Gooding, David: 15 - Highway to Holiness

From verse eight onwards of chapter sixteen of the Gospel of John, our Lord begins to comment on the ministry of the Holy Spirit. Now we must read his comments, as we have read all else, in the particular and immediate context in which he spoke them, which was the ministry of the church in witnessing to the world. The Holy Spirit has many ministries which are in addition to those here indicated, but we are thinking in particular of this matter of witness, and therefore in these verses our Lord speaks first of the Holy Spirit's witness to the world, and then of his witness to the church. His witness to the world is described in these words. Verse eight: and he, when he is come, will convict the world in respect of sin and of righteousness and of judgment. Of sin because they believe not on me, of righteousness because I go to the Father and ye behold me no more, of judgment because the prince of this world has been judged. We saw in our earlier session that the phrase when he is come, as applied to the Holy Spirit, is referring to his great coming on the day of Pentecost. Now let us spend some effort in getting the next remarks into their proper focus. We are told that the Holy Spirit at his coming at Pentecost and thereafter, will convict the world of sin. But then the sin in question is thereafter specified. It's not so much a question of the Holy Spirit convicting an individual of individual and particular sins, such as stealing or lying. He is to convict the world of sin in this particular because they believe not on me. This, of course, is the cardinal sin, a refusing to believe the Lord Jesus is the Son of God. All other sins pale into insignificance, so to speak, compared with this one. When he was here on earth, he claimed, both by his works and by his words, to be God's son. The Jews and others rejected him. Pontius Pilate with Herod and the rulers of the Jews crucified him. They refused to believe his claim. They regarded him as an impostor. But then on the day of, of Pentecost, the Holy Spirit came. And had he never spoken a word, his very coming from heaven in the name of the Lord Jesus demonstrates that Jesus was right and the Jews were wrong. His very presence in the world, in this sense, his coming sent down from heaven by the risen Christ, must convict the world of this cardinal, fundamental, and basic sin, this ghastly error of having crucified God's own Son. Then, similarly, our Lord says that the Holy Spirit's coming and at Pentecost will convict the world of righteousness. And again, notice that it is not thinking in terms of convicting men that they ought to live more righteous lives, though certainly the Holy Spirit does that, among other things. Our Lord is thinking of righteousness in a particular sense, of righteousness because I go to the Father. It is the corollary of the first statement. If the world is thus proved wrong, fearfully wrong, in refusing to believe Christ, then Christ is proved right. His claim was true. He has been justified. He has been shown to be authentic, to be true, to be right. His claims were not exaggerated, they have been honored. God has raised him from the dead. He has ascended to heaven. He has been received by the Father and sits on the right hand of the throne of God. And once more, the Holy Spirit's coming, even if the Holy Spirit did not speak a word, his very coming in the name of Christ would have this logical effect of proving Christ right and the world wrong. It has one other effect. He will convict the world of judgment because the prince of this world has been judged. If you should be happening to be reading an old translation of the New Testament, be careful just not to get, uh, deceived by the Old English. Some Old English translations have it because the prince of this world is judged, and a modern reader might think that this was a present tense, is constantly judged. That would me- be to miss the glory and the victory of this remark. The Greek is a perfect tense, and the coming of the Holy Spirit not only witnesses that Christ is ascended to heaven, but witnesses to the fact that the prince of this world has been judged. He has met, in that sense, the final, the telltale crisis. Though his activities still, uh, proceed apace, the cross has proved already his death knell, because it shows him utterly defeated. We cannot know what Satan knew of the purposes of God and what he didn't know. There are grounds for thinking that when Saint Paul says in his letter to the Corinthians, the first letter in chapter two, that none of the princes of this world knew God's hidden wisdom, for if they had, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory. Saint Paul may well have been speaking about supernatural principalities and powers who moved evil men to compass the death of Christ, but did that in ignorance of the true hidden purpose of God, who had determined through that death and apparent defeat to work a resounding victory over Satan and all his hosts, so that in compassing the death of Christ, Satan was in fact compassing his own death knell. Whatever we may think of the exegesis of that chapter of Corinthians, it is the fact that the resurrection of Christ is, in principle, the defeat of Satan. It shows that a man has lived in this world, utterly loyal to God. It shows that Satan has used all his techniques, finally to get this world to make life impossible for this man, and to give him a cross. But in so doing has utterly failed to break that man and his devotion to God. It shows Satan trying to suppress this man and all he taught and all he stood for. Not only crucifying him, but delivering him to a tomb and sealing it with a stone and putting the army and the mass might of Rome outside the tomb to keep him in and to keep him down forever. And it shows this same man triumphing over all that Satan can do, risen the third day and gone back to heaven. And never again can this world rest content to think itself a self-contained flat. For in spite of Satan's effort to maintain this world system as a self-contained flat in opposition to God, one man has broken through it. And I speak not, of course, merely physically, a breaking through the, uh, physical bounds of space. I speak not merely physically of breaking through the power of death, but I think also of those spiritual oppositions that Satan put before Jesus Christ, our Lord, tempting him as he had tempted Adam and Eve, not now with one apple off one tree, but with all the kingdoms of the world in a moment of time, if he would take the shortcut. He could have everything in this world if he would ditch for one moment his devotion to God, if he would for one moment prefer this world to God. And Satan, having done his very worst, was defeated in that temptation, and Christ, though all he got apparently from his devotion to God in this world was in the end the bare stones of Gethsemane and the rugged wood of the cross, triumphed, as he himself is about to say, I have overcome the world. It is a foolish thing to sit down and think what would have happened if Christ had not overcome, for it is envisaging the impossible. But what we can say is that the whole experiment, if I may use the term of God's making man, would have been forever and finally ruined if the second man had given way on this point. If Satan had been able to lure him from his devotion to God, while here on Earth, the whole vast experiment of human life would have been ruined and lost forever, and the universe split apart. But the universe held at its center. Not like the poet said, things fall apart, the center cannot hold. The center did hold, as Christ main- remained unswervingly loyal to God, even at the expense of the nakedness of a cross. And therefore, the cross, followed by the burial and and then by the resurrection of Christ and his ascension, is the death knell of Satan, his biggest card in the pack has failed. But then the Holy Spirit, we are told, has a ministry towards the church. And from verse twelve onward, our Lord begins to talk of this. He says to his apostles, I have many things to say unto you, but you cannot bear them now. How be it, when he, the Spirit of truth, is come, he shall guide you into all the truth. We ought to notice that these verses have their prime application, not so much to us as individual Christians, but to the apostles. It is quite true that there are many things that we cannot understand or even bear now if we were told them. But at this point, our Lord is thinking of his apostles standing round him at that moment. He had so much more to tell them. One day he did tell them that. And we now know, or could know if we wished, these further things and could bear them. For those further things are the things that we now find written in our epistles and in the book of the Revelation. But all that wealth of doctrine was at this particular moment quite beyond the powers of the apostles to sustain and understand. I have many things to tell you, you cannot bear them now. They were, in fact, to be brought to a terrible crisis when they saw Christ arrested, dead, and buried. They were going to be frightfully stumbled. And if it were going to take them all their spiritual energy simply to survive seeing Christ murdered and buried, how could they at this moment begin to think in detail of the significance of that death and of the implications of the consequent resurrection? All that was going to be left, the bare minimum could be told them now. How be it, says Christ, when the Spirit is come, he shall tell you these things, and he shall tell you things to come. Again, it would be difficult to exaggerate the importance of these verses. These verses give us our Lord's, uh, authority for the, uh, New Testament epistles and the book of the Revelation, that what we have therein written is not merely the private thoughts and peculiar interpretation of one or two apostles, but is the information that the risen Christ himself was intending to give us, but could not give the apostles for the foregoing reasons while he was with them, but communicated to them after he left by his Holy Spirit. The major topic of those further revelations our Lord describes in verse fourteen. He shall glorify me, for he shall take of mine and shall declare it unto you. All things whatsoever the Father hath are mine. Therefore said I, he taketh of mine and shall declare it unto you. It is abundantly easy to see, when we read those epistles, uh, what these words mean. He shall glorify me. The man that they stood next to at this moment, some of them had already confessed as the Messiah, the Son of the living God. And yet the implications of their confession were slow in coming home to them. Predominantly, he looked to them still, the carpenter from Nazareth. We don't find in the gospel records, do we, such things as we subsequently find in the epistles. Those glorious statements of the person and the nature of Christ and his relation to the universe, such as, for instance, we find in the epistle to the Colossians chapter one, or in the epistle to the Hebrews chapter one, uh that this Jesus Christ who worked at the carpenter's bench was nevertheless the one who made the worlds, through whom they were made, in whom they were made, and for whom they were made, who even at this present moment upholds everything by his power, and one day shall bring the universe to the intended goal that God has designed for it. Those tremendously glorious statements about the identity of the Lord Jesus were things that the Holy Spirit was used to communicate to the apostles, subsequent upon Christ's resurrection and ascension. The questions, of course, were bound to arise, weren't they? As someone that comes and dies for the sins of the world, by that very def- by that very fact, shows himself more than an ordinary man. We do need to watch it in these days because there are, uh, some very poor notions of our Lord's person becoming more than ever current in theological circles. We are merrily told that, of course, our Lord was human, and therefore he could have made mistakes. Uh, it does not follow that because he was human that he must make mistakes. We should not measure his corn by our bushel. We, being human, have made mistakes. But it is not impossible that there should be a humanity that didn't. But then we should observe what the New Testament epistles tell us, that our Lord, though human, was not only human. And though human, he was a different kind of human. The first man is of the earth, earthy, says Saint Paul. The first man was made a a a living soul, but the second man? A life-giving spirit. That is, he was human, true enough, but a different kind of human. Adam never was a life-giving spirit, nor ever would be. Christ is a human, but a different kind of human, a life-giving spirit. He shall glorify me then, said our Lord. He shall take of the things that are mine. Well, said he, when I say mine, they are the Father's, but all that the Father has is mine. How gloriously you see that come out in the Holy Spirit's ministry, showing us the oneness of Christ with the Father, so that in all respects, what God was and is, that Christ was and is. He is God of very God. In the form of God, though for a little while, being in the form of God, he was content to become a man and not to be on equal terms with God, yet essentially and in his nature never ceasing to be God, and now ascended and sitting with God at his right hand. And as we listen to this, we ourselves get an indication of what the Holy Spirit's chief concern in our own lives will be. He will lead us into truth, yes. Not in the sense that he will lead us into fresh doctrines that the apostles never heard of. That side of his ministry is finished. There is a faith once and for all delivered to the saints. But he will lead us into the truth in the sense of helping us to understand that revealed truth. And the result of his ministry, though it concern itself with all sorts of practical things, shall have as its prime goal the glorifying of Christ in our vision. It is a mark, if we would want a mark, of the Holy Spirit's ministry, that he will not concentrate our attention upon his- upon himself inordinately, but will ever seek to engross us with Jesus Christ our Lord. Not only about his present position, but about our relationship with him now, seated with him in the heavenly places. And as our Lord put it, he will show you things to come. He will occupy our hearts with the prophetic side of the New Testament, the glorious program of God for the second coming of Christ, and Christ's final fulfillment of all the purposes of God in this world, the bringing of this world eventually to its conclusion, and the introduction of the new heaven and the new earth. I say again, the Holy Spirit will cause us to consider our own characters, our own ways, our own personal holiness, the development of our inner spiritual life, but he will always and invariably balance that with this gloriously objective message, the risen Christ at God's right hand, and the objective program of God, not only in my personal salvation, but in the redemption of and reconciling of heaven, our earth with heaven. And with that, we are left with two paragraphs in this chapter uh sixteen of the gospel. They extend from verse sixteen to the end of the chapter, and while they compass these, uh, seventeen verses, at first sight they appear to be full of repetition, and indeed they are full of repetition. The reason for the repetition is once more the practical necessity that Christ was under at that moment to prepare his apostles for his going away, for the moment soon coming when they should see him dead and buried, to their awful and horrible consternation. Though in a sense they were prepared for it, they had heard him many times prophesy his death and resurrection. In another sense, it had not come home to them emotionally what it would mean, and our Lord had to warn them that when they should see him dead, crucified by the world, the emotional impact would be like the sudden onset of labor pangs in a woman with child. It would tend, by its very pain, to obliterate everything else, and they would be rudely shocked. And therefore he must prepare them. The time is coming when the world shall rejoice and you shall lament. Then the tables will be turned, and you shall rejoice with a joy that no man can possibly take from you. In the end, they would see it. While the Lord was with them in the flesh, they might secretly nurture the dread that in spite of all his powers, eventually the world might gang on up on him and crucify him and destroy the one whom they expected to be king. That's one way of curing that fear. The Lord died. He let the world do the worst till they could do no more, and then he broke their bands and rose from the dead. In that sense, now there is nothing more to be feared. Let the world do their worst. They cannot take from the believer's heart his joy and confidence founded in a Christ that has risen from the dead. And then they would need to be prepared for what should follow. You will yet a little while, and you won't see me. Again a little while, and you shall see me again. Of course, they couldn't understand what he meant and how it would be. In the event, it turned out that when our Lord rose from the dead, he would not immediately ascend to heaven, but would remain with his disciples for forty days, from time to time showing himself to them. For that too, they would need to be prepared. For when he rose from the dead and showed himself to his disciples by many infallible proofs after his resurrection, he was human still. He presented them with a body that was physical. They could touch it. It had flesh and bone. It could eat broiled fish and a honeycomb. It was the same body. They could see the mark of the wounds in his hands, feet, and side. And yet there had come a tremendous difference. And now he was already in that other world. He had a body no longer subject to the physical laws of our world. It could pass through locked doors. It seemed not to be subject to the laws of time as we are subject to them. It could appear and disappear. And the disciples had to be prepared for this to them strange and mysterious mode of being. It is a remarkable thing on the human level that none of the disciples lost their reason, isn't it? Or to be presented with such a mysterious thing. Yet instead of, uh, leading to any loss of reason, the apostles came forth, if anything, more sane than ever they were before. With a joy that was not an imaginary joy that had not learned to face the realities of life, but with a joy that was steady, that could look life's realities in the face, though they were the worst, though they were death itself, remain confident and balanced and sane. For this, our Lord was preparing them in these moments, that they should, uh, see him again after his resurrection. It has not been given us to see our Lord in resurrection as they visibly saw him and touched him. Theirs was a special office. They were appointed to see him, to eat and drink with him after he rose from the dead. But we may be very glad in our hearts that actual human eyes saw him and handled him after he rose from the dead. We have not followed cunningly devised myths. We are talking about tangible historical realities. And finally, when this should happen, he indicated that they would find a new relationship in prayer. They should learn what it is for the first time to pray in the name of Christ, and thus sustain an altogether advanced and mature relationship in their prayer life with God. What it means to pray in the name of Christ would be a subject too big for us now. We must leave it to our next session.