19 The Promise of the Spirit
the christian life is life in the Spirit. all christian are happily agreed about this. it would be impossible to be a christian, let alone to live and grow as a christian, without the ministry of the gracious spirit of God. all we have and are as Christians we owe to Him.
so every christian believer has an experience of the Holy Spirit from the very first moments of his christian life. for the christian life begins with a new birth and the new birth is a birth 'of the Spirit' (Jn. 3.3-8) He is 'the Spirit of life', and it is He who imparts life to our dead souls. more than this, He comes Himself to dwell within us, and the indwelling of the spirit is the common possession of all God's children.
is it that God makes us His sons and then gives us His Spirit, or that he gives us His 'Spirit of sonship' who makes us his sons? the answer is that paul puts it both ways. on the one hand, 'because you are sons, Sod has sent the Spirit of His Son into our hearts'. Gal. 4.6 on the other, 'all who are led by the Spirit of God are sons of God. for you did not receive the spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received the spirit of sonship' Rom. 8.14-5 which ever way you look at it, the result is the same. All who have the Spirit of God are the sons of God,
20 and ALL who are sons of God have the Spirit of God. it is impossible, indeed inconceivable, to have the spirit without being a son or to be a son without having the Spirit. moreover, one of the first and graciously continuing works of the indwelling spirit is to assure us of our sonship, notably when we pray. 'when we cry, 'Abba! Father'! it is the Spirit Himself bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God'Rom. 8.15-6; cf. Gal. 4.6 He has also flooded our hearts with God's love. Rom. 5.5 paul sums it up by affirming that 'any one who does not have the Spirit of Christ does not belong to Him'. Rom. 8.9; cf. Jude 19
this whole passage in Romans 8 is of considerable importance because it demonstrates that in Paul's mind to be 'in Christ' and 'in the Spirit', to have 'the Spirit in you' and 'Christ in you' are all synonymous expressions. no-one can have Christ, then, without having the Spirit. Jesus Himself made this plain in His upper Room discourse when He drew no distinction between the 'coming' to us of the three Persons of the Trinity. 'I will come', He said;p 'We will come' (the Father and the Son); and the Comforter will...come' Jn. 14.18-23; 16.7-8
once He has come to us and taken up His residence within us, making our body His temple I Cor. 6.19-20), His work of sanctification begins. in brief, His ministry is both to reveal Christ to us and to form Christ in us, so that we grow steadily in our knowledge of Christ and in our likeness to Christ (see, e.g., Eph. 1.17; Gal. 4.19; II Cor. 3.18) it is by the power of the indwelling Spirit that the evil desires of our fallen nature are restrained and the good fruit of christian character ins produced Gal 5.16-25 nor is he a kind of private possession, ministering only to the individual christian; he also unites us to the body of Christ, the church, so that christian fellowship is 'the fellowship of the Holy Spirit' and christian worship is worship in or by the Holy spirit (eg. Phil. 2.1; 3.3) it is He, too, who reaches out
21 through us to others, prompting us to witness to Christ and equipping us with gifts for the service to which he summons us. in addition, he is called 'the guarantee of our inheritance' (Eph. 1.13-4), for His presence within us is both the pledge and the foretaste of heaven. and on the last day He will be active in raising our mortal bodies. Rom. 8.11
this rapid rehearsal of some of his major activities in the experience of a christian should be enough to show that, from the very beginning to the very end of our christian life, we are dependent on the work of the Holy spirit - the Spirit, Paul writes, 'which has been given to us. Rom 5.5 on this I believe and hope all christians are agreed.
is this promised 'gift' of the Spirit the same as the 'baptism' of the Holy Spirit, however? it is here that convictions differ. some say 'yes' and others 'no'. those who say 'no', who believe that the 'gift' and the 'baptism' are distinct, go on to teach that the 'baptism' is a second and subsequent experience even if, at least ideally, it follows very closely on the first. on the other hand, those who believe that the two are identical, and that to have been 'baptized' with the Spirit is a vivid figure of speech for to have 'received' the Spirit, regard this 'baptism' as something which all christians have had. this is my own position, and I shall shortly elaborate what I understand to be its biblical basis.
this is not just a rather frivolous quibble over words, as it may appear on the surface to be. on the contrary, it is bound to have a considerable effect on our understanding of our own christian pilgrimage as well as on our counselling of other people. so we must investigate some important passages of Scripture which bear on this question. but first we must set the scene for our discussion.
it is always important in biblical studies to interpret a text in its context and the broader the context the more accurate our interpretation is likely to be the broadest context of all is the whole Bible. we believe that the whole
22 Bible is God's Word written. therefore, since God does not contradict Himself, we further believe that the Bible is a harmonious divine revelation. we must never 'so expound one place of Scripture, that it be repugnant to another' (Article 20 of the Church of England's 39 Articles) but rather interpret each Scripture in the light of all Scripture.
if we apply this principle to our enquiry as to what the 'baptism of the Spirit' is, the first point we shall notice is that this is an exclusively new Testament expression (occurring 7 times), but that it is also a fulfilment of Old Testament expectation. this expectation was usually expressed in terms of God's promise to 'pour out' His Spirit, and the apostle peter in his sermon on the day of pentecost specifically equated the 'outpouring' of the Spirit (promised by Joel) with the 'baptism' of the spirit (promised by John the Baptist and Jesus.) the two expressions were alluding to the same event and the same experience.
the promise of a distinctive blessing
we can go further. this 'outpouring' or baptism' of the Holy Spirit was to be one of the main distinctive blessings of the new age. so much so that the apostle Paul could describe the new age inaugurated by Jesus as 'the dispensation of the Spirit'. II cor. 3.8
this is not, of course, to say that the Holy Spirit did not exist before. the Holy spirit is God and therefore eternal. nor is it to say that he was not active before. in Old Testament days he was ceaselessly active - in the creation and preservation of the universe, in providence and revelation, in the regeneration of believers, and in the equipment of special people for special tasks.
nevertheless, some of the prophets foretold that in the days of the messiah God would grant a liberal effusion of the Holy spirit, which would grant a liberal effusion of the Holy Spirit, which would be new and distinctive, and also 9 as we shall see) available for all. thus, isaiah spoke
23 of the day when the Spirit would be 'poured upon us from on high. 32.15 in Isaiah 44.3 God promised: 'I will pour water on the thirsty land, and streams on the dry round; I will pour my Spirit upon your descendants, and My blessing on your offspring'. the same phraseology was used by Ezekiel to whom God said: 'then they shall know that I am the Lord their God...when i pour out my spirit upon the house of Israel...' 39.28-9 again, in a better known passage, God said: 'and it shall come to pass..., that i will pour out My spirit on all flesh. Joel 2.28
John the Baptist, the last prophet of the old order, summarized this expectation in his familiar saying which ascribed the outpouring of the Spirit to the messiah Himself; 'I have baptized you with water; but He will baptized you with the Holy Spirit. mk 1.8
now it is instructive to not that this prophecy of John, recorded by the three synoptic evangelists as a simple future ('he will baptize'), takes the form in the fourth Gospel of a present participle: 'i myself did not know him; but he who sent me to baptize with water said to me, 'he on whom you see the spirit descent and remain, this is he who baptizes with the Holy Spirit'. Jn. 1.33 this use of the present participle is timeless. it describes not the single event of Pentecost, but the distinctive ministry of Jesus: 'this is he who baptizes with the Holy Spirit'. indeed, the very same words ho baptizon, which refer here to Jesus, are used by Mark to denote John the Baptist himself! usually John is called Ho baptistAs, 'the Baptist', but three times in the narrative of mark (1.4; 6.14, 24) he is called hO baptizOn, an expression rendered in RSV, 'the baptizer'. in other words, just as John is called 'the Baptist' or 'the baptizer, because it was characteristic of his ministry to baptize with water,
24 so Jesus is called 'the Baptist' or 'the baptizer', because it is characteristic of his ministry to baptize with the Holy Spirit.
this reverence to the distinctive and continuing ministry of Jesus is strengthened by verse 29 of the same chapter (Jn. 1), in which the Baptist says, 'Behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world!
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment