Synoptic Gospels John 14:26

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Seems strange without a bunch of light coming in the windows, isn't it? It's one of those dark, rainy days.
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Well, rainy somewhere, just not where I was. I saw the radar last night.
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I'm like, oh, we're going to get nailed. All right. I get up this morning, and oh, come on.
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Other than a 73 -degree dew point, which is about as bad as it gets here,
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I would say, as far as the humidity is concerned. Oh, well. That's how it works.
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I have been giving due consideration to the speed, or lack thereof, at which we have been making progress.
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And I know there are some topics I'd like to be getting to and stuff, so I think what I'm going to do is pick up the pace a bit and not necessarily cover all of what's in John here.
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There are a couple of texts I really do want to address and maybe look at sort of an overarching view of what chapters 14, 15, and 16 say about the
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Holy Spirit and then get back to finishing up the synopsis and doing that a little bit faster, maybe looking primarily at the real difficulties.
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And there are many, especially in the Crucifixion and Resurrection accounts and dealing with those texts.
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That's going to require a lot of work on all of our parts, I think. But I don't want to move on without actually finishing the entire synoptic study, obviously.
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Reformed folks are frequently accused of ignoring Jesus and listening only to Paul.
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I can't remember the last time we had a study in Paul, actually, so we need to probably fix that imbalance at some point.
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But be that as it may, that's certainly where my thoughts are.
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And fortunately, looking at, for example, October, I right now am having to tell the folks in South Africa, no,
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I need to come back by about the 9th or so. They want me to stay through like the 12th.
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And if I did that, that would mean I would not be here in October at all.
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Last week of September, London. First two weeks of October in South Africa. Next week in Texas and next week in Canada.
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So, no, I'm going to have to tell them, no, I need to at least show up once in a while or bad things will happen.
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So, that's not going to help us in making much in the way of progress,
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I'm afraid, but especially when you travel overseas. It's just so incredibly expensive that if you don't go for a long enough period of time, it sort of becomes extremely expensive per day type thing.
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So, anyway, we were in John chapter 14 working through it.
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One of the texts that I know that we need to get through is toward the end of the chapter.
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It is one of the most popular texts that you will encounter amongst those who deny the deity of Christ.
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So, I want to transition down specifically to verse 25.
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These things I have spoken to you while abiding with you, but the
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Parakletos, the Holy Spirit whom the
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Father will send in my name, that one will teach you all things and bring to your remembrance all that I said to you, all that I spoke to you.
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My peace I leave with you, my peace I give to you, not as the world gives do
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I give to you. Do not let your heart be troubled nor let it be fearful. You heard that I said to you,
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I go away and I will come to you. If you loved me, you would have rejoiced because I go to the Father, for the
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Father is greater than I. Now I have told you before it happens, that when it happens you may believe.
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Now, obviously the key text that I want you to be ready to respond to, literally at the drop of a hat, though I'm not really sure if that's a relevant term anymore, the tweet of a tweet, what would be the modern example?
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The reception of a Facebook message, I don't know, but whatever a sudden opportunity is, the knock on the door, something along those lines, is of course verse 28.
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You almost never hear all of John 14, 28 quoted.
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I would be willing to bet that the majority of people who quote it, as an argument against the deity of Christ and historic
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Christian belief, could not actually quote to you the entirety of the text.
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All they know is the last phrase, all they know is the last phrase. As is so often the case when you are dealing with the abuse of Scripture, the person who is abusing the
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Scripture is ignorant of the Scripture and probably has no idea what the context is.
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If two people who are ignorant of the Scriptures and have no idea what the context of Scripture is, argue about a text, well, two blind folks will fall into the ditch, is basically the biblical phraseology at that point, in the sense that context is the guide.
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If you don't have context, you can't make progress. When you deal with a text, you have to know what the context is, you have to know what the flow of thought is.
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The person who is able to explain that in a conversation is the person who will in essence control the conversation and maybe, maybe be able to make some progress with someone else.
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That's why we read the context. The context of John chapter 14, we've already established the overall context in our studies so far.
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But there is a transition of verse 25, these things I have spoken to you while abiding with you.
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So, but the parakletos, the helper, the advocate, there's a lot of different terms to translate that term.
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The paraklet is the transliteration into English. Who is identified as the
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Holy Spirit. Now, let me just mention this in passing, I won't spend a lot of time on it, but again, you'd expect that I would probably tell you about something like this.
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You have, I don't think, no, we haven't shown in class any of the debates that I've done with Muslims on this particular subject.
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We've looked at other debates with Muslims, but I don't believe this came up. If you're just absolutely fascinated by this, the video of the debate that we did a week after the attack on the
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Benghazi embassy in London at the East London Mosque is available on YouTube.
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It was rather interesting and forthright. But anyway, Muslims, of course, believe that this text,
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John 14 and 16, the parakletos is
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Muhammad himself, and that this is a prophetic announcement of the coming of Muhammad.
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Many Muslims will say that the original was not parakletos, but it was perikletos, the exalted one, which they would try to make a connection between Greek and Arabic, and the idea, the root of Ahmed being one that's exalted or beautiful or something like that.
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Those who make that kind of argument don't seem to realize that unlike Semitic languages, such as Arabic and Hebrew, which are consonantal languages, you write the consonants, the vowels, well, there are some semi -vowel consonants, but the vowel pointing is a secondary issue.
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It wasn't original to the writing, and so you can pronounce the same written word in a number of different ways by changing the vowels.
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Greek is not a Semitic language, and the vowels are an intimate part of the actual root of the word, and you can't just switch them around for the fun of it.
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And so while the consonants might be the same, the vowing is not in Greek, and the words are not.
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And of course, there's never been a manuscript found anywhere that reads anything other than perikletos, as far as verse 26 is concerned.
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But it is interesting that when it says ta -numa -tahagion, the
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Holy Spirit, that one of my
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Muslim interlocutors has pointed out that there is a single manuscript in a different language that does not have,
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I believe, its spirit. I think it just simply says tahagion.
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And on this basis makes the argument, well, we're not really sure, because there's a textual variant where this is about the Holy Spirit.
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And as I pointed out in a debate we did in London a couple of years ago, can you imagine what
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Muslims would say if you suggested that they alter the text of the Qur 'an, not based upon any
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Arabic manuscript of the Qur 'an, but upon a single manuscript of a foreign language translation made 300 years after the time of Muhammad?
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Can you imagine what Muslims would say to a suggestion like that?
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And yet, that's exactly what the suggestion was being made, is that we don't know this is the Holy Spirit because of one
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Syriac text that does not have the word spirit. All of the
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Greek texts do. Now, I'm not going to spend time going through all the...
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It would be very, very easy for you just simply to note all the things that are said of the
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Holy Spirit. We will be looking at the Holy Spirit the next few times that I have the opportunity to be with you.
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Of course, I'm not sure, again, exactly which week that's going to be, because coming up here in just a few weeks
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I'll have a couple Sundays in a row for preaching, and so I'm not sure how we're going to do Sunday school class.
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But you could just simply make a list of the things that are ascribed to the
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Holy Spirit in this text that are utterly impossible to be applied to Muhammad, to come up with a rather compelling argument against that interpretation.
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Now, I should just mention the Qur 'an itself, the Hadith, does not tell us with specificity as to exactly which text in the
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Bible allegedly prophesied the coming of Muhammad. And so, if you disprove John 14, well, they just go to Deuteronomy 18.
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If you disprove Deuteronomy 18, they just go to Song of Solomon 5 or whatever it is.
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If you disprove all of them, the more thoughtful Muslims say, yeah, but we're not told which text it is.
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So, maybe it's just been removed from the Bible or something along those lines. But the vast majority of Muslims with whom you would speak here in the
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United States would assume that Deuteronomy 18, the prophet who will come like Moses, John 14 and 16, the paraclete, and probably
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Song of Solomon 5 and 16 all have to do with Muhammad.
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There are a plethora of others that have been suggested to get weaker and weaker and weaker as you move along.
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So, going back to the text, the spirit is identified as the paracletos, the comforter, the helper, the advocate.
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It's a word with a fairly wide range of applications in Koine and the ancient use of that particular term.
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But you will notice it says, whom, the father. Now, the term pneuma is neuter in the original language.
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And hence, in normal English translation, you would translate a relative pronoun that's neuter as it.
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But especially given the function of the paracletos and given that in this text, it says, ekainos, that one will teach you.
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I think it is appropriate to say he. The evidences of the personality of the spirit are many.
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In the Apostle Paul, for example, in his writings, it's the spirit that gives the gifts as he wills.
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The spirit speaks, the spirit sends. You can sin against the spirit. There are all sorts of reasons to recognize that those who attempt to depersonalize the spirit are missing a very important and vital element of New Testament teaching.
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You're probably aware of the fact that Jehovah's Witnesses deny that the Holy Spirit is a person.
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They identify the Holy Spirit as an impersonal active force, similar to the electricity in the lights above us, similar to water flowing through a tube or through the dam creating electricity, whatever else it might be.
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And hence, in their mistranslation of the Bible, they will not capitalize Holy Spirit.
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They will say he will baptize you with Holy Spirit, very frequently not using the article, because it's an impersonal thing.
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And we have things falling from the roof back there. Are we starting a parade back there or what?
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Almost hit the deacon, which is somewhat appropriate. What is it?
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Piece of tape. Okay. All right. So when you hold things together with tape, eventually it does come down.
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That's been my experience back when I was young. And when I was a kid,
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I was really impatient. Still am, I guess. But I like to make models, model airplanes and stuff like that.
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But you know the one thing I didn't like about making models? You had to wait for the glue to dry. So I developed the idea of putting tape on things to hold them together faster.
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Boy, that was a mess. That was not wise. It was probably good that I made models to try to teach you patience.
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But when you're trying to find ways around being patient, that doesn't necessarily work. Anyway, what were we talking about?
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There's probably no more tape to fall upon anybody's head back there. Yes, yes, yes. I remember what
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I was doing. I was being facetious. Anyhow, so the identification of the parakletos as the pneumahagion, the
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Holy Spirit, really cannot be broken. And this one is sent by the
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Father in the name of Christ. It's clear that John 14, 15, 16, all of this section of John is very rich in what we would call
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Trinitarian language, obviously in the history of the Church. This text has been exceptionally important in the development of Trinitarian thought and belief.
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And so one of the great conflicts in the history of the
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Church has been the relationship of Father, Son, and Spirit, and the question of what's called the procession of the
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Spirit. Now, most of you were not here.
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I'm sure that Brick would be able to just rip this off because he was here during the
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Church history section, which we did back in the 1990s somewhere,
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I think. And you all remember everything that I've ever said in a
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Sunday school class, I'm sure. But just for my own giggles, what is the date of what is called the great schism between the
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East and the West? Does anybody know? Yes, Mr.
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Porter? 1054. That's very close. I mean, you're within the right decade.
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1054, and you were going that direction. 1054, you have the great schism between the
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East and West, and there are a number of reasons for it. It's not like it happened overnight.
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I hope you recognize that there's the cheap and easy way to do
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Church history, and then there's the real way to do Church history. The cheap and easy way are the lists of dates that you can find very easily on the net in printed material, where it says,
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Doctrine of Purgatory, such and such a date. As soon as you see anything that says
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Doctrine of Purgatory, such and such a date, you know that this is not a meaningful source. Why?
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Well, there was a day when the
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Council of Florence, for example, made a very important statement in regards to the
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Doctrine of Purgatory, but it's not like somebody woke up that morning and said, I'm going to come up with the
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Doctrine of Purgatory today, and that's how it happened. That's not how history takes place.
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Doctrines and things like that develop slowly, sometimes painfully slowly over time, and are frequently the result of previous teachings and movements that the people who initially promulgated those things could have had no earthly idea that what they said a couple hundred years later would be taken in the way it was being taken.
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For example, I've given the example many, many times of Augustine, and the
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Donatist controversy, and how Augustine's friends and people were pushing him to allow the government to become involved in suppressing an opposing viewpoint, and how eventually he developed the idea.
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He took the section from Jesus' parable about compelling them to come in and use that as a basis for the
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Roman Empire becoming involved in suppressing those who were non -Orthodox.
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Now, he could not have foreseen, certainly did not have the intention of seeing what that would develop into hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of years later in the foundation of and the promulgation of the
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Inquisition in Spain and France and other places like that. But that's what happened.
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And so, when you look at the schism of 1054, it's not like in 1053 everything was cool, and in 1054, boom, you've got both sides excommunicating the other.
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There were issues in regards to statues and icons and clergy and so on and so forth that had been bubbling under the surface for a long, long, long, long time.
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But the theological trigger, the key theological issue, was the difference between East and West in regards to what's called the procession of the
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Holy Spirit. And you would look at a text like this, "...whom
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the Father will send in my name." What basically happened is between the
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East and the West, in the East, the Spirit proceeds only from the
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Father. But in the West, the Spirit proceeds from the Father and the
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Son. And one of the ancient, I'm really summarizing this here, but one of the ancient creeds was,
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I think most people would agree, altered in the West, added to, certainly that was the accusation from the beginning, from the
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Eastern Orthodox, is that that's not what it said, you all changed it, you all added to it. That's probably true.
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It's called the Filioque Clause and it's just simply
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Filioque and the Son. So it proceeds from the Father and the Son. So, a couple words, small phrase, and yet that was one of the huge theological arguments at the time.
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And I'm not sure it's so much the content of the statement as it is the idea in Eastern thinking, you don't get to change what was said in the past.
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All this goes back to, and I'll just briefly summarize this, just think with me for a moment, I've mentioned this before, we have lots of new folks.
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If you ever look at a map of the ancient, quote -unquote, Christian world, and you draw a line between the
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East and the West, wherever that would go, pretty much sort of through Greece, maybe at sort of an angle, you see very, very quickly exactly why what becomes
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Roman Catholicism in the West and what remains Eastern Orthodoxy in the East has the character that it does.
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Roman Catholicism is focused on what? Well, its very name tells you, Rome. And though initially the emphasis upon the
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Roman Church was because of the church, what's the emphasis today? Well, we all saw just a few months ago, didn't we?
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It's the Bishop of Rome. The Bishop of Rome is what gives the church at Rome its authority, and the
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Bishop of Rome is the successor of Peter and is the monarchical head of the church, the infallible vicar of Christ, so on and so forth.
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So, you have one leader in the West. In the East, you have patriarchs, the
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Patriarch of Constantinople, for example, the Patriarch of Jerusalem, the
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Patriarch of Alexandria. It's changed over history, obviously, but especially after the rise of Islam, Islam having a huge impact upon the
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Orthodox churches and continues to this day, clearly. But they were forced from the beginning to have multiple heads, so there had to be collegiality.
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There had to be cooperation between equals rather than a single leader. Now, we all know that it's a whole lot easier for a single leader to get things done than it is for a committee.
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Ask a Presbyterian. That's just the way it is. And so, the mindset in Orthodoxy is a mindset that struggles with the concept of change at all.
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It also results in something rather interesting. People ask all the time, why don't you deal with Eastern Orthodoxy?
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And my answer is twofold. First of all, there's only so much anyone can do well, and so there's only so many hours in a day.
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But secondly, I know enough about Eastern Orthodoxy to realize that most people's questions about Eastern Orthodoxy aren't even relevant to Eastern Orthodoxy.
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What I mean by that is real Eastern Orthodoxy is a way of thought. It is an entire mindset and worldview that most of us just struggle to even begin to comprehend.
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And hence, the language barrier and just the conceptual barriers you'd be up against.
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Huge, huge, massive thing. And I wish there were more people who really focused upon that, but that's beyond my capabilities.
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But I know enough to realize, for example, if you want to know what Rome teaches, you go pick up the
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Universal Catechism of the Catholic Church, and there it is. You can look it up, paragraph numbers.
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There's nothing like that for Eastern Orthodoxy. Nothing. None. Because, for them, the prayers and the liturgy is their theology.
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So, if you want to know what they believe, you study the prayers and the liturgy. You don't go to a book and a paragraph.
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And they wouldn't even begin a real Eastern Orthodoxy. Now, there's sort of the Americanized version, which is another variant, but a real
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Eastern Orthodox just wouldn't even understand the question. Why would you be looking for a paragraph? What do you mean?
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So, it's a tough thing to deal with. Anyhow, that's one of the great facts of church history.
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And if you are playing church history trivia in the near future, you will now know 1054 and the
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Great Schism. And the Filioque Clause and everything else. And you're going to be like, yeah. And, of course, like I said, you could have done that, right?
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Because you remember the – yeah. Because we did that in church history 20 years ago.
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And everyone would remember that. Like everyone remembers the day of the
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Council of Nicaea, right? Anyone? What's that?
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What's that? My sister? You didn't take church as well. Well, yeah, but you did drive around in cars with me. Well, yes, you did.
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You attended – you and Summer attended my church history class. Of course, you were in second grade or something like that.
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But you may have picked it up subconsciously that way.
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I don't know. But, no, when I taught church history – and it's interesting. I'm supposed to be teaching church history in Kiev in February.
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And maybe that's why I'm talking about church history today. I don't know. But now they've asked me to consider changing that and teaching justification instead.
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And I'm sort of like, I don't know. I don't know. I was sort of looking forward to doing church history.
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Maybe we could make a commitment for two years or something. I don't know. It depends on how the first year goes,
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I guess. February in Kiev sounds really cold, really, really cold.
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I used to have this long leather coat, my Matrix, my
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Morpheus Matrix coat. And I may need to be putting one of them on my Christmas list this year, definitely, because something tells me it's going to be just a little bit cool in Kiev.
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But it's better than May. I'd rather teach bundled up than teach doing this number.
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So we'll see what happens. Anyways, having wandered through all of church history and a little bit of geography and everything else there, wow, you now have a lot of background there.
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So the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name. Now, again, when we're looking at texts like this, we're so often looking at them in the context of the folks who come to our door or something like that, that we sometimes miss really clear evidences of the exalted nature of Christ because of how we're approaching the text apologetically.
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Think about what that means. I mean, for anyone who denies the deity of Christ, that should be an absolute shot in the solar plexus.
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I mean, it should just take your breath away. Whom the Father will send in my name.
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Can you imagine? Because there's nobody. I've never encountered any group at all that in looking at this text, and of course
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I'm talking about groups that would give any credence, differing levels of credence, to the text of the
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Bible in the first place. But I've never met anybody who wouldn't go, okay, the Father here is
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God. The Father here is the supreme creator of all things.
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And he does something in Jesus' name?
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Really? Have you ever thought about that? I mean, again, most of you raised in Christian families.
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You've been in Christian churches your entire lives. And as a result, you look at stuff like this, and the wow element of some of these things just goes right past us because, well, we say in Jesus' name all the time.
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And we know Jesus is exalted, and so it's just no big deal. But step back from that for a moment and think of how amazing it is that the
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Father would send the Spirit in the name of Jesus.
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And imagine what it tells you about Jesus that he would say this. Let me tell you something.
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If someone walked in here and said that God was going to send the
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Spirit in his name, we'd be asking George and Brick and little
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Billy Miller to be, see, that's what would happen. Right there. That's what would happen right there.
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Okay, thank you. That was good timing. That was right on. The immediate response would be, clear the room so that when the lightning strikes, the splatter doesn't get you.
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I mean, clearly there would be a blasphemous element to this.
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But because we already have a certain understanding of Jesus in our minds, this is a really, really good example of one of these texts where there's this incredible evidence of the deity of Christ, and we frequently just go right past it.
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Because we're looking at it with the conclusion already fixed in our mind, and so the things that provided the foundation of that conclusion sometimes miss us.
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So keep that in mind. With my Muslim friends,
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I mean, if they want to talk about the parakletos, I should have included this in my presentation.
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I will in the future. I'm glad right now that I left my windows up, personally, as we hear the flood breaking against the side of the building there.
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Now the question is, will I get home and it will be bone dry at my house? Probably.
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Probably. That's how it works in Arizona. We all know how this functions.
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And will it be raining in five minutes when we try to leave? Probably not.
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So let's hope not anyways. Or it could be hailing, which could be a pretty interesting experience for us to have.
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Anyways, I should have included this in my presentation before, and that is, if you're going to try to say the parakletos is
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Muhammad, was Muhammad sent by the Father in the name of Jesus?
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Because that would make zero sense in the Islamic mindset. Muhammad is the final prophet.
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He's not sent in anyone's name but Allah. He's certainly not sent in the name of a previous prophet, because that previous prophet, of course, would then be greater than that one.
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So it couldn't work that way. So just something to realize.
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For us, obviously, having seen that, what we see is the unity of the
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Godhead in what's going on here. Because Jesus says, I have spoken these things while I was abiding with you.
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But there's going to be someone else who's going to be abiding with you. And that parakletos, who is divine, he's sent by the
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Father, and he's sent in my name. So, in other words, he takes on and embodies the very character that my words and my ministry and my actions have already communicated to you.
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That 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.
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So here, the spirit has the capacity to allow, to bring to the memory and remembrance of the apostles those things that Jesus said.
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I mean, can you imagine, after the resurrection, and maybe after the ascension, but before the coming of the spirit, can you imagine that there may have been some concern on the part of the apostles, now that it's really beginning to dawn upon them what the full breadth of what
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God has done really is. Wow, I wish I had written everything down.
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Well, certainly there would be a concern to remember those things, but the promise is that the spirit will teach you all things and bring to your remembrance all that I said to you.
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Now, I don't think that means that the spirit turns the disciples into mp3 recorders, but what
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I do think is that exactly what the spirit wills for the apostles to embody in their teaching and to communicate to that primitive
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Christian church, and then, of course, we would, by extension, include in the writing of the
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New Testament, is exactly what God intended. Now, of course, this is one of the big problems we have today, is that people attack the reliability of the text of the
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New Testament, and what's the basis that they do it on? The basis is the rejection of this.
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In modern scholarship, even in many seminaries, you can't bring something like this in. It's irrelevant.
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It's irrelevant. You have to analyze the New Testament text on the basis of naturalistic presuppositions.
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There's no spirit. There's no God superintending these things. You have to look at it solely as some guys who got together and decided to start a religion.
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And if you start there, there really isn't much reason for believing that what we have in any of the
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New Testament is reliable or has been preserved for us or anything like that at all. But the question we have to ask is, why would you assume that?
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Why would you start with a worldview that is directly opposite to that of the
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New Testament writers themselves to attempt to reconstruct what the New Testament writers are trying to say? It's a fool's errand, and it, unfortunately, is the very essence of what we have in much of what is out there today.
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And that's one of the reasons it leaves us quite empty and brings us to conclusions far removed from what generations before us have seen.
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So, all of that actually did not take us to our text. But here
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I am trying to accelerate. And what did we do? We covered one verse. I am a royal failure.
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There is absolutely no other way around it. But it is, I think, important to see that.
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And don't forget that if you're taking notes as our official note -taker. Please realize this is part of the context.
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And probably what I'll do, even during the weeks that I'm preaching, is
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I'll probably go ahead and stay with this class, too. It's not like teaching for two hours.
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In Germany, I was teaching eight. So, every day. With translation.
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So, it's not all that difficult to do. But that will be part of the context that we'll be bringing into verse 28.
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Because when Jesus says, You heard that I said to you, I go away and I will come to you. He's still in that context of revealing.
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He's going back to heaven. The Spirit's going to be coming. And that whole discussion of the Father is greater than I am, that's the context in which it's in.
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And that's what we need to understand. Okay. Okay. Well, I'm sort of wondering what the kids are going to look like when they get over here, if it's coming down bucket loads out there.
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So, we'll leave an extra minute or two to allow parents to get over there and do whatever they need to do.
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So, let's close the word for them. Father, we do thank you for this opportunity, once again, to open your word and to consider it.
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We ask that you would, indeed, by your Spirit, help us to remember your truth. Right upon our hearts, your truth, by your
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Spirit. May we be thankful for the promise that Jesus gave to us in the presence of the
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Holy Spirit. And we ask that by his power, we would be able to worship your right in this coming hour. We pray in Christ's name.