333. JOHN 14:2: THE RELIABILITY OF THE REDEEMER
Joh_14:2: The Reliability of the Redeemer
If it were not so, I would have told you.'97Joh_14:2.
One of the most striking traits of the teaching of Jesus is its reticence concerning many things which one would like to know. Through all Christian history people have gone to the Gospels for answers to questions which seemed to them of the highest importance, and concerning which churches have quarrelled, and they have been met by silence. It is the same with the first disciples of Jesus. They bring Him their questions about His own fate, and He answers, '93Let not your heart be troubled: I go to prepare a place for you.'94 They ask Him whither He is going, and He replies, '93In my Father's house are many mansions: if it were not so, I would have told you,'94 as though it were not necessary that He should tell them more.
I have wondered most of my life why Christ spoke these words at the time He did. They seem unsatisfactorily explained, whether connected with the first clause of the phrase or with the last clause. Dr. Marcus Dods comments: '93Had there been no such place and no possibility of preparing it, He necessarily would have told them, because the very purpose of His leaving was to prepare a place for them.'94 Somehow this does not find me. Neither is Dr. John Ker, also a writer of genuine insight, much more satisfactory. He says: '93There might be some misgivings in their minds, and these words are thrown in to quiet them. Had you been deceiving yourselves with falsehood, I should have felt bound to undeceive you.'94 It is along these tracks that most of the explanations run.
But should we not rather say that Christ spoke these words with a smile? '93If it were not so, I would have told you. You know My way by this time. It has been My wont to check and thwart and dash your hopes. Things you desired, things you believed, things you dreamt of mightily'97I have told you over and over again that they were not so. Now you are right at last. You thought that there were many mansions in the Father's house. You clung to that faith when the rest went. I knew it all the time, and I never said a word to contradict you, because it was a true and sure hope, truer and surer and sweeter than you knew. If it had not been so, I would have told you; but it is so. This time you may let your hearts go free; beyond death there are no disappointments.'941 [Note: W. Robertson Nicoll, The Lamp of Sacrifice, 155.]
Still on the lips of all we question,
The finger of God's silence lies;
Will the lost hands in ours be folded?
Will the shut eyelids ever rise?
Oh, friend, no proof beyond this yearning,
This outreach of our hearts we need;
God will not mock the hope He giveth,
No love He prompts shall vainly plead.
Then let us stretch our hands in darkness,
And call our loved ones o'er and o'er;
Some day their arms will close about us,
And the old voices speak once more.
There are many matters in the short parenthetical sentence, and they all make for strength. Let us touch four things'97Christ's Knowledge, His Tenderness, His Confirmation of our Human Instincts, and His Encouragement.
1. Christ's knowledge.'97The text is a simple parenthesis in the midst of one of His greatest teachings, but it seems more than the most elaborate argument. He is speaking about the future life as the hope and consolation of those whom death bereaves, and He affirms concerning it some very definite things'97things which are a clear addition to human knowledge about it. And the manner of His affirmation is as remarkable as its matter. He calmly assumes His own certain knowledge. He is not an inquirer about the unseen world. He does not, like Plato, rest His teachings upon reasonings and probabilities. He speaks with absolute certainty. Clearly He believed Himself to have certain knowledge.
We have in this testimony of Jesus our surest guarantee of the existence of the heavenly world. Others have guessed, hoped, dreamed, speculated, poetized about heaven: Jesus knows. For He has come down from heaven. The world into which our dead pass one by one, the veil closing instantly behind them without a sign or token sent back to tell us how they fare, the world into which our prayers are sent evoking no audible response'97He has dwelt in that world, ruled over it, and is the Master of its secrets; and He calls it paradise, He calls it My Father's house. '93I speak unto you,'94 He says, '93the things that I have seen with the Father.'85 We speak that we do know, and testify that we have seen.'94 So He declared to Nicodemus, referring to heavenly as well as to earthly things. How these quiet words of Jesus reassure us, bewildered with the haze of our modern doubt!
Away down in the darkness, in the heart of the great steamer, the engineer stands. He never sees how the vessel moves. He does not know where she is going. It is not his duty to know. It is his only to answer every signal, to start his engine, to quicken or slow its motion, to reverse it, just as he is directed by the one whose part it is to see. He has nothing whatever to do with the vessel's course. He sees not an inch of the sea.
It is not our part to guide our life in this world, amid its tangled affairs. It is ours just to do our duty, our Master's bidding. Christ's hand is on the helm. He sees all the future. He pilots us. Let us learn to thank God that we cannot know the future, that we need not know it. Christ knows it, and it is better to go on in the dark with Him, letting Him lead, than to go alone in the light, and choose our own path.1 [Note: J. R. Miller, Glimpses through Life's Windows, 85.]
Who knows? God knows: and what He knows
Is well and best.
The darkness hideth not from Him, but glows
Clear as the morning or the evening rose
Of east or west.
Wherefore man's strength is to sit still:
Not wasting care
To antedate to-morrow's good or ill;
Yet watching meekly, watching with goodwill,
Watching to prayer.
Some rising or some setting ray
From east or west,
If not to-day, why then another day
Will light each dove upon the homeward way
Safe to her nest.2 [Note: C. G. Rossetti, Poems, 138.]
2. Christ's tenderness.'97'93If it were not so, I would have told you.'94 It is a parenthesis of singular significance and emphasis, full of human considerateness and tenderness. It is a measure of the greatness of the revelation which He was making to them. He would not trifle with this great human hope of immortality. Had there been no such satisfaction for it He would have told them. It was impossible for Him to deceive them with a false or uncertain hope, or to permit them to be deceived. He came to teach them about spiritual realities, and this was one of them.
Somewhere in the East Tennessee mountains a craggy bluff of limestone rises sheer from the plain, some five hundred feet in height. At its base lies the peaceful valley stretching away into the distance. A storm gathers on the horizon. The clouds fly rapidly together, the lightning leaps, there is one terrific thunder-clap. The bluff echoes the roar of the storm. Down on the side of the bluff a stunted bush is growing from the scanty soil that has drifted into a fissure of rock. On the bush a bird sits and swings and sings. The bluff echoes the song of the bird. At the base of the cliff a little child has fallen on the stones and is crying over the hurt of the fall. The bluff echoes the child's cry. Yonder in the cabin door a woman sits at her work, and as she works, the words of an old hymn float out on the open air. The bluff echoes the woman's hymn. Christ is like the echoing bluff. He catches every note that issues from human hearts, and in responding He joins the strength of the rock to a tenderness that beats swift and helpful sympathy for every sob and song that trembles in the air about Him.
3. Christ's confirmation of human instincts.'97There are some beliefs embedded in the native soil of our hearts; they grow there of themselves, and we need no proof of their existence or reality. One of these is the hope of immortality. No savage so barbarous, no religion so material, as to be without its hope and its paradise, and its realms of the blessed, where there is rest and peace after the toil and battle of life. And Jesus in adding, '93If it were not so, I would have told you,'94 seems to guarantee to us as correct interpreters of God's mind to men these deep instincts of human nature. He who ever told His disciples the truth, who kept back nothing that was for their good though He should pain and shame them thereby, would surely have told them if these hopes of future blessedness were doomed to disappointment. It is impossible that Christ should deceive.
The unspeakable value of these words of the Lord Jesus is that they vindicate a native and ineradicable instinct of the soul. They set His seal on the sanctified use of the imagination in religion. They proclaim the soul to be a freedman of the universe, with a right to exercise its faculties in picturing to itself an authentic ideal. '93In my Father's house are many mansions; if it were not so, I would have told you.'94 As though He had said, I know you have your dreams of God, of heaven, of a perfect life beyond the tumults of time and the river of death. You think of Him as the Father, the Holy One and the Good, too wise to err, too good to be unkind; whose love is as the salt sea, '93washing in pure ablution round earth's human shores,'94 whose mercy is infinite as the sky; whose will for all is eternal life;'97you dream of a state where that holy will is ideally done, and where the spirits of just men made perfect serve Him day and night in blessedness. And these dreams are true; '93If it were not so, I would have told you.'941 [Note: E. Griffith-Jones, Faith and Verification, 220.]
4. Christ's encouragement.'97Life for many of us is grey and dim. Let the glory of eternity break through the clouds. We are wanting, many of us'97how many!'97in decision, in earnestness, in elastic energy: let us find vigour where a thousand saints have found it'97at the fountain of immortal strength. Life is full of disappointments; the horizons narrow with the advancing years: let the sadness sometimes forget itself in the anticipation of eternal joy, and the poverty in the anticipation of eternal wealth. The hopes that look for fulfilment within these mortal years often fail, but the great hope is beyond the reach of vicissitude and peril; and while we are learning with sorrow the narrowing limits of our mortal strength, let us exult in the ages which are to bring a perpetual expansion to all our powers and to all our joys. Half a gospel will never give any man the whole of the Christian redemption. In the gospel of Christ, life and immortality have been brought to light, and a universal spirit that should distinguish the children of God, a magnanimous superiority to the vicissitudes of this earthly life, the courage to attempt great duties, and the fortitude to bear without complaint great sorrows'97these come not merely from the pathetic memories of the past, from the incarnation of Christ, from His sorrows, from His death, but from the endless ages of righteousness, of wisdom, of peace, of joy, and of glory, that Christ has promised us in the home of God.
He has brought life and immortality to light. Trusting Him, we can think of our bereavements calmly, and look forward joyfully to the hour of our departure. For those who believe in Christ, death is not annihilation but victory, not separation but reunion; it is not the soul's extinction, but its birth into a brighter, purer, larger life. It means '93ease after toil, port after stormy seas,'94 home after changeful, perilous journeyings, the frail tents of the wilderness exchanged for the shining gates and undecaying walls of the city of God.1 [Note: G. G. Findlay, The Things Above, 210.]
As it were better, youth
Should strive, through acts uncouth,
Toward making, than repose on aught found made;
So, better, age, exempt
From strife, should know, than tempt
Further. Thou waited'st age: wait death nor be afraid!2 [Note: Browning, Rabbi ben Ezra.]
The Reliability of the Redeemer
Literature
Allon (H.), The Indwelling Christ, 321.
Burrell (D. J.), The Golden Passional, 151.
Cobern (C. M.), The Stars and the Book, 123.
Dale (R. W.), Christ and the Future Life, 33.
Dawson (W. J.), The Church of To-morrow, 105.
Fairweather (D.), Bound in the Spirit, 151.
Findlay (G. G.), The Things Above, 188.
Griffith-Jones (E.), Faith and Verification, 219.
Matheson (G.), Rests by the River, 222.
Matheson (G.), Searchings in the Silence, 210.
Morrison (G. H.), in Great Texts of the New Testament, 83.
Nicoll (W. R.), The Lamp of Sacrifice, 155.
Peabody (F. G.), Mornings in the College Chapel, ii. 150.
Raleigh (A.), Quiet Resting-Places, 387.
Shedd (W. G. T.), Sermons to the Spiritual Man, 167.
Sunday Magazine, 1880, p. 307 (Butler).
Autor: JAMES HASTINGS