Journal: Bibliotheca Sacra
Volume: BSAC 85:338 (Apr 1928)
Article: Our Lord’s Divinity
Author: J. M. Hantz

BSac 85:338 (April 1928) p. 179

Our Lord’s Divinity

J. M. Hantz

“When He the Spirit of truth is come, He will guide you into all truth; for He shall not speak of Himself: but whatsoever He shall hear, that shall He speak; and He will show you things to come. He shall glorify Me: for He shall receive of Mine, and shall shew it unto you” (John 16:13, 14). Such were the words of our Lord to His disciples on the night of His betrayal, when, knowing that His hour was come when He should depart out of this world unto the Father, He uttered His loving words of consolation to those whom for a while. He was to leave behind on earth, and promised them after His departure the gift of the Holy Ghost, the Comforter.

Probably more than fifty years had elapsed since these words were spoken, when the disciple who among those sorrowing hearers was the one selected to preserve and record the discourse of that night, was also inspired, under the guidance of that same Holy Spirit which according to his Lord’s promise had been given abundantly to him and to his brethren on the Day of Pentecost, to write, to his little children in the faith, the witness of their aged father and teacher, to tell them what the testimony of that Spirit was, and by what means His presence and His truth were to be discerned. And very remarkable is the language in which that witness is given, both in 1 John 5:6, and in other and similar passages of the same Epistle. He does not tell us, as many later teachers have told us, that the evidence of the truth of the Christian faith is to be found in the moral excellence of its teaching and example. He does not tell us that the Spirit, speaking to our own hearts, and through our own enlightened conscience, bears witness that our Lord Jesus Christ was a great preacher of righteousness and holiness and brotherly love; that His own human life was a great moral example of the duties which He taught, of holiness and purity, and mercy, and love, and devotion of Himself for others; and that these

BSac 85:338 (April 1928) p. 180

things carry with them their own evidence of their own truth and goodness. All this is most true and most important, but it is not the truth on which the Epistle dwells in this place. The criterion to which he directs his readers as the means of discovering the presence and teaching of the Holy Spirit is of a different kind. It consists partly of the confession of a revealed theological truth which no effort of human reason could have discovered without the aid of revelation, or can even verify by its own testimony after it has been revealed; and partly of the assertion of an historical fact concerning the lif...