Know Him and Know Truth

And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Counselor to be with you forever – the Spirit of truth. The world cannot accept him, because it neither sees him nor knows him. But you know him, for he lives with you and will be in you. (Jn 14:16-17)

As the disciples lived with Jesus for three years they were also living with the Holy Spirit and getting to know him. But Jesus gives them a promise of an even more amazing relationship with the Spirit – he “will be in you.” This was fulfilled at Pentecost and now is the marvelous privilege of every believer, to have the Spirit of God living in our hearts. Jesus calls him the Counselor, the Spirit of truth. Through him we can have certain knowledge of things that otherwise we might not know at all. There are a lot of things I think are true based on evidence, there are some things I have concluded based on reasoning and there are many things I accept based on what I hear. But through the witness of the Holy Spirit in my heart there are some things I know. Through him I know God is real, I know God loves me, I know I am saved, I know the Bible is true, and I know I will live with him forever.

The world cannot accept these things because the world does not know him. In philosophy, epistemology is the study of how we know what we know. The witness of the Holy Spirit is a new type of epistemology that secular philosophers cannot accept. Oddly, while it is the most suspect to them it is the most certain to me. But because of this, I cannot expect to argue someone into agreeing with the Bible. I must point them to God and trust his Spirit to soften their hearts. I may often be able to offer evidence or reasoning or testimonies that can help my unbelieving friends see the reasonableness of Christianity, but only the Holy Spirit can make them believe it. Then they, too, will know it with the same certainty that I know it.