The Holy Spirit, Person or Power of God?

 

Seth Forrestier – August 2021

The Holy Spirit study

 

The question ‘is the Holy Spirit a person or ‘the power of God’?’ has long been a debate. That’s not surprising considering the large amounts of biblical evidence on both sides of the debate. The purpose of this hypothesis is to propose we are looking too hard at the issue to see the answer directly in the pages of the Bible. Early in this study I intended to write about how the Holy Spirit functions in people lives, but as I tried to write, following the breadcrumb trail of each group of evidence the only thing I would come to is that the other group made more sense. Then while reading through the book of revelation I THINK the answer came to me.

What if the Holy Spirit is in fact, both Person and Power? I will start, with the term ‘President of the United States of America’. The President, IS a person… yet he/she is not necessarily a person. The President is also a Power. The President speaks.. sort of, he speaks BY the mouth of the person holding that office. Abraham Lincoln was in a very real sense the same president as Donald Trump, though separated by decades they spoke the Gettysburg address and the 2020 State of the Union speech as the same entity.

Now, I propose the Holy Spirit is also an ‘office’.  The Holy Spirit is mentioned numerous times in both the old and new testaments of the Bible, and as I previously stated it’s often described with two different sets of characteristics. These two sets of characteristics have led to generations of debate, but I do not believe they are contradictory in the slightest. I also believe there is a clear example of exactly how it functions in the pages of the Bible.

The first three chapters of the book of Revelation are about the seven letters to the churches. Despite the myriad of doctrines that seem to come from this passage I propose that you read them in light of the Holy Spirit being an ‘office’. We see Christ giving specific words for these seven angels to speak and then telling the churches to listen to what these spirits say to them. Is this not exactly what Christ described ‘the helper’ to be?

Let’s take a sample of the characteristics of The Holy Spirit and hold them up to this framework.

The Personhood - The Holy Spirit is a helper, it leads us into all truth, it speaks only what it is told, it relays Christ’s words, it forbids you to go places, or leads you to other places, it convicts a believer of sin and righteousness, you can grieve it.

The Power – You can be filled with it, baptized into it, it speaks through your tongue, you can exercise it and quench it, it’s a sword,  you prophecy by it, and it bears witness with your spirit that we are the children of God, it is given by appointment from God.

Think about all those things in light of the phrase ‘the President’. An office can do ALL those things.

One of the most interesting to me is the baptism by or into it. Paul is curiously vivid in his understanding that we have crowns. What is a crown but a symbol of an office?

Here is one of the most important issues to me, this theory leaves ME no excuses or exemptions. By that I mean this “He who has an ear to hear, let him hear what the spirit says to the churches.”. It’s extremely easy to criticize others, it is often one of our most exercised talents, and that’s a problem. Enter the parable of the wheat and the tares. It would seem we have NO room to criticize others outside of the production of fruit. What room do we have to question what the Spirit says to other individuals besides the production of fruit?

Blaspheming The Holy Spirit.

The unpardonable sin as it is often referred to as, is a topic of many doctrines. It is however a rather simple thing if a curious one. We are told that every sin wil be forgiven, even blaspheming God the Father Himself can be forgiven, but blaspheming the Holy Spirit will NOT be forgiven in this life OR the next. That’s a giant statement! What then does it mean to blaspheme? Mark 7:22 is a simple place to look and see that the word blaspheme and the word slander are the same word (look up a parallel bible).

There is more than that, we’re actually given an example of someone ‘blaspheming’ the Holy Spirit. In this example these pharisees slandered the Holy Spirit by saying the authority Christ used to act was of Satan. Do we ever do that? Before you answer think hard, as one who has lived through church schisms and splits, the sentiment of ‘these people are not of God’ is not a foreign one. I have held that opinion before and I would imagine many people have. Now, there is reason on occasion to hold that opinion, we ARE to judge fruit when fruit is born. However the reason this concept is SO impactful to me is that I as an individual am not given an exemption. I am held to the same standard as everyone else and CANNOT blaspheme the Office of the Holy Spirit, or lets say, the Messenger of Christ’s direct instruction to individuals. In my experience, a theory in which you are already in the ‘right’ is a false theory, and the one that’s difficult and paints you in a not-so-good light is usually the correct one.

The Holy Spirit then, is an office. A title, currently held by seven angels given the task of making Christ’s words available to the whole world. The use of seven angels instead of one could very well point to Christ’s promise that the Holy Spirit will come upon the WHOLE earth, seven being a number often used to represent fullness, wholeness and completeness.

The implications of this would be big on the personal front.  The weight of judging fruit and not people is crushing, and the love that is then required to be a Christian is immense.  

There is also a psychological detriment to blaspheming The Holy Spirit, in that the Spirit acts as the only conduit of truth and knowledge from Christ to us. To blaspheme it, is to turn off the tap of knowledge and truth.. you can decided to not be able to learn.

The Spirit is also the sword we have, without it we cannot defend ourselves.

The end of the matter is that if we slander, or deny the authority of the Spirit we’re given, or worse if we deny or slander the authority of the Spirit given to another we are walking on dangerous ground.

That’s the bit that get’s me… we have no excuses, this theory doesn’t make me right and other people wrong. This doesn’t validate one at the cost of condemning another. This levels the playing field so to speak.

In conclusion, the hypothesis proposed is this;

The Holy Spirit is not only a person or a power, but an office, currently (since Christ’s ascension to the Father) occupied by seven angels whose job is to send personalized messages from Christ (just as in Revelation 1 through 3) to the whole world, THROUGH THE MOUTHS OF THE SAINTS. The interaction between man and The Holy Spirit is in two parts, One, is to, as Christ said hear what the Spirit says to the assemblies of saints. We take the words we hear and consider them and hold them up against the witnesses, the apostles who gave us a testimony of the words of Christ to see if they match, and if they do we heed them. The Second is to SPEAK as the Spirit gives us utterance, that doesn’t mean to babble and it doesn’t mean to be silent and wait for a magical queue, it means to speak about the things of God. Talk, Converse, debate, read, test and be vocal so that there’s real dialogue for you and others to test. We should talk about the things of God whether physical or spiritual or psychological or how nature pertains to the words of God when we rise up and when we lay down, when we go in or when we come out. We should speak to each other in songs and spiritual songs that illicit thought and contemplation. The words of God should be on our lips daily and in our thoughts constantly so that we talk about God as pertaining to all things. It’s only in that overflow of dialogue (prophecy) that we can discern between right and wrong or good and evil. The promise of the Holy Spirit coming to the whole world included that we would all, young, old, man, woman, child, rich and poor would prophecy by it. That means we HAVE TO talk.

…and that’s why I say these things as offering a hypothesis. Test these words, prove them wrong, if you do you win this battle… and if you prove them true… you also win this battle. Christianity is not the achievement of the character of Christ, it’s the active learning and changing towards the goal.

 

-SF 8/8/21