John 15

John 15:1-16

Section 4. (John 15:1-16.)The incoming change from Judaism to Christianity, and the test of profession in practical walk. Christ is then leaving the world, and His own, who are still in it, are yet not of it. As a consequence, Judaism is given up, and part with Christ takes the place of part with the nation of Israel. This is, most evidently, the meaning of the Lord now proclaiming Himself the true Vine, and His disciples “branches” in this. The vine was the Lord’s figure of Israel in Isaiah (Isaiah 5:1-30). It is as evident also that the vine is the symbol of what is looked to for bearing fruit, and that it is for bearing wild fruit that Israel is rooted out of her vineyard. In the Christianity which takes the place of Judaism on the earth, much more then is fruit the necessary requisite. And that is plainly what is insisted on here.

1. First, we see what is alone sufficiency for the fruit required. It is what is implied in the very nature of a branch, -to abide in the vine: apart from Christ we can do nothing. If the branch abide not in the vine, the vine -the vine-sap -cannot abide in the branch; and this is the reason of the connection and order which the Lord’s words indicate: “Abide in Me, and I in you.” “Abide Me,” -that is the command, -the responsibility; “and I in you,” -that will be the assured result. But let us look in detail at what is here before us. “I am the true Vine, and My Father is the Husbandman.” We are looking evidently, at what has to do with the earth: and as evidently, the true Vine is in contrast with Israel, as already said. Christ now openly takes the place which was ever His, of the real Source of all fruitfulness for God. The legal system would have made Christ the topmost Branch of the national tree, but no more: for if man could have stood under it, he would have needed no Saviour: his fruitfulness would have been of himself. But this was a means of probation only: God giving abundant testimony of what He intended by it in plain words as to the issue, as well as in that sacrificial and typical ritual which accompanied it and pointed beyond it. It was to be by a new covenant that blessing was to come to the nation, and not by the old, Sinaitic one; which testified ever by its vail dropped over the face of God that none could on that ground see or stand before Him. The vine too is the natural figure of dependence, and needs constantly the labor of the husbandman; and into such a dependent condition did the Son of God come down, that He might be the Producer of fruit for God, such as yet had never been, as well as the Pattern of fruitfulness also, wherever found. In Him was the life of faith seen in its perfection. If the branches are in Him, and so He in them, as the productive life-sap, -so does He speak also of being in the Father, and of the Father in Him: -“The Father who abideth in Me, He doeth the works.” We see thus how the figure of the vine underlies all these expressions. The dependent Man, in whom the Father abides reproduces Himself in His believing people who abide in Him. He is the Vine, they are the branches: He is in them, not personally, but as life and nature: and they are in Him as products of His life, abiding in Him by that faith which is characteristic of it. The Life is the Divine Life; and thus we hear in the Son’s prayer which follows His request, “that they all may be one, as Thou, Father, art in Me, and I in Thee, that they may be one in Us;” and so also the apostle who so closely follows Him, declares: “If that which ye heard in the beginning abide in you, ye also shall abide in the Son, and in the Father.” But there is a never to be forgotten difference between the believer and His Lord, which these very words imply: if he can be said, as the apostle here affirms, to be “in the Father,” and that seem to even him too much with the Son of God Himself, the preceding “in the Son” shows the way of it to be only through the Father’s own love -the gift of His Son for men. We are in the Son, and thus in the Father: for us that is mediatorial wholly, which for Him was the necessary prerogative of His glorious Person. Only the Son Himself could be in this way in the Father; and thus His declaration of this as to Himself was the necessary claim of Deity. Life, as we have it, is in the Son (1 John 5:11). He is the Eternal Life itself, -the Source of it for men; thus the “Last Adam” of the new creation. And here is the foundation of Paul’s doctrine as to Christian position, as already said. John’s is not position: for the Son’s position cannot be ours; and John says “in the Father,” as well as “in the Son;” where position cannot be thought of. The figure of the vine and its branches thus clearly illustrates the truth of that vital connection between Christ and His people which is what in Christianity has replaced the formal and sacramental connection which obtained in Judaism. It is quite true that there is here supposed however a possibility of a connection which is still formal merely. There is the necessity dwelt upon of abiding in the vine. The one that abides not is cast forth as a branch, and is withered and burnt. In this case, of course, the one who comes to his end in such a way could never have been a branch in vital union with Christ; or the whole doctrine as to life in Scripture would be violated. But in what branch of a vine, it will be asked, has the sap never circulated? and in what other than vital connection could one speak of a branch in the vine? The question is not answered here; and to answer it one must appeal to similar images elsewhere. We are most naturally reminded of the broken off branches of the olive, of which the apostle speaks in Romans 11:1-36. Here, without raising question as to the meaning of the olive itself, the branches are distinctly said to be broken off for unbelief, and those who stand to “stand by faith.” The interpretation of the vine is so far confirmed, that those broken off are those who have no spiritual life at all. The principle of continuance is that of faith. Nor only so; for the Gentile had no part in the olive at the beginning; he is not a natural branch, but grafted in -as the apostle is careful to tell us, “contrary to nature” -into the good olive, out of the wild olive to which he naturally belonged. This “grafting” is common to all Gentiles; but where, as in the vine here, Christ is the stock, it is clearly true that there are no natural branches, -that every one must be grafted in. Now here it is plain that every graft does not abide, or, as we say, strike." The “abiding” is just striking: it is the rooting itself in the stock, -a vivid image of faith’s laying hold, which, looking at things from the human side of responsibility insisted upon in the exhortation in this case, makes us partakers in the preciousness of Christ our life. “My Father is the husbandman,” -although it has been applied by some to the divine dealing with Christ Himself, -is applied by the Lord evidently to His dealing with His people. “Every branch in Me that beareth not fruit He taketh away; and every branch that beareth fruit, He purgeth it, that it may bear more fruit.” The vine, as already said, is the ideal of a fruit-bearer. It is fit for nothing else. “Shall wood be taken thereof, to do any work?” asks the Lord by the prophet; or will men take a pin of it, to hang any vessel thereon?" (Ezekiel 15:3). “I looked for it to bring forth grapes,” He says again of Israel as His vine (Isaiah 5:2). This is what still the Father looks for from us. And notice that it is not works, of which the vine speaks. Works may be fruit, assuredly, and blessed fruit; still, works are acts, which may have a certain character; fruit speaks more properly of the character itself. Thus “the fruit of the Spirit,” says the apostle in Galatians (Galatians 5:22-23), “is love, joy, peace, long-suffering, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, meekness, temperance.” These are things which show the life in the branch; in activities, no doubt; but they belong more to the person than do the activities.

Moreover, the apostle speaks of them as fruit, not fruits: he dwells more upon the unity exhibited than the variety. And this is a blessed character of the Spirit’s workmanship, that it is a complete harmonious development, in which every part is in evident relationship with the rest. Love that “seeketh not her own” shines out along the line of these jewels, pervading them all, and not merely stringing them together. If, therefore, there is no fruit, there is manifestly no life: the branch that bears no fruit has no title to the vine; it can only be taken away. If it bear fruit, then comes the “purging” that it may bear more fruit. Whatever this may include beside, the Lord’s words that follow show certainly that the Word is the effectual means by which this purging is accomplished. Purged," -or “clean,” -He says, “ye are already, by reason of the word that I have spoken unto you.” The Word is that which judges all that is impure in God’s sight, while by its sweet encouraging grace, it wins and divorces the heart from it. Any one who is in the least acquainted with vine-culture knows how much pruning it requires, to make a vine bear proper fruit. It is most instructive to realize that this pruning is not necessarily the taking away of what is merely, or in itself evil: leaves and branches, -even if fruitless branches, do not naturally speak of this.

The injury that they do lies in squandering the precious sap; which again does not so much lessen the quantity of the fruit produced, as it affects the quality. The things by which Christian fruitfulness are most seriously affected are apt to be, not so much things positively evil: these bear their brand upon their face, for the most part: and the conscience, if it be not dull indeed, is roused against them. It is rather the negative than the positive quality which is dangerous. It is occupation with that which simply has not Christ in it, which (tolerated for its very harmlessness) insensibly steals away the vigor of spiritual life. Lawful things, as the apostle reminds us, may bring us thus under their power; and even the name of “duty” may be invoked to cover with its sanction what is in reality only the slipping of the heart away from its first duty to Him who has redeemed and purchased us with His blood. The lesson of the vine is here that of the need of concentration: of which Paul, in his epistle to the Philippians, gives us so pregnant an example. His “one thing I do” is the only principle for Christian progress, or happiness either. It ensures both. The knowledge of the new man teaches him that “Christ is ALL:” and we cannot broaden or brighten the spiritual life by adding anything to Him. “Abide in Me” is therefore what He exhorts to: -to realize our dependence, and cultivate that faith which is the acknowledgement of it, and which brought us to Him at first, as the Only-sufficient and All-sufficient Saviour in that hour of supreme distress. Saviour He is still, and all through; not least from our own will and way: -the principle of sin, and the sure road to disaster. To be true to what was our first happiness is to make permanent that happiness; to abide in Him is to find Him in His fulness abiding in us, and all His promises interpreted to us by their fulfilment in the experiences of a blessed and fruitful life. It is only, as has been already said, what is implied in our very Christianity itself: for he who does not abide in Christ in some true sense, is not a Christian. But, alas! we need the exhortation: who will say that Christians do not need to be exhorted to be Christians? “He that abideth in Me, and I in Him, the same beareth much fruit.” We only need to be fully what we really are: -not to be untrue to our God, our Saviour, and ourselves. Now comes the warning: “If any one abide not in Me, he is cast forth as a branch, and is withered:” that is the spiritual result, as the words “as a branch,” indicate: but there follows the final judgment, in that figurative language in which it is so commonly described: “and they gather them, and cast them into the fire, and they are burned.” The change has been often noted in this place from “ye” to “any one.” The Lord would not have it supposed that it might be possible for those who are truly His to be thus cast forth and to perish: therefore His altered speech. He returns, however, immediately now to His former direct address: “If ye abide in Me, and My words abide in you, ye shall ask what ye will, and it shall be done unto you.” Here is a further condition, and which certifies, in the same manner as we have seen His language do elsewhere, the character of the prayer to which He pledges success. If His words abide in us, they will give shape to our desires and requests, so that He can answer them without injuring us or contradicting His own character. But if we thus drank in His words, what wondrous power would our prayers possess! Why do we not know more of it? There can be but one reply: we too little yield ourselves to be possessed by these precious words, -care often. too little to face them.

They demand too much of us. We would sooner pursue our own wills, giving Him what we may consider a fair proportion of what is His, and hoping He will not expect too much from such as we are. Of how much we rob ourselves, in thus robbing Him, we shall learn, it may be when it cannot be righted. He would touch our hearts with another thought, that His Father will be glorified in our bearing much fruit: and we shall become such as He can count true disciples of His own. A precious inducement! in which He appeals to our hearts, and expects them to respond to affection so well proved. Have we not dropped out a good deal out of that term so full of meaning, except as applying it to these men of a by-gone day? Is it not perhaps significant, if we have done so? 2. The Lord goes on to speak of the new position in which, as delivered from the law, they were placed, -no longer servants, but friends, -and of the communion in love implied in this. The disciples of Moses were bondsmen of the law under which they were placed, and had even no access to God, -the way into the holiest not being yet manifested (Hebrews 9:8). Grace was now changing all. They had looked upon the glory of the Word made flesh, -the glory of the Only-begotten of the Father, in whom the Father Himself was declared and seen. God had come nigh: and now, if He who declared Him were going back to heaven, heaven could not be closed by this, but rather opened.

God come nigh, for those who welcomed this, could be no transient vision. But, for one near God, bond-service is no more possible: communion in love must take the place of the former distance: and this is the subject here. As Christ on earth had been the Object of His Father’s love, so now were His people that of His. As to Him it was a love of complacent delight: walking as He did in His Father’s commandments, the One Man answering, to the heart of God; He would have them answering similarly to His own heart, walking in His commandments, so as to be partakers of the joy which He had tasted, even amid all the sorrow of His path. He desired for them fulness of this joy. And as He had loved them, even to the laying down His life for them, so was it His commandment that they should love one another: and so they would be still in fellowship with His love. He was layingHis life for them, -His friends: how could they have greater proof that such they were indeed? Friends! and no longer servants: no more did He call them that: for, instead of mere messages of their duty, He had been opening to them all the truth as to those purposes of the Father with which He had been entrusted. And such is Scripture for us now: with a length and breadth and depth and height in it which befits such a communication from the Father to the Son as that of which the Son here speaks. This love was at the foundation of all for them: and to it they owed,. and we owe, that choice which was on His side, not on ours. “Ye have not chosen Me,” He says, “but I have chosen you, and appointed you, that ye should go and bear fruit, and that your fruit should abide: that whatsoever ye should ask the Father in My Name, He may give it you.” Thus in conscious weakness the power of God is with us: and as He sought us when lost, -when there was nothing but our misery to awaken His compassion, so we may count assuredly upon Him, whatever our helplessness, to perfect the work He has begun. What comfort lies for us in that royal word, “I have chosen you!” But grace enables us to fulfill the conditions necessarily imposed by the holiness of the divine nature: -and cannot set these aside: therefore the closing words. They are in the same line with others that we have lately heard: which they emphasize only in a somewhat different way. Fruit that abides is that which alone satisfies God. How much that looks well has not that quality in it which ensures permanence. How much that seems truly of God reveals its character by its decay! This “abiding” connects itself, in the Gospel of John, with the divine side of things which is seen all through.

John 15:17-16

Section 5. (John 15:17-27; John 16:1-27.)A new place with God. All this involves, as has been seen, a new place with God. We must not expect to have it presented as we find it done by Paul at an aftertime. Only by degrees could the full truth be made known: and for this the Spirit of truth Himself must come. What we have now before us is the result of Christ’s departure from the world. His disciples being left in it as His representatives and witnesses, with the Spirit also in it, and the consequences of this, while with the Father there would be enjoyed a freedom of access in His Name before unknown. It is in fact a new place with God, but in practical life down here, which is so much the theme in all John’s doctrinal unfolding.

1. The identification of. His disciples with their Lord, whose representatives on earth they are now to be is the first thing here. The world itself would identify them. The hatred with which it had followed Him it would now show to His people. They need not Wonder at it If they were separated from it in spirit and character, as also by His choice of them to be His own outside it, then there was consistency in such opposition.

He could non commend Himself: how could they? His persecutors would, of course, be theirs: while those who kept His word would keep theirs also. The Object of their hatred was was,~ above all, Himself, and ultimately the Father, who had sent Him. They had had fullest evidence of His mission in His words and works: works unparalleled by those of any other: so that the sin of their rejection of Him Was manifest. They hated, alas! both Himself and His Father. Their own Scripture had been fulfilled, “They hated Me without a cause.” 2. Amid all this opposition, they were not alone to be His representatives, but His witnesses: they and the Spirit whom He would send to them from the Father. There would be thus a double witness, -the unseen Spirit being known in the mighty works which would be done. He would be in this way also the Advocate, plead for God and for His people, even though it might be to deaf ears. As the Spirit of truth also, the truth would commend itself to the conscience, if the heart were closed. Their own testimony would be that of men in personal acquaintance with those details of His life and ways which they have, in fact, made known to us. The human witness would be a natural and needed supplement to the divine. Spite of all, it was necessary to warn them that the opposition of the world to Him would not thus be overcome. They would be put out of the synagogues: nay, men’s hearts would so pervert their consciences that they would kill them, and offer that to God as acceptable service. We find this conspicuously enough in such an one as Saul of Tarsus, “concerning zeal, persecuting the Church:” so little does a good conscience certify a soul to be right with God! 3. The Lord goes on to speak again of the coming of the Spirit, with regard to the character of His testimony. So important for them was it that it was even expedient that He should depart, that the Advocate might come. Again He speaks of Him by that assuring title, which declares how thoroughly He has made their cause His own. According to the divine purpose, Christ must go to the Father, or the Spirit would not come; for it is to a glorified Christ that He testifies. Christianity in its full character is, in fact, the fruit of His ascension, as Paul makes fully plain, who was Himself converted by the “gospel of the glory” (2 Corinthians 4:4; 2 Corinthians 4:6). For this, however, we must yet wait: here we have, first, the result of the presence of the Spirit thus sent from the rejected One in glory, as the necessary demonstration of the world’s sin, with the judgment of its prince, and the manifestation of the Father’s righteousness. “He will convict” does not necessarily imply that men will receive the conviction. The guilty do not necessarily own the righteousness of their sentence. The world assuredly, does not own it. None the less has God demonstrated the guilt of the world, and placed men under responsibility to receive His sentence. There lies the way into inconceivable blessing in that salvation for the guilty which the gospel proclaims. Christ has been in the world: He has been rejected and cast out of it; it is too plain to be denied that He died a malefactor’s death. Men may say for themselves, that individually they had no hand in it. This they do say: how is it possible they can be guilty of what was done by men of another race, and of another time? Well, look at the Jew in the centuries that have elapsed since then: has not His blood been upon them, and on their children? Have they not bought for themselves “a field to bury strangers in” with the “price of blood?” If Christ was not what He claimed, was He not worthy of the sentence under which He suffered? If you do not believe in Him, do you not affirm that sentence to be righteous?

Who were these Jews, who put Him to death? Were they not a people carefully prepared for centuries to receive the One they rejected? If you had been among them, would not you have rejected Him too? Scripture at any rate affirms that “as in water face answereth to face, so the heart of man to man.” It does not say that the life is the same, and the difference in this respect may be due to many causes: but it says, the heart is. And it speaks of Israel as a field specially cared for and cultivated, to show precisely what one may expect from the soil of the human heart. Their own law had given a dreadful description, drawn too from experience, of what God had found in them: and the apostle, quoting it, says, “We know that whatsoever the law saith, it saith to them that are under the law.” Granted, you say perhaps, but that is Israel. See then how he concludes: what the law says it does indeed say to those who are under the law: -true, but for what purpose? why, “that every mouth may be stopped, and all the world become guilty before God” (Romans 3:19). That is, Israel is not an exception as to man’s state before God, but rather, an unexceptionably perfect example. If Israel be found such as this, one need go no further, -the whole world is condemned. This, though the sentence of the law, applies as well, as must be evident, to the rejection of Christ. The unbelief for which the world is condemned is naturally characteristic of us all: and those who are brought to receive Him are just those who will most fully own this; the language of the prophet will be theirs: He was despised and rejected of men: a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief; and we hid, as it were, our faces from Him; He was despised, and we esteemed Him not." If there be difference as to any, it is the mercy of God that has made the difference. But the presence of the Spirit convicts the world also of righteousness: “of righteousness, because I go unto the Father, and ye see Me no more.” We hear in the prayer that follows, His appeal in this way: “O righteous Father, the world hath not known Thee: but I have known Thee: and these have known that Thou hast sent Me.” Here He puts in contrast the world, which is about to demonstrate its ignorant hatred of the Father by the murder of the Son, with Himself, against whom they are showing their enmity. In this open conflict, with whom will He show Himself? His accusers dare to condemn Him in the Father’s Name; and the bitter cry upon the Cross might seem to justify their accusations. He must come openly out and show with whom He is: and in resurrection from the dead God manifests Himself accordingly. He rises, and with abundant witness, but not to show Himself to the unbelieving world, but to return in glory to the Father. The world sees Him no more till He comes back to judge it. God and the world are in demonstrated opposition. Righteousness has acted: and righteousness will act further in the nearing future, in taking out of the world which has rejected them also, those whom He has linked with Himself, as in His prayer. Resurrection and ascension will demonstrate as to them also with whom the Father is. In heaven they will be “made the righteousness of God in Him.” A marvellous display! but the Lord does not here speak of it. It is of the testimony of the Spirit’s presence in the world that He is here speaking. But what remains, then, for the world itself? Judgment! and already the prince of this world has been judged. We must not understand this to mean that sentence has been executed upon him: which plainly is not the case. It is pronounced, but certainly he is not shut up in the abyss as yet (Revelation 20:1-3); and still less in the lake of fire (ver. 10). Branded with his doom, he yet is suffered, in the wisdom of God, to be still abroad, the subtle tempter or the cruel persecutor of the disciples of Him whom he has, in both characters, assailed before. The Lord turns to brighter themes: emphasizing once again that it is the Spirit of truth that is to come to them, to guide them into what as yet they could not bear: -in fact, into the whole range of truth, and to lead out into the blessed future. In all this the glory of the Son would be revealed: for all things that the Father hath being His, there remains nothing beyond this of which to speak. As Paul says by the illumination of the Spirit now, “All things were created by Him and for Him; and He is before all things, and by Him all things consist” (Colossians 1:16-17). Let us remember with adoring hearts, that we are “heirs of God and joint-heirs of Christ;” and let us seek to enter into the amazing grace of such a revelation with all the energy that the Spirit can give. 4. The Lord again speaks of His departure, in terms which His previous words might have enabled them to understand. He was indeed going to the Father; yet by the coming of the Spirit He would, as it were, again be with them: for, as He had said, in that day they would know as they had never known, that He was in the Father, and they in Him, and He in them. But His words only show them lost in the mysterious sorrow of His departure, -the departure again of Him who had come into the world to bring in the long-expected blessing, and was going back with His end, as it seemed, unachieved, to leave them with their failed hopes! The present sorrow was too heavy upon them for the hope beyond to be realized as yet. The sorrow was plain; the hope was a perplexity. 5. But the Lord goes on to the results Godward of the new place He was about to take, and again declares the value of His Name in access to the Father. It was not to be as if He stood between, and they must come to Him, that He might go to the Father for them. No, He had opened the way for direct approach. Moreover the Father Himself loved them for the love they had to Him whom they had received as come out from the Father. Let them prove for themselves the sweetness of this way of access, that they might realize the fulness of joy resulting from so wonderful a place of intimacy as would now be theirs.

For as yet they had asked nothing in His Name: they had not learned to identify themselves with Him who as yet had not taken His place for them with God. But the sanctuary now stood open, the allegories in which He had hitherto spoken to them were to be exchanged for open speech that suited this. There was now to be in the nearest place with God a Man in heaven. Henceforth there is for men an entrance into that within the veil, whither the Forerunner has entered for us.