Lesson 180 – Ministry of the Holy Spirit in the Church Age

© Charles A. Clough 2001

Charles A. Clough
Biblical Framework Series 1995–2003

Part 6: New Truths of the Kingdom Aristocracy
Chapter 2 – The Earthy Origin of the Church

Lesson 180 – Ministry of the Holy Spirit in Church Age

29 Nov 2001
Fellowship Chapel, Jarrettsville, MD
www.bibleframework.org

We are going to finish up this second chapter on Pentecost and next week we’ll start the third event in the New Testament which will be the Acts 15 church council, in which the church emerges from Israel and you begin to see the separation of the church away from Israel. We’re going to just briefly review a few things about Pentecost and then we’re going to go through most of the doctrines, except possibly the last two.

We worked with two events, the ascension of the Lord Jesus Christ and Pentecost. These two were part of the great events, grand events, biblical story, they are actual events of history, they occurred at a point in space, a point in time, and they’re not figments of religious imagination, they are actual historical events. And following our strategy of the framework of associating a cluster of doctrine with each one of these events, so that in your mind’s eye you can think through the events and imagine the events taking place, at the same time you’re imagining the events taking place, you can associate those truths that God attaches to those events.

We called the first event, the ascension, the heavenly origin of the church, and that’s because the ascension is the Lord Jesus Christ going to heaven, getting cleared by the Father, getting approved by the Father to send the Holy Spirit and begin the Church Age. That’s the heavenly origin. We call it the heavenly origin of the church, because it’s from the highest heaven that the Bible talks about, it’s the point that we would say in the universe somewhere or external to the universe, but it has to be almost a physical thing because of Jesus Christ’s resurrection body. Jesus’ resurrection body hasn’t gone away, it’s some place. I mean, it may be 5’8” tall and weighs mass, that’s His resurrection body, it’s somewhere. It’s not in the n^th dimension; it’s got to be in a spatial location. So wherever Jesus’ resurrection body is, that’s the throne of God. I have no idea where that is but it’s some place. So that’s the heavenly origin of the church.

Pentecost was when the Lord Jesus Christ sent the Holy Spirit to earth; we talked about Acts 2 and we talked about Peter’s use of Joel 2. We said that what Peter did is he quoted Old Testament passages that had to do with spiritual phenomenon prior to the Kingdom of God starting on earth. And this spiritual phenomenon was to be sent by Yahweh, or Jehovah. Here’s the Old Testament name for God, Jewish name, covenant name of God, there’s Yahweh, and He in the Old Testament passage is the One who sends this Holy Spirit. What is remarkable in Acts 2 is that Peter substitutes for Jehovah, in that prophecy, Jesus. There is a powerful example of how the New Testament identifies Jesus Christ as God. Jesus Christ is identified. People always say oh well, there’s no verse in the Bible that says Jesus is God. Well yes, there are four or five direct verses. But there is loads of indirect evidence. And for monotheistic Jews, to call a human carpenter and have that man’s name substituted in Old Testament texts that talk about God, that’s a claim to Jesus’ deity. Otherwise it’s blasphemy. So we’re stuck, we have to say that Jesus is God on the basis of the text, these kinds of texts.

We said there were many Pentecosts throughout the book of Acts and we said that Acts has a structure it. This book is unlike a lot of books in the Bible. It’s like them in the sense that it’s a historical textbook, but it’s unlike them in the sense that there are two trends in the book of Acts. The first trend is that the very beginning emphasis is on the nation Israel. Everything is conceived in totally classical Jewish terms. Even in Acts 2, after Pentecost, where are the believers worshiping? The synagogues. They were worshiping in the Temple. Are there any Gentiles there? No, they’re Jews. It’s all Jewish, it’s centered on the Jewish temple, it’s talking about a Jewish Messiah, and there isn’t a sign of Gentiles there. It’s all heavily Jewish.

We have Acts 2 and then you come along and we have Acts 8. What happens in Acts 8? We have sort of a mini-Pentecost in Samaria. What’s the significance of that mini-Pentecost in Samaria? The introduction of non-Jews. So now we have the Samaritans, a despised group of people by Jews because they were considered to be half-breeds, people brought into the area of the northern kingdom after the decline, deliberately transplanted population to try to control politically the Jewish environment there. So they have a long history and the Samaritans, all of a sudden, trust in Jesus Christ and they experience this manifestation of the Holy Spirit, the same thing as in Acts 2.

Then we come along further on in the book of Acts and in Acts 10 we have Cornelius, and Cornelius is a Roman Gentile. Now we’ve got Gentiles added in. So we start out with Jews, then we have Jews plus Samaritans, now we have Jews plus Samaritans plus Gentiles. Then in Acts 19 we have a third kind of mini-Pentecost, and at that point we introduce people who were followers of John the Baptist, Old Testament saints, separated from the new Messianic movement, sort of off by themselves, but had received the Word of God through John the Baptist. Now they’re integrated. So now we have Jews plus Samaritans plus Gentiles plus people who were operational believers under Old Testament economy.

That’s the trend in Acts so by the time you get through in Acts you’ve got the center of action has moved outside of Jerusalem from Samaria into Judea and into the uttermost parts of the world, which is Acts 1:8 which is what the Lord said He was going to do. That’s the background for this transition and during this transition the church becomes more and more visible as an entity distinct from the nation Israel. That’s what we’re looking at. And since this event, we talked about the ascension and the doctrine we associated with the ascension was judgment/salvation, that Jesus Christ, having ascended to the Father’s right hand, is both Savior and judge, so that history is in its last stage, beginning with the ascension. The Lord Jesus Christ has done what He can, He’s sacrificed Himself, He’s secured the basis of salvation for all men, He’s been rejected, He goes to heaven and He’s going to come back, but He’s going to come back as judge: the first time as Savior, the second time as Judge.

So now the world is living inside a bracketed historical period, and that is the last days. And that historical period culminates in Jesus’ manifestation as a judge. So it’s the countdown for judgment/salvation. The doctrines that we’re associating with Pentecost, we can you can think about them if you can remember the acrostic RIBS. On page 46 I want to correct something, top paragraph, last sentence, it says “Now we will look at four doctrines about our relationship to Jesus Christ through the post-Pentecostal work of the Holy Spirit.” It’s going to be six doctrines and the reason I’m doing that is because when we get done we’re going to have six things the Holy Spirit has done for believer. Then we’re going to deal with six things the Son has done for believers, and then we’re going to deal with six things the Father has done for believers. So we’ll have a sum of eighteen different things. So count your many blessings one by one, at least we can count from one to eighteen. We’re going to deal with these things that are given to Church Age believers.

The first one we’ve been studying is regeneration. Learn to associate in your head an image with each one of these doctrines, a picture. The picture to associate with regeneration is creation, it’s a re-creation. That’s the image mentally. In Gen. 1 God spoke and it was done. The same thing happens in regeneration. God speaks and He begets. We mentioned 1 John 3:9, 1 John 1, and it’s not an easy epistle to go through because you’ve got apparent contradictions in the epistle where one thing John says we’re sinners, and the other thing in 1 John 3 he says no man sins, he who has His Spirit in him does not sin. So what do you do with that one?

Traditionally what theologians tend to do is to make it present tense, so they say that means he doesn’t continually sin. Well, what I said was pointed out by Dr. Zane Hodges is that if you do that, and you take that treatment of the verb in 1 John 3 about he who has His seed sins not, and you continue to use that in other places, you come up with such things as well, now it says that he doesn’t sin, but then it says if you see a brother who does sin. You induce all kinds of problems with the text when you go into it that way.

We said it’s better when you get into a jam like that with the text is to just stop, hold it, and say okay, let me let this text say what it wants to say, and then come over here and let this text say what it wants to say, and see where it leads us, see if it really does lead to a contradiction. We said that you have these verses, 1 John 3, 1 John 1, 1 John 5, so how do we handle regeneration? It is the seed of Christ, or the new nature of the Lord Jesus Christ that is regenerated, that is the result of regeneration, miraculous creation in the human heart. And what is happening in 1 John 3 is that John the Apostle is looking at a perspective, looking at us as believers but with a perspective. In other words, you look at things from a different angle.

In 1 John 3:9, when you see things like, “No one who is born of God” and my translation says “practices sin” but in the Greek it just says “who is born of God sins, because His seed abides in him; and he cannot sin, because he is born of God.” That “cannot sin” sounds strangely parallel to what doctrine that we learned when we were studying about the life of Christ? Impeccability. So this looks funny, we haven’t concluded, but it looks like we’ve got an impeccability issue going on here. So the question is, well what is impeccable? Is the believer impeccable? Well surely not because we’re all sinners. If we’re in need of atonement and we don’t have human merit that’s perfect, so obviously that can’t be what the teaching is. So how else do you interpret a thing like verse 9? In verse 6 he’s also said the same thing, “No one who abides in Him sins; no one who sins has seen Him or knows Him.” That’s pretty either/or-ish, and John the Apostle tends to be that way. Yet on the other hand, 1 John 1 [and] 1 John 5 talk about believers sinning. So how do we handle this?

What we said was the best way to keep coherence with the text is to say okay, what must be going on here is that in passages like 1 John 3 he’s looking at the new nature. The new nature is eternal life, that’s not contaminated, that’s a result of the miraculous manifestation and regeneration of the Holy Spirit. If He’s regenerating Christ’s life in us, that’s sharing Christ’s character, so that’s got to be sinless. So if he’s not talking about the flesh, and (quote) the sinner, but he’s talking rather about the work of the Holy Spirit, we’re okay, we haven’t got any problems here yet. And we have Biblical support for saying that John looks at it this way because Paul does this in Galatians 2:20. What does he say? “It’s not I who live but Christ lives in me.” What does he mean by that? The same thing. He’s not claiming sinless perfection, but he’s claiming that the life of Christ manifests itself in this regenerate nature.

In Romans 7 he makes that strange statement, “it is no longer I who sins” but the flesh, kind of thing. If you read that carelessly it looks like Paul is condoning his own sin and that can’t be. In order to approach these texts you have to slow down, think it through, and realize that these guys approach it from the standpoint of this regenerate nature, the seed that abides in him. A person gave me a copy of a well-known book called The Christ’s Life by A. B. Simpson. A. B. Simpson was the founder of the Christian Missionary Alliance at the turn of the century and he was respon­sible for a great our-pouring of the gospel and evangelism through the Christian Missionary Alliance, through a lot of frontier work and missions work. He’s a reputed well-known missionary spokes­man, and on page 18, listen to what A. B. Simpson says. He was a very well-prepared man. People were pretty amazed at what this guy did with his life; he was apparently a tremendous steward of time. He was President of the missionary organization, he started the CMA, he was a pastor, he did this, he did that, and yet he wasn’t rushing, he just did these things. He says:

“This life is not for Himself but for us. Having risen from the dead, He now comes to relive His life in us. This is the secret of sanctification as it is unfolded in the first epistle of John, and it is the solution of every puzzling problem in connection with that epistle. Perhaps no portion of the New Testament has so many seeming contradictions on the subject of holiness as this epistle.” So we’re not the first people to observe this, this is A. B. Simpson in the 1900s. “For example, we are told in the first chapter, “If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us,” 1 John 1:8. And yet a little later we’re told with equal emphasis “whosoever is born of God does not commit sin, for His seed remains in him, and he cannot sin, because he is born of God,” 1 John 3:9. Now how can these things be reconciled? It’s all very simple. First it is true that we, i.e., the human ‘we,’ have sinned and do sin. There is no good in us, and we have renounced ourselves as worthless and helpless. But, on the other hand, we have taken Him to be our life and His life is a sinless one. The seed,” and this is eloquent, I mean, nobody but A. B. Simpson could come up with this illustration. Listen to this illustration, it’s so simple. I think, “Gosh, why didn’t I think of this?” “The seed that He plants is as spotless as that beautiful bulb, which when planted in the unclean soil, grows up as pure as an angel’s wing, unstained by the soil around it.”

Isn’t that an interesting picture? “Unstained by the soil around it,” the seed, the tulip bulb grows into this plant. It grows in the soil, but it doesn’t share the dirt with the soil. Now you go back to 1 John what does it say, “His seed abides in him,” it’s just addressing the regenerate nature. “The key to this whole mystery is supplied by two verses in this epistle, 1 John 3:6, “He that abides in Him sins not.” Here is the secret of holiness, not our holiness,” listen to what A. B. Simpson says here, “not our holiness, but His. There is no account made here of our perfection, but it is only as we cling to Him and draw our life each moment from Him that we are kept from sin.” That is the indwelling life. So here A. B. Simpson was, 102 years ago, pointing this out. And I don’t think I’ve read anything else in all the commentaries and everything else that’s any more eloquent on how you resolve the tensions in 1 John. So that’s regeneration.

We introduced a second thing, the “I” in RIBS and we said that has to do with the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. On page 51 in the notes, the table on the indwelling Holy Spirit is my attempt to distinguish the Old Testament way the Holy Spirit indwelled from the New Testament way He indwells, by just drawing four contrasts. We went over some of these, the Holy Spirit’s ministry in the Old Testament was nation building, it involved natural talents like carpentry, economics, a political sense, here’s another good illustration. What was the ministry of the Holy Spirit indwelling Samson? It was physical strength. It wasn’t necessarily that Samson was a great saint. Samson actually is kind of a thug, and his job in life was to create a war. It really was, because the Jews were amalgamating culturally with the Philistines, and they didn’t have sense enough to separate from that culture. They were just glued to it, and somebody had to start a fight to get polarization, cultural and political polarization, to get these two away from each other. So He raised up this guy, and you can imagine how this man worked. His life is a tremendous illustration of how God can use people in odd ways.

It would be a very interesting Biblical film if somebody made, all the way from Baalim’s ass to Samson, treating all the odd ways God used very unspiritual vessels to accomplish His purpose. In the case of Samson, his whole objective was to start a war, and you remember one of the gimmicks that he did. He waited till harvest time, the nation’s economy in those days wasn’t manufacturing; it wasn’t service industries. The economy in those days was an agricultural economy. And if you’re around farmers, you know what an awful scary life farming is, because you invest everything, and if the crop doesn’t come in, you’ve got all your investment eggs in one basket here. So what does Samson do? He takes foxes, waits till harvest time, puts torches on their tails and sends them through the wheat fields, burns them all up. That didn’t go over too well with the Philistine farmers. It goes on and on, and how does he ends his life. He takes down the temple, kills himself and everybody in the temple, “Avenge me, O God,” he says, and he crushes the thing. Now the Holy Spirit indwelt him for those tasks. That was part of God’s ministry to the nation, it was physical, it was cultural, it had all kinds of semi or even non-spiritual things to it.

If you look at table 5, it was a “job-centered ministry to further the purpose of God for the nation Israel.” It was “limited to only some believers (and possibly” even occurred with unbelievers. It certainly occurred with the donkey, Baalim’s donkey. He was indwelt—the Holy Spirit worked in him. If you don’t want to call it indwelling, He worked with him. Psalm 51, David prays that the Holy Spirit not be taken from him, which in context if you read 1 Samuel, David had watched the Holy Spirit taken from Saul. When the Holy Spirit left Saul, what was it a sign of? That he lost his salvation? No, it was a sign that he had lost out as a dynasty so the Holy Spirit’s indwelling of the king was a dynastic seal. So when the Holy Spirit indwelt Saul it for the purpose of ruling and have his family be the dynasty, the royal family of Israel. And when He pulled it and He bestowed the Holy Spirit on David; that was a dynastic transfer. So you have a complete monarchial line that’s going on there, it wasn’t just spiritual life stuff, there was a lot more to it than that. David in Psalm 51, after he sinned, he prays that the Lord not take His Holy Spirit from him, meaning I don’t want to lose the dynastic position I have here. And in 2 Kings 2:9, remember Elisha, followed on Elijah, and he asked that the Holy Spirit work in his life like He had in Elijah’s life. In Luke 11 the Lord Jesus Christ talks about the Holy Spirit will be given to those who ask for Him. That was during the disciple’s ministry, before the church.

After Pentecost what do we have? We have a “life-centered ministry to make eternal fellowship with God a present reality.” So the job has changed and the manifestation of indwelling has changed, and the indwelling is now indwelling … oh, by the way, the image for indwelling is a temple, just like the image for regeneration is creation, the image for indwelling is a temple, God indwells a temple. So He indwells this regenerate nature, and energizes it. The second line in the right column, it was “universal for all and only believers, Romans 8:9” says if you have not the Holy Spirit you are not saved. So there’s the indwelling Holy Spirit, coterminous with salvation. Third, Ephesians 4:30 says we’re sealed with it, it’s permanent, it’s not temporary like David. Furthermore, the fourth one, it’s automatic. The indwelling of the Holy Spirit is never something that is asked for in the New Testament, other than Luke passage prior to Pentecost. So the indwelling occurs, we believe, at the point of regeneration. There’s no other command to ask for it throughout the whole … it’s presumed that Christians have it, Romans 8:9.

There’s an idea of the difference between indwelling in the Old Testament and indwelling in the New Testament and you can see that indwelling in the New Testament has a particular purpose of energizing the church and building it up and strengthening it, energizing the new nature.

On page 52 you see an effect of this. When you learn a Bible truth, one of the disciplines you need to do, and a lot of Christians don’t do this, one of the things you need to do when you learn something from the Word of God is ask the Lord to open your eyes to the implications, so that if this is true, what are the consequences of this. So I ask myself, okay, we talk about the indwelling Holy Spirit, Paul in 1 Corinthians 3 says the local church is a temple, in 1 Corinthians 6 he says our bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit. Well what are the implications? There are some implications, by the way, in 1 Corinthians 3 and 1 Corinthians 6, watch how Paul carries those implications out. One of those, 1 Corinthians 6 is be careful what you do to your body, your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit, the body is important. 1 Corinthians 3 says the local church is important, it’s a temple, it’s where the Holy Spirit dwells. It’s not talking about a building now; it’s talking about a group of believers.

One more implication, page 52: “The doctrine of indwelling with its temple imagery offends all advocates of religious pluralism by its dogmatic exclusivity.” What do I mean by that sentence? The next sentence, “The church is the only place of salvation on earth.” What was the temple for? Any temple? To go to meet God. So if the church is the temple, then what follows? What’s the consequence saying the church is the temple of God in this age and this history? Because that’s the only place you can meet God. [can’t understand words] spell it out. How does anybody meet God? Through the gospel. Who propagates the gospel? The local church. So you have to come in contact with some church activity, be it the Bible translation that was done by some Christians. You have to come in contact with someone who witnesses, shares the gospel with you. Some way you had to be in touch, some contact. So the church is the point of contact, that’s why the church sends missionaries out into all kinds of cultures, because it’s the point of contact. So if the church is the temple then it means that that’s the place where people come to meet God.

Now we move to the third doctrine. This is the doctrine of the baptism of the Holy Spirit. This is a little complicated because of the image. Again, review: the image of regeneration is creation; the image of indwelling is the temple; the image of baptism is judgment/salvation. In other words, it’s being identified with either judgment or being identified with being saved. It’s a separation; it’s an identification. The primary meaning is to identify.

As I said in the last paragraph on page 52, translators of the English Bible have traditionally cheated here because down through the church there’s always been this argument about immersion versus sprinkling. The translators didn’t want to get into all that so they backed off, and what did they do? They transliterated the Greek verb. The Greek verb is baptizo, so they said be baptized. Well that was cute because it got them off the hook, so now everybody in English reads, oh, they’re going to baptize, and you ask the translator and this guy will say, if he’s Presbyterian or Covenant, he’ll say it’s indwelling, if this guy is a Baptist, he could be a Reformed Baptist or not, the point is, he believes in immersion. So the translators left it up to the Christians to fight it out. But they didn’t want to take a position whether it means immersion or sprinkling. And really the word can’t be said to be any of that, if you want to look at the way it’s used, the core meaning seems to be more identification.

Table 6 on page 53 shows the surprisingly wide variations to this word “baptize” and how it’s used in the Bible. There are actually seven ways it’s used, and you could count the first one, Noah’s baptism as a sort of use of the word, although the word really, in 1 Peter, isn’t calling Noah’s flood a baptism, though, the imagery of Noah’s flood is taken as a backdrop for baptism. Turn to 1 Peter 3: 20, it says the spirits [v.19] “who once were disobedient, when the patience of God kept waiting in the days of Noah, during the construction of the ark, in which a few, that is, eight persons, were brought safely through the water.” Now the water judged and it saved. It drowned all the unbelievers, and the water saved the believers. So “during the construction of the ark, in which a few, that is, eight persons, were brought safely through the water. [21] And corresponding to that, baptism now saves you—not the removal of dirt from the flesh, but an appeal to God for a good conscience—through the resurrection of Jesus Christ.”

Now here’s the problem with passages like that. The first problem is getting the imagery wrong. And the best thing to do when you look through all the cases of baptism is ask yourself, what’s the earliest historical event that comes into association with that word? It’s right here. The earliest event in the program and progress of revelation in the Bible that’s associated with baptism is Noah’s flood. What do we know about Noah’s flood from the way we’ve handled it. What doctrinal connection? Judgment/salvation. Just like Exodus. Remember the two events, Noah’s flood, the Exodus, both were grace before judgment. There was only one way of salvation, it was God judging men, they had to trust the Lord’s promise in order to be saved. So two pictures of judgment/salvation: Noah’s flood, and the Exodus. Well isn’t it interesting that when Peter wants to illuminate the word “baptism” what is the imagery he pulls up? Noah’s Flood.

If you look in the left column of table 6 you’ll see that every one of these baptisms is dry. I deliberately do this because we think of baptism in terms of the ritual of baptism, every time we see that word baptizo in the text, we think in terms of the ritual of baptism. And we have to be careful. It’s not true … not true. The word baptizo used in the text means identification, and it can mean either it’s dry or it’s wet.

Let’s work our way quickly through table 6 and see if we can come to some overall conclusions.

First you have Noah as more of an image generator but the next one, and I give you the verses in the context, the paragraph above gives you all the Bible references. You have the case of Moses’ baptism, 1 Corinthians 10:2, it’s said to be Moses’ baptism. Who got wet? It was the Egyptians that got wet. Who was dry? It was the Jews. So Moses’ baptism doesn’t mean people got wet, the people who were saved were dry. So the word “baptize” in that case can’t refer to being wet, per se, it’s referring to something else. There’s another meaning here that the author uses baptism for. Moses’ baptism means somehow these people are identified with Moses and what God was doing with Moses at that point in space-time history. They were identified with Moses, Moses’ baptism. But it involved water as a background image because what was going on. The baptism they’re talking about is walking right through the Red Sea dry. So it’s judgment/salvation.

The Exodus; isn’t this interesting, the first one was Noah; the next one is the Exodus. Do you begin to get the flavor of the word “baptize.” The third one, this is remarkable. In Mark 10 Jesus says I will be baptized. This is after His water baptism. What does He mean by this baptism? It’s the cross; it’s the baptism of the cross. Was Jesus wet or was He dry in the baptism of the cross? Obviously He was dry, except for His perspiration. So there again He’s identified, He somehow participates in this gory form of capital punishment and it’s said to be a baptism of the cross.

I mention that as a footnote, I just read an exegetical study where a guy has pointed out that this may well be the solution to that text in Mark 16, the end of Mark’s Gospel, you know, where it talks about picking up snakes and doing all that stuff, and Jesus says he is not baptized, believe and be baptized, etc. He points out if you look carefully at the context of Mark 16 you’ll see that Jesus isn’t talking to Christians, the church. He’s talking only to a select group of His close associates there, the disciples who will be the ones who will go out as apostles, and He’s angry at them in the context of Mark 16 because they didn’t believe. He says you’re going to go out and you’re going to believe and be baptized. This man suggests in context, if you look at a concordance and you expand out from Mark 16, go back in the text of Mark 16; the previous use of the word “baptize” by Mark is Mark 10, and in Mark 10 what does the word mean? Cross, martyrdom. So he’s suggesting that the word “baptize” in Mark 16 is talking not about water baptism at all, it’s talking about martyrdom. He who believes in Me goes out and preaches this gospel and is martyred, undergoes the pressure, he will be saved in the sense of being delivered. I’m not going to debate that but I’m just point that out as an illustration that every time we see the word “baptize” do not think of the ritual of water baptism.

Finally, John the Baptist speaks of two different baptisms, the baptism of fire and the baptism of the Spirit. So now we’ve got 4, possibly five uses of the word “baptize” none of which are wet, all of which have as their …, if you take the verb, “baptize,” in these four instance who is the subject of the verb “baptize.” The subject of the verb, the verb is active voice. Who does the baptizing in every case here? It’s God. Man is not involved in this. Every one of these is God is doing the one through His sovereign providence, God is the One who does the baptizing and water is not involved. Well, it’s involved but people don’t get wet that are saved. The baptism of fire surely isn’t wet, that’s talking about the judgment to come. And the Spirit’s the salvation. So you see judgment/salvation there.

Go to the right side of table 6. Here we have wet rituals. We have John’s baptism which was given to Jews and what was the function of John’s baptism? To identify believing Jews as the remnant, the loyal remnant that were prepared for whom? For the Messiah who’s to come, the Lamb of God who takes the sins of the world, He’s coming, the Kingdom of God is at hand, it’s coming, it’s imminent, it’s going to happen. So John’s baptism is a ritual. In that case of the ritual baptize, who’s the subject of the verb “baptize” there. God, or man? It’s man.

So isn’t this interesting. These are four dry, these are three wet. So you’ve got to be careful about reading your Bible, and about what words mean. The second baptism is Jesus’ baptism, John did it but it was Jesus that was being baptized and there He Himself identifies Himself with the coming Kingdom. Now did Jesus need to be baptized to be forgiven from sin? Surely not! So this baptism had nothing to do with sin, it has to do with identification of Jesus Christ with God’s kingdom. Now we come to the third one, Christian baptism, which we are all familiar with, I don’t have to make a big thing about that.

This is just kind of a survey in preparation for teaching Spirit baptism. What does Spirit baptism mean? It’s one of those dry baptisms. It’s obviously an imagery, and what does the Spirit baptism do? Look at 1 Corinthians 12 because Paul develops the idea of baptism several places, Romans 6 is one place where he develops this baptism, people always want to read ritual, water, Christian baptism into Romans 6; it’s not necessarily there. In 1 Corinthians 12 he’s talking about spiritual gifts in this, he’s talking about manifestation, and then he says in verse 13, what is the result … [blank spot]

“For by one Spirit we were all,” not some, by the way, this is addressed to a real spiritual church, I mean these people got drunk at communion. And it says “by one Spirit we were all baptized into one body, whether Jews or Greeks, whether slaves or free, and we were all made to drink of one Spirit.” He talks about the body and he’s developing the concept of the body of the church. So Spirit baptism results in the calling out, it’s a picture of the separation of the population and being identified with this thing called the church. In ritual baptism it’s just a way of expressing that reality, but the Holy Spirit says “we are all by one Spirit baptized into one body.” And the body in the context is talking about the universal church. So the function of baptism is that it creates the church.

When did Spirit baptism start? When does the church start? Well, if baptism causes the church then the beginning of Spirit baptism must be the beginning of the church. So here’s a time line, here’s the virgin birth, here’s the death of Christ, here’s the ascent into heaven, here’s the coming of the Holy Spirit and Pentecost. The question is, where on this time line do we put the beginning of the church? So, the church, some theologians down through history, Roman Catholic theologians for example, many in the Reformed camp, would say well, we use the word “church” to refer to all believers. In other words, there was a church in the Old Testament. But what they’re talking about there is all believers, without looking at the distinctions down through history. What we’re asking is another question. When did the church, in the sense of the body of 1 Corinthians 12, when did that start? On page 54 of the notes I give four arguments why it had to have started on the day of Pentecost, the day of Pentecost, when the church formed.

Notice I did not say that the church was recognized at that time as a separate entity. We’ll get into that next, that’s the next event. But in actual reality the church was born that day, on Pentecost. The four arguments are “Paul teaches that the church is a ‘mystery’ not revealed in the Old Testament. Therefore the church could not have begun before John the Baptist. Second, Jesus taught that it was future to His time,” because in Matthew 16:18 what was the tense of the verb when He said, “I build My church?” I have built My church? I am building My church? Or I will build My church? Future! It’s future to Matt. 16 so the church did not begin during the earthly ministry of Jesus. The third argument, “The church depends upon an ascended and seated Lord Jesus Christ. Therefore, it had to originate after the ascension and session.” The Ephesian passage. “Finally, Spirit baptism prophesied by Jesus to occur after His session occurred for the first time at Pentecost,” the baptism of the Spirit and in 1 Corinthians 12 Paul identifies that as that which generates the church. Conclusion, “the church began on the day of Pentecost.”

On page 55 of the notes there are some implications of this doctrine of baptism. We’ll see all the RIBS plus ISG next time, but so far we’ve got to RIB, regeneration, indwelling, baptism; now some of the implications. “Some Christians, particularly those influenced by Pentecostal theology, insist that after one believes, one still needs a post-salvation experience of ‘Holy Ghost Baptism.’ ” You may run into this, some of the books written, probably between 1900 and 1920, if you look at the dates of books, this was a thing that was quite popular, even among what we would consider more orthodox people, Holy Ghost Baptism. The problem is that it seemed to be some­thing that occurred after baptism and it was usually done because oh well, in Acts 8 baptism came after the Samaritans believed. The problem with that is you can’t take one of the models from Acts because if we go back to the diagram we drew of Acts you’ve got four different occurrences and they’re all different. Which one are you going to make be your model? You make one and I’ll make the other one, so now what are you going to do.

So you can’t use Acts as a model. You have to come to a conclusion of teaching of the baptism of the Spirit out of doctrine of the New Testament. So we’ll say that the church, which we are calling the universal church, let’s get the vocabulary, you can’t think without an active vocabulary, “church” is being used as I’m using it here to mean believers since the day of Pentecost, believers who are baptized into the body of Christ. It is the universal church; we’re not talking here about local churches, we’re talking about the universal church. Theologians sometimes call this the Invisible Church. Why do you suppose theologians call it the Invisible Church, are we all invisible? No, what they’re saying is that it can’t be identified with any physical social group of people because you could have 122 church members, and maybe 92 are born again. So the universal church doesn’t correspond to church membership. It doesn’t correspond to this denomination or that denomination. You can have believers and unbelievers in any denomination. Being a member of a denomination doesn’t prove you’re a Christian. It just means you’ve identified yourself socially as a Christian, but it doesn’t mean you’re really born again, trusting in the Lord Jesus Christ alone for your salvation. So that’s what we mean by universal church.

Now if you really want to cause some controversy some time try this one. What was the first [can’t understand word] church creed? The Apostles’ Creed. Think about the Apostle’s creed, what is the title for the universal church in the Apostle’s Creed? The holy Catholic and Apostolic Church. We live in an area of a lot of Roman Catholicism and I’m sure the average person on the street thinks of that as the Roman Catholic Church. But let’s watch the words, “holy,” “Catholic,” and “Apostolic.” Can you see how those can be used to describe the universal church? Not the Roman Catholic organization, we’re talking about the set of all believers. Is that universal church holy in the sense, not of personal merit but sharing the holiness of God through Jesus Christ? Yes. 1 John 3, “the seed abides in him,” the “tulip” that grows up from the ground, the substitutionary blood atonement covering our sins. Sure it is. Let’s look at the next word, “Catholic?” What does that mean? It’s universal, Catholic means universal.

That’s the paradox about Roman Catholic, the word Catholic means all areas, and then they tack on Rome in front of it, one area. So it’s a really ironic title, “Roman Catholic.” Anglican Catholic is another one, English Catholic. Wait a minute, hold it, you can’t have both names, you’ve got to have one or the other. It’s the Roman Church or the Catholic Church, but you can’t have the Roman Catholic Church any more than you can have the Anglican Catholic Church. This is just another word for the universal church.

Let’s look at the third word, “Apostolic.” Is what sense is the universal church of genuine born again believers apostolic? Think about this. Down through history the Roman Catholic Church and the Anglican Church have insisted on a particular meaning for this. Apostolic succession, meaning that you had to have a continuous line, like Peter blessed this guy and got him on the roles, and this guy became a bishop and he laid his hands on this guy who laid his hands on this guy who laid his hands on this guy … down through the centuries until we have a guy here who’s a bishop and he’s had his hands commissioned, hands were laid on his head by somebody who had hands laid on his head who had hands laid on his head, all the way back to Peter. That’s called apostolic succession. That’s their interpretation of this word. That’s why they can say they’re the only church in town because they are the only ones that can trace apostolic succession, they claim, whether they can or can’t, I haven’t even studied that. But the problem with that is that’s not really the meaning of the word “apostolic.”

Apostolic means you follow what the apostles taught, and where do you find what the apostles taught? It’s what the apostles wrote; it’s called the New Testament. So we could say that this is the holy universal and New Testament church. That’s what we’re talking about, and that’s what the baptizing work of the Holy Spirit does.

We’ve finished three of the doctrines, we’ll finish the other three next week, and then we’ll move on further in the framework.

Question asked: Clough replies: The question is in Ephesians 5, so let’s turn to Ephesians 5, and at the same time turn to Colossians 3. I had said that there’s no command in the New Testament to be indwelt. However, in Ephesians 5 there is a command given to believers to be filled. So what’s that? What she has pointed out is where the confusion came at the beginning of this century. Devotional writers who spoke of the Holy Ghost’s baptism, like R. A. Torey for example, he’s a good example of this, R. A. Torey was a solid Bible-teaching guy, but he used the terminology Holy Ghost baptism for filling. And the act in Ephesians 5:18 “Be not drunk with wine, for that is dissipation, but be filled with the Spirit, [19] speaking to one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody with your heart to the Lord, [20] always giving thanks for all things in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ to God, even the Father, [21] and be subject to one another in the fear of Christ.” Then it goes on to expand all the results of the filling of the Spirit.

The filling of the Spirit is commanded and is an act, and is parallel to many of the other imperatives in the New Testament. But it’s not talking about this thing we’re talking about of the Holy Spirit coming to indwell and staying there permanently. Obviously if it’s a command believers can lose it, so the filling has to be distinguished from indwelling. That is what was not done between 1900–1920, particularly through the writings of R. A. Torey. At the end of the 20s and 30s people got really confused about this because this word was just slapped out there.

There are two different things going on here. Let me show you why. If you do an outline of Ephesians 5 and you outlined the sequence of subjects in Ephesians, the whole epistle of Ephesians, look particularly while you’re in Ephesians to the result of the filling of the Spirit, look at the results, what follows verse 18, “speaking to one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs,” by the way, that’s speaking, not necessarily in other languages, it just says psalms, hymns and spiritual songs, “singing and making melody with your heart to the Lord, [20] always giving thanks for all things …” That’s a result of the filling of the Holy Spirit, giving thanks, but giving thanks is also an imperative elsewhere. “In everything give thanks,” 1 Thessalonians 5, verb, obligation, act. Then it says in Ephesians 5:21 “and be subject to one another in the fear of Christ,” and then it talks about “Wives, be subject to your own husbands,” and it keeps on going on and on, verse 28, “husbands ought also to love their own wives …” It spells out the social results of the filling of the Holy Spirit. Clearly this is a ministry of the Holy Spirit. Clearly it is founded on the indwelling. The indwelling is the foundation for this other ministry that’s going on here.

Hold on to Ephesians5 and flip over to Colossians 3. If you look at the logic of the epistle to the Colossians, Paul talks about putting on, look at verse 15, “And let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, to which indeed you were called in one body; and be thankful.” Now look at verse 16, “Let the word of Christ richly dwell within you; with all wisdom teaching and admonishing one another with psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing with thankfulness in your hearts to God. [17] And whatever you do in word or deed, do all in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks through Him to God the Father. [18] Wives, be subject to your husbands…” does that look familiar? It’s exactly the text of Ephesians 5.

What conclusion would you come to about Colossians 3:16 and Ephesians 5:18? They must be parallel. Look at Colossians 3:16; does the word of Christ come to us? It comes to us at the time of regeneration, does it not? Right, that’s how we’re begotten, that’s how regeneration happens—the word of Christ begets us. But because we’re begotten doesn’t mean that the word of Christ is dwelling richly, willingly, we can resist it. Now turn back to Ephesians, it’s the same principle. The Holy Spirit comes to indwell, but He can be resisted. And that’s what so grievous about sin, because in Ephesians 4:30 what does it say we do when we sin? We grieve the Holy Spirit. If He didn’t indwell us He’d take off, but He sticks around.

And this is one of the implications, I think I mentioned it in the notes and I didn’t tonight, but one of the other consequences of the doctrine of indwelling is that the Holy Spirit is so close to us that when we sin it’s just like we rub it in His face. Really, when you start to think of it, it makes you a little more horrified at your personal sin, because it’s not like He’s a thousand miles away, He’s got a buffer zone between all our crud and His holiness. No, He’s in us. Talk about getting it in His face, every one of our slimy little thoughts, every one of our fits of anger, is right there, right in His face. That’s the doctrine of the indwelling Holy Spirit. So it’s a convicting consequence, if you think it through. It’s not a nice thing. It’s empowering, it’s nice to know that; it’s nice to know that the wicked one cannot touch that regenerate nature. It’s nice to know that, but it’s also very convicting to know that He’s right there in the middle of a cesspool from His point of view.

The filling of the Holy Spirit is the word plethora, it’s not taking about indwelling, it’s talking about the Holy Spirit controlling and influencing and allowed to dominate us. But that’s a choice, and that does change. When we get into the filling, which we’re not going to get into associated with Pentecost, that’s coming, we’ll see that it’s another synonymous way of expressing all the other imperatives in the New Testament. Being filled with the Spirit is like letting the word of Christ dwell in us richly. This is all Pauline, Colossians and Ephesians is Paul’s words. What would you think is the analogy or the synonym that if John the Apostle were teaching us, what is his vocabulary expression for the same thing? What does he say over and over in his epistles? Abide, and it’s a command. Notice, “abide,” it’s in the imperative mood, if it’s a command it’s obviously something addressed to us. So John tends to use the word meno in the Greek, which is abide, Paul uses a variety of texts, let the Word of Christ dwell in you richly, be filled with the Spirit, etc. etc. etc.

The thing you want to avoid about Ephesians 5:18 is getting too spooky. It’s easy to read into Ephesians 5:18 a Pentecostal type thing because it’s talking about hymns and spiritual songs, and it takes but a short stretch of imagination to think about speaking in tongues, etc. But that really isn’t the emphasis there. The emphasis is the thankfulness, it’s the mental attitude; the singing of the hymns is not an unconscious thing. If you look at the notes under this RIBS, look at the “I” intercession, and pay attention to Romans 8, the verse I quote in Romans 8 when I talk about the Spirit’s intercession for us with groanings that cannot be uttered. At the end of 1900 to 1920 when everybody was talking about this Holy Ghost Baptism thing, they would quote Romans 8 where it talks about the Holy Spirit helps us with groanings that cannot be uttered, and the groanings that cannot be uttered there were languages, foreign languages or a heavenly tongue. The complication of that is that tongues after Pentecost is a spiritual gift, but that’s taught in 1 Corinthians 12–14 and if it’s clearly taught, that is not universal to all believers. Paul says do all teach, do all speak in tongues, the answer is no, all do not. So that’s talking about a gift that is not universal. The indwelling of the Spirit is universal. The filling of the Holy Spirit should be, but it’s contingent upon our response.

Read Romans 8:26–27 read through that carefully, and here’s the question you want to work with as you read through that text. If the Holy Spirit is praying with groanings that cannot be uttered, ask yourself the following questions: to whom is He praying, that’s interesting, to whom does the Holy Spirit pray, and see if you can find out in context which of the Trinity He’s praying to. Secondly, when you’re in that passage, there’s a hint given in the context over what the Holy Spirit is praying about. Then after you’ve thought about to whom the Holy Spirit is praying and you’ve thought about what it is He’s praying about, see if you can come up with your own ideas about what does it mean “groanings that cannot be uttered.” If you have a concordance, check that word out and see where it’s used elsewhere. And you may come to a very interesting conclusion.

Those two verses are really loaded, they are loaded with heavy stuff, and it’s very encouraging stuff. It’s one of those cases where you can hear sermons thousands of times in your life and yet you come into the details of a text like verses 26–27 and you think, why didn’t someone tell me about that. Why is it I can go for years in my Christian life and never hear that teaching? Really, we have a lot of sloppy hasty teaching going on and it doesn’t’ grab the details of the text. But there’s tremendous things here for us, and this is why I hope as we go through these things, when we get done with this chapter we’re going to have at least six things that you know now, and you’re probably in the top 8% or 5% of the Christians walking around today who can tell you what concrete doctrinal Scriptural things the Holy Spirit has done, and be able to say, thank you Lord, now I can give some thanks. I might not be able to give Him thanks for the thorns and the thistles, although He can work those together for good, but by golly, in the middle of this, if there’s nothing else I can thank Him for my regeneration, I can thank Him that He’s seen fit to indwell me. Think about it, the Holy Spirit at the point of salvation started residence in you… the Holy Spirit took up residence! What a powerful idea.

Question asked: Clough replies: She’s asking, “Why, in the Old Testament, did the Holy Spirit work in a temporary way, whereas now He works in a permanent way?” In the Old Testament He worked from the outside in, because in the Old Testament they had something analogous to what we call regeneration. Do you know what it was? Spiritual circumcision, circumcision of the heart. Now obviously the people didn’t do that, somehow that was the work of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit illuminated people’s hearts, but He’s not said to be “in” them in the Old Testament. In fact, in John 14—I think it’s John 14—there’s a verse that says He is with you, but He will be in you, two different prepositions. So clearly Jesus was teaching that difference. In the Old Testament it was a different ministry. Why is it different? I think it has to do with the issue of what the church is. The Church Age is remarkably different from any other age in Biblical history. The church has a unique structure. It’s in union with the resurrected Christ. No saint in the Old Testament could have been in union with the resurrected Christ because there wasn’t any resurrected Christ.

So the Holy Spirit worked, we’re not saying He wasn’t there, He worked, but He worked differently. He works today externally too, He’s the One that handles providence issue, He’s the One that raises up kings, and He’s the One that deals with war and all the rest, He’s the agent that’s going around … but His unique ministry, His saving, redeeming ministry is centered in a location. In the Old Testament, His redeeming ministry was with the nation Israel, from Abraham on.

Where was the Holy Spirit working prior to the call of Abraham? Think about that one, let’s go back another dispensation. Before Israel what was the Holy Spirit doing? Can anybody think of a text that tells us what the Holy Spirit was doing before? We can infer something from Gen. 14, who came out to meet Abraham. A strange guy by the name of Melchizedek, who apparently happened to be a godly king, one of the last surviving remnants of the Noahic colonizers, who was a believer, in whose life the Lord worked, had taught him about communion. So there was a lot of teaching of some sort going on among Gentiles prior to the call of Abraham.

Prior to the flood, what was the ministry of the Holy Spirit then, that’s even stated, because when God comes to Noah and He announces the judgment, what does He say? “My Spirit shall not strive with man any longer.” So what would you say the Holy Spirit’s ministry was before the flood? Restraining sin. Does He restrain sin today? Yes. Was He restraining sin then? Yes. Has He changed that? No. See, a lot of things are continuous, some things are discontinuous. That’s the thing in the Scripture. The salvation is the same; was Abraham saved by faith? Yes. Are we saved by faith? Yes. Has that changed? No. Is the basis of salvation changed? No, every saint was saved on the basis of the atonement of Christ, it hadn’t come off yet, but they were saved in anticipation of the finished work of Christ. So has the basis of salvation changed? No.

Well then what’s changed? The content of the gospel has changed; the gospel that we preach has a lot more content in it than what Abraham could believe in. We’ve got a lot more centuries of revelation since Abraham. Is our gospel different from Moses’? Yeah, it’s got a lot more in it than Moses had. So some things have changed, but the basics have not changed, they remain the same, yesterday, today and forever.

Question asked: Clough replies: God was doing a slightly different thing in their lives than He is in our lives, but that’s not saying they didn’t have a personal relationship. They were deep, I mean, think of the Psalms. Why today, in the Church Age, why do we get such a devotional power out of reading the Psalms? I was just reading in Newsweek they’ve got the story of Beamer, the Christian guy that was on flight 93 that crashed in Pennsylvania, and what was it that he recited right before he said “Okay guys, let’s roll, we’re going to get these guys?” Psalm 23. Here he is in the middle of a disaster situation, a Christian guy and he’s fearful, I mean, these guys have razor blades and they’ve already killed people. But we’re not going to let them take out another target in this country, we’re going to stop these guys now, and then he recited Psalm 23. What gives that power out of the Psalms? Because David had a wonderful relationship with the Lord. Was it Spirit-given? Sure it was Spirit-given. But the ministry of the Holy Spirit in David’s life was directed to empowering him as king, empowering him as a writer of the book of Psalms.

What’s the ministry in the Church Age? That we would be occupied with Jesus Christ and be His representatives. We are said to be His ambassadors. So that’s the work the Holy Spirit’s doing. Now He’s in us and in those guys He would come in and out and work all around them, I don’t profess to know all that, I’m just saying the text says there’s something different here. And it is related to the fact that we have the content that they did not have. They could not have known all the details about Jesus Christ. David could not see, except in a vision of Psalm 22, and it seems like if you read this, and scholars who have studied the Hebrew text carefully have noticed this, that when these guys wrote these juicy texts, like Psalm 22, “My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken Me,” they must have been in a state of almost suspended consciousness in which they saw in a vision these things. They certainly didn’t make them up.

And in those visionary experiences they had as they were penning the Scriptures, they faithfully recorded what they saw in these visions. But they didn’t understand them, because what does Peter say? There’s a passage in Peter that talks about the Spirit in the Old Testament. He says they couldn’t understand the things, the Spirit testified of the sufferings of Christ and the glory that should follow, they couldn’t get it together. They did not know what is going on, all I know is God says He’s going to come down, He’s going to be glorious, we’re going to have a glorious kingdom, on the other hand we’re talking about a suffering servant, you can’t recognize him, he’s been our sacrifice, how the heck do we fit this together. They didn’t know. They didn’t have a clue. Did they walk by faith? Yes. Faith in what? The fact that God’s a rational God and He’ll get it together somehow but I don’t know what He’s doing. Doesn’t that sound familiar?

We’ll finish next week.