Place For You

Then when the Lord your God brings you to the land He promised your ancestors Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob to give you---a land with large, fine cities you did not build – Deuteronomy 6:10 (NET)

As Israel is on the verge of entering into their long-awaited land of promise, after forty years of wandering in the wilderness, Moses speaks to the people and reminds them of their God’s faithfulness to His covenant with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Along with that, he reminds them of the covenant that God had made with His people forty years prior, at Mount Sinai, which had as its basis, the statement that “The Lord is our God, the Lord is one! You must love the Lord your God with your whole mind, your whole being, and all your strength” (6:4-5). In His faithfulness, due to His love for His people, not only was God going to be bringing them into a land of promise, but He was going to provide in super-abundance, doing more than they would have asked or thought. He was going to deliver to them “large, fine cities” which they “did not build” (6:10b).

Through His servant Moses, God informed His people that the cities would consist of “houses filled with choice things you did not accumulate, hewn out cisterns you did not dig, and vineyards and olive groves you did not plant” (6:11a). God told His people that from these things, they would “eat your fill” (6:11b). Of course, with the super-abundance of blessings that were being bestowed upon them, there would be a temptation to forget the One that brought them into the place of blessed promise. After speaking of the good things that were going to be coming their way, due to God’s faithfulness, they receive a reminder of that very faithfulness, with an exhortation to their own faithfulness to the covenant, saying “be careful not to forget the Lord Who brought you out of Egypt, that place of slavery” (6:12). In this passage that is undergirded by their God’s sovereign faithfulness, as He demonstrates His power to fulfill His promises, we learn about a place that God has prepared for His people. God was taking His people into that which represented the very first part of His creation that He intended to be redeemed and restored.

As we consider that preparation, our thoughts should be quickened to the words of Jesus that we find in the Gospel of John. In the fourteenth chapter of that Gospel, we hear Jesus saying, “There are many dwelling places in My Father’s house” (14:2a). As it was for Israel, so it was for Jesus’ disciples. Moses, the deliverer of Israel, had spoken to the people of the covenant about the land of the Father’s promise---the land in which God said that He would dwell with His people---telling them that it possessed many dwelling places for them. Here, Jesus, the deliverer of a renewed Israel, speaks to the people of the renewed covenant about the land of the Father’s promise---the place in which His people will one day dwell with Him---also telling them that it was a place of many dwelling places. These words from Jesus mark the beginning of what is generally known as His “farewell discourse,” as they follow the “last supper” and Judas’ having gone out to complete his betrayal of Jesus. As He is now on the path to the cross, Jesus says, “I am going away to make ready a place for you” (14:2c).

He knew where He was going, and as Israel’s Messiah, He knew what it was that His death would accomplish. He knew that He was going down into the curse of death on behalf of His Israel, but did so in a complete trust in the promise-keeping God of Israel---Whom He trusted with His whole mind, being, and strength---to fulfill the expectations of His promise, to raise up Messiah from the dead, to conquer death through that Resurrection, and to inaugurate the kingdom of heaven in a radically transformed creation in which Jesus reigned and Resurrection power was available through the agency of the Spirit for all those who were moved to a trusting allegiance to Him as Lord and King, for the purpose of bringing God’s glory to bear in this world.

Because Jesus spoke constantly of the kingdom of God on earth, when He says that He is going to make ready a place for His disciples, we can understand that He is speaking of the kingdom of God that was going to be established with His Resurrection. This would be completely in line with the Jewish worldview, which looked to a resurrection of the righteous dead and a restoration of the creation to a pre-fall condition, with God as ruler through His Messiah. For Israel, and Jesus as the representative of Israel, this would be a world in which renewal had been commenced, in which heaven was going to breaking in and shining forth through God’s covenant people. When Jesus says “if I go and make ready a place for you, I will come again and take you to be with Me, so that where I am you may be too” (14:3), He seems to be speaking of His Resurrection, as we consider the Apostle Paul’s repeated insistence that all those that trust in Jesus as King, will be raised up from the dead in the exact same way in which He was raised up from the dead---into a world now subject to the kingdom of God and Jesus as its ruler. Finally, because He had spoken so many times of His death and His Resurrection, Jesus rather pointedly says to His disciples, though they never grasped the message or wanted to believe it, that “you know the way where I am going” (14:4).