Classic Christianity – Book of John Part 75 (09-23-19)
Synopsis
Briefly turn to the 15th chapter of John. Then we will continue in the 16th chapter. Recall Jesus is talking to his disciples, close to the end of his life on earth, heading to a cross. He is telling them about his going away and that it is better that he goes away. There are many things Jesus taught them over these three years with them but they were not understanding. The disciples would ask, “Why are you going away?” and “How can it be better for us that you are going away?” They were not able to understand. They were filled with grief, not able to bear what Jesus was telling them.
Jesus is comforting them and providing instruction concerning difficult times ahead but also providing hope of a future, of peace that surpasses understanding. He tells them that a time will come that they will be kicked out of the synagogue. He does not want them to have unrealistic expectations of the future. But he also tells them that when he goes away, he will send the Holy Spirit to be in you and to be with you forever. He will live and be with them forever, not in physical form, but by His Holy Spirit that will be placed in them. That happened on the day of Pentecost.
Here you have perfect love, God in the flesh, a man who loved like no other man, who has been with them for three years of their lives. It is hard enough for any man to bear the loss of someone who loved them who has died. Jesus has explained the plan of God to them, a plan to restore man to Himself, a plan in the heart of God even before the foundation of the world. Here is the promised Messiah foretold by all the prophets.
Jesus has come to die, to be buried, only to rise again. So Jesus, knowing that they cannot bear more right now, tells them to trust Him, for there is coming a day when the Holy Spirit will come to teach you all things. He will be placed in you, to live in you. He will remind you of everything I have spoken to you and will guide you into all truth. He will make known to you what the Father has made known to me.
Jesus later explains more fully who the Holy Spirit is. The Holy Spirit is not an experience but a person, the third person of the Triune God. The Trinity is explained. Jesus focuses on the role of the Holy Spirit, a person with feelings and emotions, with a will and a mind. You will be given the person of the Holy Spirit, who will teach the world wrong about sin, about righteousness and about judgment. Jesus is explaining what he has come to accomplish for man. Until the Holy Spirit is put back into man, man cannot discern the things of God. That is why the disciples could not bear the things Jesus was saying. They were unable to understand. Not until after Pentecost were they able to understand, to understand the meaning of God’s words.
The world is wrong about sin in regards to the work of salvation. When Jesus died on the cross, he paid the price of death for all sins, plural. He died to take away the sins of the entire world from the eyes of God. He did not take away our sinning, but our sins from the eyes of God, never to be seen again. The only sin that will be attributed to man is the sin of unbelief in what Jesus did for you. He who knew no sin became sin for us so that in Him, in His resurrected life, you can have the righteousness of God.
The world is wrong about righteousness. You have no righteousness of your own. There are only two kinds of righteousness; self righteousness and God’s righteousness. Even our good works, what man considers righteous, are like filthy rags before a perfectly Holy God. So for those who put their trust in Christ, who received His resurrected life, and are born again with the Spirit of God in them, God has credited, or imputed, His righteousness to you.
The world is wrong about judgment. The prince of this world has already been judged. As far as God is concerned, Satan has already been condemned.
Transcript
John 15:26-27
26 “When the Advocate comes, whom I will send to you from the Father – the Spirit of truth who goes out from the Father – he will testify about me. 27 And you also must testify, for you have been with me from the beginning.
When the counselor comes, Jesus is talking to his disciples, close to the end of his life. Jesus is telling them, “I am going away, but when I do, I am going to send my Spirit to live inside you, and He is the one who is going to guide you into all truth”. He is leaving them with the instruction on how they will lead their lives when he is away.
The Spirit of truth is another name for a counselor. He will testify about me. That is the role of the Holy Spirit, to testify. And when He comes to live in you, you too will testify.
Now turn to the 16th chapter.
John 16:1
1 ”All this I have told you so that you will not fall away.
“I have told you this so you will not go astray.” Jesus is saying, “If you do not listen to truth you will go astray. Many times we listen to the Spirit of God when things are going tough. It is like a fox hole religion. Whether a physical battlefield or a battlefield of business woes or wherever it might be, we run into trials and tribulations, then we turn to Jesus, and there find Him faithful to do what He said He would do. But as soon as things change around, we forget about Him and then find ourselves in the same rut we were before, going back to the same lifestyle that destroyed us, instead of holding onto that truth. So Jesus is saying, “If you do not hold onto truth, you will go astray.”
He sent us the counselor, whom he calls the Spirit of Truth, to lead us into all truth, so we will not go astray. It is like a map. If you follow the map you will get there. It would be like me trying to lead a church, where you do not have the correct map, not reading the map correctly, or simply ignoring the map altogether, leaning on your own understanding, and the people were being led astray. Jesus is saying, “If you do what I told you to do, you will not go astray.” If you do not listen to what the Spirit of Truth is telling you and me, we will go astray.
John 16:2
2 They will put you out of the synagogue; in fact, the time is coming when anyone who kills you will think they are offering a service to God.
Talking to the disciples, who were all Jewish, he is telling them, “you will be kicked out of the synagogue”. Why would they do that? They do not want to hear truth. They want to hear their tradition. They want to hear what they have interpreted as truth, and when they get confronted with the living Truth, those instructed in the written word will destroy those of the living Word.
John 16:2
in fact, the time is coming when anyone who kills you will think they are offering a service to God.
There are those today who believe they are offering a service to God when they kill the Jews and the Christians. Those of the radical arm of the Muslim faith are doing that, killing people and thinking they are serving God. They are trying to eradicate those they consider heathens.
John 16:3
3 They will do such things because they have not known the Father or me.
They do this because they have not known God. They only know a god of their own making, not the Father of the bible.
John 16:4
4 I have told you this, so that when their time comes you will remember that I warned you about them.
Jesus is saying, “I do not want you to be shocked when these things happen that I told you about. I do not want you to live in an unrealistic expectation as if these kinds of things are not going to occur, because they are. I want you to be forewarned.”
John 16:4
I did not tell you this from the beginning because I was with you,
Jesus is saying, “I did not to tell you when I was with you. When I was with you, only I was going to be in trouble. I kept you safe and in the garden of Gethsemane, when all of the soldiers came with swords and clubs, they only came to get me.”
John 16:5-6
5 but now I am going to him who sent me. None of you asks me, “Where are you going?” 6 Rather, you are filled with grief because I have said these things.
If you had been around Jesus for three years, walking with the most loving man on the face of the earth, a man who loved you perfectly and demonstrated His Deity, His love and kindness in a way no man has seen before, then it is quite logical to be filled with grief. Will I ever see this love again? What does it mean to rise again? Those are the kinds of questions the disciples asked.
John 16:7
7 But very truly I tell you, it is for your good that I am going away.
I can imagine the disciples thinking, “How can that be so good you are going away, when it has been so good when you are with me?”
John 16:7
Unless I go away, the Advocate will not come to you; but if I go, I will send him to you.
Jesus is saying, “The Spirit of God cannot take residence in you as long as I am here. But when I go away (which He did), I will send the Holy Spirit to you. ”
John 16:8
8 When he comes,
The Holy Spirit is not an it or an experience. The Holy Spirit is a person. The Holy Spirit has personality. He has emotions, thinks, feels, and has a choice and a will just like our human soul. The Holy Spirit is the third person of the Trinity, consisting of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.
John 4:24
24 God is spirit, and his worshipers must worship in the Spirit and in truth.
You cannot put flesh and blood on the Spirit. That is why people have difficulty with the Trinity, of only being one God yet scripture teaches God exists as the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. They try to put human body on all three. We may not comprehend that but we must apprehend that because that is explained in the scriptures.
An example of this is when the Trinity was referenced when Jesus was baptized by John the Baptist.
Mark 1:9-11
9 At that time Jesus came from Nazareth in Galilee and was baptized by John in the Jordan. 10 Just as Jesus was coming up out of the water, he saw heaven being torn open and the Spirit descending on him like a dove. 11 And a voice came from heaven: “You are my Son, whom I love; with you I am well pleased.”
John 16:8-11
he will prove the world to be in the wrong about sin and righteousness and judgment: 9 about sin, because people do not believe in me; 10 about righteousness, because I am going to the Father, where you can see me no longer; 11 and about judgment, because the prince of this world now stands condemned.
When the Holy Spirit comes, there are three things the Holy Spirit will do. He will convict the world of guilt in regards to sin and of righteousness and of judgment. He will convict the world of guilt in regards to sin because men do not believe in me.
John 16:9
9 about sin, because people do not believe in me
The world’s sins, plural, have all been put on the cross of Jesus Christ. Do we understand that? Jesus forewarned the people what he was going to do. When Jesus went to the cross, and died there, he who knew no sin became sin for us so that we might become the righteousness of God in Him, in His resurrection.
2 Corinthians 5:21
21 God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.
The world’s sins have all been placed on Jesus. He took away the sins of the entire world. Do we understand the truth of this? There is not one sin he did not take away from the eyes of God. Now some people mistake this, when he took away sin, by saying, “How come I still sin?” He did not take away your sinning. He took away your sins from the eyes of God. The atonement was a foreshadowing of that, where the blood of bulls and goats covered the sins from everyone’s sight, temporarily. Just like a snow storm covers the earth. It is like a picture of Jesus covering the sins of the entire world. So it was a foreshadowing of the day Jesus will take away from the eyes of God the sins of the entire world. No man will ever go to hell because of his sin. Only the sin of the rejection of God, who came to take away the sins of the world and to give life to the dead. So when the Holy Spirit comes, he is there to teach us that the world’s sin is unbelief in Jesus and the world’s sins have been taken away by Jesus from the face of God.
The second thing the Holy Spirit does is to teach the world wrong about righteousness. What does that mean? True righteousness is in Jesus. There are only two kinds of righteousness, self righteousness and imputed righteousness from God.
Romans 4:1-6 (KJV)
1 What shall we say then that Abraham our father, as pertaining to the flesh, hath found?2 For if Abraham were justified by works, he hath whereof to glory; but not before God.
3 For what saith the scripture? Abraham believed God, and it was counted unto him for righteousness.
4 Now to him that worketh is the reward not reckoned of grace, but of debt.
5 But to him that worketh not, but believeth on him that justifieth the ungodly, his faith is counted for righteousness.
6 Even as David also describeth the blessedness of the man, unto whom God imputeth righteousness without works,
The only righteousness you and I will ever possess is the righteousness given to us by Christ Jesus. So true righteousness appeared on this earth in human form, and his name is Jesus. So when you looked into the face of Jesus you saw true, pure righteousness, and in no other person except him. He came to show us what true righteousness is and was and then went back to the Father. What for? The same reason as for sending the Holy Spirit. Jesus is saying, “You cannot have righteousness unless I send Him to you and I cannot send Him to you until I go away.” Just as the Holy Spirit cannot be sent to you and me until Jesus went away, so righteousness could not be imputed to you until He went away.
Then he say he will convict the world wrong about judgment. In regard to judgment because the prince of this world now stands condemned. Satan has already been condemned as far as God is concerned.
John 16:12
12 “I have much more to say to you, more than you can now bear.”
That is sometimes true in regards to our bible reading and our study. When you are a brand new Christian, you are only ready to feed on the milk of the word. But God does not intend for you to stay feeding on milk.
The apostle Paul addressed the immaturity of the believers in Corinth, who should have been teachers by now, but failed to feed on more than just milk of the word, even after they have been believers for quite some time now.
1 Corinthians 3:1-3
1 Brothers and sisters, I could not address you as people who live by the Spirit but as people who are still worldly – mere infants in Christ. 2 I gave you milk, not solid food, for you were not yet ready for it. Indeed, you are still not ready. 3 You are still worldly. For since there is jealousy and quarreling among you, are you not worldly? Are you not acting like mere humans?
So there is a maturity process just as a child that grows in the natural world. You cannot rush that maturity. Just as a new infant needs to feed on milk and maturity comes over time. So Jesus says, “You cannot bear any more right now.” The disciples have not even received the Holy Spirit yet.
John 16:13
13 But when he, the Spirit of truth, comes, he will guide you into all the truth. He will not speak on his own; he will speak only what he hears, and he will tell you what is yet to come.
Jesus is saying, “There is more I want to tell you but you cannot understand it yet”. Why? The Spirit has not come to live within you yet. You cannot comprehend it yet until that time occurs. That occurred at Pentecost. You are standing in front of the God of truth but you cannot comprehend it until the Spirit comes to live in you and then you can comprehend it.
1 Corinthians 2:9-10
9 However, as it is written:“What no eye has seen,
what no ear has heard,
and what no human mind has conceived” –
the things God has prepared for those who love him –10 these are the things God has revealed to us by his Spirit.
For you to understand the meaning of the word of God, the Spirit of God living in you has to reveal it to you. Obviously, until the Spirit of God came to live within the believers, and within the apostles, they were not prepared to understand the true meaning of the word of God. So Jesus says, “There is more I want to say to you but you are not ready for it yet because you are not yet indwelt by the source of understanding biblical truth. He will guide you into all truth when the Spirit comes.”
If you are born again, the Spirit of God indwells you. You are indwelt by God. If we cannot get excited about that then there is something wrong with our excitement button. We are indwelt by God Himself. We have the mind of Christ. We also have my mind. I am indwelt by a person. He live in me. I have the ability to participate in the divine nature that lives in me.
John 14:16-18
16 And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another advocate to help you and be with you forever – 17 the Spirit of truth. The world cannot accept him, because it neither sees him nor knows him. But you know him, for he lives with you and will be in you. 18 I will not leave you as orphans; I will come to you.
1 Corinthians 2:16
16 for, “Who has known the mind of the Lord so as to instruct him?” But we have the mind of Christ.
2 Peter 1:3-4
3 His divine power has given us everything we need for a godly life through our knowledge of him who called us by his own glory and goodness. 4 Through these he has given us his very great and precious promises, so that through them you may participate in the divine nature, having escaped the corruption in the world caused by evil desires.
Even though we have the ability to participate in the divine nature, that does not mean I always do so, does it? That means I have a choice. When we do not participate with that truth, we go astray. So I can choose to listen to my ugly flesh. The flesh can be convincing, teaching you error as if it is the truth and you will go astray. Recall what was shared earlier. Jesus told us these things so we would not go astray.
Galatians 5:16-18
16 So I say, walk by the Spirit, and you will not gratify the desires of the flesh. 17 For the flesh desires what is contrary to the Spirit, and the Spirit what is contrary to the flesh. They are in conflict with each other, so that you are not to do whatever you want. 18 But if you are led by the Spirit, you are not under the law.
John 16:13
13 But when he, the Spirit of truth, comes, he will guide you into all the truth. He will not speak on his own; he will speak only what he hears, and he will tell you what is yet to come.
Or you can participate in the divine nature who lives in you and walk in paths of righteousness. He will guide us. He is there to guide us. That does not mean we will allow Him to guide us. He is there to guide us when we allow Him. He will not force Himself upon you. He guides us as we allow Him to do so. He will not speak on His own. He will only speak what He hears. From who? The Father.
John 12:49-50
49 For I did not speak on my own, but the Father who sent me commanded me to say all that I have spoken. 50 I know that his command leads to eternal life. So whatever I say is just what the Father has told me to say.
John 5:19
19 Jesus gave them this answer: “Very truly I tell you, the Son can do nothing by himself; he can do only what he sees his Father doing, because whatever the Father does the Son also does.”
Jesus said, ”I do not do anything unless the Father tells me to do it.” When the Holy Spirit indwells us, we do not do anything unless the Holy Spirit tells us to do it. Where did he hear what to do? From the Father. Same deal. He will tell you what is yet to come. That is why we have prophesies today.
John 16:14-15
14 He will glorify me because it is from me that he will receive what he will make known to you. 15 All that belongs to the Father is mine. That is why I said the Spirit will receive from me what he will make known to you.”
He will bring glory to Jesus. The purpose of the Holy Spirit is not to bring glory to the Holy Spirit. We are not to be sitting around glorifying the Spirit. We are not even to be glorifying the Father. The Spirit came to bring glory to Jesus, “taking from what is mine”, Jesus, “and making it known to you”, you and me and the disciples. Every thing that belongs to Jesus belongs to the Father and is mine. “The Spirit will take from what is mine and make it known to you.”
John 16:16
16 Jesus went on to say, “In a little while you will see me no more, and then after a little while you will see me.”
Jesus came to this earth to reveal truth to the lost, to reveal truth to those who do not have the truth. To this day, we sit in this country with people all over the country thinking in different ways than we were taught. On the Larry King Live show, it was supposed to be a topic on religion. They had an Evangelical, a Jewish rabbi, a Catholic priest, a Muslim, a female atheist and female mystic all on the show. All of them believed they were right.
John 8:32
32 Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.
Jesus came to reveal truth to us to set us free.
What was also interesting, at the end of the program, someone asked, “Do you just believe the way you were brought up?” To the priest, his family grew up Catholic. To the atheist, her family grew up atheist. he Jew grew up in Judaism. To the one following Mohammad, he grew up in that religion. The mystic grew up in a mystic family. All were taught what they were taught in their family. Is that true that you will follow what you were brought up with? All of them thought they had some truth. The atheist claimed that there is no evidence Jesus even came. The bible calls her a fool.
Psalm 14:1
1 The fool says in his heart, “There is no God.”
To proclaim that there is no God, then you claim you have total knowledge. If you were really smart, and say you possessed 20% knowledge, can you claim you know there is no God and that the 80% left were in error. A man to proclaim he is an atheist has committed intellectual suicide, for you are a fool to proclaim you have total knowledge. She is a fool. If I was on that panel, I would call her a fool.
The other person was a mystic. She just thought everybody was Jesus, and says it does not make much difference, as if not a big thing, or it did not matter if he was born of a virgin or not but that it is just a matter that he is. What nonsense is that? Such a person says, “All we need to do is love one another”. If you are married, I would like to meet your husband. That is a good thought, but I would like to see you pull it off. You have to understand the truth of that. Saying “God is not real just an experience“ comes from the mystics.
The follower of Mohammad, surprisingly enough, he believed in the virgin birth. I was shocked at that. They believed Jesus was sent from God but was just a good prophet and a good man, and certainly did not understand he was God. But I wonder what Jesus they had because if you say you believe in Jesus but deny what he taught when he said he is the only way to God. So all of this contradiction is there. People saying one thing but then denying what he said about Himself. He claimed Himself to be God and the only way to God and they deny that.
Then there was a Jewish man, a Jewish rabbi. When Bob was in Colorado, a person from New Jersey and one from California came. The younger sister, from California, was Jewish and came to the Lord fifteen years ago. She asked me a question to see what I thought. I said to her, “I think you will hear me say that in a lecture and you will understand that.” She came to understand the finality of the cross and got cleared up on predestination and election. All of that was cleared up.
Both of them were Jewish, but were also excited about Jesus. They both shared. “In our Jewish home, we did not know about anything. That is the normal state of Jewish people in the world today. They do not know about their religion. They know about Passover and the atonement, the things they should celebrate, and that is about it. They did not know anything. They did not know about Moses”. They both said, ”But the one thing we did know was that we do not believe in Jesus.”
