"I will come again" - John 14:3 (Part 1)

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R.M. Goatley

On the night in which the Lord Jesus was betrayed, the eve of His crucifixion, He gathered His disciples around Himself in the upper room to prepare them for the events of the morrow and the days that would follow. The agony of Gethsemane and the shame and death of the Cross were looming before Him. He knew that Judas Iscariot had already left to complete the treacherous bargain of betrayal. But, having loved His own which were in the world, He loved them unto the end, and His heart was full of tender sympathy for them as He was about to be taken from them. They would be left to be His witnesses during His absence in the very world that rejected Him and crucified Him.

It was in this atmosphere of privacy and intimacy that the Lord opened His heart to them, and from John 17:20 we know that he had in mind all who would believe on Him through their word, until He comes again. He told them of the Comforter, the Spirit of Truth, whom the Father would send to be in them, and with them forever, and we know from the New Testament epistles that this is still true of every believer today. He told them of the Father, of the Father’s love and of the Father’s House, and the place He would go to prepare for them there.

Then He gave them this wonderful promise, "If I go...I will come again and receive you unto Myself, that where I am, there ye may be also". Nowhere in Scripture had such a promise been disclosed before. The Old Testament prophets had foretold His coming to subdue His enemies and set up a kingdom that would fill the whole earth and stand forever. The Lord Jesus had expounded this to them only days before. He had spoken of the coming of the Son of Man predicted by the prophet Daniel (Dan.7:13,14; Matt.24:30), and He had given them a sign from Daniel by which those who would be alive at the time of the end would be able to gauge the proximity of that coming. (Dan.12:11,12; Matt.24:15). God had revealed this to His prophets long ago, and the disciples believed what God had said.

But now, as the Lord Jesus gives His new and special promise to His own, in this day of Grace, He says, "Ye believe in God, believe also in Me’. The glad news of the Father’s House above, and a place prepared for us there, and that He Himself will come personally to take us there to be with Him forever, was revealed in the New Testament by the Lord Jesus Himself. (To be continued)