John 16:5-16

⁵"Now I am going to Him who sent Me, yet none of you asks Me, 'Where are You going?' ⁶Because I have said these things, you are filled with grief. ⁷But I tell you the truth: It is for your good that I am going away. Unless I go away, the Counselor will not come to you; but if I go, I will send Him to you. ⁸When He comes, He will convict the world of guilt in regard to sin and righteousness and judgment: ⁹in regard to sin, because men do not believe in Me; ¹⁰in regard to righteousness, because I am going to the Father, where you can see Me no longer; ¹¹and in regard to judgment, because the prince of this world now stands condemned. ¹²I have much more to say to you, more than you can now bear. ¹³But when He, the Spirit of truth, comes, He will guide you into all truth. He will not speak on His own; He will speak only what He hears, and He will tell you what is yet to come. ¹⁴He will bring glory to Me by taking from what is Mine and making it known to you. ¹⁵All that belongs to the Father is Mine. That is why I said the Spirit will take from what is Mine and make it known to you. ¹⁶In a little while you will see Me no more, and then after a little while you will see Me."

First, in v5, notice the curious remark of Jesus. He has told them that He is going away, yet none of them asked where He was going. As v6 reveals, they were too grief-stricken to concern themselves with His destination. How would you react if your wife said, “I’m leaving.” Or maybe a better example would be this. How would your children react if you said, “I’m leaving, and you can’t come.” The first thought is not, “Where are you going?” but “Why?” The same thing is happening for these disciples, but Jesus doesn’t get to that concern. Rather, He says that it is a good thing that He is leaving.

The disciples are in despair that Jesus is leaving; they are worried about how they will find the way to see Him again (remember Thomas’ question); but the one question they are not sufficiently concerned with is where Jesus is going. But the answer to that question makes all the difference in the world: Jesus is going to the Father, to sit at His right hand in victory – and it is only when He sits in victory that the Spirit will come. There’s a bit of a mystery involved with why the Holy Spirit can’t indwell people who are in the physical presence of Jesus, but we trust that to be true. Jesus must go to send the Spirit, and beginning in v8, He speaks about one of the Holy Spirit’s roles: to convict the world of guilt, or as it would be better rendered, to expose the guilt of the world. When / how were you convicted?

The Spirit of God will play a very central role in this last and greatest of all redemptive eras before the final state of glorification on the new earth. The Spirit will go throughout the world, bringing to light men’s sin, showing them of the coming judgment, foreshadowed when the ruler of the world, Satan, was condemned by Christ’s work on the cross, and revealing to them the nature of true righteousness, which Jesus alone was demonstrating when He was on the earth. When Jesus was in His physical body, only a few thousand people could hear Him at once, and see the display of perfect righteousness. But when He sent His Spirit, He was able to speak to the individual hearts of countless men and women about all these things that he had spoken of on earth and demonstrated on the cross. And the disciples would be the mouthpieces of the Spirit’s work in the world. See Acts for the beginnings of this.

Jesus explains here how the Holy Spirit drives people to Christ and makes Him known to the elect more fully than He could even be known in the flesh – for by the Spirit, He lives in you! The disciples would be better off for Jesus to discontinue His explanation of these spiritual things, because they had had their fill – they were unable to understand any more of the mighty and powerful words of Jesus. But the Spirit, when He came, would enable them to understand. He would speak the very words of Jesus, just as Jesus speaks the very words of the Father – but He would also open the hearts of the disciples to understand these words. Jesus’ teaching ministry to His disciples was certainly a wonderful and necessary thing. But as great as it was, the teaching ministry of the Spirit, according to the divine plan, would be even better and more effective in unveiling blinded hearts to the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ (2 Corinthians 4:4-6)!

The great fear of the disciples is that if Jesus goes away, they will know Him less; but Jesus is saying that the opposite is true. He’s talking about the Scriptures. He’s talking about the way the Holy Spirit will take these disciples and through them bring to the Church the gospels and the Epistles that we have been studying ever since we first came to Jesus Christ by faith, and as a consequence, have grown to know Him more and more. As a result of His going away, He would actually be nearer to them. Wouldn’t you have liked to hear Jesus speak this discourse? Jesus is saying to the disciples that there’s a better place to be than in the upper room. It’s right here with this Book open before you, and its pages being opened up and expounded. Jesus is saying that we should prefer to have the Scriptures than to have Him present in our midst.