Chapters fourteen, fifteen, and sixteen of John are very mysterious! In these chapters the Lord Jesus disclosed a mystery to us: the Triune God wants to be our dwelling place. He wants to be our home, our tabernacle, that we may enter into Him and abide in Him and even dwell in Him. This is the first point. Secondly, after we enter into Him, making Him our home, spontaneously we also become His home. Firstly, we enter into Him and abide in Him, and then He enters into us and abides in us. So we have a mutual abiding. This mutual abiding is clearly described in chapter fifteen. In verse 4 the Lord Jesus said, “Abide in Me and I in you.”
In John 17:21 there is also the concept of the mutual abiding: “That they all may be one; even as You, Father, are in Me and I in You, that they also may be in Us.” In this verse it is really hard to tell who is in whom. But you have to realize that chapters fourteen, fifteen, and sixteen plus the one chapter for the prayer, chapter seventeen, are on the Triune God being our home that we may become His home. There is a mutual abiding. This mutual abiding produces a mutual abode.
This word, abode, is used twice in chapter fourteen, once in the plural number and once in the singular number. Verse 2 says, “In My Father’s house are many abodes.” Verse 23 says, “If anyone loves Me, he will keep My word, and My Father will love him, and We will come to him and make an abode with him.” In verse 23 abode is used in the singular number, so this means a mutual abode for the mutual abiding.
For a long time I understood the word, abide, according to the modern connotation, which mainly means to remain. At the time that the King James Version of the Bible was translated, the word mansion did equal the word abode. A mansion simply meant a dwelling place. That equaled the word abode in Greek. But today when people read the King James Version, they understand the word mansion according to the modern connotation.
In chapter fifteen to abide is not just to remain but to dwell. To abide in Me means to dwell in Me. This thought of dwelling and an abode is throughout chapters fourteen, fifteen, and sixteen. Who is this dwelling place? It is the Triune God! This is too mysterious! It would take us many days to get into it. But by looking at some of the crucial verses, we can realize that this mysterious message given by the Lord has a basic thought, that the Triune God, the Father, the Son, and the Spirit, want to be our dwelling place that we may enter into and dwell in that He may also dwell in us. Eventually, we who are dwelling in the Triune God will spontaneously become His dwelling place. Eventually we dwell in Him, and He dwells in us. There is a mutual dwelling. This is not a simple matter. How could one person enter into another person and how could the second enter into the first? It is impossible! So there is the need of the matter of life.
In 14:2 and 3 the Lord Jesus said, “In My Father’s house are many abodes; 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 am coming again and will receive you to Myself, that where I am you also may be.” These few verses have been misinterpreted by most Christians. They consider that the Lord Jesus went to the heavens after His resurrection to prepare a big mansion for them. I was taught this when I was young, but I had a question: Could this be the Lord’s salvation? Could the Lord’s salvation be that He died on the cross for our sins and that He was resurrected and that He ascended to the heavens and is now building a big mansion? As I mentioned before, in 1958 when I was in London the light came. No! this kind of interpretation is just religious. It is just traditional. Even it is like Buddhism, which teaches there is a kind of western heaven.
We all must see that to prepare the place means to die for our sins, to terminate our flesh, our natural life, our old creation, and to defeat the serpent and his serpentine nature within our being. This is to prepare the place.
In chapter fourteen when the Lord Jesus spoke of His coming back, He was not referring to His coming back the second time at the end of the age. He was referring to His coming back right after His resurrection. And He did come back. We know that on the day of His resurrection, early in the morning, He went to the Father secretly, and in the evening He came back to visit the disciples. At that time He breathed into them and told them to receive the Holy Pneuma, the Holy Breath, that is, the Holy Spirit (John 20:22). That was His coming back. He came back in another form.
When He was incarnated, He came in the flesh. But after resurrection He came back, not in the flesh, but in the form of breath, in the form of the Pneuma. He came back in the form of the Spirit, and by being the Spirit He got into the disciples. This was His coming back. In 20:16 the Lord indicated that He would ask the Father to give them another Comforter. Then in verse 18 He indicated that the other Comforter was just Himself. In verse 16 He used the pronoun He, but in verse 18 the He is changed to I. This proves that the other Comforter, the Spirit of reality who would come, is none other than Himself. This time He came as the Spirit, not to dwell among them, but to dwell within them forever. Since He came this time, He has never left His church.