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This Chapter Verse Commentaries:
‘He shall receive of Mine, and shall shew it unto you.’
Joh_16:14
I. Consider what the word translated ‘take’ really means.—It is repeated with emphasis in the very following verse, but in the present tense, so as to bring out the vivid reality of the relationship implied. This word necessarily suggests the notion of activity and even of effort on the part of the One Who thus acts. Properly speaking, you cannot ‘take’ a thing blindly or passively. Personal co-operation is implied. Besides, Jesus Christ is careful to represent the action of the Holy Spirit as continuous and not yet completed. ‘What things soever He shall hear, these shall He speak: and He shall declare unto you the things that are to come.’ It is plain, then, that we are invited to look on at the action of self-conscious Personality. Here is nothing otiose and inert. Here is nothing automatic and mechanical. An action essentially personal is unveiled to our reverent gaze. Also here is nothing selfish—one gives, the other takes. Self is perpetually being lost and found in this mutual and immediate exchange of perfect self-sacrifice. This is life at its highest and holiest, and it is noteworthy that such life is found in mutual aid, in sharing together, in fellowship. To picture life under such circumstances is to get a glimpse of something exhilarating, glorious, unfettered, self-revealing. If this is life as God lives it, then the Christian has nothing to be ashamed of, nothing to apologise for in his creed which teaches him such a moving truth. If this be the life of God, as revealed to us by Christianity, then life under such conditions is instinctively felt to be worthy, a picture of our highest ideal of what life is or might be. Here is fellowship of the highest conceivable kind, in which all things are in common, and in which joy and satisfaction arise not from clutching tenaciously the treasures of affection, thought, and will, but by sharing them.
II. What does God the Holy Spirit ‘take’ from God the Son?—Here our human experience can help us. What is the highest and best thing man can share with man? Not his money; not his goods and possessions; not his system of government. These things divide men as often as they unite them. No; ideas are the highest possession that one man can share with another. He has nothing higher to give to his fellow-man than what he knows, or thinks he knows, about the Truth. As he shares his ideas and they are accepted by his neighbour, a bond of union is knit between man and man, and nation and nation, which will defy all efforts to put them asunder. You see this when you observe how individuals or nations that have a common idea of liberty can understand one another and work to a common end in self-defence or in defence of the oppressed. No wonder Emerson said, ‘Give me a great idea and I will feed upon it.’ If we ask, therefore, what does God the Holy Spirit ‘take’ from God the Son, we may answer without misgiving that he ‘takes’ those great ideas which fill the heart and mind of Jesus, ideas of justice, equity, sympathy, self-sacrifice, brotherhood. Where these ideas are held in common, there union becomes possible and fellowship must be full of joy.
III. The relationship of God the Holy Ghost to us.—‘He shall take of Mine, and shall show it unto you.’ These words of Jesus Christ reveal not only the relationship between Him and the Holy Ghost, but they unveil the relationship between the Holy Ghost and ourselves. Three times over in three following verses this phrase, ‘He will declare it unto you,’ is solemnly repeated—‘He shall declare you the things to come,’ ‘He shall take of Mine, and declare it unto you, ‘All things whatsoever the Father hath are Mine, therefore I said that He [that is, the Spirit of Truth] taketh of Mine, and shall declare it unto you.’ Again we notice the same principle at work. God the Holy Ghost is bent on sharing with us all that He has. But it may be asked, How can you share ideas? Ideas can only be shared when they are declared in words and by deeds. Words are good, deeds are better. The Holy Spirit, therefore, by showing to us in the Gospels the human and historical life of Jesus has manifestly declared in word and in deed those great ideas of love, compassion, sacrifice, which we rightly connect with Jesus Christ. Such ideas, indeed, before the foundation of the world were in the Heart of the Eternal, but were not fully expressed to us in glowing word and glorious deed until Jesus of Nazareth, the Incarnate Son of God, revealed them to us here on earth. It is this life of Jesus which the Holy Spirit delights to show to all those who will study the Gospels. His very work is to make Christ better known and to take the great ideas illustrated by His life and declare them to us, here a little and there a little. The Acts of the Apostles and the Epistles of the New Testament teem with illustrations of the progress which men made under the guidance of the Holy Spirit in seeing deeper into the life of Christ.
—
Rev. Samuel Bickersteth.
‘He shall glorify Me: for He shall take of Mine, and shall declare it unto you.’
Joh_16:14. (R.V.)
Let us try to realise what this teaching of the Holy Spirit means, or ought to mean, to us at the present day. It is on the one hand a continuation of the teaching of Jesus. From another point of view it is in a sense a development, a fresh interpretation of the teaching of Jesus.
I. A continuation.—The Holy Spirit, being the Vicar of Christ, cannot teach anything that is opposed to the teaching of Christ. On this point our Lord’s language is quite definite and unmistakable. ‘He shall bear witness unto Me.’ ‘He shall glorify Me: for He shall take of Mine, and shall declare it unto you.’ ‘He shall guide you into all the truth: for He shall not speak from Himself; but what things soever He shall hear, these shall He speak.’ The message of the Holy Spirit proceeds ultimately from the Father and the Son. It is not within His province to give an entirely new revelation to mankind. He does not speak from Himself. The lines of Christ’s revelation of Himself and of the Father have been settled once for all. Any teaching that contradicts the direct, the explicit, the undeniable teaching of Jesus Christ cannot be the teaching of the Holy Spirit. No development of Christianity is permissible that involves this contradiction. So far, then, as the main outlines of the Christian Creed are concerned, the voice of the Holy Spirit must be in the strictest sense a continuation and a carrying-on of the teaching of the Gospel.
II. The teaching of the Holy Spirit within certain limits develops, reinterprets, readjusts for each successive generation the teaching which Jesus gave while He was on earth.—Our Lord recognised very clearly that His teaching of His first disciples could not be absolutely complete and final. Take, for instance, the words: ‘I have yet many things to say unto you, but ye cannot bear them now.’ The full development of the principles of His teaching and the application of those principles in detail, could not be communicated to the Apostles without putting on them a burden which they were unable to bear. They would not have understood what He meant. In Christ’s training of the Apostles He always kept that difficulty in view. Suppose that He had told Peter, at the time of his call in Galilee, that the Gentiles eventually would have a share in the Kingdom of God. Such a statement, if made in those early days, Peter would probably have been unable to bear. It would have confused and unsettled him; it might have ended in his leaving his Master. Peter had to be led on gradually till the force of circumstances and changed conditions compelled him to see the need of admitting Gentile converts. Then a new light burst on him, and he was able to reinterpret his Master’s sayings in this wider sense. That is a typical example of the development which results from the teaching of the Spirit. So it has been in each successive age of Christendom. Each generation has had its own needs and problems to face, and has gone back afresh to the words of Christ, and found in them a new light and helpfulness. No doubt at times there has been misinterpretation of what our Lord meant. No doubt there have been periods of stagnation and corruption in the Church, when the voice of the Spirit has been more or less stifled. But that is only what Christ foresaw. There were to be false Christs; and because iniquity was to abound, the love of the many would wax cold.
III. No doubt, too, the voice of the Spirit’s teaching has not always been distinct and unmistakable.—Different branches of the Church have interpreted some of the words of their Master in different and even in antagonistic ways. And this, too, was not wholly unexpected by Christ, for ‘in His Father’s house there are many mansions.’ But if we take a broad view of the course of Church history, is it not true that men in age after age have honestly endeavoured to put a fresh interpretation on the words of Christ, in order to meet the difficulties of their time, and by doing so have placed themselves under the guidance of the Holy Spirit? Christ’s revelation of Himself must differ in different generations, because, as He foresaw, it must be suited to the character and the conditions of each generation in turn. Only so could it last for all time. It would long ago have become a dead thing if it had been merely a cut-and-dried system of doctrines and precepts. It lives, because the ever-renewed teaching and guiding of the Spirit continually supply it with fresh life and growth.
‘He shall glorify Me: for He shall take of Mine, and shall declare it unto you.’ Our Lord in these words seems to contemplate the Holy Spirit as selecting from time to time some portion of His teaching, and developing it and emphasising it, so as to make it more real than it has hitherto been, and more fitted to give enlightenment to men’s changing doubts and difficulties. Can anything be of greater interest and value to us nowadays than this conception of the work of the Paraclete?
Rev. Dr. H. G. Woods.
Illustration‘Suppose that we did not possess the Gospel according to John; how much vaguer our knowledge would be! We should still, indeed, have the description of the day of Pentecost; we should still have the promise of Jesus that the Father in heaven will give the Holy Spirit to them that ask Him; we should still have St. Paul’s account of the work of the Holy Spirit, of the fruits of the Spirit, of life in the Spirit. But how great would be our loss if we did not possess that last discourse before the Passion, in which the writer of the Fourth Gospel has enshrined the memory (or call it, if you will, the tradition) of his Master’s teaching about the relation of the Holy Spirit to Himself and to His Church! As we think it over we cannot but feel how full of interest and of spiritual insight is the account there given of that mysterious Personality, Whom the Father was to send in Christ’s Name. As is well known, “Comforter” is a mistranslation. The Greek term “Paraclete” denotes properly the Advocate, the Counsel, Whom each follower of Christ can call in, to stand by him, to find words for him, to give him helpful suggestions, to plead for him, to act for him, in the great trial and contest, which is continually going on, and which will go on until the final Day of Judgment, between Satan and the human soul.’