The Spirit leads us into truth

I've been re-reading John 16:12-15 again. To remind you, here's what it says:

I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now. When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth, for he will not speak on his own authority, but whatever he hears he will speak, and he will declare to you the things that are to come. He will glorify me, for he will take what is mine and declare it to you. All that the Father has is mine; therefore I said that he will take what is mine and declare it to you.

There are a number of important keys to this passage, and we need to notice them if we are not to misunderstand Jesus:

1. The backdrop is the mission of the Father to reveal himself to us definitively in the person of his Son. As Hebrews 1 makes clear, the Old Testament revelation was all preparatory for this great, personal disclosure as God's own son steps into history.
2. Jesus' 11 (by this point) disciples have a key role in this. At the end of this discussion with them, he is to pray for them, and for those “who will believe in me through their word”. They are those who saw what Jesus did and heard all he taught, so a key part of the Father's plan is for those who accompanied Jesus to spread the message.
3. But this gives God the Father a problem, if we may say so reverently. 2 problems to be exact. First, some of the things that God wants to disclose through Jesus only make sense after the whole mission has been accomplished. Only after he has returned to the Father, and the disciples can look back on the whole mission, would they grasp what was being said to them. Second, the night before he died, they were too grief-stricken to be in a fit state to take key teachings on board. So, God the Father cannot tell the world about himself through his Son only by having that Son accompanied by a group of men who are then ready to relay what they thought.
4. The answer to this dilemma is the Spirit. “I sill have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now. Wen the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth.” God's Spirit, the 3rd person of the Trinity, will continue teaching these disciples after Jesus' departure.
5. So the Spirit fills what would otherwise be the two gaps. He will make sure that they can remember and understand what Jesus said to the disciples what he was alive, and he will teach them the things that Jesus was not able to say to them. (See also John 14:26).
6. But it's here that we need to remember the first thing we said. This is where many go wrong. The Spirit's work in teaching the disciples the things they could not bear earlier is not a separate work from Jesus' work in teaching them the things they could bear. It's all of a piece. “He will not speak on his own authority, but whatever he hears he will speak.” And again: “He will take what is mine and declare it to you. All that the Father has is mine; therefore I said that he will take what is mine and declare it to you.” He is not doing his own teaching; he is taking the things that the Father has given to Jesus to make known, and he is making those things known. His work, revealing “the truth”, is therefore a part of the Father's work in revealing himself through his Son.
7. It is for this reason that the goal of the Spirit's work is to glorify Jesus, as Jesus says.
8. So the promise here is that the Spirit will meet a very particular need. God's disclosure of himself, in the person of the Son, is a once-for-all, definitive disclosure. By its very nature, it cannot be completed before Jesus has returned, so the Spirit will teach the disciples who were with Jesus the things they need to pass on but could not have been taught before.
9. So God the Father will have made all things known through his Son: Some through his Son incarnate on earth, and others through the Spirit of his Son to those who knew the Son on earth.
10. The implication for us is that God the Father wants us to trust Jesus' apostles as they teach us about Jesus. We should expect them to have things to say to us that Jesus did not say on earth; Jesus says they will be taught additional things.
11. It just so happens that the 27 documents that comprise our New Testament are exactly the documents that the survived into the 3rd and 4th Centuries, and that the earliest church could be absolutely certain came from the pens, or the consciously instructed secretaries, of these first apostles.
12. So the New Testament completes the mission of the Son to earth, to reveal all we need to know about the Father. John 16 is telling us that Jesus wants us to trust all 27 books as part of what he has to say about himself. That means we trust the 4 gospels as finished literary works, not just the sayings of Jesus within them, and we trust the other 23 books as well.