John 16:14-15.
The Holy Spirit, we are here told, would take of what was of Christ and show it to the disciples, and this was all that the Father possessed. Grace and truth were come in Christ into the midst of the old creation. Man refused this grace, and rejected this truth, but now God would communicate to those who should believe in Christ the new things that were in His counsels, of which Christ was the centre and the fulness.
Into what a glorious scene we are here introduced, a scene which replaces that which the disciples were losing by the death of the Messiah! All the glory which belongs to the person of the Son, whether as the One in whom all the counsels of God are concentrated, or as to what He is in Himself, is fully revealed. If in that which we have first gone through, we have found the terrible but just judgment of the world, what a glorious scene, I repeat, opens itself here in the revelations which the Holy Ghost communicates relative to this new creation, of which the second Man is the centre, He, the Son of God, who reveals the Father - another world, where all that is in the Father and of the Father is revealed.
But this involved the death and resurrection of Christ, the end of all connection with the old creation, and a new state of man for the new. Now the glory of this new creation was not yet revealed, nor even established objectively; but the state of man subjectively, a state immortal, pure, spiritual even as to the body, was realized in the resurrection, even while the external glory was still wanting. The new and eternal thing existed in the person of Christ, and as to Him personally it was realized in that He was going to His Father, the source of all, "the Father of glory," as it is said.
Now this new state of man was familiarly manifested to the disciples during the forty days that the Lord passed upon earth after His resurrection, before He ascended to heaven. The return of the Saviour, when He shall come back in His glory, will be the moment when His dominion will be established over all things, when God will put them all under His feet, with an authority and power that He will make use of to subject them to Himself. Now that of which we speak, whether with regard to the state of man or relative to the glory, is evidently something more than the presence of the Holy Ghost, precious as that is, and it is that which now occupies the Lord. The Holy Ghost was to be given to the disciples; but more than this, He should see them again. No doubt they would see Him, when He will return in glory; but then it will be no longer a question of a testimony to render. Before that time they should see Him for a little while, for He would then go to His Father. This was the introduction of the disciples into the realization of that new state which Christ inaugurated by His resurrection, Son of God in power. They should see the second Man beyond death, and be in living communication with Him. It was not the revelation of the glorious things of the new creation by the Holy Ghost - this revelation was going to be given to them - it was Christ Himself, the Christ they had known during the days of
His flesh. "Handle me," He said, "and see that it is I, Myself." Touching and precious word! It was He whom they had known and accompanied every day and all day, He who had borne with their infirmities, sustained their faith, and encouraged their hearts; it was the same Jesus who showed Himself as familiarly with them as before, though in quite another state. "He showed Himself," said Peter, "not to all the people, but to us, who did eat and drink with Him, after that He was raised from the dead." It was the same Christ; but what is of all importance, the basis of all for us, it was Christ beyond death, the power of Satan, the judgment of God, and sin; He who had been made sin for us, He by whom our sins had been borne and put away, that God might remember them no more. We see here the link between the Jesus known in His humiliation in our midst in grace, and man in his new state, according to the counsels of God, a state in which He could no more be subjected to death, nor put to the proof. J. N. D.