Biblion Bible Commentary
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I Have Overcome the World
John 16:25-33
25 “I have spoken these things to you in figures of speech. But the time is coming when I will no more speak to you in figures of speech, but will tell you plainly about the Father. · WEB
They declare they finally understand, and are told they are about to scatter.
"I have spoken these things to you in figures of speech. But the time is coming when I will no more speak to you in figures of speech, but will tell you plainly about the Father" John 16:25.
The admission is honest about the whole discourse. Vines, birth pangs, a little while — these are pictures, and a day is promised when the pictures are not needed.
"For the Father himself loves you, because you have loved me, and have believed that I came from God" John 16:27.
The sentence removes a misunderstanding before it can form. He has just said they will ask the Father in his name, and someone might conclude that the Son must be interposed to make a reluctant Father willing.
The Father himself loves them. Nothing has to be extracted from him; the love is already there, and it is the origin of the whole arrangement — God so loved the world John 3:16.
"I came from the Father and have come into the world. Again, I leave the world and go to the Father" John 16:28.
The whole book in one sentence, and it is the plainest thing he has said all evening. From the Father, into the world, out of the world, to the Father — the arc the prologue set out John 1:1 John 1:14.
"Behold, now you are speaking plainly, and using no figures of speech. Now we know that you know all things... By this we believe that you came from God" John 16:29–30.
The disciples are delighted and it is touching and premature. They have understood the last sentence and are treating it as comprehension of everything — and their evidence is that he answered a question they never asked John 16:19, which is a small thing to build a confession on.
"Do you now believe?" John 16:31.
The question is not a denial and it is not warm. It is a query about the durability of what they have just declared, and the next verse gives it a term of hours.
"The time is coming, yes, and has now come, that you will be scattered, everyone to his own place, and you will leave me alone" John 16:32.
The prediction is unsparing and the phrase everyone to his own place is the bleakest part — not a group fleeing together but a company dissolving into individuals, each looking after himself.
"Yet I am not alone, because the Father is with me." Said the same night as the desertion is predicted, and it should be held beside the cry recorded in another Gospel Matthew 27:46. What he states here as unbroken is what will be broken, and that is what the cross costs.
"I have told you these things, that in me you may have peace. In the world you have trouble; but cheer up! I have overcome the world" John 16:33.
The last sentence of the discourse, and it holds two things without softening either. In the world you have trouble — present tense, stated as a permanent condition, with no suggestion that faith exempts anyone.
And the victory is announced in the perfect tense, before the arrest. I have overcome is said by a man who is about to be tied up, tried, flogged and executed — which means the overcoming is not the avoidance of any of it.
The peace offered is located: in me, not in the circumstances, which is the only place it could survive the next day.
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