Some of what I am about to write will not easily be accepted by Christians. The things of the Christ, the things of Jesus Christ, are not all things every Christian can receive. Revelation comes in steps. When Jesus was ministering publicly he taught differently to people depending on their stage in their faith. Some groups could only accept certain scriptures as scripture. Some could only accept a different set of scriptures to the scriptures others had learned to accept. Jesus took such things into account when speaking to people from different groups or different backgrounds. So today this is also a situation commonly found when speaking to people from various backgrounds. Denominations and sects keep people to some extent into separate groups, although some hop easily from group to group. Often a speaker to a single denomination need only focus one stage of faith, since this will be what that group has come to expect. Jesus, and now the Holy Spirit ministering in his name, addresses all kinds of groups, and makes adjustments to help people progress gently in their faith. Yet it is not always the case. Scripture writers of the New Testament presented things they had learned irrespective of all the many groups over time who would read those writings. Churches often had a mixed background congregation. We today, when reading scriptures, tend to assume it is all addressed to us, but that is not always the case. So in the initial period of the ministry of Jesus, so we can understand from the gospel accounts, Jesus often limited his teachings to what his hearers could receive. He spoke mainly from the most widely accepted scripture and did not fully explain his sayings but taught his followers to keep his sayings which they might understand better later, even after he had completed his time of initial ministry. Yet mostly he said what might be relatively easy to understand right then, or in the near future. Peter was a leading disciple of Jesus. He was also called Simon, and Cephas. He had difficulties receiving the central teaching given to Jesus Christ’s inner circle of disciples, namely that Jesus as the Christ must suffer and die and rise from the dead. Many today find this hard to believe too. Islam dismisses it, for example. For Peter, who did believe Jesus to really be the Christ, a Christ could only ever go from strength to strength in power and influence, so as to win over the people descending from Jacob (or from Israel, as Jacob was also called), to save them by becoming their rightful king, approved and anointed for this by God. Jesus had to rebuke Peter for understand it in far too human a way. Jesus pointed out that the scriptures foretold he would suffer, die and be raised from the dead by God, but Peter had a closed heart to this. Only after the resurrection did Jesus meet Peter again and explain it, opening his heart to all the scriptures of Moses and the Prophets about himself. Now before his death, Jesus had alluded to this. He had told Peter and the other leading disciples that they were not yet ready for all he had to tell them. Importantly, he said it would be when the Holy Spirit came that the Holy Spirit would bring it all to them, all the truth about him, and about the glorious things yet to happen. So when Jesus opened Peter’s and others’ hearts to the scriptures, the Holy Spirit had still not come and there were still more things of truth into which they would only later still be led. Immediately after the resurrection, before the Holy Spirit was given, when Jesus opened scriptures to them, there was still more they could not yet receive. Only after the Holy Spirit was given, months later, would they start to be led into all this truth. So, when we read the writings some of them wrote, it might have had more in it than Jesus directly told them. Yet it was all from Jesus. Jesus was still the one passing it on from God to them, but now by the work of the Holy Spirit through spiritual gifts, visions, and insights. Meetings were a leading part of this. Then beyond meetings there were other encounters leading to truth too, such as John on Patmos being shown what is written in his apocalypse, the Book of Revelation, Peter seeing a vision relating to first Gentile disciples, and Paul in Arabia receiving the gospel for the Gentiles. The epistles we have in the New Testament include things learned from the Holy Spirit after Jesus ascended and the Holy Spirit was given. So too today, when the Holy Spirit, as I once witnessed with others, ministers through gifts, the truth is beyond what Jesus taught the disciples in meeting them after his resurrection. It can include things those disciples were enable at that time to receive: Things they received later, some of which they might never have written down.
In the mid 1990s I too witnessed how the Holy Spirit leads into further truth. A message in tongues was interpreted by two people with exactly the same words, completely independently. It went: “Consider the trees. They put forth buds and leaves. They do so by the power of the name of the Lord Jesus Christ.” And it continued with more about planets and stars. Months later I saw the Book of Enoch for the first time, remembering that the New Testament quoted it. I saw in it words so close to the words in that message that I realised the same Holy Spirit had inspired both, almost the same, thousands of years apart. Combining both, it revealed more than each could give on its own, about the Lord Jesus Christ, about angels, and how the Lord’s powerful authority operated in all of Nature. This was new truth. It brought glory to God by bringing truth of Jesus and making it known to me. That is what Jesus promised the Holy Spirit would do in a believer.
