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The first category of the Spirit’s work is to convict the world in the preaching of the gospel and to translate people out of Adam into Christ. To convict people is the work of the Spirit in winning, quickening, and regenerating sinners. But the work of the Spirit involves much more than this. The second category of the Spirit’s work is to glorify the Son by revealing Him with the fullness of the Father to the believers (John 16:12-15). We may say that the first category of the Spirit’s work is to bring people in, and that the second category is to edify the believers and build them up by revealing the Son with the fullness of the Father to them. This is the building work of the Holy Spirit. The first category of the Spirit’s work is to convince sinners to repent, believe, and be regenerated. The second category is the Holy Spirit’s dwelling in the regenerated believers to reveal Christ, to glorify Christ, and to make Christ real in the believers.
The Spirit of reality is the full realization of the Son. After the Spirit has brought us to salvation, He will become in us the very reality of the Son Himself. Whatever the Son is, has, and has accomplished, obtained, and attained will all be fully wrought into us through the Spirit. The Spirit eventually becomes the realization of the Son. He is the reality of all that the Son is and has.
Verse 13 says, “But when He, the Spirit of reality, comes, He will guide you into all the reality.” The Spirit of reality does not guide the believers into the doctrine concerning Christ but into all the reality of Christ. This reality is nothing less than Christ Himself. Thus, the Spirit of reality will bring us into all the reality of Christ.
In verse 15 the Lord said, “All that the Father has is Mine.” All that the Father is and has is the Son’s. The Son is the embodiment of the Father. All that the Father is and has is embodied in Him (Col. 2:9). All that the Father is, all the fullness of the Godhead, dwells in Christ. Therefore, the Father’s fullness is the Son’s fullness, and the Father’s life and nature are also the Son’s life and nature.
In verse 14, speaking of the Spirit of reality, the Lord said, “He shall glorify Me, for He shall receive of Mine and shall disclose it to you.” All that the Father is and has is the Son’s and all that the Son is and has obtained has been received by the Spirit. All the fullness of the Godhead dwells in Christ, and the Spirit receives this from Christ.
In verses 14 and 15 the Lord said that the Spirit of reality “shall receive of Mine and shall disclose it to you.” All that the Son is and has is revealed as reality to the believers through the Spirit. This is to glorify the Son with the Father. The Spirit discloses the Son with the Father to the believers. He makes all that Christ is and has real to us.
Let us now consider some examples of how the Spirit makes God in Christ real to us. The Bible says that God is light (1 John 1:5). The Bible also says that Christ is light (John 8:12). This means that the very light, which is God Himself, is the Son. But how can this light be realized? How can it be real to us? It is realized through the Spirit. When the Spirit moves within us, the light is shining. The light is both the Father and the Son. The Father is the source and the essence of light, and the Son is the embodiment and expression of this light. We realize this light in actuality by the Spirit. When the Spirit moves within us, He is the reality of light.
The same is true with the matter of life. God is life. The Son also is life. God the Father is the source and the essence of life, and the Son is the embodiment and expression of this life. How can this life be ours? By the Spirit. Romans 8:2 says that the Spirit is the Spirit of life. When the Spirit moves within us, He is not only the shining and enlightening light but also the very life which enlivens, nourishes, and strengthens us.
The Spirit is the reality of all that the Father and the Son are. Without the Spirit there is the essence of what the Father and Son are, but there is no realization. Take the example of electricity. Although we may have electricity, it still needs to be applied for a specific purpose. That application of electricity is the realization of the electricity. Likewise, the Spirit is the application of all that the Father and the Son are. Without the Spirit as the realization and application, everything may be real, but it is not available or applicable. If we would apply all that God and Christ are, we need the Spirit. We must praise the Lord that today He is not only the Father and the Son but also the Spirit. He is not only the source and the course but also the application. The Spirit reaches us, entering into us and applying all that we need of the Father and the Son. This is wonderful.
The church life is absolutely dependent upon the Spirit. Mere doctrines concerning the Father and the Son are inadequate. We need a living application of the Father in the Son by means of the Spirit. The Spirit glorifies the Son by revealing Him with all the fullness of the Father. Let us take the example of humility. No one is born humble. People wrongly say that children are humble, but every little child is proud. We are proud by birth and by nature. Moreover, we are proud in our living. What is humility? Humility is Christ. Christ is the reality of every human virtue and every divine attribute. All the human virtues and all the divine attributes are simply Christ Himself. In a good and positive sense, Christ is everything. He is humility, love, patience, and submission. Outside of Him nothing, including us, is good. Every virtue and every attribute is Christ. How does the Spirit glorify Christ? He glorifies Christ by revealing Him item by item. For instance, in all that Christ is, there is an item called humility. One day the Spirit reveals Christ to you as your humility. This is not a doctrine of humility; it is the living person of Christ revealed to you as humility. Spontaneously, a living humility will come out of you. That is the glorification of Christ. The Spirit glorifies Christ, the Son of God, in this way. He does not do it by teaching you about Christ as humility, but by directly revealing Christ as humility to you. This humility then comes out of your very being, and this coming out of humility is the glorification of the Son.
Eventually, every characteristic of Christ will be expressed in the church life. There will be no Jewish, Greek, American, British, Japanese, Chinese, Filipino, or any other kind of expression. There will be only the expression of Christ. This is what it means to say that the Spirit glorifies the Son by revealing Him in the fullness of the Father to the believers. We all need to have much experience of this. This will enrich, strengthen, and uplift the church life. If the church life has all of these actualities, it will surely grow.
The church life is a mingling of divinity with humanity. As the Spirit glorifies the Son with the Father, the Triune God is wrought into and mingled with the believers. This matter of the mingling of divinity with humanity has been very much neglected by Christians today. The one matter that is the most central has been neglected by nearly all Christians. Christians care mostly for doctrine. But in John 16, as in 1:14 and 17, the word truth in Greek means “reality,” not doctrine. To take the word truth in John to mean doctrine will cause great damage. In the Greek language it simply means reality or truthfulness. When the Spirit of reality comes, He will guide us into the full reality of Christ and mingle us with the Triune God. The more the Son is revealed to us with the fullness of the Father, the more experience we shall have of the Son. Then there will be more mingling of divinity with humanity in the church life. The church life is a daily mingling of divinity with humanity.
We have seen that the work of the Spirit in John 16 is in three categories: to convict the world, to glorify the Son by revealing Him with the fullness of the Father to the believers, and to disclose what is to come. John’s writings are also of three categories — the Gospel, the Epistles, and the Revelation. The three categories of John’s writings correspond to the threefold work of the Spirit. His Gospel is mainly to convict the world, his Epistles are mainly to reveal the Son with the fullness of the Father, and Revelation is the book unveiling the things that shall occur in the future. In verse 13 the Lord said of the Spirit that “He will disclose to you what is to come.” The Spirit will disclose the things to come, which are mainly revealed in Revelation (Rev. 1:1, 19). In the book of Revelation, four main things are revealed: the church’s progress (chs. 1—3); the world’s destiny (chs. 4—16); Satan’s ultimate consummation — the great Babylon (chs. 17—20); and God’s ultimate consummation — the New Jerusalem (chs. 21—22). The book of Revelation discloses all of these things to us.
In verses 16 through 24 we see a point which is rather difficult to understand: the Son was to be born in resurrection as a newborn child. The Lord had told His disciples that He would be killed and that this would make the world happy but the disciples sorrowful (v. 20). Then the Lord told them that a woman who is about to bring forth a child has sorrow at the time of birth, but when she brings forth the child, she no longer remembers the affliction because of the joy that a man has been born into the world (v. 21). After the child has been delivered, the woman will be happy because a man is born. Who is this woman? The woman is the whole group of disciples. Who is the child, the son? The child is Christ. What is the birth? It is resurrection.
At the time the Lord spoke this to the disciples, He was one with them, like a child conceived within its mother, waiting to be delivered in birth that He might be a newborn child. In this sense, His disciples were the delivering woman in travail. In those three days, the disciples did suffer the travail of the birth of Christ in resurrection to be born as the Son of God. After the Lord’s resurrection, this “woman” had a newborn child and she rejoiced (20:20).
The man born into the world is the Son (v. 21). The Son was to be born in resurrection (Acts 13:33) as the Son of God (Heb. 1:5; Rom. 1:4). It was by resurrection that the Lord was born as the Son of God. The Lord was born as the Son of Man in the manger, but He was born as the Son of God in resurrection. Acts 13:33 proves this: “God has fully fulfilled this promise...in raising up Jesus, as it is also written in the second psalm, You are My Son; today I have begotten You.” On what day was Christ begotten as the Son of God? On the day of resurrection. His resurrection was a birth.
But was not the Lord the Son of God before His resurrection? Yes. Why then did He have to be born as the Son of God in resurrection? What does Romans 1:4 mean when it says that He “was designated the Son of God in power according to the Spirit of holiness out of the resurrection of the dead”? Psalm 2:7, which is quoted in both Acts 13:33 and Hebrews 1:5, prophesied that Christ would be begotten as the Son of God in resurrection. How can we explain this? Christ was the Son of God incarnated to be a man. Strictly speaking, His human part was not the Son of God, but within His humanity there was the Son of God. Before His death and resurrection He was the Son of God in humanity, but His human part was not the Son of God. Therefore, He had to pass through death and resurrection in order to bring His human part into sonship. His divine part, which was the Son of God, did not need to be born as the Son of God, but His human part needed to be born and designated as the Son of God. Before the Lord’s death and resurrection He was the Son of God; yet whenever people saw Him, they could still ask, “Who is this man? Is he the Son of God?” Since He was the Son of God, why did people still have questions about Him? Because of His human part. His humanity did not appear to be the Son of God. But through His death and resurrection His human part was processed into sonship. Now, after His resurrection, no one would have any questions about His being the Son of God. Everyone would say, “This is the Son of God!” This is the reason He needed to be born in His resurrection and designated as the Son of God. In this sense, He was a child born in resurrection. Before the resurrection of the Lord the whole universe had never seen such a person. But after His resurrection He was the wonderful child with the divine life and the human nature, with both divinity glorified and humanity “sonized.” The mother must have been very happy at the birth of such a wonderful child.
As we have seen, the mother, the woman, in verse 21 refers to the disciples. After being born as a child in resurrection, Christ came to His believers in the evening of the day of His resurrection, and the disciples rejoiced at His presence (20:20). As a mother is happy when she sees her newborn child, so the disciples were glad when they saw the Lord on the day of resurrection. In verse 16 the Lord had said to them, “A little while and you shall behold Me no longer, and again a little while and you shall see Me.” The Lord would die and be buried, and the disciples would not see Him for “a little while.” But after “a little while” longer they would see Him because He would be resurrected. The world cannot see the Lord, because the world cannot see the resurrected Lord. Only the disciples can see the resurrected Lord, the wonderful One. John 20:20 is the fulfillment of the Lord’s prediction in 16:22. The Lord predicted that the disciples would be happy and joyful, and 20:20 shows that the disciples indeed were glad when they saw Him on the day of resurrection.
In verses 23 and 24 the Lord said, “And in that day you shall ask Me nothing. Truly, truly, I say to you, if you shall ask anything of the Father, He will give it to you in My name. Until now you have asked nothing in My name; ask, and you shall receive, that your joy may be made full.” Here we see the believers being one with the Son and praying in His name. Through resurrection He was born as the Son of God and became the life-giving Spirit (1 Cor. 15:45). Now we, the believers, in the Spirit, by the Spirit, and with the Spirit, can be one with Him. To pray “in My name” simply means to pray “in Me.” To be in His name means to be one with Him. When we are one with the Lord, we do not pray by ourselves but by the Lord. The prayer that we utter in oneness with the Lord will certainly be answered. When we pray, He also prays in our praying. However, if I am not one with you, yet I do things in your name, that is not right. But if I am truly one with you, I can do and claim things in your name. Likewise, the believers can do and claim things in the name of the Son because they are one with Him.
This is confirmed by 20:22-23. “And when He had said this, He breathed into them and said to them, Receive the Holy Spirit. Whosesoever sins you forgive, their sins have been forgiven them; and whosesoever sins you retain, they have been retained.” This means that since we have received the Holy Spirit and are one with the Lord and the Lord is one with us, whosesoever sins we release, the Lord will also release, and whosesoever sins we retain, the Lord will also retain. What we loose shall be loosed by the Lord, and what we bind shall be bound by the Lord, because in the Spirit we are one with Him. But be sure that when you say, “I bind,” you are in the Spirit, for if you are not in the Spirit, it will not work. We must be in the Spirit before we can be one with the Lord. Then what we bind, the Lord will bind; what we loose, the Lord will loose; and what we ask, the Father will give us in the Lord’s name.
At that time, the Lord made clear to the disciples that He had come out from God the Father, and they believed it (vv. 27-28, 30). God the Father was His source, and He came out from that source into the world to declare and reveal God to man so that man might know the Father and get into that source.
After He finished His commission on earth, the Lord went back through death and resurrection to the Father, the source from which He came, that He might prepare the way and the standing for man to be brought into the Father (v. 28).
At that time the Lord promised to declare the Father to His disciples (v. 25). This was fulfilled by His coming back to His disciples after His resurrection, at which time He declared the Father’s name to His brothers (Heb. 2:12), making them know the Father’s life and nature. In resurrection as the firstborn Son of God, the Lord makes us, the many sons of God, His brothers, know the Father in the way of life, in the way of partaking of His divine nature (2 Pet. 1:3-4).
Through His resurrection the Lord has made the disciples one with Him. Since that time, they can pray in His name (v. 26). As they are identified with Him, He no longer prays for them but prays with them in their praying. They no longer pray indirectly to the Father through the Son; they pray directly to the Father in the Son because they are one with Him.
During the Son’s suffering, His disciples were scattered, leaving Him alone (v. 32). But He was not alone, because the Father was with Him. Even at the time of the Son’s suffering, the Father was with Him. His disciples left Him, but the Father did not.
We have peace in the Lord (v. 33). Although the Lord died and has been resurrected, we remain in the world where there is no peace. In this world we shall have only trouble. But the Lord Himself will be our peace, and we can have peace in Him. No matter how much this world troubles and persecutes us, the Lord has overcome the world. We do not need to worry; neither do we need to fear the world. Let the world persecute and trouble us. The Lord is our peace. He has overcome the world.
We need to review what is revealed in John 14 through 16. Chapter fourteen is on the mutual abode, chapter fifteen is on the organism, and chapter sixteen is a supplement to chapters fourteen and fifteen. In this supplementary chapter we have the work of the Spirit unto the mingling of divinity with humanity. This means that the work of the Spirit results in the mingling of divinity with humanity. We saw this mingling already in chapter fourteen where the mingling eventually became the mutual abode. This mutual abode is an organism, the Body of Christ, with Christ growing in the divine life to express the Father. This is the organism revealed in chapter fifteen. Chapter sixteen tells us how the mingling of divinity with humanity can take place. It happens through the work of the Holy Spirit. First, this work of the Spirit is to convict sinners that they may believe in Christ and be translated out of Adam into Christ. Second, it is to reveal Christ with the fullness of the Father to all of these translated believers that they might be edified, built up, with all the fullness of the Godhead in order to express the Triune God and to glorify the Son with the Father. Please remember these points: chapter fourteen is on the mutual abode; chapter fifteen, on the organism; and chapter sixteen, on the work of the Spirit to convict the world and to edify the saints with the fullness of the Godhead that the church may glorify the Son with the Father.
I need to add a brief word on the matter of the organism. Not one human society is an organism. They all are organizations. Only the proper and genuine church is an organism. There is no life in any of the social organizations, for there is nothing organic in them. The church, however, contains the divine life and is organic. In chapter fifteen we saw that the vine tree is the organism of the Triune God. The Triune God has wrought Himself into this organism and is now growing within it. The life, nature, substance, essence, and all the fullness of the Triune God have been wrought into the vine tree. Hence, the vine is not a lifeless organization; it is an organism which is full of life and which grows, functions, expresses the Father, fulfills His purpose, and accomplishes His economy. Praise the Lord that there is such a living organism in the universe! The Father is the source, substance, essence, nature, and life of this organism; the Son is the embodiment and expression of this organism; and the Spirit is the reality and the realization of this organism. The church today is the Body of this organism. The Son is the Head of the Body and the root of the tree which grows with the divine life and which expresses the divine riches to fulfill God’s eternal purpose. This is the organism which accomplishes the divine economy. Hallelujah for this divine mystery!
