'I have yet many things to say unto you, but ye cannot bear them now.
Howbeit when He, the Spirit of truth, is come, He will guide you into
all truth: for He shall not speak of Himself; but whatsoever He shall
hear, that shall He speak: and He will show you things to come. He
shall glorify Me: for He shall receive of Mine, and shall show it unto
you. All things that the Father hath are Mine: therefore said I, that
He shall take of Mine, and shall show it unto you.'--JOHN xvi. 12-15.
This is our Lord's last expansion, in these discourses, of the great
promise of the Comforter which has appeared so often in them. First, He
was spoken of simply as dwelling in Christ's servants, without any more
special designation of His work than was involved in the name. Then,
His aid was promised, to remind the Apostles of the facts of Christ's
life, especially of His words; and so the inspiration and authority of
the four Gospels were certified for us. Then He was further promised as
the witness in the disciples to Jesus Christ. And, finally, in the
immediately preceding context, we have His office of 'convincing,' or
convicting, 'the world of sin, and of righteousness, and of judgment.'
And now we come to that gracious and gentle work which that divine
Spirit is declared by Christ to do, not only for that little group
gathered round Him then, but for all those who trust themselves to His
guidance. He is to be the 'Spirit of truth' to all the ages, who in
simple verity will help true hearts to know and love the truth. There
are three things in the words before us--first, the avowed
incompleteness of Christ's own teaching; second, the completeness of
the truth into which the Spirit of truth guides; and, last, the unity
of these two.
I. First, then, we have here the avowed incompleteness of Christ's own
teaching.
'I have yet many things to say unto you, but ye cannot bear them now.'
Now in an earlier portion of these great discourses, we have our Lord
asserting that '_all_ things whatsoever He had heard of the Father He
had made known' unto His servants. How do these two representations
harmonise? Is it possible to make them agree? Surely, yes. There is a
difference between the germ and the unfolded flower. There is a
difference between principles and the complete development of these. I
suppose you may say that all Euclid is in the axioms and definitions. I
suppose you may also say that when you have learned the axioms and
definitions, there are many things yet to be said, of which you have
not grown to the apprehension. And so our Lord, as far as His frankness
was concerned, and as far as the fundamental and seminal principles of
all religious truth were concerned, had even then declared all that He
had heard of the Father. But yet, in so far as the unfolding of these
was concerned, the tracing of their consequences, the exhibition of
their harmonies, the weaving of them into an ordered whole in which a
man's understanding could lodge, there were many things yet to be said,
which that handful of men were not able to bear. And so our Lord
Himself here declares that His words spoken on earth are not His
completed revelation.
Of course we find in them, as I believe, hints profound and pregnant,
which only need to be unfolded and smoothed out, as it were, and their
depths fathomed, in order to lead to all that is worthy of being called
Christian truth. But upon many points we cannot but contrast the
desultory, brief, obscure references which came from the Master's lips
with the more systematised, full, and accurate teaching which came from
the servants. The great crucial instance of all is the comparative
reticence which our Lord observed in reference to His sacrificial
death, and the atoning character of His sufferings for the world. I do
not admit that the silence of the Gospels upon that subject is fairly
represented when it is said to be absolute. I believe that that silence
has been exaggerated by those who have no desire to accept that
teaching. But the distinction is plain and obvious, not to be ignored,
rather to be marked as being fruitful of blessed teaching, between the
way in which Christ speaks about His Cross, and the way in which the
Apostles speak about it after Pentecost.
What then? My text gives us the reason. 'You cannot bear them now.' Now
the word rendered 'bear' here does not mean 'bear' in the sense of
endure, or tolerate, or suffer, but 'bear' in the sense of carry. And
the metaphor is that of some weight--it may be gold, but still it is a
weight--laid upon a man whose muscles are not strong enough to sustain
it. It crushes rather than gladdens. So because they had not strength
enough to carry, had not capacity to receive, our Lord was lovingly
reticent.
There is a great principle involved in this saying--that revelation is
measured by the moral and spiritual capacities of the men who receive
it. The light is graduated for the diseased eye. A wise oculist does
not flood that eye with full sunshine, but he puts on veils and
bandages, and closes the shutters, and lets a stray beam, ever growing
as the curve is perfected, fall upon it. So from the beginning until
the end of the process of revelation there was a correspondence between
men's capacity to receive the light and the light that was granted; and
the faithful use of the less made them capable of receiving the
greater, and as soon as they were capable of receiving it, it came. 'To
him that hath shall be given.' In His love, then, Christ did not load
these men with principles that they could not carry, nor feed them with
'strong meat' instead of 'milk,' until they were able to bear it.
Revelation is progressive, and Christ is reticent, from regard to the
feebleness of His listeners.
Now that same principle is true in a modified form about us. How many
things there are which we sometimes feel we should like to know, that
God has not told us, because we have not yet grown up to the point at
which we could apprehend them! Compassed with these veils of flesh and
weakness, groping amidst the shadows of time, bewildered by the
cross-lights that fall upon us from so many surrounding objects, we
have not yet eyes able to behold the ineffable glory. He has many
things to say to us about that blessed future, and that strange and
awful life into which we are to step when we leave this poor world, but
'ye cannot bear them now.' Let us wait with patience until we are ready
for the illumination. For two things go to make revelation, the light
that reveals and the eye that beholds.
Now one remark before I go further. People tell us, 'Your modern
theology is not in the Gospels.' And they say to us, as if they had
administered a knockdown blow, 'We stick by Jesus, not Paul.' Well, as
I said, I do not admit that there is no 'Pauline' teaching in the
Gospels, but I do confess there is not much. And I say, 'What then?'
Why, this, then--it is exactly what we were to expect; and people who
reject the apostolic form of Christian teaching because it is not found
in the Gospels are flying in the face of Christ's own teaching. You say
you will take His words as the only source of religious truth. You are
going clean contrary to His own words in saying so. Remember that He
proclaimed their incompleteness, and referred us, for the fuller
knowledge of the truth of God, to a subsequent Teacher.
II. So, secondly, mark here the completeness of the truth into which
the Spirit guides.
I must trouble you with just a word or two of remark as to the language
of our text. Note the personality, designation, and office of this new
Teacher. 'He,' not '_it_,' He, is the Spirit of truth whose
characteristic and weapon is truth. 'He will guide you'--suggesting a
loving hand put out to lead; suggesting the graciousness, the
gentleness, the gradualness of the teaching. 'Into all truth '--that is
no promise of omniscience, but it is the assurance of gradual and
growing acquaintance with the spiritual and moral truth which is
revealed, such as may be fitly paralleled by the metaphor of men
passing into some broad land, of which there is much still to be
possessed and explored. Not to-day, nor to-morrow, will all the truth
belong to those whom the Spirit guides; but if they are true to His
guidance, 'to-morrow shall be as this day, and much more abundant,' and
the land will all be traversed at the last. 'He shall not speak of
Himself, but whatsoever He shall hear that shall He speak.' Mark the
parallel between the relation of the Spirit-Teacher to Jesus, and the
relation of Jesus to the Father. Of Him, too, it is said by Himself,
'All things whatsoever I have heard of the Father I have declared unto
you.' The mark of Satan is, 'He speaketh of his own'; the mark of the
divine Teacher is, 'He speaketh not of Himself, but whatsoever things,'
in all their variety, in their continuity, in their completeness, 'He
shall hear,'--where? yonder in the depths of the Godhead--'whatsoever
things He shall hear there,' He shall show to you, and especially, 'He
will show you the things that are to come.' These Apostles were living
in a revolutionary time. Men's hearts were 'failing them for fear of
the things that were coming on the earth.' Step by step they would be
taught the evolving glory of that kingdom which they were to be the
instruments in founding; and step by step there would be spread out
before them the vision of the future and all the wonder that should be,
the world that was to come, the new constitution which Christ was to
establish.
Now, if that be the interpretation, however inadequate, of these great
and wonderful words, there are but two things needful to say about
them. One is that this promise of a complete guidance into truth
applies in a peculiar and unique fashion to the original hearers of it.
I ventured to say that one of the other promises of the Spirit, which I
quoted in my introductory remarks, was the certificate to us of the
inspiration and reliableness of these Four Gospels. And I now remark
that in these words, in their plain and unmistakable meaning, there lie
involved the inspiration and authority of the Apostles as teachers of
religious truth. Here we have the guarantee for the authority over our
faith, of the words which came from these men, and from the other who
was added to their number on the Damascus road. They were guided 'into
_all_ the truth,' and so our task is to receive the truth into which
they were guided.
The Acts of the Apostles is the best commentary on these words of my
text. There you see how these men rose at once into a new region; how
the truths about their Master which had been bewildering puzzles to
them flashed into light; how the Cross, which had baffled and dispersed
them, became at once the centre of union for themselves and for the
world; how the obscure became lucid, and Christ's death and the
resurrection stood forth to them as the great central facts of the
world's salvation. In the book of the Apocalypse we have part of the
fulfilment of this closing promise: 'He will show you things to come';
when the Seer was 'in the Spirit on the Lord's Day,' and the heavens
were opened, and the history of the Church (whether in chronological
order, or in the exhibition of symbols of the great forces which shall
be arrayed for and against it, over and over again, to the end of time,
does not at present matter), was spread before Him as a scroll.
Now, dear friends, this great principle of my text has a modified
application also to us all. For that divine Spirit is given to each of
us if we will use Him, is given to any and every man who desires Him,
does dwell in Christian hearts, though, alas! so many of us are so
little conscious of Him, and does teach us the truth which Christ
Himself left incomplete.
Only let me make one remark here. We do not stand on the same level as
these men who clustered round Christ on His road to Gethsemane, and
received the first fruits of the promise--the Spirit. They, taught by
that divine Guide and by experience, were led into the deeper
apprehension of the words and the deeds, of the life and the death, of
Jesus Christ our Lord. We, taught by that same Spirit, are led into a
deeper apprehension of the words which they spake, both in recording
and interpreting the facts of Christ's life and death.
And so we come sharp up to this, 'If any man thinketh himself to be a
prophet, or spiritual, let him acknowledge that the things which I
speak unto him are the commandments of the Lord.' That is how an
Apostle put his relation to the other possessors of the divine Spirit.
And you and I have to take this as the criterion of all true possession
of the Spirit of God, that it bows in humble submission to the
authoritative teaching of this book.