Veni Creator: Thoughts on the Person and Work of the Holy Spirit of Promise

Bee following chapters have a very simple

purpose. They are not intended to constitute a technical treatise, certainly not to carry the reader into elaborate enquiries into the history of doctrines. They are intended to be a reverent review of some, and only some, of the main teachings of the Holy Scriptures concerning the ever-blessed Spirit of God, the heavenly Paraclete, the eternal Third Person, the Lord and Life-Giver, and His revealed work in Redemption. And this review shall be made, by His most merciful assistance, with a constant reference to the actual needs of the human soul, the actual experience of the people of God.

The theme is one of altogether special importance for the believing Church of these latter days. In John Owen’s Pueumatologia, his deep, massive, and most spiritual ‘“‘ Discourse

Concerning the Holy Spirit” (1674), occurs a remarkable passage (bk 1, ch. i.), in which he traces through the ages and dispensations a certain progress of divine tests of living orthodoxy, related to each of the Three Persons in succession. Before the First Advent the great testing truth was “the oneness of God’s nature and His monarchy over all,” with special respect to) the “Person of the ‘PathereeAt, the thirst Advent the great question was whether a Church orthodox on the first point would now receive the divine Son, incarnate, sacrificed, and glorified, according to the promise. And when the working of this test had gathered out the Church of Christian believers, and built it on the foundation of the truth of the Person and Work of the Lord Jesus Christ, then the Holy Spirit came in a new prominence and speciality before that Church as a touchstone of true faith. ‘‘ Wherefore the duty of the Church now immediately respects the Spirit of God, who acts towards it in the name of the Father and of the Son; and with ‘respect unto Him it is that the Church in its present state is capable of an apostasy from God.... The sin of despising His Person and rejecting His Work now is of the same nature with idolatry of old, and with the Jews’ rejection of the Person of the Son.”

The statement is perhaps too absolute in form to embrace all the data of revelation and experience. But it is at least an indication of great spiritual facts, and a solemn caution to the Christian of the present day to take heed lest he lose hold of the truth of the blessed Spirit in its humbling but beatifying fulness. All too easily, amidst prevalent fashions of opinion in the modern Church, we may insensibly, unconsciously, let that truth fall from us. We may take up with a view of human nature in its fallen estate which shall practically dispense with the need of the regenerating and sanctifying Holy Ghost. We may take up with a view of sacred order and divine ordinances which shall in effect put His sovereign and mysterious work into other hands than His. May He, the Lord, the Life-Giver, personal, sovereign, loving, mighty, preserve us from unfaithfulness of regard towards His blessed Person, from untruth of view of His divine work. May He keep us indeed “men of the Spirit,” filling us, that we may be so, with Himself.

As we approach our subject more immediately, let us very deliberately take the attitude of invocation and adoration. Who can rightly think and discourse about the Holy Spirit of God save by that same Spirit, and as seeking with humblest reverence to follow the very syllables and footsteps of that written Word which has Him everywhere for its true Author?

It is recorded in the story of the German Reformation that on one of its most memorable occasions, the disputation between Eck and Luther before Duke George of Saxony at the castle of the Pleissenburg, the controversy was preluded by the solemn chant of the Venz Creator, sung thrice over while the whole assembly knelt.” With the voices of the soul may we, writer and reader, so now unite, as we approach not a great battle of arguments but a

1 D’Aubigné, Ast. de la kéformation du xvi Stécle, liv. v., ch. iv. Késtlin, Luthers Leben, p. 149.

series of quiet meditations upon the Person and the Work of the Lord the Spirit.

“Veni, Creator Spiritus,
Mentes tuorum visita;
Imple superna gratia
Que Tu creasti pectora;

“Oui Paraclitus diceris,
Altissimi donum Deli,
Fons vivus, Ignis, Caritas,
Et spiritalis Unctio.”?

In the present chapter I propose to speak of the revealed Personatity of the Holy Spirit as the all-important preliminary to all other thoughts concerning Him. Upon His Divinity, His Deity, there is little practical need that

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1 Rendered thus among the “Hymns” formerly appended to the Prayer Book : —

“Come, Holy Ghost, Creator, come,
And visit all the souls of Thine;
Thou hast inspired our hearts with life,
Inspire them now with life divine.

Thou art the Comforter, the Gift
Of God most High, the Fire of love,
The everlasting Spring of joy,
And holy Unction from above.”

See the whole ancient hymn in Trench’s Sacred Latin Poetry, p. 184. It appears to be certainly older than its reputed author, Charlemagne. See too the beautiful hymn to the Holy Spirit by King Robert the Second of France (A.D. 997), 2072, p ‘196.

should dwell, so plain it is on the very surface of Scripture that the Holy Spirit, whether personal or not, is divine, isa Power of the divine Order. But is it He, or Ir? Is it a divine faculty, influence, phase, mode, or a divine Person? Now the most direct answer to this question, and at the same time the deepest and tenderest, is to go at once to the central passage of all Scripture in the matter. All over the blessed Book from its very first lines onward lie scattered mentions of the Spirit and His work. Here and there we have passages which go almost the length of revealing explicitly His personality; here and there passages which fully go that length, fairly interpreted. But there is one precious section of Scripture which is to these scattered rays as their combining focus, the glorious ruling passage of the subject. And where and what is it? Not some great chapter of apostolic argument and exposition, such as those in which the Godhead of the Son is asserted, or the holy paradox of Justification by Faith explained and applied to the trembling, weary conscience and longing heart. No; for the decisive teaching on the Personality of the

Holy Ghost we go yet deeper into the Scripture tabernacle; we enter its Holiest; we open the pages where the Lord Jesus Himself teaches with His own lips the secrets of spiritual life. There, as it were under the John xiv-xvi.

Shechinah itself, lies our doctrinal stronghold for this article of faith. There speaks the Christ of God, in an hour of supreme tenderness, and from which all ideas of the rhetorical and the merely poetical are infinitely distant; and He speaks with repetition and emphasis of this same Holy Spirit, and He speaks of Him as personal. My readers are well aware of the fact. But it is never in vain to impress such a fact again upon the soul by re-examination of the infallible words. Let me ask that the Greek be once more opened, and this divine grammatical anomaly once more studied — the neuter [Iveda associated repeatedly and markedly with the masculine Tlapakhyros, the Jonnxiv. 16,173

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