Christ's Going Away our Gain
The departure of our Lord was the disciples' gain, and it is ours. It is the gain of His whole Church on earth. Let us see how this can be.
I. And first, because by His departure His local presence was changed into an universal presence. He had dwelt among them as man, under the limitations of our humanity; in Galilee and Jerusalem, on the mountain and in the upper chamber, they had known Him according to the measures and laws of our nature. He had thereby revealed to them His very and true manhood. They had yet greater things to learn. They had to learn His very and true Godhead, His Divine and infinite majesty. And this was to be revealed from a higher sphere and by a mightier revelation of Himself. The day of Pentecost was the enlargement of His presence from a local and visible shape to an invisible and universal fulness. As the Father dwells in the Son, so the Son in the Holy Ghost.
II. His departure changed their imperfect knowledge into the full illumination of faith. While He was yet with them, He taught them by word of mouth. But the mysteries of His passion and resurrection were not as yet fulfilled, and their hearts were slow of understanding. The truth itself lay hid in Him. But when the Comforter came, all things were brought back to their remembrance. Old truths and perplexing mysteries received their true solution. Their very faculties were enlarged; they were no longer pent up by narrow senses and by the succession of time, but were lifted into a light where all things are boundless and eternal. A new power of insight was implanted in their spiritual being, and a new world rose up before it; for the spirit of truth dwelt in them, and the world unseen was revealed.
III. And lastly, Christ's departure changed the partial dispensations of grace into the fulness of the regeneration. It is expedient, then, for us, that He has gone unto the Father. If He had tarried upon earth, all had stood still. It would have been as a perpetual promise of day, a lingering blossom and a retarded fruit, a lengthening childhood and a backward maturity. The word of God is ever unfolding and advancing. When He was upon earth, all was local, exterior, and imperfect; now all is universal, inward, and Divine. The corn of wheat is not alone. It hath borne much fruit, even an hundredfold; and its fruit is multiplied, in all ages and in all the earth, by a perpetual growth and a perpetual reproduction.
H. E. Manning, Sermons,vol. iv., p. 86.
The Invisible Government of Christ through His Spirit
I. The Holy Spirit, in His direct, as in His subordinate or instrumental presence, is the agent, not of disjunction, but of combination, between the faithful and their Lord; Christ still continuing the fontal reservoir of all the graces communicated. The clearest general view of the agency of the Holy Spirit may be obtained by considering it as the counterpart to that tremendous activity of the Spirit of Darkness which has continued incessantly since the Fall of Man. Satan perpetually imitates the operations of God. The evil spirit has the advantage of priority in each soul as it springs to life, and he uses it. No poison so virulent can leave the constitution as it found it, and the Spirit of God in this world has to wander among ruins.
II. The nature of evil being the association of an accursed element with our nature, it surely would seem that it must, in accordance with all the intimations of Holy Writ, be met and counteracted by the introduction of an element of holiness really abiding as it is abiding, really distinct as it is distinct, the seed of eternal life as it is of death eternal. The original corruption consists, not in the evil of every faculty, but in the superadded presence of a principle, once inherent in Adam, thence by the spirit of evil perpetuated to us, which governs the will and perverts the faculties into the machinery of sin. The regenerating gift must in like manner consist, not in the annihilation of any of our natural faculties, but in the indwelling of a principle once inherent in Christ, and from Him transmitted to all who in Him are born of the Spirit a principle which as it advances displaces its rival, as it retreats admits it; when it shall make us wholly its own, shall wholly dispossess it; when it deserts us, yields the heart once more and altogether to ruin.
W. Archer Butler, Sermons Doctrinal and Practical,p. 272.
Christ's Departure the Condition of the Spirit's Advent
I. It is clear that our Lord speaks here of His ascension to the Father as the departure which was necessarily to precede the advent of the Comforter. The true nature or ultimate ground of the connection which subsisted between the ascension of Christ into Heaven and the descent of the Holy Spirit to enrich the Church is, of course, to us quite incomprehensible. The economy of the spiritual world being as certainly regulated by immutable laws of Divine wisdom as that of the world of sensible experience, we may conceive the one event as necessarily a pre-condition to the other as the members of any physical sequence whatever. And when we remember the limits of our knowledge in the latter case, we need not be much surprised at our ignorance in the former.
II. No one, whose inmost spirit has been busy with the New Testament, can fail to be aware that there is everywhere a profound community or even identity of nature intimated between the heavenly world itself and a state of spiritual-mindedness on earth, altogether transcending the mere notion of recompense or sequel. It is as if heaven itself was already, though faintly, realised in the soul, and that some rather accidental than essential obstacle delayed its consummation, as if the sanctified spirit were there, but from a temporary defect of vision could not see or enjoy it. Now, if a connection so intimate do subsist between the two departments of the great empire of grace, it seems highly consistent that that seed should be issued originally from heaven which is to flower here as heaven's image, and to bear its immortal fruits in heaven's own climate.
III. The Holy Spirit was also the fruit of a victory, and dispensed as the gift of triumph. It ought not, then, to be given till the triumph was consummated by the entrance into glory; it could not be given till the victory was publicly evidenced by the appearance of the living sacrifice priest and victor in the presence of the expectant Father, the enlargement of the kingdom following naturally and immediately on the recognised defeat of the power of evil, by the principle of righteousness incarnate in Christ.
W. Archer Butler, Sermons Doctrinal and Practical,p. 289.
The Expediency of Christ's Invisibility
I. We know that Christ, being God as well as man, deserved and received adoration during the days of His flesh. In all the instances of this unqualified adoration, however, it is not. certain how far we can answer for the absolute purity of the motives of all the adorers. Men might worship a God in the spirit of idolatry, if they worshipped only the human element of His complex nature. Now, this is just the result which the visible presence of Christ might be apprehended to produce. Perpetually familiar with the humanity, it is scarcely conceivable that men could fix a steady gaze upon the Deity it enshrined. Assuredly such a power of abstraction is not within the habits of the mass of mankind; and yet it is only under this condition that Christ can be legitimately adored with the unbounded homage of the entire man.
II. The principle of faith is the basis and the condition of the spiritual life. The faith which clings to an absent Saviour is very fitly made the connecting link between the reality of this world and the reality of the world to come; and the imagination, under the guidance of Reason and Revelation, anticipates, and by anticipating prepares for the heaven which the purified senses are yet to apprehend by direct experience. Christ stands aloof and superintends the work, Himself unseen, because He knows that at present His visible presence would interfere with the completion of the process. Faith, to qualify for glory, must fight at a disadvantage; love must seek its beloved through clouds and darkness, but could not hereafter know itself for the grace it is; joy must rejoice with trembling and smile through tears, if it will echo the song of Moses and the Lamb.
III. If it were mysteriously requisite that the Captain of our Salvation should be, in relation to His office, perfected through sufferings, it is equally fitting that the many sons to be led to glory should be led through the same pathway of sorrow; that they should be, like Him, undignified and unsustained by the visible patronage of heaven; that, their perfection being wrought out like His, they should present, and glory to present, the counterpart of every grief He bore.
W. Archer Butler, Sermons Doctrinal and Practical,p. 257.
Help from an Absent Saviour
It was expedient that Christ should go away
I. Because the great work for which He came lay as yet unaccomplished. He must depart to finish His work and their salvation. He had read to them the lesson of life; now He had to read to them the still more wonderful lessons of death; now He had to break through the inexorable door, and open the kingdom of heaven to all believers. The pathway of His degradation was the highway of the world's salvation.
II. To reveal to the disciples the true proportions of His exalted being. Hitherto they had known Christ after the flesh; henceforth they were to know Him so no more. Yes, the Saviour would gain by leaving that little band. How often, in the after years of active ministry, they would recall the old scenes and impressions, the loved walks and words! How, in such mourning, the Lord would gain in their hearts, their eyes overflowing with tears! Divinity would rise out of that manhood.
III. It was expedient to develop their own character. As long as He was with them, they would lean even too selfishly on Him. His departure roused them to action. Men's hearts had to be trained by sorrow and hardship, by trial and suffering; and so He would go away and leave them to themselves quit them visibly. It was a true, Divine, human lesson; it was rooted in the very deeps of our moral progressive being; it was a lasting theme for faith and aspiration, and effort and hope; and, instead of a life merely in the present, it was a crown held before them in the future.
IV. And, finally, our Lord included all when He Himself gave the reason for His departure. He goes, really the better to help our infirmities. It was that He might be the channel of Divine influence to the world. He is here, by His promise, the Comforter. Thus, Christ daily helps our infirmities infirmity of will, that paralysis of our moral being of temper, of speech, of knowledge.
Learn then (1) the reason of Christ's absence from you. It is expedient, and not unkind. When our Lord's absence is no more useful to us, then He will come again and receive us to Himself. In life it is so. He leaves us (a) to show us Himself; (b) to show us ourselves. (2) Learn the expediency of our dead friends' farewell. They are saying to us, in their shrouds and winding-sheets, "It is expedient we go away; we leave you to work for you and with you, and shall be the better fitted to meet you when it is done."
E. Paxton Hood, Sermons,p. 274.
I. One reason of the expediency of the Ascension which must strike a modern believer in our Lord Jesus Christ is, that it seems to him to secure an adequate sense of the true place and dignity of man among the creatures of God. There are several lines of thought I had almost said, there are some great studies which, at least as they are sometimes handled, tend to create a degraded and false idea of man. But the Christian falls back upon a distinct fact, which enables him to listen with interest and with sympathy to all that the astronomer, or the physiologist, or chemist, may have to tell him, and withal to preserve the robust faith in the dignity of man; he believes in the ascension of our Lord Jesus Christ into heaven. Somewhere in space, he knows somewhere there is at this moment, intimately and for ever associated with the glories of the self-existing Dignity a human body and a human soul. Ay, it is on the throne of the universe!
II. The expediency of the resurrection is further traceable in the effect which it may produce upon life and character by making room for faith in Christ, and by colouring the whole character of distinctly Christian worship. If Christ our Lord had continued to be visibly present among us, there would have been no room for true faith in Him. If we are to give our hearts and wills to the Author and End of our existence; if our Christian worship is not to be a coldly calculated compliment, but the outcome of a pure and of a soul-consuming passion then it is well that on the heights of heaven should throb to all eternity a human heart, the sacred heart of Jesus, and that, in the adoration which we pay Him, we should know that we are extending the inmost resources of our nature at the feet of the one Being who has upon them the claim of relationship as well as the claim of duty.
III. And a last reason for the expediency of our Lord's departure is to be found in His connection with His present and continuous work of intercession in heaven. He has entered, so the writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews tells us, into the holiest place of all, as the High Priest of Christendom. But while every Jewish priest stood ministering and offering often the same sacrifices, which could never take away sins, "This man, after He had offered one sacrifice for sins, for ever sat down at the right hand of God." It is the knowledge that the great work, on which Jesus Christ our Lord entered at His ascension, proceeds uninterruptedly, that makes hope and perseverance possible when hearts are failing, when temptation is strong, when the sky is dark and lurid. Surely it is expedient for you and me that He should go away!
H. P. Liddon, Christian World Pulpit,vol. xxiii., p. 273.
The Mission of the Comforter
There are three facts which are plainly revealed in Scripture about the coming of the Holy Spirit.
I. It is evident that in some sense the Holy Ghost had come upon men, and had dwelt amongst them, even from the first. That God should say, "My Spirit shall not always strive with men," implies that the Spirit did strive with them during a certain time. That David should pray, "Take not Thy Holy Spirit from me," "Uphold me with Thy free Spirit," implied, of course, that he had enjoyed the presence and assistance of that Spirit.
II. And yet, in the second place, nothing can be more plain than that the Holy Ghost came on the day of Pentecost, after a totally different fashion from any in which He had come before. It cannot be too strongly expressed that His coming then was an altogether new thing, never before experienced by man, and making an epoch in human history as remarkable and as blessed as that made by the birth of Christ Himself. It was to the Church, in another sphere, what the Incarnation was to the world; if the redeemed world of God date her years from the birth of His Divine Son, His chosen Church counts her age from the Pentecostal coming of His Divine Spirit.
III. In the third place, it is also plain that this change, so unspeakably important, in the manner of the presence of the Holy Ghost, was dependent on and consequent on the finished work of Christ. His presence in us is based on that humanity which is common to Christ and to us, and it is charged with all that was powerful in His atoning sacrifice, with all that was holy and victorious in His life. He comes to minister to us, all that Christ earned by His obedience to our nature, to set forward and continue in us the life that Christ lived in our nature. The Holy Ghost came at Pentecost with the life and victory and immortality of the glorified Son of Man, and bestowed them for ever on the Church.
R. Winterbotham, Sermons and Expositions,p. 276.
We can easily understand that it was in the delicacy of our Saviour's life to feel very jealous lest any of His people should think for a moment that His going away from this world would make any change in His feelings. To us now such a supposition may seem ridiculous, but not to them. Is not history full of such things men who have bound themselves to a great and spontaneous effort of affection, and when it is done, the heart, like a plant exhausted with its one flower, has lapsed, if not into its apathy, yet certainly into a very low level of feeling? We very seldom sustain anything which rises above the level of mediocrity. It might be in part to meet such a thought that our Lord spoke the words of my text. Look now at one or two of the reasons why it was good for. the Church that Christ's visible presence should be taken away from it.
I. God has so constituted us that a state of pure simple faith, i.e.,of dealing with the unseen, is essential to the development of the highest and best faculties of our nature. The best reason I can give for this is, that ultimately we shall all of us have to do with spirit; and therefore we are now disciplined to deal with what is only spiritual, that we may be prepared for perfectly spiritual intercourse.
II. But the departure of Christ was chiefly characterised as being introductory to the descent of the Holy Ghost. Was it not a part of the expansion of the covenant, a note preparatory to the larger developments which were coming, when He said, "It is expedient for you that I go away?"
III. The things which are opening now, during Christ's absence, are to prepare us and make us capable of that Presence. Already God is working towards that point. The expediency of Christ going away was, because, if He should come then in His glory, we were not ready to receive Him. But now He is making us ready to receive Him, that it may be "expedient" for us that He should come back again.
J. Vaughan, Fifty Sermons,5th series, p. 216.
Mysteries
The peculiarity of the Bible mysteries is this, that they are always associated with life, never with mere thought. They always present themselves to the view of the disciple rather than to that of the mere student; they always address the heart quite as much as the intellect. Observe how very little there is of what can be called speculative revelation in the Bible. The Bible teaches us not how to think, but how to live; and treats the thinking as part of living.
I. Take the doctrine contained in the words of the text, namely, the gift of the Holy Spirit, as an instance of the method which is always observed in the Bible in revealing mysteries. There is nowhere any distinct statement in the Bible of the attributes of the Holy Ghost, or of the part which He takes to Himself in dealing with us. What the Holy Ghost precisely is, and even what He precisely does, is nowhere defined. There is no philosophy of His existence given us. But if this is not given, what is given? Wherever the Holy Spirit acts on our life, there we are told how we can see His action. Wherever He can comfort, strengthen, enlighten, there we meet with a promise that we shall find Him. Whatever is needed to enable us to reverence Him, worship Him, obey Him, that is revealed.
II. One word on the bearing of this mystery on our own lives. In ordinary times, our consciences seem to us no more than one of the faculties of the soul. The guidance that they give does not seem very much to differ in kind from the light given by the understanding, from the influence exerted by the feelings. But every now and then we know that this is not so. Every now and then, that spiritual voice which we call the conscience, seems to rise up within us into a separate being; seems to command, to forbid, to warn us with an awful authority; seems to assert a claim to obedience, even to the death; seems to sting and pierce, or else to inspire or uplift, the soul with a power altogether beyond the power of earth. This is assuredly nothing less than the revelation of the Holy Spirit, which we read in the pages of the New Testament. Then, if we have eyes to see the truth, shall we recognise that the voice which speaks to us is the voice of the Divine Person who has promised to guide all Christians.
Bishop Temple, Rugby Sermons,2nd series, p. 162.
References: John 16:7. Spurgeon, Sermons,vol. x., No. 574; vol. xxviii., No. 1662; H. Wace, Expositor,2nd series, vol. ii., p. 202; A. Blomfield, Sermons in Town and Country,p. 110; J. M. Neale, Sermons in a Religious House,2nd series, vol. i., p. 64; Parker, City Temple,1871, p. 52; Contemporary Pulpit,vol. v., p. 287; vol. x., p. 253; J. Armstrong, Parochial Sermons,p. 282; T. Howell, Christian World Pulpit,vol. iv., p. 133; T. Gasquoine, Ibid.,vol. xvi., p. 229; H. P. Liddon, Ibid.,vol. xxiii., p. 273; J. Graham, Ibid.,p. 280; H. W. Beecher, Ibid.,vol. v., p. 138; Homiletic Quarterly,vol. iv., p. 546; vol. xiv., p. 303; J. Keble, Sermons from Ascension Day to Trinity,p. 406. John 16:7-11. W. Roberts, Christian World Pulpit,vol. xi., p. 140; Homiletic Magazine,vol. xix., p. 245.John 16:7-33. Clergyman's Magazine,vol. iv., p. 224.