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When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth” (John 16:13). Jesus mentioned the Holy Spirit eight times in the upper room, four times using the word pneuma, or “Spirit” (14:17, 26; 15:26; 16:13), and four times using the word paraklētos, translated in the ESV as “Helper” and in other translations as “Comforter,” “Strengthener,” or “Advocate” (14:16, 26; 15:26; 16:7). Jesus was preparing His disciples for life without His physical presence. The Apostles would require a great deal of help to know what to do and what to say. And that help would come from the Helper, the Holy Spirit, whom they knew in part but whom they would come to know in an even greater way after Pentecost.
In John 16:13, the Holy Spirit is distinguished as the “Spirit of truth” (see 14:17; 15:26). He is in the business of truth telling. In our postmodern world, where the very notion of “true truth” (as Francis Schaeffer would say) is denied, John 16:13 is countercultural. Like Pilate, scoffers throw their hands in the air, saying, “What is truth?” (18:38). There is truth and there is falsehood, and the disciples would need to know the difference. They were not going to be left to figure things out for themselves or to come up with personal opinions on matters of life and death. Jesus had told them many things, but He hadn’t told them everything. Even the things that He had told them were not clearly understood. The third person of the Trinity, the representative agent of the ascended Lord Jesus Christ, would come to their aid. He would teach them about the way of salvation. He would help them understand the doctrines of sin, regeneration, justification, sanctification, and glorification.
Some of the disciples would remain preachers all their lives, but some of them would be tasked with writing what would become the New Testament canon. Peter would write, “For no prophecy was ever produced by the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit” (2 Peter 1:21). The statement “he will guide you into all truth” is ultimately a statement about the production of the New Testament. This means that we, too, can know the truth. This upper-room statement had in view disciples of Jesus down through the ages. Those of us who have never seen Him or heard His voice see and hear Him in the pages of Scripture. Our eyes are opened and our ears unstopped to learn about God, about the world, about our need for salvation, and about where that salvation can be found. We are not left scrambling to discover what is true and what is not; the Holy Spirit has left us with the Bible “breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work” (2 Tim. 3:16–17).