14 - The Person and Deity of the Holy Spirit

Welcome to the Striving for Eternity Academy's School of Systematic Theology.

Now, if you like the intro that we have there, at the beginning of our show,

I love to embarrass this person anyway, so I might as well. I got my copies of a new album.

Actually, that doesn't look too good in the light. There you go. Just a few copies. I may be giving some away.

Maybe even tonight. But, I hope you get yours. You can go to Keri Atala and actually just search for Keri Atala.

I forget if it's .org or .com and you can get those. We are studying this week, we get into a new section of our book as we're going through the study of systematic theology.

We've studied what's called theology proper, which is the study of God, the

Father, and the Trinity. We looked into what is called Christology, that is the study of Christ.

There we looked at, for several weeks, the deity of Jesus Christ. We also took some time to look into the humanity of Jesus Christ and the ministry of Jesus Christ.

And now we look into the third person of the Trinity, the Holy Spirit, in what is the study of the

Holy Spirit, or noumena. This is a study of, we're going to look today at the person of the

Holy Spirit. If you have your syllabus, that is one of the things you get as a enrolled student of the academy, is you get the syllabus here.

The syllabus will give you many of my notes and some things that will help you so that you can quickly go back and have this information on hand ready for your use.

Now, we want to welcome all of the new students with us that we have, some new folks that are watching the show.

We welcome you. We do always encourage you to go back and actually watch these in order because as we go through theology, a lot of people make the mistake of jumping in in the middle.

And they don't go back to the beginning and start with the attributes of God and build on that. And we're going to start looking at some of the things that people disagree with, not so much in this lesson, but the ones to come as we look into the ministry of the

Holy Spirit. There's some confusion and some disagreements on what the

Holy Spirit's ministry is in our day and age. So we're going to see things like that where understanding the attributes of God will help you.

And that's why we encourage you to go back. Actually, we'll encourage you actually to look into the school of biblical hermeneutics before the systematic theology because then you'll learn how to actually take the

Word of God, interpret it properly so that when we start taking these categories and looking at them, you're following along just fine.

But you can still always jump in in the middle and watch along, but we do want to encourage you to go back and watch them all.

But today we're going to start with a lesson on the person of the

Holy Spirit. This is lesson 10 in your syllabus. Lesson 10 in your syllabus as we look into this.

And we're going to look into both His personhood and His deity today.

So this study is going to look into these scriptures that talk about these things.

We're going to look at why these things are important and they're actually going to give us some more basis for that when we talk about the deity, people don't really question so much of the deity of the

Holy Spirit if they get over the fact that Christ is deity because adding a third person to the deity is not so hard after you accept a second person.

So there's not much debate on the Holy Spirit being God, but we're going to look into that.

Where do we get that in scripture? Now to some of the critics out there, and if you choose you want to be a critic that's fine, you can just email us at theacademyatstrivingforeternity .org.

We will be happy to take your criticism, but to the critics that say that we don't provide enough scripture in this, well my encouragement would be get the syllabus and you can get the scriptures that we reference there and don't use in the show.

But I decided to just take a count, there's no more scripture this week than some of the others, but we have over 45 scripture verses that we're going to look at just this week.

So if your argument is we're not giving you enough scripture, you're barking up the wrong tree, alright?

Maybe the problem is you don't know your Bible well enough so that if we give a reference to scripture without giving you the quote of where it's from, it may in your mind think that there isn't a scripture verse to it.

But we give plenty of scripture references, we just don't always give with all of the scripture, we don't always give you the chapter and verse.

Sorry, that's like the way the Old Testament folks did it and the New Testament early church did it before they had the, you know, chapters and verses which came much later after the

Bible. But we are going to look into first, in the lesson of the person of the

Holy Spirit, we're going to look at His personality and if you have your syllabus, that is the first one there, your

Roman numeral 1. His personality, the personality of the Holy Spirit has been, since the early church history attacked by men like Arius who was one of the early heretics.

He denied the deity of Christ which of course if he does that, he's going to throw off the deity of the

Holy Spirit and the whole personhood of the Holy Spirit and so he denied the eternality of Christ, the personality of the

Holy Spirit, this is about 320 AD. We see his teachings continued in a group that you may know of, they come knocking on your door on a

Saturday morning unless you, like me, are on their avoid list because they're not supposed to come to my house.

They get told, I watch them, they go to my neighbors and they go right to the other neighbors. I'm thinking of doing what my friend

Mark Spence does and just getting out when I see that and just follow them around my neighborhood and say, well

I'm going to just follow you and give the truth. But the Jehovah Witnesses following with Arius and with the same attacks teach with the

Holy Spirit, they say, and this is an actual quote, I want to quote from their documents from the Watchtower, this is the 1953 edition,

January 1, page 24, quote, the Holy Spirit is

God's active force. There is no basis for concluding him a person, unquote.

Really? That was before Star Wars, maybe this is where George Lucas got it from, may the force be with you.

He was talking about the Holy Spirit. They talk about the Holy Spirit as if he's like electricity, he's just a force.

I want you to have that in your mind because as we go through class today and we look at the person of the

Holy Spirit, I want you to ask yourself, does electricity do that? Does a force do that?

This is a person that does these things. All right? And we're going to see that throughout the class tonight.

We're first going to look and see, and this is your first blank there, is that the Holy Spirit, he possesses the attributes of a person, the attributes of a person.

Now, when we look at this, we are going to see that he has certain attributes, one of them being, and this is going to be your first attribute there in your syllabus, is that he has an intellect.

He has an intellect. Let's look at 1 Corinthians chapter 2, verses, well, we'll look at 10 through 13 since that's what we have up there.

These things God has revealed to us through the Spirit, for the Spirit searches everything, even the depths of God, for who knew a person's thoughts except the

Spirit of that person, which is in him. So also, no one comprehends the thoughts of God except the

Spirit of God. Now, we have received not the Spirit of the world, but the

Spirit who is from God that we might understand the things freely given to us by God, and we might impart in these words, not taught by human wisdom, but taught by the

Spirit interpreting spiritual truths to those who are spiritual. You see there that the

Holy Spirit has an intellect. He's able to think and understand. Electricity does not think and understand.

Oh, by the way, just the fact that you can think and understand, it's more than something that a force can do.

It is something that is immaterial. For you atheists who are watching, just comprehend this because if we are nothing but chemical reactions, there is no immaterial world.

We're purely the results of chemical reactions in a material world. Guess what? You would have no knowledge of anything.

You cannot know anything without God because knowledge is not some material product of chemical reactions.

You don't shake up a soda can, open it up, and have thinking come out. You have chemical reactions come out.

You don't have immaterial things come out. This is something more than just some force.

The Holy Spirit has more than just intellect. He has emotion.

We're going to look at several of them. First, we're going to see in Ephesians 4 .30,

He has grief. He has grief. This is an emotion. Electricity doesn't have emotion.

It says here in Ephesians 4, and do not grieve the

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

So you see in this passage that the Holy Spirit can be grieved. In other words, He can have grief.

Forces don't have grief. People have grief.

That's an emotion. He also has love. The Holy Spirit loves in Romans 15 .30.

I appeal to you, brothers, by our Lord Jesus Christ and by the love of the

Spirit to strive together with me in your prayers to God for my behalf.

So you see here that the Holy Spirit not only can be grieved, but He loves.

These are emotions. These are characteristics or attributes of personality.

Now, if you go back to those early lessons we did, lesson maybe two,

I think it was, where we looked at the attributes of God in His personality, we described certain attributes that are true of God that are described as personality, and all persons have those attributes.

Angels are persons. They have those attributes. People are persons, and they have those attributes.

God is a person that has those attributes. God is three persons. Remember that from our view when we looked at the

Trinity? It's not three gods, to the Jehovah Witnesses or Muslims would say. It's three people in one

God. And we're seeing now that the Holy Spirit is a person. Not only does

He have the attributes of a person in an intellect, in emotions, but He also has a will, and that's your blank there for number three.

He has a will. Now, His will is demonstrated two different ways.

He demonstrates His will in His distribution of gifts.

Let's look at that in 1 Corinthians, 1 Corinthians 12 and verse 11, 1

Corinthians 12, 11. All these are empowered by one and the same

Spirit who apportions to each one individually as He wills.

The Holy Spirit gives gifts at salvation, and He gives them to whoever

He wills, not who we will. That's an important thing.

We're going to see that when we look into some things in a couple of weeks, and we talk about the gifts of the

Spirit, and how He ministers, and how He distributes those gifts and things, and some of the things we're going to see is that it is the

Holy Spirit who gives gifts. It is not us who seek after them, okay?

So I'm kind of tipping my hat to something. Oops, that's okay. I don't mind if you disagree with me.

I really don't. And it doesn't mean you should turn off the show just because you might disagree with something

I say. Actually, if you're going to be a good Berean, there's two things you would do.

It should cause you to study to see if the things I say are true according to Scripture, and if you find out they're not, you should be a good

Berean and correct me. Now, if you're going to correct me, I don't mind. I get corrected all the time.

I'm married. No, that's a joke. She does correct me often, but that's because I'm basically a knucklehead, and I need it.

But the reality is, is that if you're going to correct me, don't give me your experiences.

Give me Scripture. Back it up with a proper interpretation of the

Scripture, and if you don't know what a proper interpretation is, go to the school of biblical hermeneutics. That's why we spent 19 weeks going through and understanding how to interpret something so that we were sure that we were accurate with it, all right?

So secondly, not only does he show his will by the demonstration of his distribution of gifts, but also his demonstration in his division of servants, and we see this in Acts 16, 6 to 11.

I'm going to save a little time, and just so we don't read this whole thing, it's just that you see here that it is the

Holy Spirit who sends out, you see it in verse 6, the Holy Spirit was forbidding them to going and speaking into an area of Asia.

I'm just going to cut that off just so, because we have quite a bit to do tonight. But you can look up Acts 16, 6 to 11, and you can read that.

Let's go to letter B there. Letter B in your syllabus, and it is that he performs the actions of a person.

He performs the actions of a person. Now we see this, one of the things we see is that he teaches, and let's look at that passage, and you see here,

John 14, 26, you see that the

Holy Spirit, but the helper, the Holy Spirit whom the Father will send in my name, he will teach you all things to bring to your remembrance.

So the Holy Spirit teaches. We're going to see that he, let's save on some of the verses.

I want to make sure we get through everything tonight, so I'm just going to give you the verses if that's alright. You're going to see that he bears witness, the

Holy Spirit bears witness in John 15, 26. Let's turn though to John 16, 7, and 8, and see that the

Holy Spirit convicts. Nevertheless I tell you the truth, it is to your advantage that I go away, for if I do not go away, the helper will not come to you.

But if I go away, I will send him to you, and when he comes, he will convict the world concerning sin and righteousness and judgment.

Do you see that? The Holy Spirit is going to convict the world of three things.

Let's put that back up. Three things. Sin, righteousness, and judgment.

Sin, righteousness, and judgment. Our sin, God's righteousness, and a judgment that is to come.

Hey, that kind of sounds like the Gospel. We're sinners, He's not. He's righteous, we're not.

A judgment's coming, therefore we need to get right with God. There you go, that's right there is the start of what we need to know when we share the

Gospel. But it's the Holy Spirit who convicts. Now let me explain why that's important.

This is important because some people think that the very first thing that God does in saving a soul is

He redeems them as if that's the first ministry of the Holy Spirit in regenerating a person.

And yet it's not. There is a pre -conversion work of the Holy Spirit we're going to see when we look at His ministries where He convicts people of their sin.

Some push against that. They push against the convicting work of the

Spirit and some embrace it. Alright, now they embrace it because God is doing a work within them.

Let's continue on. The Holy Spirit gives glory. This is continuing with the actions of a person.

He teaches, He bears witness. If you have your syllabus you have them all there. He teaches,

He bears witness, He convicts, He gives glory. That's in John 16, 14.

He commands in Acts 8, 29. We see that He calls out for service in Acts 13, verses 2 to 4.

He examines Acts 15, 28. He leads in Romans 8, 14.

And He speaks in a whole lot of verses. Let's put that one up. Revelation 2 and 3.

And you can kind of see this over and over again. The Spirit speaks to the churches. You see that in every one of those passages there.

The Spirit speaks to the churches. The Spirit speaks to the churches. To each of the seven churches

He speaks. Maybe not with an audible voice, but He is speaking.

God doesn't have a mouth. Well, actually I guess in a way you could say He does. Because Jesus Christ is

God and He had a mouth. Alright, Jesus is still God today and He's still a man today.

Okay, He's fully God, fully man for all of eternity. Alright, so moving on we see that not only when we looked at His personality.

He has the attributes of a person. He has the actions of a person.

But let us see there. He also possesses the names of a person.

The names of a person. So you say, well His name is John, right?

No, that's not what we're talking about. Psy is probably thinking that the

Holy Spirit's name is Psy. Wrong. But let's take a look at this. The Greek word for Spirit is a neuter word.

That's your blank there, a neuter. Neuter means that it's not male or female.

Okay, so if that's the case. If you're properly to translate the

Scriptures. The Scriptures, if they followed the normal rules of grammar. You would place the

Spirit with the pronoun it. And that's your blank there in your syllabus, it. So because His name,

He has the names of a person. But His name is a neuter. The Spirit is a neutered word, which means not male or female.

And should be with a translation of it. However, we see that it is not that case.

The pronoun that we see in John 16, 13 is He. It's masculine.

That's your blank there. In John 16, 13 offers an example of the masculine

He pronoun referring to the Spirit. And it says here, when the Spirit of truth comes.

He will guide you into all the truth for what's that word?

He will not speak on His own authority.

But whatever He hears, He will speak. And He will declare to you the things that are to come.

You'd almost kind of get the idea that the Spirit's trying to tell you something in that passage.

He, His, He, He, He. And I'm not trying to laugh. For those of you who are slow,

I'm not saying He, He. Some of you guys got to wake up in class, really. All right. But this, the important part of this is that we see that His name is used with a plural pronoun.

Okay. The plural pronoun is so that we see that He has a name.

He is an individual. He is a person. Okay. Not only that, but we see

He has the attributes of a person. He has the actions of a person.

He has the names of a person. And letter D, He receives the responses of a person.

The responses of a person. Let's look at Acts 5, 3. And you can see that He could be lied to.

But Peter said, Ananias, why has Satan filled your heart to lie to the

Holy Spirit and to keep back for yourself part of the proceeds of the land?

We see that the Holy Spirit could be tested in Acts 9, continuing in that same thought there that we see

Peter said to her, this is Ananias' wife, how is it that you have agreed together to test the

Spirit of the Lord? So we see that the Holy Spirit can be lied to.

The Holy Spirit can be tested. In Acts 7, 51, we see that the

Holy Spirit can be resisted. Let's look at that one. You stiff -necked people, uncircumcised in heart and ears.

You always resist the Holy Spirit. As your fathers did, so do you.

Now, for some people, they're going to say, well, you know, there's this thing called irresistible grace.

How do you resist the Holy Spirit? Well, Scripture says that the Jewish fathers, the

Jewish leaders resisted the Holy Spirit. So now you have a question.

What does that mean? And we don't have all the time to get into that. We are going to look into that at later lessons, though.

But I want you to see that this says something about the Holy Spirit. He can be resisted.

The question is, how is that resistance? Remember, I've already kind of tipped my hat. The Holy Spirit does do a convicting work.

He does a convicting work. And because He does that, that conviction can be resisted.

All right? Now, there's some nuances to that that we'll look at when we get to soteriology, the study of salvation.

But we got a lot of ground to cover and foundation to lay before we get there. You don't want to jump into those theological pools without first having a good foundation.

All right? And that's what we're trying to do for you. So these things are going to build up, and we're going to see how they come together as we continue on.

But we see that the Holy Spirit can be grieved. This is another one. This is in Ephesians 4 .30.

We looked at this already, but let's bring it up again. Do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God.

Okay? So He can be grieved. He can also be insulted. You ever think about that?

Hebrews 10 .29. How much worse punishment do you think will be deserved by the one who has trampled on their foot the

Son of God and has profaned the blood of the covenant by which

He was sanctified and has outraged the

Spirit of grace? You see that? The Holy Spirit can actually be insulted.

All right? Now, we looked at His personality, and just as we look at His personality now, number two there in your syllabus, we look at His deity.

We look at His deity. All right? And so what we have here when we look at His deity is that there's various groups that have disputed the deity of Christ.

Now, keep in mind, those groups also deny the deity of Christ.

All right? So if they deny the deity of Christ, they also deny the deity of the Holy Spirit, which makes sense because they're rejecting the entire trinity.

You're not going to say, well, the Holy Spirit is God and God the Father is God, but God the Son is not

God. Well, maybe some people would say that. I mean, people say all kinds of things, but generally people don't do that because if you understand the trinity, if you understand that there's multiple people that make up the

Godhead, having two people versus three people isn't a big issue.

So as I mentioned already, the example in our current day is most commonly the Jehovah Witnesses, and this is their explanation.

Let me read from their own book, The Watchtower. This is from the July 15th of 1957.

Page 432 says this, quote, God's Holy Spirit is not a

God, not a member of the trinity, not co -equal, and is not even a person, unquote.

Well, there you have it. I mean, that's really clear what they're saying. They're trying to say the Holy Spirit's not a person and He's not

God. He's just some force. Well, we saw very clearly that the scriptures are trying to make it very clear

He is a person, and by observing some of the attributes used to describe the

Spirit, we're going to look at His activities and His association with God, and we are going to see that the

Spirit is in fact co -equal and with God in His essence.

All right? So this doesn't mean that He's some other God. He's not some

Jedi force, that we let the force be with us. We let the

Spirit be with us. All right? I do want to say this isn't as common.

This is really back in the, you know, I guess the 80s, 90s. It became a thing, and maybe some of those preachers that are trying to be really relevant and they go back to the

Star Wars, the original Star Wars, and make sermon series out of them. Dude, you're not relevant.

That was like 30 years ago, okay? 20, 30 years ago is not relevant.

If you're thinking that's relevant, I mean, just get into the Word of God and preach that instead. It's timeless.

It's the thing that's going to last for eternity. Not your sermon series, okay?

No one cares how you can try to twist the Bible and show yourself to be really cool and hip by talking about the

Holy Spirit be with us and, you know, trying to use the Holy Spirit to be the force from Star Wars.

It's really pathetic and sad and really borders on blasphemy.

When people get behind a pulpit and try to argue so that they can show themselves relevant to say the

Holy Spirit be with us, replacing the force with the Spirit. Yes, the

Holy Spirit being God is everywhere present like the force in Star Wars.

Yes, the Holy Spirit being God influences everything, controls everything, and is sovereign like the force in Star Wars.

But preacher, understand what you're teaching. George Lucas, if you read what he said, he did have a religious spiritual mindset behind his movie.

He was trying to teach New Age -ism when he would talk about the force.

That we're all God. And when you try to use the force of Star Wars to bring that into the

Holy Spirit, you got a major problem because you now have to say that we're all

God because that's what Lucas is teaching with the force in Star Wars. So stop trying to be relevant with 20 - and 30 -year -old movies.

Stay with the book that's timeless, the very Word of God. It doesn't need your enhancing, okay?

All right, enough. I'll get off my soapbox. Sorry. As a pastor, as a preacher of God's Word, it drives me nuts when

I see these guys just tickling ears and wasting people's eternity because He's really leading them astray most of the time.

So let's look at the deity of Christ, all right? First, we're going to see that He has the attributes of deity.

The attributes of deity. Well, let's take a look. What are some of the attributes of deity that the

Holy Spirit has? Well, one, we see in John 16, 13 or in 1

Corinthians 2, 10 and 11 that He is omniscient. Now, I sure hope that I don't need to define that because I hope you've been watching all of our lessons and you watched the first couple of classes where we went into the attributes of deity, those attributes that are true only of God.

And you remember that we talked about omniscience. This is to be all knowing. This is saying that God knows everything, okay, completely.

He didn't learn it. He knows it. And the importance of this is because the Holy Spirit in 1

Corinthians 2, 10, these things God has revealed to us through the

Spirit, for the Spirit searches everything, even the depths of God.

For who knows the person's thoughts except the Spirit of that person which is in him, so also the one who comprehends the thoughts of God except the

Spirit of God. You see, the Holy Spirit knows everything.

Now, why is that important? This is important because if you remember when we first started these classes on systematic theology, we said there are certain attributes that are true only of God, the attributes of deity.

Attributes of personality are true for all persons and we saw those already in this lesson.

But now we get to these attributes that are true only of God. So if a person is omniscient, they are

God, okay, because these are attributes of God alone. He is omnipotent,

Romans 15, 19. He is omnipotent as that again, meaning he's all powerful.

He can do anything within his nature, all right. Again, this is an attribute that is only true of God.

We see that he's omnipresent, omnipresent in Psalm 139 .7,

where shall I go from your spirit or where shall I flee from your presence?

The psalmist actually says if I go to Sheol, if I go to death, you're there. God, the

Holy Spirit is everywhere. This again is an attribute that is true only of God.

So the Holy Spirit is omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent.

He's also eternal in Hebrews 9 .14. He's eternal, something again.

He had no beginning and no end, okay. Think of it, if you think in, if you like math or geography, algebra and geography, no geography is land masses, but think of it as a line.

A line has an arrow in both directions. Now, that is

God, no beginning, no end. We and angels and everything else that's creation had a starting point and go on forever.

Now, we, everything had a starting point that we know other than God. However, angels and humans have a starting point and then we kind of go in an arrow.

That would be an array. We live forever. That's immortal, all right.

There's some technical differences between those words, eternal versus immortal. God's eternal, the

Holy Spirit's eternal, thus He's God. We are immortal. We had a beginning and we will live forever, something else

Jehovah Witnesses have a problem with. He's holy, the Holy Spirit is holy in Luke 11 .13.

He is holy. He also is truth, 1 John 5 .6.

Let's look at that one, all right. 1 John 5 .6, this is

He who came by water and blood. Jesus Christ, not by the water only but by the water and the blood and the

Spirit is the one who testifies because the Spirit is truth.

The Spirit is truth. You know, this is one of those things, you know, all of those atheists love to say and all, actually, not so much the atheists but many of them but also some of these professing

Christians that say, God is love. God is love. Oh, God is love. So, I have someone on the

YouTube channel saying, well, your God, the God of the Bible can't exist because God is love.

Yeah, God is also holy and true and just and His love doesn't counteract

His justice and His holiness and His truth. That's one of the things these people just kind of, they ignore that and then they redefine love.

God is love. He's all forgiving. Really? Is it really loving to forgive? Really?

Okay, let's try that out. You're loving to the babysitter and the babysitter has a history of, well, she likes to torture babies.

You're going to have her at your house because you really love your enemies and love your neighbor and so you're going to have this babysitter watch your infant.

Because you're going to forgive all things. Is that what God meant? Yeah, you'd be nuts.

Of course, you're not going to let that babysitter watch your children. Why? Because it wouldn't be loving to your children and it wouldn't be wise.

Okay, because the just thing to do is to keep that type of person away from your children.

Like in prison, maybe. Just saying. All right, so we see that the

Holy Spirit has the attributes of deity.

Also, that he has the activities of deity.

The activity of deity. Who created the universe? Well, God the

Father did. Well, no, no, no, no. Because in Colossians 1, 15, 16, it says

Jesus Christ did. Well, who really did? Well, Genesis 1 says,

Genesis 1 -2, the earth was form, was without form and void and darkness was over the face of the deep and the

Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters. The Spirit of God was the one that was active in creation.

So, creation is one of his activities. Another one that he was in was in 2

Peter 1, 21. For no prophecy was ever produced by the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the

Holy Spirit. So, the Holy Spirit was involved in inspiration.

Inspiration. Now, that verse is a good one to memorize or have on hand.

2 Peter 1, 21. The reason that's good to have on hand is because many people today will try to argue that the

Bible was written by men and that verse clearly teaches that men wrote as the

Holy Spirit inspired them, as he moved them to write. In other words, the writing wasn't their own.

That writing was God's writing. That's as God, the Holy Spirit did, alright?

So, we see that here, alright, that the Holy Spirit was involved here in creation, in inspiration and then in regeneration.

I love this passage. Titus 3, 5. He saved us, not because of any works done by us in righteousness, but according to his own mercy by the washing and regeneration and renewal of who?

The Holy Spirit, okay? So, he is involved in the regeneration of people, alright?

So, let's look at that. We look at his deity. We see that he has the attributes of deity.

He has the activities of deity and let us see there, he has the associations of deity.

See, notice I literated each one. The attributes, the activities and the associations of deity to help you remember them, alright?

And so, what we see there is first, we see the association with Yahweh or Jehovah, alright?

We see that the Holy Spirit is involved with, that is associated with Jehovah.

Why is that important? Well, those Jehovah witnesses, remember when we talked about the deity of Christ? We made an emphasis to show how

Jesus Christ was called Jehovah, that very special name of God in the Old Testament, the

Hebrew that is used only for God. Well, let's take a look real quick. Isaiah 6, 8 -10, and I heard a voice of the

Lord, this is the Lord Adonai saying, whom shall I send who will go for us?

Then I said, here I am, send me and he said, go and say to the people, keep on hearing but do not understand.

Keep on seeing but do not perceive. Make the hearts of these people dull of their hearings, heavy and blind, that they see with their eyes, do not hear and do not understand with their hearts.

So, this is a reference here to Yahweh and then let's look in Acts, Acts 28, the same passages quoted in Acts 28, 25 -27, and disagreeing amongst themselves, they departed after Paul had made the statement the

Holy Spirit was right in saying to your fathers through Isaiah the prophet, go to this people and say, and then we have the quotation.

So, who is it that said? Well, according to Isaiah, it's God, the

Lord. According to Peter, it is the Holy Spirit.

Which one's right? Well, we would say both, right? Because the Holy Spirit is

God. All right, next is that we see not only the association with Yahweh specifically, but the second one there is we see the association with God, the association with God.

So, we see that we won't have time to bring that up. So, Acts 5, 1 -4, we actually looked at this when we looked at the

Trinity because this is one of those passages that show the deity of the

Holy Spirit, but we see him associated with God in Acts 5, the first four verses, or you can look at 1

Corinthians 3, 16. Your syllabus has some more passages.

We also see him associated with the Trinity, with the Trinity. Again, your syllabus has many passages there, but you can just look at Matthew 28, 19, and you can see in that passage that you have all three members of the

Trinity mentioned there. The fourth association is an association with Christ, and that is in John 14, 16 -17.

If you miss these verses, if I'm going too quick, that's a really good reason to go to our website and go and enroll in the

Academy so you can have the syllabus with all of these passages and more readily available at your fingertips.

But he's associated with Christ in John 14. You can also go to YouTube and re -watch these.

If you're watching live, we always back these up to the YouTube channel so you can always watch them in order, and if you ever want to watch them or encourage others to watch them, if you go to the channel, we put it in a playlist so you can follow right from the beginning because YouTube is really nice about it.

They give it to you so you can start at lesson one of, say, the school of biblical hermeneutics, and you can watch straight through, and wherever you stop, you stop, and you can pick up where you left off next time, and they remember which ones you watched and have it ready for you next time you watch the playlist.

So it's a great way to do it. So we saw that the

Holy Spirit had personality. We saw his deity. Number three, we're going to see his identity, his identity.

And this is where first we're going to see letter A there. He is described in pictures of the

Holy Spirit, pictures of the Holy Spirit. This is his identity. He's identified in Luke 24, 19 by clothing.

Matthew 3, 16 as a dove. He is called in 2

Corinthians 1, 22 and 5, verses 5, chapter 5, verse 5, as an earnest or down payment or a guarantee of our salvation.

He's described in Ephesians 1, 13 as a seal. He's described as water in John 7, 38 to 39 and wind in John 3, 8.

So those are the pictures of the Holy Spirit. We also see letter

B there in your syllabus. Oh, by the way, I should say I skipped one. I skipped the fill in the blank there.

When we look at the pictures, by observing some of the illustrations used to describe the

Spirit of God, we may also observe some of his ministries, some of his ministries.

So you saw that he's a guarantee. He's a down payment. He's a sealing. Those are some of the ministries that we see pictured.

So not only do we see the pictures of the Holy Spirit, but we see the names of the

Holy Spirit, the names of the Holy Spirit. That's letter B there. We see he is called the

Spirit of Grace in Hebrews 10, 29. He's the Spirit of Glory.

He's the Spirit of the Living God, the Spirit of Christ, the Spirit of Truth, the

Spirit of Life. He is called the Comforter as we had seen already. And there's passages of Scripture for every one of those that I mentioned, but we just don't have time to look at each one of those today.

But each one of those are descriptions that we see of the names of the

Holy Spirit. So you see that the Holy Spirit is a person.

He is God. He is identified with his ministry. And that's what we're going to look at next time.

Next class, we are going to look at lesson 11, the ministry of the

Holy Spirit part one. Now, some of you are very astute students.

You realize that if there's a part one, there's also a very good class, a part two.

And so we will break up the ministry of the Holy Spirit in two parts so that we can go through that.

But I have an important announcement to make, and that is that next week will be no class.

There will be no class next week. That is because I will be at the

Super Bowl outreach with 120 other believers. We will be having been thoroughly exhausted.

You can be praying for us if you're not going. If you're not going, well,

I won't question your salvation. No, I'm just kidding. But be praying for us. It's going to be some very long days, and I will be traveling back

Monday after the Super Bowl. I'll still be traveling. It's a long ways to New Orleans.

So I'll be praying for my family who will be here holding down the fort without me.

But none of them will get on camera. So you'll have to do with no class next week.

All right. You can email us if you have any questions. Please go to the Facebook page, the

Facebook group. The reason I want to encourage you to go to our Facebook group, the Striving for Eternity Facebook group, is because in that group, we post a lot of questions, some thought -provoking questions to do with the lessons, and we have them there so that you can look at those things, all right, and have that dialogue back and forth.

We also put some announcements in there so that you can stay in touch with what

Striving for Eternity is doing. You can also ask questions in there. Sometimes I allow for students to answer, and sometimes, well,

I usually will answer if students don't. But I like to get the dialogue going. Now one piece of exciting news that I do want to give before we announce who we're going to have for an encouragement this week,

I want to let you know that my family and I are engaged in a new adventure, all right?

And if you happen to be visiting New Jersey and want to come to the Jackson area, maybe you want to go to Six Flags Great Adventure, that's what most people know

Jackson for, and you want to find a good place to go to church on Sunday. Well, my family and another man in his family,

Will Costello, he's from Grace Community Church, John MacArthur's Church, Master's Seminary. He's part of Grace Advance, and we are starting a church plant together.

It's actually a restart or a replant. The church was dying out. The church had a few people, and they've been working with Great Advance, Grace Advance, which is a church planting group, and we are going to restart this church, and it is called

Faith Bible Church. You can look it up, Faith Bible Church of Jackson, New Jersey. The website is there, www .fbc

-jackson .org. That is the website for our church plant or restart.

We're very excited about it. Be praying for us because it is a lot of work to start a church up from the ground up.

A lot of things, ministries aren't really in place. The ministries that are, we restart, and we're going to be doing a lot of evangelism, and we're just prepping that now as Pastor Will's teaching through some evangelism training classes.

So we are doing that together, and I really want to encourage you if you're in the area, you can think about coming and visiting.

If you're not in the area, feel free to contact either me through Striving for Eternity or us through the website.

We'd be happy to take any donations. Right now, Pastor Will is being supported as a missionary.

We'd like him to be funded through the church. I'm still working with Striving for Eternity, so we have that.

But what we do every week is those of you who are regular to the show, you know that we want to have somebody for you to go out and encourage each week.

And we want you to encourage a person because most often people are encouraging people, they're saying encouraging things like after someone's dead, right?

I mean, we eulogize and we say these wonderful things after people enter into eternity.

And you know, there's so many people that need to know an encouraging word now. They need to hear it because there's times

I'm sure in your life that you need to hear an encouraging word. If you want to, if you know someone that needs some encouragement, email us so that we know.

Give us more than just their name though. Give us some description, some reasons they need some encouragement so that we can know why they need encouragement.

Now, the next person is someone who I got to meet a first time at last year's

Super Bowl outreach. She is a sister who goes out regularly to abortion mills to where babies are killed and will evangelize to the women there.

A very necessary ministry. She reaches out to them. She is a nurse and is someone who is so devoted.

In fact, when I was over in the UK in London for the Olympics, we would not have been able to be as effective if it wasn't for this sister,

Dorothy Bourdette. Bourdette, sorry. I didn't say it with an English accent the way she speaks, which is just great to listen to.

But she is just a dear, dear sister. I want you to get to know her. She's part of the

Striving for Return Academy. She's one of the students. She's always commenting to almost every question that we put out there, the thought -provoking questions.

She's always ready with an answer. And so that's a neat thing to see. But here is a sister who is constantly sacrificing for others.

She's constantly putting herself out. And as long as I've known her, I've never heard her ever ask for anything.

But she puts herself out there for others. And she does a ministry that for many of us we should be doing, but for many we don't.

And that is to go to the women outside of abortion clinics and try to convince them to save their babies' lives and also to let them know that there is hope in Christ, not just so that their baby would live, but they would have eternal life.

Dorothy has no fear. When we were over in the UK, I'm going to share just a quick story.

We were in the UK and we were open -air preaching outside of St. Paul's Cathedral, great place to open -air preach.

We loved it. There were people sitting on the steps as eating their lunches. And we were just preaching right to them.

And we're outside the steps of a church, good place to preach the gospel.

And so they're sitting there listening. And there was a woman that we kind of all thought may have been demon -possessed, just screaming out as Brother Justin Edwards was preaching.

And she's screaming things out. And Dorothy goes right up to her, like right away, no fear.

This woman looked like she could get violent at any moment. And Dorothy just walks right up to her and just starts a conversation with her.

I mean, it was beautiful to watch. I don't think I saw her for a moment not handing a gospel track out or talking one -on -one.

And, you know, there's people who are like that, that just constantly give, give, give.

And they don't ask for anything in return. Those are the kinds of people, you know what, you and I need to encourage those people.

Because they give, give, give. And sometimes they never hear an encouraging word. They're not asking for it.

So that's some of the things to think about. All right, we want to be encouraging to everyone. This should describe us and define us as Christians.

So next class, we won't have class next week. But in the following class, we're going to look at the ministries of the

Holy Spirit part one. All right. And so we just want to thank you for being with us.

We want to encourage you to go out and strive to make today an eternal day for the glory of God.