The Spirit’s Work as Seen in John vii and xx

pee revelation through St John of the

Person and Work of the Holy Spirit has now for some time occupied us. We go once more to the same great Apostle, before - turning, as we shall then do, to the “beloved brother Paul.”

In St John’s Gospel there remain two passages in which the Holy Ghost is explicitly mentioned by the Lord Jesus, and whose messages to the believer, and to the believing Church, are of the weightiest import. In the First Epistle we have some few further precious contributions of truth on the Spirit’s work. In the Revelation finally we have Him repeatedly presented, in His heavenly glory and in His work for men. Let us make this a chapter. of fragments, taking up these successive passages each for brief remark and meditation.

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(i.) John vii. 37-39. — Here stands the Saviour before us — ‘ in the last day, that great day of the feast,” the joyous Tabernacle Feast of Autumn, following with significant closeness on the Day of Atonement. The occasion must have been a scene impressive indeed in its, externals. ‘After the priest had returned from Siloam with his golden pitcher, and for the last time poured its contents to the base of the altar; after the ‘ Hallel ’ had been sung to the sound of the flute, the people responding and worshipping as the priests three times drew the threefold blasts from their silver trumpets — just when the interest of the people had been raised to its highest pitch, [it was theny that from amidst the mass of worshippers, who were waving towards the altar quite a forest of leaty branches as the last words of Psalm cxvili. were chanted — a voice was raised, which resounded through the Temple.... It was Jesus, who ‘stood and cried, saying, If any man thirst, let him come unto Me, and drink.’ Then by faith ‘1 Him should each one truly become like the Pool of Siloam, and from his inmost being ‘rivers of living water flow.’ ... The effect ppl ld] Si pha tle the Ofte LiL he SPILRLT..” 147

Was instantaneous.... Even the Temple guard... owned the spell of His words, and dared not to lay hands an Him. ‘Never man spake like this man,’ was the only account they could give of their unusual weakness.”?

It was a voice mighty with the power at once of authority and promise. Above and through the mighty maze of symbolism it called the soul of man directly, without one intermediary film or interval, to ‘come to” Him who spoke, to come with an absolute and therefore perfectly simple faith to Him. And it promised, it guaranteed, with a self-evidencing majesty, that to all and several who should so come the very amplest blessing should result. The river of life eternal should so flow into them from Jesus Christ as to flow out through them to others. “As the Scripture had said,”’ — such Scriptures as Isai. xii. 2, 3 (observe the connexion of those verses) and lviii, 11, — “out of the belly” of each such believing man “should flow rivers of living water.”

We are at once informed by the Evangelist

1 Dr A. Edersheim, Zhe Temple and its Services, p. 244.

ASTANA aa mee ne Oc owe eta of the meaning of the glorious imagery : —” This spake He of the Spirit, which they that believe on Him should receive.” The reference was to the Holy Ghost, in His soon-coming development of presence and operation in the believing Church; “for the Holy Ghost was not yet [given], because that Jesus was not yet glorified.” Not, surely, that no rich and redundant blessing would have resulted then and there to each believer who took the Saviour at His word that hour; but that in the great order of God’s ways such redundancy was not quite yet to be the rule, the open and manifest usage of grace. For must we not observe that, although the fullest allowance is to be made for large and bright exceptions, there was just this difference of rule between the spiritual conditions of the Old Dispensation and the New — that while the Old was a dispensation of conservation the New is a dispensation also, and in wonderful prominence, of diffusion and impartation through the New Israel and through the New Israelite? To a degree altogether unprecedented this began to be at Pentecost. The Church, and the saint, were then so filled from above that it was manifestly the purpose of the Lord that not now and then only, and in exceptional cases only, but .all the true people of God always should be open channels of blessing: to men around, conduits of life, by becoming living vehicles for a living witness to the glory and all-gracious power of Christ. What Abraham, and David, and Josiah, and Ezra, as regards their personal life and its rule, were zo¢ altocether meant to be, the whole company of believers, each and all, were altogether meant to be now; channels of effusion and diffusion for the parched and weary world, in which they were to live as men filled with the Spirit who manifests and imparts the Lord.

Much might be said of course on questions in detail which gather around this great truth and principle. We might turn aside to discuss the question of the ‘“miraculous gifts,” and whether — they are at all in view here. I think they are not, for I think that here, as in the parallel passage of the Well of Sychar, the Jonniv.u. very tone and accent, so to speak, of the words of Jesus Christ lead us straight to the needs of the inmost human soul, and to the supply of those needs. And those are needs which, be it said with reverence, would be poorly met indeed by even “unknown tongues” and “gifts of healing.”* But I will not enter on any details of such a question here. We may be certain that, whatever else lies in these divine words, ¢hzs lies in them — the assurance that the believer, the believer indeed, drawing the depth and fulness of the divine life from Christ by the Spirit, shall in his wholly subordinate way, yet in a way most real, be wonderfully used in the conveyance of that life around him. He shall not be an original fountain-head; only One can be that. But he shall be a living watercourse; a living secondary cause in others of living faith, and hope, and love, by the Holy Ghost. He shall not merely speak truth about Christ and the Spirit; he shall speak it as living by it, as living it; he shall Eph. iii.2. speak by ‘the power that worketh in him”; he shall touch his brother’s conscience, and will, and love, with a contact whose power is not of him while yet it comes through him.

I See further below, p. 212.

2 SONS Base ee

If I may quote my own words written elsewhere,! the Lord “will use the man, or the woman, who is really drinking the heavenly water from the Rock, who is really filled for life’s needs with the supplies of life eternal, in. a mysterious way, and yet a way all the while profoundly natural. Through that personality the Spirit shall be pleased to work special blessings, for He will have made it fit to be so used.... It ‘shall be a vessel unto 2 Tint. ii. 2. honour, sanctified and serviceable to the Master. The believer in question may perhaps ézow that he is thus privileged and employed, or he may

never know it at all. But that matters comparatively little.” What matters is the promise of the all-faithful Lord that we, even we, shall somehow be channels for the lifegiving operation of the Eternal Spirit, on condition that we “come unto Him,” for ourselves, “and drink,” and that we live “believing,” live by faith in the Son of God.

Blessed be He for such a promise, and for such a condition. Blessed be the Spirit who

1 Thoughts on the Spiritual Life, p. 147, wills to flow forth, true to that promise, through the being of even us.

(ii.) John xx. 21-23. — We step here into a very different scene. The stir and festal triumph of the Tabernacle Day are hushed. It is the glorious calm of the evening of the first Easter, in that large Upper Room, so carefully barred and bolted, where the disciples with gladness saw the Lord. I need not recite at length His blessed words, the very first words addressed to them as a company by Him who now stood there amongst them in ‘‘the power. Heb. vii.x6. of an endless life.” Enough to remember that they were words first of divine peace to themselves and then, immediately, words of mission, mission into the world, with a view to the “remitting” and “retaining” of sins. And this mission was accompanied by a marked and deeply significant action: ‘‘ He breathed on them, and saith unto them, Receive ye the Holy Ghost.”

Here again we might turn aside to more than one enquiry by the way; for example to the question whether the Risen Lord’s action of breathing was the sacrament, so to speak, of an

THE SPIRIT IN ¥OHN XX. 153

immediate, or of a coming, gift of the Spirit; whether He then and there conveyed to them a special afflatus, or significantly assured them of the great afflatus so soon to come. But for our present purpose this enquiry is not necessary. In either case we gather unmistakably from the words and action some great spiritual facts. We see that the mission was one for which a special gift of the Spirit’s power and presence was required. And we see that that gift was to be given in the very closest connexion with the Person and Work of the Lord Jesus slain and risen again. The symbolic Breath came from His holy lips. As on the Pentecostal day so now it was “He who shed forth,” whether it was in act or in prospect, the Spirit, His Spirit, the Spirit of Christ, the Comforter in His blessed power, One with Christ, glorifying and imparting Christ.

As regards the terms of the mission I do not speak at length. Illustrated by the recorded work of the Apostles and other first preachers of the Gospel, it is surely plain what they do mot mean. They do not mean that the divine pardon of the soul is so put in charge of any

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man, or any body of men, as that for one moment that man, or that body, even if the body were the whole Church, can intercept the soul’s direct appeal to the Lord and His direct voice of peace to the soul; or can provide a substitute for either. If this were the place, it would be easy to show how the claims of the Roman Catholic priesthood (and all really kindred claims) to act as intermediaries in the actual conveyance of divine remission are quite without ground either in Scripture or in really primeval antiquity after it; and how the application of the words of this passage to the work of the Christian presbyter comes up not till comparatively late in Church history; and how even when the words were first so applied the reference was understood to be to what we may call the Church’s pardon rather than the Lord’s, to the ministry of exclusion from and re-admission to the ordinances and fellowship of the Christian community.’ But it may be enough now to say that Scripture itself

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1 See The History and Claims of the Confessional (Longmans), by the present Bishop (Reichel) of Meath. And the author’s Outlines of Christian Doctrine, p. 220.

abundantly witnesses to the Apostles’ own unconsciousness of the possession of a really mediatorial power and position; as for instance in the words of St Peter to Simon Magus at Samaria. And the practically one Acts viii. 22. alternative interpretation here is that the remission and retention are declaratory. The messengers here commissioned are to make known, for the world’s need, how sin is forgiven in Christ, and how it is not forgiven.

And we surely gather that this work for the Lord is the work not of Apostles only, not of the sacred Ministry only, distinct and special as its functions are, but of the whole true Church of Christ. More persons were present in the Upper Room than the apostles. Certainly the two friends from Emmaus were Luke xxiv. 33. there, and those two had found on their arrival “others with” the Eleven. And the Lord is at no pains to draw distinctions on this occasion, as He had been on others. No, He was empowering His whole true Church, there present by representation before Him, to be His delegate, His representative, in that part of His own mission from the Father which consisted in the unveiling to human hearts how sin is to be forgiven, how man is to enter into peace with God.

So here is a passage in which every true child of God, every true member of Christ our Head, may read what is to be the essence of his own life-work for Him. It means no ecclesiastical anarchy, I am sure. The Lord is the God of order, not confusion. ‘But it does mean that that is no true order which would debar the humblest Christian from his ‘part, or her part, in this most blessed

See x Cor. xiv.
33

Eph. iv. 12. ‘“work of service,” this earnest, Phil. ii, 16. loving, “holding out of the word of life.’ And on the other hand it solemnly, tenderly, reminds all such, as with the voice o Jesus Himself, that the inmost qualification for that work is not mere energy of character, or ease of utterance, or fancied fulness of knowledge, or even truth of view. It. 18 the vine breathed and inbreathing presence of the Holy Spirit. If the message is to be not only true

1 See Prof. Westcott’s annotation on the passage. And see some remarks in an admirable book, the late Dr Hanna’s Forty Days after our Lord’s Resurrection, pp. 72-85.

but truly carried, truthfully handled, presented as the solemn, blissful reality it is, the messenger, be he who he may, must be sfzrituat, must possess, must be possessed by, the Spirit of the Son of God. The Holy Ghost must have taught Azm indeed the realities of sin, and of its remission. The Holy Ghost must work in and through him as in a vessel meet for the Master’s use. If he bears the commission and orders of the Church of God let him thank his Master for the blessed privilege and advantage; but let him not forget that the Church gave him that gift on the solemn understanding that he believed himself to be already, in a special sense, dealt with for the purpose by the Holy Ghost. And let the lay worker for the Lord equally remember that his title to be a witness-bearer of the way of salvation is vitally connected, as between him and his Saviour, with his being indeed spiritual, ‘‘ worshipping by the Spirit of God,” ‘walking by the Phi. his.

Spirit,” bringing forth the Spirit’s Gal. v. 22s. holy, humble “fruit.” So we come round again, in essence, though under quite different imagery, to the truth conveyed by John vii. 38.

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(iii.) 1 John ii. 20, 27; iii. 24. — A very few words will suffice on these two passages of the precious First Epistle. The former has been already treated incidentally,’ and little moreneeds saying here in this ‘‘ chapter of fragments” than to call the reader to observe the imagery of ‘anointing’ used by the Apostle. The “little child” in Christ is reminded by this that the eift to him of the illuminating Spirit, who pours through conscience, mind, and affections the pure light of the eternal principles and truths of grace, constitutes him in his new life a “king and priest” to his Father, and, ix: a humble but real sense, a ‘‘ prophet” too; a man who has, under the guidance of the Word of God, more than nature’s insight into truth and error concerning salvation. The second passage, with its truly heavenly context, will indeed reward close and prayerful study as the believing reader ponders the tender, gracious commandment (not commandments) to “believe on the name of His Son, and to love one another;” the love being the sure outcome of the faith, just as far as the faith is true and full. All that

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shall be said here is, of course, on the explicit reference to the blessed Spirit. What is its assertion? It is that the sure way to ascertain that God ‘“abideth in us” is, to render the Greek literally, “out of the Spirit which He gave us.’ From that blessed Gift our proofs must be drawn. And how and where shall we find them? The immediate following context gives part of the answer; it is by finding our souls respond with a full Amen to the Scriptural revelation of the glory of the Incarnate Son and His precious work. And the whole New Testament suggests the rest of the answer; it is by finding our wills respond with a love and loyalty which only God can give to His own description of “the fruit of the Spirit,” “His will, even our sanctification,” His holy, humbling, chastening will.

(iv.) A few words on the manifested glory and work of the Holy Spirit as seen in the Book of the Revelation shall close this chapter. The book abounds in mentions of Him. They range from i. 4 — where beyond all reasonable

1 See Dr R. S. Candlish, Te First Epistle of John (Lecture xxviii.); a book of the highest spiritual value.

question the reverent Bible student will see Him, One but Sevenfold, in those Seven Spirits before the throne who are named wth and between the Father and the Son as the Source of grace and peace — to xxii. 17, where the Spirit with the Bride, the blessed Life-Giver with and through the Body which He fills with the true Life, says “Come,” to the thirsty soul of man asking: for the living water which is given in the gift of Himself. I have touched already,’ and perhaps sufficiently, on the beautiful phenomenon of Rev. ii, ili., the identification, or rather union, of the voice of Christ with the voice of the Spirit. It may be enough further to call attention to that one glorious passage where the exalted

Rev. v. 6; see
iLook

Redeemer, recent from the wounds of the Cross, is seen “having seven horns and seven eyes, which are the seven Spirits of God, sent forth into all the earth.” The imagery, sublime in its boldness, carries manifestly with it some great truths concerning the relation of the Holy Spirit to the Lord

1 Above, p. 10.

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Jesus and to His presence with His Church below. It reminds us with peculiar and vivid force of the depth and closeness of the connexion of life and work between. the Spirit and the Son. It shows us, “in the visions of God,’’ how the Spirit is inherent in. the Son, if I may dare to say so, inherent with an unspeakable union of being, and harmony of will, and order of working; and how He is sent forth by Him, radiates forth from Him. In particular it indicates that the glorified Christ, in all the exercises of His perfect Power (the “seven horns”) and most real Presence (the “seven eyes”) ‘in all the earth,” in all His dealings with and for His people here below, has, for the divine Vehicle of that power and presence, the Holy Ghost in His sevenfold perfectness of gift and working. The effluent presence of the Lamb, if I may use the phrase, is made, is conveyed, for us on earth, for all the members ‘in all the earth,” by the Holy Ghost. It is He who in perfectness of power “strengthens us in the inner man” Eph. iii. 16, x7. that Christ in perfectness of presence may “dwell in our hearts by faith.” It is by

Him that we are “joined unto the Lord.” It -Cor.viz7. is He who makes the “one body,” Ephiv.s. by the union of each believer with

the Head, and so with all the members. The

force, the presence, the voice, of the Lord

Christ Jesus — all is by the Spirit; not by

physical, or quasi-physical, contact with the

glorified Body of the Redeemer, but by part and lot in His Spirit.’

“Where that Spirit is,” said the Dean of Llandaff a few years ago in the Cambridge University pulpit, “there is the Body of Christ; and only there.”

Come, then, blessed Spirit, evermore come, and in all the sevenfold fulness of Thy infinitely gracious operation bring us the members into an ever deeper union, spiritual, heavenly, holy, with Him who is our Head.

1 [ may refer in passing to a passage in Bp Jeremy Taylor’s treatise Of the Real Presence (Sect. vii, 8), where he examines the process of divine benefit in the faithful recipient at the Fucharist: “The benefit reaching to the body by the holy Eucharist comes to it by the soul; ... therefore by faith, not by the mouth.” The words have a special argumentative reference, but also touch the general subject of the mode of the mystical Union.