I kind of like this "Visualization".
Posted on 03/15/2015 4:13:42 PM PDT by Talisker
John 16:7-15 Nevertheless I tell you the truth: It is expedient for you that I go away; for if I go not away, the Comforter will not come unto you; but if I go, I will send him unto you. And he, when he is come, will convict the world in respect of sin, and of righteousness, and of judgment: of sin, because they believe not on me; of righteousness, because I go to the Father, and ye behold me no more; of judgment, because the prince of this world hath been judged. I have yet many things to say unto you, but ye cannot bear them now. Howbeit when he, the Spirit of truth, is come, he shall guide you into all the truth: for he shall not speak from himself; but what things soever he shall hear, [these] shall he speak: and he shall declare unto you the things that are to come. He shall glorify me: for he shall take of mine, and shall declare [it] unto you. All things whatsoever the Father hath are mine: therefore said I, that he taketh of mine, and shall declare [it] unto you.
Most noticeably, Jesus didn't say "I" - He said "he," and he said it a number of times, indicating a different person than Himself. Taken at face value, this passage therefore seems to be describing a traditional sort of Messiah as is awaited by the Jews, a world leader and judge guided by God, who Jesus is here saying is not only not Jesus, but that Jesus has to leave so this person can come.
I am sincerely interested in hearing perspectives an interpretations on this passage. Therefore I ask that everyone acknowledge that there are differences of opinions and refrain from declarations of heresy towards others. Because if this passage is not taken at face value then I think it is very mysterious and worthy of discussion.
I believe Jesus is speaking about the Holy Spirit. He spoke separately of the Father too, but elsewhere says He and the Father are one. Three persons in one God. JMHO.
Before I offered my opinion on this, I checked the Koine Greek, and the word used for “Comforter” is “parakletos”. This is from two words “Para”, meaning “Beside” and is the root of many English words such as “Paramedic” and “Paralegal”. The second part of the word comes from the Greek word to “call”. So the “Comforter” is Someone Who is “Called beside you”, and the implication of the word is that He is called alongside to help. This has always meant to be the Holy Spirit, in nearly 2000 years of Christian Scholarship. Although The Father, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit are ONE, they also have separate “personalities”(if i may use that term). Jesus said “I and The Father are One” and “If you have seen Me, you have seen the Father”, yet He speaks to the Father in Prayer (John 17).
This tension in logic is too much for our finite minds to accept, yet, a similar tension exists when we speak of Jesus as Fully God and Fully Man in Hypo-Static Union. In our world nothing can be 200% or even 300% of anything!
That is where faith comes in. It is easy to believe logical stuff, but impossible to believe in the Impossible.
BUT...NOthing is impossible with God!
Peace to you, and Blessings in your quest! :-)
I point you to John 14:26 (and John 15:26).
One way to explain the Trinity is a boiled egg, the yellow middle, the yoke, and the shell.
Another way of explaining it is the Triple Crown.
The Kentucky Derby, The Preakness, and the Belmont Stakes.
The Holy Spirit is the spirit of God that was on the face of the earth in the beginning.
The Holy Spirit is God’s spirit was in Jesus Christ’s body, the Holy Spirit is beside us and dwells in us.
Jesus Christ was and is God in human flesh.
Jesus said those whom seen me has seen the father.
The Holy Spirit is the Spirit of Grace.
In Isaiah the Messiah is named Wonderful Counselor, Almighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace. So the three are alike. However, pentecost explicitly demonstrates the coming of the Holy Spirit. The Old Testament also teaches about the Holy Spirit.
One thing that jumped out at me was that it is the Holy Spirit that convicts of sin and during the Great Tribulation He no longer restrains evil. Those who are convicted of their sin but still not repentant will no longer be convicted. We see evidence of that more and more every day (http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-bloggers/3268239/posts).
The Holy Spirit does not leave believers for He gives us the words to say when we are before our prosecutors. Evil will become more evil and the Holy Spirit will become more evident because the faithful will be put to the test.
The common "street Greek" of the First Century marketplace may include no better defining word describing the Holy Spirit in this context, the total of Jesus' teaching regarding Him, the doctrine about whom it seems wise to study very closely, including doctrines of the Trinity, before reaching for a novel tradition (and actuality, for those of us who can testify to His reality) so well marked out in the context of the propositional revelation set forth in the New Testament at-large.
The Father, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit are ONE, they also have separate “personalities”(if i may use that term). Jesus said “I and The Father are One” and “If you have seen Me, you have seen the Father”, yet He speaks to the Father in Prayer (John 17).
This tension in logic is too much for our finite minds to accept, yet, a similar tension exists when we speak of Jesus as Fully God and Fully Man in Hypo-Static Union. In our world nothing can be 200% or even 300% of anything!
That is where faith comes in. It is easy to believe logical stuff, but impossible to believe in the Impossible.
BUT...NOthing is impossible with God!
Amen.
In John 17:22-23, Jesus spoke the following prayer in front of His disciples, "[Father] the glory which You have given Me I have given to them, that they may be one, just as We are one; I in them and You in Me, that they may be perfected in unity."
When I first read that, it blew me away. I didn't understand it at first. Originally it seemed incredibly confusing to me. I couldn't grasp what He was saying. Jesus appears to be giving God's glory to us! Huh? How can that be? Shouldn't glory always flow in the other direction? From us to Him? And doesn't He have all the glory already anyway?
It took me a long time to finally figure out what was going on when He spoke those words in prayer. And it is this: Glory is the vehicle that conveys and reveals the true presence of the Lord - His essence, His life, His identity. In other words, it is intimacy, with Him.
Glorification is a process, a transfer mechanism, and it flows both ways. That is what Jesus meant when He said that we ourselves receive glory when we are 'perfected in unity', and 'we are one'. Glory flows from us to Him and from Him to us. But the latter happens only when our minds are unified with His own via the Holy Spirit. And when that happens, we become united in intimacy with Christ just as Christ is united with the Father, as we become perfected in that unity.
It is the method by which He reveals Himself to us. And we in in turn reflect it back upon Him: through prayer, through public worship, through acts and deeds. All for His glory. That's the key. If we approach Christ with a pure servant's heart, the glory that we bestow on Him will be given back to us as we become united with Him, just as He is united with the Father. Isn't that awesome?
Amen.
I remember to this day, the moment I read John 17 for the first time, over 30 years ago.
I was so blown away by that chapter that I set a good part of it to music so I could memorize it more easily.
The three elements of an egg are not of the same substance, contrasted to the Godhead. I think this model would be misleading.
A better comparison would be the substance dihydrogen oxide (water) which exists in three states--solid, liquid, and gas. These three states can coexist under certain conditions, but in the physical world those conditions define an invariant point, which fixes one point on the Celsius scheme of measuring temperature.
The other point on that system is the highest point at one atmosphere of pressure that two of the phases, liquid (water) and gas (steam), can coexist. This fixed point of heat defines the upper point, as well as the range of a scale which may be registered with a device showing linear response to increase in heat content. This range can be marked off in units. Dividing this linear scale into segments of one hundred, each called a degree, give us the Centigrade temperature scale.
Take note that conditions exist in which any two of the manifestations may coexist, but the third mnifestation cannot be physically present. There is also a wide tange of conditions in which only one of the manifestations is permitted to be present, and the other two cannot.
The point here is that the compound is homogeneous down to the individual molecule of which the material exists, ad has three distinct phases each of which has its own manifestation. Their coexistence is posited by J. Willard Gibbs' Phase Rule (click here) for elements and their compounds back in the 1800s.
Of course, this is a behavior exhibited by all elements, and many chemical compounds of the element, having visible properties that remind us of the Three Personalities of the Trinity, consisting of one substance.
This comparison is worth pondering on.
"And I will pray the Father, and he shall give you another Comforter, that he may abide with you for ever;" (Jn. 14:16 AV).
"But the Comforter, which is the Holy Ghost, whom the Father will send in my name, he shall teach you all things, and bring all things to your remembrance, whatsoever I have said unto you" (Jn. 14:26 AV).
"But when the Comforter is come, whom I will send unto you from the Father, even the Spirit of truth, which proceedeth from the Father, he shall testify of me:" (Joh_15:26 AV).
The last two unmistakably identify the Comforter as being the Holy Spirit. In the first one 14:16, "He shall give you another Comforter" in the Greek is:
αλλον παρακλητον δωσει υμιν
Here "another" (αλλον allon)) is more precisely "another of the same kind"; it is not "another" (ετερον heteron), which means "another of a different kind." The idea here is that if this comforter is God in substance and quality, that would be Another, but still God in essence. If it is not of the Godhead, not of the same substance and not qualitatively God, it must be a being of a different kind, and hence not God.
Jesus was referring obliquely to Himself also as a Comforter, a Paraklete, and the Paraklete The Father will send in His place is One like Himself.
I believe the theory you propose is that of ετερον = another gospel (See Gal. 1:6 in context), a gospel of a different kind, deserving to be pronounced αναθεμα = anathema, and roundly condemned, cursed.
And I do not feel (whatever you think the terms of participating ought to be) that I am doing wrong by doing so, according to God's preemptive instructions regarding giving this hypothesis any further grounds for discussion.
Regretfully --
And I do not feel (whatever you think the terms of participating ought to be) that I am doing wrong by doing so, according to God's preemptive instructions regarding giving this hypothesis any further grounds for discussion.
Regretfully --
First of all, thank you for not only the associated and related Biblical verses in this matter, but also the analysis of the Greek. That is very much the kind of information I was looking for here.
But secondly, you just couldn't help yourself, could you? You had to get in the heretical anathema damnation thing, didn't you? What IS it with you people?! Is it like a twitch or something? Like a compulsive need? Are you like Dr. Strangelove's hand, rising on its own to choke him while you pound it back with your other fist? "Yes, you see, Jesus told us to love one another here, and here, in this way, and if you don't you're DAMNED, DAMNED, DAMNED... oh, er, sorry, now where was I..."
For Your Information, I "proposed" no "theory" or "hypothesis." Thank God for that, eh, or I would have damned my soul in asking a question about a Bible passage. Or maybe I'm damned anyway - only people who parse the Bible know for sure. You think you have the "love one another" thing down and you're safe from Gods wrath and then - BAM - someone dressed in black with a Bible concordance rides up out of the bog and points to a few passages you missed and, with divine love but regretfully - BOOM: anathema->heresy->damnation sends your soul straight to perdition. What a nightmare this love thing is that Jesus brought!
So thanks for the help in understanding this Bible passage. A trillion, trillion, trillion years from now while I'm still screaming in agony in hell, I'll at least know the difference between a couple of similar Greek words, even though I'll have paid a heavy price for asking about them. But hey, it was my own fault, right?
If you so choose.
Re the words from your first comment:
Taken at face value, this passage therefore seems to be describing a traditional sort of Messiah as is awaited by the Jews, a world leader and judge guided by God, who Jesus is here saying is not only not Jesus, but that Jesus has to leave so this person can come.
You could have fooled me. I took this as a conclusion or interpretation of your Scripture passage. If not, what was this proposition? Sounds like a theory to me --
Not at all. You need to calm down, and separate the value of your expressed conclusion (which I merely repeated back to you) from your value as a person (which I spoke nothing about).
Taking your words at face value, you did produce a theory based on the misreading of a brief passage, attributing a prophecy to Jesus that is not even consistent with the context of the rest of His discourse. Then you expected the readership of your post to give you a free pass and not bring you up short on the illogicality of your proposition.
Your reaction to a negative response has been a violent outburst, sort of like that of a child being prevented by a loving parent from grabbing and eating a chocolate chip cookie right before dinner, and attributing an evil motive to the parent: "You don't love me! I hate you! and I'm going to go eat worms!"
Come on now. Nobody is comdemning you. Your proposition is simply not thought out and too hasty, which reflects that not enough effort has been invested in a careful study on its implications. And if my response to you seems rude and unchristian, lets look at the little vignette of Jesus correcting His disciple who mistakenly thought he was more mature in judgment than his Master Teacher, and that all in front of the other disciples:
"From that time forth began Jesus to shew unto his disciples, how that he must go unto Jerusalem, and suffer many things of the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed, and be raised again the third day.
Then Peter took him, and began to rebuke him, saying, Be it far from thee, Lord: this shall not be unto thee.
But he turned, and said unto Peter, Get thee behind me, Satan: thou art an offence unto me: for thou savourest not the things that be of God, but those that be of men" (Mt. 16:21-23 AV).
How much clearer can it be that it is not wrong, but indeed loving, to quickly dispatch erroneous and non-sensical thinking not worthy of further consideration?
I most certainly don't hate you, and you have "read my mind" and attributed wrong motive and wrong behavior to me. You might want to take that back, eh?
Here's your opportunity to come to grips with this pattern of behavior and apologize.
We humans are another “type” of trinity: there’s only one of me, but I have a body, soul and spirit.
Apparently my response to you was removed by the moderator. No reason given, except that my objection to your comparing yourself to Jesus Christ and me to Satan somehow violated the religion forum, especially when I observed the insanity of your comparison and the abusiveness if your reply.
Or maybe it was because I rejected your denial of damning me to hell - I guess you can damn someone to hell, but if that is actually pointed out by your victim it is a TOS violation.
I asked a simple, honest question, you answered it and then got abusive in the extreme. You know what my experience with that kind of behavior tells me? That your answer isn’t a am answer. That your Greek isn’t appropriate Greek. And that my question did, in fact, threaten a power structure that wants people who question it, even using a straightforward Bible verse, punished.
You ate merely the hired help to do that, an enforcer shill. But you have answered my original question - you’ve shown itss vulnerable sore spot that people are willing to hurt others over. That’s the REAL answer to my question.
I know that when you say I’m going to hell it doesn’t mean you’re saying I’m going to hell, and when you claim the authority of Jesus Christ it doesn’t mean you’re claiming the authority of Jesus Christ, and when you refer to me as Satan, roundly condemned and cursed it doesn’t mean I’m Satan, roundly condemned and cursed, and for anyone to think otherwise is to be childish and have their response erased by the Admin mod because your deliberate, deep insults are not offensive, while my exposing your deliberate, deep insults are offensive. Okay, I get the rules for you, and the rules for me, are different.
But lets talk logic for a moment.
Your Greek analysis is over the word “another.” As in, “another Comforter.” And your claim is that because the type of Greek word for another implies “of the same kind” instead “of a different kind,” then that Comforter must be of the same kind as Jesus. Which sounds fine, and for which I thanked you.
But then, after sharing this rather esoteric knowledge, you felt it necessary to launch into a bizarre accusation of my very question comprising - of all things - an alternate gospel, for which I would be cursed and over which there cannot be any further discussion. Literally as if you were some medeival Pope passign judgement in a heresy trial.
Very strange. Because your answer didn’t require such a vicious attack. Basically, you seemed to have answered my question. So why then spew hatred? Literally wrapping yourself with the cloak of defending the faith and invoking Jesus for yourself?
Well, one reason to do such a thing is to prevent your answer from being investigated further.
So I investigated it further. And I found you left something out. Surprise, surprise. maybe this is why you didn’t want your answer examined? Maybe this is why you made personal attacks - because while invoking Greek is impressive, it’s also irrelevent to my actual question? Let’s see, shall we?
In my actual question , I included this part, John 16:13-14: “But when he, the Spirit of truth, comes, he will guide you into all the 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. He will glorify me because it is from me that he will receive what he will make known to you.”
Now, if this Comforter is the same as Jesus, if it is literally the Holy Spirit, then why does Jesus say of him that “he will speak only what he hears” and “it is from me that he will receive what he will make known to you”?
Because you know what that sounds like? That sounds like someone who is RECEIVING information FROM the Holy Spirit. After all, the Holy Spirit does not need to receive information from Jesus - right? And Jesus doesn’t need to receive information from the Holy Spirit - right? And neither of them needs to recevie information from God, either. Because ALL THREE ARE THE SAME.
I mean, isn’t that your point? Isn’t that the triumphant conclusion you use to make personal insults to me, damn my soul, and in general indulge in your incredible arrogance and contempt? Isn’t that it?
Then tell me, WHY does Jesus call the Comforter a “he” that “will not speak on his own; he will speak only what he hears”? WHY does Jesus say “he will receive what he will make known”? FROM WHOM will he receive this information, if he is already the Holy Spirit?
Is that a logical question? Does asking it make me anathema, a heretic, and evidence of trying to create an alternate gospel? See, to me, it does none of those things. Rather, what it does is expose you of trying to avoid this essence of my question through misdirection and inflammatory insults, not to mention the clearly heretical invocation of Jesus’ own authority. That’s why in my mod-deleted post I called you a fraud, and insane. Because by definition you are defrauding the question and claiming yourself to be Christ.
Finally, since you’re such an expert on the Bible, you should know tha there is this people called the “Jews.” And the Jews do not believe Christ was the Messiah for a number of reasons having to do with the definition of “Messiah” - those definitions being in Hebrew and Greek. So this subject is hardly Earth-shattering. And therefore, when I found this passage that seemed to so openly declare a Comforter as a person, a man, “he,” from Jesus’ own words, I was curious about it.
So in defiance of the Christian Church authorities, of their rage, of damnation and hellfire, and mocking and derision and arrogance and even flat-out misdirection and lies - ALL of which your tripped over yourself commiting, up to and including referring to me as Satanic and yourself as Jesus Christ, I did it. Yes, I actually did it -
I asked what it meant.
So damn me if you want, scorn me if you desire. But the fact of the matter is you’ve not only not resolved this question, you’ve shown it makes Christian defenders of the faith extremely nervous, and that they are quire willing to unleash filth to try to stop it from being asked.
And as I said, that, in itself, is perhaps the deepest of all answers you could have possibly given.
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