The Personality of the Holy Spirit
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
nT at
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
He ae Rint XV. 20557 XVi. masculines 6s, éxetvos, avtds.. And
let this be read in the light of the wonderful context, in which this blessed Paraclete, this
1 And if the question is asked, what language did the Lord Jesus speak that night, Greek or Aramaic; and if Aramaic, how
A dvocatus,’ ‘called in” to the aid of the otherwise ‘‘ orphaned” Church, is seen to be such, and to act so, as to be indeed the Substitute, the more than substitute, for the unspeakably real personality of the Saviour in His seen presence. The passage sets the Holy Spirit before us as not the Father, as not the Son, and yet as the “Vicar of Christ” (the phrase is Tertullian’s’), the ample Consolation for the absence of the familiar company of the beloved Saviour. It scarcely needs the impressive testimony of the Greek grammar of the sentences to assure us with deep and restful certainty that to the mind of the Saviour that night the Spirit was indeed present as a Person.
In this central and decisive passage then we have the Holy Ghost revealed to us in so many
was the contrast between masculine and neuter conveyed? we reply that the question, most interesting and important in itself, is not in point in our enquiry. For us as believers in the divine character of the Written Word the discourses of the New Testament, and of the Old Testament too, are before us as veforts corrected and edited by the Author.
1 For a vindication of the rendering Advocate for Paracletus see Lightfoot, Ox a Fresh Revision of the N.T., pp. 50-56 Meantime the dear familiar word Comforter, Cozfortator, remains as a true Jaraphrase of Paraclete.
* De Virginibus Velandis, c. 1.
words as Him, not only as It; as the living and conscious Exerciser of true personal will and love, as truly and fully as the First :Johnii.:. ‘“Paraclete,” the Lord Jesus Christ Himself. And now this central passage radiates out its glory upon the whole system and circle of Scripture truth about the Spirit. From Gen. i. 2 to Rev. xxii. 17 it sheds the warmth of divine personal life into every mention of the blessed Power. With the. Paschal Discourse in our heart and mind, we know that it was He, not It, who “brooded” over the primeval deep. He, not It, “strove with man,” or Genie. ‘“ruledin man, ‘of old:. He, -not® Gen. vis. It, was in Joseph in. Egypt, and Gen. xi. 3s. upon Moses in the wilderness of Numb. xi. x. wandering, and upon judges and kings of
1] well know that it is maintained that in the Greek New Testament, as a rule, ré Ilvedpa denotes the Personal Paraclete,
and veda without the article not the Person but the influence. v
With some exceptions I believe this rule holds good. But it leaves quite untouched the line of reasoning in the text here. When we kave ascertained that 7d IIvedua is indeed a Person we know that mvedua is a personal influence. And in the general light of Scripture teaching on divine Influences we are abundantly secure in saying that this means nothing less than the divine Person at work, Judges vi. 34.
t Sam. &. ire,
THIS hank d:0:06 by FP
2 Kings ii. 9, 15.
2 Chron. xv. 1.
Matt. xxii. 43.
Heb. x, 15.
1 Peter i. 11.
2 Peter 1. 21.
Heb. ix. 8.
x Chron. xxviii.
12.
Ezek, ii. 2.
Luke i. 35.
Luke ii. 22.
Luke iv. 1.
Acts il. 4.
Acts viii. 39.
after-days. He, not It, “spake by
the prophets,’ ‘“moving” those
‘holy ‘men? of=God.% = He, notght
drew the plan of the ancient ‘Tabernacle and of the first Temple. He,
not It, lifted Ezekiel to his feet in
the hour of vision. He, not It, came
upon the Virgin, and anointed her
Son at Jordan and led Him to the
desert of temptation, and gave utterance to the saints at Pentecost, and
caught Philip away from the road
to Gaza, and guided Paul through Asia Minor to the nearest port for Europe. He, not It, cftects the new birth of regenerate John iii. s,6,8 man, and is the Breath of his new
Acts xvi. 6, 7.
Gal. v. 25. life, and the Earnest of his coming pom val ti glory,’ By ftiim); ot bys. pethe ‘be-Gal. v. 25. liever walks, and mortifies the deeds Rom. viii x3 of the body, filled not with It, but Eph. v. 28, Him. He, not It,“issthe Spirit-of
faith, by whom it is “given unto us
to believe on Christ.” He, not It,
speaks to the Churches. He, not
It, says from heaven that they who die in the
BiCOL, 1 Vert 30
Phil. i. 29.
Rev. ii. 7, 11, 293
111, 6, 13) 22. *
RESERVE OF SCRIPTORE; ITS REASON. 11
Lord are blessed, and calls in this Rev. xiv. x3. life upon the wandering soul of man to come to the living water. Rev. xxii. 17, And let us not wonder, by the way, that the exhibition of His Personality is comparatively so reserved in Scripture; that we have need, as in the case of the Personality of the Father and of the Son we have not at all, to place Scripture by Scripture and make an induction on the subject. The reason lies in the nature Oi the «case. the -Holy Spirit is “the strue Author of the Written Word; and Heb. x.:5, His authorship there is occupied with the main and absorbing theme not of Himself but of another Person, the Son of God. Incidentally, like some of His human agents in the production of the Scriptures — like Moses, and Jeremiah, and Paul, and John — He discloses enough of His blessed Self to give us full apprehension of His personal reality; but His theme, His burthen, is Jesus Curist. And again in the unfolding and application of Redemption His work is above all things secret, internal, subjective. It is to take of the things of Christ, to deal with the blessed objectivity of the finished work and inexhaustible riches of Christ, and with inmost touches and new-creating whispers to manifest them to the spirit of man. It is to bring man, by a divine but inscrutable operation, to believe in Christ and to possess Him, with a spontaneity truly man’s own while yet Another is in it. As to His saving operations, the Spirit lies hidden as it were behind Christ Jesus and in our own inner man. So it is also in measure in His revelations of Himself in His holy Word. However this is by the way. The point before us now, in the matter of the Personality of the Spirit, is just this: that we have the central and open revelation of that personality given us in Scripture ina place and under circumstances charged with indescribable tenderness and sacredness. The truth thus appears not only as a demand on the obedience of faith — though this it is indeed — but as a gift to the believing soul of heavenly love, of love deep and warm as the heart of the Redeemer. There seems to be a drift and set at the present day, in many quarters where what are called liberalizing tendencies in theology prevail,
Ee eee eee eee a aoe FEN eee RBAT
to discredit, or minimize, or ignore, the belief of the Personality of the blessed Spirit. In what interest and to what end, one asks, is such a tendency accepted or promoted? Surely not with the hope of presenting the Christian plan, the process of eternal love and goodness, in fairer, tenderer, or more living colours and glories. If a reference to personal experience may be permitted I may indeed here “set to my seal.” Never shall I forget the gain to conscious faith and peace which came to my own soul, not long after a first decisive and appropriating view of the Crucified Lord as the sinner’s Sacrifice of peace, from a more intelligent and conscious hold upon the living and most gracious Personality of that Holy Spirit through whose mercy the soul had got that blessed view. It was a new development of insight into the Love of God. It was a new contact as it were with the inner and eternal movements of redeeming goodness and power, a new discovery in divine resources. At such a “time of finding,” gratitude, and love, and adoration gain a new, a newly realized, reason, and motive-power and rest. He who with
His secret skill, and with a power not the less almighty because it violates nothing, has awakened and regenerated the man, now shines before his inner sight with the smile of a personal and eternal kindness and amity, and is seen standing side by side, in union unspeakable yet without confusion, with Him who has suffered and redeemed, and with Him: who laid the mighty plan of grace, and willed its all-merciful success, and spared not His own Son, giving Him over for us all. If I may reverently use the simile, it is as when to two notes of the musical triad the related third note is added, and there results, in the words of the music-loving poet, “not a fourth sound, but a star.”?
As our enquiry proceeds we shall have continual occasion of course to recur to this primary theme, the Personality of the Holy Ghost; and much that is omitted in this preliminary statement will thus be supplied. But we have at least aimed here at the great mark of setting the sacred fact, as a fact, well before us, and letting it take its large place anew in
1 Browning, Adt Vogler.
the consciousness, and so in the action, of the believing man. That place is surely meant to be a large one, in the light of the Paschal Discourse, as we have traced itsimport. There the blessed Person of the Paraclete is revealed as just about to fill the void of the disciples’ hearts with a whole wealth of personal, gracious action, abiding, revealing, teaching, leading, conveying into the inmost receptacle the presence of Christ, so that. He while absent should be present, while invisible should be seen. Surely such a presence and such an action was intended to call forth on the happy Christian’s part a reverent and loving reciprocation. If thus the Spirit was to deal with him, he was to deal with the Spirit in holy recognition, and adoring gratitude, and confiding love. ‘“The Spirit with our Rom. viii. x. spirit” is a phrase meant to carry endless blessed applications in the experiences of the life of faith.
As we close, the question perhaps arises from the thoughts just suggested, whether acts of direct adoration to the Holy Spirit are prescribed to us in the Scriptures. It is certainly remarkable that we have very little in their pages which bears explicitly on the question, a fact — which however falls very naturally in with what we have already seen of the general comparative reticence of the Author of the Book about His own nature and glory. And, again, it is a fact in harmony with what we have seen of the character of His work for the Christian, a work pre-eminently subjective, so profoundly so as to occasion. such a statement as that of St Paul that the Spirit intercedes for the saints Rom. viii,27, with groanings that cannot be uttered, words whose context at least suggests that the intercession has its action in the region of the inner man, and breathes itself or groans itself forth through the regenerate human spirit. If it is the Holy Spirit’s special function not only to speak to and deal with, but also to speak and work through, the man He renews and sanctifies, we can just so far understand that He the less presents Himself for our articulate adoration. But meanwhile the sacred rightfulness of our worship of the Holy Spirit is as surely established as anything can be “that rests on large and immediate inferences from the Scriptures. If He is divine, and if He is personal, how can we help the attitude of adoration when, leaving for the moment the thought of His work in us, we isolate in our view the thought of Him the Worker? Scripture practically prescribes to us such an attitude when it gives us our Lord’s own account, in His baptismal formula, of the Eternal Name as His disciples were to know it — “The Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost;” and when in the Acts and the Epistles the Holy Ghost is set before us as not only doing His work in the inmost being of the individual but presiding in sacred majesty over the community; and when in acy. i the Revelation He, in the mysti- fia aa cal sevenfoldness of His operation, * 13. Seven yet One, appears in that solemn prelude as the concurrent Giver, with the Father and the Son, of grace and peace; een above all when in the Paschal Dis- J” *” course the adorable and adored Lord Jesus presents Him to our faith as. co-ordinate with Himself in glory and grace, ‘‘ another Comforter.”
So, while watchfully and reverently seeking to remember the laws of Scripture proportion, and that according to it the believer’s relation to the Spirit is zot so much that of direct adoration as of a reliance which wholly implies it, let us trustfully and thankfully worship Him, and ask blessing of Him, as our spirits shall be moved to such action under His grace. Let us ever and again recollect, with deliberate contemplation and faith, what by His word we know of Him, and of His presence in us and His work for us, and then let us not only “pray
Jude2, 22 the Holy Ghost” but also Zo Him, whether in the words of some ancient Vez, or in the many songs of supplication which have been given us, surely not without His leading, in these latter days of His gracious dispensation. One such out of many let me quote and let me use, breathed from the soul and mind of my own beloved and Spirit-taught father long ago, and sung by him (how often! in tones how well remembered!) in his hours of adoration to the last:
“Come, Holy Comforter, celestial Light, Relieve from all obscurity our sight;
Se ey
Come, Holy Comforter, celestial Fire,
Our souls with love and purity inspire;
Hear, Holy Ghost, our supplicating cry,
Nor leave the grace Thou gav’st to droop and die.
“Come, Holy Comforter, a Saviour’s love Reveal, and fix our hearts on joys above; Come, Holy Comforter, the flesh subdue, And aid us, one with Christ, His will to do; Hear, Holy Ghost, our supplicating cry, Nor leave the grace Thou gav’st to droop and die.”
ADDENDUM TO CHAPTER I.
THE SIN OF RAILING (SAacdnula) AGAINST THE HOLY GHOST.
(Matt. xii. 31, 32; Mark iii. 28-30; Luke xii. 10. See Heb. vj. 4-8, x. 26-31; 1 John v. 16.)
On this awful and mysterious subject I offer only a very few words, and these are offered mainly because of the connexion of the subject with that of the Personality of the Holy Spirit. For it appears to be justly reckoned among the proofs of the Personality that this unspeakably dread warning should be given, in which railing
FO ne eran ee
against the Spirit is seen as a sin comparable in kind with railing against the holy personal Saviour.
For myself I feel, as surely many a Christian does, how very much easier it is to say what this great acme and last development’ of sin zs not than what it is. Whatever it is, it is always and for ever true that the man who as a fact comes penitent to the feet of Christ for pardon finds it. And whatever it is, the Saviour’s own words of warning surely imply that it is not, so to speak, a terrible accident of the sinful soul’s action but (see Miller cited in the note) a development, the result of a process, the outcome of a deliberately formed condition. In order to it there needs, assuredly, the concurrence of great and God-given /ght upon good and evil, sin and salvation (see Heb. vi.), with a resolved, deliberate, and matured hostility and repulsion on the part of the will; a personal. hatred of recognized eternal holiness.
1See some excellent remarks on the Unpardonable Sin as being not an isolated sin but sin in its full development, in Julius Müller, Christian Doctrine of Sin, T. & T. Clark’s Eng. Trans., Ly Pp. 410, étc.
— — — — -
— —
Why is this sin unpardonable? Because, surely, it is such a closing of the door of repentance by the created personality against itself as, by laws of spiritual nature which we cannot analyse but may in part divine, shuts up the personality finally against grace; denies ail possible ground, all zzdus, to the action of Him whom it has in some sense seen and yet deliberately hated. And some further light, if I mistake not, is thrown on this zrvremzsszbzlity by the fact that the Gospel, the Dispensation of the Spirit (see e.g. 2 Cor. ili. 6-8), is seen in Scripture as the fzal message of divine mercy. He who in the full light of this final Gospel deliberately rejects its message and its Messenger, casts off the /as¢ offers, the justly and necessarily last, of salvation. No more powerful, tender, prevailing secrets of conquest and persuasion lie beyond. This comes out in Heb. x., where the possible apostate back from Christ to antichristian Judaism is warned that no new sacrifice for sin will meet his awful need. The old offerings have done their work for ever; and Calvary will not be repeated. From one point of view we may thus say that the warnings of the Saviour in the Gospels mean, in effect, that while a merciful forbearance could, in the nature of things, be extended for His sake to that rejection of Him which was committed “in the days of His flesh,” while He stood before His enemies as pre-eminently “The Son of Man,” it would be otherwise when He was deliberately and finally refused under the dispensation of that Holy Spirit who should bear witness to Him in His accomplished work and glory as “the Captain of salvation made perfect.” y
Can the truly regenerate commit this sin? I venture to say yes, and zo. In themselves, and as relying more on their regeneration than their Regenerator, yes. In Him, and under His covenant of grace, I humbly believe, xo and never. Heb. vi. 4-8, as it appears to me (the weighty remarks of J. Müller notwithstanding), deals with the case not of the soul vivified with the divine life of: holiness and love by the Spirit of Christ, but of the soul gifted by that Spirit with the fullest Aight separable from
1See Whitby, Ox the New Testament, Appendix to St Matthew xit.
Jove. Balaam’s recorded condition remarkably illustrates every detail of Heb. vi. 4-8. Meanwhile let us take heed, watching and praying, not to grieve the Spirit of love and holiness. It is better to be dismayed than to presume. But it is best of all most reverently to trust.