What Jesus' Death Meant to Him
John 14:28-31
Turn in your Bibles to our scripture reading, the fourteenth chapter of John, reading verses 28 through 31, the end of the fourteenth chapter. John chapter 14, Jesus is speaking as we begin in verse 28, "You have heard how I have said unto you, I go away and come unto you. If ye love Me, you would rejoice because I said I go unto the Father, for My Father is greater than I. And now I have told you before it come to pass that when it is come to pass ye might believe. Hereafter I will not talk much with you, for the prince of this world cometh and hath nothing in Me, but that the world may know that I love the Father and as the Father gave Me commandment, even so I do. Arise, let us go from here." May God bless this reading to our hearts as we shall study it in a few moments.
Now let us look to the Word of God in John chapter 14. We are studying, of course, as you know, in the series in the book of John and this will be the final portion of this chapter, the comfort chapter, as Jesus closes out His comments on the area of comforting the disciples in view of His departure. And these last verses are very, very interesting and rather subtle. You could read them through several times and not really catch what He is saying here. But as you study it in more detail, it becomes more clear. And really these verses deal with what the cross means to Jesus, what His death means to Him, not to us on this side of the cross, not to the disciples on that side of the cross, but to Him, what Jesus death meant to Him.
Now as we look at the cross from this side, almost 2,000 years later, we know what Jesus' death meant to us. We are aware of that. We rejoice in His death. We joy in His death. His death is the key that unlocked all hope for us. His death provided forgiveness for sins, access to God, the righteousness of Christ became ours, God's judgment was staid and we became the object of His love and children of Him. We celebrate His death, we sing about it, we talk about it, we testify about it. We meet together around the Lord's table and we share in His death. It's a beautiful thing and a glorious thing to us. On this side of the cross we understand what His death means. We say with the Apostle Paul, "I preach Christ crucified." Paul, who also said, "I am determined to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and Him crucified." Paul who also said at the end of Galatians in chapter 6, he said, "But God forbid that I should glory save in the death of Christ." And so this is the glory of the believer. We sing, "In the cross of Christ I glory." We sing, "I love that old cross, I'll cherish that old rugged cross." And so the cross to us on this side of it is beautiful, meaningful, rich, containing everything we hope for, everything that we long for, everything we put our trust in for in it Jesus Christ liberated us from the bondage of sin and set us free to commune with the living God. And so we're very clear as to what the cross means to us as we look at it two thousand years after it happened, and as we see it detailed in interpretation for us in the epistles and in the gospels of the New Testament.
But looking at it from the other side, think about these eleven disciples. They were looking at this cross from the prophecy side of it. Even though they were only a matter of hours away, it still hadn't happened. It still was not something they could comprehend. And these disciples were listening to Jesus talk who had said, "A corn of wheat must fall into the ground and die or it abideth alone." They had heard him say much earlier, "If the Son of Man be lifted up, He will draw all men unto Himself." They had heard Him say that, "If you destroy this temple, in three days I'll raise it again." He had repeatedly talked about His dying. He knew He had to go to Jerusalem. He set His face to go to Jerusalem because He was going to go there to die. He knew that He would be despised, rejected of men, and told them so much. And so they were looking at the cross from only the side of the words of Jesus and from absolutely no historical fact at all. They hadn't seen the cross yet. They hadn't seen anything about the cross. Their whole faith was a prophetic faith. Their whole faith was a believing that Christ was telling them the truth about the future because they had no history to verify it. And the Messiah had just come. The best they had to hinge their faith on were the miracles and the words of Jesus that He had done in His ministry. They had not the great dynamic events of Calvary and the resurrection and the ascension, they were still future.
And so they looked from the prophetic side of the cross to the cross and did not understand it and were confused. And all they knew really, at this point, was that their lives and their dreams and their hopes and their ambitions and their desires and everything they had, even their own physical bodies, had been placed into the service of this Jesus Christ and repeatedly now He was beginning to talk about dying and they didn't like the sound of it. They had loved Him and loved Him deeply enough to want Him. He had supplied their needs in every possible way. He supplied their physical needs, their psychological needs, their emotional needs, their need for love, their need for companionship, their need for wisdom, instruction, teaching. He supplied every need they had. He was everything to them, every resource for everything. And now when He began to talk about leaving, they reacted with shock, first of all, and then they reacted with fear, and then the anticipation of loneliness began to set in and they had kind of a premeditated loneliness while He was still there. And they couldn't imagine life without their beloved Master and Teacher.
And, you see, all they could see really in His dying was His leaving. They couldn't imagine what His death would mean to them. To them it appeared as though His death would only mean tragedy. On that side of the cross, they couldn't understand it and so they were left in deep despair and sorrow. And they begin to entertain doubts in their minds about whether or not Christ was really the Son of God, whether or not He really was the Messiah. They became confused. They wondered about His person. They wondered about His ministry. And they wondered about their own security and their own hope and whether or not they had perhaps been wrong all this time. And so with this kind of attitude in their minds, Jesus has spent from verse 1 through verse 27 giving them promises to comfort them. He has given them the richest legacy in existence. He comforted their troubled hearts with promises that are beyond imagination, promises that are super-human, supernatural, divine promises, like some dying father who gathers his beloved children about him and on his deathbed he speaks to them and tells them he is leaving them, he is going away but for them not to worry because it will be good for them really that he goes, it will allow them to begin to cultivate their own lives, their own independence, their own personality, develop their own characteristics, their own abilities. And he says, "Besides that, I've left full and permanent provision for each one of you children, you will be well taken care of." And then that Christian father passes away but before he leaves he may say this, "My children, beloved of my heart, I will see you all again in glory when we shall be together forever." And that's the hope of a Christian and certainly that was what Jesus was saying in John 14. He gave them all these promises and right in the middle of it all, He had told them, "I'll be back and we'll be together forever."
So Jesus, like that dying father, gathers His little flock about Him and He tells them how good it will be when He goes because they will have the power to do mighty works, because they will have the provision for their needs, because they will have a special helper, the Holy Spirit, who will dwell in them, they will have a new life that will waken them to the dimension of God. They will have a beautiful oneness with the Father and the Son. They will have the Spirit of God indwelling to teach them. They will have an abiding, permanent peace in their hearts. And He leaves them this legacy and it's all kind of culminated in the beginning of the chapter when He says, "And some day we'll be reunited forever because I'll come back to get you to take you where I am to dwell with Me in the Father's house." And so Jesus says to them, "It's better that I go, don't fear, don't be in despair, don't be in sorrow, it's going to be better for you now and soon I'll be back to take you where I am and you'll remain with Me forever."
Now I'm sure that when He gave them all these promises, and we've been studying them now for several weeks, that that kind of softened the blow a little bit. But faithlessness was still there to some degree and they were still showing evidence of being troubled. You say, "How do you know that?" Well, after all the promises, look at the end of verse 27. After 27 verses full of promises, what do you see at the end of verse 27? "Let not your heart keep being troubled, neither let it keep being afraid." In other words, after that, they were still in the same bag that they were in verse 1 of chapter 14. And the verbs there, the idea of stop being troubled, stop being afraid. They were continuing to be afraid even after all these promises. They were continuing to be despairing after all those promises. And so He has to repeat the very same thing that He says at verse 1 at the end of verse 27.
Now you say, "Well why would this be so? I mean, it seems to me with all of those promises that they wouldn't have still remained troubled and in despair and fear." Well have you ever met a Christian who was in fear of death? I've met an awful lot of them. Did you ever meet a Christian who didn't know how to claim all the promises Christ gave him? I've met a lot of those, too. Most Christians, in fact, don't.
Well they had a simple problem, really. Their problem, first of all, in the general sense, was that their faith was weak. But more than that, you know why they remained in despair? Simple, one word, selfishness. They were sorry because they were selfish. They loved Jesus' presence and they didn't want any substitute for that. They wanted Him around because He took care of them, He supplied their need, He fulfilled their love. He gave them everything they needed and they wanted to hold on to that. And so you, watch this now, they are looking at Christ's leaving purely from their own perspective. Don't go because we won't like it...see.
Many times when I go to a funeral of a Christian, I see this same kind of reaction. Frequently a Christian father dies and the children are heart broken and naturally so, and weeping and crying and oftentimes you hear Christians even saying, "Why, God? Why did You have to take our father?" And then you see this kind of continues, and this kind of attitude continues and you wonder whether or not they understand what's going on because, you see, if they really understood what was happening to that father, they would also understand that all their sorrow is purely selfish because what he's experiencing is absolutely total joy. He is fulfilled in the way that God designed him to be fulfilled in absolute perfection in the presence of God and Jesus Christ. And the moping around and the crying that continues on a protracted basis here is purely selfish for we should joy in what he's experiencing. Do you see what I'm driving at?
Now these disciples are in the same boat. They are exhibiting selfish sorrow. They think only of how Jesus' death affects them and the absence of the one they love only in their own perspective. And as I say, that's very much like many Christians. When death approaches their family and finally arrives, this is how they respond, in great sorrow, feeling really only what they feel and not being able to sense what the other individual who has died is experiencing...which should produce joy. And sometimes you'll see a funeral situation, someone will die and weeks later there's someone just crying and just carrying on and moping around and somebody will say, "Oh, it's because they loved them so much." And I always say, "I don't think so, I think it's because they didn't really love them enough."
You say, "What do you mean by that?" Love, Paul says, seeks not...what?...its own things. Love says it hurts, it's painful and I cry a while, but I rejoice in what you're experiencing because I know you're experiencing the things you were made to experience in the presence of God.
And so the disciples are kind of moping around brooding, stewing over their own dilemma as to how Christ's death is going affect them, selfishly showing their own despair, all based on their own little needs, and their own little problems and their own little desires and little thought for how Christ's death is going to affect Him. You see? And so Jesus hits the issue right at its heart. And He says, "Men, your lack of love is showing." Their love was rather superficial. It was a love based on need, not on the best welfare of the one they loved. That's the essence of the purest kind of love.
Look at verse 28, He says, "You have heard how I said unto you I go away and come unto you. If ye loved Me...what?...ye would rejoice. If your love was really all that it was cracked up to be, you would be rejoicing because of what this death is going to mean to Me." Have they even thought in their selfish preoccupation of what His death means to Him? I think you see what He's saying. When a Christian dies, sorrow is normal for a while. Tears are healthy. But when a person continues to cry in despair and continues to question God, he's guilty of a superficial love and a serious selfishness. And if we really loved that person as we say we do, we would rejoice because they're with God. True love always wants what's best for the object of its love. And if death is the best thing, and for a Christian it is the best thing, then it is satisfied with death. For example, in the famous poem entitled, "Go Down Death," it's not really a poem but it's entitled, "Go Down Death," and in it the author describes the death of an old black saint in these words. "She saw what we couldn't see, she saw old death, she saw old death coming like a falling star. But death didn't frighten Sister Caroline. He looked to her like a welcomed friend. She turned and whispered, 'I'm going home.' And she smiled and closed her eyes and death took her up like a little baby and held her in his icy arms but she didn't feel no chill. Then death began to ride again, out beyond the evening star, up beyond the morning star into that glittering light of glory and up into the great throne. And there death laid Sister Caroline on the loving breast of Jesus and Jesus took His own hand and wiped away her tears and smoothed the furrows from her brow and the angels sang a little song and Jesus rocked her in His arms and kept-a-saying, 'Take your rest, take your rest, take your rest. Weep not, weep not, she is not dead, she's resting in the arms of Jesus.'"
And certainly if we listen and really understand what God is saying to us about the death of a believer, if we really love that believer, their death is joyous for we see it for what it means to them, not for what it means to us. And that's what Jesus asks the eleven disciples to do right here. He's saying, in effect, if you can't get joy because of what this means to you, will you please look at it from what it means to Me?
What did it mean to Jesus? I want to show you four things that His death meant to Him that should cause those eleven men to rejoice. First of all, His person will be dignified. His truth will be documented. His foe will be defeated. His love will be demonstrated. And these are really thrilling and each one of them is loaded with truth. They are repeated in the New Testament. Each one of these four things are one of the four great characteristics of the work of Christ. In His work His person was dignified, His truth documented, His foe defeated and His love demonstrated. These are the joys of Jesus in dying.
First of all, His person will be dignified. Verse 28, the second part. "If ye loved Me ye would rejoice." Why? "Because I said I go unto the Father for My Father is greater than I." He says here you ought to rejoice in My death because it means I will finally be glorified. I will finally be dignified. I will finally receive the dignity that I deserve. And this is a reference to His exaltation. He was leaving the world. He was going to the Father. He had finished the work God gave Him to do. He was now going to go and receive the reward of the good pleasure of God. And He was to be eternally exalted.
Over in John 17 verse 4, Jesus said to the Father in this prayer in the garden, "I have glorified Thee on the earth. I have finished the work which Thou gavest Me to do. And now, O Father, glorify Thou Me with Thine own self with the glory which I had with Thee before the world was." He wanted to be restored to that pristine glory that He knew prior to His humiliation. He says, verse 6, "I have manifested Thy name unto the men whom Thou gavest to Me out of the world. Thine they were and Thou gavest them to Me and they have kept Thy Word. Now they have known that all things whatever Thou hast given Me are of Thee, for I have given unto them the words which Thou gavest Me, they have received them and have surely known that I came out from Thee and they have believed that Thou didst send Me. I pray for them. I pray not for the world but for them whom Thou hast given Me, for they are Thine and all Mine are Thine and Thine are Mine and I am glorified in them. And now I am no more in the world but these are in the world and I come to Thee, holy Father."
In other words, Jesus says I'm going back to You. I'm going back to the full expression of My glory that I knew before I came here. And Jesus is saying in verse 28 of chapter 14, "Men, if you only know what this means to Me, it means I'm going to be restored to full glory again." The humiliation of Jesus when He came into this world as a human being and took upon Himself flesh was a bitter humiliation, it was hard. A sinless Son who deserved only the glories of the eternal God had suffered as a man, He suffered the hatred that other men gave Him, men whom He loved infinitely and undeservedly. And now He could sense that it was almost over and death meant that it would be done and the sooner He got to the death, the sooner He'd get to the glory that God had waiting for Him. And so He says, "Men, can't you joy with Me because I'm going to My Father and all this humiliation and hatred and abuse will be over and I'll be back in the place of glory where I was from all eternity."
I suppose we can weakly imagine how Christ felt, just to realize that He was in eternal glory. As John 1 says, "proston theon(??)" face-to-face with God. You can imagine Him face-to-face with God, and all that that implies, with an infinite love fellowship with the Father that we couldn't even understand or comprehend. And then all of a sudden to be separated from the Father, sent to earth, spit on, maligned, despised, hated, rejected, abused, finally nailed to a cross, made a laughing stock and in His heart He senses all this and He may feel the pain more and more bitter as He approaches the cross and He says it's good to be here with men, but, Father, I long to be with You. Ephesians 1:6, you remember, says that Jesus is the Father's beloved. It talks about us being accepted in the beloved one. The Son is the beloved of the Father. And so Jesus says, "Men, rejoice with Me, I'm going to My Father. I'm going to receive the glory I've waited for. I'm going to be back in the closeness of intimate fellowship with Him. All the attributes that I've set aside I can pick up again. All that has been restricted in My humiliation will be fully expressed in My glory. I'm going back to that glory again."
Notice at the end of verse 28 He says, "For My Father is greater than I." Now that verse has been the hew and cry of Unitarians and Jehovah's Witnesses and who knows what else, everything from soup to nuts religiously have jumped on that one and said that proves that Christ is inferior to God. It doesn't prove anything of the kind. If you read the rest of the Bible it indicates that He is. In the very same chapter, verse 7 says, "If you would have known Me, you would have known the Father." And then Philip says, "Show us the Father," and He says, "Take a look, you're staring in His face." Jesus repeatedly claimed equality with God. Over and over again He said, "I am God in human flesh. I am God come to this earth." And now you come to a verse like this and some people go completely bananas at this point and say, "Oh-oh, that shows that He's not equal to God."
Friends, that statement, "My Father is greater than I," is a present statement that Jesus made indicating that in Jesus' role as a humble servant, at that point the Father was greater than He for the Father was in glory and He was humiliated in the earth. But it was only a present statement which soon would be changed, that's the whole point. He's saying, "Rejoice because now in My situation as obedient to the Father, He is exercising authority over Me in the terms of position, He's in glory, I'm humiliated, in that sense He's greater than Me. But...He says...I'm going to My Father." In other words, "I'm going to end that and it's going to be equality again in the full expression of all My glory." He longed to be dignified with the Father whom He now served. Certainly He in His humiliating role as a servant had put Himself in a lesser place than God. While He was in the garden praying He said, "Let this cup pass from Me, nevertheless not My will, but...what?...but Thine be done." In other words, He assumed the place beneath the Father as a servant and did the Father's will. And now He says yes, now I am a servant, the Father is greater than I but I'm going to the Father. I'm going to change that. I will cease the servant role. I will be lifted again to the glory that I knew and that is Mine by right of nature and essence. And in going to the Father the Son would certainly experience a vast improvement on His situation, the difference between His present humiliation and His coming exaltation. Sure, when He was on earth, when He was humbled and spit on and hated and abused, He was in the role of a servant and in that sense the Father was greater, not in the sense of essence. He's not talking about His nature. He's not talking about His deity. He's only talking about His role as servant.
And so He says, "If you only understand, men, I'm going to My Father and this humiliating role in the flesh is going to be over and I'm going to be able to be what I ought to be, be what I rightfully can be." Look at the cross from My standpoint. You see, they loved Jesus but they loved Him not with the clarity and understanding of a deep true love, a love that would have given them joy for Him, no matter what was going to happen to them. They should have been able to see in the cross the exaltation of Jesus Christ. But they didn't. They were too preoccupied with their own problems.
I think Paul had this in view, of course, when he wrote Philippians 2:5, listen to this, "Let this mind be in you which was also in Christ Jesus, who being in the form of God thought it not robbery to be equal with God." That is, He thought it not something to hold on to and hang on to, His equality with God. "But made Himself of no reputation, took upon Him the form of a servant, and was made in the likeness of man." In other words, He was there, He was equal with God. He was equal with God but He didn't think He had to hold on to that, He was willing to come down to earth. "Became a servant, was made in the likeness of man, being found in fashion as a man He humbled Himself and became obedient to death, even the death of the cross." So Christ came, became a servant, and died. Then verse 9, Paul says this, "Wherefore," that is on the basis of what He did, "God also hath highly exalted Him and given Him a name which is above every name that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow of things in heaven and things in earth and things under the earth and that every tongue should confess...watch this...that Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of God the Father." In other words, just because He was humiliated, just because He's a servant doesn't mean that men are not to confess that He's Lord God also, in fact the opposite is true. When He was exalted to heaven, every knee is to bow before Him and indeed confess that Jesus Christ is Lord.
So when somebody comes banging on your door and says, "Look with me at John 14:28," you can just unload. That's talking about His role as a servant, not His essence. And then you can take them to Philippians chapter 2 and you can say, "Brother, instead of talking like that, you better fall on your face prostrate before Christ for the Father has exalted Him and declared that your knee is to be bowed. He is Lord."
And so, Jesus Christ seeing the glory that awaits Him in heaven with the Father and the restoration of all that He knew as fully expressing Himself as God before His humiliation, as He sees that in anticipation, there's joy in the cross for Him. He'd come all the way down, all the way to a stinking stable, all the way to a life where He had no place to lay His head, suffering the hatred and abuse and the jeers and slurs of evil men, rejected by His own people, forsaken and mocked by the leaders, He was despised and rejected.
Somebody always comes along and says, "Well, you know, He didn't probably know that was going to happen when He came. He probably wasn't aware of it." My friends, if He ever read the book of Isaiah, you can read the whole account of the crucifixion. And if that doesn't suffice, read Psalm 22, those are old prophecies far earlier than Christ's birth and Christ could read the Old Testament. That was no problem. He wrote it. He knew exactly what was going to happen. Came anyway. It was a bitter cup but He was willing to drink it. In 2 Corinthians, I love that verse 8-9, listen to it, "For ye know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ that though He was rich yet for your sakes He became poor that ye through His poverty might be rich." In other words, He condescended to share His riches with us. In Hebrews there are several passages that come to my mind, Hebrews 2:9, we see Jesus who is made a little lower than the angels for the suffering of death, what happened after He had suffered death? "Crowned with glory and honor that He by the grace of God should test death for every man." Verse 17, "Wherefore in all things it behooved Him to be made like His brethren, that He might be a merciful and faithful High Priest in things pertaining to God to make reconciliation for the sins of the people, for in that He Himself had suffered being tempted, He is able to help them that are tempted." In other words, He became one of us, just that simple. Suffered what we suffered, went through what we went through, in order not only to redeem us but to be sympathetic with us. Hebrews 12:2, "Looking unto Jesus the author and finisher of our faith who for the joy that was set before Him endured the cross, despising the shame." Now what was the joy? The joy wasn't the shame because He just despised the shame. What was the joy? This, "He has set down at the right hand of the throne of God," that's the joy. In other words, He was joy...He had joy in His heart because He knew that the result of the cross would be His glorification and He could go and be with the Father at His right hand. Hebrews chapter 5 perhaps also is a good passage on that.
So we see then that Jesus Christ had cause to rejoice in His cross because His person would be dignified, restored to the place of glory. The garb of loneliness was about to fall off of Him. And if we really and truly love Jesus Christ, there will no more be the thought, "Well, this is bad for us," but the thought of joy in our hearts for what it shall mean to Christ, the thought sweet to us that our Savior, our brother, our friend will be restored to glory set on high at the right hand of the Father for all eternity and that every knee shall bow to Him who is Lord. And so His person will be dignified.
If that's not enough, He says to the disciples, secondly, "You should have joy in My death because My truth is documented." His truth is about to be documented. Now Jesus had made many claims to the disciples. You know that. He had said many things about who He was to them. And they were really having a little difficult time believing it all. They wanted to believe it. I think they did believe it in a sense, but very easily doubt would creep in and kind of rattle them a little bit. They had their doubts. They believed He was Messiah. They believed He was the Son