Park Cities Presbyterian Church (PCA)

A place prepared

by Skip Ryan

June 4, 2000

John 13:33–14:6

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John 13:33–14:6: “Little children, I am with you a little while longer. You shall seek Me; and as I said to the Jews, I now say to you also, ‘Where I am going, you cannot come.’ A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another, even as I have loved you, that you also love one another. By this all men will know that you are My disciples, if you have love for one another. Simon Peter said to Him, ‘Lord, where are You going?’ Jesus answered, ‘Where I go, you cannot follow Me now; but you shall follow later.’ Peter said to Him, ‘Lord, why can I not follow You right now? I will lay down my life for You.’ Jesus answered, ‘Will you lay down your life for Me? Truly, truly, I say to you, a cock shall not crow, until you deny Me three times. Let not your heart be troubled; believe in God, believe also in Me. In My Father’s house are many dwelling places; if it were not so, I would have told you; for I go to prepare a place for you. And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again, and receive you to Myself; that where I am, there you may be also. And you know the way where I am going.’ Thomas said to Him, ‘Lord, we do not know where You are going, how do we know the way?’ Jesus said to him, ‘I am the way, and the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father, but through Me.’”

In 1986, I had unique experience of being on loan from my church in Virginia to the U. S. Department of State in the South African Working Group, a special project which pulled together people from all parts of the government as well as outside the government to focus on a particular problem—South Africa. For six months I worked in Washington, visited South Africa, and, together with a number of other people, sought solutions to the very difficult and problematical situations in that country.

One time our group went to the White House for a briefing. We met in the Roosevelt Room, a conference room immediately across the hall from the Oval Office. After the meeting, the senior State Department official who was responsible for my appointment to the group marched me right into the Oval Office. President Reagan was not there at the time, but there was still a tremendous presence in that room, an aura to the place where such important conversations and decisions occur.

It was only because I was with my friend that I could go right in to the Oval Office. Likewise, some of us assume that we have the right to go right in to heaven. There is much hope that we will go in, but it is presumptuous to think that we can go right in, unless we go with a certain Friend.

The Presumption of Position

There are actually two forms this presumption can take. One form is observed in the Jewish leaders of the time. Jesus alludes to this in chapter 13 when He begins this discussion with His disciples. He says in verse 33, “My children, I will be with you for only a little while longer. You will look for Me, and just as I told the Jews, so I tell you now, where I am going, you cannot come.”

The Jews’ response is, “Where does this Man intend to go, that we cannot find Him?” They are presumptuous, assuming that there is no place that Jesus can go that they can’t go. After all, they are Jewish leaders. They are the achievers, the ones who have made it, the kingpins in the social order. Their educational objectives have been met. They are professionals. They presume that they have every right to go to heaven. These leaders assume that their position in life guarantees them a reservation there, just like a prominent person might assume that he can walk into a restaurant where normally one has to have reservations months in advance and get any table he wants.

We see the presumption of position more than you might think among Christians. “I am a good Christian. I go to the right church. I serve the Lord. I presume that it is my right to go to heaven.” This is very dangerous thinking.

The Presumption of Personal Ability

The second kind of presumption is seen in Peter in this conversation. It is not the willful presumption of position, but it is the naïve presumption that personal ability will enable him to follow Jesus. Jesus says, “Where I go, you cannot follow now, but you will follow later.” Peter quickly answers, “Lord, why can’t I follow you right now? After all, I am willing to lay my life down for you.” But Jesus knows what Peter is made of, and He responds with a rhetorical question in John 13:38, “Will you lay your life down for Me, Peter? I assure you that before the rooster crows, you will deny Me three times.” Peter’s good intentions when his stomach is full and the candlelight is burning softly and the fellowship is sweet cannot hold up among the mean-spirited accusers a little later in the garden.

D. A. Carson comments on this passage, “At this point in his pilgrimage, Peter’s intentions and self-assessment vastly outstrip his strength” (The Gospel According to John, 486). It is one thing to have good intentions; it is another thing to have the personal ability to fulfill them. Peter will learn that he cannot do what he presumes he can. He actually has no ability not to deny Christ. He is hopelessly lost in the presumption of his own ability.

Peter needs to realize that the issue isn’t that he, Peter, will lay down his life for the Lord; but rather, the Lord will lay down His life for Peter. Jesus’ question silences Peter. He says nothing. In fact, he doesn’t say anything for the next five long chapters in John, which, for Peter, is a record! The next time he speaks is outside Pilate’s house when a servant girl says, “Aren’t you one of the ones who was with Him?” Peter answers, “I am not.”

It is very humbling for Peter and for us to begin to understand that where were need to live is in our limitations, not our strengths. That may sound bizarre to you. You might say, “Wait a minute, Skip. I didn’t get where I am today by focusing on my limitations, but on my strengths.” Your strengths will inevitably disappoint you. I promise you that.

I got one of those sappy “Dear Pastor” birthday cards for my last birthday. To make matters worse, it was a card that had the “as you are growing older” bit in it. It was all I could do to open it. It even had flowers on the front. Inside I found a prayer coming from the pastor rhetorically, “Lord, help me to see my life not in terms of my limitations but in terms of my achievements.” I looked at that, and I read it again. “Lord, help me to see my life not in terms of my limitations but in terms of my achievements.” I read it four times and said, “That’s wrong! Hallmark got it all wrong.” I was preparing the letter in my mind that I was going to write.

Anyone who takes the existence of God seriously must learn to live his life in light of his limitations. We are limited and God is not, and we need to learn that our limitations become the doorway to knowing God’s grace. The last time I checked, my achievements are not the doorway to my knowing God better; my limitations are. It is in the midst of my limitations that I call out to God, and then I begin to know Him.

The promise of a place prepared

Amazingly, after Jesus questions Peter with a rebuke, He does what the Lord alone would do in this situation. He begins to comfort Peter and the other disciples who are worried about the fact that Jesus has said that He is about to leave them. Jesus says, “Let not your heart be troubled” (John 14:1). He encourages and comforts them as He Himself is facing the most incredible trouble the next day. Jesus has every right to be troubled, but instead He comforts them in their trouble as they grapple with what it means that He is going away. Jesus meets Peter’s presumption with the peace of a double promise: one, the promise of a place prepared for them, and, two, the promise of a way provided.

First, Jesus promises His followers, “In My Father’s house are many rooms; if it were not so, I would have told you; I am going to prepare a place for you” (John 14:2). To understand this promise, we need to understand how Jesus thought about time. For Him, the most important time was the future, not the past, although He drew upon the whole history of Israel to point to His purpose and His calling. It wasn’t the present, though He called upon His followers to love God and obey Him in the present. The pivotal point of history for Jesus Christ is always the future. The eschatological center of the scripture is the future. Everything points to the future. That is where the whole momentum is pushing. “I go away to prepare a place,” a future place, “for you. I will come again in the future to take you to Myself,” Jesus explains.

Our hope is anchored not in the past, as much as we cherish the past and know our life in Christ is anchored in the reality of the Cross and the empty tomb, yet our truest hope is yet in the future. It is not in the present either. The present is here today and gone tomorrow. Real hope is not determined by past accomplishments nor present achievements, but by the amazing promise of the future. It is a place prepared.

This same promise is ours when we consider this most serious of personal issues in our lives, namely, the loss of loved ones. If they are in Christ, they are alive with Christ and experiencing what is future to us. They are living in that great promise of the future which belongs to those who know the Lord of the future, the Lord of Sabbath Rest.

Paul, the apostle, puts it this way: “If in this life only we have hope in Christ, we are of all men to be most pitied” (1 Cor. 15:19). The one who has Christ in his or her life because of what He adds to it right now, with no orientation to the future, is to be pitied. It is incomprehensibly pitiable to put one’s hope in Christ only for this life, for all the joy and purpose that Christ gives our lives now. It is but the echo backwards of a greater joy that we will one day know. But if we are honest, many of us do measure our lives now in terms of what Jesus, religion, faith, or anything else for that matter, give us right now. So when it comes to losing loved ones, we have no choice but to measure our loss in terms of the “hereness” and the “nowness” of it.

That we do this is understandable. The ache of longing, the missing, the desperate, unquenchable thirst of absence of one we love, the pure and awful “goneness,”—there are times when it is more than we know how to bear. So what Jesus says in this passage is very practical, because He is saying to us that the future is a more certain truth than anything we see now. The future is more certain than the chair you sit on, your physical body in the chair or the book you are holding right now. This is no platitude. Our lost loved ones are experiencing our future, and while such knowledge does not lessen our loss, it does put perspective on it.

When Barbara and I visited Rome several years ago we found a cemetery right off the Via Veneto in the middle of the city. On a sign at its entrance is a message spoken by its inhabitants that says, “What you are, we used to be. What we are, you will one day be.” What is future for us is present for them.

Scripture stretches our imaginations into the future by the use of images—snapshots of heaven. It is like peeping through a keyhole in a doorway; we get just small glimpses of life, light, peace, a wedding feast, the wine of the Kingdom, the Kingdom to come, a heavenly city, and here, in this passage, the Father’s house of many rooms. The Father’s house is heaven, and in heaven there are many rooms. From the perspective of the future, the present will seem so small, so trifling, so inadequate to satisfy our deepest longings. The unqualified truth of the scripture is that if we base our hope for happiness on what we are achieving or will achieve now, we are foolish. Foolish is not my word; it is the Lord’s.

When Jesus talks about the future, He talks about a reality that is so far beyond what we can imagine, we cannot take it in. He knows that His disciples are thinking He is promising too much, and that is why He says, “If it were not so I would have told you” (John 14:2). Jesus stakes the extravagant promise of the future on the credibility of His own Word. He is either saying: “Heaven is a magnificent place I am preparing for you,” or, the alternative: “I am a liar.” We must all pick one or the other.

All of the Bible’s images of our future in heaven, including this one, are concrete. We think of heaven as abstract, ghostlike, somehow less real than this existence. But the Bible presents heaven as a place more real than this existence, a place where the senses are more attuned, more alive to the taste of finest wine, the aroma of the feast, the sound of a thousand choirs, the sight of a million angels.

This is the theme of C. S. Lewis’s wonderful book The Great Divorce. In it Lewis takes an imaginary bus trip to heaven with a group of prim and proper English tourists. The minute they get off the bus in heaven for their brief, temporary tour, they appear ghostlike. Lewis describes them as transparent, compared to everything else in heaven, which is solid and real. The visitors from London take off their shoes to go walking on the pretty green grass in the park, but the grass is so real and so strong that it hurts their tender, ghostlike feet. He calls the people who dwell in heaven “solid people,” and the earthlings are the “ghosts.” Lewis is teaching that heaven is more real than earth.

Lewis often talked about inns and said this: “God is pleased along the journey of life to give us several beautiful inns in which we may stay for awhile. But He means for us to never mistake them for home.” God gives us beauty beyond our imagining here, but all this beauty is just a foretaste of the greater and more magnificent beauty that awaits us. It is intended to whet our lips, to make us long for that beauty.

Sometimes I get up before sunrise and turn on a light and read. After reading a while, I look up and realize the sun has come up. The sunlight is flooding the room, and the light I turned on is now weak and feeble. I don’t need it anymore. There will be a day when all the beauty that we see in this earth will pale by comparison to the beauty that we will see that day. For the Christian, death is turning off the lights because the dawn has come, and the sunlight is fair and bright as it casts its glow upon the most beautiful Person we will ever see.

I have said more than the Bible says about heaven. I hope I have been consistent with the Word. I have actually used more words than the Bible, which is very reluctant to talk about heaven. It speaks in snapshots, no MGM-length movie. There is a reason for that. Paul says, “Things that the eye has not seen and the ear has not heard, which the heart of man cannot conceive, these things God has prepared for those who love Him” (1 Cor. 2:9).

The promise of a Person provided

If Jesus and the scriptures are reticent to say much about heaven, they are not reticent to speak about the way to get there. Not only has a place been provided, so has the way. It is the promise made by Jesus in John 14:6, “I am the way.” Jesus says He is ready to go prepare a place, then He’ll come again for His followers, and then He adds, “You know the way that I am going.” Earnest disciple Thomas asks, “Lord, we don’t know where you are going. How can we know the way?” Here Jesus gives His famous answer, “I am the way, the truth, and the life” (John 14:6).

Truth and life are words we are pretty familiar with in the Gospel of John by now. Jesus is the truth because He accurately explains the truth of God to us. He is the life because He has God’s life in Himself and He bestows that life on us. “I am the way, the truth, and the life” drips with irony because the One who says He is the way will hang immobile on a cross a few hours after He makes this statement. The One who says He is the truth will see the lies of men enjoying an apparent great victory over Him. The One who says He is the life will have His lifeless body sealed in a tomb.

When Jesus says He is the way He means two things: one, He is my Pilot, and, two, He is my powerful Friend.

The Pilot

Several years ago a member of my church who is an American Airlines pilot called me and asked, “What are you doing at midnight tonight?” I said, “Gee, I guess I’ll be in bed sleeping.” He said, “No, you won’t. Get Chris and one of his buddies. We are going to Fort Worth to fly a 767.”

He took us out to the American Airlines simulators that are used to train the pilots. Chris, his friend, Will, and I went out there and had a very interesting time. After the pilots were all done for the day, we got in the simulator, which creates the setting of any airport in the world, precisely the details of what it is like to approach that airport. Different kinds of weather, wind speed, runway patterns—all the possible conditions are programmed in, and the most amazing thing was how well Chris and Will knew, almost by instinct, how to fly. (I think that has something to do with years and years of video games.) I, on the other hand, hadn’t had that valuable video experience and crashed and burned every time. The toughest part of flying is landing, and only a skilled pilot, after many years of video game experience, can land a 767 on its wheels, like Chris did repeatedly, instead of its wings, like I did repeatedly. Landing on the runway at Dallas in fog and wind is tricky business. It is even dangerous.

Landing in heaven is tricky business, and it is also dangerous. Yes, heaven is dangerous if you don’t have the right Pilot, because it is full of God’s glory, His perfection, and His holiness. It is full of angels who cry day and night, “Holy, holy, holy, is the Lord God Almighty.” Heaven isn’t daffodils and tulips; it is fire and glory, and if you do not have a Pilot who can bring you safely in, you will crash and burn in a consuming fire that is God. If Jesus is your Pilot, then the author of Hebrews says, “We have confidence to enter the holy place by the blood of Jesus, by a new and living way, which He inaugurated for us through the veil, that is His flesh. And since we have a great high priest over the house of God, let us draw near with sincere heart in full assurance of faith, having our hearts sprinkled clean from an evil conscience and our bodies washed with pure water” (10:19–22). Jesus has already endured the terror of landing in the midst of the storm of God’s just anger against sin. He has already experienced the wind shear of God’s wrath that we deserve. And He has passed through the veil into a new and living way which is His flesh, which suffered the terrors of God for us.

Was He successful? That depends on how you measure success. I measure success by making heaven a safe place for me to go. There is no man or woman in the history of the world who could do that except One, One who could render a dangerous place a safe place full of delight, beauty, and wonder, a place made safe because of our very competent Pilot.

Our Friend

But Jesus is not only our Pilot who guides me to heaven; He is also our powerful Friend who brings us with Him, right into the heavenly center of the universe. “If I go and prepare a place for you, I will come back and take you to be with Me, that you may be with Me where I am” (John 14:3). Because we are with our powerful Friend, we can go with Him anywhere He goes, including the place He has prepared.

This is the great teaching at the heart of the New Testament—the doctrine of our union with Christ. We have been united with Christ in His death and in His resurrection. “For if we become united with Him in the likeness of his death, certainly we shall also be in the likeness of his resurrection” (Romans 6:5). Not only did Jesus die and rise again for us, but the massive truth of our union with Christ says that when He died, we died with Him; and when He rose, we rose with Him. He was our representative. Somehow, mysteriously, I was with Jesus when He died and when He rose. His past is my past, and His future is my future. Jesus lives, and so shall I.

When the great Christian scientist Sir Michael Faraday was dying, journalists questioned him about his speculations of life after death. “Speculations!” Faraday cried out, “I know nothing of speculations. I am resting on certainties.” Faraday knew His Redeemer lived, and he would too.

Once an old, dying man was asked what He thought of death. He said, “It matters little to me whether I live or die. If I live, Jesus will be with me. And if I die, I will be with Jesus.”

In 1986, I could walk into the Oval Office only because I had a powerful friend. And it will be only because of another powerful Friend that I will be allowed to enter heaven. When Jesus says, “I am the way,” He is not showing us the path we walk but a Person we cling to. We do not want to walk the path Jesus walked. It was a path through a garden of terrors and a garbage dump where He hung like a criminal on a cross. The whole point of the Gospel is we don’t walk that way if we believe in Jesus. If we go the way Jesus went, we will not make it. Our way is not a path; it is a Person. We go to Jesus and we go with Jesus. There is no other way.

The question is whether you are on the way or in the One who is the way. If you say, “I am on my way to heaven because...” and fill in the blank with anything except the name of Jesus Christ, you are not on the way to heaven. And if you get there, you will burn up as you land. But if you are in, with, attached to by faith the One who says He is the way, then you have a Pilot and a powerful Friend who assures you a landing at the most important airport in the universe and an entrance into the most important room in all of heaven and earth.

That is why Jesus says, “Believe in God, and believe also in Me” (John 14:1). He means “Believe into”—believe in a way that you are attached to Jesus, united to Him, so that where Jesus goes, you go. His death avails for you. His life is given to you. His promise of heaven is yours.