THE SPIRIT'S SERVICE
THE SPIRIT’S SERVICE
I find the Lord (in John 14) assuring His disciples that His absence would be compensated for by nothing less than the presence of the Holy Ghost in them, and this is the peculiar characteristic of His office that He was to abide with them for ever. Christ did not abide for ever with His disciples, but He sends One from heaven whose office [p. 264] it is to abide always. On this He grounds the expediency for them of His going to the Father, for “if I go not”, He says, “the Comforter will not come unto you: but if I go, I will send him unto you”. Thereby, though absent in Person, He could be in Spirit with His people, which doubtless is as puzzling to many now as it was to Judas in that day, though he understood it afterwards, for we find in his epistle that his primary precept to the church in the last times when disorder and confusion were beyond reformation, was that they were to “pray in the Holy Ghost”. The Spirit’s service to me is, that He comforts me in the absence of Christ, and He declares the glory of Christ — things that “eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man” (1 Corinthians 2: 9), are revealed to me now by the Spirit. I, who once read the Bible in ignorance and infidelity and with reluctance, now read it with joy, faith, knowledge. He is come in the name of Christ from the Father, teaching the doctrine and will of Christ, and giving intelligence in it, not communicating a new revelation, for all that is necessary has been given; and infinitely valuable and precious is it in this day of subdivision of opinions that there is a full and perfect and written revelation of the will of God that I can appeal to, and by which I can judge all the assertions of men.
No one knows the things of God but the Spirit of God, therefore it requires the Spirit of God to understand God’s real mind about a single verse of scripture.
Mr. Darby’s great power has been that he was imbued with the Word of God — the Spirit of scripture; his mind was dyed by it, therefore he must see things in the light of it.