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I Go Now to Prepare a Place for You?

By Jeremy Myers
30 Comments

I Go Now to Prepare a Place for You?

A reader sent in this question about Jesus’ statement in John 14:2, “I go now to prepare a place for you.” Here is the question:

If Jesus is all powerful, why does he say, “I go now to prepare a place for you”?

On a related note, I remember watching old movies when the white colonialist looks down on natives who believe their God will return and thinks they’re simple; but isn’t that what we are doing when we say Jesus will return?

Also, I’ve sometimes heard people say that the reason Jesus is waiting to return is because He wants to save more people, but if that is true, why doesn’t He just wait forever?

I started to look at these questions yesterday, and gave a broad-brush answer to the questions. This post will look in more detail at the statement of Jesus in John 14:2 where He says, “I go now to prepare a place for you.”

John 14:2 in Tradition

Upper room discourseJohn 14:2 is part of the Upper Room Discourse, and is usually understood to mean that Jesus is going to go back to heaven, where He will be at work to prepare mansions or dwelling places for the church, and when He is done, He will come back and take us to live with Him forever.

In fact, it is often taught (and I have taught it this way myself) that Jesus has in mind the Jewish wedding tradition where after a man and woman were betrothed to be married, the man would go off and build a home for his new bride.

The construction of this new home would take several months, or even up to a couple years, and the bride-to-be did not know exactly when the groom-to-be would be finished. Her only option was to wait and to be prepared.

When the man finished building his home, he would gather his friends and family and begin a wedding procession from his new home through town to his bride’s house. By the time they arrived, it would be a huge parade and party. The bride would go out to meet her husband, and they would return to his new house, where there would be a big Jewish wedding, full of food and festivities.

So it is often taught that when Jesus says, “I go now to prepare a place for you” this is what He had in mind. He is the Groom and the church is His Bride, and He has gone off to prepare a dwelling place for us, and we do not know how long it will take or when He will come for us, but we need to be ready and wait patiently. When he returns, He will take us to be with Him, and there will be a big party.

That is how John 14:2 is often read, interpreted, understood, and taught.

Honestly, I don’t have too much of an issue with this understanding of Jesus’ future return. I do think that Jesus will return physically in the future, and that since we do not know exactly when this will be, we need to be ready and wait patiently. Having said this, however, I do not think that this is what Jesus was referring to in John 14:2 when He said, “I go now to prepare a place for you.”

What did Jesus Mean when He said, “I go now to prepare a place for you”?

To understand what Jesus means when He says, “I go now to prepare a place for  you” we must look at the context. In the first half of John 14:2, Jesus says, “In My Father’s House are many mansions.”

Mansions is not the best translation of the word used here. It might be best translated as “dwelling places.” It is not exactly referring to buildings, but to rooms within a building.

Many people hear this, and think, “What? All I’m going to get in heaven is a room? What about the mansion I was promised?” Well… the truth is that Jesus is not promising to pass out mansions. Sorry! Of course, if you were only a follower of Jesus because you wanted to get a mansion, you probably were not following Him for the right reasons.

in my fathers house are many mansions

So okay, what does Jesus mean by “dwelling places?” Well, it is critical to understand first what Jesus means by “My Father’s House.” The Jews to whom Jesus was talking would have understood Him to be talking about the temple in Jerusalem. This is also how Jesus referred to the temple on occasion, as in when He cleansed the temple in John 2:16.

Furthermore, it is important to know that there were many rooms, or “dwelling places” in the Jerusalem temple (cf. 1 Kings 6:5-6; Jeremiah 35:1-4). From this, it seems that when Jesus says, “In My Father’s House are many dwelling places… and I go now to prepare a place for you,” He is saying that He is going to prepare a place for His disciples in the temple.

But why would He do that when He has prophesied that the temple is going to be destroyed? And why would the disciples want a room in the temple precincts? Those rooms were generally reserved for priests and temple servants. The disciples were not priests, and they already had families, jobs, and homes of their own.

Here we get into the New Testament teaching about how we as believers in Christ are the new temple (1 Corinthians 6:19), and how we are the new priesthood (1 Peter 2:9).

Though it would take time for His disciples to understand all this, Jesus was not talking about preparing a place for His followers in the temple on a hill in Jerusalem. No, Jesus was talking about preparing a whole new Temple and a whole new Priesthood. The true Father’s House was about to be revealed to the world, and Jesus was going to prepare it. Jesus was going to reveal it.

How, when, and where did Jesus do that? He did it on the cross, and through His death, burial, and resurrection.

When Jesus said, “I go now to prepare a place for you,” He was not talking about going to heaven so that at some future date He would return and bring us to be with Him. No, when Jesus said, “I go now to prepare a place for you,” He was talking about making a new temple, a new priesthood, and a new way of living as God’s family.

When Jesus said, “I go now to prepare a place for you,” He was talking about going to the cross.

Again, this fits with the entire context of the Upper Room Discourse. John has been telling them that He is going to suffer and die, and that they are going to deny and betray Him (John 13). The disciples are understandably upset about this, and so Jesus begins his Upper Room Discourse with some encouraging words: He is doing this for their benefit. He goes to prepare a place for them so that they can be with Him forever.

What does this Mean for Us as the Church?

What does this mean for us as the church? Does this mean that Jesus is not going to return? Of course not! He will return.

But here is the thing. In some sense, in and through the church, Jesus has already returned! He returns in us. We are the ongoing incarnation of Jesus Christ. We are His hands and feet the world. We are the Body of Christ on earth.

Yes, Jesus is still going to return physically at some point in the future, but between His resurrection and His future second coming, the church is to live and love others like Jesus did.

The world needs Jesus, and Jesus sent the church to be Himself to the world. So what happens to the world if the church just sits around and waits for Jesus to return?

Jesus went to the cross to prepare a place for us. His resurrection and the coming of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost is His coming in Spirit and power into our lives, showing that the place for us has been finished. And where is our place? Not in heaven, sitting on a cloud, strumming a harp, enjoying eternal bliss. No, the place that Jesus prepared for us is right here on planet earth. This is our place. This is our home. This is our “mansion.”

I go now to prepare a place for you

Jesus, through His death, burial, and resurrection, creation a new people of God on earth to be the living temple of God, which is filled with the Spirit of God, so that all people on earth have unmediated access to God. Because of how Jesus made dwelling places for the church in the Father’s House, people no longer have to travel to a building on a hill in Jerusalem to meet with God. The temple of God is wherever the church is, because we are now the temple of God, and God’s dwelling place is with us and we with Him.

If you are a follower of Jesus, please understand that Jesus did not give us eternal life simply so we could wait around on earth until we die so we can finally be with God forever in heaven. No!

We are not waiting for Jesus to finish preparing some dwelling place in the sky so that when He is done, we can escape this sinful earth to be with Him forever. No, the dwelling place is already finished. He finished it through His death and resurrection. And since He rose from the dead, He received us to Himself so that we are in Him and He in us, and together, we go out to batter down the gates of hell, to set the captives free, and to proclaim liberty to the oppressed.

God is Uncategorized Bible & Theology Topics: end times, John 14:2, return of Jesus, Theology of Jesus, Theology of the End Times

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Why is Jesus delaying His Return?

By Jeremy Myers
11 Comments

Why is Jesus delaying His Return?

A reader sent in this question about Jesus’ statement in John 14:2, “I go now to prepare a place for you.” The reader wants to know why Jesus is delaying His return. Here is the question:

If Jesus is all powerful, why does he say, “I go now to prepare a place for you”?

On a related note, I remember watching old movies when the white colonialist looks down on natives who believe their God will return and thinks they’re simple; but isn’t that what we are doing when we say Jesus will return?

Also, I’ve sometimes heard people say that the reason Jesus is waiting to return is because He wants to save more people, but if that is true, why doesn’t He just wait forever?

This is somewhat a multi-pronged question, which requires a multi-pronged answer. Not surprisingly, my answer will be… less than traditional. Also not surprisingly, I need two posts to answer these questions… This post will provide a general answer to the questions above, and tomorrow’s post will look at the statement of Jesus in John 14:2 in more detail.

Does Jesus Need Time to Prepare a Place for Us?

First, the reader is right to think it strange that Jesus requires time to go prepare a place for us. I have sometimes heard preachers say this: “It took God six days to create the universe; so far, Jesus has been preparing a place for us for 2000 years! Imagine what a place it will be!”

new heavens and new earthWell… that preaches…. but is it true? The person who sent in the question is right. Technically, if God is omnipotent, that is, if He is all-powerful, then He didn’t even need six days to form creation. He could have done so with a snap of his divine fingers. For reasons which I won’t get into here, God chose to form and fill creation through a much slower process than simply by snapping His fingers. I don’t care whether you think it was over six days or six-billion years, creation was not instantaneous.

So there is a reason God takes time to accomplish His will. And whether it takes six days or 2000 years, I don’t think we can say that the amount of the time which passes has any bearing whatsoever on the complexity or beauty of the work that God is doing. So we can’t say that the delay of Jesus to return is evidence that the place he is preparing for us will be exponentially better than the place we have now. I think it will be better, but not because of how much time it is taking… time has nothing to do with it.

So why is it taking so long for Jesus to return? I want to explain this statement in more detail (which I will do in tomorrow’s post), but let’s temporarily move on to the second and third questions sent in by the reader.

Will Jesus Really Return?

The reader asked about white colonialists looking down on natives who believed that their god would return, and asked how this is any different than the Christian belief that our God will return.

return of JesusI do admit, on the surface, it does seem rather strange, though I never made the connection with the colonialists. For me, the promised return of Jesus always reminded me of the prophesied return of King Arthur. You know… King Arthur and his knights of the round table. Did you know that there are predictions that King Arthur will come again? Most everybody scoffs at the idea, realizing that it is just part of the legend that surrounds the stories of King Arthur.

But this is how many non-Christians view the Christian belief that Jesus will come again. None of us think that King Arthur will come again, so why do we believe that Jesus will? The short answer is that unlike King Arthur, Jesus was God incarnate, and Jesus rose from the dead. This answer is not satisfactory to people who do not believe the Scriptural accounts about Jesus, and to them I recommend N. T. Wright’s book, The Resurrection of the Son of God and the book by Paul Eddy and Greg  Boyd, The Jesus Legend. Both of these books do a masterful job showing how the Gospel accounts of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus are historically reliable. No other explanation really makes sense.

And yet, I think it was wrong for the colonialists to look down on the people among whom they worked. I think that the natives were right in their belief that God would return, but only slightly wrong in the identity of this God. The colonialists should have affirmed and praised the people for their belief. The desire to reconnect with God and be restored into relationship with Him is a universal belief, and is something which God has placed in the hearts of all people.

Christians should almost never look down on the religious traditions and beliefs of other cultures, but should instead look for the ways which God has interwoven Himself into their traditions and beliefs, and then work to show how the longings of their hearts which are expressed in these traditions and beliefs are actually fulfilled in Jesus Christ.

But let’s move on to the third question…

Is Jesus Waiting for the Full Number of Gentiles to Come In?

Sometimes it is taught that the reason Jesus hasn’t returned is because He is waiting for the full number of Gentiles to come in. This idea comes from Romans 11:25, where Paul writes something along these lines.

return of JesusAgain, I have often heard it taught that there is this big heavenly scoreboard in heaven which is counting down toward zero, and every time a person believes in Jesus for eternal life, that countdown gets closer to zero. When it finally does reach zero, Jesus will return. When I have heard this preached, the audience is always told to go out and evangelize and witness to their friends and neighbors, because you never know if all of heaven and earth is just waiting on you to tell your neighbor about Jesus because they are the final Gentile to be brought in.

I am not going to say anything about this. I think this sort of teaching is manipulative and puts lots of people on guilt-trips, and causes people to think that the only thing that matters is preaching the gospel to our neighbors, and getting another notch on our evangelism belt (or dropping another number off the divine scoreboard), rather than actually getting to know our neighbors and love them like Jesus.

A proper understanding of what Paul is saying in Romans 11:25 would require a detailed study of Romans 9-11, something I am not going to tackle here. But suffice it to say for now, I don’t think it has anything to do with a divine scoreboard in heaven. Our evangelism efforts do not speed up or delay the return of Jesus Christ.

I think there is a great misunderstanding in the church about what it means for Jesus to return, and what it meant for Him to “go away” and much of this misunderstanding has led to great manipulation and spiritual abuse in the Christian church.

Once we properly understand what Jesus meant when He talked about going away to prepare a place for us, and what He meant when He said He would come again, I think we will see that our job as Christians right now is not just to sit at the bus station waiting for Jesus to come pick us up and deliver us from this sinful earth so we can go to the divine paradise club in heaven. That, I think, is a big lie… but we will look more at that tomorrow.

God is Uncategorized Bible & Theology Topics: Bible and Theology Questions, end times, full number of Gentiles, John 14:2, prophecy, resurrection, return of Jesus, Theology of Jesus, Theology of the End Times

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