John 14:3 Commentary and Bible Study

The great point is that the focal point of heaven and the great attraction of heaven and the wonder of heaven is not the place, but the person, the Lord himself. ‘That where I am, there ye may be also.’ Of course, it will be glorious and amazing beyond human language to describe, but it is the presence of the Lord that will be everything to us. So that is the second great point – they need to grasp the heavenly objective. He will say more about this as the discourse goes on. Get out of your minds – earth, earth, earth. It is heavenly, my mission and my purpose and my call.And then the third great remedy for the deficiencies of the disciples in understanding is this – they need to grasp his work. They will not take in that he is going to die, even less what he is going to die for. So he hangs before them a kind of statement which is designed to make them think and to draw them out.Some people say that Christ will come again in the Person of his Spirit – verse 18: ‘I will not leave you comfortless: I will come to you’, but that describes his giving the Holy Spirit, and that would be true. But obviously what he means here is that he will come for his people to take them to glory. He comes for each one of us as individuals, to summon our souls into eternity and to take us home, but ultimately he refers to his coming again when he will call this world to a standstill and bring his people together, those who have already died and are in paradise, and those who are still on earth, and give them resurrection bodies and take them into the glorious hereafter. The disciples saw his attributes in a measure on earth, but we see them in their fullness in the eternal glory, and we feel his friendship and his love, and we no longer need any faith because we see everything by sight and enjoy it first-hand. We see the indescribable glory and power and majesty and fullness of Christ beyond our comprehension here below, and his presence generates bliss for us. Now we have some little sense of this on earth: we know love one for another, and there are people we are especially close to, and if those people are present then everything lights up for us, and if those people were taken away, or that person, well, then, we would be desperately lonely. And in a mysterious way, we understand this through human love. Multiply that millions of times: just to see Christ! His presence will be everything to us. It will be amazing, and that is what he means when he says here, ‘where I am, there ye may be also’, so all the glorious things of heaven.