The Presence and Presidency of the Spirit
The word “presence” implies personality, as we more correctly use it. And the fifth chapter of the Acts of the Holy Ghost contains an unmistakable unveiling of the fact that he is a Person, present and presiding in the church.
When Ananias and Sapphira conspired in a sin of sacrilege, keeping back in part what, being already given unto God, was to be ranked among “devoted” things, they committed
Joshua vii, 21-
a sin similar to that of Achan, and a
visited with like penalties.
The noticeable feature, however, is not this correspondence, so much as the indirect but unquestionable witness to the individuality, personality, presence, and presidency of the Spirit. Peter said to Ananias, “Why hath Satan filled thine heart to LIE TO THE HoLy GuHosT?”
And afterward to Sapphira, “How is it that ye have agreed together to TEMPT THE SPIRIT OF THE LorD?” Let us mark, also, how he added to his rebuke to Ananias, “Thou hast not lied unto men, but UNTO GOD.”
Thus, in one transaction, so briefly recorded, we are vividly impressed with three facts, all the more impressive because assumed to be facts, and needing no argument or even direct assertion:
1. The Spirit is a Zerson, with personal attributes.
2. The Spirit is God, not only having divinity, but deity.
3. The Spirit is the presiding presence in the church.
If the Holy Spirit were, as some would have us believe, only “a thin and shadowy effluence proceeding from God,” as the breath exhales from one’s body, such language as is here used would be absurdly inappropriate. It is plain that a man cannot “He”? to an influence or effluence, or “tempt” and defraud anything less than a person. Moreover, it is distinctly affirmed that, in thus lying “unto the Holy Ghost,” Ananias had lied, ‘not unto men, but unto God.” And yet once more, though Peter was nominally and apparently the presiding officer, back of this visible leader was an invisible presence, One who was actually presiding over the church, and of whom Peter was but the organ and representative. And therefore it was that the lie was not unto men, but unto God, and that in this fraud and. sacrilege they were tempting the Spirit of the Lord.
Here, then, we reach another distinct stage in this revelation of the actual working of the Spirit. We are dealing with a person of the Godhead who ts present and presiding in the church as the body of Christ. And, as has been hinted, this lesson is the more emphatic because taught without argument, hesitation, or explanation. It is not treated like a truth open to doubt or surprisingly novel and startling, but most natural and necessary. The Holy Spirit is recognized as being the all-controlling Head of affairs, and as though his headship were never doubted or disputed. Any unholy, irreverent, or profane word or act was an insult to this unseen presence. Man was therefore forgotten in his august presidency.
This advanced lesson is one of the utmost importance. We cannot do justice to the Holy Spirit unless we conceive of him as individual, personal, divine. Those who have no higher thought of him than as an influence exerted by God, as the light radiates from the sun, have read the Book of the Acts to little purpose. Here he is everywhere treated as a person — personal attributes being ascribed to him, and personal claims asserted and implied for him. It is perhaps the main purpose of this book to show, once for all, how it is that he abides in believers and makes the body of disciples his habitation; how he works in and through them, developing holy character and conduct, and guiding in holy service for the kingdom. The more minute our examination of this brief narrative the more plain will it become that all true, holy, useful forms of activity for God, every word spoken in witness for him, every step taken in furtherance of his work, every plan formed for the glory of God, are to be traced directly to the Holy Spirit as their origin and inspiration.
That the fact of his presence and presidency in the church might be the more actual and awful, it was emphasized by an act of judgment. Ananias and Sapphira were both struck instantly dead. Peter had hardly said the awe-inspiring words, “Thou hast not lied unto men, but unto God,” when Ananias “fell down, and gave up the ghost”; and Peter had no sooner uttered a similar rebuke to the wife, charging her with being party to tempting the Spirit of the Lord, than she “straightway fell down at his feet’? and died also. What wonder if “great fear came upon all the church, and upon as many as heard these things’’!
The Holy Spirit is preéminently the Spirit of - love and grace, and he seems to have taken the form of a dove at Christ’s baptism because the dove is the most affectionate of the birds. But he is also the Spirit of truth, and desires and demands “truth in the inward parts.” Once for all he found it needful to impress his actual and awful presence, and his jealousy of his own honor, by a judicial infliction of penalty the like of which never occurs again in the record of his acts. This was needful for saints, but especially for sinners. The world sees him not, neither knows him; and as he had just “‘ shaken” a house incapable of receiving him and knowing him, so now he makes even those who were outside the assemblies of believers and heard these things, acknowledge his presence and power and shake and quake with fear.
But, though no longer such instant judgment follows such sins of sacrilege, is the Holy Ghost any less displeased when nominal disciples lie to him, tempt him, defraud him of his own? God seems to follow a certain policy of judicial infitction. Once for all he makes an example of an offender in each of the prominent forms of sin — as of Cain in murder, of Lot’s wife in loitering, of Achan in sacrilege, of Korah in presumption, of Uzziah in profanation, of Saul in disobedience — and afterward seldom, if ever, punishes similarly a like offense. His design appears to be to express and exhibit in one startling example his abhorrence of the particular sin which he visits with condign judgment, as if rearing a permanent memorial of his holy hatred of that specific form of evil; and thenceforward forbearing with other like offenders until the day of final judgment, when his long-pent-up wrath will have vent. We must not infer from the rarity of such judgments in this world, or from their solitariness, that God’s mind has changed as to the exceeding sinfulness and hatefulness and ill desert of the sin he has thus rebuked. The solitary example must stand as a lasting and terrible monument of what God thinks of that sin. And to him who will understand, every such visitation writes on the page of history in letters of flame:
“Oh, do not this abominable thing
Which I hate!”
We must not infer too hastily that sins against the Holy Ghost are not now committed with frequency, or that when committed they are always passed by without prompt punishment.
From time to time awe comes upon as many as hear of God’s awful inflictions of penalty upon flagrant transgressors. Those who are familiar with the remarkable career of the Wesley brothers will recall more than one instance of supernatural visitations of judgment. For example, during Charles Wesley’s revival meetings at St. Just, in Cornwall, England, a country squire, Eustick by name, drove a pack of hounds among the congregation in order to break up the meeting and drive the attendants away — a mode of annoyance not infrequent in those days. On this occasion a number of the Lord’s people withdrew and took refuge in a spacious kitchen. The prayer-meeting held there was of such extraordinary power as to surpass any other that those who were present had known. And as the service closed, Mr. Wesley, as if endowed with prophetic vision, arose and said, with an awful solemnity and deliberation, yh eens The man who has this day troubled Booth, I, 462. you shall trouble you no more forever.” Shortly afterward Eustick passed to his last account in a state of raving madness.
In our own day, in one of our State capitals, a scheme was laid to drive from his charge a godly minister who for many years had served his church with rare fidelity, and whose only fault was that of advancing age. The plot was laid to call a meeting at the close of the Sabbath morning service and compel his resignation. On the very morning when the deed was to be done, and at the very hour, the prime mover, on whom the success of the plot depended, fell dead, and again awe fell on all who heard these things.
In the year 1889 a company of twelve young men, meeting at a hotel table for a carousal, and observing their number to be that of the apostolic company at the first Lord’s Supper, actually celebrated a mock eucharist. Before midnight the leader was dead, and every other of the company hung in mortal agony on the verge of the grave!
Another instance may be given of a church in which some thirty men conspired to defeat a pastor’s measures for spirituality in church life and administration, and at last compelled his withdrawal to another field. As he left the town it suddenly flashed on him that every one of the number who had combined to thwart what he had undertaken in behalf of the Holy Spirit had suffered some form of divine judgment or chastisement. And Dr. A. J. Gordon, late of Boston, a man specially filled with the Spirit, used to give startling examples, known to him, where individuals and whole churches which had resisted the Holy Spirit were visited by remarkable judgments. God the Holy Ghost may be silent and apparently indifferent, but God zs not dead.
In this same chapter Peter says to the council, when once more arraigned for disobedience to their authority, ““We ought to obey Chap. v. a9, 32. God rather than men.... We are his witnesses of these things; and so is also the Holy Ghost, whom God hath given to them that obey him.” Here we meet for the first time in this book
THE WITNESS OF THE SPIRIT.
Among the teachings of Christ as to the ministry of the Spirit we found this matter of co-witness prominent: “He shall bear witness of me: John xv. 26,27. and ye also shall bear witness, because ye have been with me from the beginning.” And here this teaching finds exemplification.
There are three points of view from which this co-witnessing may be considered:
1. The Holy Ghost witnesses to us of Christ; that is revelation.
2. We witness to Christ by the Holy Ghost; that is declaration.
3. The Holy Ghost witnesses to us and our witness; that is a¢testation.
We cannot properly appreciate his co-witness while any one of these is overlooked. We should ourselves truly apprehend Christ only through his gracious help in unveiling our eyes and revealing the power and beauty of the Lord; we should witness to Christ with truth and power only as he endues us for the testimony; and our testimony would lack confirmation and attestation if he did not accompany it with the signs and wonders that only he can work.
As to the place which this new reference to the Spirit holds, in the progressive development of the great theme we are considering, it seems plain that we have here an incidental lesson as to the philosophy of the Spirit’s working. We have seen him, from the day of Pentecost onward, working mightily among men, pricking them with the sword of his truth, converting them by thousands, imparting supernatural boldness, and even shaking walls and avenging sacrilege, so that the people trembled with awe; and now we are taught that all this constitutes a part of his mode of confirming the testimony of these humble disciples. Few and feeble as they are, the mighty God is with them, and giving weight to their witness, by wondrous signs of the fact that they speak by higher authority, and that in disobeying men they are obeying God.
And, further, we have here a positive declaration of the grand condition of such co-witness: OBEDIENCE. The Holy Spirit is given to all obedient souls. Consequently disobedience for-Jeits all his most precious gifts. And, if his essential power has been withdrawn, if our preaching, teaching, testifying, now lacks in any degree his confirming co-witness, may it not be because there has been a departure from the New Testament models? If for any reason we have “lost our testimony” by conformity to another pattern, or by following our own devices, we have so far lost also his testimony, or attestation, and our witness has become formal and forceless.
There must have been a strange divine sanction attending the words of these poor and persecuted saints. Even the wise politician, Gamaliel, seems to have felt it, and so, from the mere point of worldly policy, he counsels that his fellow-members of the sanhedrim shall let these men alone; for he says: “If this counsel or this work be of men, it will come to naught: but, if it be of God, Acts v. 38,39. ye cannot overthrow it; lest haply ye be found even to fight against God.” But, while their foes are smitten with awe, the disciples depart from the presence of the council, unawed by the authority or threatening of men, but full of joy in the Holy Ghost, that they might, even at the price of personal suffering and shame, have the privilege and glory of being fellow-witnesses with the Spirit of God to the Jesus whom they continue daily to preach.
Let us not pass on without another reflection over the new lessons we are learning. There is a co-witness of the Spirit, and it is given to all obedient souls. They who, like the apostles, make it their one aim to bear witness to a risen, ascended, glorified Christ, shall find the Holy Spirit adding his testimony to theirs. How? By giving them w¢ferance, so that their witness becomes his testimony; and by imparting to them boldness, so that even their enemies are struck with awe.
But they had, as we also have, need of some other form of joint testimony to confirm their word, for this could hardly be called a co-witness. And we are elsewhere told how the Spirit attested, as divine, their testimony: “God also Hebrews ii. 4. bearing them witness, both with signs and wonders, and with divers miracles, and gifts of the Holy Ghost, according to his own will.”
This was the second appearance of Peter and his brother apostles before the council. On the previous occasion Peter and John had confounded these rulers by their bold witness, and by the Holy Ghost’s co-witness in the man healed and standing with them, so that the rulers could say nothing against it but were compelled to confess a notable miracle as having beendone. And now, as again they challenge the council to say whether they ought not to obey God rather than men, they openly declare the great truth that zo¢ to obey would be to forfeit that confirming co-witness! What rich lessons on holy living and mighty preaching here abound!