Heavenly Promises
Published by Stanley Pouw in 2021 · 19 September 2021
Our Lord had lived His life fully, three years of ministry, and now He is in the final week of His life. He will be the Sacrificial Lamb who takes away the sin of the world, killed at the very time the Jews were killing sacrificial lambs on the Passover that Friday. This is His last night with His disciples in the upper room on Thursday night. This is where He gives His final words to His own men, the apostles.
They have been with Him every day for the full three years. They love Him, they believe in Him, but they are profoundly confused. Their entire sense of what was supposed to happen has disappeared, vanished and faded. Their hopes and ambitions are collapsing, disintegrating around them. Why? Because the Lord continues to tell them He is going to leave them, He is leaving.
In fact, what happened on this last night fills up John 13, 14, 15, and 16, and also encompasses the prayer in John 17. That’s actually how the evening started, John 13:1, before the Feast of Passover, Jesus knowing that His hour had come, that He would depart out of this world to the Father having loved His own who were in the world, He loved them to the end.
According to the disciple’s theology, when the Lord had set up His kingdom, they would be in the primary places. Hopefully, several of them would be able to sit on His right and His left hand; and they were still arguing about that on this very occasion. And now Jesus was talking about, “I’m leaving; and you’re not going. I go to the Father and you don’t. And one of you is a betrayer.”
He said, “And you’re all going to scatter.” They are shocked and their disappointment is compounded by the ugliness of their own attitudes. They have been fighting about prominence. None of them was willing to wash the feet of the others, so the Lord had to do that. They had been followers for three years, and they expected that it would end in glory for the Lord and for them.
They show no interest in His suffering. No one offers a word of comfort to Him. No one presses close to Him to express faithful love. They seem to be indifferent to what He says is going to happen in His own suffering. They’re self-absorbed, they’re confused, they are frightened, and their messianic expectations are crumbling. They show no real love to Him, but Jesus loves them infinitely.
So He has to comfort them because they’re not comforting Him. John 14:1-3, “Let not your heart be troubled; you believe in God, believe also in Me. 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. 3 And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and receive you to Myself; that where I am, there you may be also.”
Verse 4-6, “And where I go you know.” Thomas said to Him, “Lord, we do not know where You are going, and how can we know the way?” 6 Jesus said to him, “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through Me.” Completely aware of all that He would suffer in a few hours, He is still absorbed in the fears and sorrows of His apostles as if He was not the sufferer at all.
It is the sorrow of their hearts that prompts Jesus to say everything He says in these chapters to them and to us. And the opening six verses are really just the foundation of comfort. Later He will give them the Comforter, the Holy Spirit, who will dwell in them. So we are comforted by His promises, and those comforts are increased in power by the indwelling presence of the Comforter.
Now first “the plea,” in verse 1, “Let not your heart be troubled; believe in God, believe also in Me.” Jesus knows everything that’s in a heart of a man. And their hearts are filled with a different emotions as they watch their hopes coming to an end. Their desires are vanishing by His death and His departure, and they can’t go. They are bewildered, gloomy and depressed.
The attitude of the Jews who are going to kill Jesus was going to be the same toward them. And we know the history of the apostles because almost all of them died as martyrs. And they had left everything to follow Him, and now He seems to be leaving them behind in the middle of enemies who after they’ve murdered Him are going to want to do the same to them. It was all very frightening.
On top of that, they had to deal with their pride and selfishness, and the confusion about a betrayer, and then their leader being a denier. The truth of the matter is His suffering couldn’t be alleviated anyway. He had to suffer what He suffered alone, did He not? He had to drink the bitter cup of divine wrath to the bottom by Himself. He had to tread the road to Calvary by Himself.
They had no ability to feel what He felt; since they were men, and He’s God. But the reverse is not true because He was in all points tempted like we are yet without sin, so He became a merciful and faithful High Priest. He felt their pain, He felt the agony of their losing Him for a while. Clearly, there was room in His heart for their sorrows, even when His own sorrows were infinite.
Isaiah said, “In all their affliction, He was afflicted.” Isaiah 50:6 says, “I gave My back to those who struck Me, and My cheeks to those who plucked out the beard.” And in Isaiah 50:4 it says, “The Lord God has given Me the tongue of the learned, that I should know how to speak a word in season to him who is weary.” Jesus knew their weariness, He knew their sorrow, and He says, “Stop being troubled.”
“You believe in God, so believe in Me.” Again, this is a claim to deity. John all the way through his gospel makes the case that Jesus is God, they are one in nature. John 20:31 says, “The point of this entire gospel is that you might believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God.” John begins by saying, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”
None of them had ever seen God, but they believed in God. In a sense, Jesus is stating that they are true believers. They believe in God and they believe in the revelation of God in the Son of God, and that’s why they said, “You’re the Christ, the Son of the living God.” And that’s why they said, “We know that You are the Holy One and You have the words of life.”
They had been regenerated by God and become believers in the true God. Probably long before that, they were believers in the God revealed in the Old Testament whom they’d never seen. Remember Psalm 27 where the psalmist said about David, “I had fainted under duress to see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living.” And then he follows it up in the next verse and says, “Wait for the Lord.”
The apostles had already by divine regeneration and illumination recognized that Jesus is the one who has come from God. They have seen and heard Him, and watched Him do His miracles. They did believe in the invisible God, and now they believe also in the visible Christ. But they need to believe in Him when He’s gone the same way they believe in the invisible God.
Jesus was about to be removed from them. So He said, “You must believe in Me when I’m invisible the way you believe in God who is invisible.” Deuteronomy 31:6 says, “Be strong and of good courage, do not fear nor be afraid of them; for the Lord your God, He is the One who goes with you. He will not leave you nor forsake you.” Jesus says later, “I will come to you and never leave you nor forsake you.”
Jesus says, “The Father and I will take up residence with you before you take up residence with Us. I will put my Holy Spirit in you.” We all live and move in the worship of One we’ve never seen. Peter understood it. 1 Peter 1:8-9 says, “Though now you do not see Him, yet believing, you rejoice with joy inexpressible and full of glory, 9 receiving the end of your faith, the salvation of your souls.”
Eternal salvation, comes to those who believe in the Christ they’ve never seen. And in John 16:7, He says, “Nevertheless I tell you the truth. It is to your advantage that I go away; for if I do not go away, the Helper will not come to you; but if I depart, I will send Him to you.” That’s the Holy Spirit. Do you know what is better than having Jesus Christ with you? Having the Holy Spirit in you all the time.
So the plea then is to trust Him, and that’s followed by a promise, since there are many promises. Here is the first one in verse 2 - 3, “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. And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and receive you to Myself, so that where I am, there you may be also.”
Well, what is “My Father’s house”? Hebrews 9:23-24 says, “Therefore it was necessary that the copies of the things in the heavens should be purified with these, but the heavenly things themselves with better sacrifices than these. 24 For Christ has not entered the holy places made with hands, which are copies of the true, but into heaven itself, now to appear in the presence of God for us.”
The temple was the Father’s house in the sense that it was a copy of the Father’s house which is heaven. Christ came and cleansed the Father’s house that had been turned, as Luke says, into a den of robbers. He cleansed the Father’s house on earth and then He destroyed the copy so that He might gather His people and take them into a place prepared for them that was reality in heaven.
You don’t need a map of heaven, there’s just one house. The word mansion really confused a lot of people. This is the word for “rooms.” Well, people in heaven will be those who God gathered into heaven from nations all across the earth. Revelation 21:16 says that the capital city of heaven, not heaven, heaven is infinite, but the capital city alone is 1,500 miles cubed.
In summary, it is a golden diamond city. In the center of this massive, cubed, glorious, transparent, golden diamond is God’s glory and the glory of the Lamb blazing through. And around the city are jewels, massive jewels that spin out the colors of the rainbow. The city has twelve gates and each one is a single large pearl from which the light bounces and adds to the transcendence. It’s heaven.
Then in verse 3, “I’m going to go and prepare a place for you. I’ll come again and receive you to myself that where I am, there you may be also.” Why does He put that second statement in verse 2? “If it were not so, do you think I would have told you, ‘I go to prepare a place for you’?” It is because they’re having a hard time believing that Jesus is going to leave them.
Now when He says in verse 3, “I’m coming back. I’m going to prepare a place for you, I will come again,” that’s eschatological. He’s talking about His second coming. Acts 1:10 says, “This same Jesus, who was taken up from you into heaven, will so come in like manner as you saw Him go into heaven.” In the meantime, when any believer dies, “absent from the body is present with the Lord.”
When a believer dies, immediately they enter into the presence of the Lord. Stephen is about to be stoned to death. And in Acts 7:55, “he gazed into heaven; he saw the glory of God and Jesus standing at the right hand of God.” Why is He standing? Verse 59, they went on stoning Stephen as he called on the Lord and said, “Lord Jesus, receive my spirit.” Jesus was standing to welcome Stephen.
Yes, He will come again and rapture the church, 1 Thessalonians 4, 1 Corinthians 15. Yes, the rapture of the church is the next eschatological prophetic event. We don’t know when it’s going to happen. But whenever a believer dies, the Lord is standing to receive that believer. And He says: “I will come again and receive you to Myself so that where I am, there you may be also.”
Jesus says to them then in verse 4-5, “You know the way where I’m going.” 5 And Thomas says, “Lord, we don’t know where You’re going. How do we know the way?” This takes us to the third point. First, there was the plea, then there was the promise, now there’s the provision. Verse 6, “Jesus said to him, “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through Me.”
This is the sixth “I am” in John’s gospel. He is saying, “I am the only way to God.” In John 10:9 Jesus said, “I am the door to that eternal pasture. There is no other door.” Everyone else is a thief and a robber. “I am the truth about God.” John says in John 1:14, He was full of grace and truth. “I am the life of God. In Him was life,” John writes in John 1:4.
The modern church has created a new wave of idolatry related to this foundational truth that people somehow can be saved even if they never had a Bible, never heard about the true God, never heard about Jesus Christ. They call it “later light” or “natural theology.” That’s Roman Catholic theology, Vatican One. And then there’s one called “wider mercy.” Men can be saved in other religions.
Man’s reason is so depraved he suppresses the truth in righteousness. Man’s religion is so depraved that he worships demons that are named gods. Man is so depraved in his reason that by wisdom he cannot know God. The natural man can’t even understand the things of God. He is so depraved that there’s only salvation through Christ and Christ alone, and that by a divine miracle. Let’s bow in prayer.