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The words of the Master flowed more freely once the restraint of the traitor had been removed. Furthermore, the departure of Judas on his mission of betrayal brought the Cross within a measurable distance of Our Lord. He now spoke to His Apostles as if He was feeling the crossbeams. If His death would be glorifying, it must have been because something would be done by it which was not accomplished by His words, miracles, and His healing of the sick. All through His life He had been trying to communicate His love for mankind, but it was not until His Body, like the alabaster box, would be broken, that the perfume of His love would pervade the universe. He said also that, in His Cross, God the Father was glorified. This was because His Father did not spare His own Son, but offered Him to save man. He put a new meaning into His death, namely, from His Cross would beam forth the pity and the pardon of God.
He now addressed His Apostles in two different ways: as a dying parent to His children, and as a dying Lord to His servants.
It is only for a short time
That I am with you, My children.
JOHN 13:33
Here He was speaking in terms of the deepest intimacy to those gathered about Him, answering their childish questions one after another. Because they were as infants in understanding His sacrifice, He used the simple analogy of a road they could not presently travel:
You cannot reach the place where I am.
JOHN 13:33
When they would see the clouds of glory enveloping Him in His Ascension into heaven, then they would know why they could not presently go with Him. Later on, they would follow Him, but first they needed the schooling of Calvary and of Pentecost. How little the Apostles understood His life was revealed by Peter’s question:
Lord, where art Thou going?
JOHN 13:36
Even in his curiosity, the beautiful character of Peter was revealed, for he could not bear separation from His Master. Our Lord answered him:
I am going where thou canst not follow Me now,
But shalt follow Me afterwards.
JOHN 13:36
Peter was yet unfit for the deeper realization of the Resurrection. The Savior’s Hour had come, but Peter’s had not. As on the Mount of the Transfiguration, Peter would have had the glory without the death, so now he would have the company of the Divine Master in heaven without the Cross. Peter considered the answer of Our Blessed Lord about following Him afterward as a reflection upon his courage and fidelity. So he made another request, and declared his bravery:
Lord, why cannot I follow Thee now?
I am ready to lay down my life for Thy sake.
JOHN 13:37
Peter’s emotion at that second was to follow his Master; but when the occasion to follow presented itself, Peter would not be at Calvary. Peering into Peter’s heart, Our Lord foretold what would happen when there would be a chance to follow Him.
Thou art ready, to lay down thy life for My sake?
Believe Me, by cock-crow thou wilt
Thrice disown Me.
JOHN 18:38
The Omnipotent Mind of Our Lord pictured the fall of the one whom He had called the Rock. But after the coming of His Spirit, Peter would follow Him. The significance of this is preserved in a beautiful legend, which pictures Peter flying from the persecution of Nero in Rome. Peter met the Lord on the Appian Way and said to Him, “Lord, whither goest Thou?” Our Blessed Lord answered: “I go to Rome to be crucified again.” Peter went back to Rome, and was crucified on the site where the Church of St. Peter stands today. The Sacred Heart now looked beyond that dark Hour to the days when He and His Apostles and their successors would be one with Him in Spirit. If there was any moment calculated to take a mind away from the future, it was this awful present moment. But since He had already spoken of the unity between the Apostles and Himself through the Eucharist, He would take up the theme again under the figure of the vine and the branches. This unity of which He spoke was not such as existed at that moment, for within an hour they would all desert Him and flee. Rather it was the unity that would be consummated through His glorification. The figure of the vine He used was a very familiar one in the Old Testament. Israel was called a vine, the vine that was brought out of Egypt; Isaias spoke of God as having planted that chosen vine. Jeremias and Osee bemoaned and complained that it was not bringing forth fruit. As Our Blessed Lord, in contrast to the manna that was given by Moses, called Himself the “True Bread” as in contrast to the brilliant lights of the Feast of the Tabernacles, He called Himself the “True Light” as in contrast to the temple built by hands, He called Himself the “Temple of God,” so now in contrast to the vine of Israel, He said:
I am the true vine,
And it is My Father Who tends it.
JOHN 15:1
This unity between Himself and His followers of the new Israel would be like the unity between the vine and the branches; the same sap or grace that flowed through Him will flow through them:
I am the vine, you are its branches;
If a man lives on in Me, and I in him,
Then he will yield abundant fruit;
Separated from Me,
You have no power to do anything.
JOHN 15:5
Separated from Him, a man is no better than a branch separated from a vine, dry and dead. The branch may bear clusters, but it does not produce them; He alone produces them. As He went to His death, He said that He lived, and they would live in Him. He saw beyond the Cross and affirmed that their vitality and energy would come from Him, and the relationship between them would be organic, not mechanical. He saw those who professed to be united outwardly to Him, but who nevertheless would be inwardly separated from Him; others He saw who would need a further purification by His Father through a Cross, which He speaks of in terms of a knife pruning and cutting.
The branch that yields no fruit in Me,
He cuts away;
The branch that does yield fruit,
He trims clean, so that it may yield more fruit.
JOHN 15:2
The ideal of the new community is holiness, the One Who holds the knife is His Heavenly Father. The object of the pruning is not the chastisement, but chastening and perfection—except in the case of those who are useless; these are excommunicated from the vine. When Our Lord first called the Apostles, He reminded them of all they must suffer for His sake. As He went to the Cross, He gave them a new understanding of His previous message that they should take up the Cross daily and follow Him. Unity with Him would come not merely from knowing His teaching, but principally from the cultivation of the Divine within them through the pruning of all that was ungodly:
If a man does not live on in Me,
He can only be like the branch
That is cast of and withers away;
Such a branch is picked up and
Thrown into the fire, to burn there.
JOHN 15:6
One of the effects of self-discipline to intensify this union between them and Himself would be joy. Self-denial does not bring sadness, but happiness.
All this I have told you,
So that My joy may be yours,
And the measure of your joy may be filled up.
JOHN 15:11
He talked of joy, within a few hours of the kiss of Judas; but the joy He expressed was not in the prospect of suffering, but rather the joy of making an absolute and complete submission in love to His Father for the sake of mankind. Just as there is a kind of joy in giving a precious gift to a friend, so there is a joy in giving one’s life for humanity. That joy of self-sacrifice He promised would be theirs, if they kept His commandments as the commandments of His Father. The unhappy Apostles, who saw the dream of a purely earthly kingdom fade away, could not fathom His words of joy; they would understand it later only when the Spirit came upon them. Immediately after Pentecost, as they were before the same council which condemned Christ, their hearts would be so happy, because as branches they were pruned to be made one with the Vine:
And they left the presence of the Council,
Rejoicing that they had been found worthy
To suffer indignity for the sake of Jesus’Name.
ACTS 5:41
In addition to joy, a second effect of union with Him would be love.
This is My commandment, that you should love
One another, as I have loved you.
This is the greatest love a man can show,
That he should lay down his life for his friends.
JOHN 15:13
Love is the normal relation of branches to one another, because all are rooted in the vine. There were to be no limits to His love. Peter once set a limit to love when he asked how many times he should forgive. Was it seven? Our Lord told him seventy times seven, which implied infinity and denied any mathematical calculation. There are to be no limits to their mutual love, for they must all ask themselves, what was the limit of His love? He had no limit, for He came to lay down His life.
Here again He spoke of the purpose of His coming, namely, Redemption. The Cross is foremost. The voluntary character of it is emphasized when He said that He laid down His life; no one takes it away. His love would be like the heat of the sun: those who were nearest to it would be warm and happy; those who were farthest away would still know its light.
Only through death for others could He show love. His death would not be like the death of one man out of love for another, or like a soldier for his country, because the man who saves others must die eventually anyway. However great the sacrifice, it would be a premature payment of a debt that had to be paid. But in the case of Our Savior, He need not have died at all. No one could take away His life from Him. Though He called those for whom He died “friends,” the friendship was all on His side and not on ours, for as sinners we were enemies. John later on expressed it well when he said that He died for us while we were yet sinners.
Sinners can show a love for one another by taking the punishment which another deserves. But Our Blessed Lord was not only taking the punishment but also taking the guilt as if it were His own. Furthermore, this death that He was about to die would be quite different from the death of martyrs for His cause, since they have the example of His death and the expectancy of the glory which He promised. But to die upon the Cross without a pitying eye, to be surrounded by a multitude who mocked Him, and to die without being obliged to die—such was the peak of love. The Apostles could not understand such depths of affection, but they would later on. Peter, who then understood nothing about such sacrificial love, later on, seeing his sheep go to death under Roman persecution, would tell them:
It does a man credit when he bears
Undeserved ill-treatment with the thought
Of God in his heart.
If you do wrong and are punished for it,
Your patience is nothing to boast of;
It is the patience of the innocent sufferer
That wins credit in God’s sight.
Indeed, you are engaged to this by the call of Christ;
He suffered for our sakes,
And left you His own example;
You were to follow in His footsteps.
I PETER 2:19–19
John, too, would paraphrase what he heard that night, as he leaned against the heart of Christ:
God has proved His love to us by laying
Down His life for our sakes;
We too must be ready to lay down our lives
For the sake of our brethren.
I JOHN 3:16
THE HATRED OF THE WORLD
After having finished His discourse about the unity existing between His Apostles and Himself, Our Lord passed to the next subject which logically followed, namely, their separation from those who did not share His Spirit and His life. He was referring not just to a condition or opposition that would exist between His followers and the world immediately after His leaving the world, but rather to a permanent and an inevitable condition. The contrast was between the great mass of unregenerate and unbelieving who would refuse to accept Him, and those who would be united to Him as branches to vine. The world of which He spoke was not the physical universe or the cosmos but rather a spirit, a Zeitgeist, a unity of the forces of evil against the forces of good. The Beatitudes set Him in immediate opposition to the world, and therefore prepared for His Cross. Now He warned them that they too would have a Cross, if they were really His disciples. To have no Cross would make one suspect of lacking the indelible brand of being one of His own.
If the world hates you, be sure that it hated Me
Before it learned to hate you.
If you belonged to the world, the world would know
You for its own and love you;
It is because you do not belong to the world,
Because I have singled you out from
The midst of the world, that the world hates you.
JOHN 15:18, 19
Seven times during this discourse on the world, He used the word “hate”—a solemn witness to its persistence and enmity. The world loves the worldly; but to preserve its codes, practices, and mental fashions, it must hate the unworldly or the Divine. Let the Apostles or any of His followers join a sun cult or an Oriental sect; will they find themselves hated? No, that is because the world knows its own. Let them be one in Christ following rigorously His commandments; will they be hated? Yes, “Because I have singled you out of the midst of the world.” For the moment, the Apostles could not understand this hate; even after His Resurrection they were unmolested and permitted to go back to their nets and boats. But once He ascended into heaven and sent His Spirit, they would experience the full malignity of the world’s hate. James, who heard these words at the Last Supper, would later repeat them from knowledge and experience:
Wantons, have you never been told that the
World’s friendship means enmity with God,
And the man who would have the world for his friend
Makes himself God’s enemy?
JAMES 4:4
John, too, would remind his people that the world is antagonistic to Christ.
Do not bestow your love on the world,
And what the world has to of er;
The lover of this world has no love
Of the Father in him.
I JOHN 2:15
Our Lord then explained that the world would not hate them as it hated him, but because of Him. No servant could be greater than the Master; they would be persecuted because of His name’s sake:
And they will treat you thus because
You bear My name;
They have no knowledge of Him Who sent Me.
JOHN 15:21
Our Lord gave no hope of converting everyone in the world; the masses would be more won by the spirit of the world than by Him. To share His life was to share His fate. The world would hate His followers, not because of evil in their lives, but precisely because of the absence of evil or rather their goodness. Goodness does not cause hatred, but it gives occasion for hatred to manifest itself. The holier and purer a life, the more it would attract malignity and hate. Mediocrity alone survives. Perfect Innocence must be crucified in the world where there is still evil. As the diseased eye dreads the light, so an evil conscience dreads goodness which reproves it. The world’s hatred is not innocent or guiltless:
If I had not come and given them My message,
They would not have been in fault;
As it is; their fault can find no excuse.
To hate Me is to hate My Father too….
And all this, in fulfillment of the saying which
Is written in their law,
They hated Me without cause.
JOHN 15:22–22
Their hatred for Him revealed their hatred for the Father. Evil has no capital of its own, it is a parasite on goodness. Pure hatred draws its blood from contact with goodness; this makes hell begin on earth, but it does not make it end here. His Gospel, He said, would in one way aggravate men’s sin by their willful rejection of it. There had been sin and evil throughout history; there were Cains who killed Abels, the Gentiles who persecuted the Jews, Sauls who sought to kill Davids, but all that evil was a trifling thing compared, the Lord was saying, to the monstrous evil that would be done Him. He had taught that there would be degrees of punishment meted out to those who were lost; now He added that the degree would be determined by the degree of light that they had sinned against. His coming had brought a new standard of measurement into the world. It would be more tolerable for Sodom and Gomorrah on the Day of Judgment than for Capharnaum, because the latter had turned its back upon the King of kings and the Lord of lords.
This spirit of enmity against Him would not be only while He lived, or while the Apostles lived, but as long as time endured. When Alexander died, no one raised clenched fists over his grave; hatred against any tyrant perished with the tyrant. No one hates Buddha; he is dead. But hatred against Him would live on, because He lives—“the same, yesterday, today, and forever.” To be forewarned was to be forearmed.
The time is coming when anyone who puts
You to death will claim that he is performing
An act of worship to God.
JOHN 16:2
From uncharitable censures, men would pass even to taking the lives of His followers. And they would do so under the persuasion that they were acting religiously, as the Scribes and Pharisees did, and as Paul too did, before his conversion. What He predicted for His followers came to pass: Matthew suffered martyrdom by the sword in Ethiopia; Mark was dragged through the streets of Alexandria unto his death; Luke was hanged on an olive tree in Greece; Peter was crucified at Rome with his head downward; James was beheaded at Jerusalem; James the Less was thrown from a pinnacle in the temple and beaten to death below; Philip was hanged against a pillar in Phrygia; Bartholomew was flayed alive; Andrew was bound to a cross, and he preached to his persecutors till he died; Thomas had his body pierced; Jude was shot to death with arrows; Mathias was first stoned and then beheaded. It is very likely when these things happened, they recalled the words of Our Lord at the Last Supper:
I have told you this, so that when the
Time comes for it to happen,
You may remember that I told you of it.
JOHN 16:4
The counsel that He was giving to His Apostles about the expectation of the Cross and their own lives was a proof that the Cross was paramount in His own. To His followers, He promised in this world no immunity from evil, but He promised victory over it:
I have said this to you, so that in Me
You may find peace.
In the world, you will only find tribulation;
But take courage, I have overcome the world.
JOHN 16:33
The enjoyment of peace was not inconsistent with the endurance of tribulation. Peace is in the soul, and comes from union with Him, though the body may feel pain. Trials, tribulation, anguish, anxiety are permitted by the very One Who gives peace.
THE SPIRIT
The next subject which engaged the attention of the Savior the night of His agony, was the Holy Spirit. The prophet Ezechiel had long before foretold that a new Spirit would be given to the world:
I will give you a new heart,
And breathe a new spirit into you;
I will take away from your breasts those hearts
That are hard as stone,
And give you human hearts instead.
I will make My Spirit penetrate you,
So that you will follow in the path of My Law,
Remember and carry out My decrees.
EZECHIEL 36:26, 27
Adam’s body was made when God breathed the spirit of life into him. Israel’s tabernacle and temple had to be built before the Shekinah and the glory of God came to take possession of it; so there had to be a renovation within man as the condition of God’s own Spirit dwelling there. With the coming of Christ, the fulfillment of the prophecy of Ezechiel began to take place. The Spirit had played a very important role in His life. John the Baptist had foretold two things about Christ: first, that He was the Lamb of God and would take away the sins of the world; and the other, that He would baptize His disciples with the Holy Spirit and with fire. The shedding of the blood was for the sinful; the gift of the Spirit was for His obedient and loving followers. When Our Lord was baptized in the Jordan, the Holy Spirit came upon Him. He was baptized in the Spirit; but He must suffer before giving that Spirit to others. That is why, the night when His Passion began, He spoke most profoundly of the Spirit. In His conversation with the woman at the well, He said the time was come when true worshipers would worship:
The Father in Spirit and in Truth.
JOHN 4:23
His words “in Spirit” did not mean a contrast between an internal or sentimental religion as contrasted with external observances, but rather a contrast between a worship inspired by the Spirit of God as opposed to a purely natural spirit. “In truth” did not mean “sincere and honest,” but rather in Christ, who is the Word or Truth of God. Later on, when Our Blessed Lord promised to give His Body and Blood under the appearance of bread and wine, He implied that He must first ascend to heaven before the Spirit would be given.
What will you make of it, if you see the Son of Man
Ascending to the place where He was before?
Only the Spirit gives life; the flesh is of no avail;
And the words I have been speaking
To you are spirit and life.
JOHN 6:63, 64
He began by telling them that His death would happen on the following day; they would see Him no longer with eyes of the flesh. A little more time must pass, that is to say, the interval between His death and His Resurrection when they would see Him glorified with their bodily eyes. His loss, He assured them, would be compensated for by a greater blessing than His presence in the flesh. The Apostles could not understand what He was saying about the short interval between His death and Resurrection during which their eyes were to be dimmed.
After a little while, you will see Me no longer,
And again after a little while
You will have sight of Me,
Because I am going back to the Father
JOHN 16:16
He was now down to the level of the Apostles’ mentality, for their principal concern was what would happen to Him. But in two hours they would have a better understanding of these words, for within that space interval the Apostles would momentarily lose sight of their Master, after He was arrested. Because Our Lord said that He was going to the Father, the Apostles were extremely troubled, for that meant His absence from them; they said:
We cannot understand what He means by it.
JOHN 16:18
He knew that they were eager to question Him further on this point. Their sorrow and wonderment was not just because He said that He was about to leave them, but also because of the disappointment of their hopes, for they had looked to the establishment of some kind of an earthly Messianic kingdom. He assured them that while they were presently cast down with grief, the hour would be very brief, just long enough for Him to prove His power over death and to go to His Father. When He passed into the Hour, they would be sad, while His enemies or the world would rejoice. The world would believe that it had done away with Him forever. The grief of His chosen ones, however, would be transitory, for the Cross must come before the crown.
Believe Me when I tell you this,
You will weep and lament
While the world rejoices; you will be distressed,
But your distress shall be turned into joy.
JOHN 16:20
Their passage from sorrow into joy is symbolized by the analogy of the pains and the bliss of motherhood:
A woman in childbirth feels distress,
Because now her time has come;
But when she has borne her child,
She does not remember the distress any longer,
So glad is she that a man has been born into the world.
So it is with you, you are distressed now;
But one day I will see you again,
And then your hearts will be glad;
And your gladness will be one which nobody
Can take away from you.
JOHN 16:21–21
Providence had wisely ordered that the pangs of the mother are compensated for by her joy in her child. So too, the Cross-pangs are the precursors of Resurrection-joys. There must be fellowship with His sufferings before there can be fellowship with His glory. At present, they had sadness because they would no longer see Him in the flesh, but their joy would come through a spiritual quickening, and that joy would have a permanent character about it which the world could not take away.
The nature of this ultimate joy that was to be theirs, the Savior explained in terms of the Comforter or Paraclete whom He would send.
I will ask the Father, and He will give you
Another to befriend you,
One Who is to dwell continually with you for ever.
It is the Truth-giving Spirit, for whom
The world can find no room, because it
Cannot see Him, cannot recognize Him….
It is only a little while now, before the world
Is to see Me no more; but you can see Me,
Because I live on, and you too will have life.
When that day comes, you will learn for yourselves
That I am in My Father, and you are in Me,
And I am in you.
JOHN 14:16–16
There would be another Comforter, or “Another to befriend them.” “Another” is not a difference in quality, but rather a distinction of persons. He had been their Comforter; He was at their side; He had been One with them and in His Presence they had gained strength and courage; but their trouble was that He was going. He now promised them another Comforter or Advocate. As He would be the Advocate with God in heaven, so the Spirit dwelling within them would plead the cause of God on earth and be their Advocate. The Divine secret that He gave was that their loss would now have the greater blessing of the coming of the Spirit. The Father had given a twofold revelation of Himself; the Son was His image walking among men, reminding them of the Divine original and also the Model to which they were to be restored. In the Spirit, the Father and the Son would send forth a Divine Power, Who would dwell within them and make of their bodies a temple.
It was better that He go away, for His return to the Father was the condition of the coming of the Spirit. If He remained among them, He would have been only an example to be copied; if He left and sent the Spirit, He would be a veritable life to be lived.
And yet I can say truly that it is better for you
I should go away; He Who is to befriend
You will not come to you unless I do go,
But if only I make my way there,
I will send Him to you.
JOHN 16:7
The return of His human nature in glory to heaven was a necessary preliminary to the mission of the Spirit. His going would not be a loss but a gain. As the fall of the first man was the fall of his descendants, so the Ascension of the Son of Man would be the ascension of all who were grafted unto Him. His atoning death was the condition of receiving the Spirit of God. If He did not go away, that is to say, unless He died, nothing would be done; the Jews would remain as they were, the heathens would remain in their blindness, and all would be under sin and death. The corporal presence had to be removed in order that the spiritual presence might take its place. His continued presence on earth would have meant a localized presence; the descending of the Spirit would mean that He could be in the midst of all men who would be incorporated unto Him.
The indwelling of the Spirit would mean more than His physical presence among them. So long as Our Lord was with them on earth, His influence was from without inward; but when He would send the Spirit, His influence would radiate from without; those who possessed it would have the Spirit of Christ Jesus on earth.
There would be a twofold glorification of Himself: the one by the Father; the other by the Spirit; the one would take place in heaven, and the other on earth. By the one, He is glorified in God Himself, and by the other, He is glorified in all who believe in Him:
And He will bring honor to Me,
Because it is from Me that He will derive
What He makes plain to you.
I say that He will derive from Me
What He makes plain to you,
Because all that belongs to the Father belongs to Me.
JOHN 16:14, 15
He would be glorified when His human nature would be seated at the right hand of the Father. But this heavenly spiritual glory could not be truly apprehended unless He sent the Spirit Who reveals the glory of Christ in them by dwelling and working within. Though they knew Christ by the flesh, they are now reassured that they would know Him so no longer.
Obedience was described as the necessary condition of receiving the Spirit:
If you have any love for Me, you must keep
The commandments which I give you;
And then I will ask the Father, and He will
Give you another to befriend you.
JOHN 14:15, 16
The Spirit came to Christ in the Jordan after His thirty years of obedience to His Heavenly Father and to His foster father Joseph and His mother. His second act of obedience was accepting the command of the Father to bear the Cross in response to the Divine “must.” It was only after obedience that the Spirit would be given to the Apostles. As He sent His Spirit because of His obedience to His Father, so His believers would receive the Spirit through obedience to Him. God dwelt in the temple of Jerusalem because they obeyed His instruction in building it. In the last two chapters of Exodus, eighteen times the expression had been made that all was done as the Lord had commanded. So now as Our Blessed Lord prepared to make human bodies the temples of His Holy Spirit, He too laid down the same condition that they obey His commandments.
Peter himself would speak of this immediately after Pentecost:
And now, exalted at God’s Right Hand,
He has claimed from His Father His promise
To bestow the Holy Spirit; and He has poured
Out that Spirit,
As you can see and hear for yourselves.
ACTS 2:33
He next explained that the Spirit would teach them new truths by recalling the old truths, and would recall the old truths in the teaching of the new. Christ had communicated a germinal form of truth, but not its fullness. When He sent His Spirit, there would be an extraordinary refreshment of memory and a conviction of truth which would surpass even the preparatory knowledge.
He Who is to befriend you, the Holy Spirit
Whom the Father will send on My account,
Will in His turn make everything plain,
And recall to your minds everything I have said to you.
JOHN 14:26
As a light shone on the Old Testament through the coming Christ, so a light would shine on the life of Christ through the Spirit. The strengthening office of the Spirit was thus brought into immediate connection with Christ’s illumining office of a Teacher. Those who would get back to the pure form of the Gospel forget that the Master of the Gospel, Christ Himself, spoke of the development, the evolution, the unfolding of His Truth through the Apostles. As the Son had made known the Father, so the Spirit would make known the Son; as the Son had glorified the Father, so the Spirit would glorify Christ. It was indeed only after the Resurrection and the Descent of the Holy Spirit that the Apostles remembered the things that He had said to them, and also came into full comprehension of the meaning of the Cross and Redemption.
There were two trees in the Garden of Paradise: the tree of Divine Life, and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. It was God’s plan to have man remain with Him through communion with the tree of life which he should eat and thereby live forever. Satan assured man that the way to peace was through the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. But man forgot that when evil is in him, it begins to take possession of him. By the false path of the knowledge of good and evil, man was led to destruction. Now the tree of life is erected on Calvary and given again to man. The tree of life then became the tree not of the knowledge of good and evil, but the tree of Truth itself through the Spirit.
The truth-giving Spirit, when He comes,
Will guide you into all truth.
He will not utter a message of His own;
He will utter the message that has been given to Him;
And He will make plain to you what is still to come.
JOHN 16:13
He said that the Spirit of Truth that comes from the Father and Himself would cause truth to enter the soul in such a way as to make it a reality. Natural truth is on the surface of the soul, but Divine truth is in its depths. To know the Father one must know the Son; to know the Son, one must have the Spirit, for the Spirit will reveal the Son who said:
I am the Truth.
JOHN 14:6
If all mankind needed was a teacher, man would long ago have been holy, for he has had teachers from the Indian sages up to this very hour. But it takes more than the spirit of man to make a man holy, or to know the truth; it requires the Spirit of Truth. Human truths can be known only by living them and Divine truths can be lived only by living in the Spirit.
In His promise of the Spirit, Our Lord affirmed four truths concerning Himself. First, He said that He had “come out from the Father” in other words, He is generated from all eternity as the Word or the Son of God. Next He said, “I am come into the world,” which referred to His Incarnation and the revelation of His Godhead to men. Third, “I am leaving the world,” which meant His rejection by the world, His sufferings, His Passion, and His death. Now He told His Apostles, “I go to the Father,” which referred to His Resurrection from the dead, His Ascension to the Father and glory, and the Descent of His Spirit. What effect these basic truths would have on the world He now proceeded to elaborate.
THE THREEFOLD MISSION OF THE SPIRIT
The Spirit will come, and it will be for Him
To prove the world wrong, about sin,
And about rightness of heart and about judging.
JOHN 16:8
This is the description of the triple victory which the Holy Spirit would gain over the world through the Apostles—a victory not physical, but moral. On the one side, there would be Divine truth, on the other, the false spirit of the world. The mission of the Spirit would be one of convicting and proving the world wrong in three areas: the world’s view of sin, the world’s view of righteousness, the world’s view of judgment.
About sin; they have not found belief in Me.
JOHN 16:9
The first conviction of the Spirit or demonstration would be the truth that man is sinful. Sin is never understood fully in terms of a law that is broken; evil is revealed when there is seen what it does to one who is loved. The unbelief which produced the Crucifixion was, therefore, sin in its essence. Sin, in its fullness, is the rejection of Christ. The usual way to win men to truth is by some popular appeal. But the Spirit will win men to truth by convincing them of their sinfulness; in doing this, there would be revealed the fact that Christ was primarily a Redeemer or Savior from sin.
The ministry of the Spirit would convict the world of sin from another point of view, because it refused to believe in Him. By unbelief, or by refusing to accept the deliverance from sin which Christ brought, antagonism to the Divine is affirmed. The very unbelief which men would show toward Him would unveil sin in its hiding place. Nothing but the Spirit could convince man of sin; conscience could not, for it can sometimes be smothered; public opinion cannot, for it sometimes justifies sin; but the gravest sin of all which the Spirit would reveal would not be intemperance, avarice, or lust, but unbelief in Christ. It is this same Spirit of God which renders the sinner not merely conscious of his state, but also contrite and penitent, when he accepts Redemption.
To reject the Redeemer is to prefer evil to good. The crucifix is an autobiography in which man can read the story of his own life, either to his own salvation or his own condemnation. So long as sin was regarded only from a psychological point of view, the Cross of Christ appeared as an exaggeration. The sand of the desert, the blood of a beast, or water could just as well purify man. But once sin was seen under the sight of Infinite Holiness, then the Cross of Christ alone could equal and satisfy for this tragic horror.
The second indictment of the Spirit had to do with righteousness.
About rightness of heart; I am going
Back to My Father,
And you are not to see Me any more.
JOHN 16:10
At first it seemed far-fetched to see how Christ could say that His Ascension to the Father would have anything to do with uprightness of heart. But He here added to what was said about sin. As the world sometimes sees sin only in acts of transgressions and not in unbelief, so it often sees righteousness in acts of philanthropy but not in the justification which man has at the right hand of the Father through Christ. Once Our Lord ascended into heaven, the Spirit would show how wrong the world was in regarding Him as a criminal and as a malefactor. The Ascension upset all the world’s standards of right and wrong. The fact that the Father exalted Him at His right hand would prove that all the charges against Him were false. It was the world that was unrighteous in rejecting Him.
Once man is convinced of his own sinfulness, he cannot be convinced of his own righteousness; once a man is convinced that Christ has saved him from sin, then he is convinced that Christ is his righteousness. But one cannot talk righteousness to one who is not a sinner. The Pharisee in the front of the temple was convinced of his own righteousness; the temple leaders who put Him to death were convinced of their own righteousness. Good Friday seemed to ascribe sin to Christ and righteousness to His judges, but Pentecost and the coming of the Spirit would assign righteousness to the Crucified and sin to His judges. To those who rejected Him, righteousness would one day appear as a terrible justice; to the sinful men who accepted Him and allied themselves to His life, righteousness would show itself as mercy.
About judging; he who rules this world
Has had sentence passed on him already.
JOHN 16:11
The last of the three convictions had to do with judgment. When sin and righteousness collide, there will be judgment in which sin will be destroyed. The one who is judged here is the “one who rules the world,” or Satan, the prince of the world. The judgment of the prince of the world was effected by the Cross and the Resurrection, for evil could never do anything mightier than slay the Son of God in the flesh. Defeated in that, it could never be victorious again. Adam and Eve, after their sin, were confronted with the righteousness of God, and the judgment was exile from paradise; in the Deluge, the sins of mankind were confronted with the holiness of God, and the flood came as judgment; when Israel came out of Egypt, the Exodus was accomplished by a Divine judgment; so now when the Spirit of Truth is come, He will bring home to the hearts and minds of men the judgment that was inherent in Our Lord’s life and death and His ultimate victory over evil. The world would not be convicted in its own eyes, but it would be convicted in the eyes of those whose vision has been purged by the Cross. The Holy Spirit would reveal to men the true nature of the great drama that was consummated on the Cross.
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