John 16:33 → Psalms 50:6

At the close of the farewell discourse Jesus gathers the whole of it into a single word of assurance: "I have told you these things so that in Me you may have peace. In the world you will have tribulation. But take courage; I have overcome the world!" (16:33). The perfect tense — "I have overcome" (νενίκηκα), the one occurrence of this triumph-word in John's Gospel, though it becomes the drumbeat of his later writings (1 John 5:4-5; Revelation 2-3) — declares the victory as already accomplished on the very eve of the cross. The Old Testament ground is the vindicating righteousness of God: "the heavens proclaim His righteousness, for God Himself is Judge" (Psalm 50:6) — the God who comes to render the verdict that prevails over every foe. What the psalm ascribes to God the Judge, Christ claims in the first person: His conquest of "the world" is the enforcement of God's righteous cause against the accusing powers, won not by escaping tribulation but by passing through it to the cross and out the far side. The telos is the disciples' peace — a peace that does not depend on the absence of trouble but on union with the Victor ("in Me you may have peace"). Because He has overcome, courage is not wishful defiance but sober confidence: the believer's tribulation is real, yet it is the tribulation of those on the winning side of a battle their Lord has already won.