©Clay Eldridge
Chapter 14:15-17 (ESV) - If you love me, you will keep my commandments. And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Helper, to be with you forever, even the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees him nor knows him. You know him, for he dwells with you and will be in you.
Question to consider: What is Jesus saying about Himself in equating love with obedience to His commandments?
Today’s passage is a short but important one, for it deals with the nature of God and our relationship with Him. People will argue that the Trinity doesn’t exist because the word trinity doesn’t appear in scripture. The word trinity or “tri-unity” is used to describe a concept that is presented throughout scripture. The idea is that we worship one God who has revealed Himself in three distinct persons.
Jesus has already said to His disciples that in seeing Him, they have seen the Father, and though He is separate from the Father, He is in the Father and the Father is in Him. For those who believe that Jesus did not consider Himself to be God (of the same nature or substance as the Father), they need to deal with Jesus’ statement, “Believe in God; believe also in me,” from yesterday’s passage as well as the very first sentence of today’s passage.
God revealed Himself through the following declaration by Moses, “Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might. And these words that I command you today shall be on your heart. You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise. You shall bind them as a sign on your hand, and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes. You shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates.” (Deuteronomy 6:4-9)
Simply put, God receives love from us in our desire to worship and obey Him only and to teach others to do the same. So when Jesus said, “Believe also in me and obey my commands,” He was either blaspheming God by calling the disciples to violate the first and most important of the ten commandments or revealing Himself to be God. The apostle John believed the latter which is why he focused on specific miraculous signs done by Jesus that only God could do and made such a great emphasis on the divine Logos coming in the flesh and physically rising from the dead.
In addition to revealing God as Father and Son, Jesus spoke directly in today’s passage about the “Spirit of Truth”, whom we also call the Holy Spirit. Jesus had been the disciples’ helper— their advocate and counselor, and so He was equating this new helper as someone who would continue to be with the disciples even after Jesus went to be with the Father. Thus, the Spirit of God was presented as a separate “person” who would be sent separately from the Father and the Son and could be known in addition to knowing the Father and the Son.
If we look at these three persons as separate “gods”, then this revelation of Jesus would violate the Deuteronomy passage I quoted above— the Lord our God, the Lord is one, and He wouldn’t have risen from the dead. So we are left with a God who is one in substance and nature and revealed in three distinct persons. It is okay to admit this is a mystery we cannot fully comprehend.
Dear heavenly Father, we praise You for being beyond our understanding and yet intimately close to us. We thank You for sending Your Spirit who dwells within us and makes our feeble requests presentable to You, and we look forward to the day when we can worship You without sin and without end. Amen.