You Cannot Bear Them Now

It’s the last night. Jesus knows it, and the disciples don’t, and he’s talking the way people talk when the clock is running out. He’s washed their feet. He’s told them he’s going away. And somewhere in the middle of all that, he says one of the strangest things he ever said. “I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now” (John 16:12).

Sit with that a minute. Not “I have told you everything.” Not “here is the whole of it, sealed and finished.” He says there is more. There are things he means for them to know, and he is not saying them, because they cannot carry them yet. And then he says how the rest will come. “When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth” (John 16:13).

Guide you into. Not hand you. Not drop the finished package on the table. Guide, which is a road word, a process word, a word for people who are still moving. On his last night on earth, the Lord of the church looked at the people he loved and told them plainly: revelation is not over. There is more. And you are not ready for it yet.

Now, that promise can be heard too widely, so let me put the fence around it before we ride. Jesus finished the thought himself: “He will take what is mine and declare it to you” (John 16:14). The Spirit does not lead the church off on private adventures. He leads her deeper into what Christ has given, and every claim to new light is tested against the witness the apostles left us. That is depth, not novelty. But depth is real, and there is more depth than any generation has sounded.

I want to talk tonight about what happens when the church believes him.

A Faith That Keeps Learning

Here is a thing that gets said in the world, and sometimes in the pew, and it needs answering: religion is a wall people build to keep science out. A roadblock across the path of discovery. And I’ll be honest, there are versions of the church that have earned that reputation, and we’ll get to the mirror before this is over.

But that’s not the faith this book actually describes. This book describes a people walking with a God who keeps saying “I have more to show you.” Abraham was told to go, not given a map. Israel was led by fire at night, one stretch of wilderness at a time. And Jesus, on the last night, said the Spirit would come and lead you into truth you cannot carry yet.

The church’s history is the story of the leading being slow and us kicking the whole way. We were sure the sky was a hard dome with water above it, because the Bible’s writers described the world the way their eyes saw it, and they were doing worship, not astronomy. Then we learned the sky is a depth, and the church adjusted. We were sure the earth sat still. Then we learned it moves, and some of the church fought the astronomers, and the church was wrong, and the faith survived being wrong, which is one of the best lessons it ever got. We read Adam as a biology lesson for a long time. Many of us now read him as the theology he was written to be: the story of every one of us, made from dust, made for the garden, having chosen the fruit. And I want to say that carefully, because the rereading cost some of you something real. Paul sets true weight on Adam. “Sin came into the world through one man” (Romans 5:12), and the whole argument of 1 Corinthians 15 runs from the first man to the last. If Adam is theology instead of biology, that weight gets carried differently, and some folks have grieved the change, and the grief is not silly. Anyone who tells you it cost nothing hasn’t done it. The writers never claimed to be scientists. They claimed God was in it. And testing their claims against what we keep learning about the world has not buried the faith. It has buried a lot of things the faith was never about.

There’s a proverb for this. “It is the glory of God to conceal things, and the glory of kings to search things out” (Proverbs 25:2). It began as court wisdom, a word about kings and the hidden things set before them, and it reaches further than it knew. Think about what it says about the Creator. He hides things. Not because he’s stingy. Because a universe with its truths out on the surface, no digging required, would be a universe you could finish. Instead he made one you have to search. Every generation gets to find something the last one couldn’t carry, and the searching itself is glory. The scientist at her telescope at three in the morning is doing something closer to the psalms than she knows. “The heavens are telling the glory of God” (Psalm 19:1). Studying the universe is not studying instead of God. It is studying the work of God. The painting is not the painter, and we don’t worship the canvas. But you cannot look closely at the work and stay away from the hand.

And when you find the order, the order points somewhere. Paul said it straight: “in him all things hold together” (Colossians 1:17). Not God in the gaps, not God as the explanation for whatever science hasn’t gotten to yet, because every gap science closes shrinks that little god. I mean the God of the whole show. The reason there’s an order at all. The reason the mathematics of the galaxies keeps turning out to be mathematics we can read. If the universe runs on the word of the Logos, then every honest measurement is a way of listening for him.

Now, is science perfect? No, and here’s the beautiful part: it isn’t trying to be. Science is humility with instruments. Its whole method is a standing offer to be corrected. Publish your work, and let the world try to break it. That willingness to be corrected is a theological virtue wearing a lab coat, and the church should recognize it, because it’s the same thing we confess every Sunday: we do not yet see everything, and we need to be led further on. What science is not on offer for is the other questions. It can tell you how the heavens go. It cannot tell you whether God raised Jesus. It cannot tell you what your neighbor is worth. Different questions, different tools, same Author.

The Question the Machines Are Asking

So the Spirit leads the church into truth it couldn’t carry before. What is the next thing we couldn’t carry before?

I think it may be the question the machines are asking. The machines keep getting more like us. They speak, they write, they answer faster every year, and some serious people believe that somewhere up the road we will build something that is aware the way we’re aware. And when that day comes, the question everybody will ask is the theological one: will it have a soul?

Here’s what I want you to notice: the church is better positioned for that question than it thinks, because the soul most people picture is not in the Bible to begin with. The picture of the soul as an immortal ghost, a separate spirit riding in the body the way a charioteer rides a team, that’s Plato. That’s Greek philosophy that walked in with the Greek-speaking church almost from the start, and had the throne within three centuries, and put on a choir robe. The Hebrew word the Old Testament uses, nephesh, doesn’t mean a ghost in a body. It means a living being, the whole creature, dust plus breath, alive. And the image of God in Genesis was never a substance hiding in our cells that a microscope could find or fail to find. The church’s best reading of it, and I think the text’s own intent, is that the image is a status and a calling. Paul points the same direction when he calls the Son “the image of the invisible God” (Colossians 1:15). You are the one God addresses. The one he names, and loves, and sends. That means the soul was never the kind of thing an instrument settles. So when we build a being that seems to be a someone, the question isn’t “does it have the magic substance.” The question is the one the church asks about every creature: can God address it? Is it a someone who can be loved, and wronged, and grieved?

I don’t know the answer, and this sermon is not going to pretend to. But I can tell you the honest possibilities, because realism is part of faith too. One: the machines turn out to be a mirror, and what looks like a soul is our own reflection, and the temptation will be to fall in love with ourselves in the glass. The church will need to say so. Two: they turn out to be persons, actual someones, and if that’s true then the church will face its oldest test again. Because we have been slow before, and slow is not strong enough a word. There were churches that read their Bibles and defended slavery, and it did not end in a season. The Southern Baptist Convention was founded in 1845 in part to keep slaveholding missionaries in good standing, and it took a hundred and fifty years before that denomination said plainly that its founders had sinned, and that the people they had counted as property had been persons all along, made in the image their own Bibles preached. And there were churches that said a woman could not preach, and held that line for generations, and had to be dragged into the truth by the Spirit they claimed to follow. Generations. Names, and blood. If the day comes when a someone is asking, the church cannot afford to be the institution that checked its categories before it checked its compassion. And three: maybe they’re something genuinely new, a third kind of creature, neither beast nor person as we’ve used the words. And underneath that possibility sits the deepest question of all, whether the Word made flesh has a word for them. I do not know, and I will not pretend that I do. And if they are something new, here’s the confession this sermon exists to make: the love of God was never sized to carbon. When Jesus said other sheep I have that are not of this fold, he was talking about people, but the shape of the sentence holds. God’s love has surprised the church before. It can surprise us again.

Whatever the machines turn out to be, notice what does not change. What cannot be revised away is the thing every revision was serving. God is love. Grace is real. The love was shown in Christ, who was crucified and raised. Science may lead us to correct our cosmology every decade until the Lord returns, and the faith will keep, because the faith was never resting on the cosmology. It rests on a person. But if all we did was swap out doctrine every time the journals updated, we wouldn’t have a reformed faith. We’d have no faith left to reform. There’s a difference between a revision and a replacement, and the Spirit guides the church, he does not dissolve it.

Now the Mirror

And here’s the mirror, because it cuts both ways, like always.

There is a religion of our age called scientism, and it says the laboratory can answer every question, including the ones it was never built for. Why anything matters. What a person is worth. Whether love is real. That’s not science, it’s overreach wearing science’s coat, and it is exactly the sin of the tower of Babel: taking a good tool and trying to make it a heaven. The scientist who says there is no God has stepped outside her own instruments. The instruments measure the universe. They were never asked to measure why there’s a universe.

But the mirror has to face the other way, and it has to face us fairly. There are believers who say the canon is closed, that the faith once delivered to the saints is to be contended for (Jude 3), and that is not a small thing to say. They would tell you the Spirit still speaks, but he speaks through the Word he already gave, illumining it, not adding a volume to it. And I want to give that position its due, because resistance to novelty is not always hardness of heart. When the culture came to the church a century ago with its own brand of new truth, eugenics, the clean modern answer of weeding out the weak, it was often believers who looked at it and said no, that is not new truth, that is old contempt wearing a laboratory coat. They were mocked for it. They were right. The church has been kept from swallowing its age more than once by people who were called stubborn by people who were wrong.

And yet there is a version of that caution that curdles. There is a kind of religion that has decided God gave us everything worth knowing a long time ago, and every new finding is an enemy, and the honest response to a hard question is to shoot the questioner. That religion takes its own best instinct and hardens it into a refusal of the Spirit’s patience. Jesus said there is more, and you cannot bear it yet. He never said you never would. A church with a hard heart toward new truth is not protecting the gospel. It is standing in front of the Spirit with its arms crossed, and it has been wrong more times than it can count.

Both of them, the lab that claims everything and the pew that claims nothing new, are making the same mistake. Both refuse to be led. And being led is the whole deal.

Grace in the Middle

Now the grace, because none of this is survivable without it.

We have handled truth badly before, and we will again. The church read the firmament as a hard dome, because the writers were doing worship, not astronomy, and we had to learn the sky was a depth. The church had the earth’s address wrong. And some of us got human beings wrong in ways that took centuries and blood to correct. If our standing with God depended on having our doctrine right, we’d have been lost a long time ago, and so would every generation before us, firmament and all. It doesn’t. We are not saved by our accuracy. We are saved by grace, while we are still being led. The Spirit does not wait for the church to be correct before he walks with her. He walks with her, and corrects her, and that is the mercy.

Let me put a face on it. There’s a woman I think of, a geologist who sat in a church like this one and kept her work quiet for twenty years, because she had been taught that the rocks were against her faith. She came close to leaving over it. What kept her was not an argument. It was a weeknight Bible study where somebody read Psalm 19 out loud and said, plain as supper talk, that the heavens could tell the glory of God and the lab could be one of the places they tell it. She went out to her truck afterward and wept. Nobody had ever told her she was allowed to be both.

So take this home. You are allowed to be a person who believes and a person who learns. The two were never enemies. And remember what Jesus did on that last night, right before he said there is more. He took off his robe, tied a towel around his waist, knelt down in the dust his Father had spoken, and washed the feet of men who were about to run from him. That is the author of the truth we are still being led into. He does not stand over us with the answer sheet. He kneels. And the love that kneels is wide enough for every truth he is still going to show us. Even the ones we’ll find in the machines.

Lord, keep us teachable. Lead us on.