The Holy Spirit the Revealer of Christ
G. S. Bishop, D. D. John 16:14 He shall glorify me: for he shall receive of mine, and shall show it to you. We are living in the dispensation of the Spirit. What does that mean? It means that we are living on a higher plane than ever has been occupied before. We gather this — 1. From a comparison of this dispensation with others that have preceded it. True religion is more widely disseminated in this than it has been in any preceding dispensation. 2. We know that this Dispensation is an advance, because God Himself is advance — progress. He never goes backward. 3. The same fact is clear from the structure of Scripture. 4. The whole historic development of man, looked at in the line of the plan of redemption, is clearly enough in this upward direction. The work of God is from matter toward spirit. The child leaves his playthings behind, and comes to despise them. The college student turns his back on the pleasures and games of his boyhood. The professional man has forgotten the rivalries of college life — as narrow as its walls; and the mellowed and matured philosopher "lives already amid the peace and the power of invisible scenes," and draws from above and beyond him the springs of incentive and action. The same principle holds throughout nature. Time and again our attention is drawn to the fact that there is an invisible world, and that that invisible world bears down upon and overpowers the visible. That thought and feeling and volition are stronger than substance and quality and force, and that from within what is unseen and supersensible and supernatural flow the "upper springs" of all inferior energy and action. 5. But we are not left to gather up an inference from observation, nor speculation, nor from logic. "Our Saviour Himself now assures us, that if we believe in Him we shall do greater works than even those which He performed on earth, and that we shall do them precisely because He goes to the Father." I. THE ONE ESSENTIAL TO SALVATION IS THE REVELATION OF CHRIST. How essential this is may be gathered from reason, from conscience, and from the light of the Scriptures. 1. From reason. Nowhere, outside the radius of Christianity, is there either holiness or peace. Look at Africa. Look at China. He who knows anything of the history of moral light knows that it has followed, as its centre, the planting of the cross of Christ — that just as races have receded from the light of God in the face of our Lord Jesus Christ, so they have sunken to a brutish level, and have died in the distractions of an utter unrest. 2. Conscience affirms the same truth. Conscience, in every man, says: "You are guilty! You are a sinner! God is holy. He cannot acquit!" Conscience, whatever modern thought may say, cries — "Eternal Justice is Eternal Fact, and God is just; and How can justice clear the guilty?" and to this cry of conscience is no answer but in Christ and in the sacrifice" of Christ. 3. And these deductions of our reason and our conscience are confirmed by Scripture. Now the Bible affirms. It comes straight out and says: "Apart from the knowledge of Christ there is no salvation." II. THE HOLY GHOST IS THE ONLY REVEALER OF CHRIST. He alone makes Christ glorious. The Holy Ghost has given us all the knowledge that we have of Jesus Christ. Where do we get that knowledge? How do we know that there is such a thing as a Saviour? From the Bible. Outside the covers of this Book there is not a hint of a Christ. And whence came the Bible? It was inspired. Who inspired it? God, the Holy Ghost. Not only so, but, with the Bible in our hands, how can we know anything of Christ, save as the Spirit reveals Him? Miracle never changed any man. Appearances — like that of the angels to Abraham. Abraham saw Christ's day. How did he see it? By illumination — by the Holy Ghost. Moses recognized God at Horeb. How? By the fire? No, but by God speaking out of the midst of the bush. Ezekiel was transformed at Chebar. How? By the wheels? No, but "the Spirit," he says, "entered in me." Israel was to be revived under Elijah. How? By the wind? By the earthquake? By the fire? By any sensible or ocular demonstration? No; but by the still small voice. That was the lesson taught to the prophet. The same fact comes out in the New Testament. How many saw Christ — touched Christ — said they believed on Christ in the flesh, who never went beyond impressions of their outward senses. What makes a Christian is the spiritual apprehension of Christ, and the Holy Ghost alone can reveal Him. Take the Levitical sacrifices — how without these could we explain the Atonement? Yet only a few who read them under the Old Dispensation saw Christ in these Scriptures, and why? Because they needed more than the most perfect description. They needed light on the light. They needed, like David, to have their eyes opened to see wondrous things out of God's law. The same thing is true of the New Testament. The Holy Ghost reveals Christ. He glorifies Christ. Notice: He does not create Christ; He shows Him. When we were sailing in the Grecian Archipelago we came, at dawn of day, to the Island of Rhodes. At first we saw only a grey indistinctness — the shapeless outline of vast rocks rising out of the water. Then as the sun came up, how glorious! There lay the harbour once bestridden by the famous Colossus, the sapphire ripplings of the water touched with rose and gold — the ships, the flappings of their sails stirred lightly by the morning breeze. There stretched away the green fields and the mountains round which poetry had thrown her charm; midway in the perspective rose the ancient castellated ramparts of the fortress of the Knights of St. John, all flashing, glowing, burning, touched and "transfigured by the ministry of light." "That which doth make manifest is light." The Holy Ghost is the only revealer of Jesus. And the Holy Ghost glorifies Christ or reveals Him in His true glory now, as He could not possibly do were Christ present. The apostles loved Christ too much, as the carnal loves the carnal. That is the error of Rome, with her crucifixes, her Mass, and her sensuous ecstasies. Read the memoirs of Santa Teresa and of St. John of the Cross, and you will find the love they express for the Saviour is sensuous — carnal There is something lurid about it. You are afraid of it. It was necessary that that sort of thing should be broken — that there should come an experience, which, permit me to say it, should emancipate Christ — should burst the tomb and the grave-clothes, and set Him Infinite, Omnipresent, Omnipotent, Heavenly — working above, as ever in, and through His Church — an experience like that of St. Paul when he says: "Yea, though we have known Christ after the flesh, yet now henceforth know we Him no more." We only know Him as the Spirit reveals Him. You have known a man by his clothes — by his face — now you come to know him by his character. Something reveals him in his abilities, in his integrity, in his truth, as your friend. The Holy Ghost reveals Christ. But let us come closer; the ulterior and special object of the Spirit's revelation is God's glory in the face of Jesus Christ. III. "He shall glorify" — "MAKE ME GLORIOUS." St. Paul expands our Saviour's statement in these words: "For God, who commanded the light to shine out of darkness, hath shined in our hearts, to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ." The world without Christ, or Christ in twilight — beneath the dawn-line of the Old Testament — beneath the histories, and types, and prophecies — beneath the horizon of an Arctic winter, and then, and all at once, and for ever, the Sun of Righteousness is visible perfection of His glory — the Mystery of Godliness — the Day-spring from on high! The statement of this point involves, of course, three. That there is such a thing as the knowledge of the glory of God — that this knowledge is unfolded in the face of Jesus Christ, and that it comes by a Divine in-shining. 1. The knowledge of the glory of God. If God be God, He is glorious, for glory is manifested excellence, and God is most excellent, and cannot be hid. The glory of God is not only His greatness, but the equipoise of His character. Satan is great, i.e., in faculties, but he is in no wise glorious, but infamous, because of the defect of his character. God's glory is the equipoise of His attributes. With Him nowhere is there too much — nowhere a deficit. It is important to put emphasis upon the fact before us, because the effort of to-day is to destroy the balance of the attributes of God — to posit in that justice, for example — and in measurement and in adjustment everything comes back to the straight line — that justice in God is a merely optional attribute. "How can God," says one of our modern neologians, "how can God be free if He be the slave of His own justice?" As well ask, "How can I be free if I cannot rid myself of my backbone? I am the slave, then, of my backbone. But how can I be a man and have no backbone?" For God to be free from His justice would be for Him to be free from Himself as moral, and therefore immoral; for justice is simply looking on things as they are, and treating them accordingly, and to deny this is to deny rectitude, and to deny rectitude is to deny God and make Him immoral. Justice optional! What should we think of a man to whom it were optional to be just, or to be unjust? The moral grandeur of God is His balance, His poise, that He rights Himself. "Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right?" 2. The glory of God then, as it stands revealed in vast concentric haloes, circles upon circles of immeasurable excellence, is at its brightest spot — its centre — and when focalized and gathered to one burning-point, nothing more, nothing less than conciliation of justice and grace. "How can God be just and justify the guilty?" lies at the root of the gospel. The answer to that question is the gospel, and Christ on the cross is its sum. Christ on the cross, not Christ in pre-existence, transcending thought as is the mystery of everlasting generation. Not Christ again in all the grand kaleidoscopic aspects of His ministry, as miracles spring up beneath His footsteps like fresh flowers. Not Christ in any, nor in all, these revelations, glorious as they are, but still subordinate, but Christ upon the tree. It was there seen that God could not swerve — that sin must be punished. What is the upshot of this? The upshot is that from the instant you and I look away to Christ as our Substitute, we are eternally saved. Is not that glorious? Bursts there not a glory from that torn flesh which hangs and writhes upon those ragged nails, which challenges all suns to rival it in splendour? Is not here God's glory focalized, as it swings low and kisses even your and my horizon? When we were at the North Cape, at midnight, a French gentleman took out a sun-glass and burned a hole in his hat with it. Low as the sun was, he was still clothed with all his burning power. So it was with our Saviour on the cross. "For though He was crucified through weakness, yet He liveth." 3. This glory hath in-shined — that is the third point. It hath shined not historically — not in the face of a physical Christ, although these, of course, are included; but through the veil of the heart. Christ's glory to mere worldly men is a veiled glory; "the veil" says the Apostle, "is upon their heart." That veil has been rent — not from our side — from God's side. God hath "shined in" — not into the world only, that is not enough — could not be, for "the light shineth in darkness, and the darkness comprehendeth it not." Into believing hearts God hath shined. It is not simply knowledge, but it is the light of the knowledge. It is not Church instruction, but heart-work — interior regeneration. "When it pleased God," says Paul, "to reveal His Son within me, immediately I took no conference flesh and blood."How then do we see the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ? 1. One way, by faith. Faith is the great opened eye of the soul. 2. Another way the light shines in us is by the witness of the Spirit. What is that witness if not a supernatural spiritual emphasis put on the assurances and promises of God, which makes them true to us without a question? 3. A third way light shines in is by consciousness. Consciousness of breathing goes with breathing. Consciousness of walking goes with walking. Consciousness of life and vigour goes with power. A man full of the Holy Ghost knows what he is full of, and that he is not empty. He knows that his light is not darkness — that his joy is not despair, and that his power is something other and more than physical elation or physical energy. "Can He not, through some interior eye which we know not, and for which we have no name, pour into us the radiance of His own infinite glory, though He be the King invisible, whom no man has seen, nor can see?" Can He not manifest Himself to the eye of interior consciousness with a distinctness of spiritual presence as satisfying as that which His bodily form gave to the external vision of His disciples? This revelation of Christ — fresh revelation I mean, satisfying our souls, filling, flooding — enlarging us with the light, and the love, and the joy, and the strength of the Lord is what we need. (G. S. Bishop, D. D.) Parallel Verses KJV: He shall glorify me: for he shall receive of mine, and shall shew it unto you. WEB: He will glorify me, for he will take from what is mine, and will declare it to you.