The Masters Last Promise

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Short Summary
The discourse reflects on Jesus’ final teachings to his disciples, emphasizing humility, love, and the promise of the Holy Spirit as a teacher and reminder of his words. It traces the early Christian experience with the Spirit, the development of gospel writings, and the challenges posed by differing interpretations and human influences on scripture over time. Ultimately, it encourages believers to seek understanding through God’s perspective and to critically test teachings against the core truths of Jesus’ message.

Long Summary
Context of the Discourse:
– The discourse centers on Jesus’ last evening with His close disciples before His crucifixion.
– Jesus emphasized key lessons: humility (demonstrated by washing their feet) and love.
– He gave instructions and encouragement, knowing His departure would be devastating after three and a half years of close companionship.

Jesus’ Promise of the Holy Spirit:
– Jesus assured His disciples He would not leave them as orphans (Greek word: *orphanos*).
– This was His last promise as a human before His death; after the resurrection, additional promises were made.
– Jesus promised that He and the Father would send “something else” — the Holy Spirit (also called the Spirit of Truth or the Father’s Spirit).
– Reference: John 14 (mainly from the Phillips translation), where Jesus says:
*“I shall ask the Father to give you something else. To stand by you, to be with you always.”*
– The Holy Spirit would be their teacher and would bring to their minds all that Jesus had said to them.

Understanding the Spirit in Jewish and Early Christian Context:
– Spirit (*pneuma* in Greek) was a familiar term with mixed connotations: good spirits, bad spirits, unclean spirits, blessed spirits.
– Early disciples had heard John the Baptist say the Messiah would baptize with the Holy Spirit.
– Jesus’ teaching about the Spirit was consistent from the beginning (day one) to the last night (day final).
– Jesus’ teaching on the Spirit is linked to passages such as the Beatitudes (“Blessed are the poor in spirit”) and His promise of the Spirit speaking through believers.

Events After Jesus’ Resurrection Related to the Holy Spirit:
– Jesus instructed them to stay in Jerusalem until they received the Holy Spirit.
– On Pentecost (Acts 2), the Holy Spirit came with dramatic signs: a “tornado,” flames on heads, speaking in tongues.
– This empowered the disciples to preach in various languages, marking the fulfillment of Jesus’ promise.
– Subsequent events:
– Philip’s mission to Samaria, where Samaritans received the Holy Spirit after the laying on of hands by Peter and John.
– Peter’s vision and visit to Cornelius, a Gentile, where the Holy Spirit came upon them even before baptism.
– These examples show that the Holy Spirit’s work was varied and individualized, not following a strict formula.

The Holy Spirit’s Nature and Role:
– The Holy Spirit is invisible, supernatural, and often compared to wind or breath (Greek *pneuma*).
– God is Spirit (John 4:24), and worship must be in spirit and truth.
– The Spirit is described as a teacher and a friend (per Message Bible and Peterson’s paraphrase).
– The essence of the Spirit’s work is enabling believers to see things as God sees them (referencing Paul’s prayer in Colossians).

The Spirit and Memory:
– A significant promise Jesus made was that the Spirit would bring to mind all His teachings.
– This was crucial because Jesus’ teachings were oral and extensive, and few people could read or write at the time.
– The early disciples became eyewitnesses who preserved His teachings through memory and later writing.

Formation of the Gospel Records:
– Scholars believe the earliest record was a list or “source” (called the *Q* source in German scholarship).
– The four canonical Gospels (Mark, Matthew, Luke, John) were written within approximately 100 years after Jesus’ death.
– The Gospels are narratives built upon oral traditions and memory aided by the Spirit.
– Paul’s epistles were written in parallel, contributing to the early Christian library of teachings.

Challenges in Early Christian Textual History:
– Various additional gospels and acts appeared, such as the Gospel of Peter, Gospel of Philip, and multiple Acts attributed to different apostles.
– Many apocalyptic writings circulated, reflecting popular interest in end-times.
– The canon of the New Testament was not fixed until around 400 AD; for example, the Book of Revelation was officially recognized by a pope at that time.

Historical Figures and Controversies:
– Marcion (c. 150 AD) selected only Luke and 10 Pauline epistles as authentic, rejecting other writings; labeled a heretic (from Greek *hairetikos* meaning “chooser”).
– Origen (c. 250 AD), an Egyptian Christian scholar, doubted the authenticity of texts promoting eternal hellfire and the Trinity doctrine; persecuted for his views.
– Arius (early 4th century) sparked the Council of Nicaea (325 AD) which formalized the doctrine of the Trinity.
– These events show human influence and controversies impacted the transmission and interpretation of Scripture.

Practical Takeaways for Believers:
– Christians should be recognizable as followers of Jesus by behavior, not just words (Acts 4:13).
– The Spirit’s presence and work vary among individuals—some experience dramatic signs, others a gradual inner transformation.
– Believers are encouraged to “test the spirits” (1 John 4:1) to discern truth from falsehood, based on knowledge of God and Jesus.
– The ultimate hope is to see and understand life as God does, which is the Spirit’s transformative gift.

Additional Notes:
– The Ethiopian Church preserved its own Bible collection, larger than most Western Bibles, highlighting diversity in early Christianity.
– The speaker encourages discussion about personal experiences of receiving the Holy Spirit.
– Final emphasized scripture:
– 1 John 4:1 — *“Test the spirits to see whether they are from God, because many false prophets have gone out into the world.”*
– 1 John 2:2 — Jesus is the atoning sacrifice for the sins of the whole world.

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Summary:
This discourse reflects on Jesus’ final teachings and promises to His disciples, focusing on the coming of the Holy Spirit as a teacher and reminder of Jesus’ words. The Spirit’s arrival at Pentecost and subsequent events empowered the early church amid diverse experiences. The formation of the New Testament involved oral tradition, written records, and human challenges, including theological controversies and canon formation. Despite imperfections, God’s Spirit enables believers to understand and live by God’s perspective, testing spirits and guarding truth. The discourse closes with encouragement to reflect on personal encounters with the Spirit and trust in the Spirit’s ongoing work in remembering and applying Jesus’ teachings.

Transcript

The last evening that Jesus was with his close disciples, he reminded them, I suspect, of what he thought were the most important lessons. So there was the humility. He did the feet washing. He talked about love, and those were instructions.

I want you to do this, and I want you to do that. But he also then did some encouragements. He knew better than they did, that he was about to leave and it was going to be devastating to them. Three and a half years they had been arm to arm, so to speak. They ate together, they slept together, everything for three and a half years.

Almost daily he said to them, I don’t want to leave you as orphans, and I smiled at that word, orphans, because you know what the Greek word for orphan is? Listen carefully. Orphan.

Orphan. Orphan. So another Greek word to put it into your personal vocabulary, Christian vocabulary. Jesus is not leaving us as orphans.

So he makes them a promise. Now, there were a couple other promises that came later, after the resurrection. This is his last promise as a human before his death. So he says that in his place he and the Father would send them something, and in one place he calls it a gift.

This is From John, the 14th chapter, mostly from the Phillips translation. I. I hope I meet Philip someday. I’m going to tell him I changed one or two words in this translation, but he’ll forgive me. I shall ask the Father to give you something else. To stand by you, to be with you always.

I mean the spirit of truth.

The one who is coming to stand by you is the sacred spirit, Spirit. We call it the Holy Spirit or the Father’s Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name.

Now then he tells them what the Father’s spirit will do. He says, this gift will be your teacher.

I wish I could shout that word out. This spirit will be your teacher.

But then he added something which.

Can I tell you that I kind of forgot it was there. If you asked me what happened this night, I would have just given you. I would have remembered the first part, the spirit, the Parakletos. But then Jesus added something that I confess I really didn’t remember, and he says, the same spirit will bring to your minds all that I have said to you.

All that I have said to you. Are you serious? 3 and a half years of daily talking.

But that’s a promise. It’s got two parts. There’s a teacher and all I have said to you.

So let’s talk a little bit first about the spirit part, would you?

This word was known to them. Spirit was not a new idea. A spirit they had all Kinds of spirits. They used the word frequently, but a lot of times it was negative. They talked about a bad spirit.

They talked about it, evil spirit and unclean spirits, and then sometimes they did use it when they, when a woman would become pregnant or something, they would say, oh, you had a blessed spirit and stuff. So it was in their everyday language, spirit. Sometimes if they talked about a ghost or something, it was a spirit also. But mostly it was good spirit, bad spirit, stuff like that.

And one of the times that they might have remembered was at the very beginning of their meeting with Jesus, and you remember that several of them asked John the baptizer if he were the Messiah, and John said, no, no, no, no, I’m not the Messiah. He says, I baptize with water, but the one who follows me will baptize with the sacred spirit, the Holy Spirit. So if they remembered at all, that was like day one.

And here we are talking about the very last night they’re together and it’s the same subject. It’s kind of sweet. Day one and last day. I love it.

So another couple of examples that Jesus used spirit on the Sermon on the Mount, Blessed are the poor in spirit. It might have been later in Matthew 10 where Jesus said, this is not you that’s speaking, this is the spirit speaking in you. So it was in their conversations. We don’t know how much they understood and especially what John said. It would have taken some thinking, it would have taken some contemplation.

What did he mean by that? I would think that went through their heads. So after the resurrection, but before his ascension, Jesus appeared to them multiple times. You know, all this, and he said to them, stay in Jerusalem.

So you remember what happened another 10 days later. It was a Jewish holiday and they were gathered together, and this is in the acts now we’re in the fourth chapter and it says that John used to baptize with water. But Jesus is telling them, but before many days are past, you will be baptized by the Holy Spirit, and then this event comes.

They’re all together and there is a tremendous tornado. You know the story. The flames came into the room, it says, and then they went on each head, they spoke up. Every head had the, the flame on it, and you know, they started talking in different tongues.

And they, they were starting. This is like a first lesson of what it meant to get the Holy Spirit. They were different people. I mean, they couldn’t speak Egyptian before that or Arabic or anything else. They, they were Aramaic speaking group.

So it was probably scary, and so that was Like I said, one of the first. It says literally in Acts, they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in different languages as the Spirit gave them power to proclaim Jesus message. All right, this is the first step in the fulfillment of what Jesus has said in that upper room.

And then there were other things that happened, right? Philip went up to Samaria. Samaria, that was forbidden territory. He went there, he talked to them. What was his reception?

It was wonderful. They loved what he said, and.

I’m skipping ahead here.

Did I go to by samaria?

Well, The point of the Samaria thing is that they were forbidden to talk to them, right? So Philip goes and he says they accepted the message of Jesus. So then Peter and John went up, I think, to kind of check on what Philip did. They don’t believe him right off, and so the expression is that Peter and John laid their hands on the Samaritans and they got the Holy Spirit.

So this was a case of hearing the message, liking it, and then the disciples laid their hands on them. All right, that’s the Samaritans. The next big event in Acts is with the Gentiles, okay? The only thing worse than Samaritans are Gentiles. So.

Oh, my gosh. Now Peter has the dream, the vision of the blanket coming down with the animals, all the unclean animals. You know the story. He goes to Cornelius, he starts to the family there, the family friends, Cornelius. The house was full.

And Peter starts telling them about Jesus Christ, these Gentiles, and all of a sudden, they get the Holy Spirit while he’s talking, and the reason I am emphasizing this is to illustrate how different the Holy Spirit was working in these different situations. Sometimes they had been baptized and they hadn’t, and they didn’t get the Holy Spirit. Somebody had to come and do something later.

Sometimes they got the Holy Spirit. So don’t create a structure that you do this and then this happens and this happens and then has. It doesn’t work that way. God does what he wants to do, and he dealt, dare I say, individually with these people, I think so.

There’s the beautiful section.

In chapter four, where again, Peter and John got arrested for being out and talking about Jesus, and so they brought him in the next day and they were grilling them and talking to them, and in that verse 13, it says, when they saw the complete assurance of Peter and John, who were their words, obviously uneducated, untrained men, they were staggered, and they recognized them as men who had been with Jesus. Okay, well, that’s a takeaway, right? You know, that that’s what we want in our lives.

Is it recognizable that we have been with Jesus? By behavior, not by talking. Good. Okay.

They went back to the Brethren on that incident, and the ground shook. They had a prayer there. So all these different things, tornado, ground shaking, it wasn’t always the same.

So how are we doing on those different events? How was it with you? Did the ground shake? Was there the tornado? Did anybody see the flames?

I didn’t experience any of that. But I did have a point in my life where I saw a change, and I said, I think this is the Holy Spirit.

It was about four years after I was baptized.

I was baptized before I went to college.

Enough said. Four years later, I was on my own. The new English Bible had just been published. I devoured it, and I had the feeling, okay, it’s happening to some small degree. I can feel.

The Holy Spirit had nothing to do with all the other accounts, though. No flame, no ground, no tornado, no nothing. No laying on of hands. So I encourage you, if you can get on the subject, ask somebody at the table, say, when was it that you felt? Or you could start by saying, what did you think of that discourse?

It was pretty different, huh? And then say, well, how were you at that? When you got the Holy Spirit? When did you first feel that you really had the Holy Spirit? Okay, that would be a good discussion.

All right. We talked about the Samaritans, we talked about Cornelius. That was so beautiful, and.

Now the Holy Spirit is not easy to talk about because it’s invisible, it’s not physical. You can’t touch it, and it was kind of unnatural, but I like the word better. It was supernatural. That’s what it really was.

And so the cultures, for centuries, going way back, Jewish culture and beyond, they didn’t know how to deal with it either, and they called it the wind, or the word in Greek, pneuma is air. Pneumatic tires, there’s some kind of disease, pneumatic thorax or something, you know, it has to do with air in lungs, and it went back. Plato used the word Aristotle.

This is not a new word. Pneuma, air spirit. It’s not a Christian invention, but the idea is close. It’s this wind, and we know that Jehovah is a spirit being.

John in chapter four, said, God. God is a spirit, and those who worship him can only worship him in spirit. So the first promise is going to give you the spirit.

And I think it’s Phillips that says it will be Your teacher, that’s pretty important. I do like the message Bible here. He says, peterson says it’ll be your friend. I like that the Holy Spirit is our friend, and we won’t go into all the details of the Parakletos and stuff like that.

We’ve said all that before. So this is the Father’s spirit.

And I love the opening of. You can see, I love a lot of things in Colossians. Paul writes to them and he says, I pray for you that you would see things like God sees them.

To me, that’s the essence of the Spirit. I try a lot of ways to describe what the Spirit is, the inner feeling, the thoughts, all those things. But if I only needed one phrase, this is it, that you can see things the way God sees them. All the troubles of the earth, our personal failings, all these things. If you could see them as God sees them, that’s having God’s spirit.

So let’s say that that’s the first part of the promise.

Do you remember what the second part of the promise was?

It’s about memory. Hello.

Okay. That’s the part I keep forgetting. So Jesus said, the Spirit will bring to your minds all that I have said to you. That’s pretty astounding because there was a lot of talk and I wonder.

If it wasn’t all about providing the future generations some kind of record of what Jesus taught and what the early church taught. I think that’s one of the reasons. So we keep in mind that at this time period back then, very few people could read and write. Jesus did not say, I want you to make some documents. He didn’t say that.

He said, I’m going to give you the Spirit that you will remember. He said this to this very small group. So what did the group do? Well, I would say that these were eyewitnesses.

Now what do we know about eyewitnesses on any kind of accident? Five witnesses. How many different stories? Five. Yeah.

So how about these dear ones? 11 or 12. 11 of them, maybe more. Because of the 70 who were invited to join in his pre death work, How many stories do you think they really kind of got? And did they all, did they all come up with the same story?

No, not really. You know, sometimes one part’s this way and sometimes one part’s the other way. So there’s different words used, and then we can add the somewhat negative concept that there were false prophets wanting to get in and disrupt what Jesus was trying to do. So what they tell us, the men who study this as their profession.

The first record that was made was a list. A list. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and I think of the Phillips translation is a good one because it has titles kind of over each paragraph. It’ll say the Sermon on the Mount, the story of this, the leper healed.

And you go down these sections. That’s kind of what this is. It doesn’t exist today, but they have their ways of saying. We can tell there was originally a list, and the group that promoted this kind of the most were a bunch of German scholars in the early, early 1800s.

And they called the list, even though they didn’t have a copy of it, they called the list the Source. The Source. Now, I’ve been practicing to say that German word for a couple months now, and I can’t do it. But I brought some translators over and Wiebke, where are you? How do you pronounce this German word for source?

You get it? Kvela. If we looked at it, it would be Q, U, E, L, L, E, quelle, something like that. It means the source. So they had this list that was the source.

And because the German word starts with a Q, they just call it the Q. So as you read now, historical records of the Gospels, they’re going to talk about the Q. That’s the source. It was a list. There is a side suggestion that this list was made by Matthew.

Now, I absolutely love that because Matthew was the accountant and Matthew would kind of, I think, put things in a list. It fits for me. I love it. Okay, it doesn’t matter who did it. There was a kella.

Then we’re talking. Now Jesus is gone, and gospels are written narratives. There’s nothing. The list is not a narrative. The list is a list.

Period. Then they went to narratives. Mark wrote the first, and all these things happened in the first, I would say, 100 years. Okay? So Mark wrote his, then Matthew wrote his, then Luke wrote his, and John came quite a bit later, almost around the year 100 CE.

So, you know, I wonder, how did they remember this? Well, it had to be the Holy Spirit. There’s no way I can remember, you know, what I had for breakfast. So I can’t imagine they could remember 75 years later, you know, what was said. But anyway, it worked.

So that was the general timeline.

In parallel, Paul was writing letters.

And the point is that we’re starting to build this library of teachings. Excellent.

But it’s not that easy or almost honest because new documents started to occur and all of a sudden there was a gospel. Right? We’ve got Matthew, Mark, Luke, John. There’s now all of a sudden a new gospel, the Gospel of Peter.

Then there was a Gospel of Phillips. What’s going on? This is reality.

The book of Acts. One Book of Acts. No, there was Acts, supposedly written by Paul. Peter wrote a book of Acts. Supposedly Thomas wrote a book of Acts.

And you know what the favorite Jewish topic was? The Apostle Apocalypse. They wanted to hear about the Apocalypse. I’m not going to say there were a hundred apocalypses, but there was like something like 10 or 15 different apocalypses written, and this is getting out of sequence, but I’ll tell you a secret.

You know who picked the apocalypse in our Bible? One of the popes, around 400. So next time you start pounding the table about your revelation, I say, oh, okay, I’ll listen to you. All right. So the point is that letters, epistles, gospels were being added.

So it’s getting a little complicated.

So let’s jump ahead 75 years now. Let’s go into.

The year 150, something around 150, and there was a Christian brother who was from northern Turkey. I’m going to talk about a couple Christians here from this time period and I want to give this caveat first. Most of the records are we have about these, I’m calling them brethren. These are my brethren.

I think they were Bible students because they believe like I do, right? No Trinity, no hellfire and all those things, right? So these are my brothers. So the history that we get about these men was written by their enemies. You know, history.

There’s an old saying, history is written by the victors. So if there’s a war that’s won, the history is written by who won. Nobody goes and asks the losers, how did you do? So keep in mind, anytime you reference some of these men that I’m going to mention to pretty quickly keep in mind, and I don’t believe everything that those especially papal system historians tell about these men. Okay?

So the first man I’m talking about, the first brother, is Marcion. M A, R C I, O, N. I wanted to do a two slide power point point, but it’s against the rules. You have to do long power for. I’m just kidding, but I’ll spell it for you, Marcion. So Marcion was upset with the chaos, all these other books and writings.

So he looks at them and he decides out of all the gospels, he picks Luke as the most authentic. That’s a pretty good choice, at least Luke’s longest. So it’s going to have a Lot of material. That’s good. He liked the apostle Paul really a lot.

And he picked 10 of the apostle Paul’s writings, and you know what? That was his New Testament. He picked 11 books. At that time, there was a list of 35 or 40 books that were being promoted as part of the New Testament.

35 or 40. Marcion picks 11 because he says, I’m going to choose, and so they gave him a nickname. Daniel used choose in his talk. So they said, you’re the man that chooses.

Guess what the Greek word is for choose?

Heretic. That’s it. I didn’t make that up. That’s this Greek heretic. It wasn’t so bad in the beginning.

It’s just somebody that made a choice. In most cases it was a choice that I didn’t make. Right. So I don’t like you. I’m going to call you a heretic.

The word got worse and worse and worse as time went on. So eventually these men got excommunicated. Okay, I got to jump ahead to the next, the next man. Another hundred years now. Origen, O R I G E N O R I G E N I think he was from Egypt and he believed all the stories about Jesus.

He believed the stories of Jesus healing, Jesus preaching about love. He was totally convinced of that, and when he looked at the Bibles, now we’re another hundred years, okay, so that Marcion was 150. Now we’re talking about 250.

When he looked at the Bibles and what they were promoting in that year, 250ish. He says, this doesn’t make sense. He says, I’ve heard of Jesus and God and they talk about love and the brotherhood, and he says, that’s what I believe, and he says, these documents that you’re showing me which are now preaching eternal hell fire and a three headed God.

He says, I’m sorry, I don’t believe that. They said it’s in the manuscripts. He said, well, I don’t think those manuscripts are authentic. That was origin.

They killed them for that.

So we have one man whose death is kind of unknown, Marcion. We have another brother, Origen, who was persecuted and killed. So my point is that God intended, had intentions, and he wanted this record of his son’s life.

But human fingerprints got over the records. That’s the reality. Okay, so.

It’s okay. I’m at least halfway through my material, so I know I can finish on time. Don’t worry, John, I’ll do it. The next name I wanted to talk about you Know. Well, Arius, same thing.

They got the council together in Nicaea, the neighborhood of Constantinople, and they had over 300 elders come together and they passed rules that you can’t believe in one God. It has to be three in one. All those things. So that’s what happened with the record keeping.

So we have the Bible, but fingerprints of fallen humans got on it. Sometimes it was by accident, sometimes it was on purpose. So to end, I guess if I was hoping that you would remember one thing, it was. It would be the actual quote from Colossians that you. That we pray for each other.

That we can see things as God sees them. If. If we can do that. I think it covers everything.

I was going to elaborate, but I’ll leave one. One scripture. One. One more. It’s in First John, fourth chapter, the first verse.

And John says, test the spirits. He says there’s. John says, there’s good spirits and there’s bad spirits. I’m writing to you, warning you about false prophets. So he says, test the spirits.

How do you test the spirits? Well, you have to have the framework of who Jehovah is and who Jesus is. What do they stand for? What are their intentions? We know Jesus, the atoning victim.

First John 2. 2. He is the atoning victim for our sins, but not for our sins, only the sins of the whole world. So we know these different principles of truth.

So there’s a lot of good news out there about the manuscripts. Half a minute, John. I loved also the story of the Ethiopian Church. The Ethiopian Church was cut off from the Vatican Church, and when they had the synagogues and the elders meetings, they never invited the Ethiopians.

And the Ethiopians collected their own libraries. They have their own Bible. It’s bigger than our Bible. Oh, that’s kind of interesting, isn’t it? Okay, next time we’ll have to talk about the Ethiopian collection.

Thank you for your kind attention.

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