Why did Christ have to go? If witness to the world was the main task that lay ahead, how would it not be far better for Him to stay and conduct that witness Himself? How could it make sense for Him to tell His disciples, “It is expedient for you that I go away,” and then to add, “If I do not go away, the Counselor will not come to you” (16:7)?
We must make sure we understand what our Lord meant by ‘going away.’ We must not be like the disciples. They were so sorrow-filled at the announcement that none of them had thought to ask Him in more detail where He was going to (16:5-6). True, Peter had earlier asked Him (13:36-37) where He was going; but his further remark, “Why can I not follow You even now?…I will lay down my life for You,” seems to show that for him ‘going’ meant simply ‘going to His death.’ Now our Lord was certainly about to die; but dying was not the goal of His going. He was ‘going to the Father’ (16:10), and that would involve not only His dying, but His bodily resurrection, ascension, and exaltation.
And now, perhaps, we can begin to see the relevance of Christ’s going to the problem that has just been mentioned in our present context: the hostility towards Jesus and His disciples on the part of their Jewish contemporaries. If the Holy Spirit was coming to witness to people like that, how would He do it? What would He say?
Jesus, in His life on earth, had preached many sermons and done extraordinary miracles. In spite of it, they remained unbelievers. They would have said, if asked, that they were believers in God: it was only Jesus that they did not believe in. In a sense, of course, it is true that they were believers in God: they believed God existed, was All-holy and All-mighty. They were proud that they knew that there is only one True God: paganism’s polytheism was to them an absurdity and an abomination. They believed also that God had chosen their nation Israel for a special role in history, and had revealed Himself to them through the Old Testament prophets.
But in another sense, indeed in the most important sense of all, they were not believers in God! They were in fact rank unbelievers. For Jesus Christ was God in human form, the God who had made Himself known to them as the I AM (Ex. 3). In not recognizing Him, it was God they did not recognize: “They have not known the Father, nor Me,” said Christ (16:3). And not believing in Jesus, they showed themselves to be unbelievers in God.
A God-Given Example
As an example, we can take the apostle whose conversion experience is explicitly said in Scripture to be an example “of those who should hereafter believe on Him (Jesus Christ) unto eternal life” (1 Tim. 1:16). In his pre-conversion days, Saul of Tarsus would have believed in God, would have been zealous to keep God’s law, and punctilious in his religious observance, all in the hope of meriting acceptance with God. But in the most important sense of all he was not a believer. His persecution of God-Incarnate in Jesus, showed it. And after his conversion he confessed it: “I obtained mercy because I did it (persecuting Jesus and His followers) in…unbelief” (1 Tim. 1:13). Moreover in later years, discussing God’s strategy for the conversion of all Israel, he points out that before God can have mercy and save them, He will have to bring them to the point of discovering and confessing that hitherto they have been unbelievers (Rom. 11:30-32). The lesson should not be lost on us Gentiles. It is possible to be a sincere believer in God in one sense, and yet in the sense of ‘being justified by faith’ not to be a believer at all.
But to get back to our context. We may put to ourselves two questions:
1. If, after a lifetime’s preaching and miracles, Jesus had not convinced the Jews that He was the Son of God, what more could the Holy Spirit say or do to convince them that He was?
2. It was a prerequisite for their being saved that they should be brought to realize and confess that their unbelief in Jesus was unbelief in God, and that it was heinously sinful. They must also acknowledge that they were therefore sinners, as bad as any pagans, and had now no hope of meriting salvation by their efforts to keep God’s law, but must be saved solely by faith in God and His mercy. What, then, could the Holy Spirit do to bring them to such radical repentance and faith?
The answer to these questions is this: the Holy Spirit would be able to proclaim–and by His presence and power demonstrate–that the very Jesus whom they had crucified, God had raised from the dead and that Jesus had now ascended into heaven and had gone back to the Father from whom He had come.
Now we can see one of the main reasons why the Holy Spirit would not come unless Jesus went. If Jesus had not ‘gone,’ that is, if He had not been crucified, buried, raised from the dead, gone back to the Father and glorified, the Holy Spirit would have lacked the necessary message to preach!
Let’s get this clear in our heads: the Holy Spirit did not achieve the conversion of thousands of Jews from Pentecost onwards by reminding them of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, and urging them to reconsider it and try to put it into practice. Nor will the world today be converted through the preaching of Christian ethics, important as they are in their proper place. The message which the Holy Spirit preached was Christ Himself: His Person, His redeeming work, His death, resurrection, ascension, and eventual return! “The gospel by which you are saved” writes Paul (1 Cor. 15:1-4) “is that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, and that He was buried, and that He has been raised on the third day according to the Scriptures; and that He will come again” (15:22-23; 50-58).
The Case Which the Holy Spirit Argues
The Holy Spirit, said Christ, would convict the world of three things: of sin, of righteousness, and of judgment. But He is careful to explain in what sense He meant these three terms. So let us study them in order. The Holy Spirit will convict the world:
1. “Of sin…because they believe not on Me.” Notice at once that the sin in question is not sin in general–lying, stealing, adultery and so forth–but the particular sin of not believing in Jesus. And if we ask how He will convict them that this refusal to believe was sinful, the answer is given in the second item:
2. “Of righteousness, because I go to the Father and you behold Me no more.” ‘Righteousness’ must be understood in its basic legal sense. By raising Jesus from the dead and exalting Him to His own right hand, God has vindicated Jesus, has declared Him to be right, and by that same token has reversed the world’s verdict and shown the world to be wrong and sinful in refusing to believe in Jesus.
3. “Of judgment, because the Prince of this world has been judged.”In the first place all Satan’s schemes–to have Jesus betrayed, officially condemned by the religious and then by the political authorities, utterly discredited, crucified and destroyed–have been brought to nothing and reversed by Jesus’ resurrection.
Secondly, the Prince of this world has been morally defeated. One Man has finally stood firm in His loyalty to God in spite of every Satanic temptation and has been crucified for it: and His faith and loyalty to God have been fully and publicly vindicated. God has raised Him from the dead and placed Him at the pinnacle of universal power.
Thirdly, in the great spiritual contest between Satan and God, Satan has been shown to be a slanderous liar. Ever since Eden Satan had argued that God was against man. But the cross of Christ has shown the opposite. For, on God’s side, the death of Christ was God’s provision for man’s redemption, forgiveness, and reconciliation. In giving His own Son, God has commended His love towards mankind in that Christ has died for them even while they were still sinners, ungodly, and enemies of God (Rom. 5:6-11). The most violent rebel can be forgiven and reconciled; the filthiest sinner can be justified and cleansed, and all free and for nothing by God’s grace. None need perish. If any do, none, not even Satan himself, will be able to argue that it was God’s fault. Satan’s age-long lie has been shown to be what it is.
And fourthly, Satan’s moral and spiritual defeat has sounded his death knell; which in turn warns those who persist in taking his side that they must one day share his doom.
The Sequel
The disciples may not have understood all this very clearly, if at all, at the time. But when we open the Acts of the Apostles and observe how they witnessed on the Day of Pentecost and thereafter, it is evident that the Holy Spirit had come and was doing precisely what Christ had said He would do. The apostles and preachers did not concern themselves with denouncing individual sins, nor with encouraging people to develop worthy virtues. That is not because the early Christians were indifferent to ethical issues and human values: the letters which the apostles wrote to their early converts are full of such moral instruction.
But in their witness to the world, they–or rather the Holy Spirit through them–were preoccupied with one particular sin of overwhelming significance. The resurrection of Christ had demonstrated Him to be the Son of God with power; and the inevitable implication was appalling: Israel had crucified their God-sent Messiah; human beings had killed the Source of their life (3:15); mankind had murdered its Maker. The crucifixion of Christ, as the early Christians saw it (basing themselves on the Bible), was sheer human rage against God: a concerted effort by both Jews and Gentiles to cast off God’s restraint and claims upon them (4:23-31). This is no exaggeration. The cross of Christ diagnoses the basic trouble of the whole world at all times. It is not man’s hostility to man: that is only a secondary symptom. It is man’s hostility to God. The crucifixion of God’s Son was but the cone of a volcano through which, at a certain time and place in history, there erupted that deep-lying resentment and rebellion against God which, ever since man first sinned, have smoldered in everybody’s heart, religious or irreligious, ancient or modern.
But if this is how, according to the Holy Spirit, the cross of Christ diagnosed and exposed man’s sin, the matter was not allowed to rest there. Simultaneously the Holy Spirit proclaimed to all who would hear, that the death of Christ, His resurrection, and His exaltation to the throne of God were the very basis on which God could now offer forgiveness of sins and the gift of His Holy Spirit to all who repented and believed. And this is still the message that we, as the Holy Spirit’s junior partners, may and must proclaim as maturing holiness leads us to witness to the world.