- Overcomer Literature Trust
- Swindon
- Wiltshire
‘The Return.’
By Alexander Maclaren.
"I am going to prepare a place for you. And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come back and take you to be with Me" (John 14 v2-3).
The purpose of our Lord’s departure, as set forth by Himself here, guarantees for us His coming back again. That is the force of the text and of the soothing repetition of the words, “I am going to prepare a place for you. And if I go to prepare a place for you, I will come back and take you to be with Me”. Because the purpose of the departure of Jesus was to prepare ‘a place’, it must be followed by a return. He who went away as the Forerunner has not done His work until He comes back and as Guide lead those for whom He had prepared the place, home.
Unquestionably the main meaning and application of the words is to that final and personal coming which stands at the end of history, and to which the hopes of every Christian soul ought to be steadfastly directed. He will “come in the same way” that He had gone.
We are not to water down such words as these into anything short of a return, precisely corresponding in its method to the departure, and as the departure was visible, literal, personal and local, so the return is to be visible, literal, personal and local too. And He will come as He went, a visible Manhood, only throned amongst the clouds of heaven with power and great glory. This is the aim that He sets before His departure. He leaves in order that He may come back again.
And let us remember and live in the strength of the fact that this return ought to be the prominent subject of Christian desire. There is much about this solemn return, with all the uphevals that attend it and the judgment which is to follow, that may well make men’s hearts chill within them. But for us, if we have any love in our hearts and loyalty in our spirits to our King, we should join in the great burst of rapture of many a psalm which calls upon the rocks and hills to break forth into singing, and trees of the field to clap their hands because He comes. His own parable tells us how we ought to regard His coming. When the fig-tree’s branch begins to soften, and the little leaves to push their way through the polished stem, then we know that summer is at hand. His coming should be as the approach of that glorious time in which the sunshine has tenfold brilliancy and power, the time of ripened harvests and matured fruits, the time of joy for all creatures that love the sun. It should be the glad hope of all His servants.
We have a double witness to bear to this generation. One half of the witness stretches back to the Cross and proclaims “Christ has come”, the other reaches onwards to the Throne and proclaims “Christ will come again”. Between these two moves the world’s history which will close with the return, to judge and to save, of the Lord who came to die and has gone to prepare a place for us.
The departure for such a purpose necessarily involved the return again. Both are stages in the process which is perfected by complete union, "that where I am there you may be also".
Christ is Heaven. His presence is all that we need for peace, joy, purity, rest, love and growth. To be with Him, as He tells us in another part of these wonderful last words in the upper room, is to behold His glory. And to behold His glory, as John tells us in his letter, is to be like Him. So Christ's presence is the communication to us of all His radiance, all His purity and all the depth of His blessedness. His glorified Manhood will pass into ours, and all that are with Him where He is will rest and find Him all sufficient. His presence is heaven.
That is almost all we know. And it is more than all we need to know. It is because what is there transcends in glory all our present experience that Scripture can only hint at it and describe it in a ‘negative way’ - no night, no sorrow, no tears, former things passed away, and by symbols of glory gathered from all that is loftiest and noblest in human knowledge, but all that is secondary and poor. The living heart of the hope, and the centre of the brightness is, "So shall we be with the Lord for ever".
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