John 16:4

John 16:4. But these things have I spoken unto you, that, when their hour is come, ye may remember them, that I told you. The analogy of such passages as chaps. John 2:22; John 12:16; John 14:26, seems to show that the ‘remembering' here spoken of is not an effort of memory alone. It involves the deeper insight given by experience and the teaching of the Spirit into the meaning and purpose of trial in the economy of grace. The disciples shall so remember that they shall have a fresh insight into the mystery of the Cross. Nay more, they shall learn to feel themselves peculiarly identified with their Lord. As there was an ‘hour' in which His enemies were permitted to rage against Him, an hour which was theirs (Luke 23:53), so there is an hour again given them when they shall rage against the preachers of the truth (comp. John 16:2).

And these things I told you not from the beginning, because I was with you. Had Jesus, then, not told them these things in the earliest period of His ministry? It is often urged that passages such as Matthew 5:10; Matthew 9:15; Matthew 10:16, show us that He had, and that it is impossible to reconcile these with the words before us. Yet we have only to put ourselves into the position of our Lord and His disciples in order to see that there is no contradiction. It is not merely that He now speaks, or that they now understand, with greater clearness than before. His ‘going away' is an essential part of ‘these things,' and with it all that He now says is so connected that it has its meaning only in the light of that departure. He could not then have so spoken ‘from the beginning,' for the simple reason that He was not then going away. General allusions to their coming sufferings there might be and were. But that they would have to take His place, and, in doing so, to find that His trials were their trials, He had never said. That solemn lesson was connected only with the present moment, when their training was completed, and they were to be sent forth to be as He had been.