The Gospel of John

The Avenging Spirit

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Conversations, Panels and Sermons

Lesson: 52- 70

Genre:

Track: 052

Dictation Name: RR197AC54

Location/Venue:

Year:

Let us worship God. Prepare ye the way of the Lord, make straight in the desert a highway for our God. Blessed is he that cometh in the name of the Lord, hosanna in the highest. Let us pray.

Almighty God our Heavenly Father, we give thanks unto Thee in this joyful season that our Lord has come. That He now reigns in heaven, lord over all things in heaven and on earth. We thank Thee that in Him we have the assurance of victory in time and eternity. Oh Lord our God make us always joyful in Jesus Christ, give us the confidence that there is nothing too great nor too small for Him. Give us grace therefore to commit our every care unto Him who carest for us. In Christ’s name we pray, Amen.

Our scripture lesson is John 16:1-11. The Avenging Spirit is our subject, John 16:1-11.

“These things have I spoken unto you, that ye should not be offended.

2 They shall put you out of the synagogues: yea, the time cometh, that whosoever killeth you will think that he doeth God service.

3 And these things will they do unto you, because they have not known the Father, nor me.

4 But these things have I told you, that when the time shall come, ye may remember that I told you of them. And these things I said not unto you at the beginning, because I was with you.

5 But now I go my way to him that sent me; and none of you asketh me, Whither goest thou?

6 But because I have said these things unto you, sorrow hath filled your heart.

7 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 depart, I will send him unto you.

8 And when he is come, he will reprove the world of sin, and of righteousness, and of judgment:

9 Of sin, because they believe not on me;

10 Of righteousness, because I go to my Father, and ye see me no more;

11 Of judgment, because the prince of this world is judged.”

Our Lord tells the disciples these things have I spoken unto you that you should not be offended or you should not be made to stumble. The savage hostility that they would face would tend to shake any man. They are therefore in need of strength to face the coming assault. Christ plans to arm them through His words and by means of the Holy Spirit the strengthener. Verses one through eleven as a result deal with the Holy Spirit. It is a mistake to assume that the Spirit’s work is only with Christ’s people. As you shall see we have a great many false ideas about the Holy Spirit because we have false ideas about God and about Christ. Now, if we believe that God is only love we distort the scriptures. God is love, He is also a consuming fire, a jealous God, an avenging God. Well if the Trinity is one we cannot say that these things do not apply to the Holy Spirit as well as to the Son. But men have worked the whole of the doctrine of the trinity and especially the doctrine of the spirit who has been made to be pure love only so that the [unknown] who began early in the middle ages held that the third age would be the age of the Spirit and of universal love and of course the third age people, the age of [unknown] people are all in this group. Therefore they cannot see that the Holy Spirit is also an avenging spirit to those outside the fold. Well, in verses one through eleven we have the Holy Spirit presented by Christ as an avenging spirit.

His work is not only with Christ’s people, we are told that the Holy Spirit in verses eight following will reprove the world, the word reproved means to convict, rebuke, reproof, expose. Thus while the Holy Spirit is our strengthener He is the weakener of the enemies of Christ. While this can inflame the enemies of Christ all the more it means also that they will be weakened by the inner knowledge of their guilt and evil. The Holy Spirit is thus the strengthener of Christ’s new human race, but yet the weakener of fallen men, of Christ’s enemies. The Holy Spirit is thus a lawyer in the [unknown] of the Lord. The Holy Spirit strengthens, comforts us, He is our advocate which means our attorney. That He is the weakener, the prosecutor of the enemies of Christ. Well the enemies of Christ will strike at His people to gain their revenge, our Lord says, they will put you out of the synagogues, verse two, yea the time cometh that whosoever killed you will think they do God’s service or offers service to God. [unknown] pagan Roman, [unknown], he saw the persecution of Christians as morally justified and this is true of the enemies of Christ today. It is a bitter hostility because it deals with life’s basic issues. In verse three our Lord says:

“3 And these things will they do unto you, because they have not known the Father, nor me.”

They cannot know Jesus Christ because they do not know God the Father. This is not an ignorant do to lack of knowledge but a willful moral self-blinding because they are determined to be their own God.

Because of this they refuse to know the true God except on their own terms. The ungodly often hate God while giving some lip service to Him but in their enmity they strike at His people. In verse four our Lord continues:

“4 But these things have I told you, that when the time shall come, ye may remember that I told you of them. And these things I said not unto you at the beginning, because I was with you.”

Up to this point Jesus had been the target of hostility, malice and misrepresentation. Now because He would soon be leaving them they would become the object of the evil will of ungodly men. Jesus had delayed telling them of this because earlier until then He had been with them and He Himself had born the blunt of the malice of men. Then in verse five:

“5 But now I go my way to him that sent me; and none of you asketh me, Whither goest thou?”

The disciples were so wrapped in their own expectations that none had yet asked whither goest thou? Peter in John 13:36 and Thomas in John 14:5 had both asked a question somewhat like that but not even remotely in the sense that Jesus meant it. Their own expectations blocked out hearing Jesus as He intended to be heard. They believed in Jesus but only as the subject of their faith and hope, not as He himself was and is. They loved the Lord, but they had remade Him in the image of their faith and hope. In verse six:

“6 But because I have said these things unto you, sorrow hath filled your heart.”

Their sorrow was grounded on their failed expectation. It was not grounded in the reality of Christ’s enthronement as king, priest and prophet in the days ahead. He could not console them because their own grief had so captured them. We too often are so wrapped up in our grief and our troubles that we cannot hear the spirit. Jesus was soon to be crucified and yet the disciples were most absorbed in their grief, more observed in it than His coming passion, death and resurrection.

Our Lord continues in verse seven:

“7 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 depart, I will send him unto you.”

Our Lord’s departure is necessary, the responsibility for the conquest of all men and nations is on the believers shoulders. The Comforter or the Strengthener will come when Christ departs: but if I depart, I will send him unto you. This statement clearly speaks of the procession of the Spirit from the Son. Then in verse eight:

“8 And when he is come, he will reprove the world of sin, and of righteousness, and of judgment:”

This is a very important text. It tells us that the Holy Spirit keeps fallen men mindful of his condition. Fallen men are willfully ignorant of their sin, they refuse to acknowledge that God’s justice is alone righteous because they prefer their law to God’s law. They refuse to admit that God’s justice already written in the tablets of their heart is true and altogether just. The Holy Spirit is thus very active in the hearts of the ungodly. In verse nine:

“9 Of sin, because they believe not on me;”

The rejection of Jesus is at the basis of all sin. Such a rejection means that men refuse to acknowledge Christ’s atoning work because of their self-righteousness. Christ’s atoning work is the ground of our salvation and of our hope but the fallen man wants at best God to be his helper, not his Father. Too much theology is disguised anthropology and man too often plays the ventriloquist talking for God.

Then in verse ten:

“10 Of righteousness, because I go to my Father, and ye see me no more;”

The holy spirit will force unto the minds of the ungodly a new recognition of the meaning of righteousness or justice. They will fight it, they will repress it but the Holy Spirit in convicting them will force it into their minds and hearts. In spite of man’s rejection of Jesus Christ the Holy Spirit will force the ungodly to an unwilling awareness of God’s justice in Christ. Then in verse eleven:

“11 Of judgment, because the prince of this world is judged.”

The meaning of judgment is revealed in judgment. There is a chasm between good and evil and between God and Satan. Judgment prevents men from obliterating the difference. The goal of fallen men is to eliminate the antithesis between good and evil and to reduce moral choice to a question of personal taste which is what men today insist that it is. In present day thinking an absolute moral law is denied. Moral matters are held to be purely personal taste, not universal concern. Again and again men have reduced God’s moral law to a question of custom, private taste and irrelevant tyrannies but the law remains to judge all men. The Holy Spirit thus works in all men but in different ways. To Christ’s new human race, to His redeemed, He is the advocate, the Comforter or the strengthener. To the ungodly He is a prosecutor, a terror and a weakener. To reduce the work of the Holy Spirit to the inner life of Christians is to limit Him severely. Of course He indwells in His people and the church but He is also at work in the world to prosecute and to convict, to weaken. We need to pray that He convicts Christ’s enemies of their sin and bring them down if not to their knees.

Our Lord tells the disciples and us that in sending the Spirit He is turning loose on the world an unrivaled force that brings terror and weakness to His enemies. The prevalence of psychologists, psychiatrists, and psychoanalysts in our rebellious era is evidence enough of the devastations wrought upon Christ’s enemies by the Holy Spirit. Freud who knew what he was doing knew that sin or rather guilt was in every man. He felt it was inescapable, he ascribed it to evolutionary factors but he recognized that men feel the need all over the world for a pastor or a priest, some kind of person who can open up the meaning of God and redemption to them and Freud self-consciously decided that priests and pastors were in the age ahead to be replaced by psychiatrists and psychoanalysts. And that’s why they are so prevalent, Freud was right! Ungodly men need some kind of counseling, some kind of assurance, someone to help them cope with the problem of guilt and of course Freud’s answer was that he would enable men through psychoanalysts to live with their guilt, not to remove it, he felt that was impossible. He would enable them to live with it. But no psychoanalyst can out influence the Holy Spirit who is God’s avenger, prosecutor, convictor, so that guilty men know their sin and guilt because of Him. Let us pray.

Our Father, we thank Thee for this Thy word. We thank Thee that we do not battle the world alone but Thy Holy Spirit is at work among all men weakening them, convicting them for Thou hast said one man shall put a thousand to flight. Make us strong in Thy Spirit that we may put to flight the ungodly. Grant us this in Christ’s name, Amen.

Are there any questions now about our lesson? Yes?

[Unintelligible Question]

[Rushdoony] Yes, yes. And I think that the [unknown] heresy has really come to full circle not only in all the churches where it sees the Holy Spirit reduced to love but especially in the Charismatics because if our Lord was right here and there is no question that He is the Holy Spirit is at work in the world among the ungodly with the power and force that is greater than anything we can imagine and because of His nearness to them unlike the Son and the Father He is the deadliest force God has unleashed among the ungodly even as He is the most powerful force that He has given to us. Are there any other questions?

Clearly in terms of this text most of the books written about the Holy Spirit need revising because they have reduced Him to love. Now, having done that consider what else they’ve done. If you are at all strict or stern in your requirements of those who work with you, or with your children or people generally, oh somehow you’re unchristian, you don’t know anything about the gospel because they’ve reduced the Spirit and God and the Son to a sentimental love and this is the terrible perversion.

It has used the materials of the bible as I’ve said on other matters to materials for idolatry. Totally warping the scriptures, totally distorting the meaning of the Spirit as well as the Father and the Son. I think some of you have heard me describe the book Crime and Punishment but it bears repeating, so I will. In that book Dostoyevsky has this atheistic, intellectual, university student come to the conclusion that religion is a myth, conscious is a myth and anyone can be killed if we decide that they are socially useless, he kills an elderly woman, a pawn broker, whom he regards as no more important than a human flea or a flea, not a human being in any significant sense and he is sure that having done it he is going to feel that he has contributed to the betterment of humanity. Currently, by the way, there is a prominent woman, a part of the major advocates of the new world order who has said that we, meaning her class, the upper class intellectually of the world, have a responsibility to eliminate, to execute and eliminate the one fourth who are social misfits and useless. She has stated this boldly. Well, at any right Raskolnikove, Dostoyevsky’s student, finds that after he commits the murder that he has a conscious and this irritates him and he’s going to try and get rid of it. But he finds that as he rounds the corner of the street and there’s a policeman walking his way he turns and runs because his conscious bothers him.

On one occasion when he is with a prostitute he gets into a discussion of things with her and the jist of it is that she reproves him. She says I know I’m a sinner and he feels immediately to his great annoyance a real anger because she comes out in the discussion as far superior to him because she knows she’s a sinner and he refuses to acknowledge it. It ends up of course with him being caught and convicted and sent to Siberia and she hands him a New Testament as he is about to leave. At the time when I was a university student there was this militantly atheistic and very brilliant student that I knew who was also reading Crime and Punishment in the same class and course that I was. And he was passionately convinced that Raskolnikove was right. Well one day we were having lunch and we were discussing it and we rounded a corner and there was a policeman and he turned and ran and when I caught up with him he started to swear that he was going to drop out of that course and read no more of that book which he did, he dropped out. Well, the Holy Spirit was at work there and we have to recognize that we are not alone when we confront the world, or confront people who are ungodly. The Holy Spirit is at work convicting them, avenging God upon them who will not conform to God’s word. Well are there any more questions, we have a little time left, yes?

[Unintelligible Question]

[Rushdoony] Yes. Absolutely, very very true. They are like the troubled sea he says which cannot rest. Well, let us conclude with prayer.

Our Father we thank Thee for Thy word. We thank Thee that Thy Holy Spirit even as it weakens and convicts the ungodly strengthens and blesses us. Give us grace to be ever mindful of His presence and of Thy nearness that we may confront every adversity as more than conquerors. And now go in peace, God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Ghost, bless you and keep you, guide and protect you, this day and always, Amen.