Biblical Systematic Studies

HOLY SPIRIT AND JOHN  16:13

Understanding and experiencing the mechanisms of the Holy Spirit

The Holy Spirit was present from Creation as Genesis is describing. God spoke about "us" in "Let us" and the Spirit and the Father was included in this creation event at the beginning of this world's history. The Trinity was always working as a team, unified in their perspectives and objectives and one cannot think of one part of the Trinity without the other. Unfaithful people and rationalistic inclined people want to split hairs with logical tit for tat arguments to try to cancel the Trinity concepts, but if one believes in the Word of God and if one wants to be serious about that, the Trinity is an aspect that cannot be circumvented. The Holy Spirit as well. In the Gospel to John, John describes the words of Jesus about the Spirit that He does not speak out of Himself, but unselfishly give up self for the advantage of the whole and as such the Spirit wish to work for Christ as Christ wishes to work for the Father and the Father wishes to work for both. In John 16:13 he said "for not does He [Spirit] speaks from Himself, but what He hears, He speaks". Of course the Spirit hears the Words some of which are parked in the Scriptures. There is no conflict with what is written in the Scriptures.

          The Bible tells us that the Spirit has a cardinal role to play in the salvation of a sinner. The Spirit serves as a bridge for Christ and the Father. He pass one what He heard from Christ. The object of what is passed on over the bridge of the Holy Spirit to the essence of the existence of a human, is navigational information. It is truth. The Spirit will lead man into all truth. What is truth? Peter Kreeft the Catholic philosopher cited someone who said that "truth is rightful ordered love and love is rightful ordered truth" (see his online lecture at the St. Augustine College on what truth is in 2010). Most of the lecture was very insightful except the pluralism and ecumenism aspect of Paul. According to Romans 1:15 the Holy Spirit speaks words to compare, thoughts are comparing. There is a cognitive appeal. The brain is stimulated and interested. The brain is warmed up to the issue. 

          The word parakletos means someone who is called next to someone else. The Holy Spirit is the one who is standing next to humans and calling on their conscience or cognitive abilities to pay attention to the navigational aspects necessary in their lives. What navigational aspects? Direction. Anyone born in sin in this world needs direction. Without the Spirit we are just floating in time moment by moment with the weak battery of our own insights providing poor management of our decisions to cross the dark river of understanding. The Spirit brings enlightenment and understanding. It brings clarity and truth. Says John, the Spirit will lead you into all truth. People get BA's to get understanding in their professions, namely how to teach as a teacher. Christians get BA or born again experiences to get understanding in their lives on earth and the world awaiting afterwards. Because of sin, three questions are cardinal to where are you going? Only with the help of reason, existentialism, ontology, our own logic, senses, we cannot get far. What is necessary is an objective outside source that can tell us more than just the subjective conclusions that we are making. A sinful self-analysis will end in pessimism, not maybe, definitely. So what is needed to prevent running into a cul-de-sac, is an objective source and the Bible is that objective search engine of the soul. It is endless. It is a library not just a book of one person. It is a book by God through man but about Himself and man and how He wishes to help man to get out of this mess. A mess it is for that is what Satan made of this world.

            There are skeptics who say that they do not believe that there is a God. They feel comfortable with evolutionism and do not want to be bothered about that. But think of this, religion aside: how come NASA could not find any life on Mars and the Moon? It is bare, dusty, rocky, nothing else. How come the sister planet earth is so complex that it is a universe within and without, a universe in micro-biology and a universe in macro-astronomy. Is this not strange? Because there is nothing on Mars and because there is nothing on the Moon, no intermediate phases, the Buddhistic idea of uniformatism is shelved. It is no longer a working theory. Uniformatism is the concept that everything will be the same into eternity as it was the same coming from eternity. It remains cyclical with born, live, die cycles. It fails to explain the origin of our complex earth and its biology and zoology and fails to explain the utter nothingness on Mars and the Moon next door. The contrast is too good to be true for uniformatism. Thus, evolutionism is shelved as well and creationism is the only option available.

The Holy Spirit supplies the sinner with these perspectives, namely the origin of problems, death, sickness as starting with the Rebellion in Heaven of Lucifer who became Satan and bound on this universe of ours with the earth as his center. If Adam and Eve did not succumb to the temptations of Satan, an experiment or visual display of Satan's methods to the unfallen worlds, then we would have been in peace, security, happiness and joy unending. But now we are here and we need the Holy Spirit as navigation.

Sometimes the Holy Spirit works like a dictophone. If He speaks what He hears from Christ, He is a dictophone.

Romans 5:5 establish to us that the Holy Spirit is a divine EQ installer. In Romans 1:15 we learn that the law is written on the heart and in Jeremiah 31:30-34 the law is written on the heart of the person after his heart was created anew as Ezechiel 36:26-27 tells us. This creation is not from below or by our own machinations or any earthly machinations. It is from above as John 3:3 tells us. It is to be born again or born anew. Romans 5:5 hold out for us that the Holy Spirit throws containers filled with God's love out into our hearts. When this happens a peace comes over our lives. Now we are no longer looking horizontally only. We are also looking vertical. In fact, the vertical now determines the horizontal. When the human comes to this stage of his development, he/she is willing to die for their faith and believe in the same way as all the people of the past died for their faith and believe. It is the new reality and surpasses all other realities as mere virtual realities full of deception, temporality and misleading content.

The Bible does bring an understanding of the way God works. The more one studies it the more one understands. It is going to take eternity to fully understand the Bible and that is why faithful people will continue studying it in heaven perhaps, then be able to ask the faithful writers of the Bible themselves to lecture on what they wrote and why.

What makes God's book so unique is that He does not hide the sins of the faithful but brings it good and bad as is. This brings objectivity and legitimacy to the source. In the Assyrian historiography, the annals and obelisk of Shalmanezer III 853 BCE, he only mentions his good deeds and successes. His failures are not listed. It is an Ancient Near Eastern disease in historiography that all of them had in common. But not so with the Bible.

A Sinner that is baptized with water and with the Spirit enter a spiritual rest every Sabbath with comparison of God resting on Saturday from His work after Creation week's activities. So every Sabbath is thus a weekly commemoration of the Creation week tied into salvation weekend when Christ rested in the grave dying the eternal death or eternal rest on our behalf so that we can escape that eternal rest in commemoration of both deeds, Christ's eternal death/rest and the Creator's exemplary rest on Saturday at the end of Creation week for us to follow as He explicitly commands in Exodus 20:8-11. Baptism with the Spirit carries with it all these concepts intertwined and one can understand Hebrews 4:4 better through this.

Studies in biblical topics systematize faith for the soul

koot van wyk (DLitt et Phil; ThD)

Visiting Professor

Kyungpook National University

Sangju Campus

South Korea

Conjoint lecturer of Avondale College

Australia

30 September 2011