But this He said of the Spirit, whom those who believed in Him were about to receive; for the Spirit was not yet, for Jesus had not yet been glorified.
— John 7:39

In a recent Note (“The Lamb, the Serpent, & the Seed” • 6) we considered how the verse above, quoted from the Standard Version of the New Testament, indicates that Jesus had to pass through the process of death and resurrection before He could impart the divine life that was within Him to us, His fellow human beings.

In that Note we also quoted Andrew Murray (1828 – 1917) regarding this verse. He was a Bible teacher who served the Lord in South Africa, and whose devotional booklets have for decades helped Christians worldwide.

The full statement he makes in this regard is an excellent exposition of the true meaning of John 7:39, and I wanted to pass that along to you; it is below.

Andrew Murray:
The Spirit of the
Glorified Jesus

John 7:39 states that “the Spirit was not yet, because Jesus had not yet been glorified.” The expression, “the Spirit was not yet” has appeared strange to some, and so some versions insert the word “given” [e.g., KJV, NKJV, NASB, ESV, NIV]. But the actual expression, if accepted as it stands, may help us understand the real significance of the Spirit’s not coming until Jesus was glorified.

God has given a twofold revelation of Himself: first as God in the Old Testament, then as Father in the New. The Son, who had from eternity been with the Father, entered upon a new stage of existence when He became flesh. When He returned to heaven, He was still the same only-begotten Son of God, and yet not altogether the same. For He was now also, as Son of Man, the Firstborn from the dead, clothed with that glorified humanity which He had perfected and sanctified for Himself. And just so the Spirit of God as poured out at Pentecost was indeed something new. He came as the Spirit of the glorified Jesus, the Spirit of the incarnate, crucified, and exalted Christ, the bearer and communicator to us not of the life of God as such, but of that life as it had been interwoven into human nature in the person of Christ Jesus. And of this Spirit it is literally true: the Spirit was not yet. The Spirit of the glorified Jesus—the Son of Man become the Son of God—He could not be until Jesus was glorified.

From His nature, as glorified in the resurrection and ascension, His Spirit came forth as the Spirit of His human life, glorified into union with the divine, to make us partakers of all that He had personally wrought out and acquired, of Himself and His glorified life. He could now communicate what previously had no existence—a life at once human and divine. Just as the Spirit is the personal life principle in God, so He can be in the child of God, crying in our heart, “Abba, Father.”

In our place, as man and the Head of man, Christ was admitted into the full glory of the divine. And the Holy Spirit came down as the Spirit of the God-man—most really the Spirit of God, and yet as truly the spirit of man. We must not rest content with the faith that trusts in the cross and its pardon; we must seek to know the new life, the life of glory and power divine in human nature, of which the Spirit of the glorified Jesus is meant to be the witness and the bearer (Col. 1:26-27).

Adapted from The Spirit of Christ, chapter 5, “The Spirit of the Glorified Jesus.”; c. 1900.

Sent to our mailing list on
—  26 October 2024 —