John 16:7-15

The struggle of the Spirit with the world, John 16:7-15.

At once as a consolation and as a prophecy of the future dispensation, our Lord now declares that it is expedient FOR THEM, that he should depart. Why? Because the Christian dispensation is, according to God’s plan, to be, not the dispensation of Christ’s bodily presence, but the dispensation of the Spirit. Christ came and gave that dispensation its start; but the Spirit must give it its development, its maturity, its consummation, until Christ come again and affix its judgment end. The bodily must give place to the spiritual. There must be an invisible Saviour, for the same reason that we have an invisible God; namely, that the souls of men may have room for faith and be developed into growth by faith. That invisible Saviour must be above, that men’s souls may be developed upward, and not downward, heavenward, and not earthward. Men, upon these low grounds of earthly nature, must grow up, and form their probationary character, not under a living present corporeal teacher, but under the impregnating power of a spiritual influence, rendering an elevating faith necessary, as shaping their personality to a firm and solid piety and fitness for heaven. Christ must therefore go, in order that the Spirit may come.

What was obscure to these apostles time has rendered plain to us of the present age. We can now understand that it was God’s great plan, that, once for all, Christ should come as a Saviour in a most miraculous manner; that then he should ascend and leave the world under the secret ministration of the Spirit, with the co-operation of mere human agency, even unto the end. Human agency, Christ being corporeally withdrawn, aided by the Spirit, must establish his Church, gather in the Gentiles, convert the world, and prepare for the consummation at the judgment day. Thus it accorded with the laws of human history that miracle should be limited to the least possible space, and that men, from the Ascension to the Advent, should be allowed to work out their own mission and probationary destiny while probation lasts.