His dis­ci­ples said, “Ah, now you are speak­ing plainly and not using fig­u­ra­tive speech!”– John 16:29

Yay for clar­ity! You can find the full­text of John 16 here. Apolo­gies for the slight ram­bling­ness of this post. It gains clar­ity towards the end… twas some­what shaped off a Skype con­ver­sa­tion that I haven’t the time nor energy to prop­erly edit at this point :)

John 8:14 is pretty funny in its por­trayal of the sheer incor­rect­ness of the Phar­isees’ asser­tion of the pas­sage prior: It’s like… you can’t speak truth because you’re speak­ing truth about your­self (!!)… and then, fast­for­ward back to 16:30  –  “We know that you know all things and don’t need any­one to ques­tion you; this is why we believe that you came from God” – then, in verse 31, Jesus — “oh, so NOW you get it…”

Verse 32 — “But, seri­ously… yeah, right. Even if you say you do you’re all about to piss­bolt… Oh, that’s now, btw.”

33 — “but I’ve said this stuff so that”… You’ll know after the res­ur­rec­tion what’s going on… The res­ur­rec­tion is the act that will make sense of all of this; there will be no fig­ures of speech because it’s a con­crete demon­stra­tion of what the Christ is achiev­ing — “over­com­ing the world” and bring­ing peace for those who are in him — kinda like way the Father is with Him even when all oth­ers desert

Verse 23 is con­fus­ing… “You won’t ask me any­thing” vs. “My father will give you what­ever you ask in my name”… are they both talk­ing about prayer or is the first talk­ing about information/knowing stuff about Christ’s iden­tity and rela­tion­ship to the Father and the sec­ond talk­ing about prayer?’

Per­haps its about the per­fect suf­fi­ciency of the cross — read­ing 22 AND 23 together:

(Para­phrase of Jesus:) You will be sor­row­ful til I’m back, and then I basi­cally won life (lit­er­ally! haha) and you have a joy that can’t be taken away from you and what you’re ask­ing the Father will be asked in my name!

You’re not try­ing to ask it directly of Him (the Father) any­more. You won’t need to, because you have the Spirit of Christ once Jesus has con­quered death and returned to His Father. What I think that means, in the con­text of the “Spirit of truth” from ear­lier in the pas­sage, is that the things you ASK for are asked as Jesus would (i.e. you’re not stand­ing alone before the father with an impaired rela­tion­ship ask­ing things for your­self once Jesus has con­quered and we’ve received the spirit of truth that speaks what He hears from the Father and Son. Our hearts will desire dif­fer­ent things, and we’ll have a com­plete joy that can’t be taken from us in Christ.

We don’t get the Spirit so we can ask for crap, but so that He can declare what he hears (from the Father) — AND — in verse 14 – 15, His pur­pose is to glo­rify the son, who is King over every­thing that is the Father’s; the Spirit will declare the things of Jesus to his peo­ple. So, ask­ing of the Father “in my name” is about ask­ing to receive joy in full…

“I am not say­ing that I will ask the Father on your behalf” — Does this mean Jesus ISN’T an inter­me­di­ary (as in Hebrews 7:25)? And Romans 8:26 says that the Holy Spirit inter­cedes for us when we don’t know what or how to pray. But this pas­sage (John 16) says that the Holy Spirit will speak only what He hears from the Father and Son: there­fore, His inter­ces­sory prayer for us will nec­es­sar­ily take the shape of prayer for things that God desires. And that should be our prayer always.

Christ needn’t ask the Father on our behalf because His act of death and resurrection/victory OVER death means that our sins have been paid for if we trust in Jesus and call him our Lord. When our sins are paid for, we can be in rela­tion­ship with God the Father and pray to Him; the High Priest that Hebrews 7 talks about is pre­sent­ing us blame­lessly in unblem­ished rela­tion­ship again with God, so we can approach Him. When Christ’s per­fect sac­ri­fice was made, we are able to and should do as the writer of Hebrews says we should in chap­ter 10 of that let­ter: Where there is for­give­ness of sins and law­less­ness, there is no longer any offer­ing for sin. There­fore… let us draw near with a true heart in full assur­ance of faith, with our hearts sprin­kled clean from an evil con­science and our bod­ies washed with pure water.

We are able to draw near to God. Right now this is in the form of prayer to Him and for His pur­poses; that He might achieve them and use His peo­ple to this end in His ser­vice. We don’t need to pray in a church or tem­ple, we don’t need to burn incense or hear music to uplift us — though these things are not intrin­si­cally bad. We have free­dom as we are saved by Christ’s sac­ri­fice for us; we have a new Spirit which He has put in His peo­ple to allow them to draw near to God with­out imped­i­ment or con­stric­tion. We needn’t pray to Christ, because He has opened a new way to the Father for us, hav­ing ful­filled the law of the scrip­tures and mak­ing per­fect that which we (His peo­ple) could not.

God’s pres­ence used to dwell in the holi­est place of the Tem­ple; now, He dwells in the hearts of His peo­ple as Christ has made us His own.

When Jesus says “It is to your advan­tage that I go away”, he means it. If Christ hadn’t gone away from His fol­low­ers to the bru­tal Roman cross to pay for our sins, we would not have peace with God, and there’s no way He could say “I have over­come the world” with­out lying through his teeth unless He faced death and came out the other side, open­ing a new way to God for His people.