Stuff About Things
Going Home! Is there a more heart- warming thought? Poets, song-writers, and story-tellers have played the full scale of our emotions with this theme, but it can not be exhausted.
It conjures up visions of warmth and safety, with mother and dad. Long forgotten moments of joy, intimate corners in the attic where we kept our childhood treasures, a swing beneath our favorite tree — these flash through our memory like tiny bits of honey — so sweet — so soon gone. Our head tells us the past can never be recaptured, but our heart refuses to believe it. Some day we will go home, and things will be exactly as we have long remembered them. And even as we reprove our heart with reality, we have tasted the sweet sorrow of the universal longing for home.
The many mansions of John 14:2 are incorrectly thought of as palaces or ones gold (mansion) that is silver lined — as the song Mansions Over the Hilltop puts it. Scriptures do describe the heavenly Jerusalem as a city of gold, whose walls and foundation are precious stones — but never with the crass materialism often shown in our use of such terms. Heavens treasure is far richer than that which could be spent for possessions or fleshly gratifications. Its beauty and value are represented to humans by human terminology (how else?) yet it is the abiding place that Jesus emphasizes. We will dwell there, and that spells HOME.
The Greek none is only used in two places: Jn. 14:2, and 23. Bagster says it means a stay in any place.. . The word is from meno, remain, abide, tarry, continued presence. it does not describe the elaborateness of a house, as does mansion in our current usage, but says here you may no more uncertainty, no more subject to day-to-day circumstances, no more wondering, waiting, wishing. You may here abide, here remain.
The second use of the word (Jn. 14:23) is also significant. If a man love me, he will keep my words: and my father will love him, and we will come unto him, and make our abode with him. In pagan philosophy the ultimate is to lose identity in nothingness with the universe; but the child of God finds true identity in his relationship with his Creator. He spends his earth-time in faithful service, and confidently awaits the final home to be with the Father.