John 14:15-27 — Not as Orphans

LINDA BROWN: Who exactly is the Holy Spirit? I mean that as a real question. People say it the way they say God or Jesus, and some older Bibles even call him the Holy Ghost, which makes him sound like something out of a spooky story. Plenty of people have never had it explained to them at all. FRANK EDWARDS: Then today is the day, because this is where Jesus explains it himself, to his own friends, on the last night before he dies. Welcome to Dig Deeper, I'm Frank Edwards, Linda Brown is with me, and this is day twenty-two in John's Gospel. We are back at the supper table in chapter fourteen, a little further on from where Jesus said, I am the way. John chapter fourteen, verses fifteen to twenty-seven. LINDA BROWN: Read it for us. FRANK EDWARDS: If you love Me, you will keep My commandments. And I will ask the Father, and He will give you another Advocate to be with you forever, the Spirit of truth. The world cannot receive Him, because it neither sees Him nor knows Him. But you do know Him, for He abides with you and will be in you. I will not leave you as orphans; I will come to you. In a little while the world will see Me no more, but you will see Me. Because I live, you also will live. On that day you will know that I am in My Father, and you are in Me, and I am in you. Whoever has My commandments and keeps them is the one who loves Me. The one who loves Me will be loved by My Father, and I will love him and reveal Myself to him." Judas (not Iscariot) asked Him, "Lord, why are You going to reveal Yourself to us and not to the world?" Jesus replied, "If anyone loves Me, he will keep My word. My Father will love him, and We will come to him and make Our home with him. Whoever does not love Me does not keep My words. The word that you hear is not My own, but it is from the Father who sent Me. All this I have spoken to you while I am still with you. But the Advocate, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in My name, will teach you all things and will remind you of everything I have told you. Peace I leave with you; My peace I give to you. I do not give to you as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled; do not be afraid." LINDA BROWN: I will not leave you as orphans. That is the line that stopped me. Why would grown men need to hear that? FRANK EDWARDS: Because of what a teacher was in their world. A disciple did not just attend lectures. He followed his rabbi everywhere, lived near him, ate with him, learned a whole way of life by watching it. Students spoke of their teacher almost as a father. When a great teacher died, his followers often scattered. Plato, writing about the death of the philosopher Socrates centuries before, said his friends felt they would spend the rest of their lives as orphans. So these men are hearing that their teacher is leaving, and the fear in the room is, who will we belong to now? Jesus names it and refuses it. I will not leave you as orphans. I will come to you. LINDA BROWN: And then he gives them someone. Another Advocate. That is a strange word to use. FRANK EDWARDS: In ordinary Greek it meant someone called alongside you to help. Often it was used in a law court: the friend who stands next to you when you have to speak for yourself. Some Bibles translate it Helper, others Comforter or Counsellor, and all of them are catching part of it. And the word another matters as much as Advocate. Jesus has been their helper for three years, walking beside them, teaching them, defending them. He says the Father will give them another one of the same kind. Not a stranger taking over. Someone like him, and this time staying forever. LINDA BROWN: So that is the plain answer to my question. Who is the Holy Spirit? FRANK EDWARDS: Put as simply as I can: the Holy Spirit is God himself, present with his people. Not a force, not an atmosphere, not a feeling. Jesus talks about him as a person, he, him, someone who teaches and reminds and stays. Christians believe there is one God, known as Father, Son and Spirit, and in this passage you can hear all three. The Son asks, the Father gives, the Spirit comes. And look where he comes. He abides with you and will be in you. Not visiting from time to time. Living in. LINDA BROWN: Which is where I get uneasy, and I want to be fair about it. Promising an invisible helper sounds like exactly what a leader would say to followers he is about to lose. You cannot see this Spirit. How would anyone know he is real, and not just a feeling people talk themselves into? FRANK EDWARDS: That is a serious question, and the passage gives a more careful answer than people might expect. Jesus does not tie the Spirit to feelings at all. He ties him to his own words. The Spirit will teach you all things and will remind you of everything I have told you. The test of the Spirit, in John, is not a sensation. It is whether he leads people back to what Jesus actually said and did. LINDA BROWN: That still sounds like something you could not check from the outside. FRANK EDWARDS: Not directly, no, and I will not claim you can put the Spirit under a microscope. But you can see what John says happened. More than once in his Gospel he tells us the disciples did not understand Jesus at the time, and only remembered and understood his words after he had risen. That is the remembering this passage promises. And John records the same frightened men, behind a locked door after the crucifixion, receiving the Spirit from the risen Jesus and then going out into the city they had been hiding from. Something changed them. John says it was this. LINDA BROWN: I can see that something changed them. Whether it was the Spirit, I honestly cannot tell from where I sit. I am not going to pretend otherwise. FRANK EDWARDS: And you should not pretend. Jesus himself says the world cannot receive him, because it neither sees him nor knows him. It is not a claim that can be proved to an outsider by argument. What I would say is that the passage does not ask anyone to work themselves into a feeling. It points to Jesus' words, which anyone can read, and to a promise made to people who love him and keep his word. LINDA BROWN: That last part. If anyone loves me, he will keep my word, and we will come to him and make our home with him. That one is beautiful, whatever I make of the rest. FRANK EDWARDS: Listen to how it connects with the beginning of the chapter. Back on day twenty-one, Jesus said, in my Father's house are many rooms, and I am going to prepare a place for you. The word for rooms there is a word meaning a lasting dwelling place. Here, in verse twenty-three, the same word comes back for home. We will make our home with him. Before anyone reaches the Father's house, the Father and the Son come to make their home with the one who loves Jesus. The direction turns around. LINDA BROWN: So God is not only waiting at the end of the road. He comes to live where you are now. FRANK EDWARDS: That is the gospel in this passage. The Bible starts with God wanting to live with his people. In the desert, he told Moses, I will dwell among the Israelites and be their God. The tent in the wilderness and later the temple were signs of that, with God's presence behind a curtain. The prophet Ezekiel looked forward to the day when God would say, I will put my Spirit within you. Jesus is saying that day is about to arrive. So the claim of this passage, put plainly, is that Jesus will not leave his people alone: through the Spirit, God himself comes to live with everyone who loves Jesus, and because Jesus lives, they will live too. LINDA BROWN: Because I live, you also will live. He says that the night before he dies. FRANK EDWARDS: He says I live, present tense, the night before the cross. His life is not something death can end, and the people joined to him share in it. Their future rests on his life, not on how strong they feel. LINDA BROWN: And then the goodbye. Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. I do not give to you as the world gives. FRANK EDWARDS: Shalom, in his own language, the ordinary greeting and farewell. But he fills it to the brim. Not, I hope things go well for you. My peace, the peace he has with his Father, handed to them as a gift. The world's peace depends on everything going right. His does not. LINDA BROWN: That is where this lands for me, in the relationships that have gone quiet. The call you have been meaning to return for months. The name you avoid at family dinners. The apology you have rehearsed so many times it has worn smooth and still never said. Most of us try to make peace by managing the silence, and it never quite works. FRANK EDWARDS: And the passage does not hand out a technique for that. It does something deeper. It says the peace Jesus gives does not depend on every relationship being mended, and it does not leave you alone with the ones that are broken. People who are not carrying the whole weight of their peace on their own shoulders often find they can make the call they have been avoiding. LINDA BROWN: Not because they have to, but because they are not alone in it. FRANK EDWARDS: Not alone in it. And for anyone still unsure about all of this, there is something worth noticing in who Jesus says this to. Not to people who had it together. To friends who, within hours, would run away from him. He promised them his Spirit anyway. LINDA BROWN: Do not let your hearts be troubled; do not be afraid. FRANK EDWARDS: Jesus does not leave his people alone; his Spirit stays. LINDA BROWN: Next time, still that same night, Jesus says, I am the true vine, and you are the branches, and calls his followers friends. There is a short devotion on the Spirit and the peace he leaves, in the app today. FRANK EDWARDS: Dig Deeper is a free app, and you can open it at dig deeper dot A I.