The Holy Spirit Illumines
Published by Stanley Pouw in 2021 · 17 October 2021
Look at John 14:25-27, “These things I have spoken to you while being present with you. 26 But the Helper, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in My name, He will teach you all things, and bring to your remembrance all things that I said to you. 27 Peace I leave with you, My peace I give to you; not as the world gives do I give to you. Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid.”
So He promises to His disciples and all who will come after them: that He will come and take them to heaven. But in the meantime, all of heaven’s resources are available through prayer. Then our Lord promises that throughout our lives, and on into eternity, we will enjoy the presence of the Trinity. The Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit all together will live in us.
There is another promise. Verse 26, “But the Helper, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in My name, He will teach you all things, and bring to your remembrance all that I said to you.” The greatest gift that God has ever given the world is the truth. The truth about Himself, about us, about time and eternity, about life and death, about origins, about judgment, about salvation, about heaven, and about hell.
In a world of liars, and of lies, in a world where deception abounds because the whole world is controlled by the evil one who is the arch deceiver, and who applies his deception through a mass of fallen angels identified as demons, and has held captive the entire human race. In the midst of all of the deception of Satan and duped human beings; God deposits the truth.
It says in Exodus 34:6, “It is the Lord God, who abounds in truth.” And it tells us in Psalm 119:142 and 151 that His Word is truth. The prophet Zechariah wrote that one day, the Messiah will come to set up His kingdom in the world. And Jerusalem will be given a new name. In Zechariah 8:3 the new name of Jerusalem will be Truth City. In the meantime, the church is the pillar of truth.
Zechariah also tells us that His people will love truth. Because God is true, Christ is true and the Holy Spirit is true. Jesus always tells the truth. And here, He promises the Holy Spirit is the Spirit of Truth who will inspire the biblical writers to write the truth, which will be contained in the Word of God and handed to the church, which becomes the pillar and ground of the truth.
Now, all disciples know that Jesus is leaving to go to the Father. This is Thursday night of Passion Week. This creates horror in the disciple’s minds. He has been their heaven on earth. He has been their hope, their resources to sustain them for these three years. He has been the truth in so much that He has made the Old Testament come alive. On the road to Emmaus, He taught their meaning to them.
Judaism is full of lies. The leaders of Judaism, the Pharisees and Sadducees were liars. They were part of the kingdom of darkness. In John 8:41, Jesus says to the leaders of Israel, “You are doing the deeds of your father.” And then at the end, they say, “We have one Father, God.” And Jesus said to them, ‘If God were your Father, you would love Me, for I come from God, He sent Me.
Verse 44, “You are of your father the devil, and you want to do the desires of your father. He was a murderer from the beginning, and does not stand in the truth because there is no truth in him. Whenever he speaks a lie, he speaks from his own nature, for he is a liar and the father of lies.” Verse 47, “He who is of God hears the words of God; for this reason you do not hear, because you are not of God.”
Can people find the truth on their own? No, the Bible says “the world by wisdom knew not God” in 1 Corinthians 1:21. Take the wisest, the most elite, the finest minds, and the most brilliant people. And individually, or collectively, or even in continuity through history, they cannot find the truth. Why? They’re dead in trespasses and sins, their souls are black with the darkness of Satan.
There were things that Jesus said that the disciples didn’t understand. In John 2:22, when “He was raised from the dead, His disciples remembered that He had said this; and they believed the Scripture and the word Jesus had spoken.” They did not understand Him until after the resurrection, until after the road to Emmaus. And then, when the Holy Spirit came, there was an explosion of understanding.
What jogged their memories? What gave them understanding? It was the Spirit’s coming that enlightened them. That’s why our Lord said in John 16:7, it is better that I go and the Helper comes, because He will teach you all things. There are things I’ve taught you, that you don’t understand. Some you’ll only understand after the resurrection. Some you’ll understand after I rise.
Knowing all things that I have desired to reveal to you, necessitates the coming of the Holy Spirit. This is primarily a promise that the Holy Spirit will enable the apostles and their associates to write the New Testament. And the Lord will give us all the things that He couldn’t say, because the disciples weren’t able to handle it. That’s what this promise is primarily all about.
Now, there is an illuminating ministry of the Holy Spirit for which I am profoundly grateful, and you are too. First John 2:19, “They’re not really of us, because “they went out from us, but you,” meaning you true believers, “you have an anointing from the Holy One, and you all know.” His presence then results in the fact that we don’t need human teachers. That’s what he means by that.
But we have an anointing that “teaches you about all things.” That’s almost a direct quote from John 14. “He will come and teach you all things.” And then in 1 John, he says, and He has come and He will “teach you all things,” and is true, and not a lie, and just as that anointing taught you, you abide in Him. So, it’s a Him. It’s a person. It’s none other than the Holy Spirit.
As a believer in the Lord Jesus Christ, you are the temple of the Holy Spirit. He dwells in you. Your body, in reality, contains the Trinity in a spiritual presence. And you have a resident truth teacher. What is the Holy Spirit teaching me? He does exactly what Jesus did. He’s another helper of the same kind. He is the interpreter of Scripture to the faithful student. That is His ministry.
The Holy Spirit points to Christ. Christ is the object of the Spirit’s ministry because Christ is the theme of Scripture. When we preach Christ through the Old Testament; and as the apostles preached Christ through the New Testament, we are following the leading of the Holy Spirit to learn all things that God wanted to reveal in the Old Testament. Hebrews 1:1, “God spoke through the prophets.”
In 2 Peter 1:21, holy men were “moved by the Spirit of God,” and they wrote. In the same way that God spoke to the prophets who wrote the Old Testament, He promises that He will send the Holy Spirit to do the same thing with these apostles who wrote the New Testament. But, before He can illuminate the truth for us, He has to inspire the truth in the apostles and the other Bible writers, right?
Now, do you mean every word in Scripture is inspired? That’s what it claims for itself. This is the promise of divine inspiration. Verse 26, “He will teach you all things, and bring to your remembrance all that I said to you.” How can these apostles and those associated with them write the four gospels so correctly that you can take the four gospels and blend them together?
How could they ever recall all of that? There’s an interesting incident that happens in Acts 11:15. Peter began to speak, “and the Holy Spirit fell on them.” The next verse 16 says, “And I remembered the word of the Lord, how He used to say, ‘John baptized with water, but you will be baptized with the Holy Spirit.’” All of a sudden, Peter remembers a statement that our Lord made when “the Holy Spirit fell on them.”
This is like a little microcosm of how the Holy Spirit works. It is humanly impossible to reproduce Matthew, Mark, Luke, John; to even record the book of Acts, to pull quotes from Jesus out of the air, even the one that’s in the Acts 20, “It is more blessed to give than receive,” which isn’t in the gospels. They can’t make up the theology of the epistles nor the visions of the book of Revelation.
It’s humanly impossible to reproduce correctly all the human words, all the divine words, all the incidents, all the conversations, all the encounters, all the accurate sequences. It’s even more impossible because they didn’t understand it all. They would never be able to write the New Testament if they were left to their memories. They were led along by the Holy Spirit. Every word was God-breathed.
Can God also use a man to do anything else He wants? Of course He can. He can make a donkey speak, and rebuke a prophet. If He can put words in the mouth of a donkey, can He put words in the mouth of an apostle? He used a hand without a body and mind to write: MENE, MENE, TEKEL, UPHARSIN in Daniel 5:25. Could He not guide a mind of an apostle to write His words?
And what about Caiaphas? Wicked, full of bitterness and hate, who abandoned himself to the cruelty of his own heart, and never dreaming that he was speaking precise words from God, cried out to the Jewish council in John 11:49-50, quote, “You know nothing at all, nor consider that it is expedient for us that one man should die for the people.” End quote. That was Caiaphas. He said venomous words directed at Christ.
So, God chose every word. Because in John 11:51 it says, “He spoke this not of himself.” He prophesied that Jesus should die “in order that He might gather into one the children of God that were scattered abroad.” Wicked Caiaphas spoke words from God. If God can choose the exact words of a wicked enemy and make them speak for Him, can’t He choose the words by His Holy Spirit for a saint?
God does this all the time. Think of the complexity of creation. Just incomprehensible complexity in which He employs everything together to accomplish His creative ends. And then go further into complexity with providence, how God accomplishes the development of all of His plans and purposes by means of the unexpected concurrences of a thousand-million acts of human will.
Why can’t God send forth His Holy Spirit into one of His saints, cause him to write His very words? Of course He can. Everywhere you go in the Bible, there’s this uniformity. Whoever holds the pen. It might be a shepherd. It might be a king. It might be a farmer. It might be a prophet. It might be a scribe. It might be a fisherman. It might be a priest. Or it might be a tax collector.
You keep getting the same message. Hundreds of years go by. These writers are isolated from each other. But the same God is behind it all because men are described the same, nations are described the same, history is described the same. It’s the same angels, the same past, the same present, the same future, the same heaven, the same hell, the same judgment. The same God speaks about the same sin.
The abundance of humanity found in Scripture does not speak against inspiration; it speaks for it. Moses was daunted by what he had been called to do, so he said to the Lord in Exodus 4:10, “Please, Lord, I have never been eloquent, for I am slow of speech and slow of tongue.” The Lord said, “Who made man’s mouth? Now you go, and I will be with your mouth and teach you what to say.”
Verse 27, “Peace I leave with you, My peace I give to you; not as the world gives do I give to you. Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid.” Peace appears twice in that brief verse. It’s an almost impossible reality. Turmoil is in us, near us, around us, and beyond us, dominating the fallen world. There is an absence of personal peace, family peace, local peace and international peace.
We’re now facing street riots, execution-type killings, and the threat of terrorism in our neighborhoods. Family disintegration is prevalent. Children are born without a married mother and father, divorce is everywhere. People pursue their peace by diversion, by drugs, by recreation, by entertainment, by shopping. People say that peace will come when there is social change or economic change.
Shalom is a word that is an all-encompassing word, and in essence means: a wish for completeness; or a wish for contentment; or a wish for fulfillment, or satisfaction, or blessing; or maybe well-being works; a wish for prosperity on all levels. And that’s what people still mean. The New Testament counterpart to that word is eirn that describes a satisfied soul, which is peace and prosperity.
But that is not how the Bible views peace. The most definitive statement on peace is John 14:27. It is talking about something completely different; Jesus says, “I’m giving you My peace.” He also knows that His disciples are profoundly distressed. But this is a supernatural peace. It belongs only to those who are Christ’s. It’s an objective peace which is outside of you. This is a gift.
It is about peace with God because the gospel brings peace between the sinner and God. You are justified by faith in Christ and by the work that He did on the cross. We are welcomed into God’s family and God’s presence forever. But that objective peace also provides for us a subjective peace, an internal peace, a sense of goodness, trust, contentment, tranquility, confidence, and well-being. Let us pray.