John 14:1-31
Jesus Comforts His Disciples
1 “Do not let your hearts be troubled. You believe in God; believe also in me. 2 My Father’s house has many rooms; if that were not so, would I have told you that I am going there to prepare a place for you? 3 And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come back and take you to be with me that you also may be where I am. 4 You know the way to the place where I am going.”
Jesus the Way to the Father
5 Thomas said to him, “Lord, we don’t know where you are going, so how can we know the way?”
6 Jesus answered, “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. 7 If you really know me, you will know my Father as well. From now on, you do know him and have seen him.”
8 Philip said, “Lord, show us the Father and that will be enough for us.”
9 Jesus answered: “Don’t you know me, Philip, even after I have been among you such a long time? Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father. How can you say, ‘Show us the Father’? 10 Don’t you believe that I am in the Father, and that the Father is in me? The words I say to you I do not speak on my own authority. Rather, it is the Father, living in me, who is doing his work. 11 Believe me when I say that I am in the Father and the Father is in me; or at least believe on the evidence of the works themselves. 12 Very truly I tell you, whoever believes in me will do the works I have been doing, and they will do even greater things than these, because I am going to the Father. 13 And I will do whatever you ask in my name, so that the Father may be glorified in the Son. 14 You may ask me for anything in my name, and I will do it.
Jesus Promises the Holy Spirit
15 “If you love me, keep my commands. 16 And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another advocate to help you and be with you forever— 17 the Spirit of truth. The world cannot accept him, because it neither sees him nor knows him. But you know him, for he lives with you and will be in you. 18 I will not leave you as orphans; I will come to you. 19 Before long, the world will not see me anymore, but you will see me. Because I live, you also will live. 20 On that day you will realize that I am in my Father, and you are in me, and I am in you. 21 Whoever has my commands and keeps them is the one who loves me. The one who loves me will be loved by my Father, and I too will love them and show myself to them.”
22 Then Judas (not Judas Iscariot) said, “But, Lord, why do you intend to show yourself to us and not to the world?”
23 Jesus replied, “Anyone who loves me will obey my teaching. My Father will love them, and we will come to them and make our home with them. 24 Anyone who does not love me will not obey my teaching. These words you hear are not my own; they belong to the Father who sent me.
25 “All this I have spoken while still with you. 26 But the Advocate, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you all things and will remind you of everything I have said to you. 27 Peace I leave with you; my peace I give you. I do not give to you as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled and do not be afraid.
28 “You heard me say, ‘I am going away and I am coming back to you.’ If you loved me, you would be glad that I am going to the Father, for the Father is greater than I. 29 I have told you now before it happens, so that when it does happen you will believe. 30 I will not say much more to you, for the prince of this world is coming. He has no hold over me, 31 but he comes so that the world may learn that I love the Father and do exactly what my Father has commanded me.
“Come now; let us leave.
The New Testament mentions a Special Man throughout all its chapters...And we learn about Him not only in the New Testament, we get hints and prophecies of who He is throughout the Old Testament too...For me the most Divine Learning about this Special Man and His Special Relationship with His Father are in John's gospel and particularly strongest in chapter fourteen, about His Special Relationship with His Father...There are many other verses that talk about Their Relationship, but John 14 are particular interesting for men...
When John wrote his gospel and writes that a Man said, "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God...He was with God in the beginning...Through Him all things were made; without Him nothing was made that has been made...In Him was life, and that life was the Light of all mankind...The Light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it....Then John adds later He says: 'I Am the way and the Truth and the Life...No one comes to the Father except through Me.'" This "I AM" statement teaches us and repeats God's self-identification in Exodus 3:14 when God said I AM is My Name to Moses, is suggesting this Man is claiming His Oneness with God...Then He "If you had known Me, you would have known My Father also...From now on you know Him and have seen Him.'"...This Man equates knowing Himself with knowing the Father, implying a deep-seated connection...Then He says to His Disciple Philip, "'Anyone who has seen Me has seen the Father.'...Don't you believe that I AM in the Father and the Father is in Me?'...The words I say to you are not My Own, but My Father who dwells in Me speaks through Me...Would He not then do the works Himself?'"...This emphasizes This Man's Oneness with the Father, both in essence and in His Actions...
I believe from the start of God's first Book Genesis and the other Old Testament explains who this Unique Man is...And the story begins in Genesis, about learning who God is as best we can and then continues through the rest of the writings of the Old Testament...
In the Book of Genesis which is the first book of the Bible, we learn about God and how the Sacred Book describes the start of the heavens and earth...In the Old Testament we learn about God's Great Power and how He created the world...We learn of His Great Power and how He created the first man and woman, and all the things of the earth and of the universe...He gives the first man and woman an Eden to live in with Him...And living in the Presence of God is Heaven and Paradise...
But an evil one in the Garden came to the man and woman and tempted the first occupants of earth...He talked them into eating a fruit from a tree that God had forbidden them to eat...And when they ate this particular fruit they realized that there is right from wrong and that evil is different from good...Before eating this they had the minds of innocent, naive beautiful children...But that dramatically changed...And this cannot be understated...We had committed our first sin...When Adam and Eve ate the fruit, after always being unclothed, they realized now that they were naked and felt ashamed...They also became aware of mortality and death...As time as wore on, mankind has committed more and more sins...We come to learn over time that every man has sinned, and we all fall short to the Glory of God...
It is written during our Fall: And I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and hers; he will crush your head, and you will strike his heel.”..So in Genesis, it is often interpreted as a prophetic hint towards a Particular Man by Christians...In this light, we can understand: Who will strike His heel?...The serpent represents evil, often understood as Satan...So, in this interpretation, Satan will strike the heel...And therefore we know whose heel will be bruised?...The verse uses "her offspring" to refer to Eve's descendants, ultimately culminating in Jesus...Therefore, in this interpretation, the heel bruised would belong to Jesus...This interpretation draws parallels between the promised victory of Good over evil and the suffering Jesus endured on the cross...While Satan inflicted pain on Jesus (the bruised heel), Jesus ultimately triumphed over evil (crushing the head)...
So we lost our innocence and became sinners in Eden by not following God's will...More importantly we lost our perfect relationship with God in Eden...So we have been trying to get back to the Garden ever since...God wants His family back to Paradise with Him...And so He patiently has taken His Time, which is Eternity and is leading those who believe in Him back to the Garden...Many readers through the years see the Garden of Eden as a symbolic representation of a state of perfect communion with God as they lived and worked the Garden of Eden, and then was lost through their sin...In this view, getting back to the Garden and this Perfect Communion with God symbolizes achieving an inner peace, a spiritual perfection, and a reconciliation with God, not necessarily in a physical location...It is an Inner Peace, a Spiritual perfection not of this world, but one in God's Kingdom...
God from the earliest of times shows His people, the Hebrews, now called the Jews, His Guidance and Influencing their faith, their viewpoints and their values as the Old Testament plays out through the chapters...God through His always being the same yesterday, today, is forever influencing the Israeli people that shows His persistent and constant teaching of His people in trying to get His family back together...In the Old Scripture we learn and His people learn who God was and who God is...The Old Testament emphasizes God's role in guiding and influencing the Jewish people's understanding, acknowledging their own interpretations of Him and their responses to Him..
God used His Guiding and Influencing throughout His Word of His Books of the Old Testament through His Dialogue and Teachings...Moses, the Prophets, and other wise men wrote about God, so we might learn who He is...The Israelis learned Who the Living God is through the writings and history of the Old Testament with what the Old Testament writers wrote and their first hand experiences with Him...For example, God was with Moses leading God's people through the desert for forty years...In these forty years with Moses and God leading their way, He of course, knew His people so He knew they needed this Guiding and Influencing and often disciplining them...The Old Testament highlights this reciprocal process where both God and the Jewish people contribute to their experiences of their journey with each other...This journey and transformation of God's people through the Old Testament focused on the dynamic and evolving nature of the relationship between God and the Jewish people throughout the writings in the Old Testament Books...
When Moses is leading the people through the desert he gives us another hint of One who will help us later, when he says: "The LORD your God will raise up for you a Prophet like me from among your fellow Israelites, and you must listen to that Prophet...I will raise up a Prophet like you from among their fellow Israelites...I will tell that Prophet what to say, and He will tell the people everything I command Him."...
Then God sent this Prophet, this Man (who we talked about at the first of this writing) who was a Jew, if it is fair to call Him a Man among His fellow Israelites...He went around speaking, healing, forgiving like He was and is God...He said He fulfilled the Old Testament Scripture...He said God's Word and therefore His Books are the Truth...He taught His followers that all Scripture and the Bible is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work...He told His followers that if anyone would come after Him, let them deny themselves and take up His cross and follow Him...For whoever would save His own life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for His sake and the gospel’s will save his life...He told people the only Way to get to God was and is through Him...He said that He is LORD of the Sabbath...He said that we are to love our enemies...That He is the Way, the Truth, and the Life...He said that if we have seen Him, we have seen God...This Man declares that He has always existed...He says before Abraham was born, I AM!...I AM is the Name of God...This verse when we read it literally can be interpreted that this Particular Man is stating that His existence before Abraham, who lived centuries before Him has always existed and is God...At the very least He is comparing Himself very closely with God...He ask God to Glorify Him in God's Presence with the Glory He had with Him before the world began....This prayer and other things He claimed and spoke can be seen as claiming pre-existence by referring to a Shared Glory with our Father in Heaven...He calls God His Father and many times claims a Special Relationship with God, His Father...He says He and the Father are One...
Now this Man as stated earlier that He was a Jew, and He was always teaching about God and knew the very first commandment where God states: I AM the LORD your God, you shall have no other gods before Me...So this statement along with all the other claims He made about Himself in such a humbling and subtle way, which seem as natural as they could be -and yet somehow seem as something He should be saying all along...However, the religious groups of His time took exception to His statements...The High Priest, the Pharisees and the teachers of the law were quite shocked that He was often comparing Himself to God, even though it seems quite the natural thing to do and say for this Particular Man...They called Him saying of these comparable about Himself and God, blasphemy...It might have been the most shocking thing these religious men had heard coming from Another Individual...But the people knew something was different about this Particular Man...He could do signs or miracles...
Yet, all these claims this Particular Man made, could make only sense if He was the Messiah...The One who was to come from the Old Testament...And the Twelve Disciples that He chose believe He is the One who was to come, except one who was a traitor to Him...And so this Man would heal every disease brought to Him, and always be speaking about God, His Father, and would commonly go around forgiving others of their sins...And as stated earlier it all seemed easy and common for Him...It just seemed right, what He was saying, and what He was doing...
One Very Remarkable Nature of this man was the way this Man would and could go around forgiving others...His forgiveness cannot be compared to human standards...While humans usually consider the offended party and the consequences of their actions before forgiving, This Man offered Unconditional Forgiveness...We might believe that such Unconditional Forgiveness only makes sense if this Man was and is Truly Divine...By assuming the authority to forgive others in any circumstance, this Particular Man implicitly claimed to be the One ultimately that is "offended" by my sin or your sin or the one He was forgiving, aligning Himself with God as the lawgiver and source of all LOVE...This belief in Him gives prudence that His Claim to forgive along with His Very Own sacrifice on the cross suggests that This Particular Man has, in fact, took on the burden of human sin, experiencing suffering to redeem humanity and offer forgiveness to everyone...
Many will acknowledge and belief that He is the Messiah but this explanation doesn't answer all questions about God and forgiveness...But it answers most of them...It emphasizes the importance of faith in accepting God's LOVE and the hope offered by This Man's Personal Sacrifice...This explanation of This Man help us answer His Actions and Claims...This passage reflects a specific understanding that emphasizes This One Man's Divinity and Redemptive Sacrifice...It gives believers able to say that He is our Redeemer, our Personal Savior...