Chapters 8 to 9 - Christ’s Teachings and Today’s Christianity

- 6 - Apostles themselves were not yet mature enough to receive them, and so would not have understood them. “You will find this statement of mine confirmed in Christ’s own words: John 14: 16: ‘I will ask the Father to send you another helper, who will be with you always, the spirit world of truth.’ John 16: 12- 13: ‘I have much more to say to you, but you cannot bear it now. However, when the spirit world of truth has come, they will introduce you to the whole truth.’ John 14: 26: ‘The helper, however, the holy spirit world, which the Father will send in my name, will teach you whatever else you need to know and will remind you of all that I have told you.’ According to these words, then, the spirits of truth had a twofold task. First, they were to remind the faithful what Christ as a man had told them, and to confirm its truth. Beyond that, they were to continue the teaching that Christ had begun, and to proclaim those further truths that he had purposely withheld for the abovementioned reasons. • Moreover, the spirits of God were to be with the faithful forever, since, with the power of evil and the weakness of man, the danger of error was ever present. Subsequent generations must not be dependent upon the religious records of their ancestors, for such human records would bear no guarantee of truthfulness, and those to whom they were handed down could not discern what was derived from God’s wellspring of truth and what was attributable to human error. “Thus, after Christ’s corporeal death God’s messengers arrived constantly as spirits of truth, according to his promise. The Apostles continually cite them when exhorting their hearers to believe in their teachings. Paul’s writings, especially, abound in references to these messengers. I Corinthians 2: 4-5: ‘The things that I have said and preached I did not lay before you in impressive words of human wisdom, but it was a spirit of God and God’s power that spoke through me. Your faith was to be founded not on human wisdom, but on God's power.’ I Corinthians 2: 10-14: ‘But to us, God has revealed these things through his spirit..... Now the spirits we have received are not the spirits that rule the world, but spirits that come from God. We preach not in words taught by human wisdom, but in words that are taught to us by God’s spirits; thus, we deliver the spirit’s message in the same words in which the spirit gave it to us. True, a worldly minded person does not accept what comes from a spirit of God, for he considers it foolishness. He is not fit to understand it, because it must be judged spiritually.’ II Corinthians 3: 3: ‘You are an epistle of Christ, written by us as servants of Christ, not with ink, but with a spirit of the living God.’ Galatians 1: 11-12: ‘Let me say to you, dear brothers, that the gospel I preach is not the word of men. I neither received it from men, nor was it taught to me, but it was imparted to me through a revelation from Jesus Christ.’

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