John 14:1-31
Jesus and God Have a Special Relationship
1 Jesus said, “Don’t be troubled. Trust in God, and trust in me. 2 There are many rooms in my Father’s house. I would not tell you this if it were not true. I am going there to prepare a place for you. 3 After I go and prepare a place for you, I will come back. Then I will take you with me, so that you can be where I am. 4 You know the way to the place where I am going.”
5 Thomas said, “Lord, we don’t know where you are going, so how can we know the way?”
6 Jesus answered, “I am the way, the truth, and the life. The only way to the Father is through me. 7 If you really knew me, you would know my Father too. But now you know the Father. You have seen him.”
8 Philip said to him, “Lord, show us the Father. That is all we need.”
9 Jesus answered, “Philip, I have been with you for a long time. So you should know me. Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father too. So why do you say, ‘Show us the Father’? 10 Don’t you believe that I am in the Father and the Father is in me? The things I have told you don’t come from me. The Father lives in me, and he is doing his own work. 11 Believe me when I say that I am in the Father and the Father is in me. Or believe because of the miracles I have done.
12 “I can assure you that whoever believes in me will do the same things I have done. And they will do even greater things than I have done, because I am going to the Father. 13 And if you ask for anything in my name, I will do it for you. Then the Father’s glory will be shown through the Son. 14 If you ask me for anything in my name, I will do it.
The Promise of the Holy Spirit
15 “If you love me, you will do what I command. 16 I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Helper to be with you forever. 17 The Helper is the Spirit of truth. The people of the world cannot accept him, because they don’t see him or know him. But you know him. He lives with you, and he will be in you.
18 “I will not leave you all alone like orphans. I will come back to you. 19 In a very short time the people in the world will not see me anymore. But you will see me. You will live because I live. 20 On that day you will know that I am in the Father. You will know that you are in me and I am in you. 21 Those who really love me are the ones who not only know my commands but also obey them. My Father will love such people, and I will love them. I will make myself known to them.”
22 Then Judas (not Judas Iscariot) said, “Lord, how will you make yourself known to us, but not to the world?”
23 Jesus answered, “All who love me will obey my teaching. My Father will love them. My Father and I will come to them and live with them. 24 But anyone who does not love me does not obey my teaching. This teaching that you hear is not really mine. It is from my Father who sent me.
25 “I have told you all these things while I am with you. 26 But the Helper will teach you everything and cause you to remember all that I told you. This Helper is the Holy Spirit that the Father will send in my name.
27 “I leave you peace. It is my own peace I give you. I give you peace in a different way than the world does. So don’t be troubled. Don’t be afraid. 28 You heard me say to you, ‘I am leaving, but I will come back to you.’ If you loved me, you would be happy that I am going back to the Father, because the Father is greater than I am. 29 I have told you this now, before it happens. Then when it happens, you will believe.
30 “I will not talk with you much longer. The ruler of this world is coming. He has no power over me. 31 But the world must know that I love the Father. So I do exactly what the Father told me to do.
“Come now, let’s go.”
When I read the Old Testament and New Testament, I feel like the books are definitely divided into two different parts...Both the Old Testament and New Testament he writes about in his books Mere Christianity and another of his books, God in the Dock...C. S. Lewis helps me understand why I think they are different in these two books...
When St. John writes about Jesus we read He is full of Grace and Truth...The Historical Person, Jesus was a Jew, born in Bethlehem...He lived in the region of Galilee and was from the city of Nazareth...And from this One Man, who is One with God and in God, He made all the nations, that they should inhabit the whole earth...He marked out their appointed times in when they would live in history and the boundaries of their lands...God did this so that they would seek Him and perhaps reach out for Him and find Him, though He is not far from any one of us....For God is Spirit...For in God we live and move and have our being...As some of the Greek poets have said, ‘We are His offspring.’...He would do exactly as His Father told Him to do...He always followed God's Will...That He would go around regularly forgiving people, when He walked the earth...We learn He is the Way, the Truth, and the Life...We find He is the Only Way to God...When we really know Him, we also know God...We find out that anyone who has seen Jesus has also seen God...The Father’s glory would be shown through the Son in His Words, His deeds, and His resurrection...Mankind would know that His followers are in Him and He is in His followers with the Holy Spirit...Those who really LOVE and believe in Him are the ones who not only know His commands but also obey His Words...My Father will LOVE His Son's followers, and Jesus would LOVE them too...Jesus would make Himself known to His followers through the Holy Spirit...Judas (not Judas Iscariot) said, “LORD, how will You make Yourself known to us, but not to the world?”...Jesus answered, “All who love Me will obey My teaching...My Father will LOVE them...My Father and I will come to them and live with them in His Spirit...But anyone who does not love Him does not obey His teachings...His teachings that He taught we not His teachings and Words that we hear, it is from the Word of God who sent Him...When Jesus had finished the work His Father gave Him to do, He had God glory on earth...And now, Father, gave Him glory with Him (God)...God had given Him the glory He had with God before the world was made...Jesus brings the Old Testament and New Testament together...He connects the Old and New Testament...
In one of C. S. Lewis' book, God in the Dock, Lewis gives a general scope of the Bible...He says, the Bible can be divided into two parts – the Old and the New Testaments...The Old Testament contains fabulous elements...The New Testament consists mostly of teaching, not of narrative at all: but where it is narrative, it is, in my opinion, historical...As to the fabulous element in the Old Testament, I very much doubt if you would be wise to chuck it out...What you get is something coming gradually into focus...First you get, scattered through the heathen religions all over the world – but still quite vague and mythical – the idea of a god who is killed and broken and then comes to life again...No one knows where he is supposed to have lived and died; he’s not historical...Then you get the Old Testament...Religious ideas get a bit more focused...Everything is now connected with a particular nation...And it comes still more into focus as it goes on...Jonah and the Whale, Noah and his Ark, are fabulous; but the Court history of King David is probably as reliable as the Court history of Louis XIV...Then, in the New Testament the thing really happens...The Dying God really appears – as a Historical Person, living in a definite place and time...If we could sort out all the fabulous elements in the earlier stages and separate them from the historical ones, I think we might lose an essential part of the whole process...
Lewis wrote in another of his books, Mere Christianity, mankind needed and still needs a remedy from our from our fall from God's Grace, and we need a remedy to fix this...We cannot fix being disobedient to God... God had told Adam and Eve that they could not eat fruit from the tree that was in the middle of the garden, and they could not even touch it, or they would die...But they did touch and eat fruit from the tree, He had forbidden them to touch or eat from...And it is interesting, the two being disobedient to God, we see being described as pleasing to the eye and out of this fall they gained wisdom, and it appears they gain a new level of consciousness -because their eyes were no open...Moses writes, when the woman saw that the fruit of the tree she saw that it was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom (it appears we now have learned right from wrong), she took some and ate it...She also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it...Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they realized they were naked; so they sewed fig leaves together and made coverings for themselves...The two sense right from wrong...Then the man and his wife heard the sound of the LORD God as He was walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and they hid from the LORD God among the trees of the garden...But the LORD God called to the man, “Where are you?”...Adam answered, “I heard You in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked; so I hid.”...And God said, “Who told you that you were naked?...Have you eaten from the tree that I commanded you not to eat from?”...They had committed mankind's first sins...
Lewis then writes in Mere Christianity: And what did God do?...First of all He left us conscience, the sense of right and wrong: and all through history there have been people trying (some of them very hard) to obey it...None of them ever quite succeeded...Secondly, He sent the human race what I call good dreams: I mean those queer stories scattered all through the heathen religions about a god who dies and comes to life again and, by His death, has somehow given new life to men...Thirdly, He selected one particular people and spent several centuries hammering into their heads the sort of God He was — that there was only one of Him and that He cared about right conduct...Those people were the Jews, and the Old Testament gives an account of the hammering process...Then comes the real shock...Among these Jews there suddenly turns up a Man who goes about talking as if He was God...He claims to forgive sins...He says He has always existed...He says He is coming to judge the world at the end of time...Now let us get this clear...Among Pantheists, like the Indians, anyone might say that He was a part of God, or One with God: there would be nothing very odd about it...But this Man, since He was a Jew, could not mean that kind of God...God, in their language, meant the Being outside the world, who had made it and was infinitely different from anything else...And when you have grasped that, you will see that what this Man said was, quite simply, the most shocking thing that has ever been uttered by human lips...