Concerning the Doctrine of the Holy Spirit, some of us come from stoic backgrounds and Holy Ghost language gives us the heebie-jeebies.

Others of us come from more pentecostal or charismatic backgrounds and we tend to put great emphasis and trust in our experiences of what we perceive to be the Holy Spirit.

But what, specifically, does Scripture tell us about the person and work of God’s Holy Spirit?

Join us today for part one of Michael’s teaching on The Doctrine of the Holy Spirit.

This message was originally given to students and faculty at Moody Bible Institute.

Show Notes:

In the book, Foundational Faith, Unchanging Truth for an Ever Changing World (Gen. Editor John Koessler, 2003), Koessler writes about the time D.L. Moody was settling in Chicago and beginning his work as an evangelist:

Some in Protestant Christianity believed the only way to keep Christianity from becoming irrelevant was to adapt its teachings and worldviews to modern ideas, accepting contemporary theories about the beginning of the world and Biblical criticism. They called themselves modernists.

To be a Christian who has firm, theological, foundational convictions is not easy.
The Doctrine of the Holy Spirit is a fountainhead of controversy.
“The Foundations of Faith” – creeds were written in a context. There are many similar kinds of concepts and as you study the Doctrine of the Holy Spirit, things are added to explain and exclude this Person, the work of the Holy Spirit.
Like all issues of doctrine, this is enormous to try to get our arms around.
Article: “The Holy Spirit and Hermeneutics,” Dr. Dan Wallace:

“The relation of the Holy Spirit to hermeneutics is a hot issue among evangelicals today. On a popular level, there’s always been a large misunderstanding about the Spirit’s role.
Many Christians believe if they simply pray the Holy Spirit will give them the proper interpretation.
Others are not so concerned about the interpretation of the text, rather, they are happy to see and idiosyncratic meaning of the text. In other words, ‘what this text means to me.’
All of this is the doctrine of the priesthoods and of the believers run amuck.
Although each of us is responsible before God for understanding and applying the message of the Bible, this in no way means a pooling of ignorance or merely a pietistic approach to the Scriptures that meets a divine mandate.”

(Hermeneutics: the branch of knowledge that deals with interpretation, especially of the Bible or literary texts.)
Surprisingly, there’s also an increasingly large gap among conservative scholars.
Dr. James D. Young says, “When it comes to scholarly methods of interpreting the Bible, the Holy Spirit may as well be dead.”
Why this polarity in the way we understand the role of the Holy Spirit? Dr. Young presents four reasons:

1. The shift toward post-modernism
2. The unwillingness to do hard study
3. Evangelicals thought was indeed and by too much in rationalism
4. Evangelicalism is moving toward post-conservatism, in which tolerance rather than conviction is the popular stance on many issues.

The inclusive and the diverse, the “why can’t we get along?” discussion in the large umbrella of evangelical fundamentalism, when we start to disagree on theologies we just say, “oh, it’s not that big a deal. It’s just semantics. It doesn’t really matter if we have a Trinitarian Godhead. It doesn’t really matter if the role of the Holy Spirit is interpreted vastly different from different groups that would call themselves believers in Christ.”
My course of study:
Keeping Step with the Spirit, by J.I. Packer
The Ministry of the Spirit, A.J. Gordon
TheHoly Spirit, by Sinclair Ferguson, a good reformed writer
The Work of the Holy Spirit, by Abraham Kuyper, a very reformed writer
The Holy Spirit at Work Today, by John Walvoord
The Holy Spirit and Your Teaching, by Roy Zuck
The Holy Spirit,–that’s just a shorter title –by Charles Ryrie
The Secret, by Bill Bright.
Some of us are from a stoic side of the continuum. You’d be happy if there wasn’t a Holy Spirit. Holy Ghost language gives you the heebie-jeebies.
The other side of the room have perhaps been bred and buttered in a Pentecostal, charismatic, perhaps more open view of the Holy Spirit’s role, and we would be more subjective.
Not to be oversimplified, but let’s put stoic’s on one side of the room and subjective’s on the other. Stoics who vilify experience, and subjective’s who see everything in the experience, and some place in between.
We hear this in different ways.
People pray and they say, “The Lord led me…, the Lord told me…”
Have any of you had a person come up and say, “God told me to tell you–”?
That puts one in a very interesting situation. If the person is dressed rather oddly and has alcohol on their breath and perhaps clearly hasn’t bathed in a while, you sort of dismiss that one.
But, you know, Balaam’s donkey spoke to him.
I had a woman in the first church I served rush into my office one morning. She hadn’t slept all night because she had a dream about something bad happening to me. No matter what I told her, I couldn’t convince her that nothing bad had happened. This captivated the poor woman for four or five days.
So, what do you do with those experiences?
Said another way: some basically ignore the Spirit, some overstate the experience that they call the Holy Spirit.
What I want to do is not give a definitive treatise on the Spirit’s ministry. That would be impossible.
We’re not going to be exhaustive in these surveys, but why we believe what we believe about the Holy Spirit is crucial because each of us moves and breathes in a context where people are going to have very different views than those that you have.
What I want to do today is not point out where other groups are wrong or right.

What I want to do is tell you what I think the Scripture does tell us very specifically that are clear facts that we know about the Holy Spirit of God.

To begin, we’ll start with the word pneumatology:
Pneuma, the Greek word for spirit or wind; -ology, the study of something, the content of it.
So, we have “the study of the Spirit.”

The Old Testament has over a hundred references to the Spirit of God. Two to look at:

Psalm 51:11 – David, after he sinned-he committed adultery and murder and tried to cover it up-and when he’s exposed by the prophet, he writes this incredible psalm. He throws himself on the mercy and grace of God and says, “don’t take your Spirit from me.”
David the king understood at full measure that God’s Holy Spirit indwelt him. He didn’t have the full revelation you and I have in the New Testament, but he understood this.
Isaiah 61-63 are rich texts about the Holy Spirit.
Isaiah 63:10
So the prophet Isaiah, under the inspiration of God, talks about the Holy Spirit at the exodus; the Holy Spirit working in their life.
There are four clear roles of the Holy Spirit in the OT:

1. He’s involved in creation. The Spirit of God was moving over the waters. In Hebrew: Ruah (the Spirit), Ruah Elohim (the Spirit of God).
2. He sustains life. Job 33:4 God breathed His Spirit and made man in His image. Job understands this. The oldest book in the Bible includes a clear understanding of the Spirit giving and sustaining life.
3. The invisible activities of God: Judges 3:10, 1 Samuel 10:6. In this period of time from the prophets to judges where things couldn’t get any worse morally or spiritually, God raises up Othniel as the first judge. The Spirit comes upon him to do this work of the seven cycles in Judges, and the first judge comes about and is announced as being full of God’s Spirit.
4. He is God’s presence.

Creation, sustaining life, invisible activity, and His presence. This can apply to prophecy, to when God makes a covenant with His people, to when they have supernatural wisdom (like Solomon).
Isaiah 59:21 – this activity of God through His Spirit: judging, creating, sustaining life –
His power and His presence are all seen in the Old Testament
There are a number of other passages in the Old Testament – some quite interesting. Even introducing some controversy about the Spirit early on as in the story of Eldad and Medad in Numbers 11. They were prophesying and Joshua tells Moses to make them stop, and Moses says, “no, this is God’s Spirit.”
There was recognition of the Holy Spirit in the Old Testament that we sometimes forget.
Isaiah 61:1-3 is rich in the Doctrine of the Holy Spirit.
The last passage we’ll look at references the filling of the Spirit, which Peter, with the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, will speak on the day of Pentecost in Joel 2:28-29
The Old Testament believer understood from Job to David, to Joshua and Moses, to Isaiah, to the judges that God’s Holy Spirit somehow moved in the believing Jew to accomplish things that are often difficult to describe.

Let’s jump to the New Testament.

The synoptic gospels: Matthew, Mark, and Luke, talk about the work of the Spirit mainly in reference to Jesus’ ministry. That’s interesting to note as the Johannine (John’s writings in the New Testament) literature will talk about the role of the Spirit in a very different way.
Four examples of synoptic use: the birth narrative, the baptism of Jesus, the temptation of Jesus, and the great commission. It’s interesting that God superintended the appearance of His Spirit on these four crucial events of the life of Christ.

• Matthew 1:18, Mary’s birth announcement: the Holy Spirit will literally impregnate her and by the act of the Holy Spirit of God coming over her, she is going to bear the Messiah.
• The baptism of Jesus in Mark 1:10
• The temptation of Jesus in Matthew 4 – isn’t it interesting that the Holy Spirit is involved in Jesus’ going into the wilderness to be tempted, because as fully God, fully man, He has to be tempted in all ways––and He is.
• We have baptism and temptation and, finally, the great commission. It is through the Holy Spirit that what is going to occur through the disciples and through Jerusalem, Judea, and the remotest part of the earth, it will require God’s very Spirit to implement these four very crucial events in the life of Christ to continuing on.

Now, Luke and Acts––Many times we refer to the book of Acts as not the Acts of the apostles; but the Acts of the Holy Spirit.
We refer to it as such because as we read through Acts 1:8, we read about what the Spirit will do, and how the Spirit leads and moves and guides, and how people come to Christ and the dramatic change when the Holy Spirit indwells them at Pentecost.
Picture the the bible from beginning to end, right in the middle you have a diamond: the book of Acts. Law and grace collide. Works and grace collide. Jewish believers and the gentile world collide.
All these things collide in the book of Acts and it requires God’s Spirit to sort through these things and verify that the old is fulfilled and the new is in the work of Jesus Christ.
The book of Acts is a book of Holy Spirit transition.
In Luke, in writing, we have the prophecy of John the Baptist. The conception of Jesus again, and an interesting phrase – where Simeon knows that this is baby Jesus – though, he calls Jesus “the consolation of Israel” (Luke 2:25). Because Israel’s in upheaval. Israel is waiting for their king to come. Israel wants to be liberated, and Simeon says, “it’s the consolation of Israel,” this Jesus Christ. All these are the Holy Spirit at work.

There are contexts of the person and work of God’s Spirit in the Old Testament and in the New.

The major change in the New Testament is that each individual, when he or she trusts Christ, is indwelt by God’s Spirit.
When we understand the new covenant – that His Spirit did not come and go as He did in the Old Testament, but that when you trust in Christ and Christ alone, the person of the Holy Spirit indwells you. The Bible teaches us we are indwelled by His Spirit, we can be controlled by His Spirit, we can be empowered by His Spirit and are sealed by His Spirit.
It’s not a simple subject, but it’s a vital subject, and unfortunately many Christians amble around not understanding the person, nor the work of God’s Spirit.
1 Corinthians 2:14
Paul uses terms to say the natural man thinks God’s Spirit is foolish, but the person who is spiritually appraised sees value.
Now perhaps you’ve gone and had a piece of jewelry appraised. When Cindy and I were dating, I wanted to get her a diamond for her engagement ring and so I had a friend in college who happened to be a gemologist and he offered to find a diamond for me.
So this gentleman came to me with a bag of diamonds. He dumped them out on a piece of fabric and with a loop, an eight power magnifying lens called a loop, he showed me things like color, clarity, cut, carats, and he explained these things to me like I understood what they meant.
But he explained them tome and then he chose let’s say five or six diamonds that he liked. So I’m looking at them through this little Lupe (magnifier) and he would say, “Ok, I see that one’s got a crack. That one’s yellowish. This one’s clear. This one looks like a piece of glass. You look right through it.” So we picked out several and I said, “Alright, how much do these cost?” And he rattled off numbers like, “Well this one’s $3,700, that one’s $1,200, this one’s $4,200.
Now, I looked at him and there was no price tag on them. I looked at him and I said, “How do you know that’s what they cost by looking at them?” He responded to me somewhat incredulously. He said, “Michael, I’m a gemologist. This is what I do for a living.”
See, he’d been trained to appraise jewelry as a certified appraiser. He could look at something under magnification and say it was worth so much.
Why I love that story is because, a natural person, before we know Christ, we cannot put value to the things of the Spirit. We can’t put value to the Bible. We read it and it’s boring, or it’s immaterial, or it’s confusing…
But when you’ve trusted Christ and God’s Spirit indwells you, you might say, “Now you can appraise its value.”
You see, the Holy Spirit doesn’t necessarily tell us things that are outside the Bible. What we know, for sure, is what the Scripture says: “he who is spiritual appraises all things,” meaning that now we have the mind of Christ, because His Spirit lives in us.
So when you read a story that at one point was foolish, or confusing, or just a piece of literature, it now has great value.
Understanding the person and work of the Spirit is a critical thing for all Christians to know: Why We Believe What We Believe about Christ’s Spirit in you.

Have a Biblical or Theological question? Ask Dr. E! Call us at 615-281-9694 and leave a voicemail with your question or email us at question@michaelincontext.com. Michael will answer it on an upcoming Ask Dr. E episode!