Exegetical and Hermeneutical Commentary of John 16:8
And when he is come, he will reprove the world of sin, and of righteousness, and of judgment:
8. The threefold office of the Advocate towards those who do not believe but may yet be won over. And He when He is come will convict the world concerning sin, and concerning righteousness, and concerning judgment.
he will reprove ] ‘Convince’ (as the margin) or convict is to be preferred (see on Joh 3:20). This rendering gives additional point to the rendering ‘Advocate’ for Paraclete. To convince and convict is a large part of the duty of an advocate. He must vindicate and prove the truth; and whoever, after such proof, rejects the truth, does so with responsibility in proportion to the interests involved. The word occurs once in S. Matthew (Mat 18:15) and once in S. Luke (Luk 3:19); but is somewhat frequent in the Epistles. Comp. 1. Cor. Joh 14:24; Tit 1:9; Tit 1:13; Tit 2:15; Jas 2:9; Judges 15, [22], &c.
The conviction wrought by the Advocate may bring either salvation or condemnation, but it must bring one of the two. It is given to men ‘for their wealth;’ but it may ‘be unto them an occasion of falling,’ if it is wantonly set aside.
Fuente: The Cambridge Bible for Schools and Colleges
He will reprove – The word translated reprove means commonly to demonstrate by argument, to prove, to persuade anyone to do a thing by presenting reasons. It hence means also to convince of anything, and particularly to convince of crime. This is its meaning here. He will convince or convict the world of sin. That is, he will so apply the truths of God to mens own minds as to convince them by fair and sufficient arguments that they are sinners, and cause them to feel this. This is the nature of conviction always.
The world – Sinners. The men of the world. All men are by nature sinners, and the term the world may be applied to them all, Joh 1:10; Joh 12:31; 1Jo 5:19.
Fuente: Albert Barnes’ Notes on the Bible
Joh 16:8-11
And when He is come, He will reprove the world of sin, and of righteousness, and of judgment
The mission of the Comforter
This is the only passage in which the Saviour has expressed the process of the Spirits action in regenerating the world.
It forms Christs own history of the silent progress of the spiritual life. The first step in the Divine life is the sense of sin. That sense is excited by the conviction of the hearts unbelief in the Christ who died. Then the sense of sin must pass into the belief in righteousness. The Spirit reveals righteousness in the Christ who rose. And from this twofold revelation must spring the belief that evil is conquered and that sin shall finally pass away; for the Spirit reveals its overthrow in the Christ who lives and reigns. Mark the mission of the Comforter in
I. AWAKENING THE SENSE OF SIN.
1. The ground on which the charge of sin is founded–because they believe not on Me. This may seem strange at first sight. But on examination we shall see that no charge but this can awaken a real deep sense of sin. Take the other grounds on which men have attempted to bring home the conviction.
(1) The innate depravity of man. Of its awful truth, indeed, there can be no question. But in what does the enforcing of this issue? Do not the questions rise–Who made me thus? Why was I born in sin? Am I responsible?
(2) The evil of a mans actions may be felt by him, and yet he may say, It is not I that do those things. There are two powers in me, For that which I do I allow not, &c.
(3) Or you may awaken simply a confession of self-reproach: I have erred, and played the fool exceedingly, but you have not made the man feel that he–the personal self–has deliberately endorsed the action as his own.
(4) Still further, you may preach the doctrine of everlasting condemnation, and you produce either a cowardly confusion of suffering with sin, defiant unbelief, or abject despair.
2. Take now unbelief in Christ, and see what the rejection of Him implies. Whatever excuses a man may make for committing sin, he knows that it creates an alienation from God, that its effects on the soul are devastating. Now the Cross stands as the sign of reconciliation with God, and therefore of healing and blessedness. But by unbelief, refusing Christs deliverance, I affirm my antagonism to the Divine. There is the revelation of sin. Man defying the supremest love.
II. THE CONVICTION OF RIGHTEOUSNESS IN THE ASCENDED SAVIOUR. The first deep glance into lifes evil overcomes a man with hopeless sorrow. It is vain to tell him to let the dead past bury its dead. Forgetfulness would not destroy, but only cover with a thin veil the evil He has found–a veil that death would rend in twain. It is useless to say, Obey conscience, and become righteous. Conscience has no power to raise; it can only point out the right and condemn the wrong. It is a flaming terror until a man finds Christ. Thus awakened, the great cry of the heart is this, Can I ever be cleansed? Can those memories be banished into eternal forgetfulness by the forgiveness of God? Unless these cries are answered, it were a cruel punishment to convince man of his evil. But the Comforter does answer them. There is righteousness because Christ is gone to the Father, and ye see Him no more. It is not, therefore, Christ crucified only, but Christ risen and ascended, who reveals a righteousness for man, Why is this so? and how does the Comforter inspire this conviction? There are three requisites which must be fulfilled before man, as a sinner, can feel the possibility of His righteousness. And these are all met by the truth that Christ has gone to the Father.
1. The assurance of forgiveness for the past. Explain it how we may, there is no conviction more profound and universal than that sin is death, and that its pardon necessitates the death of a pure and unstained life. The worlds altars, laden often with human victims, bear witness to this. There is in conscience an inner witness to the rectitude of the law that condemns, and it gives man no peace till he feels that a Holy Being, who was yet one with Him, has become obedient unto death, and thus manifested the sanctity of the commandment. But suppose Christ had vanished in death, who would have known that He had finished the work He had undertaken? But He rises and ascends to His Father and our Father, and becomes the eternal Priest, dispensing forgiveness to the world. This is the truth revealed by the Comforter. Touched by the Spirits power, we accept Christs sacrifice as our sacrifice, and find pardon.
2. The removal of the terrors of the future. It is the double curse of sin that, while it narrows our range of vision, it clothes immortality with terror. We feel sin is barring our entrance into those bright abodes. We need a Deliverer who shall open for us those barred and everlasting doors. Christ ascended to heaven to be our Brother and Intercessor there. The grand assertion, In My Fathers house are many mansions, &c., falls like music from the sky that received Him. This, then, is the truth revealed by the Comforter, which, by removing the terrors of the future, deepens the conviction of righteousness.
3. The creation of a new manhood in the present. When the past is forgiven and the future brightened, we want to become righteous men. And here we approach the doctrine of imputed righteous-ness–a righteousness not ours, but Christs. But the idea of a transference of spiritual states is only a figurative expression of a great truth. We become righteous only when we feel that we are nothing, have nothing, can do nothing, and trusting solely on Christ, yield ourselves to Him. Then the old forces of sin die. The love of Christ possessing us recreates us, and God, seeing in that life of faith the first beginnings of a purity which shall become perfect and everlasting, regards us as righteous in Christ Jesus.
III. The belief which completes and renders perfect the new nature–THE BELIEF IN JUDGMENT THROUGH THE CONQUEST OF THE PRINCE OF THIS WORLD. This passage is frequently interpreted as though it referred to the final judgment. But this destroys the connection between the three convictions, and the words have a present meaning–is judged. The judgment, therefore (see Joh 12:31), is that conquest which Christ should gain on His cross. Taking it in that sense, we perceive at once why the belief in judgement must follow the belief in righteousness. For when we have been freed from sin, and made righteous in Christ, we find that we have entered on a life-long struggle with evil; and as the one thing to keep us true, we need the assurance of final victory. These words present two thoughts:
1. Christs conquest over the kingdom of evil.
(1) The kingdom of evil as opposed to the Saviour. The prince of this world suggests the majesty of the power that He overcame for man. This world expresses the collective forces that are opposed to God; Prince manifestly implies that evil forces are not separated, but combined, and form a great living power, a kingdom of wrong. But the phrase points to a personal evil spirit as lord of that evil kingdom. This was the kingdom that opposed itself to the Son of man. Evil spirits confronted Him constantly. It seemed as if the dark spiritual world were stirred through all its depths by the appearance of the Perfect Man. The whole world was groaning in the throes of spiritual death. The light of Divine revelation was dying out. All the evil influences that touch the human soul gathered themselves against the Perfect Soul to turn Him aside and tear Him from His self-chosen path of dedication for the world.
(2) The Saviours conquest. For this two things were requisite
(a) Christ must overcome the essence of evil by a means common to humanity. Now, the essence of evil is self-will. Its first expression was the
I will of man opposing itself to the Thou shalt not of God. Christ must conquer sin through the might of a Divine obedience, and yet occupy a battle-ground common to humanity. And where was this so perfectly accomplished as in His life and death?
(b) Christ must show by His conquest that the facts which seem to prove the perpetuity of evil are really signs of its overthrow. The darkest lie of the evil one is this–that evil is an eternal power. Before the advent of the gospel, the world was beginning to believe in the omnipotence of wrong, and men were losing faith in anything which could conquer evil. Just note the two great facts which, as the results of sin, lay at the root of this state. First, Suffering. It seemed to belie the goodness of God and prove sin to be irresistible. Now suffering, in all its deepest dreadfulness, Christ endured. He was perfected through sufferings, and thus revealed it to man as the education of a Father. Secondly, Death–the sign-manual of sins dominion. Christ became subject to its power. It seemed to conquer Him. But, rising from the grave, He ascended to the heavens, thus consecrating death for all men as a pathway to the Fathers home. Such was Christs conquest. It was the crisis of earths history–the judgment and overthrow of the prince of this world.
2. Christs conquest as a pledge of victory for man. There are three ways in which this is revealed by the Comforter.
(1) The fact itself is a power. We are strengthened by the belief that some one has known our difficulties and subdued them. On this deep principle of human nature Christs conquest lays hold. Like us He fought. By a strength which we may share He conquered. Look at the early Church, when the meaning of this fact was revealed by the descending Comforter. Men awoke with new power. The old tyranny of evil was broken; and hoary apostolic men, kindling with the energies of youth, went forth to do battle with it in the world which had so long groaned under its sway.
(2) Christ is Gods promise. Through His life Gods voice speaks to us now. If we conflict like Him, like Him we shall conquer. We must copy His instant resistance to temptation, and His prayerful submission in suffering, if we would share the glory of His victory.
(3) Christ a present friend. We do not always realize His presence, but sometimes amid the pauses of the battle, we feel Him near in that peace which passeth understanding, and hear Him saying, Be faithful unto death, and I will give you a crown of life. (E. L. Hull, B. A.)
The object of the mission of the Comforter
To reprove the word of sin is one thing; but (as the original expression implies) to convince is quite another. The reproof of sin has been the practice of philosophers, the object of poets, the office of moralists, the aim of satirists, in every age. Parents reprove their children; silent virtue reproves obtrusive vice. But sin may be reproved, and yet not be eradicated; be silenced by exposure, and yet not subdued. Hence the reproofs of the world have fallen upon the sins of the world too often, as the winds fall upon the bleak hill, or the waves of the sea beat upon the solid rock–leaving no impression behind. Now to convince, or to convict means to bring home sin to ones judgment, and to render all denial impossible; to ones conscience, and to render all evasion impracticable; to unveil sin in its own hiding-place; to detect it when it lurks in the core of the most exquisite bud, or when it nestles in the bosom of the most fragrant and beautiful flower; to fix upon it the sinners eye so intently, that he shall see it lying where he never suspected it to be before, nestling amidst the affections he thought holy, clinging to the habits he thought beautiful, and staining all his nature so entirely by its venom, that he shall feel that none but the Omnipotent Spirit of God can enable him to get rid of it. It is easy to convince a man of outward offences, none but the Eternal Spirit can convince the honourable, the great, the moral, that all their excellencies are like flowers and leaves torn from the root, and doomed soon to fade, and that the only excellencies that will survive the storm, and bid defiance to the grave, are those which spring from the living principle imparted by the Holy Spirit of God. Many have tried to convince of sin, besides the Holy Spirit.
1. Conscience. But it fails to do so with any sensible results. No man sins without hearing the remonstrances of that solemn monitor; but you have defied it, mastered it, bribed it, and now it has become more or less stupefied. Or if not it has recourse to the only other expedient to those atoning efficacies said to be in all the relics and prescriptions of an absurd superstition.
2. Public opinion. But while this reproves some sins, it connives at others.
3. The law of Sinai. This commands, in the accents of thunder, the duties which it reveals by the lightings flash; but that law only speaks of outward acts; it lops off branches, it cuts off a main stem–but as soon as it has done so, a thousand shoots start from the root. The only being, then, that can convince of sin savingly, really, deeply, is the Holy Spirit. He shall convince the world
I. OF SIN: of one special sin; not intemperance, avarice, or selfishness. These are of flagrant enormity, but there is one which outweighs them all in its guilt–a sin that lies too at every mans door–at the door of philanthropist and of the felon, a sin that ties to us all sins, and prevents their forgiveness; unbelief in Christ. This is just the sin of which we have no conception, except by the teaching of the Holy Spirit. Conscience does not accuse you of it; society will not denounce you for it.
1. How this can be so heinous a sin? Because it is rejecting the great remedy for all sin; it is suspecting the love, doubting the mercy, disputing the sufficiency of the blood of the Lord Jesus Christ. It is not a sin merely against God as a judge, but against God as a Saviour. And those persons approach more or less to the guilt of this sin, who have doubts whether Christ will have mercy on them that appeal to Him; lest His blood be not adequate to cleanse them; that He would thrust them away if they were to make the experiment. If there be a single obstruction between the greatest sinner and the bosom of God, it is not in God–it is in your hearts alone.
2. What is it to believe in Christ? It is to feel that if God were to sink you to the very depths of hopeless ruin, He would not inflict a punishment greater than your sins have deserved; but, on the other hand, it is to feel that if, in the name and through the righteousness of Christ, He were to raise you to a glory too brilliant for mortal eye to look on, God would not bestow upon you a greater boon than Christs merits entitle you to.
II. OF RIGHTEOUSNESS. He opens our ears, that we may hear the curse, but He opens our ears, that we may hear the music of the blessing also. Sin shall not have dominion over you: Be of good cheer; thy sins be forgiven thee. And when the Spirit convinces of righteousness, it is not that Christ is simply a righteous man; that would be no comfort to me, but He was righteous for us. Hence our justifying righteousness is not a faint imitation of what Christ is, but an acceptance of what Christ has bequeathed. Imitate what Christ is, and there is your model; but to be justified you must believe on and embrace by faith what Christ has done, and that alone, as your title and your righteousness in the sight of God. Just as Christ was condemned for my sin, so I am justified because of Christs righteousness.
III. OF JUDGMENT. The first promise was, The seed of the woman shall bruise the serpents head; the Spirit of God convinces His people that this process of bruising goes on–that the earth now, while under grace, is also partly under judgment, and that those things which the world cannot explain by what is called the law of nature, are the judgments of God. For instance, disease, decay, and death, the world calls the laws of nature: the Christian calls them the judgments of God. Death does not belong to nature; it is a disruption of nature. It is sin that is the cause of all the headaches and the heart-aches which our mortality is heir to. And therefore the Spirit of God and He only will convince that they are the judgments and decrees of God. Wherever you see a Christian happy amid oppression, there you have an evidence that the prince of this world is judged. And is it not still becoming more and more true that humility is dignity, and that holiness is strength? And the time is coming more and more, I trust, when the prince of this world, being judged, shall be cast forth from the cabinets of queens and from the councils of statesmen, from the press and from the pulpit, from all mens hearts and from all mens homes–and the joy and holiness and happiness of God shall, overflow the world, like a mighty and deepening river, Oh! that the Spirit of God may then convince us of this! (J. Cumming, D. D.)
The hardened sinner
Angelo Marie, a Jesuit librarian at the Vatican, made the discovery, many years ago, that some of the ancient MSS. had more than one layer of writing upon them. By certain chemical experiments, he succeeded in making legible the ancient writing. Archbishop Whately has suggested the theory, now generally admitted, that this was done on account of the expensiveness or scarcity of parchment in the middle ages. De Quincy, in his Confessions, has given us a chapter on the subject, applying it to signify different layers of thought and emotion that have at different times passed upon the heart, and become apparently covered over completely with some other. So it is with the hardened sinner. How many a layer of conviction after conviction and partial reformations has he known, yet still how thick a case covers his hardened heart!
The spirit of fire
Suppose a blacksmith were sent for to mend a number of old broken iron vessels, and told that he must do it without fire, what would he say to the proposal? Yet sinners hearts are as hard and cold! and just as foolish are they who think that all that is needed is to begin and go on hammering at them, and that will convert them. No! heat the iron, and it may be mended and remoulded. Melt the soul with the Spirit of burning, or we are without hope of seeing any saving change.
The awful evil of sin
Oh sirs, if I had a dear brother who had been murdered, what would you think of me if I valued the knife which had been crimsoned with his blood?–if I made a friend of the murderer, and daily consorted with the assassin, who drove the dagger into my brothers heart? Surely I, too, must be an accomplice in the crime! Sin murdered Christ; will you be a friend to it? Sin pierced the heart of the Incarnate God; can you love it? Oh, that there was an abyss as deep as Christs misery, that I might at once hurl this dagger of sin into its depths, whence it might never be brought to light again! Begone, O sin! (C. H. Spurgeon.)
The threefold conviction
I. OF SIN–in that they believe not on Me.
1. The worlds conduct towards Christ is the decisive proof of its sinfulness. His Cross manifests, as nothing else, what the bad element in human nature is capable of. So it must needs be. When the Holy One comes into a world of sinners they must either renounce their sins or contradict Him. And if He endures their contradiction they must hate Him; and if He still braves their hatred it is but another step to slay Him. If I had not come they had not had sin, &c. In conflict with the light darkness is known for darkness indeed.
2. Therefore, the gist of the Spirits charge lies simply in this: that the world does not believe in Christ. All the rest, the insolence and outrage, &c., was nothing more than the logical outcome of unbelief. Here is the root of the matter. For the rest Christ could say, Father, forgive them, &c.
3. On this point the Paraclete has to convince the world. The rejection of Jesus was virtually the act of the race. Herod, &c., were not fiends but men. We can understand them because we are so much like them. All the vices that culminated in the Crucifixion are those of every generation, nay, of ourselves.
4. The present world thinks that it would have acted differently. Let it not be too sure: Your fathers killed the prophets, &c., and so the ungodly world may be garnishing the sepulchre of Him whom it treats as a dead Christ, in so far as it does not believe in Him.
5. Just as all good works are at the bottom acts of faith, so every kind of evil doing runs up into unbelief. The first sin began here, Hath God said? And so the ripened form of human sin reproduces naturally the seed from which it sprang. And this is the condemnation of the whole world: They have not believed Me.
6. One day this conviction of sin will have penetrated to the worlds very heart. It will look on Him whom it has pierced and mourn, as it confesses that it has not yet believed on Him.
II. OF RIGHTEOUSNESS. In the thought of sin, man is the central subject, as himself sinful; in the thought of righteousness, Christ as alone righteous.
1. The personal righteousness of Christ was at stake in the controversy between Himself and the world, and everything depended on clearing that first of all. Only as it appreciated that could the world understand righteousness. Of this the world is now convinced. But Christ could not have waited for this vindication, which without other proof would never have been brought about. And besides, the Father was concerned to vindicate Himself and the Son of His good pleasure by some immediate and unanswerable demonstration. This was seen in His going to the Father. So He says, If ye loved Me ye would rejoice, &c.
because He would be glorified and the world put to shame, convinced of His righteousness, convicted of its sin.
2. By the death of Christ the case as between Him and the world was transferred to the final court of appeal, After death, judgment. His accusers had said, This Man is a sinner, and by crucifying Him they invited the Divine judgment. And thither with His dying breath He made His own appeal, Into Thy hands I commit My spirit. Those appeals were answered, and in three days Jesus lived again, and in due time went where He was before; and all the angels worshipped Him, and the Father set Him at His own right hand where every word He said is justified, every claim He made established, and where heaven and earth combine to adore Him as Jesus Christ the Righteous.
3. And if righteous, then Divine. It is no discrepancy that the Evangelist should report the officer as saying, This Man was righteous, and He was Son of God. Every one knew that this was the capital charge against Him; and, indeed, if He was a righteous man He was Son of God; if He was not Son of God, He was not even a righteous Man. Therefore He was declared Son of God with power by the resurrection of the dead, and His righteousness is not simply that of the righteous man, but a manifestation of that of the righteous Father whom the world had not known, but of which it had to be convinced.
4. And if tie is righteous, then the great ideal has been realized, the hunger after righteousness may be assuaged; for righteousness has appeared in concrete human form. There is hope of righteousness for the sinful world. He died the just for the unjust, &c. He goes to the Father, and so we have an Advocate with the Father, &c. Well may we then, through the Spirit, wait for the hope of righteousness by faith.
III. OF JUDGMENT. Because the prince, &c. The death of Christ caused a judgment to be passed on Satan, which he and his kingdom felt to be a virtual overthrow. Christ saw again and again behind all human forces another antagonist guiltier and mightier. He who knew what was in man recognized lurking behind Judas, Peter, the Pharisees, &c., him whom He thrice called the prince of this world. It was his works that He came to destroy, and His death-fearing subjects He meant to deliver. And the strong man armed knows who it is that has entered his domain. Calvary is to be the decisive battle-field. He was allowed to reach the height of his apostasy in his lying temptation, and failing that, in his murder of the Incarnate Son, and from this height he fell instantly, utterly, as lightning from heaven. He is judged, has failed, is doomed. Henceforth he waits with fearful expectation till the kingdoms of this world have become the kingdoms of our God, &c. Slowly, yet surely, this sentence is taking effect. After dispossession comes punishment. What else meant the terror of demons at the voice of Christ, and the dreadful words (Mat 25:41) re-echoed in the Apocalypse (Joh 20:10)? He is judged already, butthe day shall declare that judgment. But, alas! he is not the only subject. The judgment that fell upon him cannot but strike those who choose their part with him (Rev 21:8). (Geo. G. Findlay, B. A.)
The Holy Spirits threefold conviction of men
Observe what the Holy Spirit did as an Advocate. The passage cannot be fully understood except we give it three renderings. A promise is here made to the servants of Christ, that when they go forth to preach the gospel the Holy Ghost will be with them
I. TO REPROVE MEN. By this is meant, not so much to save them as to silence them. Another advocate appears in court, whose pleadings would make it hard for men to resist the truth. Observe how this reproof was given with regard to
1. Sin. On the day of Pentecost when Peter stood up to preach to the assembled multitude, the signs and wonders wrought by the Spirit in the name of Jesus were a witness which they could not refute. The evidence was brought home to them that they had with wicked hands crucified the Lord of glory: and so they stood reproved. All the subsequent miracles went to prove the same thing.
2. Righteousness. Jesus was gone, and His Divine example no longer reproved their darkness, but the Holy Spirit attested that righteousness, and compelled them to feel it. A fresh standard of morals was set up, and it has never been taken down; it stands in its place to rebuke, if not to improve.
3. Judgment.
(1) They were made to feel that somehow the life and the death of Jesus of Nazareth had made a crisis in the worlds history, and condemned the way and manner of the ungodly. All historians must confess that the turningpoint of the race is the cross of Christ. It would be impossible to fix any other hinge of history. From that moment the power of evil received its mortal wound. It dies hard, but from that hour it was doomed. Systems of false worship, so firmly rooted in prejudice and custom, that it seemed impossible that they should ever be overthrown, were torn up by their roots by the breath of the Lord.
(2) Moreover, the thought flashed upon humanity more clearly than ever it had done before–that there would be a day of judgment. The dim forms of Rhadamanthus on a cloudy judgment seat, and of the assembly before his throne, and of the crowds divided according to their lives, now began to assume another and far more definite shape. The Holy Spirit attested the teaching of the apostles. Henceforth man is accused and rebuked by the great Advocate. He who rejects human testimony when it is true is foolish; but he who despises the witness of the Holy Ghost is profane. Let him beware lest he so sin against the Holy Ghost as to never have forgiveness.
II. TO CONVINCE MEN
1. Of sin.
(1) He comes on purpose to convince men that they are so guilty that they are lost and ruined; to remind them of their enmity to the God of love. He does not come to make sinners comfortable in their sins, but to cause them to grieve over them. He comes to wound so that no human balm can heal; to kill so that no earthly power can make us live.
(2) This work is most necessary, because without it there is no leading men to receive the gospel. We cannot make headway with certain people who profess faith very readily, but are convinced of nothing. But get near a real sinner, the man who mourns in his inmost soul that he is so, and you find one who will welcome the Saviour. To him the news of pardon will be as cold water to a thirsty soul.
(3) The Spirit comes to convince men of sin, because they never will be convinced of sin apart from His Divine advocacy. A natural conscience may show a man his faults, make him uneasy, and may bring about reformation; but it is only the Spirit of God that to the full extent convinces a man of sin so as to bring forth repentance, self-despair, and faith in Jesus.
(4) The Holy Spirit dwells upon one point in particular, They believe not on Me. None see the sin of unbelief except by His light. For a man thinks, Well, if I have not believed in Christ, that is a pity, perhaps; but still, I was never a thief, or a liar, &c. Unbelief is a matter of little consequence; I can met that square at any time. But the Holy Spirit makes a man see that not to believe in Christ is a crowning sin, since it makes God a liar. He who believes not on Christ has rejected Gods mercy, and has done despite to the grandest display of Gods love. In this he has dishonoured God on a very tender point: His only begotten Son.
2. Of righteousness–that is to show them that they have no righteousness of their own, and no means of working it, and are condemned. Thus He leads them to value the righteousness of God which is upon all them that believe.
(1) Among men, if a person is convicted of wrong-doing, the next step is judgment. A young man has embezzled money: he is convicted by process of law, and found guilty. Then judgment is pronounced, and he must suffer. But observe how God interpolates another process. Truly, His ways are not our ways! He shall convince of sin The next step would be judgment; but no, the Lord inserts a hitherto unknown middle term, and convinces of righteousness. Be amazed at this. The Lord takes a man, even when he is conscious of sin, and makes him righteous on the spot, by putting away his sin and justifying him by a righteousness which comes to him by the worthiness of another. This seems to be a thing so impossible that it needs the Spirit of God to convince men of it.
(2) Note well the great point of the Spirits argument, Because I go to My Father, and ye see Me no more. Our Lord was sent into the world to work out a righteousness, but He would not go till He had fulfilled His covenant engagements. Behold, then, Christ has finished a righteousness which is freely given to all them theft believe, and all those who trust in Christ are for His sake regarded as righteous before God, and are in fact righteous, so that, Who is He that condemneth? It is Christ that died, &c.
3. Of judgment. The Father hath committed all judgment unto the Son. The true penitent feels that the great enemy of his soul must be dethroned, or else forgiveness itself will afford him no rest. He must be rescued from the power as well as from the guilt of sin, or else he abides in bondage. Jesus came to destroy the works of the devil; and on the cross our Redeemer judged Satan, and cast him down. He is now a condemned criminal, a vanquished rebel. His reigning power over all believers is broken. Though it will cost you many a conflict, the Lord shall bruise Satan under your feet shortly, for He has already bruised him under His own feet on your behalf.
III. TO CONVICT MAN.
1. The world stands a prisoner at the bar, and the charge is that it is and has been full of sin. In courts of law you are often surprised with what comes out. The prisoner seems to be a respectable person, and you say, I should not think he is guilty. But, as the evidence proceeds, you say to yourself, That is a villain. Now hear the Spirit of God. The Spirit came into the world to make all men know that Jesus is the Christ, and He attested that fact by miracles, and by the conversion of myriads. But this wicked world nailed Christ to a cross. By this the world is convicted, its guilt is proven beyond question. The wrath of God abideth on it.
2. What follows? The trial is viewed from another point. The world has declared that the gospel is not righteous, that the system which our Lord has come to establish is not true. But, by sanctifying men through the gospel so that they lead gracious lives, the Holy Spirit proves that the gospel is righteous. This process grows more and more complete as time rolls on. Were not the world unrighteous it would long ago have yielded to the holy message and its holy Messenger. But it will be forced to own the truth one day.
3. When the world shall see Jesus enthroned at last on the clouds of heaven, what conviction will seize on every mind! Not a sceptic will be found in that day! Christ seen at the Fathers right hand will end all unbelief. (C. H. Spurgeon.)
The Spirits threefold conviction
I. THE SPIRITS CONVICTION OF SIN. And first, the Spirits conviction of sin–Of sin, because they believe not on Me.
1. This is not societys definition of sin: according to society, sin means crime, vice, immorality. Neither is it the philosophers definition of sin: according to the philosopher, sin means misdirection, abuse, disease. Neither is it the theologians definition of sin: according to the theologian, sin means transgression of Gods law, coming short of Gods glory, hereditary guilt. But it is Christs definition of sin: according to Christ, sin means unbelief on Himself, unbelief in Jesus as the Christ and Son and Image and Revealer of the Father. To disbelieve on Jesus, then, is to disbelieve on Deity Himself. Whosoever denieth the Son, the same hath not the Father (1Jn 2:23). Christlessness in a Christian land is atheism. Sin, therefore, became a new thing when Jesus came into the world Joh 15:22).
2. Observe now that of this sin of sins the Spirit is the sole convicter. When He is come, He will convict the world in respect of sin, because they believe not on Jesus. And no other power can. The preacher cannot do it; conscience cannot do it; even holy scripture cannot do it. Remember the difference between sins and sin. A jury may convict me of crimes: conscience may convict me of sins. But no power less than the Holy Spirit can convict me of sin. No barb but His can pierce to the root of my nature; no flash but His can show me to myself as a ruined sinner. And the argument he wields in convicting me of sin is this very fact that I do not believe on Jesus. Calvary, not Sinai, is the Spirits mightiest artillery. But what avails it to be convicted of sin, unless at the same time we are also convicted that there is somewhere righteousness, and that this righteousness can be made available to ourselves?
II. THE SPIRITS CONVICTION OF RIGHTEOUSNESS.
1. Of righteousness. What is this righteousness of which our Lord here speaks? Whose righteousness is it?
(1) Certainly not the worlds. For the world is quite swift enough to detect its own merits. No Holy Spirit does it need to convince it of its own virtues. A very Narcissus it is, seeing everywhere the reflection of its own beauties and worshipping itself. But let us look at this matter a little more deeply, noting what the worlds conception of righteousness really is. True, we admire and value righteousness. But why do we admire it? Because it is righteousness? Or because, in a civilized, well-ordered community, righteousness is one of the conditions of success? Do we not, practically speaking, secretly feel that Thomas Carlyle has hit the truth when, in his Heroes and Hero-worship, he virtually tells us, Success is virtue; might makes right? Let righteousness but stand in the way of success, and let the choice lie between the two; and then see which the world will choose. Yes, the world crucified, and, were He to return, would virtually crucify again, the only absolutely righteous One the world has ever seen.
(2) Whose then is the righteousness the conviction of which the Spirit is to bring to the world? Evidently Christs righteousness, But what part or element of Christs righteousness is the righteousness of Which He here speaks? Evidently, righteousness in the general, complete sense of the word; the sum total of all that God requires; the righteousness of a perfect character. In other words, the righteousness of which the Lord here speaks is the righteousness which was incarnated in His own blessed person and career and character and work. And of this righteousness Christs departure and present invisibility are both the illustration and the proof: Of righteousness, because I go to the Father, and ye behold Me no more.
2. Because I go to the Father. This going to the Father involves several profound things. First, it involves Christs own death. And why did Jesus Christ die, and so go home? Just because He was righteous, and lived in a world which did not believe on Him. His very righteousness crucified Him. Again: This going to the Father involves Christs resurrection. And why was Jesus Christ raised from the dead? Just because He was righteous: He was declared to be the Son of God with power by His resurrection from the dead (Rom 1:4). Once more: This going to the Father involves Christs ascension and heavenly enthronement. And why was Jesus Christ exalted to the right hand of the Majesty on high? Just because He was righteous; His exaltation being the reward of His incarnate obedience. His going to the father was both a revelation and a demonstration of Christs righteousness.
3. And ye no longer behold Me. Why did not the risen Lord remain on earth? Why is He not here now, to be a terror to His foes, a comfort to His friends? We behold Him no more in order that we may the better understand what righteousness truly is. For righteousness is not a bulk–so many inches cubic; not a weight–so many pounds avoirdupois. Righteousness is a quality, a character.
4. And of this righteousness the Holy Spirit is the sole concictor: When He is come, He will convict the world in respect of righteousness. It may also be admitted that the world does in a certain sense admire Christs character. Few eulogies are more eloquent, so far as language goes, than the eulogies which eminent unbelievers have pronounced on the Nazarene. But admiration is one thing: loyalty is another thing. There is a tremendous difference between aesthetic admiration and practical devotion; between assent to Christs teaching and consent with Christs character. And what the world needs is to have such a profound conviction of Christs personal, conspicuous, distinctive righteousness as to yearn for it, crying, O Jehovah, be Thou my righteousness (Jer 22:6). And this conviction no power but the Paraclete can effect.
III. THE SPIRITS CONVICTION OF JUDGMENT. But what avails it to be convicted of righteousness, unless at the same time we are convicted that righteousness will be victorious?
1. The prince of this world. If you ask me why Satan was allowed to enter this world and usurp its throne, my only answer is this: I do not know. Here is one of those secret things which belong to Jehovah our God Deu 29:29). Of one thing, however, I am only too sure. Satan is the prince of this world. A usurped principality though it is, the principality is nevertheless his. See how he lords it over mans moral nature, as disclosed in the various religions of the world. Look, for example, at the worlds idolatries: at its Apis, its Baal, its Dagon, its Mithras, its Siva. Look at the Greek and Roman mythologies. Or, to keep within our own land, look at the idolatry of second causes, the worship of antecedent and consequent, the adoration of the powers of nature. What is materialism but a sort of sublimated fetichism? Again: See how Satan lords it over mans psychical nature–over the capacities and affections and desires of men, instigating to all passions of pride and selfishness and ambition and hate and lust. Once more: See how Satan lords it over mans bodily nature, driving his thorns in the flesh to buffet us; bringing disease and pain and death and grave. In fine, look at this world as it actually is; its crimes, frauds, robberies, hates, falsehoods, perfidies, oppressions, cruelties, sensualities, blasphemies; its griefs and woes and deaths: look at all these and similar instigations and works of the devil, and tell me, Is not Satan the prince of this world?
2. But is this to be so always? God be praised, no! for the prince of this world hath been judged. To us indeed Christs judgment of Satan seems to be a process still going on. But this is only because we are finite: for this idea of process, or succession in time, is one of the tokens of human weakness. But to the eye of the Son of God the overthrow of Satan was a single act, and an act already accomplished (Luk 10:17). But how was this judgment on Satan affected?
(1) To answer, first, in a general way: it was effected by the Incarnation. To this end was the Son of God manifested, that He might destroy the works of the devil (1Jn 3:8). The Incarnation itself was a judgment
(2) But to give a more particular answer: Satan was judged by Christs own death. Accordingly, a few days before, Jesus exclaimed: The hour is come, that the Son of Man should be glorified Now is the judgment of this world; now shall the prince of this world be cast out: and I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all men unto Myself. This He said, signifying by what manner of death He should die (Joh 12:28-33).
3. And this judgment on Satan is a judgment of which the world needs to be convicted: and this, not merely in way of intellectual apprehension, but, especially and emphatically, in way of moral conviction.
(1) Thus each Christian needs this conviction for himself. For he is exposed to a thousand discouragements: for example, the sense of infirmity, the enigma of delays and disappointments and adversities, the prevalence of iniquity, the enmity of Satan himself. Verily he does not yet see all things subjected to Jesus Christ (Heb 2:8). Hence he needs the saving power of hope (Rom 8:24). He needs the conviction that Christs grace within him is omnipotent; that the life in Jesus will not be a failure; that the Christians victory, if he holds steadfast, is a matter of certainty. What he needs is to be sealed with the Holy Spirit of promise, which is an earnest of our inheritance unto the redemption of Gods own possession, unto the praise of His glory (Eph 1:14).
(2) And as each Christian needs this conviction for himself in order to his own salvation and victory, so does the Church of the Lamb need it in order to her own going forth and battling under inspiration of assured triumph. What she needs is the certain conviction that the Churchs triumph is a foregone conclusion in the Divine mind; that in virtue of her joint-heirship with Jesus Christ (Rom 8:17), the appointed heir of all things Heb 1:3): she will share His sovereignty, even already owning this world by a sort of reversionary right.
4. But how shall this conviction be wrought? By no power less than the Holy Spirit. When He is come, He will convict the world concerning judgment, because the prince of this world has been judged. Conscience cannot work this conviction: all that conscience can do is to make us aware that we are under Satans power. Neither can philosophy work this conviction: all that philosophy does is to try to make us believe that there is not, and never has been, any Satan at all; that hell is only the obverse side of heaven, or heaven seen in a side-light. The philosopher does, indeed, talk of a golden age. But what kind of a golden age is it? An age when all that is now anomalous and discordant and monstrous shall give way to universal law and order and beauty; in brief, when the world shall develop into a godless paradise, from which Satan and Jesus shall be alike aliens. (G. D.Boardman, D. D.)
Conviction
The idea is complex. It involves the conceptions of authoritative examination, of unquestionable proof, of decisive judgment, of punitive power. Whatever the final issue may be, he who convicts another places the truth of the case in dispute in a close light before him, so that it must be seen and acknowledged as truth. He who then rejects the conclusion which this exposition involves, rejects it with his eyes open and at his peril. Truth seen as truth carries with it condemnation to all who refuse to welcome it. The different aspects of this conviction are brought out in the usage of the word in the New Testament.
1. There is the thorough testing of the real nature of the facts (John Eph 5:13).
2. The application of the truth thus ascertained to the particular person affected (Jam 2:9; Jdg 15:22; 1Co 14:24; 2Ti 4:2; cf. Mat 18:15; Joh 8:9).
3. And that in chastisement (1Ti 5:20; Tit 1:9; Tit 2:15; cf. Eph 5:11); or with a distinct view to the restoration of him who is in the wrong (Rev 3:19; Heb 12:5; Tit 1:13). The Gospel of St. John itself is a monument of the Spirits conviction of the world concerning
I. SIN (Joh 3:19-21; Joh 5:28, &c.; Joh 5:38-47; Joh 8:21, &c.; Joh 8:34-47; Joh 9:41; Joh 14:27; Joh 15:18-24).
II. RIGHTEOUSNESS (Joh 5:30; Joh 7:18; Joh 7:24; Joh 8:28; Joh 8:46; Joh 8:50; Joh 8:54; Joh 12:32; Joh 14:31; Joh 18:37).
III. JUDGMENT (Joh 12:31; Joh 14:30; Joh 18:15). (Bp. Westcott.)
The facts which convince the world
Our Lord has just been telling His disciples how He will equip them, as His champions, for their conflict with the world. He now advances to tell them that the three-fold conviction which they, as counsel for the prosecution, will establish as against the world at the bar, will be based upon three facts: a truth of experience, of history, of revelation, all three facts having reference to Christ and His relation to men. Now these three facts are–the worlds unbelief; Christs ascension and session at the right hand of God; and the judgment of the prince of this world. These three facts are the staple and the strength of the Christian ministry. These are misapprehended, and have failed unless they have driven home to our consciences and understandings the triple conviction of my text.
I. THE REJECTION OF CHRIST AS THE CLIMAX OF THE WORLDS SIN.
1. This is the most striking instance of the gigantic self-assertion of our Lords. The world is full of all manner of evils, but Christ passes them all by and points to a mere negative thing, and says, There is the worst of all sins.
2. And some of us do not think it is sin at all; that man is no more responsible for his belief than he is for the colour of his hair. Well, what is it that a man turns away from when he turns away from Christ? And what does such an attitude indicate as to the rejecter? He stands in the presence of the loveliest revelation of the Divine nature, and he sees no light in it. Why but because he is incapable of seeing God manifest in the flesh he loves the darkness rather than the light. He turns away from the revelation of the most self-sacrificing love. Why but because he bears a heart cased with selfishness? He turns away from the offered hands heaped with the blessing that he needs. Why but because he does not care for the gifts that are offered? Forgiveness, cleansing, purity, a heaven which consists in the perfecting of all these has no attractions for him. The man who is blind to the first, who has no stirrings of responsive gratitude for the second and who does not care for the third, in turning away, manifests and commits a true sin.
3. Then our Lord here presents this fact of mans unbelief as a typical sin. In all other acts of sin you get the poison manipulated into various forms, associated with other elements, disguised more or less. However unlike they may be to one another–the lust of the sensualist, the craft of the cheat, &c.–all of them have this one common root: a diseased and bloated regard to self. The definition of sin is, living to myself and making myself my own centre. The definition of faith is, making Christ my centre and living for Him. And so, if you want to know what is the sinfulness of sin, there it is; it is all packed away in its purest form in the act of rejecting Christ. When you have summoned up the ugliest forms of mans sins, this one overtops them all, because it presents in the simplest form the mother-tincture of all sin, which, variously coloured and perfumed and combined, makes the poison of them all. A heap of rotting, poisonous matter is offensive to many senses, but the colourless, scentless, tasteless drop has the poison in its most virulent form, and is not a bit less virulent though it has been learnedly distilled and christened with a scientific name, and put into a dainty jewelled flask.
II. THE ASCENSION OF CHRIST AS THE PLEDGE AND THE CHANNEL OF THE WORLDS RIGHTEOUSNESS. Christ speaks as if the process of departure were already commenced. It had three stages–death, resurrection, ascension; but these three are all parts of the one departure.
1. The fact of an ascended Christ is the guarantee of His own complete fulfilment of the ideal of a righteous man. Suppose Jesus Christ never rose from the grave, would it be possible to believe that, however beautiful these records of His life, and however lovely the character they reveal, there was really in Him no sin at all? A dead Christ means a Christ who, like the rest of us, had His limitations and His faults. But if it be true that He sprang from the grave because it was not possible that He should be holden of it, and because in His nature there was no proclivity to death, since there had been no indulgence in sin; and if it be true that He ascended up on high because that was His native sphere, as naturally as the water in the valley will rise to the height of the hill from which it has descended, then we can see that God has set His seal upon that life by that resurrection and ascension.
2. And further, with this supernatural fact, stands or falls the possibility of His communicating any of His righteousness to sinful men. If there be no such possibility, what does Jesus Christs beauty of character matter to me? I shall have to stumble on as best I can, sometimes ashamed and rebuked, sometimes stimulated and sometimes reduced to despair, by looking at the record of His life. But there can come nothing other in kind, though, perhaps a little more in degree than comes from any other beautiful soul that has lived. But if He hath ascended up on high, then His righteousness is not a solitary, uncommunicative perfectness for Himself, but like a sun in the heavens, which streams out vivifying and enlightening rays to all that seek His face. If Christ be risen, His righteousness may be the worlds; if Christ be not risen, His righteousness is useless to any but to Himself.
III. THE JUDGMENT OF THE WORLDS PRINCE AS THE PROPHECY OF THE JUDGEMENT OF THE WORLD.
1. The world has a prince. That chaotic agglomeration of diverse forms of evil has yet a kind of anarchic order in it, and, like the fabled serpents locks on the Gorgon head, they intertwine and sting one another, and yet they are a unity. We hear very little about the prince of the world in Scripture. Mercifully the existence of such a being is not plainly revealed until the fact of Christs victory over him is revealed.
2. That prince is judged. The Cross did that, as Jesus Christ over and over again indicates. Since that Cross, the power of evil in the world has been broken in its centre; God has been disclosed, and new forces have been lodged in the heart of humanity, which only need to be developed in order to overcome the evil. Since that auspicious day when He spoiled the principalities and powers, &c., the history of the world has been the judgment of the world. Hoary iniquities have toppled into the ceaseless washing sea of Divine love which has struck against their bases. Ancient evils have vanished, and more are on the point of vanishing. A loftier morality, a deeper conception of sin, new hopes for the world and for men, have all dawned upon mankind; and the prince of the world is led bound, as it were, at the victorious chariot wheels. The central fortress has been captured and the rest is an affair of outposts.
3. A final judgment is coming and that it is, is manifested by the fact that Christ, when He came in the form of a servant and died upon the Cross, judged the prince. When He comes in the form of a King on the great white throne He will judge the world which He has delivered from the prince.
(1) That thought ought to be a hope to us all. Are you glad when you realize the fact that the righteousness which is in the heavens is going to conquer and coerce and clap under the hatches the sin that is riding rampant through the world? Men who did not know half as much of the Divine love and righteousness as we do, called upon the rocks and the hills, &c., to rejoice before the Lord, for He cometh to judge the world.
(2) It ought to be a hope; it is a fear. And there are some of us that do not like to have the conviction driven home to us.
(3) But hope or fear, it is a fact, as certain in the future as the Cross is sure in the past, or the Throne in the present. Have you learned your sin; have you opened your heart to Christs righteousness? Then, if you have, when mens hearts are failing them for fear, and they call on the rocks and the hills to cover them from the face of Him that sitteth upon the throne, we shall lift up our heads, for our redemption draweth nigh. Herein is our love made perfect, that we may have boldness before Him in the day of judgment. (A. Maclaren, D. D.)
The fixing of impressions
When Daguerre was working at his sun-pictures his great difficulty was to fix them. The light came and imprinted the image; but when the tablet was drawn from the camera the image had vanished. Our lamentations is like his–our want the same; a fixing solution that shall arrest and detain the fugitive impressions. He discovered the chemical power which turned the evanescent into the durable. There is a Divine agency at hand that can fix the truth upon the heart of man–Gods Holy Spirit. (J. Stoughton, D. D.)
Fuente: Biblical Illustrator Edited by Joseph S. Exell
Verse 8. He will reprove] , He will demonstrate these matters so clearly as to leave no doubt on the minds of those who are simple of heart; and so fully as to confound and shut the mouths of those who are gainsayers. See Ac 2:1, c.
The world] The Jewish nation first, and afterwards the Gentile world for his influences shall not be confined to one people, place, or time.
Fuente: Adam Clarke’s Commentary and Critical Notes on the Bible
When the Holy Spirit is come in the days of Pentecost, he, by his inward operation in mens hearts, and by his gifts bestowed upon you that are his apostles,
will reprove the world.
By the world here, may be meant all men and women, as it is used in some texts; neither is the operation of the Spirit here mentioned to be restrained to carnal and wicked men.
The word translated
reprove:
1. Lets us know, that the Holy Ghost is here mentioned, not in the notion mentioned Joh 14:16, as a Comforter, but in the larger notion, (there mentioned), as an Advocate; which possibly had been a better translation of it, Joh 16:7, than Comforter, as we translate it; for it is not the proper work of the Spirit considered as a Comforter to reprove, but it is proper enough to the notion of an Advocate to do it.
2. The word here translated reprove doth often so signify, and is so translated, Luk 3:19; Joh 3:20; Eph 5:11,13. It signifieth real rebukes, Heb 12:5; Rev 3:19. But it also signifieth to convince, Joh 8:9,46; 1Co 14:24; 2Ti 4:2; Tit 1:9; and in several other texts. Yet it is one thing to convince the understanding and judgment; another thing to prevail upon the will, by reason of the total corruption of our souls; so that we will not embrace what we confess is truth, nor do what we know is best; but, through the stubbornness of our will, we resist the light and conviction of our understandings.
The Holy Spirit is here promised, not only (as before) to lead men into truth, by a work of illumination, but to bow the hearts and wills of some in the world, to the embracing of it, and living up to it, while others yet remain without excuse. The things of which the Spirit is promised to convince the world, are
sin, righteousness, and judgment, which are further opened in the following verses.
Fuente: English Annotations on the Holy Bible by Matthew Poole
8. And when he is come, he will,c.This is one of the passages most pregnant with thought in theprofound discourses of Christ with a few great strokes depicting alland every part of the ministry of the Holy Ghost in the worldHisoperation with reference to individuals as well as the mass, onbelievers and unbelievers alike [OLSHAUSEN].
he will reproveThis istoo weak a word to express what is meant. Reproof is indeedimplied in the term employed, and doubtless the word begins with it.But convict or convince is the thing intended; and asthe one expresses the work of the Spirit on the unbelievingportion of mankind, and the other on the believing, it isbetter not to restrict it to either.
Fuente: Jamieson, Fausset and Brown’s Commentary Critical and Explanatory on the Whole Bible
And when he is come,…. The coming of the Spirit here, chiefly designs his descent upon the apostles, at the day of “Pentecost”: as the things ascribed to him, and which were then done by him, clearly show; though it may also include his coming along with, and by the ministration of the Gospel, into the hearts of his people at conversion, in all after ages of time:
he will reprove the world of sin, of righteousness, and of judgment: by “the world” is principally meant, the Jews; the world among whom Christ personally was, who knew him not, disbelieved him, rejected him as the Messiah, hated and persecuted him, even unto death; though not to the exclusion of the Gentiles, the whole world that lies in wickedness; since both joined, and were concerned in these things, and reproved of them; which “reproving”, as it may respect different persons, may intend both such reproofs and convictions, as are not attended with conversion, and issue in salvation; and such as are powerful, spiritual, and to saving purposes: the several things the Spirit of God is said to reprove of, being repeated in the following verses, with reasons or specifications annexed to them, will be there considered.
Fuente: John Gill’s Exposition of the Entire Bible
And he ( ). Emphatic demonstrative masculine pronoun.
When he is come (). Second aorist active participle of , “having come” or “coming.”
Will convict the world ( ). Future active of , old word for confuting, convicting by proof already in John 3:29; John 8:46. Jesus had been doing this (7:7), but this is pre-eminently the work of the Holy Spirit and the most needed task today for our complacent age.
In respect of sin ( ). Concerning the reality of sin as missing the mark and as wronging God and man, and not a mere slip or animal instinct or devoid of moral responsibility or evil. Some scientists and psychologists (Freudians and behaviourists) seem bent on destroying man’s sense of sin. Hence crime waves even in youth.
And of righteousness ( ). The opposite of “sin” and to be yearned for after conviction. Cf. Ro 1:19-3:21 about the necessity of the God-kind of righteousness and the Sermon on the Mount for Christ’s idea of righteousness.
And of judgment ( ). As certain to come as condemnation because of sin and the lack of righteousness. These are not played out motives in human life, but basal. For this ministry we have the help of the Paraclete. The Paraclete is here spoken of “not as man’s advocate with God (1Jo 2:1), but as Christ’s advocate with the world” (Bernard).
Fuente: Robertson’s Word Pictures in the New Testament
Will reprove [] . See on 3 20. Rev., convict.
Of sin – righteousness – judgment [] Literally, concerning. Rev., in respect of. Of gives a wrong impression, viz., that He will convict the world of being sinful, unrighteous, and exposed to judgment. This is true, but the preposition implies more. He will convict the world as respects these three; that is, will convict it of ignorance of their real nature.
Righteousness [] . Only here and ver. 10 in the Gospel. It occurs in the First Epistle and in Revelation.
Fuente: Vincent’s Word Studies in the New Testament
1) “And when he is come,” (kai elthon ekeinos) “And when that one comes,” to work and witness in and through each of you all, as promised, Luk 24:49; Act 1:8.
2) “He will reprove the world,” (elegksei ton kosmon peri hamartais) “He will reprove, convict, or reprimand the world,” the world as opposed to Christ.
a) “Of sin,” (peri hamartais) “Concerning sin,” or lawlessness, as when Peter preached on the day of Pentecost, Act 2:36-37; Act 7:51-54; Act 9:5; that all are sinners, condemned, and sin has wages that must be paid by someone, Rom 3:19; Rom 3:23; Rom 6:23; Joh 3:18.
b) “And of righteousness,” (kai peri dikaiosunes) “And concerning righteousness,” Rom 1:17; Rom 10:1-4; What is and what is not righteous, morally, ethically, or doctrinally; and of righteousness that is found in Jesus alone, in and through Jesus only, Isa 42:21; 2Co 5:21.
c) “And of judgment:” (kai peri kriseos) “And concerning judgment,” that is certain, no man can escape, whether saved or unsaved, Heb 9:27-28; 2Co 5:10-11; Rev 20:13. Sin, righteousness, and the judgment to come are the three facts that the Holy Spirit continually witnesses, even as when Paul preached to Felix, Act 24:25.
Fuente: Garner-Howes Baptist Commentary
8. And when he is come. Passing by the diversity of expositions, which we have received in consequence of the obscurity of the passage, I shall only state what appears to me to be in accordance with Christ’s true meaning. He had promised his Spirit to the disciples; and now he praises the excellence of the gift from its effect, because this Spirit will not only guide, support, and protect them in private, but will extend more widely his power and efficacy.
He will convince the world; that is, he will not remain shut up in you, but; his power will go forth from you to be displayed to the whole world. He therefore promises to them a Spirit, who will be the Judge of the world, and by whom their preaching will be so powerful and efficacious, that it will bring into subjection those who formerly indulged in unbounded licentiousness, and were restrained by no fear or reverence.
It ought to be observed, that in this passage Christ does not speak of secret revelations, but of the power of the Spirit, which appears in the outward doctrine of the Gospel, and in the voice of men. For how comes it that the voice proceeding from the mouth of a man (94) penetrates into the hearts, takes root there, and at length yields fruit, changing hearts of stone into hearts of flesh, and renewing men, but because the Spirit of Christ quickens it? Otherwise it would be a dead letter and a useless sound, as Paul says in that beautiful passage, in which he boasts of being a minister of the Spirit, (2Co 3:6,) because God wrought powerfully in his doctrine. The meaning therefore is, that, though the Spirit had been given to the apostles, they would be endued with a heavenly and Divine power, by which they would exercise jurisdiction over the whole world. Now, this is ascribed to the Spirit rather than to themselves, because they will have no power of their own, but will be only ministers and organs, and the Holy Spirit will be their director and governor. (95)
Under the term world are, I think, included not only those who would be truly converted to Christ, but hypocrites and reprobates. For there are two ways in which the Spirit convinces men by the preaching of the Gospel. Some are moved in good earnest, so as to bow down willingly, and to assent willingly to the judgment by which they are condemned. Others, though they are convinced of guilt and cannot escape, yet do not sincerely yield, or submit themselves to the authority and jurisdiction of the Holy Spirit, but, on the contrary, being subdued they groan inwardly, and, being overwhelmed with confusion, still do not cease to cherish obstinacy within their hearts.
We now perceive in what manner the Spirit was to convince the world by the apostles. It was, because God revealed his judgment in the Gospel, by which their consciences were struck, and began to perceive their evils and the grace of God. for the verb ἐλέγχειν here signifies to convince or convict; and, for understanding this passage, not a little light will be obtained from the words of the Apostle Paul, when he says,
If all shall prophesy, and an unbeliever or unlearned man enter, he is convicted by all, he is judged by all, and thus shall the secrets of his heart be made manifest, (1Co 14:23.)
In that passage Paul speaks particularly of one kind of conviction, that is; when the Lord brings his elect to repentance by the Gospel; but this plainly shows in what manner the Spirit of God, by the sound of the human voice, constrains men, who formerly were not accustomed to his yoke, to acknowledge and submit to his authority.
A question now arises, For what purpose did Christ say this? Some think that he points out the cause of the hatred which he had mentioned; as if he had said, that the reason why they will be hated by the world is, that the Spirit, on the other hand, will earnestly solicit the world by means of them. But I rather agree with those who tell us that the design of Christ was different, as I stated briefly at the commencement of the exposition of this verse; for it was of great importance that the apostles should know that the gift of the Spirit, which had been promised to them, was of no ordinary value. He therefore describes its uncommon excellence, by saying that God will, in this way, erect his tribunal for judging the whole world.
(94) “ La voix sortant de la bouche d’un homme.”
(95) “ Leur conducteur et gouverneur.”
Fuente: Calvin’s Complete Commentary
(8) And when he is come, he will reprove the world.Better, as in margin, convince the world. (Comp. Joh. 3:20; Joh. 8:46.) The only other passages where it occurs in the Gospels are in Mat. 18:15, and Luk. 3:19. It is not in the better reading of Joh. 8:9; but it occurs not unfrequently in the Epistles. (See especially Note on 1Co. 14:24.) This conviction of the world is by witness concerning Christ (Joh. 15:26). It is the revelation to the hearts of men of the character and work of Christ, and, therefore, a refutation of the evil in their hearts. The result of this conviction is two-fold, according as men embrace it, accept its chastening discipline, and are saved by it; or reject it, and in the rejection harden their hearts, and are thus condemned by it. (Comp. 2Co. 2:15-16.) The effect of St. Peters sermon on the Day of Pentecost is the first great historical comment on this verse; but the comment is continued in the whole history of the Churchs work. The remainder of the verse enumerates the three steps in this conviction, which are more fully defined in the three following verses.
Fuente: Ellicott’s Commentary for English Readers (Old and New Testaments)
8. When he is come This gift is not a mere fluid or emanation shed off from the divine essence or person; it is a He, the essence or person himself. It is not an influence shed from the Spirit, but it is the influencing Spirit. It is not a vapour, but a living Being and Person. The qualities, actions, efficiencies of a living agent are, through the whole passage, ascribed to this Comforter. There is no alternative left but either to pervert the passage, or to acknowledge herein the presence of the third person of the adorable Trinity.
Will reprove Will demonstrate, (so the word signifies,) so that the conscience and mind cannot but more or less clearly perceive the truth. By this Spirit’s power responsibility is made possible. The inability, natural to the human heart, either to perceive or obey divine truth, is more or less dissipated. The Spirit shows to the soul the things of Christ; salvation is brought within its reach, and condemnation for rejection becomes just.
The world The world viewed as apart from the redemptive scheme; the race as it is left in Adam without Christ. This is a fallen world, and it is the purchased Spirit that comes to reconstruct it. Over this world a prince (Joh 16:11) has usurped a dark despotic rule, and the aim of Father, Son, and Spirit is that he be judged, cast out, (Joh 16:31,) and finally sent to the bottomless pit. This, however, is not to be done by immediate force, but by the conviction which the Holy Spirit may work by his gentle dealings with the free volitional spirits of men.
Sin righteousness judgment These are the three great topics presented by the Holy Spirit to the human conscience and intellect.
Sin, from rejection of Christ; righteousness, through the ever-living intercession of Christ; judgment upon persistent sin, executed by Christ.
Fuente: Whedon’s Commentary on the Old and New Testaments
“And he, when he is come, will convict the world in respect of sin, and of righteousness and of judgment. Of sin because they believe not on me. Of righteousness because I am going to the Father and you see me no more. Of judgment because the prince of this world has been judged.”
‘When He is come.’ From the previous verse we can add ‘to you’. The Holy Spirit is not some vague wind blowing around the world. He comes to and on God’s people, and it is through them that He carries out His activity.
‘He will convict the world.’ The basic meanings possible for this verb are (1) “to convict or convince someone of something”, (2) “to bring to light or expose something, and thus reveal guilt”, and (3) “to correct or punish someone”. The last is clearly not His purpose at this time. It may well be that it is a combination of the first two that is in mind. He convinces and convicts. This work will mainly be accomplished through His disciples and their lives and preaching, followed by the lives and preaching of those who follow them.
‘He will convict the world of sin — because it believes not on me’. This means that He will make clear the sin of men’s unbelief. Not to believe in Christ is the greatest sin of all for it is to sin against Him Who is the light, and reveals the darkness of the heart. It is to hide from the light. The light has shone revealing the truth about God and His love for man revealed in the cross and in the giving of His only Son. By rejecting Him men show what their hearts are really like deep down. Thus through God’s people the Spirit will expose men’s unbelief, and cause them to be declared guilty. Guilty because of what they are, and guilty of not believing in, and responding to, the light from God. He will bring home the fact that when the world as a whole rejects the One Who has come as a light into the world they do so because their deeds are evil, and they are therefore condemned because of it (Joh 3:16-21).
We can compare here Joh 12:37. ‘Although He had done so many signs before them yet they did not believe on Him.’ The sin of these men against the light from God was the more inexcusable because the coming of the One Who was the light was testified to by such great signs. They had no excuse at all. Had their hearts been open their response would have been certain. But they had in fact deliberately closed their minds to Him. They were therefore doubly guilty.
For as Paul elsewhere makes clear, all men are without excuse for God has revealed Himself in other ways too and men have still closed their hearts and minds (Rom 1:18-20).
There are, however, the comparatively few, who will be awakened by the light that has come from God, and will respond to it (Joh 3:18-21). They too are convinced of the sinfulness of not responding to the light, they too are made aware of the sinfulness of their own hearts. But in their case their response is to come to Him to receive forgiveness and eternal life.
‘He will convict the world of righteousness — because I am going to the Father and you see me no more.’ The presence of Jesus in the world has revealed more fully than ever before what true righteousness is. He was righteousness personified and His life and teaching had shown forth righteousness in all its true glory. Thus the work of the Spirit may be seen as taking over that task of revealing what true righteousness is to the world, when Jesus has gone to the Father, again mainly through God’s people and through God’s word.
He will convict the world of righteousness because He will bring home to them what true righteousness is. He will convince some of them of their own need of righteousness. He will bring home to them how they can obtain perfect righteousness through Christ.
So will the world continue to be faced with the light, to have the truth about itself and its deeds exposed. The righteousness and the righteous teaching of God’s people will convince some and lead to their response to Him. But that same activity will also face those who reject Christ with their sinfulness, and will declare them guilty, ‘so that every mouth may be stopped and the whole world be declared guilty before God’ (Rom 3:19). And they will not like it.
This convicting of ‘righteousness’ may also be seen as convincing men of their need for imputed righteousness. They will recognise that there is a need for them to have righteousness put to their account by the One Who as the Righteous One bore their sins and offered them His righteousness (2Co 5:21; 1Co 1:30), because their own righteousness can never be enough. These two aspects of righteousness, true righteousness and imputed righteousness are but two facets of the same jewel. Imputed righteousness is the true righteousness of Christ put to men’s account. The awareness of true righteousness will make them aware of their need, because they are not truly righteous. The offer of imputed righteousness will provide a way by which they can receive righteousness and become acceptable to God. And then they will begin to live righteously and teach righteously and the Holy Spirit will convict the world of righteousness. Imputed righteousness inevitably results in practical righteousness as God comes home to the heart, and the result is that that world is also faced up to true righteousness.
So the Spirit’s convicting of righteousness may be seen as declaring that, as a result of Christ’s offering of Himself, the Holy Spirit will, through God’s people and through His word, bring home God’s offer of imputed righteousness through Him, which men will either accept ‘unto righteousness’ or reject ‘unto judgment’. However this awareness of the need for imputed righteousness can only arise from a recognition of what righteousness really is. Without awareness of the one, men will not recognise their need for the other.
Alternately some would argue that the idea behind ‘righteousness’ here is of vindication, and thus they see it as meaning that the Holy Spirit will vindicate Christ and establish His righteousness before the world. Thus when Christ goes to the Father it will be a proof that the Father has vindicated Him, something that the Spirit will bring home to the world.
Indeed all may be seen together in that the Spirit will reveal true righteousness, including revealing the true righteousness of Christ which can be imputed to the believer, something which will result in the offer of mercy to man through that righteousness and the vindication of Christ, together with the imparting of true righteousness which will result in men becoming truly righteous.
‘He will convict the world of judgment — because the prince of this world has been judged.’ This means that His work will be such that it demonstrates the judgment of ‘the prince of this world’. The prince of this world is finally Satan (Luk 4:5-7) but the term also incorporates all who rule in this world in antagonism to God. For they rule under Satan (which was why at Jesus’ temptation Satan could offer Him authority over the whole world). This then involves in judgment all those who ‘lie in his (the Evil One’s) arms’ (1Jn 5:19). Again in Paul’s words, ‘the whole world is declared guilty before God’ (Rom 3:19), along with its supernatural prince. Some will be convinced of this by the cross and respond to Christ. Others will stand convicted and condemned.
We must compare in this regard Jesus’ words in Joh 12:31-32, ‘now is the judgment of this world, now shall the prince of this world be cast out’. There they are linked with His being lifted up on the cross. As Jesus is lifted up on the cross for man’s sin, and then finally resurrected in vindication of His righteousness, this expresses and declares God’s judgment on the world for its sins, and on its ways and on its prince. In the final analysis this can only refer to Satan for it was he and his minions who were defeated at the cross (Col 2:15). It is this revealed judgment that the Holy Spirit will bring home against the world, declaring the world guilty, producing response from some and rejection to final judgment in others.
Thus we may sum up that the work of the Holy Spirit through the disciples, His people and His word, will be to make mankind aware of its need and sinfulness, especially in respect of its attitude to the One Whom God sent. He will bring home to man what true righteousness is, and how he has fallen short of it, and how Christ has provided true righteousness for guilty man on the cross resulting in His own vindication. And He will make clear the final judgment of God on all who fail to respond as evidenced by His work and victory on the cross, while in the light of that revealed judgment causing some to be convinced and respond to Him..
Fuente: Commentary Series on the Bible by Peter Pett
The reproof of the world:
v. 8. And when He is come, He will reprove the world of sin and of righteousness and of judgment:
v. 9. of sin, because they believe not on Me;
v. 10. of righteousness, because I go to My Father, and ye see Me no more;
v. 11. of judgment, because the prince of this world is judged. And that Person, the Holy Spirit, coming into the world, will convict the world. That is one special function and activity of the Spirit, to convict the unbelieving world on three counts, with regard to sin, justice, and judgment. This the Lord explains. Of sin the world stands accused and unable to deny the charge that they do not believe on Christ, because they willfully choose unbelief. That is the chief sin of the world, of the unbelievers, that they reject Christ and His Gospel. All other sins do not come into consideration if a person but believes in the forgiveness of sins. And therefore unbelief, which refuses to accept the forgiveness of sins, deliberately cuts itself off from salvation. This fact the Spirit impresses upon the minds and hearts of the unbelievers. “The world will not hear such preaching that they should all be sinners before God, and that their pious works have no value before Him, but that they rather through this crucified Christ must obtain mercy and salvation. Such unbelief against Christ becomes the sum and substance of all sins that lead a person into damnation, so that there is no help for him. ” In close connection with this fact is the further truth that the Spirit convicts the unbelieving world of righteousness, since Jesus was going to the Father and would no longer be with them according to His visible presence. The true righteousness consists in this, that Christ, by His going to the Father, by His suffering, death, and resurrection, earned and prepared the righteousness which is acceptable with God. But the world wants nothing of Christ’s blood and righteousness, preferring its own self-righteousness. And so both righteousness and salvation are lost to them by unbelief, as the Spirit will impress upon them. And He will finally convict them of the judgment, because the ruler of this world is judged and condemned. The redemption of Christ sealed the devil’s doom; he has lost might and right with regard to mankind since sin was conquered by Jesus. This the Holy Ghost testifies to the hearts of the unbelievers, showing them that because of their unbelief they will have to share the doom of the devil, that they are condemned for rejecting the Conqueror of Satan. This also serves for the comfort of the believers, since they know that the world is even now convicted.
Fuente: The Popular Commentary on the Bible by Kretzmann
Joh 16:8. And when he is come, he will reprove He will convince, &c. “And he, coming from on high, by virtue of my death, and in consequence of my resurrection and exaltation, shall carry on my cause in this lower world by demonstratively convincing both Jews and Gentiles, wherever my gospel comes, of their guilt, depravity, and obnoxiousness to the wrath of God; of the righteousness which I bring in by my obedience and sufferings to the death of the cross, for the justification of such as are conscious that they have no righteousness of their own to recommend them to the divine favour and acceptance; and of my holy and judicial power, in setting to rights the disorders of human nature by sanctifying grace, in overthrowing Satan’s dominion, and in passing judgment against him and the finally unbelieving and unrighteous at the great day of account.” See the following notes.
Fuente: Commentary on the Holy Bible by Thomas Coke
Joh 16:8 . [171] The threefold ministry of the Paraclete towards the unbelieving Jews and Gentiles. Thus will He be your counsel against the !
] convict , namely, through His testimony of me, Joh 15:26 . This , of which the apostles were to be the bearers in their office, is the activity which convinces the person concerned ( arguendi ratio exprobans ), which reveals to him his unrighteousness, and puts him to shame (Joh 3:20 , Joh 8:9 ; Joh 8:46 ; 1Co 14:24 ; Tit 1:9 ; Mat 18:15 ; Luk 3:19 , et al. ), and the consequence of which may be in the different subjects either conversion (1Co 14:24 ), or hardening and condemnation (Act 24:25 ; Rom 11:7 ff.). To apprehend it only of the latter side of the matter (Erasmus and many others, including De Wette, Brckner, and especially Wetzel, following the Fathers), is not justified by , since the is intended, not of the , but of the devil, and stands opposed to the Johannean view of the deliverance of the world through Christ; the unbelieving world (Joh 16:9 ) is to be convicted of the sin of unbelief; and this, to him who is not hardened, is the way to faith (comp. Joh 17:20-21 ), and therewith to separation from the world. Godet well designates the threefold as the moral victory of the Spirit through the preaching of the apostles. As the first prominent example, see the discourse of Peter, Act 2 , with its consequences.
, . . .] The objective contents of the set forth separately in three parts (themata). See, respecting the individual points, on Joh 16:9-11 .
[171] See Wetzel, b. d. Elenchus des Parakl . Joh 16:8-13 , in the Zeitschrift f. Luth. Theol. 1856, p. 624 ff.
Fuente: Heinrich August Wilhelm Meyer’s New Testament Commentary
DISCOURSE: 1702
OFFICES OF THE HOLY SPIRIT
Joh 16:8-11. And when he is come, he will reprove the world of sin, and of righteousness, and of judgment: of sin, because they believe not on me; of righteousness, because I go to my Father, and ye see me no more; of judgment, because the prince of this world is judged.
IN judging of the dispensations of Gods providence or grace, we are extremely apt to err. Hence we often mourn for things, which, if we knew the end of them, would afford us occasion for joy. This was the case with the Disciples, who were dejected on account of their Lords approaching departure from them. To relieve their minds, our Lord not only promised them another Comforter, but told them for what ends and purposes that Comforter should come:
I.
To convince the world of sin
This office the Spirit executed among the Jews
[The sin of rejecting Christ was that which the Spirit was more particularly to reveal to the world; and he discovered it fully by his miraculous operations on the Disciples [Note: Christ had rested, as it were, the whole credit of his Messiahship on this one point: consequently, the visible descent of the Spirit, accompanied with the miraculous gift of tongues, was such an attestation to Christ, as could not be doubted, and such a reproof to his murderers as could not be withstood.], and wrought an irresistible conviction of it by his gracious influences on the hearts of thousands.]
This office too he yet executes in the Christian Church
[The external testimony which he gave, remains the same in all ages: the internal witness is given to those only whom God has ordained to life. To them the Spirit shews the number, the greatness, the malignity of their sins; and particularly, the guilt, and danger of that unbelief, in which they have ignorantly lain. This is the Spirits work; nor is it wrought in any, but by his almighty power [Note: Zec 4:6. 2Co 5:5. 1Co 12:11.].]
If he proceeded no farther, he would not be a Comforter; but it is his office also,
II.
To convince the world of righteousness
This also was accomplished by him on his first descent from heaven
[Christ, though professing himself the Saviour of the world, had been crucified as a malefactor. The Spirit therefore was to evince, both that Christ was a righteous person, and that through his righteousness others also might be saved. Accordingly, by his descent, the Spirit proved these things beyond a doubt. He shewed that Christ was accepted of the Father (which he would not have been, if he had been an impostor), and had finished all that was necessary for our salvation; seeing that, if any thing had remained to have been done on earth, he must have returned hither in order to complete it [Note: See the text.]. He moreover inclined, and enabled multitudes to believe on him for righteousness, whom they had just before reprobated as worthy of universal execration.]
And yet daily is he occupied in glorifying Christ among us
[Whomsoever the Spirit convinces thoroughly of sin, he leads also to discoveries of Christ. He shews to the soul the suitableness and allsufficiency of Christs righteousness to all those who trust in it [Note: ver. 14.], and leads them, with holy glorying, to say, In the Lord have I righteousness and strength [Note: Isa 45:24.].]
He has yet further undertaken,
III.
To convince the world of judgment
He shewed to the first Christians that Satan was a vanquished foe
[By the descent of the Spirit it was manifest, that Christ had triumphed over sin and Satan, death and hell [Note: Eph 4:8. Col 2:15.]. By his gracious influences also, he rescued myriads from their power, and inspired them with an holy confidence, that they should finally prevail over all their spiritual enemies [Note: 2Ti 1:12.].]
Thus at this day does he cause the weakest to exult over their fallen enemy
[However active and malicious Satan is, his head is bruised [Note: Gen 3:15.], his power is limited [Note: Rev 2:10. 1Pe 5:8.], his doom is fixed [Note: Rom 16:20.]. Of this the Holy Spirit assures the weak and trembling believer; and puts into his mouth, even in the midst of all his conflicts, that triumphant song [Note: Rom 8:38-39.]]
Uses
1.
Of conviction
[All true Christians have received the Spirit for the ends and purposes for which he is here promised. In vain then will be our orthodoxy in sentiment, if we have not this evidence of our conversion to God [Note: Rom 8:9.]. Let us pray that the Spirit may be poured out upon us; and let our views of our guilt and weakness lead us to glory in Christ alone.]
2.
Of consolation
[Are we bowed down with a sense of sin? we may be sure that Christ has sent his Spirit to work that conviction in us; and that, if we be instant in prayer, he will, by the same Spirit, lead us also to a view of his righteousness. Are we ready to despond by reason of the power of sin? the resistance which the Holy Spirit has enabled us already to make to its dominion, is a pledge that we shall be more than conquerors, through Him that loved us [Note: Rom 8:37.]. Let us only seek the Spirit as our Comforter, and we need regret no loss, no pain, no trouble, that may be the means of bringing him into our hearts.]
Fuente: Charles Simeon’s Horae Homileticae (Old and New Testaments)
And when he is come, he will reprove the world of sin, and of righteousness, and of judgement; (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 judgement, because the prince of this world is judged. (12) 1 have yet many things to say unto you, but ye cannot bear them now. (13) Howbeit, 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 shew you things to come. (14) He shall glorify me: for he shall receive of mine, and shall shew it unto you.
Reader! It must have been a matter of great importance, that the Lord Jesus in this farewell sermon, dwelt so much upon the Person and Offices of God the Holy Ghost. Never would Christ have described him so particularly, had it not been, that his Church might be taught everything concerning Him, in whose teachings and consolations they were so highly concerned. I pray the Reader to indulge me in my endeavors to follow the footsteps of the Lord Jesus, in marking some at least, of the several features of character, by which God the Spirit, according to the Lord’s representation of him, was to be known.
The regeneration, which God the Holy Ghost, in his covenant office-character, engaged to perform on the whole Church of Christ, no doubt comprehended, (as the greater includes the less,) all his blessed work. And this sovereign act, as hath been already observed, (see note on Joh 14:16-27 ) is no doubt in point of importance, equal to the electing love of God the Father, or the betrothing and redeeming love of God the Son. But in the Almighty act of regeneration, is included every other office of God the Spirit. For as an Apostle under his authority hath said, in all the manifestations of the divine life, in which the Church is changed into the same image from glory to glory; it is, even as by the Spirit of the Lord. 2Co 3:18 .
It will not be improper, neither I hope unprofitable, to take a brief view of some of those office-characters of God the Holy Ghost, which have not been already noticed, and which the Lord Jesus hath specially marked in this sermon. They will serve in some degree to manifest the love of the Spirit to the Church.
I pass over, (because not spoken of in this place by Jesus,) the consideration of the work of God the Holy Ghost on the Person of Christ. This forms a separate subject, but yet highly worthy of the first attention when speaking of the office-characters of God the Spirit, in relation to the everlasting covenant. He it was who formed the human nature of the Son of God in the womb. Mat 1:20Mat 1:20 ; Luk 1:35 . He it was who consecrated Christ to the Messiahship. Isa 11:1-2 ; Act 10:38 . He it was who anointed Christ to all his offices, and so Jesus himself declared. Isa 61:1 with Luk 4:18 . He it was who wrought with Jesus in all his miracles. Mat 12:28 ; Act 10:38 who wrought with Christ and the Father in his resurrection. Rom 8:11Rom 8:11 . And He it is who now proclaims Christ in the hearts of his redeemed, when, like Christ in his resurrection from the dead, they are quickened from the death of sin by the Holy Ghost. Eph 2:1 . For none can say, that Jesus is the Lord, but by the Holy Ghost. 1Co 12:3 . All these, and others of a like nature mentioned in scripture, are in proof of the work of God the Holy Ghost upon the Person of Jesus; and in a subject, where at any time the Sacred Writers are speaking of his office-characters in the covenant, these things ought not to be overlooked or forgotten. But the Lord Jesus in this sermon, mentions only his gracious acts towards, and over the Church; and therefore it is to such only I would call more particularly the Reader’s attention.
The Lord Jesus begins the subject here in speaking of the office-work of the Holy Ghost, with observing how he will work conviction in the heart on account of sin; how he will proclaim righteousness, even the personal righteousness of Jesus, as all-effectual and complete in the great work of redemption; and of judgment in the fullest establishment of the Lord Jesus, as Judge of quick and dead, which the Jews had attempted to call in question and deny.
Reader! it is a blessed confirmation of the truths of God, when the outward ministry of God’s word, is inwrought in the heart by the inward effect. Will you allow me to ask, whether God the Spirit hath so glorified Christ in your heart by such testimonies of his office-work as these, in receiving of Christ’s and shewing unto you? The question finds an answer as luminous as though written with a sun beam, when God the Holy Ghost hath truly wrought these operations in the heart and conscience. He proves to a man’s own feelings, the filth and guilt, and the loathsome nature of sin. He holds up Jesus in such views of his glory, greatness, fulness, suitableness, and all-sufficiency, as determine the soul to behold in him, everything suited to the want and misery of the sinner. He shews not only the ability, but the readiness of Jesus to receive, and bless the sinner in his low estate. And at length so overrules all the arguments, which sin, unbelief, the world, or the powers of darkness raise up in the way, that the heart is constrained to come to Him; and the soul, that in the first awakenings, under the conviction of sin, trembled with apprehensions to approach; at length finds the Holy Ghost witnessing to the gracious estate of an interest in Christ, from the gift of God the Father, before the foundation of the world. Gal 4:6 ; Rom 8:14-17 .
I pray the Reader to notice another of the blessed employments of the Holy Ghost in his office-work, namely, in glorifying Christ Jesus. And how is this done? Surely in the most blessed way and manner that the imagination can conceive. God the Spirit holds up the Lord Jesus as a most complete Savior. And while he shews us the sinfulness of our nature, he shews the holiness of Jesus; and with these different views, he so graciously works in the soul by his persuasive power and grace, that he inclines the heart of the true Israel of God to receive Christ, and to barter sin for righteousness, and joy for sorrow; that while Jesus is glorified, the sinner is made happy; and thus this office of the Holy Ghost is most compleatly answered.
I have known, however, some precious souls at a loss to apprehend what is meant by the Holy Ghost’s receiving of Christ, and shewing to them. They have been fearful that the application hath not been made. But, if they were to attend to the scripture words and not their own, and as Jesus hath stated this office-work of God the Spirit, the difficulty would vanish. The Lord does not say, that the Holy Ghost shall glorify him by receiving of his, and applying to his people; but shewing them. And what is it to shew the people? Certainly it is simply this, and no more. The Holy Ghost shews the sinner his own wants, and Christ’s suitableness to supply those wants, and readiness in supplying them. And thus having shewn that a rich Savior is suited for a poor sinner, and a poor sinner for a rich Savior; sweetly and powerfully the blessed Spirit inclines the heart of the needy sinner to receive, and belief to the salvation of his soul. Hence Christ is glorified, and the sinner is made happy. This is to believe the record God hath given of his Son!
Fuente: Hawker’s Poor Man’s Commentary (Old and New Testaments)
8 And when he is come, he will reprove the world of sin, and of righteousness, and of judgment:
Ver. 8. And when he is come, &c. ] This text had been easy, had not commentators made it so knotty.
He will reprove ] Or undeceive the world, by refuting those odd conceits and erroneous opinions, that men had before drunk in, and were possessed of, . Ita ut nihil habeat, quod praetexat. He shall clearly convince them of the hatefulness of sin, of the necessity of getting righteousness, both imputed and imparted; both that of justification, inherent in Christ, imputed to us, and that of sanctification also, imparted by Christ, inherent in us; this latter is here called judgment, as it is likewise Mat 12:20 . Till he bring forth ( ) judgment to victory; that is, weak grace (called before a broken reed, smoking wick) to perfect conquest over corruption. Cum vi quadam, frustra obsistente Satana. Compare with this text that of the apostle,1Co 6:111Co 6:11 ; Such were some of you ( scilicet, mundus immundus ), but ye are (in general) washed from your sins, of the hatefulness whereof ye are now clearly convinced; and (in particular) ye are sanctified by the Spirit of our God, and ye are justified in the name, that is, by the merit, of the Lord Jesus the righteous, who is the propitiation for our sins.
Fuente: John Trapp’s Complete Commentary (Old and New Testaments)
8 11. ] We have here, in a few deep and wonderful words, the work of the Spirit on the world set forth. This work He shall begin , scil. : not, however, merely ‘ by your means ,’ but personally: so that it is not the work and witness of the Apostles which is spoken of, except in so far as they are servants of the Holy Spirit, but ( ) His own immediate personal working.
] It is difficult to give in one word the deep meaning: ‘ convince ’ approaches perhaps the nearest to it, but does not express the double sense of , which is manifestly here intended of a convincing unto salvation, and a convicting unto condemnation: ‘ reprove ’ is far too weak, conveying merely the idea of an objective rebuke, whereas reaches into the heart, and works subjectively in both the above-mentioned ways. See the whole question amply discussed in Archdeacon Hare’s Mission of the Comforter, vol. ii. note K.
Lcke’s comment is valuable: “The testimony of the Holy Ghost in behalf of Christ as opposed to the unbelieving world (ch. Joh 15:26 ) is essentially a refutation , , a demonstration of its wrong and error.” All the apostolic preaching, as addressed to the world, takes necessarily this polemical form (1Ti 5:20 ; 2Ti 4:2 ; 2Ti 3:16 ; Tit 1:9 ; Tit 1:13 ; Tit 2:15 ). And the more difficult was the disciples’ conflict against the power of this world with only the Word for their weapon, the more comfort was it for them, that the power of God the Spirit working by this was their help. In Mat 10:19-20 ; Luk 12:11-12 , the apologetic side of their conflict, which was in close connexion with the polemical, is brought into view. In is always implied the refutation, the overcoming of an error, a wrong, by the truth and the right. And when, by means of the , the truth detects the error, and the right the wrong, so that a man becomes conscious of them, then arises the feeling of guilt , which is ever painful. Thus every is a chastening, a punishment. And hence this office has been called the Strafamt (punitive office) of the Spirit. The effect of the of the Divine Spirit in the world may be to harden: but its aim is the deliverance of the world. , in John, includes those who are not yet delivered (from the power of Satan to God), who may be yet delivered , not the condemned. If the of the world is a moral process, its result may just as well be conversion, as non-conversion. Only thus did the of the Spirit answer the end of Christ’s coming; only thus could it be a cheering support to the Apostles. Certainly, the with which the closes is condemnation , not however of the world , but of the Prince of the world ” (ii. 649 f.).
De Wette denies the salutary side of this but he is certainly wrong: see below.
These three words, , , , comprehend the three great steps of advance in spiritual truth among men. Of itself the world does not know what Sin is, what Righteousness is, what Judgment is. Nor can either of these be revealed to any man except by the Spirit of God working within him. Each man’s conscience has some glimmering of light on each of these; some consciousness of guilt, some sense of right, some power of judgment of what is transitory and worthless: but all these are unreal and unpractical, till the of the Spirit has wrought in him (see Stier, ver. 306, edn. 2).
Fuente: Henry Alford’s Greek Testament
Joh 16:8 . “and when He” (with some emphasis, “that person”) “has come, He will reprove,” or as in R.V [89] , “convict the world” “Reprove,” reprobare, to rebut or refute, as in Henry VI., iii., l. 40, “Reprove no allegation if you can,” is no longer used in this sense. The verb expresses the idea of pressing home a conviction. The object of this work of the Spirit is “the world” as opposed to Christ; and the subjects regarding which ( ) the convictions are to be wrought are “sin, righteousness and judgment”. Regarding these three great spiritual facts, new ideas are to be borne in upon the human mind by the spirit.
[89] Revised Version.
Fuente: The Expositors Greek Testament by Robertson
And, &c. These four verses exhibit the Figure of speech Prosapodosis, App-6.
when He is come = having come.
he. Greek. ekeinos. See Joh 14:26.
reprove = convict, i.e. bring in guilty. Greek. elencho (Latin. convince). Elsewhere in Joh 3:20, “reprove”; Joh 8:9, “convict”; Joh 8:46, “convince”. Compare also Tit 1:9. Jam 2:9.
world. Greek. kosmos. App-129.
of = concerning. App-104.
sin. App-128.
judgment. App-177.
Fuente: Companion Bible Notes, Appendices and Graphics
8-11.] We have here, in a few deep and wonderful words, the work of the Spirit on the world set forth. This work He shall begin , scil. : not, however, merely by your means, but personally: so that it is not the work and witness of the Apostles which is spoken of, except in so far as they are servants of the Holy Spirit, but () His own immediate personal working.
] It is difficult to give in one word the deep meaning: convince approaches perhaps the nearest to it, but does not express the double sense of , which is manifestly here intended-of a convincing unto salvation, and a convicting unto condemnation:-reprove is far too weak, conveying merely the idea of an objective rebuke, whereas reaches into the heart, and works subjectively in both the above-mentioned ways. See the whole question amply discussed in Archdeacon Hares Mission of the Comforter, vol. ii. note K.
Lckes comment is valuable: The testimony of the Holy Ghost in behalf of Christ as opposed to the unbelieving world (ch. Joh 15:26) is essentially a refutation, , a demonstration of its wrong and error. All the apostolic preaching, as addressed to the world, takes necessarily this polemical form (1Ti 5:20; 2Ti 4:2; 2Ti 3:16; Tit 1:9; Tit 1:13; Tit 2:15). And the more difficult was the disciples conflict against the power of this world with only the Word for their weapon, the more comfort was it for them, that the power of God the Spirit working by this was their help. In Mat 10:19-20; Luk 12:11-12, the apologetic side of their conflict, which was in close connexion with the polemical, is brought into view. In is always implied the refutation, the overcoming of an error, a wrong,-by the truth and the right. And when, by means of the , the truth detects the error, and the right the wrong, so that a man becomes conscious of them,-then arises the feeling of guilt, which is ever painful. Thus every is a chastening, a punishment. And hence this office has been called the Strafamt (punitive office) of the Spirit. The effect of the of the Divine Spirit in the world may be to harden: but its aim is the deliverance of the world. , in John, includes those who are not yet delivered (from the power of Satan to God), who may be yet delivered,-not the condemned. If the of the world is a moral process, its result may just as well be conversion, as non-conversion. Only thus did the of the Spirit answer the end of Christs coming;-only thus could it be a cheering support to the Apostles. Certainly, the with which the closes is condemnation, not however of the world, but of the Prince of the world (ii. 649 f.).
De Wette denies the salutary side of this -but he is certainly wrong: see below.
These three words, , , , comprehend the three great steps of advance in spiritual truth among men. Of itself the world does not know what Sin is, what Righteousness is, what Judgment is. Nor can either of these be revealed to any man except by the Spirit of God working within him. Each mans conscience has some glimmering of light on each of these; some consciousness of guilt, some sense of right, some power of judgment of what is transitory and worthless: but all these are unreal and unpractical, till the of the Spirit has wrought in him (see Stier, ver. 306, edn. 2).
Fuente: The Greek Testament
Joh 16:8. , He will reprove or convict) through your preaching, and through works of conversions and healings: which reproof the world will partly submit itself to, partly resist, but its resistance will be but a kicking against the pricks. Appropriately after the verb , He shall testify, ch. Joh 15:26, is put the verb , He shall reprove, here. Ammonius says, is taken in a good sense, in a bad sense. Christ is good, the world is bad.- , the world) which is hostile to you, the whole of it universally, including those who are accounted the most holy and most powerful in the world, and who do not believe in Me: the Jews and the perverse Gentiles.-, concerning) Three remarkable heads are mentioned, concerning sin, concerning righteousness, concerning judgment. Righteousness is opposed to sin: righteousness belongs to Christ: Satan is condemned in judgment. He who is convicted concerning sin, subsequently either passes over to the righteousness of Christ, or has his share in judgment (condemnation) with Satan. The fulfilment of this passage is to be found in the Acts of the Apostles. See there an example of the Holy Spirits reproving, concerning the sin of unbelief, ch. Act 3:13-14, Peter in Solomons porch, Ye denied the Holy One and the Just, and desired a murderer to be granted unto you: concerning righteousness, ch. Act 13:39, Paul at Antioch, By Him all that believe are justified from all things, from which ye could not be justified by the law, which comp. with what goes before; concerning judgment, ch. Act 26:18, To open their eyes, to turn them from darkness to light, and from the power of Satan unto God, etc.
Fuente: Gnomon of the New Testament
Joh 16:8
Joh 16:8
And he, when he is come,-[It is strange in the light of these words, and, indeed, this whole conversation, that any can be found to deny the personality of the Holy Spirit, and to speak of him as a mere abstract influence. Here, as in regard to Satan, Jesus made a very uncertain use of words. if he did not know, and mean to assert, the personality of the Holy Spirit.]
will convict the world-[Not by direct work upon their hearts, but as the event shows (Act 2:37), through the life of the apostles, declaring the wonderful works of God. He came not to the world, but unto you, the disciples. The world could not receive him directly (Joh 14:17), and never can, as the world. But the apostles received him, and through their testimony he reaches the world.]
in respect of sin,-[This convicting and convincing work of the Holy Spirit is entirely in relation to Jesus Christ. The world had no consciousness of sin in regard to him, believing him either fanatic or impostor in the claims which he made. The Holy Spirit is to show them that they are sinners against Christ.] When the Spirit came on the day of Pentecost, his first work was to bear witness that Jesus was from God, that the world had rejected and crucified him; but that God had raised him from the dead and had made him both Lord and Christ. The Spirit did this work of bearing witness of Christ through the apostles, who, under the guidance of the Spirit, bore witness themselves of the works he had done, of his death, burial, resurrection, and ascension to his Father, and the descent of the Holy Spirit who was directing the works they saw.
and of righteousness,-He not only convicted the world of sin in crucifying the Lord, but they presented him as the Holy One. through whose mission the sinner could be made righteous.
and of judgment:-Judgment in which the wrath of God against sin and the reward of righteousness would be executed. [The power with which Jesus is to be clothed to judge the world.]
Fuente: Old and New Testaments Restoration Commentary
world kosmos = mankind. (See Scofield “Mat 4:8”).
sin Sin. (See Scofield “Rom 3:23”).
Fuente: Scofield Reference Bible Notes
The Spirit and the World
And he, when he is come, will convict the world in respect of sin, and of righteousness, and of judgment: of sin, because they believe not on me; of righteousness, because I go to the Father, and ye behold me no more; of judgment, because the prince of this world hath been judged.Joh 16:8-11.
1. Sin, righteousness, judgment, are three of the greatest terms in the vocabulary of men. And they stand for tremendous spiritual realities by which our state is conditioned and our destiny determined. The words that stand for these realities are to be found in all languages; and in some languages (and particularly in the language of the New Testament) the terms are characterized by intellectual precision and beauty. Yet in the time of Christ they had come to stand for lost ideas. The terms were there, but the meaning had faded out of them. They had been lowered and belittled; they had suffered deterioration generation after generation; they had received into themselves foreign and alien significations by which their meaning had been still more obscured and perverted; and though they were still in the speech they failed to convey to the understanding and to the conscience of men the tremendous realities for which they stood. And nothing could have arrested the decline of these terms; nothing could have prevented their gravitating into the region of dead speech, speech from which true vitality had gone; nothing could have prevented that consummated deterioration but the coming of the Lord Jesus Christ and the mission of the Holy Ghost. It was by Christ that sin was reproved and righteousness revealed and judgment assured; and it is by the Holy Ghost that sin, righteousness, and judgment are continually revealed, attested, and brought home to the hearts and consciences of men.
2. Did Jesus Christ, then, come to give the world a new thought about sin? Did He come to reveal to men a different pattern of righteousness? Did He come to say a new thing concerning judgment? No. It is remarkable that Jesus said very little that was new. Every truth He uttered we may find in the Old Covenant; but He picked up the truths that were partially seen and imperfectly understood, shrouded in the mists and mysteries of mans finite conception. He put them into simplicity, into plainness, into proportion and perspective, and He gave us a fair and perfect temple of truth. This is what He has done for the race concerning these three great thoughts which break in upon a man when he is awakening to spiritual being. The message of Christianity to the world is this: that sin has now a new centre, righteousness a new possibility, and that judgment is wholly altered by this new sin centre and this new possibility of righteousness: of sin, because they believe not on me; of righteousness, because I go to the Father.
3. Let us take the three together before we examine them singly.
(1) To know what sin is we must know what righteousness is. To be quite sure of righteousness, we must be sure how it will stand at the end in relation to sin. It must stand over sin, and judge it, and destroy it. Judgment is not primarily punishment, nor is it a mere declaration of the state of the law, but it is the actual final establishment of righteousness upon the wreck of sin. The stroke of sin upon sanctity can only evoke judgment, which by the grace of Christ becomes salvation. In the world it is sin that judges righteousness, and does with it what it will. In the Kingdom of God it is righteousness that judges sin, and does with it the will of Godit destroys it.
(2) With the awakening of the spiritual consciousness in man there always comes a threefold conviction, conviction concerning sin, concerning righteousness, and concerning judgment. When the earliest consciousness of a mans spiritual nature breaks in upon him, the three facts that he faces, immediately and necessarily, are those referred to in the text,sin, righteousness, judgment,and the consciousness concerning each is a double consciousness of the spiritual realm that lies beyond, and of his own personal relationship to that spiritual realm.
The words suggest to us the three moral ingredients of healthy public opinion in a Christian country. Every society, every nation, has its public opinion, its common stock of hopes, fears, prejudices, likings, enthusiasms, repugnances, tastes, points of view,the common stock to which all contribute something, and by which in turn all are influenced. The old-world cities, each of them had a public opinion of its ownRome, and Athens, and Jerusalem; and now too, wherever men meet and exchange thoughts, and know themselves to be bound to each other by the ties of race, or of common interests, or of historical associations, there grows up inevitably a common fund of thoughts and phrases which may be barbarous or enlightened, as the case may be, but which is always influential. Like the smoke and vapours which hang visibly in the air over every large centre of human life, to which every hearth contributes something, and by which every window is more or less shaded, so in the world of public thought and feeling there is a like common product of all the minds which think and feel at all, which in turn influences more or less all the contributors to it. And what I am now insisting upon is, that this inevitable product and accompaniment of human society,public opinion,if it is Christian, must contain a recognition of the three solemn factssin, righteousness, judgment.1 [Note: H. P. Liddon, Sermons on Some Words of Christ, 351.]
I
Sin
He will convict the world in respect of sin. Now the world as such knows nothing of sin; and yet it is the root of all that from which it suffers. It is the root, it is the explanation of all the numberless forms of damage and deterioration that human character suffers. Sin is the source whence all the ills of human life and human society arise. Many terms are needed to describe the manifestations or results of sin. The world is well aware, for example, of defects of human character, and it can describe them in detail. It says of a man that he is unjust, or that he is cruel, or proud, or sensual, or covetous; and yet these are but minor terms to specify this or the other manifestation of a deep, central, fundamental evil of the world, the very existence of which, as a fundamental evil, the world has never understood. It is very touching and very pathetic to observe that while the world had large, immense experience of sin it had little or no sense of sin.
Mr. Gladstone once spoke of the absence of the sense of sin as perhaps the greatest peril of modern society. And I think it is not too much to say that, apart from the person of Christ and the mission of the Holy Ghost, we not only have no guarantee that the sense of sin would be maintained, but we have every reason to believe that it would again die out; and that while men would be irritated and angered by this and the other evil and wrong in society, their conscience concerning the mystic and root evil would as before show itself utterly inadequate to the exigencies of the case.1 [Note: F. W. Macdonald.]
1. The world must be convinced of sin. Let us take due account of the fact that conviction of sin is a profoundly intelligent matter, and worthy, in that view, to engage the counsel of God in the gift of His Son. If we have any such thought as that what is called conviction of sin is only a blind torment, or crisis of excited fear, technically prescribed as a matter to be suffered in the way of conversion, we cannot too soon rid ourselves of the mistake. It is neither more nor less than a due self-knowledgenot a knowledge of the mere understanding, or such as may be obtained by philosophic reflection, but a more certain, more immediate sensing of ourselves by consciousness; just the same as that which the criminal has, when he hides himself away from justice; fleeing, it may be, when no man pursueth. He has a most invincible, most real, knowledge of himself; not by any cognitive process of reflection, but by his immediate consciousnesshe is consciously a guilty man. All men are consciously guilty before God, and the standards of God, in the same manner. They do not approve, but invariably condemn themselves; only they become so used to the fact that they make nothing of it, but take it even as the normal condition of their life.
(1) It is not easy to convince men of sin.Confucius is said to have once exclaimed, in an outburst of despondency, It is all over! I have not yet seen one who could perceive his fault and inwardly accuse himself. Confucius is not alone in that verdict upon human nature. The lament is suggestive. It implies the enormous difficulty of bringing an average man to admit his fault. It implies also that, with his many virtues and excellences, Confucius did not achieve a character of such ideal perfection that his contemporaries felt themselves smitten with shame by his transcendent example. And it implies that the common conscience needs to be reinforced with supernatural influence and vitality before it can assert itself and compel confession and repentance.
A friend told me this tale, a few years ago, as we paced together the deck of a steamship on the Mediterranean, and talked of the things unseen. The chaplain of a prison, intimate with the narrator, had to deal with a man condemned to death. He found the man anxious, as he well might benay, he seemed more than anxious; convicted, spiritually alarmed. The chaplains instructions all bore upon the power of the Redeemer to save to the uttermost; and it seemed as if the message were received, and the man were a believer. Meanwhile, behind the scenes, the chaplain had come to think that there was ground for appeal from the death-sentence; he placed the matter before the proper authorities, and with success. On his next visit, very cautiously and by way of mere suggestions and surmises, he led the apparently resigned criminal towards the possibility of a commutation. What would he say, how would his repentance stand, if his life were granted him? The answer soon came. Instantly the prisoner divined the position; asked a few decisive questions; then threw his Bible across the cell, and, civilly thanking the chaplain for his attentions, told him that he had no further need of him, nor of his Book.1 [Note: Bishop Moule, From Sunday to Sunday, 190.]
(2) Conviction of sin is necessary.He shall convince the world of sin. The first outstanding characteristic of the whole Gospel message is the new gravity which it attaches to the fact of sin, the deeper meaning which it gives to the word, and the larger scope which it shows its blighting influences to have had in humanity. Apart from the conviction of sin by the Spirit using the Word proclaimed by disciples, the world has scarcely a notion of what sin is, its inwardness, its universality, the awfulness of it as a fact affecting mans whole being and all his relations to God. All these conceptions are especially the product of Christian truth. Without it, what does the world know about the poison of sin? And what does it care about the poison until the conviction has been driven home to the reluctant consciousness of mankind by the Spirit wielding the Word? This conviction comes first in the Divine order.
I do not say that the process of turning a man of the world into a member of Christs Church always begins, as a matter of fact, with the conviction of sin. I believe it most generally does; but without insisting upon a pedantic adherence to a sequence, and without saying a word about the depth and intensity of such a conviction, I am ready to assert that a Christianity which is not based upon the conviction of sin is an impotent Christianity, and will be of very little use to the men who profess it, and have no power to propagate itself in the world.1 [Note: A. Maclaren, The Holy of Holies, 274.]
I remember seeing, in my early childhood, the dear and beautiful subject of the following incident, the aged widow of a farmer in my fathers parish. My mother took me to visit Mrs. E. one day in her farm-kitchen. It was, I think, in 1849. I still see the brightness, the sweet radiance, of that venerable face; it shone, as I now know, with Jesus Christ. At the age of about eighty-one, after a life of blameless kindliness, so that to say she had never done harm to any one was from her no unmeaning utterance, she was, through the Holy Scriptures, convinced of sin. I have lived eighty years in the world, was her cry, and never done anything for God. Deep went the Divine work in the still active nature, and long was the spiritual darkness. Then the word of the Cross found its own way in her soul, and believing, she rejoiced with joy unspeakable. Three or four years of life were yet given her. They were illuminated by faith, hope, and love in a wonderful degree. To every visitor she bore witness of her Lord. Nights, wakeful with pain, were spent in living over the beloved scenes of His earthly ministry: I was at the well of Samaria last night; Ah, I was all last night upon Mount Calvary. In extreme suffering an opiate was offered, and she declined it; for when I lose the pain I lose the thought of my Saviour too. At last she slept in the Lord, gently murmuring, almost singing, Rock of Ages, with her latest breath.2 [Note: Bishop Moule, From Sunday to Sunday, 191.]
2. The sin of which the world has to be convinced is the sin of unbelief. The Spirit convinces men of sin because they believe not on me. He shows them that unbelief is sin. It is the root of sin. The greatest sin that men can commit is the rejection of Christ. The message of the Gospel is so framed that no apology shall be able to extenuate the act of refusing it. Men shall never say that it is too hard to be understood; for its sublimest revelations have in them a simplicity that makes them intelligible even to illiterate persons, and appreciated by children. They shall never say that the doctrines of the Gospel are unreasonable; for the light which it throws upon intricate social problems, the complete and unanswerable replies that it gives to questions unsettled before, the plain and sober goodness and the eminent reasonableness that lie at the root of its laws, all of which qualities men can understand, shall prove to them that they ought to accept those supernatural features which are beyond their comprehension. They shall never say that its purpose is unnecessary; their own hearts and life shall tell them, and the condition of the world around shall cry aloud in their ears, that sin is an unconquerable power; that the sources of crime, disorder, and social debility are as prevailing as they are pestilent; that no remedy of human preparation has ever succeeded in effectually checking them; and that it is the business of all men, unitedly, personally, and constantly, to endeavour to remove them; when, therefore, the Gospel of Jesus presents itself to a despairing world as another hope of deliverance, a last hope, men shall never be able to object to it as unnecessary. Finally, they shall not decline to accept it because it can point to no witnesses or examples of its power. These shall always be at hand, comprising a mighty and ever-accumulating argument, a vast cloud of witnesses, spreading themselves over the world, not like distinct and eccentric meteors to dazzle and perplex, but like a dawn coming from that quarter of the horizon where men expect the daya mild, genial, useful glory, the luminous ordinance of God Himself. So convincing did the Holy Ghost make the Gospel, and does still make it, defending it by every proof that can tell upon the convictions of men. Wherever Christ is preached, hearers shall be condemned because they believe not on Him. Possibly they may not be convinced, certainly they shall be convicted.
Men say they understand that cruelty, treachery, and lust bring their punishment sooner or later. But what they cannot understand is that the mere fact of refusing to believe is the sin of sins. A typical writer of the period says: Science is but a new way of applying the mind to everything. It has affirmed the right and duty of investigation and verification. It has set up a new kind of intellectual morality, which has substituted the duty of inquiry for the duty of belief. The immediate result has been in England a sudden and amazing diminution of intolerance, a wonderful and wholly unexpected increase of mental freedom. In other words, conscience may speak about other sin, but in the case of unbelief the thing forbidden does not appear to be in its own nature wrong, and Don Worm refuses to bite.
The appeal must be to what is elemental in human nature and experience. Content to be judged by that appeal, we maintain that the conscience bears witness that unbelief is the sin of sins. If ever conscience speaks out it is when this sin is committed on the levels of human life. As Bunyan puts it, they shut up Mr. Conscience, they blind his windows, they barricade his door, they cut the rope of the great bell on the housetop which he is wont to ring, that the town of Mansoul may not be disturbed. But sometimes Mr. Conscience escapes and rings his bell. For the sin of all sins to which the conscience bears witness is the sin of mistrusting and despising love. There is so little love in this world, and there is such a hard need of it. Multitudes have to go through life famished for lack of love. Even the most favoured have very few really to love them. If we have no love, human or Divine, then indeed life ceases to be worth living. I would rather, said one, be condemned to be led out and hung if I knew one human soul would love me for a week beforehand and honour me afterwards, than live half a century and be nothing to any living creature.1 [Note: W. Robertson Nicoll, Sunday Evening, 21.]
3. Unbelief is always seen at last to be want of belief in Christ. The Spirit, says Jesus, will convince the world of sin, in that they believe not on me. He will show the real nature of sin. How shall we work the works of God? it was asked; and it was answered by Christ, This is the work of God, to believe on him whom he hath sent. Sin is not measured by a law, or a nation, or a society of any kind, but by a Person. The righteousness of God was not in a requirement, system, book, or Church, but in a Person, and sin is defined by relation to Him. He came to reveal not only God but sin. The essence of sin is exposed by the touchstone of His presence, by our attitude to Him. He makes explicit what the sinfulness of sin is; He even aggravates it. He rouses the worst as well as the best of human nature. There is nothing that human nature hates like holy God. All the worlds sin receives its sharpest expression when in contact with Christ; when, in face of His moral beauty, goodness, power, and claim, He is first ignored, then discarded, denounced, called the agent of Beelzebub, and hustled out of the world in the name of God.
What is the belief that saves? We are asking the question in order that we may discover the unbelief that is sin. The belief that saves is that conviction which produces the abandonment of the whole life to the King. When I have believed that He is able to do all that I want, and I have ceded to Him all my life, then have I believed. A man does not believe the truth he holds, to borrow a very popular phrase, but he believes the truth that holds him. You have never yet believed on Jesus until you have abandoned your whole life to His Lordship, and trusted your soul to His Saviourhood, and never a man so believed but He broke the power of cancelled sin, and set the prisoner free.1 [Note: G. Campbell Morgan.]
4. What means does the Holy Spirit use in order to convince the world of the sin of unbelief in Christ?
(1) He puts an environment of new ideals before the mind.He testifies of Christ, and in so doing makes us see how in His humanity all Divine excellences have come down into the midst of men and made themselves a new law to the conscience. We are not, after all, in a universe dominated by avarice, envy, falsehood, animalism, but by unselfishness, sanctity, truth, spiritual principle.
Some little time ago I was passing through a country lane, and saw a flock of sheep feeding on the hillside. They seemed to be milk-white, justifying the Scriptural metaphor, He scattereth the hoarfrost like wool, and fit to be welcomed as pets into a drawing-room. In comparison with the green pastures in which they were feeding, their fleeces seemed bleached into spotlessness. Not long after, a snowstorm came, and I had occasion to pass by the same field. But the sheep did not seem to be the same creatures at all. The background had changed as if by magic, and they were in a new world, the conditions of which served to bring out their griminess. They looked speckled, dingy, piebald, and anything but clean in comparison with the glittering snows in which they were nestling. The collier, rising out of the pit into the sunshine after a night of toil, scarcely looked grimier than those spotless sheep of yesterday. The stainless and dazzling snow served to bring into view all the dust from the roadside, all the bits of blackthorn from the hedges, all the carbon flakes ejected from the chimneys of the adjoining town that had been caught in their fleeces.1 [Note: T. G. Selby, The Holy Spirit and Christian Privilege, 53.]
(2) The Spirit comes with a new atmosphere of sympathy and graciousness, unlike that which exists in the world and provokes to ingenuous self-justification. He who comes under this ministry feels almost instinctively His right to search the heart and bring every delinquency before a Divine tribunal. It is useless to attempt concealment, for the Spirit knows us more thoroughly than we know ourselves, and can constrain the most reluctant natures into a consciousness of their own evil. Indeed, the desire to cloak or dissemble silently disappears, for we instinctively recognize that His revelations, however unwelcome, are benevolent in motive. Whilst the full revelation of Divine love cannot be vouchsafed at this stage, we see at once that the attempt to convict us is not that of some competitor who is trying to smite us down. He acts upon us, not like the angry storm which leads men to bar their doors and close their shutters, but like the soft south wind, which opens every labyrinth of the heart and life to the light. It is no treachery or ill-will or unrelenting antagonism that is bringing home to us the unwelcome facts of the past, but helping and healing beneficence. In the most vivid revival of the half-forgotten sin there is no malicious exaggeration. His enforcement of the fact of our guilt is recognized as a gentle and tender effort to teach us those forgotten realities of law with which we have to reckon, and to put us into a better position for dealing with them. Whatever pain He inflicts, it is inseparable from the cure of a dire disease, and from the process of arousing faculties marked hitherto by ominous numbness and dormancy. He brings the hard rebel world, ever on the alert to justify itself, into an atmosphere that is something more wonderful than even the essence of compassionate fatherhood.
(3) A new power of moral discernment is aroused.In what is called Christendom, there has been a manifest uplifting of the moral standards, and a correspondent quickening of the moral sensibilities, both of individual men and of whole races and peoples. In the people of the old dispensation and of the great pagan empires long ago converted to the Cross, moral ideas have now taken the place, to a great extent, of force; the coarse blank apathy of sin is broken up; the sense of duty is more piercing; and it is even as if a new conscience had been given respecting the soul in its relations to God. It is as if men had seen their state of sin glassed before them, and made visible in the rejection of Christ and His cross. Jews and pagans had before been made conscious at times of particular sins; we are made conscious, in a deeper and more appalling way, of the state of sin itself, the damning evil that infects our humanity at the rootthat which rejected and crucified the Son of God, and is in fact the general madness and lost condition of the race.
Immediately after the departure of Christ from the world, that is, on the day of Pentecost, there broke out a new demonstration of sensibility to sin, such as was never before seen. In the days of the Law, men had their visitations of guilt and remorse, respecting this or that wrong act; but I do not recollect, even under the prophets, those great preachers of the Law and sharpest and most terrible sifters of transgression, a single instance where a soul is so broken or distressed by the conviction of its own bad state under sin as to ask what it must do to be savedthe very thing which many thousands did, on the day of Pentecost, and in the weeks that followed, and have been doing even till now.1 [Note: Horace Bushnell, Christ and His Salvation, 115.]
II
Righteousness
He will convict the world in respect of righteousness. The Gospel of the Son of God is not the Gospel of forgiveness merely. It is also the Gospel of life and power, a great message, declaring that to the man who believes on Him, the living Lord, there comes new life-force, a new dynamic of virtue; and therefore the sin that ruins is the sin of unbelief. Merging into that first statement is necessarily the second statement of the text. Of righteousness, said Jesus, because I go to the Father. Who else could have uttered these words? If we can say that we shall go to the Father, our going is through the merit and for the sake of another, but none introduced the Man of Nazareth to the Father. He asked no mercy; when He ascended on high He did not appear in Heavens court in virtue of what another had done, but stood unafraid in Heavens light, in the perfect light of His victorious manhood. He says, I go to the Father, and in His going to the Father He has vindicated the possibility of the perfection of righteousness as an ideal life. And yet He did infinitely more by going to the Father. He received that Spirit which, poured out, becomes the life-force for others.
1. The Spirit convinces the world of the existence of righteousness.The world as a world has but dim and inadequate conceptions of what righteousness is. A Pharisee is its type, or a man that keeps a clean life in respect of great transgressionsa whited sepulchre of some sort or other. The world apart from Christ has but languid desires after even the poor righteousness that it understands, and the world apart from Christ is afflicted by a despairing scepticism as to the possibility of ever being righteous at all.
Those who know this earth only can make nothing of righteousness. They try various definitions of it, such as equality of exchange or of condition and what is good for the greater number; but these accounts, besides failing to satisfy the idea of justice, carry no constraining authority to the individual conscience. In the New Testament age, whilst there was a strong tradition amongst the Romans in favour of orderly administration, thinking men were at a loss how to understand justice or righteousness in itself, and the general mind was not dominated by any clear conception of its nature or its authority. What was justice? What was a just man? Why was any one bound to be just? To such questions no answer was found. Our Lord says, the Spirit will bring the world to the knowledge of righteousness, because I go to the Father, and ye behold Me no more.1 [Note: J. Ll. Davies, Spiritual Apprehension, 47.]
2. The Spirit convinces the world of the righteousness of Christ.Jesus Christ, the Son of God, took on Him our flesh, and in the flesh condemned sin. Every thought, and word, and deed of His life was, in the highest sense, right. He lived amidst the ordinary surroundings of men, exposed to the same temptations, corruption, and weakness, a thoroughly Divine life, which could not fail to heighten the standard of the world. He was God manifest in the flesh. Of Him, alone, of all those born of woman, it could be said in the fullest meaning of the words: He hath done all things well. Here, then, was the worlds need supplied by the living Model of a perfectly holy life. But the world was by no means willing to receive and act upon the heaven-sent Light which penetrated its darkness. Just as a person long accustomed to the foul atmosphere of a dirty, unhealthy room, will resent with indignation any attempt to let in a breath of purifying air, so the degraded human race arose with one accord to reject the example of righteousness God had sent into their midst. This was the condemnation that light had come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil. Jesus Christ never thought of Himself: their whole thoughts were centred on self. His heart was set on things above: theirs on the gratification of their own needs, desires, and pleasures. They were covetous and filled with worldliness: He had no earthly possessions, not even a place where to lay His head. They were proud and self-willed: He was meek and lowly, and His daily endeavour was to do His Fathers will. So, because it was clear that one or other of these standards must be wrong, it seemed an easier plan for mankind, instead of reforming its own habits, to determine that the Lord Jesus was an impostor.
Accordingly, they banded themselves together and agreed that He was blaspheming God when He declared that He was the Divine Lifethat He, the friend of publicans and sinners, was indeed the Son of the Most High, the heaven-sent Pattern of eternal righteousness. On this pretext they condemned Him to death, and nailed Him to the Cross; and then, when they had laid a great stone at the mouth of the sepulchre, sealed it, and set a watch, they trusted His witness was silenced for ever. But Gods voice is not so easily silenced as sinful men desire. Jesus Christ was content to be led as a lamb to the slaughter because it was part of the eternal counsel that His blood must thus be shed for the sins of the world; but He declared most clearly, alike to friend and to foe, that His life was the only one with which God was well pleased. He set forth also most emphatically the test to which His words were to be subjected: If I rise from the dead on the third day, and after showing unmistakable proofs of having been nailed to the cross, I ascend into heaven, then you must acknowledge that My record is true. If I thus go to My Father and you see Me no more, then you will be compelled to admit that I have spoken truth, that you have failed in convincing Me of sin, and that I am indeed the Holy One of God.
The world that had slain Christ as unrighteous would own His righteousness when He had gone to the Father and they had seen Him no more. In all the literature of love and sorrowand the two are never disjoinedwe have this interpreted to us. It is in the withdrawal, in the departure to eternity, in the time of the lost vision that we know the righteousness we denied, or imperfectly recognized, when it was with us in its human dress. In Brownings great poem he tells us how the murderer and ruffian husband, Guido, whose cruelty and malignity to the pure and trustful Pompilia passed all bounds, discerned her at last when she was with God. The procession entered his cell to lead him away to death, and he called out in an agony of fear
AbateCardinalChristMariaGod
Pompilia! Will you let them murder me?
Pompilia, the sweet child, saint, martyr, was, in the mans thought, exalted even above God in the power to save. In all the paths of life, even the highest, the same holds true. The background of death is needed to bring out the full meaning and force of life. The highest we have known may indeed shine upon us through the semi-opaque routine of daily duties. But we feel as if we had never known them when they go to the Father, and the thought clutches the heart that we shall see them no more. One illustration is in every readers mind. Queen Victoria was loved and reverenced as perhaps no monarch ever was before her death, with a love and reverence that grew with time. But how infinitely the devotion of her people was enhanced when she went to the Father and they saw her no more! In what a new way the nation perceived how she had given them all her strength and tenderness through these long, brave, faithful, constant years!1 [Note: W. Robertson Nicoll, Sunday Evening, 208.]
3. The Spirit convinces the world that only in Christ is righteousness to be found.There are three requisites which must be fulfilled before man, as a sinner, can feel the possibility of his righteousness. The sins of the past haunt and terrify him; they bind him with cords of fear and self-condemnation, which prevent his rising;here, then, the sense of forgiveness is the first requisite. But the sense of sin awakens the sense of immortality, and clothes it with fear. He dare not look onward, for his sin has peopled the worlds of the future with terrors, and for his justification he needs a Deliverer who shall have explored the future worlds, and illuminated their mystery; here is the second requisite. But he needs yet more. It is not enough for the past to be forgiven, and the future brightened; he himself must possess the germ of a new, righteous, God-like life; he must be a new man, rising into that revealed immortality. These three necessities: the assurance of forgiveness of the past; the removal of the terrors of the future; the creation of a new manhood in the present, are all met by the truth that Christ has gone to the Father; and when that is revealed by the Comforter, we have the conviction of righteousness.
Newman, in a very remarkable passage, says of the saints that their lingering imperfections surely make us love them more without leading us to reverence them less, and act as a relief to the discouragement and despondency which may come over those who in the midst of error and sin are striving to imitate them. That is to say, if their lives were beautiful before God we do not ask that they should be stainless, for even the stains show us that we, too, though we fall, may rise again. But let us ask how it would have been if any speck had fallen on the life of our Lord Jesus? How would it have been with us if He had spoken one rash word, if He had cherished in His mind one single unjust thought, if one arrow of the enemy had pierced His armour? If that had been, the prince of this world would be still in power, and all our hope were dead. But He kept innocency and took heed to the thing that was right from the beginning to the end. Wherefore God hath highly exalted Him and given Him a Name which is above every name, even the saving Name. By His righteousness so dearly wrought out, we too may be made righteous. His righteousness is our beauty, our glorious dress, proof against the fires of the Last Day. We are redeemed by that voluntary substitution of the Innocent for the guilty with which the Father is well pleased.1 [Note: W. Robertson Nicoll, Sunday Evening, 214.]
(1) Because I go to my Father. What is the meaning of because? It is this: If He had not been right in the claims He made He could not have gone to the Father when He died. If He went to the Father, if His Spirit convinced men that He was there and was acting from there, then He had been right in the claims He made about His relations to the Father and about His judgment of the world, and especially of Israels sin. The apostolic fact of His resurrection was proof that Israels God confirmed the claim of Christ, and gave judgment for Him against Israel. That was what settled the matter for St. Paul. As soon as He was convinced that God had raised up Christ and set Him at His right hand in glory, the whole fabric of his Judaism gave way. God would not raise a fanatic, impostor, or blasphemer. The Spirit convinced St. Paul that Jesus was the Holy One and the Justnay, the very Righteousness of God; that the sin of sins lay with the people who thought themselves the best of the good.
(2) And ye see me no more. We are often like His disciples among these deep mysterieswe cannot tell what He saith. And yet the Holy Spirit makes the meaning as clear as it can be made to mortals. We are to lose the earthly vision that we may gain the heavenly. We are to lose the vision after the flesh that we may win the vision after the Spirit. Even in the highways of earthly love this may be understoodthe more excellent glory of the spiritual love. Love, says our greatest poet, is not times fool, and perhaps the finest love-line in our language was written by another poet, hardly less great, to his wife:
To you who are seventy-seven.
III
Judgment
He will convict the world in respect of judgment. We miss the note of judgment in our day. Our convictions do not start from a sense that we are convicted. We want to be convinced by evidence where we should be convicted by the Spirit. This is an element that has dropped out of our view of the Cross, and therefore out of much Christian life; Christ crucified, we think, took the pain of sin but not its penalty, its sorrow but not its curse. We have of late done justice to the idea of sacrifice in connexion with the Cross; but in the same proportion we have lost the idea of judgment. We have revived the ethical idea of the Kingdom of God, but we have not grasped the idea, which fills both Old Testament and New Testament, that it could be set up only by a decisive act of holy judgment upon the kingdom of the world. The Cross was indeed the Divine sacrifice, but sacrifice is not a final idea without judgment. It is not an end in itself,except to the ascetics,it is a means. But judgment is an end, it is final in its nature, because it is the actual vindication of holiness and the establishment of righteousness, and beyond holiness and its victory we cannot go.
1. He will convince the world that there is judgment in the earth.It is evident that if by the enlightening operation of the Holy Spirit sin is known, and righteousness is known, the ground is then laid for judgment, because judgment is only the just, and proper, and true estimate of righteous men and wicked men. The Holy Spirit, therefore, convinces the world of judgmentthat is to say, He brings out in prominent and living characters the whole idea of judgment; of there being a division in the world; of there being two kinds of people in the world, good and bad, righteous and wicked.
There stands up everywhere in Scripture the pillar of fire and of cloud, and it comes between the camp of Israel and the camp of the Egyptians, and gives light by night to the one, but cloud and darkness to the other. The Gospel is especially penetrated by this idea of judgment; it declares the enmity of the world to God, and distinguishes between the world and those who are not of the world; it separates the followers of Christ from the world; it announces that Christ will manifest Himself to His disciples and not unto the world. It says, Woe unto the world because of offences; it says that we cannot serve two masters; that we cannot have the treasure of our heart in earth and in heaven at the same time. Our Lord Jesus Christ is Himself described as the Judge who thus separates between the righteous and the wicked, who places the sheep on the right hand, and the goats on the left; Whose fan is in his hand, and he will throughly purge his floor, and gather his wheat into the garner; but he will burn up the chaff with unquenchable fire.1 [Note: J. B. Mozley, Sermons, Parochial and Occasional, 164.]
(1) Judgment is yet to come.It is very hard on the lower planes of life to convince the world of judgment, to persuade men that there is an infallible reckoning for all transgression, that no sin can be permanently concealed, that in the end the hidden things of darkness will come to light, and will receive their just reward. It is hard to bring this home even in the case of offences that come within the province of criminal law. A man will commit a murder and believe that he will never be found out, that the blood will not speak. He will cover over the body with sand, not thinking that one day the skeleton arm will push itself through and appeal to the sky. And yet the vast majority of people have been so convinced of judgment in the realm of criminal law that they never put themselves within its reach. How are they convinced of judgment? There is only one way. They are convinced by the judgment of an actual transgressor, by the manifested sin of a criminal. People read in the newspapers day by day of the strange ways in which the dead are avenged, and they are convinced of judgment. And yet there is always an obstinate remnant that fixes its eyes on the crimes not yet expiated, and thinks that it may sin and escape.
(2) Judgment is now.It is evident that Christ referred to a judgment that had then and there commenced, for the words have a present meaning. The prince of this world has been judged. We can most easily understand this by referring to a precisely similar utterance in the 31st verse of the 12th chapter: Now is the judgment of this world; now shall the prince of this world be cast out. The Saviour had just declared that by His death He should give life to the world. He had just glanced into the awful struggle that was approaching, and His soul was troubled. He had just received from heaven the assurance of final victory, and then He declared, with the glory of the triumph already brightening, Now is the judgment of this world; now shall the prince of this world be cast out. The judgment, therefore, to which He pointed was that conquest which He had already commenced of the dominion of evil, and the final victory over it which He should gain on His Cross. And the same meaning must be attached to the word world here, so that the verse may be rendered thus: He shall convince the world that evil is conquered, overthrown, and shall finally pass away.
The last judgment is a phrase which we have almost robbed of its effect because we have used it chiefly for a remote and pictorial future. We have dwelt on the final date of judgment, and lost sense of a state of judgment, a judgment always there, and always final in its nature. We have pictured it in ways which have emptied it of spiritual awe, and reduced it to little more than physical terror and moral impotence. We do not realize that the prince of this world has been finally judged, and that we live in a saved world only because we live in a judged world. Either with the orthodox we have made judgment a cosmic catastrophe (and astronomy is full of them, and geology has made them too familiar), or we have reduced it, with the liberals, to the historic process on its ethical side, with its moral crises, and jail-deliveries, and fresh starts, from time to time. We have lost the note of judgment from the Cross, and so from our moral world. And we have lost it, with the orthodox, in a distant judgment scene, or with the liberals, who made it the mere Nemesis of history, which is too slow and subtle to curb the pushing hour. The worlds history is the worlds judgment, says Schiller. He wished to recall the last judgment from its remoteness to be a power in the heart of present things and living conduct. But there is something more true than Schillers famous phrase. It is not the worlds history, but Christs history that is the worlds judgment. And especially is it Christs Cross.1 [Note: P. T. Forsyth, Missions in State and Church, 72.]
2. Because the prince of this world hath been judged. Who is the prince of this world? The phrase this world is frequently used in the New Testament to express the collective forces that are on this earth opposed to God; and in speaking of a Prince, Christ manifestly implies that evil forces are not separated, but combined and connected things; that they form a great living power, a kingdom of wrong. But the phrase means more than this; it points to a personal Evil Spirit as lord of that evil kingdom. Not in the sense that he is the cause of it all, but that he is representative of it, as being the greatest and the first. According to the teaching of Christ and the Apostles, evil began far back in the spiritual world, and came from thence to man. Interpreting the phrase thus, we have the idea of evil as a power mysteriously connected with the invisible world, and of an Evil Spirit as its representative.
Do you think of the prince of this world as one who holds in his tyranny a world of victims who are miserable because they struggle in his yoke? That is not the conception here at all. He represents here all that is most congenial to the worlds way. He is the personalized spirit of a willing and admiring world. He is the organ of a world proud of its representative. He has its confidence. He is the agent of methods which the world thinks essential to its prosperity and stability, which make its notion of eternal life. The world he represents has no idea that its moral methods can be bettered or its principles overthrown. To its mind the moral is an impertinence and the spiritual is a superstitionfeeble, but capable of becoming dangerous. It must therefore be fought. And its antagonist is just as sensible of the antagonism. There is no compromise possible. They were destined to meet in a struggle which is inevitable and a judgment which is finaland that meeting was in the Cross.1 [Note: P. T. Forsyth, Missions in State and Church, 71.]
(1) The Spirit will convince the world that the prince of this world has been judged by showing that Christ has conquered sin through obedience to the will of God. And where was this so perfectly accomplished as in His life and death? All forces were in action to turn Him from submission. From first to last He was perpetually tempted to forsake Him chosen path of obedience. The cold, the hunger, and the lonely temptation of the wilderness formed but the prelude to the long struggle with the Evil One, which culminated on Calvary. It was the same temptation throughout to assert His own will against His Fathers will. It opened with the challenge in the wilderness, If thou be the Son of God, command that these stones be made bread; If thou be the Son of God, cast thyself down; and closed with the last taunt, If thou be the Son of God, come down from the cross. But the cry, It is finished, was the herald of conquestthe proclamation to the world that one Man had stemmed the tide of evil and broken its force. The moment of seeming defeat was the moment of mightiest victory.
(2) The Spirit will show that by this victory the perpetuity of evil is shattered. The darkest lie of the Evil One is thisthat evil is an eternal power. Before the advent of the Gospel, the world was beginning to believe in the omnipotence of wrong. The slavery wrought by sin was so complete that men were losing faith in anything that could conquer evil, and were sinking into a dreary and hopeless fatalism. Just note the two great facts which, as the results of sin, lay at the root of this state: (a) Suffering. Men felt the pressure of its mystery. It seemed to belie the goodness of God, to darken the heaven of His love, and prove sin to be irresistible. Its shadow rested on the ages of the past, and projected itself with a grim certainty into the future. Now suffering, in all its deepest dreadfulness, Christ endured. He became the High Priest of sorrow. He grew glorious through it. He was perfected through sufferings, and thus revealed it to man as the education of a Father. (b) Death. The great mystery, the spoiler of human hopes, the divider of friend from friend, the sign-manual of sins dominion. He became subject to its power. It seemed to conquer Him. It seemed to divide Him from the Father, but really it was the pledge of their eternal union. Rising from the grave, He ascended to the heavens, thus consecrating death for all men as a pathway to the Fathers home. Such was Christs conquest. It was the crisis of earths history, the judgment and overthrow of the prince of this world.
All hail! dear Conqueror! all hail!
Oh what a victory is Thine!
How beautiful Thy strength appears!
Thy crimson wounds, how bright they shine!
Thou camest at the dawn of day;
Armies of souls around Thee were,
Blest spirits, thronging to adore
Thy flesh, so marvellous, so fair.
Ye heavens, how sang they in your courts,
How sang the angelic choirs that day,
When from His tomb the imprisoned God,
Like the strong sunrise, broke away!1 [Note: F. W. Faber.]
The Spirit and the World
Literature
Bushnell (H.), Christ and His Salvation, 98.
Davies (J. Ll.), Spiritual Apprehension, 40.
Forsyth (P. T.), Missions in State and Church, 51.
Hull (E. L.), Sermons preached at Kings Lynn, 2nd Ser., 14, 29.
Jenkins (E. E.), Life and Christ, 143.
Liddon (H. P.), Sermons on Some Words of Christ, 342.
Maclaren (A.), The Holy of Holies, 279.
Moule (H. C. G.), From Sunday to Sunday, 188.
Mozley (J. B.), Sermons Parochial and Occasional, 160.
Nicoll (W. R.), Sunday Evening, 3, 21.
Selby (T. G.), The Holy Spirit and Christian Privilege, 43.
Wilkinson (G. H.), The Invisible Glory, 233.
Christian World Pulpit, lvi. 120 (Macdonald); lxii. 395 (Campbell Morgan).
Fuente: The Great Texts of the Bible
he will: Zec 12:10, Act 2:37, Act 16:29, Act 16:30
reprove: or, convince, Joh 8:9, Joh 8:46, 1Co 14:24, Jud 1:15
Reciprocal: Lev 13:12 – cover all Psa 98:2 – righteousness Isa 2:4 – And he Isa 4:4 – by the spirit Isa 51:4 – I will make Mic 4:3 – he shall judge Joh 12:31 – is Act 24:25 – righteousness Rom 8:15 – the spirit 1Co 2:4 – but 1Co 2:14 – the things Gal 5:5 – through Phi 3:9 – the righteousness 1Ti 3:16 – justified Jam 2:9 – are
Fuente: The Treasury of Scripture Knowledge
CONVICTION OF SIN
When He is come, He will reprove (convict) the world of sin.
Joh 16:8
I. There is nothing in the world more difficult than to convict any soul of sin, or to be convicted of sin ourselves; and that for four reasons.
(a) Because of the deep-seated self-complacency which blinds every soul.
(b) Because our tendency is to imagine that we are going to be judged by the standard of our set.
(c) Because we are apt to be blinded by the good opinions that people have of us.
(d) Because we think we are people with exceptional difficulties.
II. Now we come to what the Holy Spirit does.He cuts right away from us all these four things on which we stand, and He tears away all these four veils which blind our eyes.
(a) He first of all tears away the veil of self-complacency. He convicts of sin because He convicts of judgment. Do you realise that you and I have to stand, one by one, before the judgment-seat of God? That we have to give an account of ourselves before God? That every day that is passing is bringing us nearer to that judgment, and that, as a matter of fact, God is judging us every day we live? You do not imagine, do you, that death is going to change you? Five minutes after death we are just the same as five minutes before. Exactly. The real terror of death is that it changes absolutely nothing. And you go to your own placethe place you have prepared for yourself. And that is the first thing the Holy Spirit has to bring home to us. The awfulness of it, and the utter folly of waiting on year after year as if some day was going to come when everything would be changed, when we should have plenty of time to repent and get ready for heaven. God save you from that miserable delusion!
(b) Then the second work that the Holy Spirit does in convicting the world of sin is to press home the standard by which we shall be judged. Not the standard of your set; not the standard of what they think in the club, or in the office, or in the warehouse. God shall judge the world by the standard of that Man Whom He has ordained, and that Man Whom He has ordained is Jesus Christ our Lord. That is the standard. The generations come and go, but the standard is the same. How do we meet that standard?
(c) And then, again, the Holy Spirit has to break through our reliance upon the good opinion of our friends. I do want the Holy Spirit to make every one of us realise that it is not what our friends think of us that matters in the least, but what do I think of God and what does God think of me as He watches me all my time on earth? That is the only question of priceless importance.
(d) And then, fourthly, are we exceptional? Is human conceit right in persuading us that we are exceptional people, to be exceptionally judged? The Holy Spirit has to bring home, if we imagine that, the unpleasant but very wholesome truth that we are all very ordinary men and women, and no temptation has overtaken us but that which is common to man. Do you imagine, when you have that struggle with your thoughts, that you are the only one that has ever had to face such a difficulty? Do you imagine, you who are coming through the difficulties and perplexities of doubt, that you are the only one who has ever had to fight them? There is no temptation that has overtaken you but that which is common to man, and before the Holy Spirit can build up strength in you and give you the power which He wants to give you, and is ready to give you, to make you a strong, self-controlled, and holy man, He has to make you realise first that you have broken His laws.
Bishop A. F. Winnington-Ingram.
Illustrations
(1) I remember so well (says the Bishop of London) when I was speaking about the Good Shepherd and the lost sheep to a man once in a slum where I was visiting him; he said quite cheerfully, Oh, yes, sir; I quite understand all about that. The more a man sins the better God likes him. What he had carried away from Mission sermons which he had heard was this: that God liked forgivingto put it into his mode of expressiona good big sinner. And the Church had begun the wrong side of the Gospel with him. What he wanted was to have preached to him judgment to come first; for he had no idea that he was a sinner. He did not realise that he was trampling under foot the blood of the Most High and putting Him to an open shame. He was judging himself by the standard of his set.
(2) A man once said, Oh, there is plenty of time; I have only got to say, Lord, have mercy upon me, before I die, and it will be all right. Shortly afterwards he was thrown from his horse, and as his friends gathered round him, he looked round and said, Can you do nothing for me? He saw in their blank faces that his case was hopeless. He looked round again, and, with a fearful oath, he died. That comes of waiting for the time when we are going to have plenty of time to repent.
Fuente: Church Pulpit Commentary
8
This verse is a general statement of the work of the Spirit after it has come upon the apostles. Reprove is from euegoho and has various shades of meaning, including the conviction of those who are guilty of wrongdoing, and bringing to light what constitutes a life of righteousness. The work of the Spirit (through the mouths and pens of the apostles) that is stated in general terms in this verse, will be considered in its several parts in some verses to follow.
Fuente: Combined Bible Commentary
And when he is come, he will reprove the world of sin, and of righteousness, and of judgment:
[He will reprove the world of sin, etc.] the Holy Spirit had absented himself from that nation now for the space of four hundred years, or thereabout: and therefore, when he should be given and poured out in a way and in measures so very wonderful, he could not but evince it to the world that “Jesus was the true Messiah,” the Son of God, who had so miraculously poured out the Holy Spirit amongst them; and consequently could not but reprove and redargue the world of sin; because they believed not in him.
Fuente: Lightfoot Commentary Gospels
When our Lord in this passage speaks of the Holy Spirit “coming,” we must take care that we do not misunderstand His meaning. On the one hand, we must remember that the Holy Ghost was in all believers in the Old Testament days, from the very beginning. No man was ever saved from the power of sin, and made a saint, except by the renewing of the Holy Ghost. Abraham, and Isaac, and Samuel, and David, and the Prophets, were made what they were by the operation of the Holy Ghost.
On the other hand, we must never forget that after Christ’s ascension the Holy Ghost was poured down on men with far greater energy as individuals, and with far wider influence on the nations of the world at large, than He was ever poured out before. It is this increased energy and influence that our Lord has in view in the verses before us. He meant that after His own ascension the Holy Ghost would “come” down into the world with such a vastly increased power, that it would seem as if He had “come” for the first time, and had never been in the world before.
The difficulty of rightly explaining the wondrous sayings of our Lord in this place is undeniably very great. It may well be doubted whether the full meaning of His words has ever been entirely grasped by man, and whether there is not something at the bottom which has not been completely unfolded. The common, superficial explanation, that our Lord only meant that the work of the Spirit in saving individual believers is to convince them of their own sins, of Christ’s righteousness, and of the certainty of judgment at last, will hardly satisfy thinking minds. It is a short-cut and superficial way of getting over Scripture difficulties. It contains excellent and sound doctrine, no doubt, but it does not meet the full meaning of our Lord’s words. It is truth, but not the truth of the text. It is not individuals here and there whom He says the Spirit is to convince, but the world. Let us see whether we cannot find a fuller and more satisfactory interpretation.
For one thing, our Lord probably meant to show us what the Holy Ghost would do to the world of unbelieving Jews. He would convince them “of sin, and righteousness, and judgment.”
He would convince the Jews “of sin.” He would compel them to feel and acknowledge in their own minds, that in rejecting Jesus of Nazareth they had committed a great sin, and were guilty of gross unbelief.
He would convince the Jews of “righteousness.” He would press home on their consciences that Jesus of Nazareth was not an impostor and a deceiver, as they had said, but a holy, just, and blameless Person, whom God had owned by receiving up into heaven.
He would convince the Jews of “judgment.” He would oblige them to see that Jesus of Nazareth had conquered, overcome, and judged the devil and all his host, and was exalted to be a Prince and a Savior at the right hand of God.
That the Holy Ghost did actually so convince the Jewish nation after the day of Pentecost, is clearly shown by the Acts of the Apostles. It was He who gave the humble fishermen of Galilee such grace and might in testifying of Christ, that their adversaries were put to silence. It was His reproving and convincing power which enabled them to “fill Jerusalem with their doctrine.” Not a few of the nation, we know, were savingly convinced, like Paul, and “a great company of priests” became obedient to the faith. Myriads more, we have every reason to believe, were mentally convinced, if they had not courage to come out and take up the cross. The whole tone of the Jewish people towards the end of the Acts of the Apostles is unlike what it is at the beginning. A vast reproving and convincing influence even where not saving, seems to have gone over their minds. Surely this was partly what our Lord had in view in these verses when He said, “The Holy Ghost shall reprove and convince.”
For another thing, our Lord probably meant to foretell what the Holy Ghost would do for the whole of mankind, both Gentiles as well as Jews.
He would reprove in every part of the earth the current ideas of men about sin, righteousness, judgment, and convince people of some far higher ideas on these points than they had before acknowledged. He would make men see more clearly the nature of sin, the need of righteousness, the certainty of judgment. In a word, He would insensibly be an Advocate and convincing Pleader for God throughout the whole world, and raise up a standard of morality, purity and knowledge, of which formerly men had no conception.
That the Holy Ghost actually did so in every part of the earth, after the day of Pentecost, is a simple matter of fact. The unlearned and lowly Jews, whom He sent forth and strengthened to preach the Gospel after our Lord’s ascension, “turned the world upside down,” and in two or three centuries altered the habits, tastes, and practices of the whole civilized world. The power of the devil received a decided check. Even infidels dare not deny that the doctrines of Christianity had an enormous effect on men’s ways, lives, and opinions, when they were first preached, and that there were no special graces or eloquence in the preachers that can account for it. In truth, the world was “reproved and convinced,” in spite of itself; and even those who did not become believers became better men. Surely this also was partly what our Lord had in view when He said to His disciples, “When the Holy Ghost comes, He shall convince the world of sin, and righteousness, and judgment.”
Let us leave the whole passage, deep and difficult as it is, with a thankful remembrance of one comfortable promise which it contains. “The Spirit of truth,” says our Lord to His weak and half-informed followers, “shall guide you into all truth.” That promise was for our sakes, no doubt, as well as for theirs. Whatever we need to know for our present peace and sanctification, the Holy Ghost is ready to teach us. All truth in science, nature, and philosophy of course is not included in this promise. But into all spiritual truth that is really profitable, and that our minds can comprehend and bear, the Holy Spirit is ready and willing to guide us. Then let us never forget, in reading the Bible, to pray for the teaching of the Holy Ghost. We must not wonder if we find the Bible a dark and difficult book, if we do not regularly seek light from Him by whom it was first inspired. In this, as in many other things, “we have not because we ask not.”
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Notes-
v8.-[And when He is come.] These words would be rendered more literally, “And He having come.” Here, as in other places, we must remember that the “coming” of the Holy Ghost does not mean His coming for the first time into the world. He was in all the Old Testament saints, and no one ever believed or served God without His grace. Wherever there has been a true servant of God, there has been the Holy Ghost. The “coming” here mentioned means His coming down with larger power and influence on all mankind after the ascension of Christ, and specially on the day of Pentecost. From that day began an enormous extension of His influence and operations on human nature: an influence so much wider than it ever was before, that He is said to have “come.”
Light Foot remarks that “the Holy Spirit had absented Himself from the Jewish nation for four-hundred years!” Hence the phrase “come” had a special significance.
[He will reprove…judgment.] This sentence is perhaps one of the most difficult in the whole of John’s Gospel. Men will probably never agree about it entirely till the Lord comes. There is something in it which seems to baffle all interpreters.
The commonest explanation is that which regards the passage as describing the ordinary operations of the Holy Ghost in saving God’s people. It is He who convinces people that they are sinners; convinces them that they must be saved by Christ’s righteousness, and not their own; and convinces them that there is a judgment to come. This interpretation is the one adopted by Alford and many others.-No doubt it contains truth, but it is not at all clear to me that it is the truth of the passage. It is open, in short, to grave objections, and, in common with some commentators, I cannot feel satisfied with it. For popular addresses this view may do pretty well. But, I venture to think, no man who sits down and calmly weighs the meaning of words, can fail to see that it is open to very serious objections.
Inward conviction is certainly not the meaning of the word rendered “reprove.” It is rather refutation by proofs, convicting by unanswerable argument as an advocate, that is meant.
Believers and God’s people are not said to be the subjects of the Spirit’s reproving work. It is the “world” that is to be reproved; and this very world, in this last sermon, is continually put in contrast with Christ’s people.
Add to all this, that the latter part of the ninth, tenth, and eleventh verses can hardly be said to suit and square in with the verse we are considering. If our Lord had simply said, “The Spirit shall convince your hearers of their own sins, of my imputed righteousness, and of a day of judgment,” it would have been plain enough. But unfortunately there are several things added which really do not chime in with this mode of interpretation. I repeat, that no intelligent Christian, of course, will think of denying that conviction of sin is a special and saving work of the Holy Ghost on the hearts of believers. But it does not therefore follow that it is the thing taught in this passage. It is truth, but not the truth of the text.
I believe the meaning to be something of this kind.-“After the day of Pentecost the Holy Ghost, the great Advocate of Me and my people, shall come into this world with such mighty power that He shall silence, convince, and stop the mouths of your enemies, and oblige them, however unwillingly, to think of Me and my cause very differently from what they think now. In particular, He shall convince them of their own sin, of my righteousness, and of the victory which I have won over Satan. He shall, in short, be a crushing Advocate whom the world shall not be able to resist or gainsay.”
That this was one effect of the Holy Ghost coming down on the day of Pentecost, appears so frequently in the Acts of the Apostles that it is needless to quote texts. It is clear from the whole narrative of the earlier portion of Acts, that after the day of Pentecost there was a peculiar, restraining, irresistible power accompanying the work of the Apostles, which the unbelieving Jews, in spite of all their numbers and influence, were unable to withstand. Nor was this work of the Holy Ghost confined to the Jews. Wherever the Apostles and their fellow-labourers went, the same convincing power accompanied them, and obliged even the heathen to acknowledge Christianity as a great fact, even when they did not believe. Pliny’s famous letter to Trajan about the Christians, is a remarkable illustration of this.
I prefer this interpretation to the one above mentioned, as held by Alford and most commentators, for two simple reasons. One is that it suits the language of the passage, and the other view does not. The other reason is that it harmonizes with the context. Our Lord is encouraging the disciples against the world by the presence of the Comforter. And one special part of the encouragement is, that the Comforter shall do for them the work of an advocate, by silencing, crushing, refuting, and convincing their enemies.
After all, the enormous change which took place in the state of “the world” within a few centuries after Pentecost, is a strong proof to my own mind of the correctness of the view I advocate. About sin, Christ, and judgment, the opinions of men were completely transformed, even though men were unconverted. And who did this? The Holy Ghost. Nothing can account for the change but the miraculous interposition of the Holy Ghost.-I frankly confess that this view of the passage before us is not that of the vast majority of commentators. But in these matters I dare not call any man master, and must say what I think. Those who wish to see the view I maintain more fully argued out and supported, are advised to consult “Poole’s Annotations,” and Suicer’s “Thesaurus” on the Greek word which we translate “reprove.” Schleusner also seems to support the view.
Scott remarks here, “It is worthy of notice that an immense proportion of the human race, since the pouring out of the Holy Spirit after our Lord’s ascension, have been led to form such sentiments about sin, righteousness, and a future judgment, as the world up to that time had not the most remote conception of; so that a far higher standard of morals has been fixed throughout numerous nations than was at all thought of before.”
v9.-[Of sin…believe not…Me.] I think this verse means, “The Holy Ghost shall first and foremost convince the world concerning sin, by obliging my enemies to see, though too late, that in not believing Me they made an enormous mistake, and committed a great sin. He shall make them feel at last that in rejecting Me, they rejected One whom they ought to have believed.”
v10.-[Of righteousness…no more.] I think this verse means, “The Holy Ghost, secondly, shall convince the world concerning my righteousness, that I was a righteous Man, and not a deceiver. And this He will do after I have left the world, when the Jews can no longer see Me, and form any opinion of Me. I go to the Father, you know, and you will soon see me no more. But after I am gone the Holy Ghost will oblige my enemies to feel that I was a just and righteous Person, and was unjustly slain.” Even the centurion who saw our Lord crucified, declared, “Certainly this was a righteous man.” (Luk 23:47.)
v11.-[Of judgment…judged.] I think this verse means, “The Holy Ghost, in the last place, shall convince the world concerning the judgment and overthrow of Satan’s usurped power, by setting up a new kingdom everywhere, even my Church, by emptying the heathen temples of their worshippers, and by drying up the power of idolatry, and delivering vast portions of the world from its dominion.”
The “Prince of this world,” of course means the devil. How great His power was over mankind before Christ came into the world, and how great a change Christ’s death and resurrection produced in the general condition of mankind, are things which at this period of time we can hardly realize. The coming of the “kingdom of God,” or “kingdom of heaven,” was a reality 1800 years ago, of which we can now form little idea. The Holy Ghost produced a general conviction that a new order of things had begun, and that the old king and tyrant of the world was dethroned and stripped of much of his power.
Such is the view that I take of this passage. I do not pretend to deny that there are difficulties about it. I only maintain that these difficulties are fewer than those which surround the common idea attached to the passage.
Poole’s “Annotations” perhaps throw more light on the passage than any commentary I have met with. But even he says things which appear to me not warranted by the words of the evangelist.
v12.-[I have yet many things…you.] This clause seems to refer to the higher, fuller, deeper views of Christian truth which our Lord doubtless revealed to His disciples during the forty days between His resurrection and ascension, when He was continually “speaking of the things pertaining to the kingdom of God.”
The absurdity and unreasonableness of concluding from this text that there are many other truths which Christ after His resurrection revealed to the Apostles, but which are not recorded in Scripture, is well exposed by Ecolampadius and other Protestant commentators.
[Ye cannot bear them now.] This word “bear” means literally “carry.” It does not therefore signify things that the disciples could not “apprehend,” but things that their minds were not yet strong enough to endure and digest.
Do we not see here that there are steps and degrees in Christian attainment ? A man may be a good man, and yet not able to endure the whole truth. We must teach people as they are able to bear, and be patient.
v13.-[Howbeit…He…guide…all truth.] Here our Lord gives another promise concerning the Holy Ghost. He shall guide disciples into all truth. He will lead and direct them into the full knowledge of all the doctrines of the Gospel, and all the truth they need to know.
It is needless to say that “all truth” here does not mean all scientific truth. It applies specially to spiritual truth.
This great promise does not appear to me to signify “inspiration,” or the imparting of that power to write and teach infallibly which the Apostles possessed. I much prefer the view, that it is a wide promise belonging to the whole Church in every age. It means that special office of “teaching” by which the Spirit illuminates, guides, and informs the understandings of all believers. That the minds of true Christians are taught and enlightened in a manner wonderful to themselves as well as others, is a simple matter of Christian experience. That enlightenment is the gift of the Holy Spirit, and the first step in saving religion. At the same time we must never forget that the disciples received an immense increase of spiritual knowledge after the day of Pentecost, and saw everything in religion far more clearly than they did before.
Alford observes, “No promise of universal knowledge, nor of infallibility, is hereby conveyed; but it is a promise to them and us, that the Holy Spirit shall teach and lead us, not as children under the tutors and governors of legal and imperfect knowledge, but as sons, making known to us all the truth of God. (Gal 4:6.)
It is worth notice that in the Greek it is literally, “guide into all THE truth;” as if it specially meant “the truth concerning Me.”
Poole remarks that the Greek word rendered “guide,” is one of great emphasis, signifying not only a guide who will discover truth as the object of the understanding, but one who will bow the will to the doctrines of truth.
[For…not speak…Himself…hear…speak.] Here begins a list of things said about the Holy Ghost, which our weak capacities can hardly take in.
The clause before us seems meant to show the close and intimate union existing between the Spirit and the two other Persons in the blessed Trinity. “He shall not speak from Himself, independently of Me and my Father. He shall only speak such things as He shall hear from us.”
The phrases “speak” and “hear” are both accommodations to man’s weakness. The Spirit does not literally “speak” or literally “hear.” It must mean, “His teachings and guidings shall be those of One who is in the closest union with the Father and the Son.”
“Of Himself” does not mean “about Himself,” but “from Himself.”
[He will show…things to come.] The second thing said about the Spirit, is that He will show “things to come.” I can only suppose that this points to the prophetical revelation of the future of the Church which the Spirit was to impart to the disciples. He did so when He inspired Paul, Peter, Jude, and John to prophecy. The expression probably includes the destruction of Jerusalem, the removal of the Mosaic dispensation, the scattering of the Jews, the calling in of the Gentile Churches, and the whole history of their rise, progress, and final decay.
v14.-[He…glorify Me.] The third thing said of the Spirit, is that He shall “glorify Christ.” He shall continually teach, and lead, and guide disciples to make much of Christ. Any religious teaching which does not tend to exalt Christ, has a fatal defect about it. It cannot be from the Spirit.
[He shall receive…mine…show you.] This is the fourth thing said of the Spirit in this place. He will take of the truth about Christ, and show it or reveal it to disciples. I can attach no other meaning to the phrase “mine.” It is in the singular number,-“that thing which is mine,”-and I cannot see what it can mean but “truth concerning Me.”
Alford remarks, ” This verse is decisive against all additions and pretended revelations, subsequent to and beside Christ; it being the work of the Spirit to testify to the things of Christ, and not to anything new or beyond Him.”
v15.-[All things…Father…mine, etc.] The object of this deep verse seems to be to show the entire unity between Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in the revelation of truth made to man. “The Holy Spirit shall show you things concerning Me, and yet things at the same time concerning the Father, because all things that the Father hath are mine.”
Both this verse and the preceding one are strikingly calculated to humble a Bible reader, and make him feel how little he knows, at his very best, of the full meaning of some Scriptures. There are things in them which we must feel we do not comprehend. Beyond the great principle, that it is the special office of the Holy Spirit to glorify Christ, and to show disciples the whole truth concerning Christ, it is very hard to get.
May not the clause, “All things that the Father hath are mine,” be specially put in to prevent our supposing that there can be any real separation between the things of Christ and the things of the Father? It is like “I and my Father are One.” “All mine are Thine, and Thine are mine.”-“Think not,” our Lord seems to say, “when I speak of the Spirit showing you ‘my things,’ that He will not show you the things of my Father. That would be impossible. There is so close an union between the Father and the Son, that the Spirit cannot show or teach the things of the one without the things of the other. In a word, He proceeds from the Father as well as from the Son.”
Fuente: Ryle’s Expository Thoughts on the Gospels
Joh 16:8. And he, when he is come, will convict the world concerning sin, and concerning righteousness, and concerning judgment. The Agent has been spoken of; we now enter upon His work, and the climax from chap. Joh 15:26, where the same aspect of the Spirit s work is spoken of, is clearly perceptible. We are not to understand by the word convict either simply reprove or convince. It is much more than both, and implies that answer of conscience to the reproving convincing voice, by which a man condemns himself (chaps. Joh 3:20, Joh 8:26). The word concerning also is not the same as of. The inference to be drawn from these considerations (comp. also on chap. Joh 14:30-31) is that in the conviction of the world here spoken of its conversion is not necessarily implied. Conversion may or may not follow for anything here stated. The promise now given to the disciples is not that they shall convert the world, but that it shall be silenced, self – condemned, overwhelmed with shame and confusion of face. The Judge of all the earth is upon their side; He will judge for them.
Fuente: A Popular Commentary on the New Testament
In these and the following verses our Saviour acquaints his disciples with the advantages that will redound by the coming of the Comforter.
First, the advantage to the world.
Secondly, to the apostles.
And, thirdly, to himself.
To the world, 1. He shall convince them of sin, righteousness, and judgment. Of sin: that is, of their sinful state and nature, of the large extent of sin, and particularly of the sin of unbelief.
Learn hence, 1. That the Spirit of God is the author of conviction of sin, and that all convictions of sin do either mediately or immediately flow from him.
2. That unbelief is a sin of the greatest malignity against Christ, and of the greatest danger to a Christian’s soul: He shall convince the world of sin, because they believe not on me.
Secondly, Of righteousness; that is, of the insufficiency of all human righteousness, and of the necessity of the righteousness of a mediator; by which alone we are to expect acceptance with God; or of a complete and perfect righteousness in me, imputable to sinners for their perfect justification: and that it is so, appears because I go to the Father, and ye see me no more.
As if Christ had said, “Hereby you may be satisfied, that by my active and passive obedience I have fully satisfied my Father’s justice for you, and you shall never be charged or condemned; because, when I go to heaven, I shall abide there in glory with my Father, and never be sent back again, ye shall see me no more, as I must have been, if anything had been omitted by me.”
Note farther, that none are convinced of righteousness who are not first convinced of sin. None will come to Christ by faith, till convictions of sin have awakened and distressed them.
Thirdly, Of judgment: that is, the Spirit shall convince the world, that Jesus is both Lord and Christ, that he had power to judge Satan the prince of the world, and that he did by his death put down the kingdom of darkness.
Learn hence, 1. That Satan is a prince who by unjust usurpation, and sinners voluntary consent, has exercised a tyrannical power over the world.
2. That Christ by his death did judge, condemn, and overcome, this mighty prince, and hath made his conquest evident to the consciences of men, by the convictions of his Holy Spirit: The Spirit shall convince of judgment: that is, that Satan the prince of this world is judged.
Fuente: Expository Notes with Practical Observations on the New Testament
Vv. 8-11. And when he shall have come, he will convince the world of sin, of righteousness and of judgment; 9, of sin, because they believe not on me; 10, of righteousness, because I go to my Father and you will see me no more; 11, of judgment, because the prince of this world is judged.
Here is the description of the victory which, through the agency of the disciples, the Holy Spirit will gain over the world. The discourse of St. Peter at Pentecost and its results are the best commentary on this promise. It will be a victory of a moral nature, the mode of which is expressed by the term , to convince of wrong or of error; here both the one and the other.
This word does not also designate a definitive condemnation, as the Fathers, and then de Wette and Bruckner, thought, as if the Holy Spirit were to demonstrate to lost humanity the justice of its condemnation. Joh 16:11 proves that the prince of the world alone is already judged. If, then, the world can profit by the reproof of the Holy Spirit, it is still capable of salvation. This is proved by the effect of the apostles’ preaching, in the Acts, in the case of a portion of the hearers. The reproof given by the Spirit may lead either to conversion or to hardening; comp. 2Co 2:15-16. The apostles are not named as instruments of this internal operation of the Spirit. Their persons disappear in the glory of the divine being who works by their means. But it is certainly through their intervention that it takes place, as the of Joh 16:7 proves; comp. also Joh 16:13-15. The error of the world on the one side, and the divine truth on the other, will be demonstrated with regard to three points. The absence of the article before the substantives, sin, righteousness, judgment, leaves to these three notions the most indefinite meaning. Jesus will give precision to the application of them by the three , in that or because, which follow. If this explanation of Jesus Himself failed us, we should undoubtedly regard the idea of righteousness as the intermediate one between the two others: righteousness applying itself to sin to producejudgment. But the explanation of Jesus places us on an altogether different path. Only it concerns us to know whether we must translate the three by in that or because. In the first case, the fact mentioned afterwards is that in which the sin, righteousness, judgment, consist, and the conjunction may be regarded as dependent on each of the three substantives; in the second, the conjunction in each instance depends on the verb convince, and announces a fact which will establish the truth of God and the error of the world on these three points. The first interpretation, as it appears to me, cannot be applied to the second of these points.
The world, here the Jewish world, was in error respecting sin, seeking to find it only in the shameful excesses of tax-gatherers and the gross infractions of the Levitical law. Israel condemned and rejected Jesus as a malefactor because of His violations of the Sabbath and His alleged blasphemies. The Spirit will reveal to it its own state of sin by means of a crime of which it does not dream, unbelief towards its Messiah, the messenger of God; comp. the discourse of Peter, on the day of Pentecost, Act 2:22-23; Act 2:36; and Act 3:14-15. Sincere Jews recognized immediately the truth of this reproof (Act 2:37). And this office of the Spirit continues always. Jesus is the good; to reject Him is to prefer the evil to the good and to wish to persevere in it; comp. Joh 3:19-20. This is what the Spirit without cessation makes the unbelieving world feel by His agents here on earth.
Thus does not mean: He will convince the world of sin which consists in unbelief; but He will convince it of its state of sin in general, and this by rendering it palpable to it by means of a decisive fact, its unbelief with regard to the Messiah. It goes without saying that this work of the Spirit is not to be confounded with the usus elenchticus of the law.
The Jewish world is also in error as to the way in which it has understood righteousness. Exalting itself with pride in its meritorious works, Israel has taken its position in opposition to Jesus as the representative of righteousness, and has rejected Him from its midst as an unworthy member. The Holy Spirit will fulfil with reference to this judgment the function of a court of appeal. Holy Friday seemed to have ascribed sin to Jesus, and righteousness to His judges; but Pentecost will reverse this sentence; it will assign righteousness to the condemned One of Golgotha and sin to His judges. This meaning results first from the contrast between the two terms sin andrighteousness, then from the following explanatory clause, according to which the righteousness which is here in question is that which glorification will confer upon Jesus in the invisible world, and which the sending of the Spirit by Him to His own will proclaim here below. This righteousness cannot therefore be, as Augustine, Melanchthon, Calvin, Luther, Lampe, Hengstenberg, etc., think, the justification which the believer finds in Christ, or, as Langesupposes, the righteousness of God, who deprives the Jews, as a punishment for their unbelief, of the visible presence of the Messiah and of His earthly kingdom (you shall see me no more). In the words: because I go to my Father, Jesus presents His ascension, the end in which His death issues, as intended to afford the demonstration of His righteousness; and He adds what follows: and you will see me no more, to complete this proof: You will feel me to be present and active, even when you shall see me no more. The body of Jesus will have disappeared; but His divine activity in this state of invisibility will prove His exaltation to the Father, and consequently His perfect righteousness (Act 2:24; Act 2:26).
The judgment, of which the Holy Spirit will furnish to the world the demonstration, will not be that great judgment of the Gentiles which the Jews were expecting, nor even that of the Jewish world convinced of sin. For the final sentence of the one party and the other is not yet pronounced. The prince of this world alone has from henceforth filled up the measure of his perversity, and can consequently be finally judged. Until Holy Friday. Satan had not displayed his murderous hate, except with reference to the guilty. On that day, he assailed the life of the perfectly righteous One. In vain had Jesus said: He has nothing in me. Satan exhausted on Him his murderous rage (Joh 8:44; Joh 8:40). This murder without excuse called forth an immediate and irrevocable sentence against him. He is judged and deprived of power. And it is the Holy Spirit who proclaims this sentence here on earth, by calling the world to render homage to a new Master. This summons reveals the profound revolution which has just been wrought in the spiritual domain. Every sinner rescued from Satan and regenerated by the Spirit is the monument of the condemnation of him who formerly called himself the prince of this world.
Thus by the testimony of the Spirit the world, righteous in its own eyes, will be declared sinful; the condemned malefactor will be proved righteous; and the true author of this crime will receive his irrevocable sentence: such are the three ideas contained in this passage, whose powerful originality it is impossible not to recognize. It does not differ except as to form from Joh 12:31-32; the three actors mentionedthe world, Satan and Jesusare the same, as well as the parts which are attributed to them. Our passage only adds this idea: that it is the Holy Spirit who will reveal to men the true nature of the invisible drama consummated on the cross. The result of this reproof of the Spirit is that some remain in the sin of unbelief and participate thus in the judgment of the prince of this world, while others range themselves on the side of the righteousness of Christ, and are withdrawn from the judgment pronounced upon Satan.
But if this victory of the Spirit is to be gained by means of the apostles, it must be that previously the work of the Spirit has been consummated in them. This is the reason why Jesus passes from the action of the Spirit on the world through believers to His action in believers themselves (Joh 16:12-15).
Fuente: Godet Commentary (Luke, John, Romans and 1 Corinthians)
Verse 8
Reprove; teach, convince.
Fuente: Abbott’s Illustrated New Testament
16:8 {3} And when he is come, he will {a} reprove the {b} world of sin, and of righteousness, and of judgment:
(3) The Spirit of God works so mightily by the preaching of the word that he forces the world, whether or not it wants to, to confess its own unrighteousness and Christ’s righteousness and almightiness.
(a) He will so reprove the world, that those of the world will not be able to give any excuse.
(b) He refers to the time that followed his ascension, when as all those opposed were manifestly reproved, through the pouring out of the Holy Spirit upon the Church: so that the very enemies of Christ were reproved of sin, in that they were forced to confess that they were deceived, in that they believed not, and therefore they said to Peter in Act 2:37 , “Men and brethren, what shall we do?”
Fuente: Geneva Bible Notes
The Spirit’s coming would result in heightened conviction among unbelievers concerning sin, righteousness, and judgment. [Note: See Chafer, 3:210-24: "The Convicting Work of the Spirit;" and John Aloisi, "The Paraclete’s Ministry of Conviction: Another Look at John 16:8-11," Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 47:1 (March 2004):55-69.] Before then, that conviction had come mainly from the Old Testament, John the Baptist, Jesus, and the disciples’ personal influences.
What did Jesus mean when He said the Spirit would "convict" (Gr. elenxei) the world? This Greek verb occurs 18 times in the New Testament (Mat 18:15; Luk 3:19; Joh 3:20; Joh 8:46; Joh 16:8; 1Co 14:24; Eph 5:11; Eph 5:13; 1Ti 5:20; 2Ti 4:2; Tit 1:9; Tit 1:13; Tit 2:15; Heb 12:5; Jas 2:9; Jud 1:15; Jud 1:22; Rev 3:19). In each case it involves showing someone his or her sin with a view to securing repentance. [Note: Cf. Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, s.v. elenxo, by F. Büchsel, 2:473-74.]
"In Joh 16:8 the Holy Spirit is involved in pointing out sin in order to bring about repentance. The legal idea suggested by some seems to have been derived from the use of the term in extrabiblical literature, whereas the biblical writers used elenxo primarily to describe correction, not prosecution or conviction." [Note: Robert A. Pyne, "The Role of the Holy Spirit in Conversion," Bibliotheca Sacra 150:598 (April-June 1993):208. For the legal idea, see Paul Enns, "The Upper Room Discourse: The Consummation of Christ’s Instruction" (Th.D. dissertation, Dallas Theological Seminary, 1979), pp. 296-97; or Rudolph Bultmann, The Gospel of John: A Commentary, pp. 564-65.]
Wherever the Greek preposition peri ("concerning" or "in regard to") occurs after elenxei ("convict"), as here, some evil or source of evil follows (cf. Joh 8:46; Luk 3:19; Jud 1:15). The Spirit would not just accuse people of sin, but would bring an inescapable sense of guilt before God upon them (cf. 2Sa 12:7; Psa 51:4). [Note: Tenney, "John," p. 157. Cf. Donald A. Carson, "The Function of the Paraclete in John 16:7-11," Journal of Biblical Literature 98 (1979):547-66.] This sense of guilt is an indispensable prerequisite for salvation.
The title paraclete (i.e., one called along side to help, cf. Joh 15:26) is an appropriate one for the Spirit. He acts as a prosecuting attorney by demonstrating the guilt of those whom Jesus accused with His teaching. Earlier Jesus had spoken of the Paraclete as the defender of believing disciples (Joh 14:16-18), but now the Eleven learned that He is also the prosecutor of unbelieving sinners. Believers are witnesses, the Holy Spirit is the prosecuting attorney, and the lost are guilty sinners.