The Holy Spirit, What We Believe, Part 10

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One, two, three. Welcome to The Rap Report with your host, Andrew Rappaport, where we provide biblical interpretation and application.

This is a ministry of striving for eternity and the Christian podcast community. For more content or to request a speaker for your church, go to strivingforeternity .org.

Well, welcome to another edition of The Rap Report. I am your host, Andrew Rappaport.

Happy New Year. It's a new year. It's 2022. Well, it will be by the time you listen to this.

Not yet for Jim and I, but we're here waiting, waiting to see what 2022 brings in.

You know, Jim, you know, I think that everyone was talking at one point about the 2020 vision.

And I think that, I think 2020 had a virus and we needed to do a reboot. Yeah, that's exactly right.

Yeah, I think they're calling it the great reset is what they're... Yeah. Hopefully, 2022 will bring the coming of the

Lord. That's what I'm hoping for. Yes. Ace in the day. That's right. And after last week's episode that we talked a lot about that, but this week we're going to talk about something else.

As we get in continuing our series, what do we believe? And this is something you can go to strivingforeternity .org,

go to the about section, click on what we believe. And what we're doing is working through the doctrinal statement there.

And a doctrinal statement is an important thing to have. It tells us what we believe and what we don't believe.

But it becomes very important. I was speaking with someone recently and saying that they're a church that has a very, very small doctrinal statement.

And yes, everybody can agree with it. You know what the problem is? No one knows where the disagreements are.

Yeah, and you don't find that out until you're already committed and you're there and you're pushing through on some issues. Exactly.

And so our disagreements are just as important for us to understand. And a doctrinal statement, even though it may be posited in the positive way, still talks against the things that we would see as negative things.

So we have to look at that. That's what we're looking at. So this week we're doing, if you go to the about section and what we believe at strivingforeternity .org,

click on the little plus sign to expand the section on God. And we're looking at God, the

Holy Spirit. So we're going to start this week, and this is episode number 10 in our series.

We're now going to look at the Holy Spirit. Now, I'm going to have Jim read the first two paragraphs, because that's about as much as I think we're actually going to get through today, because we have a lot here to discuss with this.

So Jim, would you mind reading the first two paragraphs? All right. The Holy Spirit is a divine person, eternal, underrived, possessing all the attributes of personality and deity, including intellect, 1

Corinthians 2, 10 through 13. Emotions, Ephesians 4, 30. Will, 1 Corinthians 12, 11.

Eternality, Hebrews 9, 14. Omnipresence, Psalm 139, 7 to 10.

Omniscience, Isaiah 40, 13 and 14. Omnipotence, Romans 15, 13.

And truthfulness, John 16, 13. In all the divine attributes, He is co -equal and consubstantial with the

Father and the Son. Matthew 28, 19. Acts 5, 3 through 4. 28, 25 and 26.

1 Corinthians 12, 4 through 6. 2 Corinthians 13, 14. And Jeremiah 31, 31 to 34.

And Hebrews 10, 15 through 17. The work of the Holy Spirit is to execute the divine will with relation to all mankind.

His activity is sovereign in creation, Genesis 1, 2. The incarnation, Matthew 1, 18. The written revelation, 2

Peter 1, 20 and 21. And the work of salvation, John 3, 5 through 7.

So this is something we have to start on. Before we even get into the discussion, which we're going to look at today with his attributes and his works, we have to realize something.

Because we're mentioning the Holy Spirit does not mean we're charismatic. That may surprise some people.

Because unfortunately, in the last hundred years, it seems the only groups of people that talk about the

Holy Spirit are the charismatics and those who believe that the charismatic gifts continue.

This is a real problem, I would argue, for, well,

Christianity. Because we are not delving in and studying often on the person of the

Holy Spirit. I think it was Charles Ryrie, when

I read his book on the Holy Spirit, where he mentioned basically, and I'm going to paraphrase because I don't remember the exact quote, but he basically said that no one studies the

Holy Spirit anymore because everyone's afraid to be called charismatic, and therefore the charismatics can actually be the ones to describe the

Holy Spirit, and much of the time they do it incorrectly. Now, if you're charismatic, that doesn't mean

I'm saying that you're wrong. We'll get to some of that in a future episode. Yeah, almost.

We have allowed them to set the terms of the debate. We've allowed them to define the terms. We've allowed them to determine the hermeneutic that we approach

Scripture with. We've allowed them to set all the presuppositions with which we approach Scripture and the whole discussion about spiritual gifts and the role of the

Holy Spirit and the person of the Holy Spirit because we've sort of exited the debate. And as somebody who has done debates, you know this, that when you allow your opponent to define the terms, they win the debate.

And so then we have done that with charismatics, allowed them to define the terms of the debate and to basically seize the parameters under which we have the conversation.

It's going to look like they hold the winning argument sometimes, and they don't. Yeah, and this is the thing is,

I remember being a moderator in a debate on the charismatic gifts, and the gentleman who said the charismatic gifts continue, his position was, if you don't first assume his position, you can't understand

Scripture. So that ends up saying that you have to believe his view of the Holy Spirit to even be able to understand anything about the

Bible, especially his view of the Holy Spirit. And so there is much confusion on the personal

Holy Spirit. Now that doesn't mean that everything that charismatics say about the Holy Spirit is wrong, but there are some.

And so those are things that we end up having, that we have to address. And this doctrinal statement, not this week, but in future episodes, we're going to deal with some of those things, but we're going to deal with some things that people do get wrong here.

For example, we say the Holy Spirit is a divine person. Now we're being really specific with that term, that he's a divine person.

The reason is because this is something that if you were to go to the

Jehovah Witnesses and you were to look at what they would say of the Holy Spirit, well,

I think they kind of get their idea of the Holy Spirit from Star Wars.

They believe that he's a force. Luke, let the force be with you.

That's how they pretty much describe him. And so when I'm saying he's a person,

I'm being very specific in the sense that I, in my theology, if you go to the

Striving Fraternity Academy, and you can go to strivingfraternity .org, go to the academy section, we have a course on systematic theology, and in there we have the attributes of God or the perfections of God.

And as we look at those perfections, there's lots of different ways they're broken up.

For example, many people break them up as communicable and incommunicable, meaning communicable are those that are communicated to man, those things that we have that God also has.

He communicates those to man. Incommunicable are those things only God has, the attributes of deity, like his omniscience, omnipresence, things like that.

So there's different ways of breaking those things up and categorizing them. And though most people do it that way,

I have chosen to break it down a little bit more specifically. So I have attributes of deity. Those are attributes that are true only of God.

So if you have those attributes, you are God. Those are attributes, for example, of incomprehensibility, immutability, being infinite as far as being self -existent, eternal, things like omniscience, omnipresence, omnipotence, things like that.

But then there's attributes that I define as attributes of personality. These are attributes that define a person, personhood.

So being spiritual, having life, self -conscience, emotional, intelligence, self -determination.

Now, some of those things we can say, okay, this defines us different than animals. So we have this personality, but we end up seeing that personhood also includes

God. God has all these attributes because all the attributes we have are from God. These are communicated from God to us.

But guess what? There's also, this is communicated to angels as well.

They have emotion. They have intelligence. They're spiritual. They can have that. And so this defines personhood.

And then lastly, I group them as attributes of morality, things like holiness, righteousness, justice, goodness, wrath, truth, veracity, faithfulness, love, grace, mercy, long -suffering, kindness, forgiveness.

Now, God has all of those attributes, but those are attributes that we have in being moral beings.

And so what we're saying there is that the Holy Spirit is a person, a divine person.

So not just a regular person, but has the attributes of personhood and divinity.

This means that the Holy Spirit is not just a spirit or a force, the way that Jehovah Witnesses would argue that the

Holy Spirit is like electricity. Well, electricity does not have attributes that we're going to see the

Holy Spirit has. Divine attributes and human attributes. And what we're going to spend a lot of time looking at today are the attributes or what we could say perfections of the

Holy Spirit. And we have to be clear with this because as Jim and I already said, we don't want to give up the debate by letting those who are trying to push a specific point of view of the

Holy Spirit to define who he is. We want to let Scripture do that defining, not our experiences.

And so I'm saying that to say if any of this, as we look at, if it contradicts your view of the

Holy Spirit and we're pointing out it from Scripture, then it's not the Scripture that's wrong. It's your experience that's wrong or your view of the

Holy Spirit that's wrong. Scripture is never wrong. Now, you might argue that we're misinterpreting the Scripture. Well, contact us and let us know if you believe that.

Info at strivingforeternity .org. Info at strivingforeternity .org. I will be happy to pass on any complaints to Jim and let him answer them.

Jim – I have a file folder for those. Jared – Yeah. Is it that black little basket that you have right by your desk?

Jim – Yep. Jared – Good thing I'll send it in email then. Oh wait, you've got a folder for that too. Jim –

I've got a folder for that. Jared – So let me just start, Jim, and ask you, have you seen people that have some confusion when it comes to the person of the

Holy Spirit over your time in ministry? Jim – Oh, I think so.

Not just Charismatics, but there's a lot of people who would call themselves cessationists, I think, who are confused about what the

Spirit of God does, and even people who would – and I write – my book, God Doesn't Whisper, is really geared toward people who would call themselves cessationists, but yet have a view that if the

Spirit's not whispering in their ear and giving them private personal revelations in the moment to make decisions and guide them in day -to -day living, that the

Holy Spirit is therefore absent from them. They have a very truncated view of the Holy Spirit. He's shrunk down, and the only time that people sense him working is when they get what

I call the liver quivers or the Holy Spirit goosebumps, that they feel something supernatural. Then they say, oh, the

Spirit of God is at work. And I like to remind people, the Spirit of God is at work all the time. Most of what he does for you and to you is undiscerned by us.

He is working on us and through us and in us and sanctifying us, and most of it is unperceived.

And so just because you get an emotion – and there's a lot of things that can create emotions and quivers and goosebumps, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's the

Holy Spirit. And we have to have a theology of the Holy Spirit that allows us to have room for him to be working in all kinds of ways that we don't perceive him to be working.

And just because we don't feel it doesn't mean that he's not active and at work in us doing his work, and we need to keep that in mind.

And when we say that the Holy Spirit is not giving you promptings and nudgings and impressions, that doesn't mean the

Holy Spirit's not doing anything. Many Christians just have no room in their theology for a Holy Spirit that convicts of sin and exhorts believers and encourages and strengthens and comforts and gifts and empowers and providentially guides our steps and regenerates.

And all of those things, they don't have any categories for the Holy Spirit to work in.

To them, it's just, I need to hear the whispers in my heart. And that's a very small, narrow, almost like you're putting the

Holy Spirit in the box by saying that the Holy Spirit has to be doing this before I will credit him any work.

And I say, and they would ironically accuse me of putting the Holy Spirit in the box when I say he's not whispering promptings and nudgings in your ear.

And if you want to get the book that Jim mentioned, God Doesn't Whisper, you can go to jimosman .com, until of course he finally ships us a large enough amount that we can start selling them at Thriving Fraternity, hint, hint.

But yeah, you could get them at jimosman .com. Here's the thing with that though, Jim, they do accuse you of putting

God in the box. But is God in the box when it says God cannot lie?

Yes. Because he puts himself in the box. Why? Because that's something he can't do.

It's against his perfection. And so God is in a box. Yeah, you're not putting

God in a box when you just accurately describe how he has described himself. When you accurately communicate how

God himself has described himself, you're not putting him in a box. You're just saying, here's what's true, and God has said this. Now here's the dilemma that I often see with people that say, well,

I have to have this feeling. What do you do with the unbelievers that have the same feelings? I've spoken to countless

Mormons that have a testimony, and that's their proof that they're right. And their testimony sounds so much like the person who might be a charismatic and is giving their experience.

How then do we discern the difference? Because many of these folks we're speaking of, not all, but many, will argue that the scriptures have to be proven out by their feelings from the

Holy Spirit. And that's where there's the dilemma. Because we have to interpret the ministry and role of the

Holy Spirit from scripture and not our experience. Anytime we use our experience to interpret scripture and not the rules of hermeneutics, we're in trouble.

Hermeneutics is the science of interpretation. So anytime we don't follow those rules but use our experience, we're going to get ourselves in trouble.

We might get the right conclusion, but a broken clock is right twice a day. Unless, of course, it's a 24 -hour clock, and then it's only once a day.

So let's look at some of these attributes that we end up seeing. The Holy Spirit, why would we say he's divine?

Well, he's described as being eternal, underrived.

In other words, he's self -existent. So those are attributes of deity.

He doesn't have a beginning. He doesn't have an end. Now, one of the things

I notice is that most people do not have trouble understanding the deity of the Holy Spirit once they accept the deity of Christ.

I've only met one group of people that accept the deity of Christ and not the deity of the Holy Spirit. But the majority of people that accept the deity of Christ can easily accept the deity of the

Holy Spirit. And I think that's why most people focus on the deity of Christ. Yeah, that's because the arguments that we make for the deity of the

Holy Spirit are the same ones that you would make for the deity of Christ. So the argument is the same. We're saying, once we admit that there's a difference between substance and person, we say, okay, you can be one substance, even two separate and distinct persons.

Once you make that distinction, then, of course, you have to ask, well, what does Scripture say concerning other persons who are also called

God, who have the same qualities that the Father and the Son have? So once we open up our understanding of God from a

Unitarian perspective and say, okay, we recognize the difference between substance and person, we can have two persons who share the divine substance, then it's nothing to just add a third person who also shares that divine substance.

Particularly if we see in Scripture that there is someone referred to as the Spirit of the

Lord, who is separate from the Father and separate from the Son, and yet shares all of the divine attributes and honors and names and deeds and power of God.

And once we see that all of those attributes are possessed by another person, and he's separate from the

Father and separate from the Son, then, of course, that brings us, then, to the doctrine of the Trinity. And when we look at the

Trinity—I've said this before, but I'm going to say it again in case you missed the past episodes, which you should go back and listen to—but the

Trinity is not a problem, it's a solution. It's a solution to a problem.

And what's the problem? You have the Father, the Son, and the Spirit. All three have the titles of deity, the attributes of deity, do the works of deity.

And so you see all three of them, those attributes, titles, and works that can be done only by deity, and yet we see them at the same place at the same time, so they can't have modalism, they're separate from one another.

And so, how do you deal with that problem? The Trinity is the solution, that there's one

God, as Scripture clearly says, with three persons that are separate and distinct from one another.

So, what we end up seeing here is that the Holy Spirit is a divine person, eternal, underrived, possessing all the attributes of personhood and deity.

As I had looked at, as I mentioned earlier, so now we're going to look at some of them. We see that he has an intellect.

Now, Jim, does the electrical socket in your house, does that have intellect? No, it does not at all.

In fact, you know, you mentioned how the people compare the Holy Spirit to electricity. There's something else about electricity, not only does it not have intellect or any of these attributes that we're going to see the

Holy Spirit has, but there's something that, electricity is something that we have under our control, and this is actually more akin to a charismatic view of the

Holy Spirit. We control electricity, we can send electricity from point A to point B, we can control what electricity does, we can control the power of electricity, the amount that we send, the amount that we use, we can control how it's used, we can convert electricity into other things, heat energy or cool energy.

We can do all kinds of things with electricity. Once you say that the Holy Spirit is like a force, like electricity, what you're saying is, he's something that we can control, we can manipulate it, we can do with him what we want.

And that really is how charismatics view the Holy Spirit. And yet the reality is you have smart plugs, don't you?

So that must mean they're intelligent, right? No, I mean, the reality is that electricity is, you know, it's the way something is working, you know, you can look at, someone will say that the

Holy Spirit is like radio waves or like electricity, but these things do not have an intellect.

The Holy Spirit has an intelligence, has an intellect, and because of that, in 1

Corinthians 2, verse 10, it says that the Spirit searches all things, even to the depths of God.

How can the Holy Spirit do that without an intellect? The Holy Spirit knows the thoughts of men.

The whole point of that is to say that this can't be some force. The Holy Spirit has that attribute, that perfection called intellect, has a knowledge of things.

The Holy Spirit's also emotional. You know, people don't often think about this, but you can grieve the

Holy Spirit. And by the way, grieving the Holy Spirit is not claiming that there are certain attributes that, or certain gifts don't continue today.

There are some who claim that that is what grieving of the Holy Spirit is, is when you're saying that the gifts of the

Spirit ceased. Well, I only say that they ceased because I think the

Bible says that they ceased. So, again, if God says they ceased, guess what? They ceased.

But when we look at the context, I know that's a hard word for some people is to look at context, but we have to look at context because when we're going to look at what

Scripture says, that's what's going to tell us the meaning of something. So, looking at the context of Ephesians chapter 4 and verse 30, so verse 30, like I said, do not grieve the

Holy Spirit of God by whom you were sealed on the day of redemption. Okay.

So, is that talking about saying that gifts cease? Well, there's nothing in actually

Ephesians chapter 4 that mentions anything about gifts ceasing. In fact, there's nothing in all of Ephesians that mentions about the gifts ceasing.

So, where do they get this? Oh, wait, hold it. Hold it, Jim. My hand's going up in the air. I just caught something right out of the air.

That's where they get it from. They make it up from nothing. It's just pulling it out of the air, okay?

In fact, what it says in verse 29 is, let no unwholesome word proceed from your mouth, but only such a word which is good and edifying according to the need of the moment, so that it will give grace to those who hear.

Do not grieve the Holy Spirit by whom you are sealed for the day of redemption.

Let all bitterness and wrath and anger and clamor and slander be put away from you, along with all malice.

Be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving each other, just as God in Christ has forgiven you.

So, that's what the grieving of the Holy Spirit is. It has to do with the idea of the way we behave, what we say, and what we do can grieve the

Holy Spirit. But to our point today, it shows that the Holy Spirit has emotion. Your electricity or radio waves do not have that.

We see that the Holy Spirit has a will in 1 Corinthians chapter 12. He has a will in 1

Corinthians 12 verse 11. But one and the same Spirit works all things, distributing to each one individually as He wills.

That's speaking of spiritual gifts. But who decides who gets which gifts? The Holy Spirit.

Now, how does He do it? Based on His will. He chooses. He's eternal.

We mentioned this already, but you can look at Hebrews chapter 9, verse 14. How much more will the blood of Christ, who through the eternal

Spirit, offered Himself without blemish to God? Now, what's the importance of Him being eternal?

It means He did not have a beginning or an end. You and I had a beginning. We were created, and then we exist forever.

God did not have that. And therefore, anything that would have existed before creation would be

God. And God is the only being that exists before creation. Because God created as Isaiah 44, 24 says,

God created alone. No one else helped Him. Therefore, anything that's not created has to be

God. Because if it was created, it had to be created by God, and therefore couldn't be God. So if the

Holy Spirit is eternal, cannot be created, must be

God. Another attribute that the Holy Spirit has is omnipresence.

This is the idea that He is everywhere present. Now, I know, Jim, a lot of people give this attribute to Satan.

A lot of people all around the world are saying, Satan made me do it. Satan did this, Satan did that. Satan is not omnipresent.

Satan is being one place at one time, and He is a temporal being like you and I.

He was created. He's not everywhere. He's not making you do everything that you think is being done.

That's right. Yep. Yeah, He exists in one place at one time.

His minions are all over the place. But He Himself is not omnipresent for the Spirit of God is, and that's an attribute of deity.

But wait, Jim, there's someone else that's also given this attribute sometimes. No, I'm not talking about Santa Claus, but he seems to be given this too, but he doesn't actually exist.

Mary. The Catholic Church will put Mary with this attribute because they'll say that Mary could hear everyone's prayers.

She's everywhere. She could listen to everybody. Mary is not omnipresent either. Only God can be omnipresent.

Now, like we just said with Satan and Mary, there's another attribute that ends up being applied to Satan and Mary incorrectly, and that's omniscience, that they know all things.

Mary cannot hear all of the prayers of all the people, and Satan does not know what's in your mind.

Now, I always thought this was funny, Jim. There's a clip that Justin Peters will play of,

I forget who, it might be Kenneth Copeland, but I forget who it is. He says that the reason we speak in tongues is because that's an angelic language, and if you don't want

Satan to hear it, you speak in tongues. Actually, no, I think it's the guy from It's Supernatural that says this.

Sid Roth. Sid Roth. He says we speak in tongues because that way Satan won't understand what we're hearing.

I love how Justin always plays that because he plays that clip and goes, if you're speaking in some angelic language to hide it from Satan, Satan is an angel.

If there's an angelic language, he would speak that angelic language. It would be foolish.

That's the worst language to speak in if you want to not have Satan know it.

If you want to hide what you're saying from Satan, speak his native tongue. That makes a lot of sense. You know what

Satan can't hear? Satan can't hear that prayer that you have in your mind because he can't know anything that's in your mind because he's not omniscient, but the

Holy Spirit is. The Holy Spirit does know what we think. The Holy Spirit's also omnipotent, meaning he's all -powerful.

This, again, is one of those attributes only of deity. The last one we mentioned here, and truthfulness.

The Holy Spirit is referred to as truth. This, again, is an attribute of personality.

What we have here, the way I define it of morality, but it still fits with it.

This is an attribute you can't have. You can't have this of a force. The Holy Spirit can't be some sort of spirit, non -entity the way some describe him.

Now, I say him, but we don't have a male -female gender usually used that I could think of for the

Holy Spirit. We do have for the Son and the Father. There may be out there,

I haven't checked all the passages, but I still say him. So, any question you have or anything you want to add,

I should say, Jim, with any of the attributes or perfections we mentioned there? No, just two things.

First, Jesus did use the male pronoun of the Holy Spirit, right? He will guide you into all truth.

Oh, yeah, you're right. Okay, there we go. So, he uses the male pronoun of the Holy Spirit.

And I would also point out that with all of these things, none of this can be said of an energy force or electricity.

Electricity cannot lie to you, and electricity cannot tell you the truth. Correct. So, I sit corrected.

There you go. That didn't take long. But yeah, and that's the whole point of this is that the reason to emphasize all these is there are groups that want to say that the

Holy Spirit is just a force, and we want to say no. No. Not only is he not just a force, he has attributes that only

God can have. And so, we go on to say in all the divine attributes, he is co -equal, co -substantial with the

Father and the Son. And the reason to say that is to point out, as we said, this is the issue.

He is divine, and he must be one of the triunity. It's not that this is you have the

Father and the Son, they're God, and the Spirit is something else. No, he's co -equal, co -substantial.

He is of the same nature and essence as much as the

Father and the Son are. You can't divide those three when it comes to the divinity.

And this, again, solves the problem. The definition of trinity solves the problem, the dilemma that we see in Scripture.

So, let's move on to his work now. Now, we've already looked at his attributes, and I said when it comes to deity, we have the titles, we have the attributes, we have the work.

Now, we just spent the time looking at the attributes. Now, what we want to do is look at the work of the

Spirit. Now, we're going to break this up a little bit into two different areas. So, this week, we're going to look at his works of deity.

Next week, we'll look at his works within humanity. Okay? So, we'll start getting into some different things next week as far as the ministry that he has on earth.

But as we look at his works that he does, there are certain works that only

God can do and only God's involved in. Now, if you've been following along with this podcast, you already picked one up because I mentioned one earlier, but we're going to get to it again.

So, the work of the Holy Spirit is to execute divine will with relation to mankind.

Now, we already said that the Holy Spirit has a will. We already said he's divine. So, he is going to execute that will within mankind.

He is working actively in our day and age, okay, and he is the one that is going to be working right now.

Jesus Christ doesn't walk the earth right now. And so, he executes his divine will in relation to mankind, and we're going to see many ways he does it.

But first, I want to look at the divine ways. So, his attribute, we see his activity in sovereign creation.

So, in Genesis 1 -2, we end up seeing scripture says, the earth was formless and void, and darkness was over the surface of the deep.

And the Spirit of God was moving over the surface of the waters. So, I could be wrong there,

Jim, but who is it there that's being credited with that part of creation? That's the

Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit. Interesting. Because, you know, Isaiah 44 -24 says this, Thus says the

Lord, your Redeemer, and the one who formed you from the womb,

I the Lord am the maker of all things, stretching out the heavens by myself, and spreading out the earth all alone.

Well, that makes it pretty clear who created. So, now you have a dilemma, because guess what?

Who else is credited with creation? Well, Jesus. Jesus. If you go to Colossians 1 -15 -18, looking at verse 16 specifically, speaking of Jesus, Well, let's see what was created.

What does he mean by created, Jim? Let's see. Both in the heavens and the earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities, just in case he left anything out, he says,

All things have been created through him and for him. Okay, so he made it clear all things, right?

Anything that was created was created by him and for him. So, Jesus created.

Does the scripture say anyone else created that you could think of? No. God the

Father, God the Son, God the Holy Spirit. That's right. The Father, right? And so, in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.

So, all three of them. But Isaiah says only one, right? Well, that one is

God. This is the point of this. Creation is one of those things that God alone did.

So, therefore, what does this say? This is clear that the

Jehovah Witness example or argument that God created Michael, the angel, and then

Michael created all things. That's not the case. That's not what scripture says because they're going to say that Michael becomes

Jesus and that's how Jesus could then be the creator. But then what do we do with the

Holy Spirit who created in Genesis 1 -2? By the way, I always find it interesting because we see in scripture that Satan, Lucifer, seems to be the highest angel before the fall.

So, why would Michael be the creator of all things? He would create someone named

Lucifer who would be a higher ranking angel than him. These are the dilemmas that you end up thinking through sometimes.

These are the questions I pose to when I talk to people and I'm using apologetics, I like to come up with things like this that most people don't think of because the

Jehovah Witness doesn't know how to answer that one. They don't have a ready answer because they're not used to answering it. But you see, that's a dilemma for them.

You know why they choose Michael? Because there's only three angels that I know of mentioned in scripture. Michael, Gabriel, and Lucifer.

Well, you can't mention Lucifer because that's Satan. So, they don't want to say Satan created everything. That would be a dilemma.

So, they got to choose between Michael and Gabriel. Okay? That's the dilemma then.

But that doesn't make sense that Michael would create a being greater than them. You know what also this answers,

Jim, is something popular about your way is Mormonism or the

Church of Jesus Christ of Latter -day Saints. Because they believe that Heavenly Father was born, and he had parents, and he was born on a planet called

Golub. Well, when you look at that, you go, well, wait a minute. So, if he did that, how did he create the planet he was born on before he was born?

How did he create his parents before he was born? There's a dilemma there. And so, what they would argue is that Heavenly Father was a man.

By the way, he was a sinful man on another planet. But he lived a good Mormon life and got to be

God of this planet. And Jesus lived as a man. But Jesus didn't sin first. He was good. He didn't sin.

Unlike Heavenly Father. And he became perfect. And he's going to be

God of his own planet one day. But here's the dilemma. What do you do with the Holy Spirit? Like, what is he?

Because he's a spirit. He's given the attributes of deity. And yet, he doesn't have a planet.

Now, in their thinking, all of the souls, all the spirits were created once. And so, now that they're created, they're just given into bodies.

So, that would say that the Holy Spirit is a spirit without a body. We never had a chance to be

God, yet has attributes of deity. This becomes the dilemma that you end up seeing with some of these groups.

Because they try to have an answer for everything. But they have to twist the scriptures to make the answer.

We can sit here and have a consistent position. Because that's what you do with the truth. 2

Corinthians 13, 8, you can do nothing against the truth, but by the truth. When you have the truth, all of the answers fit.

Doesn't mean we have all the answers. Because there's something we can't comprehend. But the

Holy Spirit was active in creation. Anything you want to add about that part before we get to the next?

Nope, I don't think so. I think you covered it well. Okay. Then let's look at the incarnation. Because the incarnation,

I'll tell you what, Jim. Let me let you define the incarnation. That way I get to take a drink of water.

Okay. The incarnation is the doctrine of the second person of the

Trinity becoming incarnate. Taking upon himself in flesh. Carnate or carnal.

Kind of the word we get from which we hear the word carnal, which means flesh. Being incarnate means in the flesh. So when we talk about the incarnation, we're talking about the second person of the

Trinity. The son, the divine son, the eternal divine son. Taking upon himself human flesh and becoming man.

So uniting divinity with humanity in the person of Christ. One person, two natures. That is the incarnation.

The miracle of God becoming a man or uniting with man. Not the father. And this is not the

Holy Spirit. So when we say, when Andrew says here his activity is sovereign in creation, the incarnation, we're not saying that the spirit became flesh.

But rather we're saying that the spirit did the work of creating the body of conceiving in Mary the human body in which the second person of the

Trinity dwelled while he was here on earth. And the same glorified body now, the body that is glorified now in which he will dwell for all of eternity.

And that's the doctrine of the incarnation. And so this is really important because some people will say, some groups say that the

God the Father impregnated Mary. Okay, well let's see what scripture says.

Matthew 1 .18. Now, the birth of Jesus Christ was as follows.

When his mother Mary had been betrothed to Joseph before they came together, she was found to be with child by the

Holy Spirit. So he was involved in the incarnation. Now this cannot mean, as some try to claim, that somehow the

Father impregnated Mary. Well, because it says the spirit. Well, then they got a dilemma because some of the people that will make that argument that the

Father did it also believe that the Father was somehow had physical attributes because he has hands and feet and hears and sees.

So they say he has human body parts. If you argue that way, Mormons argue that way. If you argue that way, also recognize he's described as having feathers.

So is God a chicken? You know, I mean, there's no reason not to take that point of view.

If you're going to take it literally, you have to be consistent. And so this is the

Holy Spirit. Well, the Holy Spirit's a spirit. So now we would say the Father is a spirit, but those people that make those claims say he has physical attributes.

But what we end up seeing is that it is the spirit by the spirit, the incarnation.

Now, this is, again, one of the things we see the Father, the Son, and the Spirit all involved in the incarnation of Jesus.

That is something only God can do. That is a work of God alone. And so what we see is that it's by the

Holy Spirit that Jesus became a man. Let's move on to the next one.

This is an important one, and this is going back to what we talked about with some of the abuses of the

Holy Spirit, is that his activity is sovereign in the written revelation.

Okay, 2 Peter 1 .20 says, but know this, first of all, that no prophecy of Scripture is a matter of one's own interpretation.

Okay, sorry, let me read verse 22. For no prophecy was ever made by an act of human will, but men moved by the

Holy Spirit spoke from God. So when we speak of Scripture, now we know we call it

God's Word. We know Jesus is the Word, and we see references to Scripture being from both of them.

Thus says the Lord throughout much of the Old Testament. So what you end up seeing is there will be things attributed to God in the

Old Testament that are attributed to Christ. So what we end up seeing is that it is the

Spirit who gives us written revelation. He inspires this. Now this is a dilemma for those who abuse the

Holy Spirit, because there are some who abuse it and say that the Holy Spirit has given me a word.

Well, Jim, if the Holy Spirit was to give us revelation, give us a word, give us some knowledge, would that be equivalent with Scripture?

It would have to be, because it comes from God. And if Scripture has its qualities of inerrancy, infallibility, and inspiration, and it is authoritative, if it has those qualities, it has those qualities not because it's written down, not because it's old, and not because it was apostles that gave it to us, but because it's

God's Word. So if God's Word has those qualities and the Holy Spirit gives us some revelation, how can that revelation not have those exact same qualities and therefore be on par with Scripture?

And this is hard for some to say, because they want to believe that they're getting prophecies. Now, Jim, the thing that's amazing, you know,

I really don't get this, because I think it's even Bill Johnson who admits that the prophecies coming out of Bethel are 80 percent accurate.

I mean, would we trust Scripture if we were— How can he not speak errantly on any occasion? Yeah. How can he speak errantly on any occasion?

That's just—it's clownish. Yeah, because Scripture is infallible.

And so if someone gets a revelation from God because of its source, God, who cannot lie, that is going to be inerrant.

So if you have anybody who claims— Has to be. So if you have anybody who claims they have a prophecy, they have a revelation, and it doesn't come true ever, then it wasn't from God.

Why would you trust any other thing that they claim? Our friend Justin Peters did a video after the 2020 elections, and he pointed out—he took all the prophecies at the beginning of 2020, with all these prophecies that were going to come true, all the prophets they made, and then he looked at them at the end of 2021—or sorry, at the end of 2022 and beginning of 2021, and pointed out all the things they didn't see.

Every single one of these supposed prophets predicted Trump's re -election eight consecutive years.

Or me. You know? Yeah. And that's not true. And they—oh, but Trump did win. He's not in office, as they claimed, right?

And so the reality is they're all—every one of them revealed themselves to be a false prophet.

Every one of them in 2020 predicted greatness, wonderful things for the world in 2020.

None of them, not one of them, predicted a pandemic. Well, okay, it's not really a pandemic, but how do you miss what the world's gone through in 2020?

Right. Yeah. You can't. No, the biggest event, the biggest series of events to hit anything, to hit our world since the charismatic movement started, and they missed it.

They biffed it entirely. Yeah. I mean, how do you miss the—because they're all here in America that made these predictions.

How do they all miss the two biggest things that affected America, right? None of them saw the world shut down for two weeks that's been going on for two years.

No one—they didn't see that. And they didn't see Trump out of office.

Not one of them. Not one of them. Yeah. So, you know, that's the thing.

When you have someone that says that they're getting a vision, they're getting a revelation, it has to fit with the same as Scripture.

It must be perfect. No errors. That's not what we see from most of these folks.

So there's one last thing that we're going to cover here in the work of the Spirit, and that is his work in salvation.

We know that if you read, actually, in Ephesians, you'll see the Father planning salvation, the

Son providing salvation, and then you'll see the Spirit who does the work of salvation.

So you have Christ providing it on the cross, but it's the Holy Spirit who's involved in that as well.

All three of them. That's why I love that passage because all three, as you look at Ephesians 1—okay,

I do also love it because it's a long run -on sentence from like 3 to 14, and, you know, my

English teacher always told me never to have run -on sentences. I say, if it's good enough for God, it must be good enough for me.

Okay, they didn't have punctuation back then, but it really is, you know, but he speaks about the Father and the

Son and the Spirit and each of their roles in our salvation.

Again, salvation is something that can only be done by God. Why? Because only

God—God's the only being of personality that doesn't need salvation.

See, the angels are either holy or unholy. They were judged. That's it.

Done. But those that are unholy, they can't get salvation, but they would need a salvation.

The holy angels were declared holy, okay, but when it comes to mankind, so he can't be an angel for that reason.

He can't be man because man needs salvation. So the Holy Spirit couldn't be like us because that would put him in need of it.

By the way, this also answers the question of Mary because Mary claimed she needed salvation.

So as the Catholic Church gives her attributes of deity, it would be impossible for her to have those attributes because she's not deity for many reasons, one of which being she needs salvation.

This also answers the—that also answers, by the way, a side note, but it answers the

Immaculate Conception, which most people have wrong. Most people that are not Catholic do not understand the

Immaculate Conception. Most people think—and actually many Catholics get this wrong, too—many people think the

Immaculate Conception is the conception of Jesus, which was immaculate, which was supernatural. That's not what the

Immaculate Conception is. The Immaculate Conception is the birth of Mary, the claim that Mary somehow was born sinless so that she could give birth to a sinless being.

Now, the dilemma is there. I mean, if God can create an Immaculate Conception with Mary, why wouldn't he just do it with Jesus?

Yeah, exactly. And if Mary has to be sinless, because the argument they'll say is Mary had to be sinless to give birth to a sinless being, well, then why didn't her mother have the

Immaculate Conception? Because she needed to be sinless to give birth to Mary, which was a sinless being. And then you go back to her mother and her mother and her mother until you get to Eve.

There's the dilemma. So you end up seeing that that breaks down. That's a side note.

But the fact that the Spirit is active in salvation shows us that he is

God. We see this in John 3, 5 to 7.

Jesus answered, Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born of water and the

Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God. So you end up seeing there that the

Spirit is involved in salvation. If the Spirit's involved in salvation, he must be deity.

Because he does the works that only deity could do. Now, next week, we'll probably start getting into some of the issues of some of the views of the

Charismatics, but we'll probably do that two episodes from now in the series where we're going to deal with the issue of gifts.

And what we may do, we'll see, but we may take a little bit of a step back because we may take just the one paragraph dealing with gifts and do an extended episode just on that to explain some of the confusion that people have with it.

So if you disagreed with some of the things we said earlier, hold on. Don't throw us out the door just yet.

Give us some time to explain our views. And please, do not reject us because we disagree with you.

If you're thinking that, please go back to last episode that we talked about when we mentioned end times. We can disagree and still learn from one another.

And so at least understand our view. Understand why we believe what we believe before you criticize what we actually believe.

It's an important thing to do. So, Jim, let me give you some any closing comments that you might have.

No, I think you did a good job of covering the essence there. We're really talking about his deity and his personality here in this episode and really not so much his work in terms of what he's doing in this world.

So it'll be interesting in the weeks ahead to see where that takes us and how we can develop that. I'm sure that we will have a lot of questions that we can address that would be asked by people who might wonder, how does the

Spirit of God work in terms of revealing things to us, convicting us, guiding us, things of that nature.

That's right. And before we get to something that I want you to be able to announce in just a moment, but for those who may not have heard last week's episode, but now would be a good time for me to let us know, let you guys know about our sponsor,

MyPillow. MyPillow is a sponsor of the show. You can go to MyPillow .com

and get any of their great products at a discount using the promo code SFE. Use promo code

SFE, get their products. They're some great quality products. If you have not tried a

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Jimmy, you have a MyPillow, right? And you... I do, yeah. I slept on it last night. And you enjoyed it?

I love them, yeah. Yeah, they make great gifts. I mean, I've been saying this for a while, but if you have a gift for that person who seems to have everything, it's a great gift to have.

If you go, well, they already have a MyPillow, then check to make sure that if they have the mattress topper, because that is even better than the pillow sometimes.

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and use promo code SFE. Now, we're one week away, though, Jim. One week away from something happening in your church.

Yeah, we are hosting Justin Peters and his Clouds Without Water seminar at our church

January 14th and 15th. Justin's going to be here and do six sessions, two on Friday, four on Saturday. No cost to the seminar, the conference, to any who come.

You do have to go to our website, KootenayChurch .org, that's K -O -O -T -E -N -A -I -Church .org,

and register there. Tell us how many people are coming so we know how many people to plan refreshments for. We are going to be taking up an offering as part of that conference, and any money that comes in over and above the cost of the refreshments for that is going to go straight to support

Justin Peters' ministry. Wait, can I send in an offering and put hashtag JustinIWin in there?

You can do that, yes. I can do that. We'll take your money. I have his previous pastor's permission to do that.

We'll take your money. So folks, it may be too late for you to fly in for that, but hey, it's only a little over a week away, so not really, but if you could drive anywhere in the driving area, northern

Idaho, I encourage you to get out to Kootenay Community Church, check out that seminar. If you haven't heard it, especially if you're one who disagrees with much of what we've been saying about the

Holy Spirit today when it comes to charismatic gifts, may I strongly encourage you to check it out.

Now, I'm going to say this, I'm personal friends with someone who does believe that gifts continue, and he loves

Justin Peters' ministry, because Justin does do a lot of exposing the extremes, as some would say, of the charismatic movement, and many charismatics believe that has to be, the extremes have to be pointed out.

So, as I would think, though, I kind of think that some of that's not the extreme.

That seems, unfortunately, to be the norm. The extreme is the people who aren't going crazy with some of this stuff, but just looking at the majority of people that are believing it.

But I do want to encourage you, check it out. Before you judge a book, you should read the book.

Before you judge the seminar from Justin Peters, you should check out the seminar from Justin Peters. Before you judge us as being wrong in our views of the

Holy Spirit, you should listen to everything we have to say about the Holy Spirit. So I hope you'll continue to tune in to more episodes that we deal with as we finish

What Do We Believe? And you know what, Jim? What's that? That's a wrap.

2. Can you explain the Trinity to me? 3. How is Jesus both God and man?

And a slew of other questions you will be able to answer if you get Andrew Rappaport's new book,

What Do We Believe? It will help you a ton. Get your copy at whatdowebelievebook .com.