The Holy Spirit and Divine Revelation
John 16:12-15
In John 13-16 Jesus is preparing His disciples for His departure. It is the night He will be betrayed and arrested. The next day Jesus will be condemned and crucified. Jesus has been speaking freely and frankly, teaching His disciples essential truth that will encourage them for what lies ahead.
Now, in John 16:7 Jesus has told them for the third time that when He goes away He will send the Helper to them. The Helper is the Holy Spirit (John 14:26) who Jesus promised will abide with them forever (John 14:16), will be in them (John 14:17), will teach them all things by reminding them of what Jesus said to them (John 14:26) and will testify of Jesus (John 15:26).
Jesus told His disciples that it was to their advantage, their benefit, that He goes away because only then would the Holy Spirit come to them. In John 16:8-11 as we saw last time, Jesus has just spoken to them about the ministry of the Holy Spirit to the world. He said that would be a ministry of convicting the world of sin, righteousness and judgment. Now in John 16:12-15 Jesus speaks to the disciples about the Holy Spirit’s ministry to them.
John 16:12-15
12 “I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now. 13 However, when He, the Spirit of truth, has come, He will guide you into all truth; for He will not speak on His own authority, but whatever He hears He will speak; and He will tell you things to come. 14 He will glorify Me, for He will take of what is Mine and declare it to you. 15 All things that the Father has are Mine. Therefore I said that He will take of Mine and declare it to you.
Here for the third time Jesus speaks about the Holy Spirit as the Spirit of truth (John 14:17; 15:26; 16:13). The great work of the Holy Spirit is to bring God’s truth to men. We have a special name for this bringing of God’s truth to men; we call it revelation. By revelation I do not mean just the last book of our bible. I mean that God reveals truth to us. God reveals Himself to us. We believe that God has not left us to grope in the dark. He has spoken. He has revealed Himself.
Hebrews 1:1-2 teaches this concept of divine revelation:
1 God, who at various times and in various ways spoke in time past to the fathers by the prophets, 2 has in these last days spoken to us by His Son, whom He has appointed heir of all things, through whom also He made the worlds;
The scriptures of the Old and New Testaments are the record of this divine revelation. The apostle Peter writes (2 Pet. 1:20-21), “knowing this first, that no prophecy of Scripture is of any private interpretation (or origin), for prophecy never came by the will of man, but holy men of God spoke as they were moved by the Holy Spirit.”
In John 16:12-15 Jesus teaches His disciples the principles of divine revelation. This morning I’d like examine this text under 3 simple headings: the scope of the Holy Spirit’s revelation; the source of His revelation; and the subject of His revelation.
1. The scope of the Holy Spirit’s revelation.
Notice what he says in John 16:12, “I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now.”
Under this idea of the scope of the Holy Spirit’s revelation we need to understand that,
God’s revelation is progressive.
For three and a half years Jesus had been pouring forth His wonderful words of life. He had taught His disciples many things and He had revealed the truth to them. But there was more to come. The Lord knew that the disciples were not ready at that point to bear all that He could teach them. This may have been due to their slowness to believe all that the prophets had spoken, especially the truths related to Messiah’s suffering (Luke 24:25-26). Jesus had repeatedly told the disciples that He was going to die and be raised from the dead, but they didn’t really comprehend it until after His resurrection (Luke 9:22, 44-45; 24:45-46). Jesus will teach them after His resurrection and before His ascension (see Luke 24:13ff.), but most of the teaching will be done by the Holy Spirit, after our Lord’s departure.
Remember, the disciples at this time simply could not comprehend a dying Messiah. Although Jesus taught that truth, it did not fit into their believe system. They could not fathom the idea of Gentiles being included as equals in the Church. They weren’t ready to hear about end of the ceremonial law. Emotionally and spiritually, they were simply in no condition to understand all of these things until after Christ’s death, after His resurrection, after His ascension into glory and after the Spirit of God came upon them at Pentecost. Only then were they able to receive these mysteries through the Spirit’s inspiration and understand them because of the Spirit’s work of illumination.
The point in our text is that the Lord doesn’t dump the whole thing on us at once. As a loving Father, He knows how much His children can bear, and so He patiently teaches us what we need for the stage of growth that we are in. A young believer needs the milk of the Word: to understand what salvation means, who God is, how to live by faith, how to read and study the Bible, how to pray, etc. Later, he can begin to digest some meat (1 Cor. 3:1-3; Heb. 5:11-14; 1 Pet. 2:2). So keep reading your Bible over and over, asking the Holy Spirit to reveal more of Christ to your soul.
God’s revelation is comprehensive.
But Jesus says to them (John 16:13), “However, when He, the Spirit of truth, has come, He will guide you into all truth; for He will not speak on His own authority, but whatever He hears He will speak; and He will tell you things to come.”
Jesus says, “He will guide you into all truth.” Not all knowledge, but all truth. We know that this does not mean that He will reveal all knowledge. How could the omniscience (all-knowing) of God be revealed to men? John makes clear that his Gospel, as all the others, is but a sampling of the things Jesus said and did: “This is the disciple who testifies of these things, and wrote these things; and we know that his testimony is true. And there are also many other things that Jesus did, which if they were written one by one, I suppose that even the world itself could not contain the books that would be written. Amen.” (John 21:24-25).
So by “all truth” Jesus must mean all the truth which is necessary for the church will be revealed to the apostles. Jesus is speaking to His eleven disciples here. He is not making a general statement that the Holy Spirit would reveal new truth to all believers. I believe that this promise of Jesus pertains to the New Testament apostles and is not a promise which can be claimed by men today.
“All truth” is what Jude 1:3 calls “the faith which was once for all delivered to the saints.” Paul writes of the household of God (Eph 2:20), “having been built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Jesus Christ Himself being the chief cornerstone.” And again in Ephesians 3:5 he writes about the mystery of Christ “which in other ages was not made known to the sons of men, as it has now been revealed by the Spirit to His holy apostles and prophets.”
Leon Morris therefore issues a sober warning:
Believers should be very careful here, for from time to time through the history of the Christian church, people have arisen who have said that they had new revelations and they have led people astray. It is important for us to keep a firm hold on the truth that the definitive revelation has been given in Scripture. Christian teaching is the teaching God gave through Christ and Christ’s apostles. Nothing can claim to be authentic Christian teaching that does not agree with this. (Reflections on the Gospel of John (Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1988), vol. 3, p. 546).
It’s for this reason that the final warning in Scripture, in Revelation 22:18-19, we read,
18 For I testify to everyone who hears the words of the prophecy of this book: If anyone adds to these things, God will add to him the plagues that are written in this book; 19 and if anyone takes away from the words of the book of this prophecy, God shall take away his part from the Book of Life, from the holy city, and from the things which are written in this book.
Jesus says to them (John 16:13), “However, when He, the Spirit of truth, has come, He will guide you into all truth; for He will not speak on His own authority, but whatever He hears He will speak; and He will tell you things to come.”
“Things to come” again refers to all the truth that the Spirit will reveal about Jesus Christ. Morris (The Gospel According to John [Eerdmans], p. 701) says, “‘the things to come’ is a way of referring to the whole Christian system, yet future when Jesus spoke, and to be revealed to the disciples by the Spirit, not by natural insight.”
The Holy Spirit has not given new, authoritative revelation since the completion of the canon of Scripture. As Jesus affirmed (John 17:17), God’s Word is the truth. Psalm 119:160 puts it, “The entirety of Your word is truth.” That truth is sufficient for life and godliness (2 Pet. 1:3). We need to ask the Holy Spirit to give us understanding and illumination as we study the Scriptures, but He is not giving new revelation on a par with that given to the apostles and prophets as contained in the Bible.
This should cause all of us to rejoice, dear friends. The Spirit of truth has given us all the truth that we need in the revelation of His word. If you’re miserable in your marriage today, God has the solution in His word. If you’re frustrated over knowing how to raise your children, God has the truth in His word. If you’re struggling with some life dominating sin, God has the truth in His word. If you’re worried about the future, God’s word reveals what is to come.
That is the ministry of the Holy Spirit to us today. He reveals the truth of God’s word to us. He guides us and teaches us the truth of the Bible that He inspired. Paul writes about (1 Cor. 2:9) “the things which God has prepared for those who love Him” saying,
10 But God has revealed [them] to us through His Spirit. For the Spirit searches all things, yes, the deep things of God. 11 For what man knows the things of a man except the spirit of the man which is in him? Even so no one knows the things of God except the Spirit of God. 12 Now we have received, not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit who is from God, that we might know the things that have been freely given to us by God. (1 Cor. 2:10-12).
What a blessed thing it is to have this built in guide in the Holy Spirit! But a guide is utterly useless unless you stay close to Him and follow Him and that’s what we must do with the Spirit. We must walk in the Spirit so that we will not carry out the desires of the flesh (Gal. 5:16).
This is the scope of revelation. All the truth. The progressive, comprehensive, final truth that would be revealed and recorded in the New Testament.
2. The source of the Holy Spirit’s revelation
Again look at John 16:13, Jesus says, “He will not speak on His own authority, but whatever He hears He will speak.”
As we have seen throughout the Gospel of John, Jesus never spoke or acted on His own initiative but always in harmony with the will of His Father (John 3:34; 5:19, 20; 7:16-18; 8:26-29, 42-43; 12:47-50; 14:10). The Holy Spirit speaks in the same way. He never speaks independently of the Father or the Son.
Now, I want you to follow the logic here: since the Spirit never spoke or acted on His own initiative but always disclosed only what He heard from God the Son and God the Father, isn’t it fair to say that what He spoke, in other words, the inspired word of God, must be inerrant? That makes sense to me. He is the Spirit of truth, not the Spirit of error. “To reject Scripture is to reject the Trinity. It’s to reject the word of the Father, the word of the Son, the word of the Spirit inspired through the writers of Scripture” (MacArthur).
So here we have the source of the Spirit’s revelation, it’s from God. He is God. He has heard it from the Lord Jesus and the Father as well. As D. A. Carson puts it so well, “He is doing little more than fleshing out the implications of God’s triumphant self-disclosure in the person and work of his Son.”
Finally we see,
3. The subject of the Holy Spirit’s revelation
Well, Jesus makes the subject of the Spirit’s revelation makes very clear here in John 16:14-15, “He will glorify Me, for He will take of what is Mine and declare it to you. All things that the Father has are Mine. Therefore I said that He will take of Mine and declare it to you.”
In other words, the Spirit is going to come and He will unfold the glorious realities of the person and the work of the Lord Jesus. This will include all that Jesus revealed about the Father. The Holy Spirit’s role is not to glorify Himself, but Christ. He does not call attention to Himself, but to Christ. He does not lead us to focus on our experiences, but on Christ.
This is a powerful truth. Think about this: the Spirit’s goal is to help us understand the word of God so that we can glorify Christ and become more conformed to His likeness. The Spirit exalts Jesus Christ. Dr. Carson (The Farewell Discourse and Final Prayer of Jesus [Baker], p. 151) states: “Nothing brings more glory to our exalted Lord Jesus than for his followers to become steeped in all truth concerning him…. Glory comes to Jesus as the truths of the gospel are established in the lives of men.”
The point is this: as we read and study and preach and teach the word of God, we should see the glory of Christ because this is the great work of the Spirit.
Let me say something very practical to you: if you read the word of God and you do not see the glory of Christ, there is something wrong with your perspective. You’re probably reading it with a lens of self, “What’s in this for me?” Rather than, “What does this tell me about my glorious Savior so that I might love Him with all my heart?”
Show me a church where the majority of people are lost in the wonder and the glory of the Gospel, where they love Jesus more than life itself, where they are growing the self-sacrificing love of Christ, where they have hunger for the Word of Christ, where the people are increasing in holiness and effective witness for Christ and they have a longing to see their Savior face to face – there is a church that is hearing the Spirit of truth, because it is the ministry of the Spirit to proclaim the glory of Christ through the word.
When you look in the New Testament, whenever Christ preached, whenever others preached, they preached about the Gospel of Christ and His glory. They didn’t tell us how to help us fulfill our God-given dreams, how to live your best life now or to stop sitting on the sidelines of life. They didn’t preach about politics and the elimination of poverty and income inequality and any number of social justice issues. What they preached about was Christ and Him crucified and resurrected and ascended and exalted and coming again. Everything in the Bible is ultimately about Jesus Christ and for His glory.
Amy Carmichael, the famous missionary to India once said, “The amazing thing is that everyone who reads the Bible has the same joyful thing to say about it. In every land, in every language, it is the same tale: where that Book is read, not with the eyes only, but with the mind and heart, the life is changed. Sorrowful people are comforted, sinful people are transformed, peoples who were in the dark walk in the light. Is it not wonderful to think that this Book, which is such a mighty power if it gets a chance to work in an honest heart, is in our hands today”? (Carmichael, Thou Givest…Thou Gather, pg. 7).
