SPIRITUAL REVELATION
‘He shall receive of Mine, and shall shew it unto you.’
There can be no doubt that the words used, ‘He shall take of Mine, and shall declare it unto you’ (R.V.), are selected with care.
I. Consider what the word translated ‘take’ really means.—It is repeated with emphasis in the very following verse, but in the present tense, so as to bring out the vivid reality of the relationship implied. This word necessarily suggests the notion of activity and even of effort on the part of the One Who thus acts. Properly speaking, you cannot ‘take’ a thing blindly or passively. Personal co-operation is implied. Besides, Jesus Christ is careful to represent the action of the Holy Spirit as continuous and not yet completed. ‘What things soever He shall hear, these shall He speak: and He shall declare unto you the things that are to come.’ It is plain, then, that we are invited to look on at the action of self-conscious Personality. Here is nothing otiose and inert. Here is nothing automatic and mechanical. An action essentially personal is unveiled to our reverent gaze. Also here is nothing selfish—one gives, the other takes. Self is perpetually being lost and found in this mutual and immediate exchange of perfect self-sacrifice. This is life at its highest and holiest, and it is noteworthy that such life is found in mutual aid, in sharing together, in fellowship. To picture life under such circumstances is to get a glimpse of something exhilarating, glorious, unfettered, self-revealing. If this is life as God lives it, then the Christian has nothing to be ashamed of, nothing to apologise for in his creed which teaches him such a moving truth. If this be the life of God, as revealed to us by Christianity, then life under such conditions is instinctively felt to be worthy, a picture of our highest ideal of what life is or might be. Here is fellowship of the highest conceivable kind, in which all things are in common, and in which joy and satisfaction arise not from clutching tenaciously the treasures of affection, thought, and will, but by sharing them.
II. What does God the Holy Spirit ‘take’ from God the Son?—Here our human experience can help us. What is the highest and best thing man can share with man? Not his money; not his goods and possessions; not his system of government. These things divide men as often as they unite them. No; ideas are the highest possession that one man can share with another. He has nothing higher to give to his fellow-man than what he knows, or thinks he knows, about the Truth. As he shares his ideas and they are accepted by his neighbour, a bond of union is knit between man and man, and nation and nation, which will defy all efforts to put them asunder. You see this when you observe how individuals or nations that have a common idea of liberty can understand one another and work to a common end in self-defence or in defence of the oppressed. No wonder Emerson said, ‘Give me a great idea and I will feed upon it.’ If we ask, therefore, what does God the Holy Spirit ‘take’ from God the Son, we may answer without misgiving that he ‘takes’ those great ideas which fill the heart and mind of Jesus, ideas of justice, equity, sympathy, self-sacrifice, brotherhood. Where these ideas are held in common, there union becomes possible and fellowship must be full of joy.
III. The relationship of God the Holy Ghost to us.—‘He shall take of Mine, and shall show it unto you.’ These words of Jesus Christ reveal not only the relationship between Him and the Holy Ghost, but they unveil the relationship between the Holy Ghost and ourselves. Three times over in three following verses this phrase, ‘He will declare it unto you,’ is solemnly repeated—‘He shall declare you the things to come,’ ‘He shall take of Mine, and declare it unto you, ‘All things whatsoever the Father hath are Mine, therefore I said that He [that is, the Spirit of Truth] taketh of Mine, and shall declare it unto you.’ Again we notice the same principle at work. God the Holy Ghost is bent on sharing with us all that He has. But it may be asked, How can you share ideas? Ideas can only be shared when they are declared in words and by deeds. Words are good, deeds are better. The Holy Spirit, therefore, by showing to us in the Gospels the human and historical life of Jesus has manifestly declared in word and in deed those great ideas of love, compassion, sacrifice, which we rightly connect with Jesus Christ. Such ideas, indeed, before the foundation of the world were in the Heart of the Eternal, but were not fully expressed to us in glowing word and glorious deed until Jesus of Nazareth, the Incarnate Son of God, revealed them to us here on earth. It is this life of Jesus which the Holy Spirit delights to show to all those who will study the Gospels. His very work is to make Christ better known and to take the great ideas illustrated by His life and declare them to us, here a little and there a little. The Acts of the Apostles and the Epistles of the New Testament teem with illustrations of the progress which men made under the guidance of the Holy Spirit in seeing deeper into the life of Christ.
—Rev. Samuel Bickersteth.