11 November

Bible in 365 Days

John 16-18

John 16

Throughout these discourses our Lord was preparing His disciples for all that He saw coming to them. He told them that they would have sorrow resulting from their suffering. Because of this, it was necessary that they have the Comforter, and He could come only after the bodily departure of the Lord Himself.

The world was still in the heart of Jesus, and He told His disciples in very clear terms what the office of the Spirit would be in the world. To gather up the teaching, we see that the testimony of the Spirit is to be wholly concerned with Christ, and is to convince the world of sin, righteousness, and judgment. As to His own, the Comforter will guide them into the truth, and into the perfect knowledge of Christ Himself. Here we see they displayed their ignorance, not understanding what He meant by "a little while." This, with great patience, He interpreted to them.

In the closing section of His discourse our Lord told them that He had been speaking in proverbs, but undoubtedly again referring to the coming Comforter, He declared that He was henceforth speaking to them plainly of the Father. All ended with the august words, "I came out from the Father, and am come into the world; again, I leave the world, and go unto the Father." In those sentences we have a declaration of the whole redemptive progress of the Son of God. From the Father into the world; from the world unto the Father.

John 17

This chapter records for us words of our Lord addressed to His Father. In the first movement He was dealing strictly and only with relationships between Himself and the Father, referring to a past glory, and anticipating the coming glory, first, that resulting from the Cross, and then the return to that which had been abandoned.

In the second section He spoke to His Father of His relationship with the men immediately surrounding Him at the time. His prayer for them was not indifferent to the world, although He prayed at the moment not for the world, but for these men as the instrument by which He would yet reach the world. For them He asked that they might be kept from the evil that is in the world, and that to this end they might be sanctified in the truth. These men no longer belonged to the world in its degradation, but they did belong to it for its salvation. This He indicated as He said, "As Thou didst send Me into the world, even so send I them into the world."

Finally, He said, "Neither for these only do I pray, but for them also that believe on Me through their word." Thus He looked on and prayed for the world. Therefore He prayed that they might be one. The closing words of this intercessory prayer reveal our Lord's final purpose for the Church. It is that all His own might be with Him. The first application undoubtedly is to His Cross, with Him in its fellowship; and the last inevitably to the glory, with Him in the glory that will follow.

John 18

From the sacred hours of teaching and prayer our Lord passed to the final acts in His mighty work. This brought Him to Gethsemane, where we have a revelation of His majesty and His meekness. He suffered Himself to be seized and bound, and led away, and so He passed to the court of the high priests.

In all the annals of human crime there is nothing more utterly degraded and despicable than the procedure of what is spoken of as His trial before them. Unable to deal with the situation, they sent Him to Pilate, and once again we have the amazing story of the majesty and dignity of His dealing with this' representative of the Roman power. It is quite evident that Pilate would have preferred to release Jesus.

It was during this period that Peter came to the full realization of his appalling weakness as it had been declared to him by his Master. Under the pressure of the hour he uttered the threefold denial. Carefully observe how at this moment of finality and his failure he was not abandoned.