16 "“I have said all these things to you to keep you from falling away. 2 They will put you out of the synagogues. Indeed, the hour is coming when whoever kills you will think he is offering service to God. 3 And they will do these things because they have not known the Father, nor me. 4 But I have said these things to you, that when their hour comes you may remember that I told them to you.
“I did not say these things to you from the beginning, because I was with you. 5 But now I am going to him who sent me, and none of you asks me, ‘Where are you going?’ 6 But because I have said these things to you, sorrow has filled your heart. 7 Nevertheless, I tell you the truth: it is to your advantage that I go away, for if I do not go away, the Helper will not come to you. But if I go, I will send him to you."
John 16:1-7
The chapter division here is artificial, and the thought of these verses continues that of what precedes them, in 15:17-27. The warnings that Jesus gives the disciples are grim and forbidding indeed, and it is well that He has already set over against them overwhelming reality of the Spirit’s help and grace (15:5), else they might well have lost heart because of the very severity of the pressures that were to come upon them. The words of 4a are of wide application. The kind of pressures of which here speaks may not be our particular problem at the moment, but none of us knows when they will be, or when we shall urgently need the grace He promises. But He gives us these assurances in advance, so that, in time of need, we may be recalled to them by Him who brings such things to our remembrance at the critical moment. In 7 there is one supremely important consideration to be grasped. The expediency of Christ’s going away is not so much that the Comforter, the Spirit , is greater than Christ – that could not be, for He is the Spirit of Christ – as that His going away completes, so to speak, His saving work in the world begun in His Incarnation and brought to its climax in His death and resurrection. His going to the Father is His exaltation, His assumption of power at the Father’s right hand, and it is on this basis that the gift of the Spirit is made to His people. Until this was accomplished, He was inevitably straitened. 'I have a baptism to be baptised with, and how I am straitened till it be accomplished', He once said. What He meant was that, until the baptism of His passion there were things He could not do in the world; He could not fulfil His destiny as the world's Saviour. The expediency of His going lay in the fact that, in going, He would be going unto death, and through death as Victor and hence to the Father's right hand, and that then the Spirit could come and make real in the hearts of His people all that He had wrought for them in His saving work.