J C Ryle
We find the Lord giving a special reason why it was expedient for Him to go away from His disciples. “If I go not away,” He says, “the Comforter will not come unto you.”
We can well suppose that the gracious Lord saw the minds of His disciples crushed at the idea of His leaving them. Little as they realised His full meaning, on this occasion, as well as on others, they evidently had a vague notion that they were about to be left, like orphans, in a cold and unkind world, by their Almighty Friend. Their hearts quailed and shrunk back at the thought. Most graciously does the Lord cheer them by words of deep and mysterious meaning. He tells them that His departure, however painful it might seem, was not an evil but a good. They would actually find it was not a loss but a gain. His bodily absence would be more useful than His presence.
It is vain to deny that this is a somewhat mysterious saying. It seems, at first sight, hard to understand how in any sense it could be good that Christ should go away from His disciples. Yet a little reflection may show us that, like all the Lord’s sayings, this remarkable utterance was wise and right and true. The following points, at any rate, deserve attentive consideration.
If Christ had not died, risen again and ascended up into heaven, it is plain that the Holy Spirit could not have come down with special power on the day of Pentecost and bestowed His manifold gifts on the Church. Mysterious as it may be, there was a connection in the eternal counsels of God between the ascension of Christ and the outpouring of the Spirit.
If Christ had remained bodily with the disciples, He could not have been in more places than one at the same time. The presence of the Spirit, whom He sent down, would fill every place where believers were assembled in His name, in every part of the world.
If Christ had remained upon earth and not gone up into heaven, He could not have become a High Priest for His people in the same full and perfect manner that He became after His ascension. He went away to sit down at the right hand of God and to appear for His people, in their glorified human nature, as the Advocate with the Father.
1Taken, with editing, from Expository Thoughts on John, vol 3. This is the last section in Ryle’s comments on John 16:1-7.
Finally, if Christ had always remained bodily with His disciples, there would have been far less room for the exercise of their faith and hope and trust than there was when He went away. Their graces would not have been called into such active exercise, and they would have had less opportunity of glorifying God and exhibiting His power in the world.
After all, there remains the broad fact that, after the Lord Jesus went away and the Comforter came down on the day of Pentecost, the religion of the disciples became a new thing altogether. The growth of their knowledge and faith and hope and zeal and courage was so remarkable that they were twice the men they were before. They did far more for Christ when He was absent than they had ever done when He was present. What stronger proof can we require that it was expedient for them that their Master should go away?
Let us leave the whole subject with a deep conviction that it is not the bodily presence of Christ in the midst of us, so much as the presence of the Holy Spirit in our hearts, that is essential to a high standard of Christianity. What we should all desire and long for is not Christ’s body literally touched with our hands and received into our mouths,2 but Christ dwelling spiritually in our hearts by the grace of the Holy Ghost.