“I SHOULD Have Told You”

“Let not your heart be troubled: ye believe in God, believe also in me.

In my Father's house are many mansions: if it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you.

And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again, and receive you unto myself; that where I am, there ye may be also.

And whither I go ye know, and the way ye know.” John 14:1-4

For some reason, this time in reading John, the words “if it were not so, I would have told you” jumped off the page and grabbed my attention.

It constantly amazes my how true it is that “the word of God is quick, and powerful.” Though it was written so long ago, yet it is still alive and consistently speaks with new freshness. We just have to have eyes to “see.”

As the layers of my predisposed theological background continue to peel away, I notice things that I never knew I needed to consider. Such is the case in verse 2: “if it were not so, I would have told you.”

Bear with me a moment. I want to apply the truth of these words to a wider context.

Yeshua is getting ready to depart from this world. He wants to comfort, encourage and prepare His disciples for life after He’s gone. One of the ways He does this is by assuring them that they will all be together again in the glorious realm of the Heavenly Father. He wants them to be so sure of this that He lets them know He’s going on ahead to make preparations for the grand reunion. Awesome.

He highlights this fact by telling them that if it had been otherwise He would have informed them. I take this to mean that Yeshua equipped His disciples with the knowledge and information they were going to need after He was gone.

Therefore I submit that …

Yeshua would have instructed His disciples, in this as well as other things, regarding what they would need to know after He was gone. He would not allow them to think one thing … only for them to find out something different later on.

Make sense? I think so.

Let’s expand on this then —

Would Yeshua go out of His way to assure His disciples nothing was changing in relation to this topic and not let them know that other things WERE going to be changing?

Does that make sense? I don’t think so.

And yet, we’re suppose to believe that Yeshua did in fact leave without so much as hinting that major changes were on the horizon. In other words, if Yeshua was going to be doing away with or fulfilling other things, why didn’t He give the disciples, and us, any heads up?

Things like:

The Sabbath being changed to Sunday.

Eating no pork to — “all you can eat in the sheet.” (Acts 10:11)

Moving from Biblical Holidays to only man-made holidays.

Having the angry God on the left side of the Book and the loving God on the right side of the Book.

Israel being replaced by the “Church.”

The Law being for the Jews and Grace being for the Gentiles.

You get the point, I hope.

If all this was to change, why not one word from Yeshua Himself? Don’t you think that “if it were so, [He] would have told [them]?” I really do think He would have.

So, if He didn’t tell anyone about all these “changes” then maybe, just maybe, they weren’t supposed to change after all. It was this line of inquiry that brought me, after many years, to where I am now.

But please, let me stress some things here.

We’re not talking about eternal consequences in relation to matters of salvation. Nobody looses or gains salvation by any of these. None of these plunges a person into the realm of abject heresy. These are not doctrinal issues for which to die over.

However …

They are a window into a person’s perspective on the Bible as a whole and on the God of the whole Bible.

As I see it, there are only two choices.

Either —

God is the same yesterday, today, and forever.

Or …

He changes and leaves His children in doubt as to whether He’ll be changing some time again in the future?

I can’t serve a fickle God like that. And I don’t. My God never changes and will never change. He doesn’t leave His children uncertain as to what they can expect from Him.

Let me close with this illustration. I’ve mentioned this in the past but it bears repeating here.

In college we had a hall monitor that did room checks every morning. Our beds had to be made. The floor had to be clean. The sink couldn’t be filthy. The mirror had to be clean. The trash had to be empty. If any of these weren’t done properly, the person in charge of the specific infraction got demerits. It was frustrating. We all thought he was over zealous. But in spite of that, we ultimately believed he was the best monitor we ever had. Why? Because he was consistent day-in-and-day-out. He Never Changed. He was the same yesterday, today and everyday.

It therefore seems logical to me that we should have a God that is at least as consistent as my hall monitor.

Or maybe …

He SHOULD have told us.