Written by Kevin T. Bauder |
Tuesday, July 4, 2023
Jesus’s promise is not that the Holy Spirit would help the disciples to understand truth they had already received. Rather, the Spirit would guide them into the truth—all of it—that Jesus wanted them to have but that they were not yet ready to bear. In other words, these verses are about receiving truth (new revelation) and not about understanding truth already given (illumination).

Jesus cited, used, and endorsed every section of the Old Testament, whether law, prophets, or writings. Consequently, the Old Testament stands as a unit with His stamp of approval upon it. To reject its authority is to assail the authority of Christ Himself.
The authors of the New Testament had a very high view of their own writings. They asserted the authority of what they wrote, comparing it to the authority of recognized biblical texts and of the Lord’s own words. They also endorsed each other’s writings. To accept apostolic authority is necessarily to accept the authority of the New Testament.
A question arises, however, and it is an important question. Did Jesus ever endorse the New Testament? Does it stand beside the Old Testament with His stamp of approval upon it?
To discover Jesus’s opinion of the New Testament will require a different kind of evidence than His explicit endorsement of the Old Testament. By the time Jesus was born, the most recent document from the Old Testament was several hundred years old, widely distributed, and well known. Yet not one book of the New Testament was written during the earthly life and ministry of Jesus. If Jesus endorsed the New Testament at all, then He had to do it before it was written. His words about the New Testament would have to take the form of foretelling a later event.
Such words can be found in Jesus’s discourse on the night before He died, which appears in John 13–17. This discourse is divided by the departure of Judas in John 13:31. After Judas had gone, Jesus addressed the eleven remaining apostles. Most of what He said was directed specifically to them. When Jesus meant to include other believers, He either used indefinite language, such as when He referred to “every branch in me” (15:2) or broadened His reference with some phrase such as “them also which shall believe on me through their word” (17:20). In this discourse, when Jesus used the plural “you,” He usually meant specifically, “you apostles.”
He certainly meant the apostles when He said, “I have yet many things to say to you” (16:12). Throughout His ministry Jesus had been revealing new truth to His disciples. Here, on the last night before the cross, He told them that He had more to say to them. This was an intimation that His revelation to the disciples remained incomplete.
The reason it was incomplete is because the disciples were “not yet able to bear it” (16:12). They lacked some capacity for bearing up under the weight of the truth that Jesus wanted to communicate to them.
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Hagar’s circumstances were not fixed. She still had to bear Abram’s child and return to her mistress. However, Hagar didn’t find comfort in her circumstances but in the God who cared for her. Out in the desert—lonely, scared, and running away from a terrible situation—the God of the universe pursued Hagar. He knew her, looked after her, and “listened to [her] affliction” (Gen. 16:11). This is my hope and prayer for wives suffering from sexual betrayal: that they would lay their souls bare before God and be satisfied in him alone.

As a Harvest USA intern, some of my time has been dedicated to serving sexually betrayed wives through our biblical support group. I quickly learned that sexual betrayal in marriage has complicated, painful consequences and observed the tension these wives experience through feeling hopelessly stuck in their marriages.
A sexually betrayed wife faces her husband’s violation of the marriage covenant. When children are present, she may have to consider boundaries and relational dynamics within the home. She may be burdened with the family’s finances if the sexual betrayal caused his unemployment. Wives are sometimes unseen by their church leadership and left to suffer alone. Regardless of their circumstances, these betrayed wives are “bent over” (Luke 13:10–17), desperate (like Hannah, 1 Sam. 1), and longing to be seen (Gen. 16).
As I grieved with these women, I turned to God’s words to Hagar—a woman shunned, moving toward a dead end, and longing to be seen.
Echoes of the Fall
Hagar was Sarai’s Egyptian servant. Because Sarai was frustrated by her infertility, she commanded her husband, Abram, to “go in to” Hagar so Sarai might obtain children through her. He listened, and when Hagar conceived, she looked at Sarai with contempt. Therefore, Sarai dealt harshly with Hagar and Hagar fled (Gen. 16:1–6).
Sin drives this entire narrative. Sarai sinfully doubted God’s promise to provide a son, leading her to take matters into her own hands. Abram’s sinful desires caused him to listen to his wife’s voice and sleep with Hagar rather than protect Sarai (and Hagar) with God’s promises.
Does this ring a bell? Sarai and Abram’s behavior mirrors the fall in the Garden of Eden. Rather than clinging to God’s commands and promises, Eve doubted his words. She pursued knowledge with her very own hands— “she took of its fruit and ate, and she also gave some to her husband who was with her, and he ate” —like Sarai, who “took Hagar the Egyptian, her servant, and gave her to Abram her husband as a wife” (Gen. 3:6 and 16:3, my emphasis). Adam ate the fruit, without any question or objection, and Abram took a second wife.
Then the story in Genesis 16 reveals another layer of sin: Hagar responded to the wrong committed against her by being sinfully contemptuous of Sarai and running away (Gen. 16:4).
Sin begets sin and comes from the heart (Luke 6:45).
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How would you know where Jesus is? Answer: by remembering who He is! This is also the only record we have in Scripture of Jesus ever being scolded by His human parents. But, if we believe in the doctrine of the sinlessness of Christ at age twelve, then it was a scolding He did not deserve. But Gothard’s view assumes He did deserve it since he had already gotten out from under their “umbrella of authority.” Fortunately, Luke is telling this story instead of Gothard. And as Luke tells it, the sinless Christ, at age twelve, answered His parents’ question with His own questions: Don’t you know who I am? And don’t you know that who I Am dictates where I am?

Editor’s Note: Bill Gothard’s unique and at times, unbiblical teachings have impacted churches, homeschool groups, and Christians far beyond the over two and a half million that have attended his Basic Seminar. If his teaching on authority is applied consistently, Jesus was a sinner, visualization is “one of the most basic aspects of faith,” and First Century authoritarianism is the biblical model for Christians and the church. We decided to post an excerpt of our updated and newly released book, A Matter of Basic Principles: Bill Gothard and His Cultish Teaching. This comes from chapter three, “The Emerald City.”
The Links in Gothard’s Chain of Authority
Gothard teaches that God had three primary purposes for instituting human authority:

“To [help us] grow in wisdom and character;”
“To gain protection from destructive temptations” (as outlined above); and
“To receive clear direction for life decisions.”1

To prove his point, Gothard writes:
The only recorded incident in the life of Christ between the ages of two and thirty was a discussion with his parents, which involved authority. This occurred when He was twelve. Should he follow His spiritual calling and be about His Father’s business (Luke 2:49), or should he become subject to His parents and leave His ministry at the temple? He did the latter, and the following verse reports, “And He increased with wisdom and stature, and found favor with God and man” (Luke 2:52).2
Here Gothard took a story from Luke, designed to illustrate the identity of Christ as the Son of God and Messiah. But in his hands, it becomes a story about internal conflict within the Lord Jesus over whether to obey the parental authority of Joseph and Mary so he can fit it into his system. However, there is nothing in Luke 2:41-52 that even remotely implies that Jesus was struggling with the issues Gothard mentions here. He reads these ideas into the passage, giving unwary readers the impression that they are in the text itself. As illusionists quickly distract their audiences from what they are actually doing, Gothard quickly moves on without providing readers with a verse to back up his assertion.
He apparently doesn’t realize the theological problems that result from this sleight-of-hand. If Gothard’s interpretation is correct, Jesus deliberately remained behind in the Temple against what He obviously knew (since He was God) to be his parents’ wishes as His authority. This would mean that even before the boy Jesus had resolved His supposed “inner-conflict,” He had already sinned! This, of course, directly contradicts biblical teaching on the sinless nature of Christ.
The notion that this is a story about Jesus resolving His own internal conflict is also at odds with its climactic scene (which Gothard oddly omits). Luke records this in verses 48-49:
And when they saw him, they were amazed: and his mother said unto him, “Son, why hast thou thus dealt with us? Behold, thy father and I have sought thee sorrowing.”
And he said unto them, “How is it that ye sought me? Wist ye not that I must be about my Father’s business?”
This sure doesn’t sound as though Jesus decided against being about His Father’s business! He clearly stated He must be about it! Why does Gothard contradict Jesus’ words by stating He chose against being about His Father’s business by being subject to His parents? And where does the text teach that being about His Father’s business and being subject to His parents are incompatible so that He cannot do both at the same time?
Luke’s climax also does not uncover any sort of “inner conflict” Jesus may have experienced. On the other hand, he portrays Joseph’s and Mary’s inner conflict quite vividly. We can read and re-read this passage countless times, but we’ll never find Gothard’s teachings— however, we may find Luke’s.
Luke is telling a story in narrative form. Narratives are often about conflict and resolution. In this case Gothard reads into the text the wrong conflict and is teaching a false resolution. When you read this kind of story (or hear it, or see it in a movie), you can tell what it’s about by following the key players in the conflict. A good storyteller knows how to focus your attention on the conflict to build suspense so that the conflict’s resolution makes a memorable impact on the readers.
Everyone who has children or young siblings can relate to the terror of losing track of one’s young charge, even for a brief period of time. Joseph and Mary were a full day’s journey away before they realized Jesus was missing (v. 44), and it took them three days to find Him after they made it back to Jerusalem (v. 46)!
Luke supplies these details because this is what the story is about. He wants his readers to ask the same question Joseph and Mary were asking: “Where could Jesus be?” He wants them to feel the same range of emotions any parent would feel because the lesson for the reader is the same as it was for Joseph and Mary.
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