John 14:16-21 Jesus tries to explain the working of the Holy Spirit to His
disciples. It helps to have the Spirit of truth in you, although it is also difficult.
The world cannot receive the truth because it lies in the power of the evil one
(I John 5:19) who is the father of lies. (John 8:44) We struggle to accept and
live in (or out) the truth, or even acknowledge it. It was never God's plan for
humankind to struggle with the truth, but Adam and all of his seed (except
Jesus) have chosen in part to partake of the adversary's lies. It is a hard
road back. But the Spirit of truth is also God and fully loves in revealing
truth. There are many dimensions to truth, as there are many dimensions to
reality. The Lord does not dump it all on us at once, to bury us as under a
dump-truck load of sand. The Spirit of truth reveals it to use a bit at a time,
so that we can take it, and bit by bit align our lives with it.
What does truth mean in this context?
We think of truth in ordinary life as propositional content that correspond to
reality. Truth in this context must mean that it is statements that correspond
to spiritual reality. We have a hard time with spiritual truth not because it
is intrinsically hard to accept, but because spiritual reality runs against the
grain of our natural lives. Hence the incredible patience with which God, in
all three of His persons, works.
In concert with the presence of the
Holy Spirit in them, Jesus Himself will come to the disciples and they (we)
will see Him and will have life. And then they (we) will know that He is in the
Father, and the ones who love Him (Jesus) will be loved by His Father. And again He includes a reference to the one
who has and keeps His commandments. This is proof of love for Him.
How do we reconcile the grace that
Jesus showed and taught with this apparent legalism and conditional love? The
Greek word in John 14:21 translated as commandment is entolas, which gives us no relief because it
is derived from a similar word usually translated as injunction or
prescription. I think we must interpret
this in the same vein that we understand Jesus' parting words to the woman
caught in the act of adultery. (John 8:11) No word of God is without power of
fulfillment. When Jesus said that the one who has and keeps His commandments is
the one who loves Him, He was speaking of it as evidence of the flow of the
power of God within that person's life, not as a condition to receive love. The
path to disclosure by Christ of Himself to each individual is through a life in
which the Holy Spirit flows freely and is allowed to empower that person to
live the kingdom life.
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