The Benefit of Christ leaving
Published by Stanley Pouw in 2021 · 5 December 2021
The gospel of John is the history of our Lord’s life and a presentation of His deity as God in human flesh. This is Thursday night before His crucifixion on Friday. Judas was dismissed to do his betrayal, and the eleven disciples remained with Jesus and He spoke to them, and what He said to them is contained in John 13, 14, 15, and 16. It is the legacy of Christ, not only to His eleven disciples, but to all believers.
Everything that Jesus said has been about the love that the Lord has for His own. And then all of the promises, blessings and gifts of His love are described and promised one after another. But suddenly, our Lord moves from talking about the blessings of heavenly love to the realities of earthly hatred. John 16:1-7, “I have told you these things so that you won’t abandon your faith.”
“2 For you will be expelled from the synagogues, and the time is coming when those who kill you will think they are doing a service for God. 3 This is because they have never known the Father or Me. 4 Yes, I’m telling you these things now, so that when they happen, you will remember my warning. I didn’t tell you earlier because I was going to be with you for a while longer.”
“5 But now I am going away to the one who sent Me, and not one of you is asking where I am going. 6 Instead, you grieve because of what I’ve told you. 7 But in fact, it is best for you that I go away, because if I don’t, the Helper won’t come. If I do go away, then I will send Him to you.” So this is the world for believers loved and blessed by God and hated by the world.
The word martyr is a Greek word for “witness.” It has become the word for a person who dies under persecution. When you say someone is “a martyr,” you’re saying they died. Peter, James, and Andrew were crucified. Bartholomew was whipped and then crucified. James, son of Zebedee, was beheaded. Mark was dragged through the streets of Alexandria until he was dead.
James, the half-brother of our Lord, was stoned by order of the Sanhedrin. Philip was stoned to death. Stephen was stoned to death. Matthew, Simon the Zealot, Thaddeus, and Timothy were martyred; and Paul had his head chopped off. Those apostles in the New Testament times suffered exactly what was prophesied. Through jealousy, the most righteous pillars have been persecuted to death.
The leaders of the Roman Empire persecuted and killed Christians during the first three centuries. It reached a high point during the Protestant Reformation. The Reformers were appalled by the moral, ethical, and doctrinal corruption of the Roman Catholic Church, and they spoke out against them. And the response from the Roman Catholic Church was violent with massive persecution.
A 1997 article in the New York Times reported that more Christians have died under persecution in the twentieth century than the first nineteen after the birth of Christ. And now in the twenty-first century a 100 million Christians are under persecution. This is exactly what our Lord said was going to happen. We’re more shocked that people in America have been able to escape persecution.
They now have both sides with promised blessings and persecution. And the truth about these two and the reason Jesus talked about the persecutions after the promises is that they blend into one. They blend into one because the promises are our hope in the midst of our persecution. With the promises that we have received and the power of the Holy Spirit, we have everything we need in the midst of our persecution.
The world will hate you, Jesus said, but I will love you. The world will be your enemy, but I will be your friend, our Lord said. The world will persecute you and kill you; but I will supply all your needs, answer all your prayers, and give you everlasting life. The world will give you trouble, but I will give you peace. The world will bring you sadness, but I will give you joy.
Let us look at John 16:1-3, “I have told you these things so that you won’t abandon your faith. 2 For you will be expelled from the synagogues, and the time is coming when those who kill you will think they are doing a service for God. 3 This is because they have never known the Father or me.” I’ve told you this so you’re not shocked. This is what it means to be a disciple.
What if they hadn’t known this? They joined Jesus with grandiose expectations. They knew that the Old Testament promised a Messiah, a kingdom, that He would establish His throne in the world in Jerusalem. They thought they were the inner circle for the establishment of this worldly kingdom. They even argued about which of them would sit on the right and left hand of Jesus.
Never did Jesus use His power to change the Jewish establishment or to free them from Roman occupation. And then He started talking about His death, and that He would be betrayed, and that He would be arrested, and that He would be beaten and spit on and crucified, and this began to frighten them. And Judas was so frightened, he got out and got the money he could get betraying Jesus.
If Jesus had never said anything about persecution, if He had never warned them about it with specifics, and when He went back to heaven and the Holy Spirit came, all of a sudden the apostles started being executed, and the writers of Scripture starting to be murdered, and persecution broke out everywhere, they might begin to wonder whether Jesus was the Messiah after all.
So to make sure that they knew it was to be expected, our Lord tells them all these things. In spite of that, later on past midnight in the garden, Matthew 26 says, “After they sung a hymn in the upper room, they went out to the Mount of Olives. Jesus said, ‘You will all fall away because of Me this night, for it is written in Zachariah, “I will strike down the shepherd, and the sheep of the flock shall be scattered.”
In Matthew 26:55, Jesus says to the crowd that comes to arrest Him, “Have you come with swords and clubs to arrest Me as you would against a robber? Every day I used to sit in the temple teaching and you didn’t seize Me. But all this has taken place to fulfill the Scriptures of the prophets.” Though they were forewarned, they were caught in a trap. “Then all the disciples left Him and fled.”
That’s how we sometimes are too. The Lord gives us all the promises and the warnings, and yet we get trapped and offended, fall into fear and doubt, and sin and stumble, and become confused. We have all the promises, and we have the Holy Spirit whose purpose it is to fulfill all those promises. That’s John 16:14, “He will take of Mine and will deposit all those promises with you.”
And the hatred which the Jewish leaders focused on Christ will pass to the followers of Christ. Remember the blind man in John 9? Our Lord healed him. “His parents,” verse 22, “were afraid of the Jews, for the Jews had already agreed that if anyone confessed Jesus Christ to be Messiah Christ, he was to be put out of the synagogue.” That was to separate a person from his community.
In first-century Judaism if you were thrown out of the synagogue, you were thrown out of the nation. There was no separation between the secular and the sacred. You were thrown out of your family; you lost your job; you lost your friends. You became a spiritual leper. To be thrown out of the synagogue, would be literally to be eliminated from the hopes and the prerogatives of being Jewish.
In modern times, the persecutor of Christianity across the world is Islam, and they think they’re doing service to their god. Religion always is the ultimate persecutor of the truth because Satan is religious. He disguises himself as an angel of light; he works in all false religions. In John 10, when the Jewish leaders heard Jesus say that He and God were equals, they were ready to stone Him as a blasphemer.
And the reason they finally put Him on a cross was because they saw Him as a blasphemer who, by saying He was God, shattered the reality of one God. They had no concept of God as a Trinity, three persons in one. And if Jesus says He is equal to God, then He has created a false God, and they had to protect the ‘true God’. Saul said, “The more Christians I killed, the more I advanced in my religion.”
Oprah has a new program called “Belief,” and there is every possible, imaginable and unimaginable belief, all put at an equal level. But the only people who know God are the people who believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, who know the God and Father of the Lord Jesus Christ, the one who is one with Christ. No man comes unto Christ except by the Father, and the only way to the Father is through the Son.
How can we have any effective witness? In John 15:26-27, Jesus says, “It’s the Holy Spirit who’s going to empower you to give that witness.” He says something similar in John 16:12-15. So this is a shock to these disciples. Verse 3, “These things they have done because they have never known the Father or Me.” Persecution of Christianity comes always from other false religions.
All other religions of the world are satanic, and they all hate God. They don’t know God. That is Satan’s great deception. The Jews and the Romans have created their own god, a fictitious deity that doesn’t exist, who is Satan masquerading as deity, and they persecute Christians. So our Lord calls for those who are willing to see it for what it is with denying self, taking up a cross and following Him.
In John 14:29, Jesus says, “I have told you before it happens, so that when it happens, you may believe.” We believe in Christ is because He knows the future, and that is divine. Eventually Peter says in 1 Peter 4:12 - 13, “Beloved, do not be surprised at the fiery ordeal among you, which comes upon you for your testing, as though some strange thing were happening to you.”
And then Jesus says in verse 4, “I didn’t tell you earlier because I was going to be with you for a while longer.” What does that mean? Well, He certainly made some general references in Matthew 5, 10 and Luke 9, “Blessed are you when you’re persecuted. And if they persecute the Master, they’ll persecute the servant.” But never with this kind of specificity. Why? “Because I was with you.”
But now He’s not going to be there, and all of that hostility is going to come to those who have His name. That’s why Paul said, “I bear in my body the marks of Christ: all the whippings, all the thrashing with rods, all the beatings with whips, all the scarring from the stones.” All the rest of the things that he suffered, in 2 Corinthians, were the marks of Christ. They hit the one who bore His name.
Go to Revelation 12, and look ahead to the time of great tribulation in the future before the Lord sets up His kingdom. The dragon who is Satan is going to be in a rage. And is going “to make war with the rest of the children” of the woman (this is the offspring of Israel) who are believers in their Messiah, “who keeps the commandments of God and holds to the testimony of Jesus.”
So this persecution will escalate all through human history into the time of tribulation. It’ll be that way until Jesus comes to judge the ungodly and establish His kingdom. And it will always be His people who are the target. Let us look at the provision for the disciples by the Lord in verse 5, “But now I am going away to the one who sent Me, and not one of you is asking where I am going.”
Verse 6, “Instead, you grieve because of what I’ve told you.” You can’t get your eyes off yourself to get them on Me. They didn’t ask Him about death, burial and resurrection. Then He reiterates the greatest of all promises in verse 7, “But truthfully, it is best for you that I go away, because if I don’t, the Helper won’t come. If I do go away, then I will send Him to you.”
That is the ministry of the Holy Spirit. The gift of the Holy Spirit is a gift that heaven sends as a reward for Christ’s completed work. The Spirit can’t come until My work is done. Peter said that on Pentecost in Acts 2:33, “Therefore, having been exalted to the right hand of the God, and having received from the Father the promise of the Holy Spirit, He has poured forth this which you both see and hear.”
The gift of the Spirit then is the pledged and promised reward for Christ’s completed work. The Holy Spirit comes in response to the finished work of Christ. How could a group of persecuted, sorrowing disciples confront a hating and persecuting world? No way, except in the power of the Holy Spirit. Remember John 15:26, “the Spirit of truth...He will testify about Me, and you will testify also.”
The Holy Spirit is going to empower you to make an effective testimony against the enemies of God. So what is the ministry of the Holy Spirit to the believer? He comes to make all the promises of Christ real. This is elevated, majestic, divine, exalted truth concerning the Holy Spirit, and to think any less of the Holy Spirit than this is to violate the commandment, “Do not take the Lord’s name in vain.”
It is the Holy Spirit who inspired the people who wrote Scriptures. It is the Holy Spirit who makes us alive so that we can believe. It is the Holy Spirit who grants us faith, who makes the gospel clear. It is the Holy Spirit who gives us spiritual life. It is the Holy Spirit who is now sanctifying us. How? By illuminating the Word of God and depositing in us all the promises of heaven. Let us pray.