'These things have I spoken unto you, that ye should not be offended.
They shall put you out of the synagogues: yea, the time cometh, that
whosoever killeth you will think that he doeth God service. And these
things will they do unto you, because they have not known the Father,
nor Me. But these things have I told you, that, when the time shall
come, ye may remember that I told you of them. And these things I said
not unto you at the beginning, because I was with you. But now I go My
way to Him that sent Me; and none of you asketh Me, Whither goest Thou?
But because I have said these things unto you, sorrow hath filled your
heart.'--JOHN xvi. 1-6.
The unbroken flow of thought, and the many subtle links of connection
between the parts, of these inexhaustible last words of our Lord make
any attempt at grouping them into sections more or less unsatisfactory
and artificial. But I have ventured to throw these, perhaps too many,
verses together for our consideration now, because a phrase of frequent
recurrence in them manifestly affords a key to their main subject.
Notice how our Lord four times repeats the expression, 'These things
have I spoken unto you.' He is not so much adding anything new to His
words, as rather contemplating the reasons for His speech now, the
reasons for His silence before, and the imperfect apprehension of the
things spoken which His disciples had, and which led to their making
His announcement, thus imperfectly understood, an occasion for sorrow
rather than for joy. There is a kind of landing place or pause here in
the ascending staircase. Our Lord meditates for Himself, and invites us
to meditate with Him, rather upon His past utterances than upon
anything additional to them. So, then, whilst it is true that we have
in two of these verses a repetition, in a somewhat more intense and
detailed form, of the previous warnings of the hostility of the world,
in the main the subject of the present section is that which I have
indicated. And I take the fourfold recurrence of that clause to which I
have pointed as marking out for us the leading ideas that we are to
gather from these words.