John 16:12

John 16:12. I have yet many things to say unto you, but ye cannot bear them now. Jesus is about to draw His instructions and consolations to a close. He does so by returning to the great promise of the Spirit already given in chap. John 14:26. Yet there is a difference between the promise there and here; and the difference, as usual, is one of climax. Teaching of a higher kind is now to be referred to, for the element of experience comes in. It is not enough to have been taught by Jesus Himself. The disciples were to take their Master's place, and to carry on His work. The Spirit, then, who had been His strength, must be also theirs. Thus it is not so much new teaching that they need as the old teaching in a new way, brought home to their hearts with a new power. It is, indeed, often supposed that the ‘many things' here spoken of refer to new truths. This seems improbable. We can hardly suppose that Jesus had left any large part of His revelation not given, especially when He had so often spoken of the revelation of ‘the Father,' as if it contained the sum and substance of religious truth. Besides this, we have already seen that in the words of Jesus ‘all things' are implicitly contained (comp. on chap. John 14:26). And, further, the word ‘bear' does not mean to apprehend; it is to bear as a burden, and the most glorious and encouraging truths may become a burden to one too immature to bear them.

Not, therefore, because the disciples could not in a certain sense even now understand further revelation, but because they had not yet the Christian experience to give that revelation power, does Jesus say that they cannot bear the many things that He has yet to say unto them. When shall they, or when shall the Church, be able to understand them? The answer is, When at any stage of their or her future history the ‘many things' are needed, and so may have their power felt. But just because of this they need not be, as the whole context teaches us they are not to be, new truths. They are old truths made new, expanded, unfolded (as we see especially in the Epistles of Paul), illumined by receiving light from the lessons of history, when these are read in the spirit of Christian trust and confidence and hope, but not wholly new. There will not be in them one revelation, strictly so called, that was not in the words of Jesus Himself: but their ever greater depths shall be seen as the relations of the Church and of the world respectively become more complex. It has been so in the past: it will be so in the future. There is no reason to think that the treasure in the words of Jesus will ever be exhausted: it contains, according to the seeming paradox of the apostle, what we are ‘to know,' although it ‘passeth knowledge' (Ephesians 3:19). This is the true development of Christian insight and experience, not the false development of Rome.