89 - The Teacher Within

There are spiritual truths that you cannot understand, no matter how smart you are, until God reveals them to you. Once you finally understand, the meaning seems so obvious you find it hard to believe that you never saw it before. But the fact is, until God explained it to you, it never made sense. This is what Jesus was explaining to His disciples that evening when He said to them, “I still have many things to tell you, but you cannot bear [them] now…” (literal) (v12). In other words, He told them, “You don’t have the spiritual capacity yet to comprehend what I want to teach you.” No matter how carefully Jesus might try to explain those things, He would only confuse them. But the next statement He made was a promise that the obstruction that prevented them from understanding spiritual truth would be removed when they were baptized in the Holy Spirit. Listen: “…but when He, the Spirit of Truth comes, He will guide you into all truth…” (v12). He was pointing to the new gift of the Holy Spirit they would receive on the Day of Pentecost. When that promise arrived, which Jesus’ death and resurrection would make possible, the Spirit would dwell inside them and empower their minds to comprehend spiritual truth. In the future they would always have a Teacher to guide their learning until they understood God and His ways with no deception or distortion.

Then, as if to prove His point about their inability to understand, Jesus made a simple statement which, given all that He had said in the past, should have been easily understood. He said, “A little while, and you will no longer behold Me, and again, a little while and you will see Me” (literal). In other words, “I’m going to die, but don’t worry, I’ll only be dead for a short time, and then I’ll come back to life and you’ll see Me again” (paraphrase). He summarized in one sentence a truth He had been trying to teach them for the past two and a half years. But His words left them so confused they conducted a discussion among themselves, and decided that they had no idea of what He meant, and not even Peter had the courage to ask for further clarity. Frankly, their ignorance is odd, and a bit unsettling. You almost wish John hadn’t mentioned it because we don’t understand why they didn’t understand. But if we think back to what Jesus said moments earlier, we discover a very important insight about how humans learn about God. We discover that spiritual truths appear to be foolish to the unenlightened mind. We discover that understanding spiritual truth requires a miracle, and thankfully it’s a miracle God wants to give us.