On This Day: The Children Who Know What Only God Knew

   “These things I have spoken to you while I am still with you. But the Helper, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, he will teach you all things and bring to your remembrance all that I have said to you." (John 14:26-26)

   My journey through the Last Supper account in John 13-17 is amazing me with how many ways Jesus told the disciples they would see him again after his death and they couldn’t grasp it because of what they expected the Messiah to do to deliver Israel from the Romans. There are big lessons in that regarding how we often cannot accept what God is teaching us in his word because we are already clinging to something contrary we were taught by our family, church, or Bible college.

   The thing that hit me like an arrow finding the bull’s eye is how Jesus’ teaching about the Holy Spirit presents evidence that we are born again. It focuses on Paul’s elaboration in I Corinthians 2:9-11. The primary focus for the moment is this:

But, as it is written,

“What no eye has seen, nor ear heard,

    nor the heart of man imagined,

what God has prepared for those who love him”—

these things God has revealed to us through the Spirit. (vss 9-10)

   Paul is writing after the fact of what Jesus was telling his disciples on the night of the Last Supper. As Jesus’ promised, the Holy Spirit had come, he had been teaching the church through the apostles all about salvation and the righteousness of faith, and he was constantly reminding the church of what Jesus had already taught during his earthly ministry.

   Paul quotes from the Tanakh (the Hebrew Scriptures we call the Old Testament) what was being fulfilled in the work of the Holy Spirit. There were things no one had seen because they were hidden in God. There were things no one had heard because God hadn’t yet told anyone. And there were things no one had imagined God to be doing (as shown very clearly with the disciples during the last supper and the few days Jesus was dead) because God’s thoughts and ways are higher than our thoughts and ways.

   Paul makes clear a few verses later that “the natural person does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are folly to him, and he is not able to understand them because they are spiritually discerned” (vs 14). This is why Jesus told Nicodemus that he had to be born again to see and enter the kingdom of God. This is why Jesus said that people had to become like little children in order to see Jesus and hear what he was saying. The point is the same all the way through, that in and of ourselves we are dead in our trespasses and sins and cannot know and do the will of God.

   And that’s when it hit me. Because I do know and do the will of God, and because I do know the things once hidden in God, the only explanation is that I have been born again and taught by God. In fact, what Paul writes in this section is, “Now we have received not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit who is from God, that we might understand the things freely given to us by God” (vs 12).

   Today I needed this comfort of knowing that knowing what only God knew is a clear sign of the new birth. I can be transformed by the “renewal of the mind” given to us in regeneration because “we have the mind of Christ” (vs 16). God has been pleased to reveal this to me as a little child so that, even though I could never keep up in a debate about doctrine, I know that I know what once only God knew.

   And now that I know that, I want to make it known to all who will hear Jesus’ voice, that we can still be those who are taught by God and know what only can be known by the word and the Spirit of Jesus Christ our Lord.

 

 

© 2026 Monte Vigh ~ Box 517, Merritt, BC, V1K 1B8

Email: in2freedom@gmail.com

Unless otherwise noted, Scriptures are from the English Standard Version (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version. ESV® Text Edition: 2016. Copyright © 2001 by Crossway Bibles, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers.)

 

On This Day: How the Deity of Jesus Simply Adds Up

  When he had gone out, Jesus said, “Now is the Son of Man glorified, and God is glorified in him. If God is glorified in him, God will also glorify him in himself, and glorify him at once." (John 13:31-32)

   Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father. (Philippians 2:5-11)

   The deity of Jesus Christ is denied by Muslims, Mormons, and JWs, but clearly taught as fact in God’s word, the Bible.

   For me, this is a mix of revelation (what God tells us in his word about his Son), and relationship (how I have come to know Jesus in the way revealed). Both make it feel utterly crucial that we do not let go of this glorious reality that Jesus is glorified as the Son of God who makes his Father known.

   Part of the deep feelings I have about this comes from the rhyming thoughts of Scripture on the topic. God presents truth in parallel thoughts so that, just as multiple threads are woven together to make a strong cord, the revelation of Jesus as God the Son is so strong that anyone who hangs his/her life from it will never be ashamed.

   The point is to see how all the rhyming thoughts are synonymous in revealing the relationship between the Father and the Son. The Father has his place in the Triunity of God, and the Son has his. And, just like my son and daughter are as much human as I am even though I am the dad and they are my children, Jesus is just as much God as his Father even though the Father is the father and the Son is the son.

   Part of the glory of all these references to Jesus in his relationship with the Father is the pattern they follow. In the center is “of”. On the first side is something about Jesus; on the other side is something of the Father. Every such phrase tells us a different color of the spectrum of the divine light of their relationship.

 

Something about God the Son

Of

Something about God the Father

 

   Here are a variety of these expressions listed together so you can see their unity and harmony in revealing this relationship.

 

Something about God the Son	Of	Something about God the Father	Scripture
The image	of	the invisible God	Col 1:15
The radiance	of	the glory of God	Heb 1:3
The exact imprint	of	his nature	Heb 1:3
The form	of	God	Phil 2:6
The Son	of	God	Too many!

 

   We can add to this that Jesus is “the Word” of God, even though the exact phrase is not found in Scripture. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God” (John 1:1-2). Jesus was with God, he was God, and as “the Word” he is the ultimate revelation of God.

   One of the beautiful pictures of what it will be like in the new heavens and the new earth is “And the city has no need of sun or moon to shine on it, for the glory of God gives it light, and its lamp is the Lamb” (Revelation 21:23). What a beautiful summary of everything the rest of Scripture teaches, that Jesus is the lamp who makes the Father’s light known to the world. He had that “form of God” in the beginning, “the Word became flesh” in time, and we will see the glory of the Father in the Son for eternity.

   This is why it is such “good news of great joy” that “God, who said, ‘Let light shine out of darkness,’ has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ” (II Corinthians 4:6). Let yourself picture that. It is ours already. By faith, we see in the face of Jesus Christ the glory of God. Jesus came to make this known to us!

    So, when Jesus is just hours away from his crucifixion, and he tells us, “Now is the Son of Man glorified, and God is glorified in him” (John 13:31), it is to prepare us for what we would see of the world’s hatred of our Savior. Death and the grave would have no victory over Jesus even though he would humble himself to experience both.

   But because of his resurrection, we believe that Jesus will appear in glory soon enough no matter how long it seems to take for his return. For “we know that when he appears we shall be like him, because we shall see him as he is” (I John 3:2).

 

© 2026 Monte Vigh ~ Box 517, Merritt, BC, V1K 1B8

Email: in2freedom@gmail.com

Unless otherwise noted, Scriptures are from the English Standard Version (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version. ESV® Text Edition: 2016. Copyright © 2001 by Crossway Bibles, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers.)