All the Truth

“When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth.”

One of the things the Lord has impressed on my heart repeatedly over the last decade or so is the importance of paying attention to pronouns in the word of God. The spirit of our present age is relentlessly individualistic and more than a little narcissistic. It turns other people’s responsibilities into my rights, passing observations into my personal promises, and conversations about other people into conversations about me.

That same spirit takes every pronoun in the Bible and makes it mine. No wonder Christians get confused when they read the scriptures. Much in the word of God concerns other people entirely.

All the Truth

Now, the famous verse from John 16 I’ve quoted above is most certainly a personal promise, not merely a passing observation about what is. No doubt about that. But my question is this: Who is the “you” of verse 13? Was the Lord speaking only to the disciples in the upper room who became his apostles, or can all believers legitimately claim it?

A quick scan of a few internet sites shows David Platt is convinced we can, and he’s very excited about it. John Rasicci thinks this relates to personal guidance. He says, “When the Holy Ghost guides us into all truth, it will not just be truth to take care of past facts, but it will be truth to help us with things in our future.” Sounds a bit mystical to me. Mission Venture Ministries agrees, only provided we are paying sufficient attention to that “still small voice” within us. Again, hmmm.

A Common Assumption

In fact, the assumption these Christians are making is exceedingly common, and I used to make it too. I’ve changed my mind about that, and here’s why:

1/ It’s Observably Untrue of Christians Generally

This first point is practical and, I think, irrefutable. If every genuine believer can claim the Lord’s promise literally, explaining the divisions of Christendom both today and historically becomes impossible. The Holy Spirit does not speak out of both sides of his mouth. He does not tell one thing to Believer X and the opposite to Believer Y. His teaching is consistent. Therefore one or possibly both believers have not been led into all the truth.

One of four possible conclusions follows: (1) “all the truth” did not really mean all the truth; (2) the Lord’s promise was abrogated; (3) getting any doctrine wrong proves your profession of faith is fake and the true Church is much, much smaller than we think; or (4) his promise was for his eleven disciples, not for you and me.

I for one prefer the final explanation. The reason should be obvious: the other three are much less appealing.

2/ In Context, ‘You’ is the Disciples

In context, “you” is not me; it’s the people closest to the Lord Jesus in the first century. This is not difficult to demonstrate, especially with online Bibles and word searches that highlight specific text. There are 46 instances of “you” in John 16 alone, starting in verse 1, where there are two: “I have said all things to you to keep you from falling away.” Did the Lord say these things to me? No, he said them around AD30 to eleven men in an upper room in Jerusalem. Verse 2: “They will put you out of the synagogues.” Is that me? Definitely not. I’ve never even been to a synagogue. We could continue.

In fact, the vast majority of the occurrences of “you” in the chapter are demonstrably relevant only to the people in that room. On what legitimate interpretive basis do you and I claim verse 13 is the exception?

3/ Other Promises in the Passage were Fulfilled in the Disciples

Can we point to the fulfillment of other promises in this passage? Sure. For example, later in the same verse, we read, “He [the Spirit] will declare to you the things that are to come.” The most obvious example is John, who received the entire book of Revelation, but at least one other disciple in that room had “things that are to come” revealed to him personally by the Spirit of God.

I can confidently assure you I have never had a spiritual experience in which the Holy Spirit revealed the future to me independently of the written word of God. I’m fairly confident you haven’t either. Even that is very much a second-hand revelation, though I’m exceedingly grateful for it. But at least two disciples had revelation about the future first-hand in the Spirit, and probably more.

A Better Explanation

Now, understand, I’m not in the least denying that the Spirit of God guides believers into the truth through the written word of God. Paul tells us that only through the Spirit are we able to grasp the meaning of the things the apostles wrote. The “natural person” cannot understand them. We discern them spiritually, meaning the Spirit of God is the one who reveals the truth to us. I’m exceedingly grateful for the Spirit’s work in my heart that enables me to comprehend some of the words of Christ. But only some. I’m still working on many, many portions of scripture and will be until the day I die. However, John 16:13 is not one of the verses of scripture from which I get my understanding about how the Spirit operates in me.

Moreover, even with the guidance of God himself, coming to grips with the meaning of the written word is far from an infallible process. The individual Christian has to filter what the Spirit is telling him about the word of God through his own false assumptions, previous bad teaching, limited familiarity with scripture in its totality, the deceptions of the devil, and the boundaries of his intellect. He will still learn a great deal. He will learn enough to please the Lord and do his will in his own circumstances. But he manifestly will not learn “all the truth” of which the Lord was speaking. None of us comes to that sort of comprehensive knowledge in this life, no matter how intelligent, careful, godly and long-lived.

Truth and Memory

If we compare verse 13 with John 14:24, the Lord earlier at that same Passover meal promised the disciples that the Holy Spirit “will teach you all things and bring to your remembrance all that I have said to you”. Again, this is not a promise that applies to you and me, but it was extremely relevant to the Eleven, who heard Jesus repeatedly on the same subjects and were constantly forgetting what he had told them. How many times did they all hear that he must suffer, die and rise from the dead after three days? Yet not one of them anticipated the resurrection. Human memory is faulty, limited, ever-shifting and, as I can assure you from personal experience, relentlessly on the decline. If we were dependent for our teaching about Christ on the natural human memories of the disciples, we would be in big trouble, especially considering the number of years that passed before most of them started writing down what happened.

Here’s what I believe the Lord was promising the disciples: that the Holy Spirit would remind them — collectively*, not individually — of every truth he wanted them to pass on to their fellow believers, and that he would guide them into an accurate understanding of it. Moreover, the Spirit would reveal new things to them through the prophetic word. By this means, the truths about which they agreed, that they taught in the churches and wrote down for them and us became the Spirit’s infallible message for the Church Age, the faith once for all delivered to the saints.

John 16:13 is a wonderful promise that gives me great confidence that I can trust the written word of God. With that in mind, the fact that the Spirit has yet to guide me personally into all the truth is, comparatively speaking, a minor inconvenience. That time will surely come.

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* Herod killed James the brother of John some three to ten years prior to the estimated date either Paul or another James wrote the first book of the New Testament canon. James missed not just the book of Revelation but all truth prophetically revealed in the latter half of the first century. He didn’t get any of it! So then, I believe the appointed task of the Holy Spirit was to guide the apostles collectively into all the truth, not individually.