , &c., at least no such meaning is here conveyed) abiding-places; room enough for them all; . Euthym [189] If not, if they could not follow Him thither, He would not have concealed this from them. This latter assurance is one calculated to beget entire trust and confidence; He would not in any matter hold out vain hopes to them; His word to them would plainly state all difficulties and discouragements, as indeed He does, ch. Joh 15:18 ; Joh 16:1 ; Joh 16:4 ; which last verse , is decisive for the above interpretation here, against those who would join with (Euthym [190] , Aug [191] , Erasm., Luther, Bengel): which besides does violence to the next verse, where the ‘going to prepare a place’ is stated as a fact . The may, it is true, have been inserted as a recitantis , to favour the view just controverted: but it is much more probably genuine, signifying because, and belongs to the whole sense of Joh 14:1-2 , as a reason why their heart should not be troubled.
[185] Alex. Clement of Alexandria, fl. 194
[186] Tertullian , 200
[187] Hilary, Bp. of Poictiers , 354
[188] Augustine, Bp. of Hippo , 395 430
[189] Euthymius Zigabenus, 1116
[190] Euthymius Zigabenus, 1116
[191] Augustine, Bp. of Hippo , 395 430
The sense confidently proposed for the many mansions by a correspondent, that He was going to one part of His Father’s house, while they would remain in another , that house being not Heaven, but the Universe, is entirely put out of the question, as being frigid in the extreme under the solemn circumstances, as being contrary to all Scripture analogy of expression, and as inconsistent with the , where the is of necessity correlative with the , which are in that whither He is going. Besides, their earthly could in no sense be called a . The is that of which we sing, “When Thou hadst overcome the sharpness of death, Thou didst open the Kingdom of Heaven to all believers:” see note on Luk 23:43 . And thus it is , not : the place as a whole, not each man’s place in it.
Fuente: Henry Alford’s Greek Testament
Joh 14:2 . As an encouragement to this trust, He adds, . He is going home to His Father’s house, but had there been room in it only for Himself He would necessarily have told them that this was the case, because the very reason of His going was to prepare a place for them, assigns the reason for the necessity of explanation: the reason being that His purpose or plan for His future would require to be entirely altered had there been no room for them in His Father’s house. “My Father’s house” is used in Joh 2:16 of the Temple: here of the immediate presence of the Father and of that condition in which His love and protection are uninterruptedly and directly experienced. This is most naturally thought of as a place, but with the corrective that “it is not in heaven one finds God, but in God one finds heaven”. Cf. Godet. In this house, as in a great palace, cf. Iliad , vi. 242, . ( ), only here and in Joh 14:23 , means a place to abide in, and was used of a station on a journey, a resting place, quarters for the night, and in later ecclesiastical Greek a monastery. See Soph., Lexicon . “Mansions” reproduces the Vulgate “mansiones”. See further Wright’s Bible Word-Book . “were it not so, I would have told you,” “ademissem vobis spem inanem,” Grotius. Had there been no such place and no possibility of preparing it, He necessarily would have told them, because the very purpose of His leaving them was to prepare a place for them. , a figure derived from the custom of sending forward one of a party to secure quarters and provide all requisites. Cf. the Alcestis , line 363: , , , . What was involved in the preparation here spoken of is detailed in Hebrews. Cf. Selby’s Ministry of the Lord , 275.
Fuente: The Expositors Greek Testament by Robertson
John
THE FORERUNNER
‘MANY MANSIONS’
Joh 14:2
Sorrow needs simple words for its consolation; and simple words are the best clothing for the largest truths. These eleven poor men were crushed and desolate at the thought of Christ’s going; they fancied that if He left them they lost Him. And so, in simple, childlike words, which the weakest could grasp, and in which the most troubled could find peace, He said to them, after having encouraged their trust in Him, ‘There is plenty of room for you as well as for Me where I am going; and the frankness of our intercourse in the past might make you sure that if I were going to leave you I would have told you all about it. Did I ever hide from you anything that was painful? Did I ever allure you to follow Me by false promises? Should I have kept silence about it if our separation was to be eternal?’ So, simply, as a mother might hush her babe upon her breast, He soothes their sorrow. And yet, in the quiet words, so level to the lowest apprehension, there lie great truths, far deeper than we yet have appreciated, and which will enfold themselves in their majesty and their greatness through eternity. ‘In My Father’s house are many mansions; if it were not so, I would have told you.’
I. Now note in these words, first, the ‘Father’s house,’ and its ample room.
Think for a moment of how sweet and familiar the conception of heaven as the Father’s house makes it to us. There is something awful, even to the best and holiest souls, in the thought of even the glories beyond. The circumstances of death, which is its portal, our utter unacquaintance with all that lies behind the veil, the terrible silence and distance which falls upon our dearest ones as they are sucked into the cloud, all tend to make us feel that there is much that is solemn and awful even in the thought of eternal future blessedness. But how it is all softened when we say, ‘My Father’s house.’ Most of us have long since left behind us the sweet security, the sense of the absence of all responsibility, the assurance of defence and provision, which used to be ours when we lived as children in a father’s house here. But we may all look forward to the renewal, in far nobler form, of these early days, when the father’s house meant the inexpugnable fortress where no evil could befall us, the abundant home where all wants were supplied, and where the shyest and timidest child could feel at ease and secure. It is all coming again, brother, and amidst the august and unimaginable glories of that future the old feeling of being little children, nestling safe in the Father’s house, will fill our quiet hearts once more.
And then consider how the conception of that Future as the Father’s house suggests answers to so many of our questions about the relationship of the inmates to one another. Are they to dwell isolated in their several mansions? Is that the way in which children in a home dwell with each other? Surely if He be the Father, and heaven be His house, the relation of the redeemed to one another must have in it more than all the sweet familiarity and unrestrained frankness which subsists in the families of earth. A solitary heaven would be but half a heaven, and would ill correspond with the hopes that inevitably spring from the representation of it as ‘my Father’s house.’
But consider further that this great and tender name for heaven has its deepest meaning in the conception of it as a spiritual state of which the essential elements are the loving manifestation and presence of God as Father, the perfect consciousness of sonship, the happy union of all the children in one great family, and the derivation of all their blessedness from their Elder Brother.
The earthly Temple, to which there is some allusion in this great metaphor, was the place in which the divine glory was manifested to seeking souls, though in symbol, yet also in reality, and the representation of our text blends the two ideas of the free, frank intercourse of the home and of the magnificent revelations of the Holy of holies. Under either aspect of the phrase, whether we think of ‘my Father’s house’ as temple or as home, it sets before us, as the main blessedness and glory of heaven, the vision of the Father, the consciousness of sonship, and the complete union with Him. There are many subsidiary and more outward blessednesses and glories which shine dimly through the haze of metaphors and negations, by which alone a state of which we have no experience can be revealed to us; but these are secondary. The heaven of heaven is the possession of God the Father through the Son in the expanding spirits of His sons. The sovereign and filial position which Jesus Christ in His manhood occupies in that higher house, and which He shares with all those who by Him have received the adoption of sons, is the very heart and nerve of this great metaphor.
But I think we must go a step further than that, and recognise that in the image there is inherent the teaching that that glorious future is not merely a state, but also a place. Local associations are not to be divorced from the words; and although we can say but little about such a matter, yet everything in the teaching of Scripture points to the thought that howsoever true it may be that the essence of heaven is condition, yet that also heaven has a local habitation, and is a place in the great universe of God. Jesus Christ has at this moment a human body, glorified. That body, as Scripture teaches us, is somewhere, and where He is there shall also His servant be. In the context He goes on to tell us that ‘He goes to prepare a place for us,’ and though I would not insist upon the literal interpretation of such words, yet distinctly the drift of the representation is in the direction of localising, though not of materialising, the abode of the blessed. So I think we can say, not merely that what He is that shall also His servants be, but that where He is there shall also His servants be. And from the representation of my text, though we cannot fathom all its depths, we can at least grasp this, which gives solidity and reality to our contemplations of the future, that heaven is a place, full of all sweet security and homelike repose, where God is made known in every heart and to every consciousness as a loving Father, and of which all the inhabitants are knit together in the frankest fraternal intercourse, conscious of the Father’s love, and rejoicing in the abundant provisions of His royal House.
And then there is a second thought to be suggested from these words, and that is of the ample room in this great house. The original purpose of the words of my text, as I have already reminded you, was simply to soothe the fears of a handful of disciples.
There was room where Christ went for eleven poor men. Yes, room enough for them! but Christ’s prescient eye looked down the ages, and saw all the unborn millions that would yet be drawn to Him uplifted on the Cross, and some glow of satisfaction flitted across His sorrow, as He saw from afar the result of the impending travail of His soul in the multitudes by whom God’s heavenly house should yet be filled. ‘Many mansions!’ the thought widens out far beyond our grasp. Perhaps that upper room, like most of the roof-chambers in Jewish houses, was open to the skies, and whilst He spoke, the innumerable lights that blaze in that clear heaven shone down upon them, and He may have pointed to these. The better Abraham perhaps looked forth, like His prototype, on the starry heavens, and saw in the vision of the future those who through Him should receive the ‘adoption of sons’ and dwell for ever in the house of the Lord, ‘so many as the stars of the sky in multitude, and as the sand which is by the seashore innumerable.’
Ah! brethren, if we could only widen our measurement of the walls of the New Jerusalem to the measurement of that ‘golden rod which the man, that is the angel,’ as John says, applied to it, we should understand how much bigger it is than any of these poor sects and communities of ours here on earth. If we would lay to heart, as we ought to do, the deep meaning of that indefinite ‘many’ in my text, it would rebuke our narrowness. There will be a great many occupants of the mansions in heaven that Christian men here on earth-the most Catholic of them-will be very much surprised to see there, and thousands will find their entrance there that never found their entrance into any communities of so-called Christians here on earth.
That one word ‘many’ should deepen our confidence in the triumphs of Christ’s Cross, and it may be used to heighten our own confidence as to our own poor selves. A chamber in the great Temple waits for each of us, and the question is, Shall we occupy it, or shall we not? The old Rabbis had a tradition which, like a great many of their apparently foolish sayings, covers in picturesque guise a very deep truth. They said that, however many the throngs of worshippers who came up to Jerusalem at the passover, the streets of the city and the courts of the sanctuary were never crowded. And so it is with that great city. There is room for all. There are throngs, but no crowds. Each finds a place in the ample sweep of the Father’s house, like some of the great palaces that barbaric Eastern kings used to build, in whose courts armies might encamp, and the chambers of which were counted by the thousand. And surely in all that ample accommodation, you and I may find some corner where we, if we will, may lodge for evermore.
I do not dwell upon subsidiary ideas that may be drawn from the expressions. ‘Mansions’ means places of permanent abode, and suggests the two thoughts, so sweet to travellers and toilers in this fleeting, labouring life, of unchangeableness and of repose. Some have supposed that the variety in the attainments of the redeemed, which is reasonable and scriptural, might be deduced from our text, but that does not seem to be relevant to our Lord’s purpose.
One other suggestion may be made without enlarging upon it. There is only one other occasion in this Gospel in which the word here translated ‘mansions’ is employed, and it is this: ‘We will come and make our abode with him.’ Our mansion is in God; God’s dwelling-place is in us. So ask yourselves, Have you a place in that heavenly home? When prodigal children go away from the father’s house, sometimes a broken-hearted parent will keep the boy’s room just as it used to be when he was young and pure, and will hope and weary through long days for him to come back and occupy it again. God is keeping a room for you in His house; do you see that you fill it.
II. In the next place, note here the sufficiency of Christ’s revelation for our needs.
The gaps in our knowledge of the future, seeing that we have such a Revealer as we have in Christ, are remarkable. But my text suggests this to us-we have as much as we need. I know, and many of you know, by bitter experience, how many questions, the answers to which would seem to us to be such a lightening of our burdens, our desolated and troubled hearts suggest about that future, and how vainly we ply heaven with questions and interrogate the unreplying Oracle. But we know as much as we need. We know that God is there. We know that it is the Father’s house. We know that Christ is in it. We know that the dwellers there are a family. We know that sweet security and ample provision are there; and, for the rest, if we I needed to have heard more, He would have told us.
‘My knowledge of that life is small,
The eye of faith is dim;
But ‘tis enough that Christ knows all;
And I shall be with Him.’
May we not widen the application of that thought to other matters than to our bounded and fragmentary conceptions of a future life? In times like the present, of doubt and unrest, it is a great piece of Christian wisdom to recognise the limitations of our knowledge and the sufficiency of the fragments that we have. What do we get a revelation for? To solve theological puzzles and dogmatic difficulties? to inflate us with the pride of quasi-omniscience? or to present to us God in Christ for faith, for love, for obedience, for imitation? Surely the latter, and for such purposes we have enough.
So let us recognise that our knowledge is very partial. A great stretch of wall is blank, and there is not a window in it. If there had been need for one, it would have been struck out. He has been pleased to leave many things obscure, not arbitrarily, so as to try our faith-for the implication of the words before us is that the relation between Him and us binds Him to the utmost possible frankness, and that all which we need and He can tell us He does tell-but for high reasons, and because of the very conditions of our present environment, which forbid the more complete and all-round knowledge.
So let us recognise our limitations. We know in part, and we are wise if we affirm in part. Hold by the Central Light, which is Jesus Christ. ‘Many things did Jesus which are not written in this book,’ and many gaps and deficiencies from a human point of view exist in the contexture of revelation. ‘But these are written that ye may believe that Jesus is the Christ,’ for which enough has been told us, ‘and that, believing, ye may have life in His name.’ If that purpose be accomplished in us, God will not have spoken, nor we have heard, in vain. Let us hold by the Central Light, and then the circumference of darkness will gradually retreat, and a wider sphere of illumination be ours, until the day when we enter our mansion in the Father’s house, and then ‘in Thy Light shall we see light’; and we shall ‘know even as we are known.’
Let your Elder Brother lead you back, dear friend, to the Father’s bosom, and be sure that if you trust Him and listen to Him, you will know enough on earth to turn earth into a foretaste of Heaven, and will find at last your place in the Father’s house beside the Brother who has prepared it for you.
Fuente: Expositions Of Holy Scripture by Alexander MacLaren
In. Greek. en. App-104.
My Father’s. In John’s Gospel the Lord uses this expression thirty-five times, though in a few instances the texts read “the” instead of “My”. It is found fourteen times in these three chapters 14-16. It occurs seventeen times in Matthew, six times in Luke (three times in parables), but not once in Mark.
mansions = abiding places. Greek. more (from meno, a characteristic word in this Gospel). Occurs only here and in Joh 14:23,
if it were not so = if not. Greek. ei me. There is no verb. I would, &c. All the texts add “that” (hoti), and read “would I have told you that I go”, &c.
Fuente: Companion Bible Notes, Appendices and Graphics
2.] This comfort-of being reunited to their Lord-is administered to them as , in forms of speech simple, and adapted to their powers of apprehension of spiritual things. The is Heaven: Psa 33:13-14; Isa 63:15. In it are many (in number-not in degree of dignity, as Clem. Alex[185], Basil., Theod., Chrys., Theophylact, Tert[186], Hil[187], Aug[188], &c., at least no such meaning is here conveyed) abiding-places; room enough for them all;- . Euthym[189] If not,-if they could not follow Him thither, He would not have concealed this from them. This latter assurance is one calculated to beget entire trust and confidence; He would not in any matter hold out vain hopes to them;-His word to them would plainly state all difficulties and discouragements,-as indeed He does, ch. Joh 15:18; Joh 16:1; Joh 16:4; which last verse , is decisive for the above interpretation here, against those who would join with (Euthym[190], Aug[191], Erasm., Luther, Bengel):-which besides does violence to the next verse, where the going to prepare a place is stated as a fact. The may, it is true, have been inserted as a recitantis, to favour the view just controverted: but it is much more probably genuine, signifying because, and belongs to the whole sense of Joh 14:1-2, as a reason why their heart should not be troubled.
[185] Alex. Clement of Alexandria, fl. 194
[186] Tertullian, 200
[187] Hilary, Bp. of Poictiers, 354
[188] Augustine, Bp. of Hippo, 395-430
[189] Euthymius Zigabenus, 1116
[190] Euthymius Zigabenus, 1116
[191] Augustine, Bp. of Hippo, 395-430
The sense confidently proposed for the many mansions by a correspondent,-that He was going to one part of His Fathers house, while they would remain in another, that house being not Heaven, but the Universe,-is entirely put out of the question, as being frigid in the extreme under the solemn circumstances,-as being contrary to all Scripture analogy of expression,-and as inconsistent with the , where the is of necessity correlative with the , which are in that whither He is going. Besides, their earthly could in no sense be called a . The is that of which we sing,-When Thou hadst overcome the sharpness of death, Thou didst open the Kingdom of Heaven to all believers: see note on Luk 23:43. And thus it is , not :-the place as a whole, not each mans place in it.
Fuente: The Greek Testament
Joh 14:2. , house) He shows already whither He is going.-V. g.] A rare appellation of the heavenly habitation: a house of residence, into which are admitted children, and in which the Father dwells. Jesus looks beyond His sufferings to the goal. Comp. Heb 12:2, Who, for the joy that was set before Him, endured the cross; 2Ti 4:7, [so Paul in a dungeon before his martyrdom] I have fought a good fight, I have finished my course, I have kept the faith.- , of My Father) In the beginning of this sermon, Jesus often adds the pronoun to the mention of His Father; but as He gets forward in it, and at its close, after that He has taken precaution to establish His own pre-eminence above believers, and has stirred up the disciples to faith, He speaks as it were more in common, calling God, the Father, namely, Mine, and at the same time also yours.-, mansions) This refers to place, not to time [places of abode; not times of abode]; and it is said in the plural, on account of the multitude of those whom that common mansion contains.-) many, so as to contain angels and your predecessors in the faith, and you, and very many more. By the plural number itself there appears also to be implied a variety of the mansions: for He does not say, a great mansion, but many mansions. Comp. Rev 21:16, note, The city lieth four-square, etc.-, there are) already now, and from the beginning.- , but if it were not so) If there were not already [many mansions].- ) I would tell, or rather, I would have told you. Concerning the pluperfect, comp. ch. Joh 4:10, note [ – ]. What would He have told them? This very thing, which follows, , I go. Parodying [an adaptation of] the very similar passage, ch. Joh 16:26, illustrates the sentiment here: I have not said to you, that I would prepare a place for you; for already there ARE mansions, and those numerous.-, I go) to the home of My Father.-, to prepare) He does not altogether deny that He prepares the place, with which comp. the following verse, where He Himself affirms it: but each of the two statements mutually qualifies the other. But see, what force there may lie in the order of the words: in Joh 14:2 it is said, , a place for you; in Joh 14:3, , for you a place: the first word in each instance respectively containing the emphasis, as in 1Co 7:22, note [-,- ]. The place itself is already prepared: but for you it has yet to be prepared. The one preparation is absolute, the other relative. The beginning of the third verse, , and if, does not depend on , I would have told you, but stands by itself.
Fuente: Gnomon of the New Testament
Joh 14:2
Joh 14:2
In my Fathers house are many mansions;-[Many abiding-places in the footnote; many homes; in short, besides this one we call earth. Leaving earth, there are other places to which to go, places all radiant with beauty.]
if it were not so, I would have told you;-[I would not have allowed you to give up the things of this world if I had not had better things to offer you. I would have told you frankly that it was all sacrifice and no reward.]
for I go to prepare a place for you.-[This separation that makes you so sad is only a step toward providing you with a better home than earth can furnish.] He had told them that he would be separated from them for a time; that he would go where for a while they could not come, but afterward they would be with him. The assurance he gave them was that there was ample room in his house for them to dwell with him, and that he went before to prepare a place for them. When Jesus went to prepare for them the Holy Spirit came to earth to guide and direct them, to prepare and fit them to dwell in the place he prepared for them. Had there not been ample place he would have told them. He could not deceive them.
Fuente: Old and New Testaments Restoration Commentary
The House of Many Mansions
In my Fathers house are many mansions.Joh 14:2.
1. Simpler words than these it would not be easy to find in human language. There is nothing here either in the words or in the ideas which a child cannot understand. There is a Father, and there is a house of many mansions where He dwells; there is a Son who has been there, and can speak of what He knows and has seen. He has come to His brethren here for a time, and He is about to leave again for home. But He is not merely going home; He is going to prepare a place for His brethren, and He is coming back for them, when their place is prepared, to take them to itto His Fathers and His own home. If it were not so, He would have told us. That is simplicity itself: the words and the ideas alike strike a familiar chord in our hearts, and we need no one to explain them. What more do we need to know about the life to come than this? If we believe in God and in His Son, it is a going to the Father. Is it not enough for life and for death, for this world and for that which is to come, to know that we are going home?
2. But it is one of the characteristics of our Lords teaching that, though it is within the reach of every man, it is beyond the reach of every man. The truths which are contained in these words are stated in forms which are intelligible to those who are incapable of speculative thought; but let a man of the most vigorous and adventurous intellect attempt to explore them, and he will find that year after year they will become more and more wonderful, and that they will always transcend the limits of his thought. The words of Christ have a meaning which can never be exhausted. He Himself had descended from the heights of God to the lowliest human condition; but through His lowly human life those who had eyes to see discovered a Divine glory. His words were like Himself, lowly and simple, but through the lowliest and simplest of them there gleams the light of a diviner world than this. What these words mean we all know; explanation is unnecessary: what they mean none of us know; for as soon as we try to explain them we discover that explanation is impossible. We can travel a little way into the provinces of truth which they reveal, but our strength fails, and we can only sit down and wonder at the glory which lies beyond us.
The Gospel of St. John will ever be the solace and joy of the Christian in his loftiest and his lowliest moods. He will always feel the truthfulness of the language in which the childlike Claudius describes his emotions while perusing this Gospel: I have from my youth up delighted to read the Bible, but especially the Gospel of St. John. There is something in it exceedingly wonderful; twilight and night, and through them the quick flash of lightning; soft evening-clouds, and behind the clouds, the full-orbed moon. There is something, also, so high, and mysterious, and solemn, that one cannot become weary. It seems to me in reading the Gospel of St. John, as if I saw him at the Last Supper leaning upon the breast of his Master, and as if an angel were holding my lamp, and at certain passages wished to whisper something in my ear. I am far from understanding all that I read; yet it seems as if the meaning were hovering in the distance before my minds eye. And even when I look into an entirely dark passage, I have an intimation of a great and glorious meaning within it which I shall one day understand.1 [Note: W. G. T. Shedd, Sermons to the Spiritual Man, 169.]
I
The Fathers House
1. The Fathers House is both heaven and earth.The words are usually applied to heaven, and to heaven only; but we may give them a larger yet not opposing meaning, which blends harmoniously with the mind of Christ. There are two glories in the words of Jesus; the one is, that He made heaven so real, and the other is, that He made this present world thrill to its finest chord with the Divine. In spite of all the havoc sin had wrought, this world was full of God to Jesus Christ. There was God in every lily of the field. There was God in every fowl of the air. In all the love of a mother for her child, in the hunger and thirst of the most sunken heart, there was that which spoke to Jesus of His Father, and told Him that the Divine was here.
(1) Perhaps it is best to say that in the mind of our Lord heaven and earth were not separate. And with us also there are rare moments when, standing upon this bank and shoal of time, we feel that it is good for us to be here, and that the humblest place where Christ vouchsafes His presence may be none other than a house of God and a gate of Heaven. Disenchantment comes to the Christian worker as to other men. The rough experience of the world damps the ardour of the most courageous, and drives men to look above and beyond for what they do not find here. It is far easier to dream of a Paradise beyond the grave than to reform even a single abuse in this world. The belief, however, that looks forward to another state of being for complete fulfilment of Christs promises is not irreconcilable with a persuasion that the words of Christ in the text point to a near, and not to a remote, futurethat when He said, I go to prepare a place for you, it is in this world, primarily at least, that we are to look for a fulfilment of His promise.
As I read this profound, touching discourse of Jesus, I see no hint in it that the disciples were to wait for the hour of their death before being reunited to their glorified Redeemer. On the contrary, I find many an emphatic assurance that that reunion was to be soon. Over and over again, like a plaintive refrain, come the simple, consolatory words, I go away and come again to you. Now I go away to him that sent me. A little while, and ye see me not, and again a little while, and ye shall see me. Separation, the Saviour insists, shall not be an eternal, shall not be even a protracted, severance. A short interspace of gloom there shall bea preliminary hour of sadness. Then the broken link will be reunited, and the disciples will enjoy a fellowship with their Lord truer, because more spiritual, than they had ever known before.1 [Note: J. W. Shepard, Light and Life, 3.]
(2) Taking this to be the keynote of this part of our Lords discourse, we see in it an assurance of speedy and almost immediate consolation. If we must fix some definite note of time for the fulfilment of the promise, everything points to the outpouring of the Spirit on the day of Pentecost. For it was from that day forward that the idea of Christs life and death creptand crept as a transforming powerinto the study of the disciples imagination, so that the old relationship between them and their Master was replaced by one more distinctly spiritual. Then the merely human tie was dissolved, and the Spirit manifested Christ as a hidden Power to their souls. Then they began to learn that because the Spirit which He sent down upon them was a Spirit proceeding from the Father, therefore in being reunited to Christ spiritually they became the inmates of that Fathers home. Night and day is the Divine home open to all who by faith in Christ come to know themselves as children of the Heavenly Father. The household of that Father is wider than our poor thoughts about it. We enter it not through the grave and gate of death, but through a willing surrender of ourselves to God as dutiful children.
The Apostles evidently understood their Master to promise that, when He had gone out of their bodily sight, He would come to them again in spiritual presence, and they would dwell with Him and the Father in a spiritual home; and after the Day of Pentecost they were accustomed to assume that the promise had been fulfilled, and that they were living as the Fathers children with the other members of the Divine family, looking up to the Divine Son as their head.1 [Note: J. LI. Davies, Spiritual Apprehension, 351.]
(3) Let us not think of any break at death. The course of life, life of the plant, the animal, the soul, is maintained along lines of uninterrupted continuity. To-day is born from the womb of yesterday, and to-morrow will be the offspring of to-day. There is nothing in Scripture or in nature to sustain the supposition that the highway of our life once begun is gashed with any abyss of meaningless suspension, that threads are broken and have to be knotted together again, and that the little territory we know as our present life is islanded from all that great continent of being that fills to the full the area of the eternal to-morrow. The souls celestial life is not distinct from its terrestrial life save in the sense in which the blossom is distinct from the bud. We are never to be rooted out from those beginnings of spiritual life in which we are already planted and secured.
The soul, like the plant, must be uncovered to the airs that blow across it from the distances, and bared to the baptism of the unfathomed sky by which it is overarched. The great world of spirit is nowhere if it is not here. The world of the blessed is not framed in walls. The beginnings of heaven are in the heavenly mind. This is part of the Fathers house and here are some of the mansions. Having referred to some of the lesser blessings by which life is enriched Wordsworth goes on to say:
Not for these I raise
The song of thanks and praise;
But for those first affections
Those shadowy recollections,
Which, be they what they may,
Are yet the fountain-light of all our day,
Are yet a master-light of all our seeing;
Uphold us, cherish, and have power to make
Our noisy years seem moments in the being
Of the eternal Silence; truths that wake,
To perish never:
Which neither listlessness, nor mad endeavour,
Nor Man nor Boy
Nor all that is at enmity with joy,
Can utterly abolish or destroy!
Hence in a season of calm weather,
Though inland far we be,
Our Souls have sight of that immortal sea
Which brought us hither;
Can in a moment travel thither,
And see the Children sport upon the shore,
And hear the mighty waters rolling evermore.1 [Note: Wordsworth, Intimations of Immortality.]
(4) Is there no comfort in this? Is there no consolation in the hour of sorrow?
I once had a conversation with a lady who years before had lost her beloved husband. The relation between her and him had been emphatically a union of souls, one wherein the physical element had been very, very secondary. And yet when the hour of his dissolution arrived, and all that had been the visible expression of his personality, and all through which the tenderness of his devotion had sweetly disclosed itself, had been laid beneath the sod, the more material side of her nature at first asserted itself and for many days it remained the persistent and despairing passion of her heart to tarry by his graveside, and to seek comfort and to find a kind of companionship in clinging as it were to the silent and hidden memorials of a life that was done, of a spirit that was fled.
But one day looking upon the grave she suddenly said to herself: The thing that lies there is not my husband. His spirit and his love do not belong to the realm of decay. Soul lives: love is one of the eternals. And there in the midst of an acre dedicated to corruption she gathered herself up from the morbid debility of despair, forsook the grave, bade a permanent good-bye to putrefaction, and in the sweet and chastened vigour of a nature to which a new revelation had come, flung herself out upon the support of the great love of the heavenly Father, and in quietness and absolute assurance went on into the years brightened and warmed by an experience of the things which eye hath not seen nor ear heard.1 [Note: C. H. Parkhurst, A Little Lower than the Angels, 226.]
Faithful friends, it lies, I know
Pale, and white, and cold as snow;
And ye say: Abdallahs dead
Weeping at the feet and head.
I can see your falling tears;
I can hear your sighs and prayers;
Yet I smile and whisper this:
I am not the thing you kiss!
Cease your tears and let it lie,
It was mine, it is not I.
Sweet friends! what the women lave
For the last sleep of the grave
Is a hut which I am quitting,
Is a garment no more fitting,
Is a cage from which, at last,
Like a bird my soul has passed.
Love the inmate, not the room;
The weaver, not the garb,the plume
Of the eagle, not the bars
That kept him from the splendid stars!
Loving friends, oh rise and dry
Straightway every weeping eye!
What ye lift upon the bier
Is not worth a single tear.
Tis an empty sea-shellone
Out of which the pearl is gone.
The shell is broken, it lies there;
The pearl, the All, the Soul, is here.
Tis an earthen jar whose lid
Allah sealed, the while it hid
That treasure of his treasury
A mind that loved him; let it lie.
Let the shards be earth once more,
Since the gold is in his store.
Allah glorious! Allah good!
Now thy world is understood
Now the long, long wonder ends;
Yet ye weep, my foolish friends,
While the man whom you call dead,
In unbroken bliss instead,
Lives and loves you,lost, tis true,
In the light that shines for you.
But in the light you cannot see,
In undisturbed felicity
In a perfect Paradise,
And a life that never dies.
Farewell! friendsyet not farewell;
Where I go you, too, shall dwell.
I am gone before your face
A moments worth, a little space.
When you come where I have stept
Ye will wonder why ye wept;
Ye will know by true love taught
That here is all, and there is naught.
2. The Fathers House is heaven.When a saint draws near the appointed span of life, more and more do his thoughts go out to heaven. He dwells on heaven with an increasing joy, as you may read in many a biography. And it is, indeed, one of the last rewards of a life that has been spiritually true, that when the shadows of the twilight fall, it hails the glory dawning in Immanuels Land. So it was with Jesus Christ our Lord. He did not hail the cross, He hailed the glory of which the cross was a God-appointed part. And ever, as He drew nearer to the end, He dwelt more intensely on Immanuels Land, until at last for the joy that was set before Him, He endured the cross, despising the shame. For these reasons, as well as from the context, there is no doubt as to the first meaning of our words. Primarily, and as spoken to the Twelve, the House of the Father was the heavenly glory.
(1) And so, first of all, Christs words give us assurance of life beyond death. Nothing evinces more conclusively the difference between Jesus Christ and other men who have lived and died upon the earth than the confidence and certainty with which He spoke of the invisible world. Not only is there no doubt or hesitation in His language, but there is no ignorance. He never says: Now I know in part. On the contrary, we feel that He knew much more than He has disclosed; and that if He had chosen to do so, He could have made yet more specific revelations concerning the solemn world beyond the tomb. For all other men, there are two worldsthe one here and the other beyond. Their utterances respecting this visible and tangible sphere are positive and certain; but respecting the invisible realm they guess, and they hope, or they doubt altogether. But for our Lord, there was, practically, only one world. He is as certain in respect to the invisible as to the visible; and knows as fully concerning the one as the other.
No mind unassisted by revelation ever reached the pitch of faith in the unseen and eternal that was attained by Socrates. But he was assailed by doubts; and he confesses his ignorance of the region beyond the tomb. After that lofty and solemn description in the Phaedo (113, 114) of the different places assigned after death to the good, and incorrigibly bad, and those who have led a middle life between the two, he adds: To affirm positively, indeed, that these things are exactly as I have described them, does not become a man of discernment. But that either this or something of the kind takes place in regard to our souls and their habitationseeing that the soul is evidently immortalappears to me most fitting to be believed, and worthy of hazard for one who trusts in the reality. For the hazard is noble, and it is right to charm ourselves with such views as with enchantments. How different is the impression made upon us by these noble but hesitating words, from that which was made upon John the Baptist by our Lords manner and teaching upon such points, as indicated in his testimony: He that cometh from above is above all: he that is of the earth is earthly, and speaketh of the earth: he that cometh from heaven is above all. And what he hath seen and heard, that he testifieth. How different is Platos dimness of perception, his merely hopeful conjecture respecting another life, from the calm and authoritative utterance of Him who said to Nicodemus: We speak that we do know, and testify that we have seen. And no man hath ascended up to heaven, but he that came down from heaven, even the Son of man which is in heaven. How different is the utterance of the human philosopher from that of Him who said to the cavilling Jews: Ye are from beneath, I am from above; I go my way, and whither I go, ye cannot come; I proceeded forth, and came from God; Doth this offend you? What and if ye shall see the Son of man ascend up where he was before? How different are the words of Socrates from the language of Him who in a solemn prayer to the Eternal God spake the words, blasphemous if falling from the lips of any merely finite being: O Father, glorify thou me with thine own self with the glory which I had with thee before the world was. Christ, then, speaks of heaven and immortal life as an eye-witness. The eternal world was no dim, undiscovered country for Him; and therefore His words and tones are those of one who was native, and to the manner born.1 [Note: W. G. T. Shedd, Sermons to the Spiritual Man, 171.]
I am persuaded that Tennyson and Lightfoot were right when they said that the doctrine of the New Testament is the doctrine of the other life. Many are the blessings that spring up, flower-like, in the track of faith. Here, by fidelity and by love, we may enjoy God as well as glorify Him; but the hope of the New Testament is beyond the years of time. As Bunyan put it, Children, the milk and honey are beyond this wilderness.2 [Note: W. Robertson Nicoll, The Lamp of Sacrifice, 166.]
Yes! of all words that have been spoken upon earth, these have done the most to dispel the darkness beyond the grave, and to give secure expectations to men as they approach it.3 [Note: Bernard.]
For ever since from the portal
Of chaos came forth man,
The longing for life immortal
Hath coloured every plan.
Yes, life, new life, is ever
The surety that nature shows,
And to this one law for ever
The infinite system goes.
So close up your ranks, my brothers,
And with hearts too high to fail,
Let us say Farewell while the others
On the other side cry, Hail!
(2) Again, the words tell us that we may conceive of heaven as a place. The disciples watched Jesus disappearing into the cloud which received Him out of their sight, and stood for a long time gazing up into the sky after Him as if expecting to catch another glimpse or see Him come back. Where did He go? We believe that He took with Him our human form, bearing even the marks of the crucifixion. He must be somewhere, and Gods house in some sense must be a place. Doubtless we are usually too crass in our conception both of Christ and of heaven, and before it can be a place, heaven must be first a state; yet we can scarcely resist the conclusion that in some sense it must be a place also. If we, at least, are to live again and be clothed upon with our body which is from heaven, we must have some place to live in. God is a spirit, for Him a house seems not so necessary; but as for us, we must live somewhere, and the Fathers house, into which at the last we are to be gathered, must be a place. Somewhere in His great universe, in the infinite realms of space, God must have a place which He calls His homea house of many mansions to which, one by one, He welcomes His children.
It is here distinctly implied that heaven is a place, a definite locality. I do not contend, indeed, that the phrase, I go to prepare a place for you, of necessity involves the assertion of locality; for the word place may simply mean here, as elsewhere, space or room. But the whole description of heaven here given implies locality. It is a fathers house, and there are many mansions, i.e., residences in it; and the disciples are to have a place in it; and, what is equally suggestive, Christ has to go away from the earth to get to it, and to come back again to the earth to fetch His people to it. The whole of the discourse seems built upon the idea of definite locality.1 [Note: W. Roberts.]
(3) But the words of Jesus tell us also that if heaven is a place, it is before that a state; it is the knowledge of heavenly things; it is communion with God, the vision of God as Father, and consciousness of ourselves as His children. He manifests Himself in many ways. The whole earth is full of His glory, but some of the manifestations are higher than others. From nature up to Christ He reveals Himself, and in heaven that manifestation will be perfected.
Sometimes it is a pain that we know so little of God and of the things that are unseen and eternal; sometimes they lose their reality to us, and our vision of God is dimmed and obscured and clouded, our sense of His presence vague and dull, our consciousness of His Fatherhood fitful and uncertain. How seldom we truly feel at home with God! Like the Psalmist, we remember Him and are troubled; instead of the love and affection of the child there is coldness, distrust, and a sense of distance; we are not brightened as we should be by the perfectness of His sympathy and the abundance of His provision. In a world that is full of God, in lives that are daily loaded with His benefits, we fail so to see Him as to be made glad with the light of His countenance. Times there are, doubtless, when God is very near, and joy fills our hearts, and our devotion seems perfect; but for most of us, it is all our trouble that God is not nearer, consciously nearer, dwelling in our house, standing at our right hand, a source of constant inspiration and gladness. Oh, the pain of those days and hours when He seems to have forsaken us and left us to our own poor resources and devices, when we begin to wonder if we have ever known Him, if He has ever called us to His service, if He is really on our side to help and shield and strengthen us! Oh, those days, when we cannot pray, when the heavens are as brass, and no prayer will move in our hearts, and life seems joyless and labour in vain! If you have felt that pain, if ever in your heart you have known what it is to struggle for the consciousness of Gods approval and the knowledge of His presence, it will be a kindling, inspiring, uplifting thought that the time is coming when we shall be children again in our Fathers house, trustful, glad, free from feara household dwelling with God under the same roof, knit together as one great family brightened by the Fathers presence. There will be nothing then to hinder our communion; there will be no days of darkness and uncertainty and doubt; we shall know God in His own home, know Him as children know their father in the freedom and unchecked familiarity of our common domestic life.1 [Note: D. Fairweather, Bound in the Spirit, 155.]
3. Heaven is home.In presence of the shadow of death which was casting its thick gloom over the company of the disciples in the upper room, Jesus pointed them to His Fathers house of many mansions, where, after all the separations of earth, they would be gathered together with Him. So then heaven is only another name for home, that sacred, much-loved, familiar name which calls up thoughts we love to linger on, of all that is best and holiest in our life. There is nothing we know so much about, where it is, how it looks, the familiar walls and rooms and windows, the faces of loved ones who move about in it, inseparably bound up with our tenderest associations and brightest hopes.
One of the first things of which we become conscious in this world ishome. It grows and clings around us with multiplied associations and deepening spell during all our growing years. To leave it is to young man or maiden sometimes like the pangs of death. To turn to it again in thought and desire from scenes of change and strife, or from the shores of a distant land, is like the daily bread of the heart, a part of religion itself. To come home again after absenceeither in health and joy, laden with the fruits of prosperity, or wearied, and baffled, and sick, and dyingis the very instinct of the soul. Home! the soldier thinks of it on the battle-field, and the sailor on the stormy sea, and the traveller amid the strange scenes of a foreign land, and many a stricken man in the fever-ward of the hospital, and many a lonely wanderer of the street, and many a criminal in the jail. Visions of its freshness and purity come floating around some men all their life long; and follow them whithersoever they go. Sometimes, when they have gone all the allotted way, and the end is coming fast, they go back again in memory, and with instinctive and mysterious love, to the home of childhood, and its tender sunshine and its sweet shade come flickering over the dying bed, and often amid these simple hallowed thoughts the dying comes. The strifes and the honours of manhood are all forgotten, and the thirsty home-sick soul must drink at the fountains of the youthful time, and see in that light of heaven that lies about us in our infancy, and so fall asleep like a child, unknowingly, rocked by a loving hand, in the cradle of death. Thus full many a time the first home becomes the type and the very threshold of the highest and the best. The wearied soul in its dreams and yearnings is seeking the first home, groping through the shadows of death to find the door, and looking for fathers or mothers face, when lo! there is the glow and warmth of the heavenly House, and chanting in the air the music of the new song, and the sweet light of the perfect love on every face, and for the newcomer the encircling of the everlasting arms! Oh, sweet sleep of death that has such glad awaking! Happy close of lifes day, whether it has been spent in storm or in calm, if it brings us safely within the portals of that house from which we shall go no more out.1 [Note: A. Raleigh, Quiet Resting-Places, 394.]
What joys are lost, what hopes are given,
As thro this death-struck world we roam.
We think awhile that home is heaven;
We learn at length that heaven is home.2 [Note: Bishop Moule.]
4. How, then, is heaven a home?
(1) The Father is there.It is the Fathers house. It is a paternal home. This is needed to make it a home in any sense; needed to give the heart rest either on earth or in heaven. Men who inquire into the facts and laws of the world, and find no God in it, have made themselves homeless. Men who have found human affection, but no God beneath it, have found only the shadow of a home. Thought and affection are shallow, short-lived things without Him who sets the solitary in families,the Father of spirits. It is to teach us this that God has made a fathers love the bond of a true human household.
God will not only reveal Himself to us in wonderful ways, and give us a constant sense of His presence with us, He will reveal Himself as our Father. We can imagine many forms of Divine revelation that would give us no permanent delight, and that would contribute very little to the development of the higher forms of moral and spiritual perfection. It is possible to become weary of the grandeur and the vastness of some of the aspects of physical nature,weary of the ocean, weary of the immensities of the starry heavens, weary of the roar and rush of the waters of Niagara, weary of the awful loneliness and desolation of the Matterhorn. They reveal God, but they do not reveal those elements of His life which are nearest to ourselves, which solicit trust, which create love, and which inspire delight. At home God will reveal Himself in other ways. There may be within sight the most majestic achievements of His power and wisdom; we may be environed with the most gracious illustrations of His delight in beauty; but we shall know Him as we have never known Him beforeas our Father. He will be righteous,but He will lay aside something of the awfulness of His righteousness; infinitely wise and strong,but His wisdom and strength will appear, not in forms to oppress and confound us, but in forms to excite our wonder and delight. We shall be very near to Himnear as the children of a king to their father when he has laid aside for a time the pomp and cares of State, and is at once finding and giving joy among those who are dearest to him.1 [Note: R. W. Dale, Christ and the Future Life, 41.]
You recollect how Joseph, when he spoke with his brethren and asked them of their welfare, could not rest until he had drawn an answer to his question, Is your father well, the old man of whom ye spake? Is he yet alive? And when the hope of seeing him was near, how he made ready his chariot, and went up to meet Israel his father, and fell on his neck and wept; and Israel said unto Joseph, Now let me die, since I have seen thy face, because thou art yet alive. We may feel sure that the restored affection of his brethren, even Benjamins, could not have filled the place in his heart had his father been no more; and the good of the land of Egypt would have been empty, and its glory gone, without his father to look on and share it with him.2 [Note: J. Ker, Sermons, ii. 258.]
(2) The children are there.It is one of the loveliest of the ideas of Christ that the Kingdom of heaven is the kingdom of the child. As men hover round a thought dear to them, and though they leave it still return to it, so Christ came back again and again to this as if He could never tire of it. Children were sacred in His eyes, the Kingdom of God belonged to them, and to them God revealed His secrets. Children were the examples and model of the Christian life. The disciples were to be as children. Except they became as little children they could not see the Kingdom. To be humble like them was to be greatest. When they prayed, they were to begin, Our Father; they were to live as children taking no thought for the morrow; and when they died, they were to go home to the Fathers house and still be children.
Do you want the key to the religious life? Most of you have it at hand in your own families. The Word of God is very nigh you if you have ears to hear it. Christ could find no better illustration of that trust and love and sympathy which should exist between God and us now, and no better illustration of the future life of communion between God and His saints, than that with which any happy home amongst ourselves can furnish us. Christ says we are to be young again: we are to be as children in the happy, free, unanxious days of old when no care crossed our minds, and the world of thought and feeling had no perplexities, and all things were our own by the joy they gave us, by the love we bore them. These were the days when we inherited the earth: we had a kingdom fit for any king, greater than any possessed, and our wealth brought no pain or envy, because our hearts were simple and our minds were pure, and every day was bright, and everything a wonder. Does it not soothe our hearts, tired with pain and sorrow, with very weariness that nothing is fresh and new, that over all the dull light of commonplace is cast, when, in the light of Christs words, we realize that God regards us still as children who will yet dwell with Him and with each other, one family, in His own house?1 [Note: D. Fairweather, Round in the Spirit, 157.]
(3) Christ Himself is there.Our Lord has taught us to connect heaven with the thought of HimselfMy Fathers house. Heaven is the house of Christs Father. It is as when an arch is built, and last the keystone is put in which binds it all into one; or as when a palace has been raised with all its rooms and their furniture complete, but it is dark or dimly seen by lights carried from place to place. The sun rises, and by the central dome the light is poured into all the corridors and chambers, and by the windows there are prospects over hill and valley and river. The Lord Jesus Christ is the sun of this house.
Let us remember that these are His words. We must not take them rashly out of His lips or borrow them for ourselves, without considering very reverently that they belong in their first and proper sense to Him who is the only begotten of the Father, who was with God and was God in the beginning. As He left the world, Jesus said indeed, I ascend unto my Father and your Father, and my God and your God. That and links us to Himself; but it is a bridge thrown across an infinite chasm, spanning the distance between the Divine and the human. For He had given it to be understood that God was his own Father making himself equal with God. Heaven was to Jesus Christ My Fathers house; by this title He brings it near to His disciples and lights it up with welcome.2 [Note: G. G. Findlay, The Things Above, 187.]
Heaven is the Fathers house of Jesus Christ; and as a son over his own house, He invites His friends and promises them places in it,He, the well-beloved, unto whom the Father has committed all judgment. Father, He prayed in the hearing of these men, I will that they also, whom thou hast given me, be with me where I am; and He said to the dying robber on the cross: To-day shalt thou be with me in paradise. His word opens heaven to men His fellowship assures our place there as nothing else can do.1 [Note: G. G. Findlay, The Things Above, 190.]
II
The Many Mansions
The Greek word here translated mansions is the same as that in the 23rd verse of this chapter, where it is said, We will come unto him, and make our abode with him. It is a somewhat uncommon word, not elsewhere found in the New Testament, and once only in the Septuagint version of the Old Testament and Apocrypha. Possibly its use a second time in this chapter may not be unintentional. As the Father and the Son make an earthly abode in the hearts of those who prove their love by keeping Christs commandments, so also shall heavenly abodes be prepared for those who love Him. There is an interchange, as it were, between earth and heaven, man abiding with God, and God with man.
Three things seem to be suggested by the phrase many mansionsPermanence, Spaciousness, Variety.
1. Permanence.It is a place of mansionsboth the English word and the Greek intimate thisa place where the dwellers shall abide, like a city to wanderers in the wilderness. You have known Me, He says to His disciples, for a few years, moving to and fro, but I leave you for the city of God, where you also shall enter in, to go out no more at all.
Indeed, the assurance of an abiding union fills the entire discourse. With this thought our Lord would soothe the hearts of His friends, and His own heart that suffered with them. He seeks in this way to heal the sore wound of their bereavement. A dreadful change is coming for them. They will be scattered, He tells them, as sheep without a shepherdsheep in the midst of wolves! They are to be friendless, homeless, hunted, martyred men. But beyond it all, for them as for Him, there is rest, safety, permanence,an everlasting home. Him that overcometh will I make a pillar in the temple of my God, and he shall go out thence no more. This is the crown of comfort,the promise of an eternal inheritance.
The child asks you when you give him anything: Can I have it to keep? It is the immortal spirit within him that speaks. Here our Lord satisfies this immortal craving in man, and speaks of abiding places in the heavensnot tents, which you no sooner erect than you pull down again, and give back to the waste that spot which for a brief night you have associated with your hearth and home, but abiding places, from which we shall go no more out for ever. Some time ago I revisited the village in which I was born. I looked for the chapel-house where as a child I spent many happy days. To my surprise, it was no longer there, but another house had been built on the same site. Then I turned to the garden where I had often played; but the greater part of it had been added to the adjoining graveyard. Ah! I thought, there is no abiding home on earth, and every garden, sooner or later, has graves dug in it; but in my Fathers house are many abiding places.1 [Note: D. Davies.]
In Lord Tennysons biography a story is related of Napoleon. A friend was urging on him how much more glorious the artists immortality is than the soldiers. He asked how long the best-painted and best-preserved picture would last. About eight hundred years, he was told. Bah! he exclaimed with contempt, telle immortalitSuch a poor immortality! It is my feeling. I want to live not for eight hundred years, nor for eighty times eight hundred, but for ever and ever. And God gives me my desire.2 [Note: A. Smellie, In the Secret Place, 377.]
2. Spaciousness.Neither pray I for these alone, Jesus said, referring to His first followers; but for them also which shall believe on me through their word. The heart of the Redeemer went out to the unnumbered multitude of all kindreds and tongues, who should wash their robes and make them white in His blood and pass through tribulation to His Kingdom. The Heavenly City is a place of vast dimensions and boundless hospitality. Jesus is not afraid of inviting too many guests.
Death is not a closing so much as an openingnot a falling so much as a risingnot a going away so much as a coming home. It is the passing of a pilgrim from one mansion to another, from the winter to the summer residence, from one of the outlying provinces up nearer the central home. In my Fathers house are many mansions. This is not a chance expression, far less a mere figure of speech. There are many other expressions quite as large. We read of the third heavens, as if there were heavens above heavens, and again heavens above those. We read of Christ having passed through all heavens on His upward way, that he might fill all things. And of heaven, even the heaven of heavens, a place evidently spoken of as being of inconceivable grandeur and largeness, for it is said that even that cannot contain the infinite presence of God.
The Vatican is the largest palace in the world, with more than eleven thousand apartments. Nicholas v. (144755), the builder Pope, wished to make it the centre from which all the messengers of the spiritual empire should go forth. His aim was to unite in that palace all the Government offices and the dwellings of the cardinals. He died before he could carry out his vast design, and only a portion of it has ever been completed.
3. Variety.Out of the idea of vastness arises almost necessarily the idea of an endless variety. At least it is so in this world. And surely we must not think of heaven as less than earth. The variety existing in Gods works here is one of the principal charms of the natural world. Not only has every country in the globe its distinctive qualities and natural productions, but within any one country what variety exists! In the land of our birth, without crossing any sea, we can find the region of perpetual snow, and some favoured spots where the flowers never die; ruggedness in one place, beauty in another; productiveness here, sterility there; and a never-ending variety running through the whole. No two faces in all the world, no two trees, no two flowers, no two blades of grass, could be pronounced exactly alike. Then we are almost bound to apply the analogy to the future life, and to believe that as there are many mansions, so the furnishing and adorning of them will be very various. One will not be as another. There will not only be room for all, but interest for all.
Do not the words many mansions bear witness to us of the largeness of Gods love, and the infinite varieties of His redeeming grace? May we not behold there the great intellect, now emptied of all pride? and the dull intellect, now learning, as it never learned in life, the wondrous things of Gods law? and, again, the penitent whose sins were as scarlet, but are now white as snow; who wandered far from his Fathers house, and felt the mighty famine, and almost perished with hunger, but at lastat last came to himself; and arose and came to his Father, and was welcomed with a warmth he had never dared to expect, and now in one of those many mansions yearns that others too may return while yet there is time? Yes! and there must be places of abiding where those who knew God but dimly learn to know Him more; where the poor and the neglected marvel at the breadth and depth of the gospel; where the children who died in infancy marvel at the blessedness of their elders who came out of great tribulation, and wonder what was that strange earth which has been the scene of so many tears, and so much repentance; where those who in early boyhood have slept in Jesus can see that the call was a summons of love, and that the blow which well-nigh broke the hearts of parents, and saddened the musings of companions, saved them from perils unsuspected, and kept them safe in Christs arms.1 [Note: H. M. Butler, in Sunday Magazine, 1880, p. 308.]
(1) There is variety of Race.The Fathers house is ample enough in its great hospitality to receive all Gods children from far and near. In it there are many abodes, many dwelling-places; within its hospitable shelter there will be room for saints of all ages and types and beliefs, of all nations and kindreds and tongues. They shall come from the east and from the west, from the north and from the south, and shall sit down with Abraham and Isaac and Jacob in the Kingdom of heaven.
(2) There is variety of Disposition.Was there ever a little company of men more diverse in disposition than the Twelve? That little company who followed Christ would almost seem to be the world in miniature. Thomas was there, the man of melancholy, who haunted the dim margins of despair. Peter was there, with his big and generous heart, swift to act, equally swift to speak. Philip was there, practical and cautious; and Simon Zelotes, a fiery insurgent. And John was there, with a mighty heart on fire, and ready to call down fire on the Samaritans, and yet even already, under the grace of Christ, taming its passion into the flame of love. Would there be room in heaven for all these, so diverse and so different from each other? If they quarrelled as they journeyed to Jerusalem, would the New Jerusalem hold them all in peace? We can picture Jesus at the table, smiling upon that strangely assorted company, and saying to them, Let not your heart be troubled: in my Fathers house are many mansions.
There was an article in a religious weekly the other day, suggested by the recent death of Mark Twain. The article was headed, A Land of No Laughter? In other words, as the writer put it further on, Can we find a place for laughter in heaven, or is it a land of no laughter? The point is that it could be put in that way at all.1 [Note: R. Whyte.]
(3) There is variety of Experience.There are those who have often doubted their acceptance and forgiveness, who have walked in darkness and with difficulty stayed themselves on God, questioning whether they might not in the end be castaways; and it stands inscribed, Thy sins, which are many, are forgiven thee. There are those who have felt the want of the likeness they should bear to God, and of the love and gratitude which should bestow it on them. They take home to themselves the reproach, Their spot is not the spot of his children: is not he thy Father that hath bought thee? For them it is written, Ye backsliding children, I will heal your backslidings. And they shall see his face; and his name shall be on their foreheads. There are those who have felt all through life as if God were turned to be their enemy, and were fighting against them. Their desires have been thwarted, their hearts pierced through and through with losses and crosses and cruel wounds, and failure upon failure has followed their plans. But it is written, Whom the Lord loveth he correcteth, even as a father the son in whom he delighteth; and under it, All things work together for good to them that love God. And there are those who have yearnings of heart to feel Gods presence close and constant, to hear Him and speak with Him, and be sure He is not, as some would say to them, a voice or a vision or a dream of their fond imagination. They have felt it at times so certain that they could say, The Lord is the strength of my life; of whom shall I be afraid? But clouds roll in on the assurance, and the voice seems far off or silent, as if it were among the trees of the garden; and it is toward evening, and there is doubt and fear. But it shall be as the light of the morning, when the sun riseth, even a morning without clouds; as the tender grass springing out of the earth by clear shining after rain; and His name shall be written as the Father of lights, with whom is no variableness, neither shadow of turning.
By comparing my experience with that of others, you may perceive how different ways God leads different souls. But though a man should be led in a way different from that of all other men: yet, if his eye be at all times fixed on his Saviour; if his constant aim be to do His will; if all his desires tend to Him; if in all trials he can draw strength from Him; if he fly to Him in all troubles, and in all temptations find salvation in His bloodin this there can be no delusion. And whosoever is thus minded, however or whenever it began, is surely reconciled to God through His Song of Solomon 1 [Note: John Wesleys Journal (Standard Edition), ii. 47.]
Gather us in, Thou Love that fillest all,
Gather our rival faiths within Thy fold,
Rend each mans temples veil and bid it fall,
That we may know that Thou hast been of old:
Gather us in.
Gather us in: we worship only Thee;
In varied names we stretch a common hand;
In diverse forms a common soul we see;
In many ships we seek one spirit-land;
Gather us in.
Each sees one colour of Thy rainbow-light,
Each looks upon one tint and calls it heaven;
Thou art the fulness of our partial sight;
We are not perfect till we find the seven;
Gather us in.
Thine is the mystic life great India craves,
Thine is the Parsees sin-destroying beam,
Thine is the Buddhists rest from tossing waves,
Thine is the empire of vast Chinas dream;
Gather us in.
Thine is the Romans strength without his pride,
Thine is the Greeks glad world without its graves,
Thine is Judas law with love beside,
The truth that censures and the grace that saves;
Gather us in.
Some seek a Father in the heavens above,
Some ask a human image to adore,
Some crave a spirit vast as life and love:
Within Thy mansions we have all and more;
Gather us in.
The House of Many Mansions
Literature
Abbey (C. J.), The Divine Love, 269.
Campbell (R. J.), A Faith for To-day, 331.
Cox (S.), Expository Essays and Discourses, 106.
Dale (R. W.), Christ and the Future Life, 33.
Davies (J. Ll.), Spiritual Apprehension, 348.
Ellicott (C. J.), Sermons at Gloucester, 233.
Fairweather (D.), Bound in the Spirit, 151.
Findlay (G. G.), The Things Above, 188.
Griffith-Jones (E.), Faith and Verification, 219.
Hall (N.), Gethsemane, 314.
Horder (W. G.), The Other-World, 99.
Ker (J.), Sermons, i. 245, ii. 247.
MacColl (M.), Life Here and Hereafter, 71.
Morison (J.), Holiness in Living and Happiness in Dying, 202.
Morrison (G. H.), in Great Texts of the New Testament, 83.
New (C.), Sermons in Hastings, 311.
Oosterzee (J. J. van), The Year of Salvation, i. 442.
Parkhurst (C. H.), A Little Lower than the Angels, 214.
Parkhurst (C.H.), The Pattern in the Mount, 227.
Pierson (A. T.), The Hopes of the Gospel, 121.
Raleigh (A.), Quiet Resting-Places, 387.
Shedd (W. G. T.), Sermons to the Spiritual Man, 167.
Shepard (J. W.), Light and Life, 1.
Smellie (A.), In the Secret Place, 377.
Telford (J.), The Story of the Upper Room, 87.
Tipple (S. A.), Days of Old, 123.
Wilkes (H.), The Bright and Morning Star, 272.
Christian World Pulpit, ix. 90 (Roberts); xxix. 10 (Davies); lviii. 21 (Aked); lxv. 14 (Hale).
Sunday Magazine, 1880, p. 307 (Butler).
Fuente: The Great Texts of the Bible
my: 2Co 5:1, Heb 11:10, Heb 11:14-16, Heb 13:14, Rev 3:12, Rev 3:21, Rev 21:10-27
if: Joh 12:25, Joh 12:26, Joh 16:4, Luk 14:26-33, Act 9:16, 1Th 3:3, 1Th 3:4, 1Th 5:9, 2Th 1:4-10, Tit 1:2, Rev 1:5
I go: Joh 13:33, Joh 13:36, Joh 17:24, Heb 6:20, Heb 9:8, Heb 9:23-26, Heb 11:16, Rev 21:2
Reciprocal: Gen 45:10 – be near Gen 47:11 – Rameses Jos 3:6 – Take up Jos 19:51 – These are Psa 45:8 – ivory Psa 115:16 – heaven Psa 131:2 – myself Son 1:4 – the king Zec 3:7 – I will Mat 25:34 – prepared Luk 9:27 – I tell Luk 14:22 – and yet Joh 10:4 – he goeth Joh 14:4 – whither Joh 20:17 – I ascend 2Th 2:14 – to
Fuente: The Treasury of Scripture Knowledge
THE FATHERS HOUSE
In My fathers house are many mansions.
Joh 14:2
In My Fathers housethe Greek rather means household, or homeare many mansions. And indeed the single word home possesses magic power.
I. It is a home of perfect light.Now we see through a glass darkly (1Co 13:12). There are many mysteries: the mystery of sin, the mystery of suffering. We cannot at present unravel all the threads of Gods providence. We are able only to trace out parts of that vast piece of tapestry-work. Let us wait till the other side is shown. What I do, thou knowest not now, but thou shalt know hereafter.
II. It is a home of perfect purity.Every thought of every heart is holy. The old enemies, the world, the flesh, and the devil, are conquered and done with for ever.
III. It is a home of perfect rest.In My Fathers house are many abiding-placesblessed contrast to this poor dying world, where there is none abidingmany resting-places. Perhaps Christ alluded to the many apartments in the Temple, and the vast number lodged there.
IV. It is a home of perfect love.Robert Hall thought heaven was rest. To Wilberforce it was love. Both were right. There is rest that never ends, and love that never dies.
V. It is a home of perfect joy.There is joy in homecoming after years of absence, joy in health after weary sickness. Jacobs heart rejoiced when he saw the wagons his long-lost son sent to carry him; but there is more joy in heaven. I will receive you unto Myself. That makes the joy. The gates of pearl, the streets of gold, the walls all bright with precious stonesthese things do not make heaven. Without Christ it would be no heaven at all.
Rev. F. Harper.
Illustration
The gentle and saintly Cowper was lying apparently in despair, but it is said that just before his last breath was drawn, the two physicians who were watching beside him saw a smile, so marvellous in its blending of astonishment, delight, and thankfulness, come over his face, that they said to one another, He is telling us as plainly as if he could speak it, I am getting into heaven after all!
(SECOND OUTLINE)
COMMUNION WITH THE DEPARTED
At the present time the desire on the part of serious and religious persons more fully to realise the nature of our communion with the departed is steadily increasing.
The text which I have chosen seems to throw an important side-light on such thoughts as the present, and on our relations, while here on earth, with those who, in the faith and fear of God, have entered into another and higher sphere of individual existence.
I. It is confessedly difficult to trace the exact connection between the words of the text and what had preceded.What immediately preceded was the self-confident declaration of St. Peter, and the solemn and prophetic warning as to the speedy test to which the Apostles declaration would be put. But between this and the words which immediately follow at the beginning of the next chapter, Let not your heart be troubled, which were most certainly addressed to all the Apostles save Judas Iscariot, who had gone forth into the darkness, there is no connection that can be regarded as throwing the least explanatory light on the Lords exhortation or on the words of our text, which almost immediately follow it. The true connection must be looked for, not in the incident itself connected with St. Peter, but in the foregoing words of our Lord, in which He alluded to His approaching separation from His followers, and especially in His going whither they could not come. If this be so, all becomes plain.
II. The Apostles are not to be troubled in mind; they were to believe in Him as they believed in God. Though He was leaving them now, it was to return to His Fathers House, and, in the unnumbered abiding-places of that House, to prepare a place for them. And so will it be, in varying measure and degree, to all who have loved and served our dear Lord faithfully here below, and especially to those who have been His apostles of mercy and love.
III. All that we can venture safely to deduce from our text is that the life after death, in the case of the faithful departed, will be a life of blessed continuance, in a higher plane of existence, of the life lived, in Him and for Him, here belowevery deed done for His dear sake, blest, purified, and developed, following with us into the abiding-place which His redeeming love had prepared for us and permitted us to enter.
IV. Between us and the faithful departed there may be, even now, far more actual communion than, as yet, we are able adequately to realise. It is the settled conviction of thousands of serious and faithful hearts that consciousness of this communion will increase greatly and continuously; and it well may be so. This at any rate seems year by year becoming clearer to all thoughtful and watchful observers of the spiritual movements of our own times, that the Holy Spirit is now vouchsafing to manifest His holy powers in the Church and in the world in a degree, and to an extent, to which no preceding age supplies any recorded parallel.
Bishop Ellicott.
(THIRD OUTLINE)
MANY MANSIONS
I. The Fatherhood of God is the first truth our Lord propounds in connection with this picture of heaven.
II. Turn our attention now from the Father to the Fathers house.We have responded to the hallowed attractions and the sunny memories which cluster around the paternal home. Transfer your thoughts from the earthly to the heavenlytake the purest, the fondest, the most poetic conception you can form of the one, and blend it with the otherand still you have but the faintest analogy of heaven!
III. The many mansions.The solemn hour of death once passed, the spirit, upborne by angels, finds itself at once ushered into
(a) The reception-room of heaven, the first of the many mansions. There we shall see Jesus, not seated, but standingas when He rose to receive His first martyrto welcome us home.
(b) The heavenly repast, which succeeds the reception, will introduce us into the banquet-hall (Son 2:4).
(c) The Fathers house has also its music-mansion. Adoration and praise would seem to constitute the principal employment of the redeemed in heaven.
(d) The throne-room of heaven is not one of the least appropriate and gorgeous mansions of the Fathers house (Rev 20:4).
Let us aim to model and to mould our earthly homes after the heavenly. There righteousness dwells, holiness sanctifies, love reigns, perfect confidence and sympathy and concord exist.
Rev. Dr. Octavius Winslow.
Illustration
Let us cherish domestic thoughts and anticipations of heaven. This will make us long to be there. How confirmatory of this the dying testimony of some! Listen to their glowing language. Almost well, and nearly at home, said the dying Baxter, when asked by a friend how he was. A martyr, when approaching the stake, being questioned as to how he felt, answered, Never better; for now I know that I am almost at home. Then, looking over the meadows between him and the place where he was to be immediately burned, he said, Only two more stiles to get over, and I am at my Fathers house. Dying, said the Rev. S. Medely, is sweet work, sweet work; home! home! Another on his death-bed said, I am going home as fast as I can, and I bless God that I have a good home to go to.
Fuente: Church Pulpit Commentary
2
If a dear friend is about to leave us, it would be some consolation to know that his leaving was not to be a permanent separation, and also that he was going away to arrange a special and better place than the one we now occupy. And what is especially cheering is the promise that he will find a place where we and our departing friend can again be together, never to be separated. Such a consolation Jesus offered to his apostles. The Father’s house means Heaven, the personal dwelling place of God and the holy angels, and the place where Jesus lived before coming to the earth. Mansions is from MONE, and Thayer defines it, “A staying, abiding, dwelling, abode: Joh 14:2.” There is only one place called Heaven as the dwelling of God, and it was in existence before Jesus came to the earth. He therefore was not going away to build or create such an institution. But he was going to make arrangements for the residence of his apostles in that celestial city. If a man writes ahead to a hotel for reservations, he does not expect the managers to build some more rooms, but to reserve those already there for the use of the expected guests. That is what Jesus meant he was going to do when he said, I go to prepare a place for you. He was going to Heaven to make “reservations” for his apostles (as well as for all others who faithfully serve Him).
Fuente: Combined Bible Commentary
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.
[I go to prepare a place for you.] Compare this with Num 10:33; “And the ark of the covenant of the Lord went before them, to search out a resting place for them.”
Fuente: Lightfoot Commentary Gospels
Joh 14:2. In my Fathers house are many places of abode: if it were not so, I would have told you; because I go to prepare a place for you. All the substantives here usedhouse, places of abode, placeare full of meaning. The first is not the material building, but the building as occupied by its inmates (comp. chaps, Joh 2:16, Joh 11:20, with Joh 4:53, Joh 8:35, Joh 11:31); the second, used in the New Testament only in this verse and in Joh 14:23, is connected with the characteristic abide of our Gospel; and the third embodies the idea of something fixed and definitesomething that we may call our own (comp. chap. Joh 11:48). But the full force and beauty of the words are only understood by us when we look at them in a light different from that in which they are generally regarded. For my Fathers house does not mean heaven as distinguished from earth, nor are the abiding places confined to the world to come. Earth as well as heaven is to the eye of faith a part of that house: abiding places are here as well as there. The universe, in short, is presented to us by our Lord as one house over which the Father rules, having many apartments, some on this side, others on the other side, the grave. In one of these the believer dwells now, and the Father and the Son come unto him, and make their abode with him (Joh 14:23): in another of them he will dwell hereafter. When, therefore, Jesus goes away, it is not to a strange land, it is only to another chamber of the one house of the Father: and thus many is not to be understood in the sense of variety,of different degrees of happiness and glory provided for different persons. The main thought is that wherever Jesus is, wherever we are, we are all in the Fathers house: surely such separation is no real separation. Had not this been the true nature of the case,had it not been essentially involved in the mission of Jesus that His disciples, once united to Him, could never be separated from Him, He would have told them, His teaching would have been entirely different from what it had been; but, because wherever He was there He would prepare a place for them also, He had not thought it necessary till now to speak either of being separated or of being united again. It will thus be seen that the words beginning with because are to be connected with those going immediately before, and not with the earlier part of the verse.
Fuente: A Popular Commentary on the New Testament
Joh 14:2-4. In my Fathers house From whence I came, whither I am going, and to which place I am conducting you; are many mansions or apartments (he alludes to the palaces of kings) sufficient to receive the holy angels, your predecessors in the faith, and all that now believe, or shall hereafter believe, even a great multitude, which no man can number. Our Lord means by the expression, different states of felicity in which men shall be placed, according to their progress in faith and holiness. If it were not so If there were no state of felicity hereafter, into which good men are to be received at death, I would have told you so, and not have permitted you to impose upon yourselves by a vain expectation of what shall never exist; much less would I have said so much as I have done to confirm that expectation: but as it is in itself a glorious reality, so I am now going, not only to receive my own reward, but to prepare a place for you there. By passing into the heavens, as your great High-Priest, through the merit of my sacrifice, and by appearing in the presence of God as your Advocate and Intercessor, I shall procure for you an entrance into that place, which otherwise would have been inaccessible to you. And if I then go and prepare a place for you You may depend upon it that this preparation shall not be in vain; but that I will certainly act so consistent a part as to come again and receive you to myself, that where I am And shall for ever be; ye After a short separation; may be also To dwell for ever with me, and partake in my felicity. And Surely I may say in the general, after all the instructions I have given you; that whither I go ye know, &c. That ye cannot but know the place to which I am going, and the way that leads to it; for I have told you both plainly enough.
Fuente: Joseph Bensons Commentary on the Old and New Testaments
14:2 In my Father’s house are many mansions: if [it were] not [so], {a} I would have told you. I go to {b} prepare a place for you.
(a) That is, if it were not as I am telling you, that is, unless there was room enough not only for me, but also for you in my Father’s house, I would not deceive you in this way with a vain hope, but I would have plainly told you so.
(b) This whole speech is an allegory, by which the Lord comforts his own, declaring to them his departure into heaven; and he departs not to reign there alone, but to go before and prepare a place for them.
Fuente: Geneva Bible Notes
Jesus next explained the reason the disciples should stop feeling troubled at the thought of His leaving them. He was departing to prepare a place for them, and He would return for them and take them there later (Joh 14:3; Joh 14:28).
The Father’s house is heaven. This is the most obvious and simple explanation, though some commentators understood it to mean the church. However the fourth Gospel never uses the house metaphor for the church elsewhere, and the phrase "the Father’s house" occurs nowhere else in Scripture as a figure of the church. Neither can it refer to the messianic kingdom since Jesus said He was about to go there. The messianic kingdom did not exist and will not exist until Jesus returns to the earth to set it up (cf. Dan 2:44; et al.)
There are many dwelling places (Gr. mone, cognate with the verb meno, meaning "to abide" or "remain") in heaven. The Latin Vulgate translated the noun mansiones that the AV transliterated as "mansions." The NIV "rooms" is an interpretation of mone. The picture that Jesus painted of heaven is a huge building with many rooms or suites of rooms in which people reside. The emphasis is not on the lavishness of the facility as much as its adequacy to accommodate all believers. Other revelation about heaven stresses its opulence (e.g., Rev 21:1 to Rev 22:5).
"The imagery of a dwelling place (’rooms’) is taken from the oriental house in which the sons and daughters have apartments under the same roof as their parents." [Note: Tenney, "John," p. 143.]
"This truth may reflect the marriage custom of the bridegroom, who would go to the bride’s house and bring her to his father’s house, where an apartment would have been built for the new couple." [Note: Bailey, p. 184.]
Jesus assured His disciples that if heaven were otherwise He would have told them just how it was. This assurance recalls Joh 14:1 where Jesus urged them to trust Him.
Jesus had previously spoken of His departure as including His death, His resurrection, and His ascension (Joh 13:31-32; Joh 13:36). Consequently He probably had all of that in view when He spoke about going to prepare a place for believers. His death and resurrection, as well as His ascension and return to heaven, would prepare a place for them. [Note: Edersheim, 2:514.] The place, the Father’s house or heaven, already existed when Jesus spoke these words. He would not go to heaven to create a place for believers there. Rather all that He would do from His death to His return to heaven would constitute preparation for believers to join Him there ultimately. The idea that Jesus is presently constructing dwelling places for believers in heaven and has been doing so for 2,000 years is not what Jesus meant here. Jesus’ going itself prepared the place.