The value of what directs the life, of which it was also the revealing means, cannot be exaggerated; and this we have seen in the commands and words of our Lord Jesus, by which He exercises the life He has given to the believer, as indeed He is their life. But now He adds fresh consolation and blessing in the relation borne by the Advocate, or Paraclete (for so now the Spirit is not only characterized but called). “These things I have spoken to you, while abiding with you; but the Advocate, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, he shall teach you all things, and bring to your remembrance all things which I said to you.” (Ver. 26.) How blessed that the same Holy Spirit, who anointed and abode in Him while ministering here below, was to teach the disciples all things, and to give them back all the words of Jesus 1 And so it was fulfilled, and more, as became a divine person who deigned to serve in love, sent by the Father in the name of the Son. It is not here the on asking the Father, and the Father giving, as in verse 16, but the Father sending in the name of the Son the One who could, and would, teach all things, besides recalling all that Jesus said to them. Room is thus left, not only for His reviving in their memory all the injunctions of Christ, but also for His own unlimited teaching.
But there is more than doctrine. “Peace I leave with you, my peace I give to you, not as the world giveth give I to you. Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid.” (Ver. 27.) Throughout the Lord supposes His death. This was necessary to peace; His own peace goes farther still. It was the peace He enjoyed while here—a peace unruffled by circumstances, and in unbroken communion with His Father; a peace as far as possible from man's heart, in such a world as this, ignorant of the Father, and on all points at issue with Him. But it characterized the second Man, who gives it to as. In the faith of Him who loves us perfectly and to the end, who has accomplished all to God's glory and for us, we are entitled to it. And the Holy Ghost would have us enjoy it according to His word. He who gives it gave it not away, and had it not the less because we were to receive it. Like all else that He gives, it is enjoyed unimpaired in its own divine fullness, everyone that shares rather adding to it than taking from it. The question is not merely of reality, but of its course and character. “Not as the world giveth, give I unto you. Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid.” Why, indeed, with His peace, should the heart be confounded or fearful?
But the Lord looks now for hearts purified by faith to delight in His glory. “Ye heard that I said to you, I go away, and come unto you; if ye loved me, ye would have rejoiced that I go unto the Father, because the Father is greater than I. And now I have told you before it come to pass, that when it is come to pass ye may believe.” (Vers. 28, 29.) Thus, whatever His essential and personal glory, He never forgets that He is man on earth. As such He goes away, and comes back to the disciples. As such He calls upon them to rejoice in His proceeding to the Father. It was no small thing that man in His person should thus enter into glory; and there is almost as much unbelief in Christendom's taking it as a matter of course, in utter indifference to its value, as in Jewish rejection of it as incredible, if not impossible. The Jew, as such, looked for man, that is for himself, to be blessed in the highest degree by God on the earth, and so, doubtless, beyond his thought it will be in the kingdom by-and-by. But the Lord would have the Christian rejoice in the second Man, gone up even now into the paradise of God, the sure pledge of our own following Him there when He comes back again for no. And therefore does He the more impressively call attention, not to the fact only, but to His mention of it then before it came to pass, that when it did, they should believe. Himself in glory is the living object of faith, full of weighty and fruitful consequence for us. It is well to give His death the deepest value. Never can we lose sight of His profound humiliation in self-sacrificing love to glorify God, and to bear our burden of sins and judgment, without incalculable loss to our souls; but we do well to have our eye fixed on Him received up in glory, and ever to wait for Him as about to come and have us there with Himself in the Father's house.
“No longer shall I talk much with you, for the prince of the world cometh, and hath nothing in me. But that the world may know that I love the Father, and as the Father commanded me, so I do. Arise, let us go hence.” (Vers. 30, 31.) The Lord thus intimates that He has not much more to talk with them. He had another task on hand; for the enemy was coming, characterized now as the prince of the world which had rejected the Son of God, proving thereby its opposition to the Father, and its subjection to Satan; but, come when he might, he had no more in Christ at the end than at the beginning. Then he would gladly have enticed the Savior out of the path of obedience, by offering gratification; now he strives to fill Him in that path with fear and horror of the death which was before Him; but in vain: “The cup which my Father giveth me, shall I not drink it?” In us, naturally, there is everything which can afford a handle to Satan; in Christ he had nothing. So it could not but be because of the glory and unsullied perfectness of His person, true God and unblemished Man; and so, it must be for us, if we were to have eternal life in Him, and He to take away our sins, and all this in obedience and to the glory of God His Father. Therefore does He add, “'but that the world may know that I love the Father, and as the Father commanded me, even so I do.” It was indeed the Son's love to the uttermost, it was also unqualified obedience.
Here the Lord ends this part of His communications, and marks it by the closing words, “Arise, let us go hence.”