Scripture Authenticated
Published by Stanley Pouw in 2022 · 2 January 2022
From John 13 through John 16, essentially, there is everything that relates to Christian life. It is a great resource and treasure. So we have finally reached John 16:12 – 15, “There is so much more I want to tell you, but you can’t bear it now. 13 When the Spirit of truth comes, He will guide you into all truth. He will not speak on his own but will tell you what He has heard.”
“He will tell you about the future. 14 He will bring me glory by telling you whatever He receives from Me. 15 All that belongs to the Father is mine; this is why I said, ‘The Spirit will tell you whatever he receives from me.’” We study the Bible in every book, every chapter, every paragraph, every sentence, and every word, because every word is from God. This is the revelation from God.
And that is precisely what our text that I just read to you is talking about. It is our Lord Jesus speaking concerning the Holy Spirit’s work in giving us, in particular, the New Testament. Our Lord quoted the Old Testament often, and He explained it, and He interpreted it, and He called on people to study it because it was the Word of God and revealed the truth of God.
Our Lord actually said in the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 5:18, “that not one letter or one stroke (in a Hebrew letter) would ever be removed from the Word of God until it was all fulfilled.” And then in John 10 Jesus said, “Scripture cannot be broken.” It is one continuous revelation from beginning to end, from Genesis to Revelation that cannot be broken. It is a chain that cannot be broken.
And as a child, He grew in wisdom and knowledge with His perfect mind, He came to a perfect understanding of the Old Testament. And because He perfectly understood the Old Testament, from the very revelation of God in the Old Testament, He knew what was ahead of Him, because the Old Testament detailed His career, detailed His life, detailed His death, and detailed His resurrection.
The writers of the New Testament say about the Old Testament, “Every word is God-breathed. Every word comes from the Holy Spirit.” And here the Lord Jesus who affirmed the Old Testament now declares His affirmation of the coming New Testament, which will also be authored by the Holy Spirit. This is where our Lord on Thursday night, Passion Week, gives them His final promises, and His final warnings.
At first, it’s all about love and all the gifts that heaven is going to pour because of God’s love. And then in John 15:18, it turns from an evening of love to an evening where the world is going to pour out hate. And Jesus explained to them why they hate the disciples and all believers, and why they will continue and do continue to hate true Christians even up to now, and will until Jesus comes back.
It is because we are not of the world, we’re not part of that system, and that system is Satan’s system, while we are aliens. It is because they hated Jesus Christ; and we bear His name, so they hate us. And it is, finally, because they don’t know God. They are cut off from the life of God; therefore, cut off from spiritual reality. Then Jesus said, “I’m leaving. I’m going to die.”
So they’re in the midst of this fearful confusion. “You say You are going to prepare a place for us. You say You’re going to give us peace, joy, love; we don’t feel any of it. We have no peace, we feel no joy. You expect us to represent You and to proclaim Your gospel to the world, and then You tell us the world will hate us, they will throw us out of the synagogue, and they will kill us.”
Essentially, all the apostles were murdered except John who was exiled to Patmos. How is that possible if You’re not here?” because He was the source of everything. So Jesus answers, “I’m going to go, but I’m going to send somebody else.” John 14:16, “I’ll ask the Father. He’ll give you another Helper to come alongside and help you, who will be with you forever.” It’s the Holy Spirit.
This is the promise that was fulfilled on the Day of Pentecost when the Holy Spirit came. And since then, every Christian is the temple of the Holy Spirit. This is the mystery of the Trinity: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Jesus says, “I’m going, but the Spirit is coming, and He is the same as I am. The Spirit will provide you all the truth you need so that you can prosecute the world.
You indict the world by measuring people against the revelation of God. And the New Testament condemns the world for failure to believe in Jesus Christ. 1 Corinthians 16 says, “If you do not love the Lord Jesus Christ, you’re damned,” The New Testament says that Jesus is the only one who by His own holiness could enter into the presence of God, the only one. Nobody else can.
So we condemn the world as being unholy and unacceptable to God. And if you think you’re going to be escaping judgment you are wrong, because the New Testament shows us that the ruler of this world, Satan, has already been judged and sentenced. And if the most powerful force for evil in the universe has been judged, you as a person that are lesser are not about to escape.
Here we find out what Jesus Christ thinks about the New Testament, that it is all the product of the Holy Spirit. Paul says, “All Scripture is given by inspiration of God, God-breathed.” Peter says, “Men moved by the Holy Spirit wrote.” That is our Lord’s view laid out in verses 12 to 15. Did you notice that it refers to the Father in verse 15, it refers to the Spirit in verse 13, and Jesus speaking refers to Me and Mine.
So you have in these few verses the entire Trinity involved in the revelation of the New Testament. Here is our Lord Jesus providing pre-authentication of the, as yet, unwritten New Testament. Jesus Christ even speaks of it at the end of verse 13, “The Holy Spirit will disclose to you what is to come.” Not all the revelation was done in the Old Testament, there is more to come.
There are things to think about. First, the need for Holy Spirit revelation. Without the New Testament we would be in a dire situation. We would be lost if we didn’t know the truth as revealed in Scripture. There are all kinds of lies and false representations, and we measure all of that against the Bible. Verse 12, “I have many more things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now.”
Well, what more things? Everything contained in the New Testament which is so much more. But Jesus says, “You can’t bear it now.” There are a couple of reasons why they couldn’t handle it. In verse 6, their judgment is completely clouded by sorrow. They thought He would come, conquer the Romans, throw them out, and establish the world supremacy of Israel. But none of it happened.
Jesus will die. In John 2:19, “He says, ‘Destroy this temple; in three days I’ll raise it up.’ And the Jews said, ‘It took 46 years to build this temple and You will raise it in three days?’ But He was speaking of the temple of His body.” So He was talking about dying and rising from the dead. In the next verse it says, “So when He was raised from the dead His disciples remembered that He said this.”
John 12:16, “These things His disciples did not understand at the first. But when Jesus was glorified after the resurrection, then they remembered that these things were written of Him, and that they had done these things to Him.” The point is, up until the death of Christ and the resurrection of Christ, they didn’t get it. There was a lot more Jesus wanted to say to them, but they were not in any position to receive it.
We see this even after Christ dies. In John 20:6, Simon Peter comes to the tomb, goes in, he sees that the Lord is not there. Verse 8, “The other disciple, John, who had first come to the tomb also entered. For as yet, up to that point when John saw that the body was not there, they did not understand the Scripture, that He must rise again from the dead.” That just wasn’t in their thinking.
Another significant event was the transfiguration of the Lord. After the transfiguration, they were coming down off the mountain in Mark 9:9 and “Christ gave them orders not to relate to anyone what they had seen until the Son of Man rose from the dead. They discussed what rising from the dead meant.” They just didn’t want to believe that Jesus was going to die.
The point is in John 16 that Jesus couldn’t say any more about what was coming because they didn’t understand what He had said up to that point. It wasn’t until after the resurrection it began to dawn on them. It became clear on John when he showed up at the tomb and the Lord wasn’t there. And it took a long while for the rest of them. There were a few on the road to Emmaus who also did not understand.
Remember what Jesus did? He explained the sections of the Old Testament, and spoke of all the things related to Messiah’s suffering and glory, and it dawned on them. And then that night of the resurrection, Sunday night, He went to the room where all the disciples were, and in Luke 24, explained that this was all in the Old Testament, and that He had fulfilled the Scripture.
And then Acts 1 says, “He spent 40 days speaking to them of things concerning the kingdom.” And after Jesus rose then the Holy Spirit came and really illuminated their minds. So He says, “Look, I have so much more to say, a whole New Testament worth. But you can’t handle it. I can’t even get you to understand where you should be, let alone the things that are beyond that.”
Verse 13, “When He, the Spirit of truth, comes, He will guide you into all the truth.” Deuteronomy 12:32 says, “Don’t add anything to this and don’t take anything away.” Revelation 22:18-19 says, “If anyone adds to these things, God will add to him the plagues that are written in this book; 19 and if anyone takes away from the words of the book of this prophecy, God shall take away his part from the Book of Life.”
The Spirit of truth will allow you supernaturally to remember everything Jesus did and everything Jesus said to write it down in the four gospels.” And then He will inspire the story of the church in the book of Acts, and then He will inspire the theology of the gospel in the Epistles, and then He will inspire the great book of Revelation. All the truth, from the virgin birth to the eternal state.
The Bible is the testimony of God. 1 Corinthians 2:4 says, “So my preaching, are not persuasive words of wisdom, but it is the demonstration of the Spirit and of power, so your faith doesn’t rest on the wisdom of men, but on the power of God.” Verse 7, “the wisdom of God in a mystery, the hidden wisdom which God ordained before the ages for our glory, 8 which none of the rulers of this age understood.”
Verse 10-12, “But God has revealed them to us through His Spirit. For the Spirit searches all things, yes, the deep things of God. 11 For what man knows the things of a man except the spirit of the man which is in him? Even so no one knows the things of God except the Spirit of God. 12 Now we have received, the Spirit who is from God, that we might know the things that have been freely given to us by God.”
What is the Bible? Spiritual thoughts in spiritual words. The Holy Spirit is going to give you words. So verse 16 says, “You have the mind of Christ.” You know how Christ thinks, and that’s how God thinks, because that’s what the Holy Spirit has revealed. So your Bible basically reveals the mind of Christ, the mind of God. This is the Word of God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit.
The Holy Spirit doesn’t speak on His own initiative. Now, they would understand that because that’s exactly what Jesus said to them constantly. In John 5:30, “I can do nothing on my own initiative. As I hear, I judge; and My judgment is just, because I do not seek My own will, but the will of Him who sent Me. If I alone testify about Myself, My testimony is not true.”
The purpose of the revelation in verse 14, “He will glory Me.” It’s fair to say there’s much in the Old Testament about Christ because that’s what Jesus said: “Search the Scripture, for they speak of Me.” And on the Road to Emmaus He went to the Old Testament to all the Scriptures that spoke about Him and explained the prophecies of His suffering and His glory to them.
Who’s the main person in the four gospels? Jesus Christ. Who’s the main person in the book of Acts preaching the gospel by the apostles to establish the church and becomes the head of the church? Christ. Who’s the main person in all the Epistles that explain the meaning of the gospel? Christ. Who’s the main person in Revelation? Christ. “These are written about Christ that you might believe and have life in His name.”
Now, if you’re going to demonstrate by the Scriptures that Jesus was the Christ, you have to have the record of Jesus and compare it with the Old Testament, right? We compare the Old Testament prophecies of Christ with the New Testament revelation of Christ to demonstrate that He is the promised Messiah. So this is what the Holy Spirit is going to do in verse 15, “He is going to testify about Me and declare it to you.”
So we have all we need, because all the promises of Christ are here, and the Holy Spirit deposits them in our lives. All the theology of Christ is here and the Spirit instructs us as to its reality. All the necessary truth to prosecute the world and then preach the gospel that saves is here. So our Lord makes a promise to the disciples that is so essential: we need the Holy Spirit to write the New Testament. Let us pray.