Love; John 14:15-31

In this passage the primary importance of what Jesus is saying is the importance of knowing God. The point of all of this is, how do we know God? That is the theme, the substance of what Jesus is saying. The only way to know God is through Jesus Christ. As the incarnate God Jesus is the highest expression of God possible in human history. If we say right now that we want to know God better, you can’t. You go to the Scriptures. That is the highest, most profound, most lucid revelation of God in all of human history. This fact is confirmed in the opening verses of Hebrews: “…in these last days [church age] has spoken to us in [through or by means of] His Son…” There is no immediate knowledge of God available. You can’t have an intuitive knowledge of God. That needs a little qualification: we know God exists but we don’t know much more than that because of God-consciousness. Everybody knows that but to add substance to that revelation means that there has to be some verbal communication. General revelation is non-verbal, there are no words there, just a mute testimony. So God has spoken to us by means of His Son. “… whom He appointed heir of all things, through whom also He made the world.” The culmination of revelation is in the second person of the Trinity. “And He is the radiance [flashing forth] of His glory and the exact representation [essence] of His nature, and upholds all things by the word of His power.” Jesus Christ in His essence is deity and He upholds all things by the Word of His power. “When He had made purification of sins, He sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on high.” So in these two verses we see the connection between the essence of God, creation, the hypostatic union and the redemption work of Christ on the cross. This shows how they are all related.

The point that we are making is that it is Jesus Christ who is the ultimate, the highest, the fullest expression of God possible in human history. You can’t know God any better than by knowing Jesus Christ. Incidentally, just by way of application, this is one reason that the canon of Scripture is closed. This is one indication why revelation has ceased in human history. What more can be added to the revelation of God in Jesus Christ and through the apostles than what we already have. You can’t add more, it is the ultimate revelation of God in human history.

We know Jesus only through His words and His works. We do not have a direct, immediate knowledge of Jesus. Jesus has not appeared to anybody. This is the remarkable thing about the church age. This is what elevates us so much. There has been no more revelation from God to the faith that we have had for nineteen hundred years and that means that our faith, our trust in the written Word of God, is superior to the trust of those who saw and felt and touched the Lord Jesus Christ. We know Jesus, not through a direct knowledge but only through the indirect record of His words and His works. So we can say that to know Jesus through His words and works is to know the Father because they are identical. We know Jesus’ words and works only through the Scriptures. There is no other way that we can come to a knowledge of who Jesus Christ is, and understand His character and essence, than by looking at the Scriptures. Therefore the only way to know God is through the Scriptures. That does away with all mysticism, this intuitive approach to religious things that is so popular today. If there was a physical presence of Christ today on the earth that physical presence would be a distraction from knowing who He is and His essence or character. It is a higher form of love to be able to learn who he is on the basis of the principles of Scripture than it is to love Him because He happens to be there. 1 Peter 1:8 ^NASB “and though you have not seen Him, you love Him…” How do we come to love Him? By knowing Scripture. That is why it is so important to have our minds constantly saturated with Bible doctrine—day in and day out, week after week, over and over again. This is the way we shape out thinking according to the Word of God. It is based not on this direct, immediate knowledge which everybody wants, but the Scripture says we walk by means of faith (in Scripture) and not by means of sight.

We can know Jesus’ character, who He is, His thinking, His will, His plan, His purposes because we have the mind of Christ, 1 Corinthians 2:16. If we want to know how Jesus thinks, how God thinks, open our Bibles. The implication from that is that if we don’t have respect for Bible teaching and in-depth Bible study, then you don’t have any respect for knowing God or for God Himself. How you feel and what you think about the Word of God and Bible study is what you really think about God and about Jesus Christ.

But that is not enough. What we see in this passage is that the disciples had the physical presence of Jesus, His physical teaching, everything, for three years plus and they can’t pull it together. So something is missing. Man on his own in terms of his ability to understand and comprehend and learn doctrine can only go so far. At regeneration we are given the human spirit. The human spirit is what allows us to understand the things of God, according to 1 Corinthians 2:14. But beyond that you have to have the teaching ministry of God the Holy Spirit. This is the point that Jesus is driving home in the upper room. John 14:16 ^NASB “I will ask the Father, and He will give you another Helper, that He may be with you forever; [17] {that is} the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it does not see Him or know Him, {but} you know Him because He abides with you and will be in you.” Here we see that one of the key issues in the Holy Spirit’s ministry to the life of the believer is related to the truth, the understanding of Bible doctrine. In His high priestly prayer Jesus said: “Father, sanctify them by means of truth.” That is why we are saved: to be sanctified. Sanctification is that process whereby we go from being abnormal, fallen creatures to being restored to the image of Christ which was the original status of man in the garden; and that is what normality is. Normality for humanity is what God intended man to be as the image and likeness of God in Genesis 1:26, 27. Jesus Christ is the second Adam; He is normal. Adam fell from normality at the fall, so from Adam on we are all born abnormal. Jesus Christ as the second Adam is the standard for normality. So how do you and I become normal? By learning the Word of God by which we are transformed and our thinking is renewed.

What we have seen is the progressive nature of learning, that God is not going to reveal more to us in terms of understanding the Word of God if we are not doing anything with what we already have. So if we are not growing and advancing spiritually we are going to get to a point where we are scratching our heads and saying we really don’t understand what he is talking about, it is just a lot of abstract theology, it doesn’t mean anything to me, doctrine really doesn’t work. Generally that is a preface to a person’s collapse in life because they have really been negative for some time, they are not really applying and sooner or later the adversity will come and the stress in their soul will cause an internal collapse.

John 14:22 ^NASB “Judas (not Iscariot) said to Him, ‘Lord, what then has happened that You are going to disclose Yourself to us and not to the world?’” If the Lord is going to disclose Himself to those who are obedient Judas immediately picks up on the fact that God has discrimination in whom He is going to disclose Himself. Not a politically correct notion! God is not going to reveal Himself to everyone. Jesus said in the principle, “Don’t cast your pearls before swine.” You don’t reveal your wisdom to those who aren’t willing to accept it. We have to learn when to keep our mouths shut. We have to understand Judas’ basic question. He is asking how people can know the Lord if He is not there. Furthermore, what is it about His departure and absence that is going to make His absence more significance than His presence.

John 14:23 ^NASB “Jesus answered and said to him, ‘If anyone loves Me, he will keep My word…” That is he will be obedient, he will learn doctrine under the filling of God the Holy Spirit and will apply it. The issue is to internalise the doctrine in the soul so that we learn to think and respond to life’s situations as Jesus would. That comes from learning doctrine. “… and My Father will love him, and We will come to him and make Our abode with him’.” The word here for “abode” is the Greek word monen [monhn] which is the same word used earlier when Jesus said, “In my Father’s house are many dwelling places.” So we see that it is a place of fellowship. So the emphasis here in what Jesus is talking about is not salvation, the indwelling of God the Father and the Holy Spirit in terms of position, but He is talking about fellowship. Fellowship is related to obedience. What Jesus is saying in this verse is that if we are going to go anywhere in the spiritual life it is not based on confessing our sins—we have to do that to be restored to fellowship, but that is just putting us back into a position where we can grow—but growth comes by keeping His words, His commandments. It is not optional. These are not suggestions, they are mandates. Spiritual growth doesn’t come because we have confessed our sins, spiritual growth comes because we have confessed our sins, stayed in fellowship, and advance through obedience to God’s Word. It is obedience, then, that is the basis for God’s loving us, coming to us, and making His abode with us. This is the whole process of sanctification and spiritual growth.

John 14:24 ^NASB “He who does not love Me does not keep My words; and the word which you hear is not Mine, but the Father’s who sent Me.” This is the believer who is choosing to live in carnality. They don’t learn any doctrine so they can’t be obedient. You can only obey and apply what you know. So they go out and are still thinking according to worldly concepts. The point of the second part of this verse is that keeping Jesus’ commandments is keeping God’s commandments. Our response to the Bible is the same as our response to Jesus, and that is our response to God. So now we really have to sit back and ask what we really think of Bible study, because Bible study is the only way that we can get to know Jesus or the Father. This is why for 2000 years there has been no physical, empirical experiences with Jesus. It is because God is teaching Christians in the church age to live at a higher plain of relationship where the focus is not what we see but where the focus is what we know by means of faith in the Scriptures. This is why this is the crowning dispensation in all of human history and why church age believers are the pinnacle of believers in all of history. And every church age believer has the same equipment and we can all achieve the same level of spiritual maturity. The issue is our volition, what we decide to do with what God has given us.

A theme that has run throughout the Gospel of John is the idea that there is a category of believers who are saved but they exercise negative volition. They have a saving faith, they have believed in Christ as saviour, but they don’t have a faith that produces spiritual growth and spiritual maturity. John 6:66 ^NASB “As a result of this many of His disciples withdrew and were not walking with Him anymore.” John 8:31 ^NASB “So Jesus was saying to those Jews who had believed Him, ‘If you continue in My word, {then} you are truly disciples of Mine’.” John 12:42 ^NASB “Nevertheless many even of the rulers believed in Him, but because of the Pharisees they were not confessing {Him,} [admitting to knowledge of Him] for fear that they would be put out of the synagogue.” So what we are seeing is that Jesus is really uncomfortable with that kind of faith. It is a faith that doesn’t produce growth or fellowship or relationship with God.

John 14:25 ^NASB “These things I have spoken to you while abiding with you.” What are the “these things”? Bible doctrine: doctrinal principles that have been taught again and again by Jesus to His disciples during the time of the incarnation.

John 14:26 ^NASB “But the Helper, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in My name, He will teach you all things, and bring to your remembrance all that I said to you.” This is future tense. This indicates that something is going to happen in the future that is vastly different from how God has been operating in the past with believers; they have not had the Holy Spirit. “He will teach you all things, and bring to your remembrance all that I said to you” is speaking specifically to the disciples. This is the principle for how the canon of Scripture was revealed and given. Cf. John 12:16 ^NASB “These things His disciples did not understand at the first; but when Jesus was glorified, then they remembered that these things were written of Him, and that they had done these things to Him.” What we see is that we possess as believers in the Lord Jesus Christ in the church an ability to learn doctrine that no other believer in all of human history had. That means that the everyday, ordinary believer in the church age has more and is far superior to and can understand vast amounts of doctrine that the Old Testament believer never had a clue to. This is because of what God gave each one of us at the moment of salvation.

John 14:27 ^NASB “Peace I leave with you; My peace I give to you; not as the world gives do I give to you. Do not let your heart be troubled, nor let it be fearful.” Notice how this goes right back to what He said in 14:1, “Let not your heart be troubled; believe in God, believe also in Me.” What is this theme that we have seen running through these questions? Belief in God is the same as belief in Jesus Christ. God is immutable and His Word is immutable, and the only way we can have true peace and stability in this life no matter what is going on is to have a focus on the Word of God and the person of Jesus Christ.

John 14:28 ^NASB “You heard that I said to you, ‘I go away, and I will come to you.’ If you loved Me, you would have rejoiced because I go to the Father, for the Father is greater than I. [29] Now I have told you before it happens, so that when it happens, you may believe. [30] I will not speak much more with you, for the ruler of the world is coming, and he has nothing in Me.” In a few hours Satan is going to come indwelling Judas Iscariot as he comes with the Roman soldiers and temple police to arrest Jesus. [31] “but so that the world may know that I love the Father, I do exactly as the Father commanded Me. Get up, let us go from here.” He is saying that in order to evidence the world of my relationship with the Father and I am completely submissive and subordinate to His authority, I am going to go through this and go to the cross and die for the sins of the world, despite the fact that it is going to cause me enormous suffering and pain because I, perfect, impeccable humanity, will be tainted by the sin of every human being.

The point in all of this is that as a believer in the Lord Jesus Christ we can know Jesus only through the Word of God, and the only way we can know His Word is to be in Bible class.