Another Counselor

I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Advocate, who will never leave you.   John 14:16

“Over the last three years,” Jesus was saying, “I’ve been your advocate, but when the Holy Spirit comes, he’ll be everything to you that I’ve been.” This tells us two important things about the Holy Spirit. If he is to be everything to us that Christ was to the disciples, the Holy Spirit is a person and the Holy Spirit is God.

Jesus never referred to the Holy Spirit as “it,” and neither should we. When talking about the Spirit, Jesus said, “The world cannot receive him, because it isn’t looking for him and doesn’t recognize him. But you know him, because he lives with you now and later will be in you” (John 14:17, emphasis added).

The Holy Spirit is a person, so we shouldn’t think of him as a power or a force. The Bible talks about lying to the Holy Spirit (see Acts 5:3) and bringing sorrow to the Holy Spirit (see Ephesians 4:30). You cannot lie to a force or bring sorrow to a power. A burst of energy could never be to the disciples everything that Jesus was. The Holy Spirit is as much God with you as Jesus was God with the disciples.

Notice Jesus called the Spirit “another Advocate” (John 14:16, emphasis added). In other words, the Spirit and the Son have distinct identities. But then Jesus added, “I will not abandon you as orphans—I will come to you” (14:18). In other words, where the Spirit is, Christ is. He went another step: “All who love me will do what I say. My Father will love them, and we will come and make our home with each of them” (14:23). We learn that where the Spirit is, both the Father and the Son will make their home.

You cannot know one person of the Trinity without the others. There’s no such thing as knowing the Father apart from the Son—it’s through the Son that the Father has made himself known. Nobody knows the Son apart from the Spirit—it’s through the Spirit that we come to faith and repentance in Jesus Christ.

For further reading, see Ephesians 4