Synoptic Gospels John 14:16

A review of where we have been anyhow. But in verse 15 of chapter 14, a lot of people have a problem with the concept of commandments. Language such as you are no longer under law but under grace, taken out of its context, has been used by people to in essence say that there are no commandments in the New Covenant, even though the New Covenant is described in Jeremiah as God writing His law upon our hearts.

In other words, it's internalized. It is something that the new creature in Christ rejoices to do God's will and God's will is revealed in His law, etc., etc. But it's a completely different thing than a performance-based situation where your relationship with God is dependent upon your fulfilling of certain things.

It's a recognition that Christ has fulfilled all things. And even when you emphasize that, people say, oh, Christ did it all, therefore I no longer have to be concerned about these things. You end up with people on both sides.

I've debated people on both sides of this issue. You have the libertines who on the one side in essence do not see that there is any moral guidance in the Christian faith whatsoever. It's sort of you know, well, it's good to do this or it's good to do that, but you don't really have to worry about it.

And there's a very broad spectrum of evangelicalism. Well, I wouldn't call it evangelicalism. There's many people who have come under the once saved, always saved type teaching that basically have been told you walked down an aisle, you shook somebody's hand, you signed a card, you got dunked, you got your ticket punched, and now you know, whatever happens from there, no big deal.

Don't have to worry about it. Don't have to be concerned about it. Then on the other side, you have truly legalistic groups that in essence say, well, grace is necessary, but it's not enough. You need to do this, you need to do that.

Sometimes the list of items to be done is short. Sometimes it's very long. But in any situation, it's a situation where God's grace helps, but it's not enough. You need to do this, this, this, and this to be able to either enter into a relationship with God or to maintain that relationship with God.

And being balanced on this is, honestly, I think it's something that requires constant output of energy because it just seems that mankind doesn't want to remain balanced on this. So many examples on both sides of the road of people just completely losing it.

And it normally doesn't happen just overnight. It's not like, I don't know if any of you saw that video, I only saw it yesterday, but one of these storm tracker vehicles down Oklahoma City, they got a little bit too close.

And there's two of them together and you can just see, it's obviously difficult to see through the rain and everything else as this barn explodes and this stuff's hitting the car and all this stuff, but you just all of a sudden see this, the wind just picked this thing up and it's just like a toy.

It just throws it off the road and it spins off into the field.

Rolling along.

It was amazing to watch. I'm sure they were doing everything they could to go to the direction, but sometimes it's just, you're going to fall off the road. That was really fast. That was done very quickly.

Generally, it's not normally how people end up going off into error. It's a little bit here, a little bit here. It's a trajectory over time, at least my experience with most folks as to how they end up in those areas.

But going back to verse 15, if you love me, you will keep my commandments. In other words, there is a new dynamic in the New Covenant and that is the keeping of commandments is not so that one will maintain one's relationship or earn something or demonstrate to other people, see by my doing this, I am in right relationship with God.

The motivation for the Christian is love of Christ and that can flow from many considerations of what Christ has done. His sacrificial death, His perfect life, His condescension in the incarnation. There are so many things that we could look at that would be a source of this, but there is a huge difference.

Any legalistic system I've ever encountered included in it some type of reference to this verse or a verse like it. So everyone is going to try to say, well, the reason you do this is because you love, etc.

But it just strikes me that really, and I don't want to make a sermon out of this, so I'll be brief, but I think the takeaway here, aside from, for example, noticing that Jesus says my commandments. I hope I've taught you over the years to catch that kind of thing.

Isaiah never talked about my commandments. Moses said he was speaking for the Lord. Jesus says my commandments. And he says it in the context that you know these are God's commandments. The fact that he can speak so easily in that way again is one of the many, many, many evidences of the exalted nature of this one who we are hearing speaking in these texts.

And it's one of the main reasons that liberals reject these as having anything to do with Jesus because Jesus could never have said anything like that. Well, their Jesus couldn't, I suppose. But it strikes me that the real takeaway is if you love that which is good, then there must be a corresponding detestation and hatred of that which is the negation of that good.

So, to put it this way, for a long time there was the big fad of the WWJD bracelets. What would Jesus do? And I always found that interesting because there were so many situations that really didn't work.

I've gone on a bunch of cruises in my life and we were on this one that was just throwing me around like anything. And what would Jesus do? He would have calmed the seat. Not a part of my options. It doesn't really fit for me.

That sort of missed the point as far as I was concerned. If you love Christ and you recognize that the price of your freedom and eternal life is his suffering under the wrath of God, that all of your sins are laid upon him, this is another one of the reasons I just do not understand the motivation of many people in just demanding a universal atonement concept who then also believe in penal substitutionary atonement.

Because what they're saying is, we have to believe that the sins of every single human being were placed upon Christ so that he suffers in their place and yet they're going to suffer for the very same sins.

And so the wrath of God is completely satisfied against their sins. But not really. Because then the wrath of God is going to be upon them for their sins for eternity. Well, but they have to believe. So wait a minute, wait a minute.

Okay, so the only sin anyone's going to suffer for in hell is unbelief. Unbelief isn't a sin that Jesus carried. It better be or we're all in trouble because none of us have perfect faith, that's for sure.

It just doesn't make any sense to me at all but people really emphasize it. But from a reform perspective, which is where the penal substitutionary atonement concept comes from really, if I recognize that my sins are placed upon Christ, if I love him, I am not going to want to continue to increase the burden that he bore in my place by my continually sinning.

And when I do even in light of that knowledge, I'm really demonstrating how much I love my sin more than I love my Savior. And so it would seem to me that an important element of this if you love me, you will keep my commandments is to see who he is, what he's done and as a result to have a detestation of my own sin.

So that in a lack of days to go apathetic attitude on my own part really reflects a lack of love for Christ and a growing love for myself and my own flesh. And so when we experience these times in our lives, and all of us have at some point or another certainly, we may be there even now.

And in fact, I would imagine all of us would sit here and go, well, I can probably think of a time when I've been more focused upon my love for Christ than right now so, but, you know, you can start taking you may stop listening to me as you start taking stock of such things.

That's one of the dangers of addressing this. But the reality is that the keeping of Christ's commandments isn't some keep your nose clean buddy or you're out situation. It is a if you if you love me, if you know who I am and you're truly focused upon expressing your love for me, then you will recognize what Christ has done and therefore will not desire to live in the realm of sin and darkness and that which is not only displeasing to him but that for which he died and suffered.

And it's interesting that that also comes up at the verse I keep talking to us about. In verse 28, you have heard that I said to you, I go away and I'll come to you. If you loved me, you would have rejoiced because I go to the Father, for the Father is greater than I am.

If you loved me, then you would have rejoiced. There's a suggestion there that you really don't love me the way that you should. And of course, I don't know that in this life we can ever love fully in the way that we should because of our ignorance and our fallen nature and sin and everything else.

But he uses the same terminology there in verse 28 and it forces us to recognize that you have to know the object of your love. That's why, you know, what are we commanded to do? Grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ.

And the more we know him then the more basis there's going to be for us to not be in love with our sin. And the less we know about him, the more he is just a concept or something we've inherited from our parents that we've never really made our own.

That's certainly a danger in Christian families. Then the less concern we're going to have about walking in a way that is pleasing to him. And instead, we will be concerned about walking in a way that is pleasing to us.

Which could then allow us to discuss the many forms of theology that are out there today that, in essence, allow us to do exactly that. Define the Christian faith on the basis of our own lusts and desires, but we will avoid the temptation to go that direction.

The New Covenant, Commandments, and Love for Christ

So, beginning with verse 16 then, we have the introduction of the parakletos, the paraklete, the helper, which we started talking about last time. I do recall that now.

And the.

Helper is described as one who is given by the Father. I will ask the Father and he will give you another helper. That is, a helper of the same kind as I am. This is in the context of his departure. That he may be with you forever.

So, obviously, the mechanism and means by which the parakletos will be with the disciples is a different kind of presence than what you see in Jesus' ministry, which is by design and by intention and by purpose temporary.

The Incarnation had a particular purpose at a particular time for a particular time span and that does not, of course, mean that Christ has gotten rid of his physical body. It is amazing how many conservative Christians don't think much about whatever happened to the physical body of Jesus.

You know, it is on display some places and like that. As if the Incarnation was only meant to be a temporary thing. The Incarnation truly becomes the basis for our own union with God through Christ and really becomes the, as I've said many times, the guarantee of our own resurrection because he rose from the dead.

We have the promise of God that we likewise will rise from the dead as well. And so, notice that verse 16 then is a Trinitarian verse. What do I mean by that? Well, I, this is the Son speaking, will ask the Father and he will give you another helper, that is the Spirit of Truth.

Now, if language has its natural meaning, the Spirit is other than the Father or the Son. Now, English speakers love to show their ignorance of other languages or at least the natural forms of other languages by stumbling over the issue of gender.

Now, we don't really have, I guess, when we have some really obvious loan words from other languages, it might come through, but we don't really have gender in English outside of he, she, it. There you have the three, but we do not transfer that over to the forms of nouns.

So, car is just car, but if you learn that in another language, for example, in German it's das Auto. So, you've got der, die, oder das. Those are your three and every noun has a gender attached to it.

And the simplistic understanding that frequently English speakers have is, well, that must mean something about the character of the noun. And sometimes that could be the case, but it often is not the case.

And so, for example, pneuma, the Spirit, is not a masculine noun. And some of the more interesting textbook variants in the New Testament are where masculine forms of pronouns were actually used for the Spirit because the natural way of referring to a person, a human being or a personal being, is through the use of the masculine, but the Spirit, the very term itself, is neuter, and so the normal pronoun that you would use is a neuter pronoun to make reference to tot pneuma.

So, that's what you have in, for example, verse 17 in the Greek text. The reason I point this out is that some of those folks who will wake you up on a Saturday morning at your doorstep, knocking on the door, dressed far too nicely for, A, Saturday morning, B, that time, and C, this time of the year in Phoenix, put all three of them together and you see the Jehovah's Witnesses walking down the street at 10 .30 in the morning when it's already 108 degrees and you just go, that might be evidence of purgatory.

I'm not sure, but that might be evidence of purgatory right there. It's sort of hard to say, but they will emphasize that the Spirit is not a person. In Jehovah's Witness theology, the Spirit is God's impersonal active force, and hence in their I hate to even use the term translation of the Bible.

In their perversion of the Bible, known as the New World Translation, they do not capitalize the word Spirit or Holy Spirit and will frequently not even use the definite article. So, for example, we would say, He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit.

Their rendering would be, He will baptize you with Holy Spirit. Sort of like He will baptize you with ketchup. He will baptize you with water. He will baptize you with sand, whatever. It's an inanimate object, not a person, and hence you don't use, generally in the English language, the definite article at that point.

So, here, immediately they would say, well, what is this Spirit? Isn't it just like electricity and the lights above us, or the water running through the dam, or this impersonal active force? Well, I don't think the disciples would have gotten that idea.

There were a number of discussions in the intertestamental period, between the closing of the Old Testament writings and the time of Christ, the intertestamental period, where the Jews were speculating about many things in the Scriptures.

Some of those speculations were way off base. Some were quite interesting. Some are reflected in New Testament writings. There are some references to intertestamental writings similar to how I've said many times, if the New Testament were being written today, would it ignore all written sources?

Well, the Old Testament didn't. The Old Testament made reference to annals of certain kings and chronicles of this, that, and the other thing, which are not found in Scripture. And the New Testament writers cited books that are not found in Old or New Testament as well.

They didn't say, thus it stands written by the Lord or something like that, but I think if the Lord were to inspire the New Testament today, that there would probably be a few references to Pilgrim's Progress in there someplace.

I mean, certainly there would have to be. I mean, especially if Reformed Baptists were going to accept it, you'd have to have at least some references to Pilgrim's Progress in there just to make it sound good.

But that wouldn't make Pilgrim's Progress Scripture. Even though some of you may have already had it bound with your Bible, you might want to not do that anymore. It's not a good thing to do. In the same way, when you look at some of these intertestamental works, there are some very interesting streams of thought in regards to the nature of the Messiah, in regards to the text we read today in the opening.

Proverbs chapter 8. That discussion of wisdom, that personification of wisdom in Proverbs chapter 8, lots of speculation about that. The attributes of God began to be personalized in some of the Jewish thought.

And wisdom became personalized. And there was a lot of this type of stuff going on. So, the Word of God, that terminology, the exalted Word of God in the Psalter, there were people who were looking at those and expanding upon those and considering those things.

So, the disciples, when they hear Jesus talking about another paraclete who is described as the Spirit of Truth, would have had at least some... this would have not been some new thing. You know, the Spirit appears in Genesis 1.

And yet, I think what causes some people to stumble is they look at the Old Testament, they look at the Old Covenant Scriptures and they go, well, there's so many areas that are not nearly as explicitly laid out as they are in the New, that, well, we'll just say the New Testament guys sort of made this up.

Or they come up with this on their own, or something along those lines. And I don't think that's the way to look at it at all. I think that the Old Covenant Scriptures are to be seen in their fulfillment in the New Testament.

We have to be very careful how far we take this. It's very easy to just completely throw out what the Old Testament writers would have understood and ignore that and just completely import the New Testament into that.

That, I think, goes too far. But then it's also possible to just cut the two apart and go, we can only look at what the Old Testament says. We can't go beyond that. There cannot be any fulfillment. And that's a fundamental denial of what we've seen in Hebrews, which is telling us this is a shadow.

It is a foretype. And finding balance there in our interpretation is, well, why you can buy lots and lots of commentaries at the Christian bookstore, basically, is what that's all about. In other words, the disciples would have had a background.

They would have had enough within their context to understand that when Jesus starts talking about another helper who's of the same kind, he's going away. It never would have occurred to them that the one that the Father was going to send who would be with them forever is impersonal.

Jesus is personal. He is a person. He communicates. He interacts. They have communion with him. And so, the one who must take his place in the same verse is said to be another of the same kind, and yet there's going to be a difference because he will be with you forever.

So, in other words, unlike Christ, who comes for a specific mission, to accomplish a specific thing, then there's going to be something that goes around it. Yes, sir? Yeah, but you've got to realize the folks at your door or on the Internet, my experience with them is almost universally the same, and I've been dealing with them now for nigh on to three decades.

I have sat down with people who will give you what sound like very in-depth discussions of well, I've told the story before. I'll repeat it now. It's not specifically on Numa, but I'll get back to that.

Years ago, when I first met with Jehovah's Witnesses, now, what I mean by that is to actually try to witness to them as an adult. I had known Jehovah's Witnesses. We had lived across the street from the Kingdom Hall.

I had had some interaction and stuff, and my parents had just said, look out. They're weird. To actually sit down and talk with them, I met with these two ladies, and I was probably somewhere between first and second year Greek at that point in time.

I had a Greek New Testament, but wasn't certainly able to read overly well yet or anything like that. This woman gives about a, it seemed like five minutes at a time, but it was probably two, two-and-a-half-minute pre-memorized speech on the significance of the lack of the definite article in the third clause of John 1 .1.

If you're not familiar with what that is, is the last phrase of John 1 .1. Jehovah's Witnesses translate that, and the word was agod. This woman gives me, like I said, it probably was at least two minutes long.

It seemed longer at the time. Pre-memorized speech about the Greek language at this point. Well, I have a Greek New Testament. Not an interlinear. Not one of those that has English on one side and Greek on the other.

It's just Greek. I handed it across to her, and I asked her to show me a Greek article. She didn't even know which way to hold the book. She could not read a word of Greek, but she trusted implicitly what the Watchtower Society told her, and give her kudos.

I mean, how many of us would memorize something like that to be able to use in witnessing situations? It's a really good illustration of how far people will go for something that's wrong. My point being that I've encountered much sharper people than her, who have done a tremendous amount of research into, say, Pneuma, and its being neuter, and have parallel examples in the Greek Septuagint, and la, la, la, la, la, la.

Generally, my experience with them is it sounds like they actually know the language, but ask them to translate a passage that is not significant to the specific battles that they fight with Orthodox Christianity, and they're lost.

They have no earthly idea. They could no more translate from the Gospels, where Jesus is saying, bless her, the meek, or something. Their life depended on it, because they actually, all they know about the language is what they have studied for apologetic purposes.

That's been my experience with them. And so, sure, you and I know that if you try to apply their rules outside of just these little passages, it's going to make mishmash out of everything. It's not going to make any sense.

But they don't translate those passages, so it never bothers them. They don't even see that the rules they've come up with actually aren't rules. They make no sense.

Right? You, obviously, you can use this, or something.

Like that. It's a long story we'd go into, but it is amazing the depth to which people will go. That's one of the reasons I've identified the New World Translation as one of the most dangerous pieces of anti-Christian literature around, because when you change the book, you change the faith.

And for the large portion of us who would like to reach those Jehovah's Witnesses, our hearts break when we see these people walking down the street with their tie and they've got a bag like mine right there.

And they're peddling Watchtowers and Awake magazines. And I know what their life is like. And I know what they've been taught. And I know that there's just no... I mean, I've attended district conventions of Jehovah's Witnesses years and years ago.

And to listen to them sing, it's just sort of like... There's just no joy. There's no happiness. It's just such a dark and dreary thing. And you want to reach them, but man, they have been incredibly well insulated from the truth, if we want to put it that way.

But then again, as I think about it, it's the same thing. You're dealing with Mormons. They've been insulated by language. And I'm doing all sorts of interviews these days on Islam because of my new book.

And I almost always try to work into, because there are almost always Christian talk shows, the three major hurdles you have to get over with, the three major barriers to the gospel amongst Muslims. And so, when you think about it, there are lots of barriers in most situations.

But anyways, they are a very difficult group to deal with. There's no question about it. Now, getting back to verse 16, notice again I just want to emphasize this. Another helper of the same kind, but with you in a different way.

The role of the Spirit is and I would emphasize freely, I believe freely chosen in the eternity past, but the role of the Spirit is to be the one who indwells the church, directs believers to Christ, the one who makes application of what the Father and Son have done in redemption itself, and what identifies the body of Christ in each and every generation is the presence of the Spirit.

As Paul will say, if you do not have the Spirit of God,.

You do not belong to Him.

You can have all the right theology in the world and you can quote all the right creeds in the world but if you do not have the Spirit, you do not belong to Christ. That's just all there is to it. That He may be with you forever.

Now, obviously the you here is transcending just the disciples. We're starting to see here language that will transcend, that will see the disciples as the beginning of the fulfillment, but there's going to be more that comes beyond that because the emphasis is not really that He will be with you and just you guys forever in heaven.

The point is, as Jesus will in John chapter 17, He talks about the disciples first and then He talks about those who will believe through their witness. And the same way, this coming of the Spirit is promised to all believers in Jesus Christ.

And there is no idea here, let me mention something else really practically here, of the Spirit being withdrawn for a period of time. Now, why do I mention that? Well, I just mentioned them in passing, but our Mormon friends think that there was about an 1800 year hole in this promise.

That within a generation or two of the apostles, the church went into apostasy not just in the sense of, well, the majority of people went astray. No, that's not what they mean. The church only exists in LDS theology when the proper priesthood authority exists on earth.

That priesthood authority was lost and so the church in toto, as the church ceased to exist somewhere around the beginning of the second century and was not established until April of 1830. And so that's a long period of time where the Spirit of God was not functioning in this way because they would also say that to receive the Spirit of God you need to do so through the power of the priesthood.

That's one of the specific functions of the Melchizedek priesthood in Mormon theology and that Melchizedek priesthood is not restored to the earth until shortly before that time in 1830 by the later story that Joseph Smith made up.

That wasn't the original story, but that's a whole other story we can't get into right now. Anyhow, the idea being that there was this big gap and there was a massive apostasy. Now, I would certainly agree that especially after Theodosius around 380 AD you do have a tremendous amount of what we would call apostasy or I think the better way to describe it is not apostasy because that's someone who once knew the truth and has walked away from that.

What you have is nominalism. Nominalism. What is nominalism? In name only. And nominalism has been truly one of the greatest enemies of the true Christian faith throughout its history. It certainly is today.

I mean, I would say the consistent biggest hurdle I have to jump over as an apologist all the time is the fact that my enemy, no matter what they are, secularist, Muslim, Mormon, Jehovah's Witness, if they're opposing the Christian faith, they can find someone who calls themselves a Christian who will agree with them about whatever it is they want to argue about.

When you look at liberalism, when you look at dead evangelicalism, when you look at traditionalism, whatever terminology you want, when you have people who are Christian in name only but are not concerned about what the Scriptures actually teach, not concerned about Orthodoxy, not concerned about the application of the Lordship of Christ in all of their lives, etc.

That really is one of the hardest things to deal with and certainly you see that in so much of this time period. When Christianity becomes the end thing in a society, that's always dangerous. That's always dangerous because the world hates the light.

The world's never going to rejoice in the light and certainly in the situation that you saw develop, really as soon as the persecution against the Church ends and even sometimes earlier than that during periods of non-persecution in a certain region, you get people who are Christians in name only.

The truth is always damaged when there are those who name the name of Christ but do not walk in accordance with his commandments. If you love me, keep my commandments. So, that's something to consider.

Alright, we only got through verse 16. We need to talk about what it means to be a spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive. But again, this is some of the deepest, richest material on the Spirit of God.

So, I don't want to rush it simply because there's only so much of it in the Scriptures. I think it would be good to have a proper understanding of what is being said here. So, we'll look carefully at that as we have opportunity of doing so.

I believe I'm here next week and then gone for two weeks. The first weekend in Boston, the second weekend. I'll be done preaching hours before you gather because Germany is a long ways from here and the sun rises there a long time before it does here.

So, I'll be teaching textual criticism in Berlin in just a few weeks. So, that's going to be exciting. Let's close the Word of Prayer. Father, we thank you for this day. We certainly thank you for the promise of the Spirit.

We thank you for the fact that it is that very Spirit who has preserved these words for us. That very Spirit who has brought us here today and has given us an interest in these things, a desire to know.

So, we would ask that you would bless our study of this text and, Lord, not just that we would gain intellectual knowledge, but that we would know better the one who is our helper and our comforter. We would ask that he would be with us now as we go into worship so that we might experience true worship.

To your honor and glory, we pray in Christ's name. Amen.