Wednesday

Related Verses
John 14:3, 17-19, 20
3 And if I go and prepare a place for you, I am coming again and will receive you to Myself, so that where I am you also may be.
17 Even the Spirit of reality, whom the world cannot receive, because it does not behold Him or know Him; but you know Him, because He abides with you and shall be in you.
18 I will not leave you as orphans; I am coming to you.
19 Yet a little while and the world beholds Me no longer, but you behold Me; because I live, you also shall live.
20 In that day you will know that I am in My Father, and you in Me, and I in you.

John 1:14
14 And the Word became flesh and tabernacled among us (and we beheld His glory, glory as of the only Begotten from the Father), full of grace and reality.

John 10:10
10 The thief does not come except to steal and kill and destroy; I have come that they may have life and may have it abundantly.

John 20:22
22 And when He had said this, He breathed into them and said to them, Receive the Holy Spirit.

Related Reading
The Lord’s redemption was not to prepare a place for us in heaven. The Lord’s redemption was to prepare a place for us in God…This thought is on the highest plane. The Lord redeemed us to bring us into God, to prepare a place for us in God…After we have been redeemed, after we have been saved, after we have been regenerated, please tell me where we are. We are in Christ and in God. Even John’s first Epistle reveals that we abide in God and that God abides in us (4:13). Throughout the whole New Testament the central thought is that after we have been saved and regenerated, we are in God and in Christ. God and Christ are our dwelling place. Furthermore, we have become the dwelling place for God. Thus, God and we, we and God, are a mutual abode…[The Lord] was preparing a place that we might get into God, that the Lord might bring us into God by His redemption. By His death and resurrection He has brought us into God. Praise the Lord that each one of us has a place in God! (Life-study of John, 2nd ed., pp. 346-347)

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The Lord’s going was to bring man into God for the building of His habitation. He went to the cross to accomplish redemption, removing all the obstacles between man and God, that He might open the way and make a standing for man to get into God. The standing in God, being enlarged, becomes the standing in the Body of Christ. Anyone who does not have the standing, a place, in God does not have a place in the Body of Christ, which is God’s habitation. Hence, the Lord’s going to accomplish redemption was to prepare a place in His Body for the disciples.

John 14:3…proves that the Lord’s going (through His death and resurrection) was His coming (to His disciples—vv. 18, 28). The tense here is very strange to the English language. It means that His going was His coming, that He was coming by going…The Lord’s intention was to get into His disciples. He came in the flesh (1:14) and was among His disciples, but while He was in the flesh, He could not get into them. He had to take the further step of passing through death and resurrection that He might be transfigured from the flesh into the Spirit that He might come into the disciples and dwell in them, as is revealed in 14:17-20. After His resurrection He came to breathe Himself as the Holy Spirit into the disciples (20:19-22). Therefore, His going was just His coming.

The Lord said, “I am coming again and will receive you to Myself” (14:3). This does not mean that the Lord receives us into a place but that He receives us into Himself. In receiving the disciples to Himself, the Lord put them into Himself, as is indicated by the words you in Me in verse 20.

In verse 3 the Lord said that He would receive us to Himself so that “where I am you also may be.” Where is the Lord? Is He in heaven? No, He is in the Father. The Lord wants His disciples to also be in the Father (17:21). Since the Lord is in the Father, He will also bring us into the Father…Through His death and resurrection the Lord has brought us into Himself. By being in Him we are also in the Father because He is in the Father. Where He is, there we are also…Before His death and resurrection the Lord Jesus was in the Father, but the disciples were not. After His death and resurrection all the disciples got into the Father, just as the Lord was and is in the Father. At that time the Lord could say, “Where I am you also may be.”

The Lord Himself is the living way by which man is brought into God the Father, the living place. Like us, the disciples thought that both the place and the way were places, not persons. Notwithstanding, the Lord said to them, “I am the way.” (Life-study of John, 2nd ed., pp. 347-349)

Further Reading: CWWL, 1994–1997, vol. 4, “The Divine and Mystical Realm,” ch. 3