But when He, the Spirit of truth, comes, He will guide you into all truth. He will not speak on His own; He will speak only what He hears, and He will tell you what is yet to come.- John 16:13

October 16, 2007 Floyd Ray Gage

Jesus had told His disciples that they were not ready for some of the teaching that He wanted to share with them at that particular time. They needed to grow more before they would be ready for this instruction. The beautiful thing is that they would still have a teacher even though Christ was leaving. Jesus said that not only would the Holy Spirit guide the disciples into the truth that He wanted to share with them at that point, but that He would guide them into all truth.

What does Jesus mean by “all truth?�?This is a very important question, because some might misunderstand what Jesus is saying here. Our ideas of truth as men and women is not God’s idea of truth. We think of truth as something we discover and set the standards for in our own minds and reasoning. For us, something is not truth unless we experience it or discover it. The scientific mind does not want to admit that anything exists unless it can be quantified and analyzed.

Is this God’s idea of truth? I don’t think so. Some truth is beyond our understanding and yet we can believe it. We cannot fully understand eternity and God’s existence, and yet we can believe in it. We cannot fully understand the incarnation and yet we can believe in it. It is still a truth though we do not fully and completely comprehend it.

It think Jesus understood this when He said that the Holy Spirit would guide us into all truth. This means that the Holy Spirit will allow us to glimpse and to believe in all truth, but we will not necessarily fully understand all truth. There is some truth that God reserves for Himself and that is why He is God. There is some truth that we simply cannot comprehend, because we are finite and our minds cannot grasp concepts of the infinite because of that finitude. We cannot understand having no beginning and no end, because everything we deal with in this physical world has a beginning and an end.

To fully understand the truth that Jesus is talking about we must look at the rest of His statement. The Holy Spirit doesn’t speak on His own. He speaks and teaches what He hears. What is His source of information? Jesus, Himself. Jesus told us that He is the way, the truth, and the life in John 14:6. Since Jesus is the truth, then it would stand to reason that the Holy Spirit is going to concentrate on leading us into that truth. Jesus is the Supreme truth and all other truth is understood through the matrix of Jesus Christ. All creation is comprehended through Christ. Creation was made for Him and has Him as its focus and aim.

The Holy Spirit has one subject to teach. He is a specialist and His specialty is Jesus Christ. Therefore, anything that is claimed to be a teaching of the Holy Spirit that doesn’t lead us into the ultimate truth of Jesus is not really a teaching of the Holy Spirit. A lot is going under the heading of the Holy Spirit’s guidance that probably isn’t His guidance at all. There are many teachings that are said to be inspired by the Holy Spirit and yet they do not lead others to a deeper understanding or relationship with Jesus Christ.

The bottom line is that the Holy Spirit is not going to teach anything that does not lead us deeper into a knowledge of Christ and a more intimate relationship with Him. He is the Spirit of truth and therefore He is the Spirit of Christ. He is the agent of action in this world today through which Christ acts and teaches. He will always lead to Christ!