Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4108. The spirit reception pattern that runs through Acts 2, 8, 10, and 19 is one of the more rewarding things to trace through the whole book, because Luke is not simply recording four unconnected incidents. He is showing his readers, one carefully placed scene at a time, how the Holy Spirit brought four…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4107. Simon Magus is one of the more unsettling figures in the book of Acts, precisely because he looks, for one brief moment, like a genuine convert. Luke tells us plainly that Simon believed and was baptised along with the rest of the Samaritans who responded to Philip’s preaching (Acts 8:13). And yet within…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4106. Philip the evangelist is one of my favourite characters in the whole book of Acts, and I suspect he does not get nearly the attention he deserves. He was not one of the twelve apostles. He held no office higher than deacon, appointed in Acts 6 to wait on tables so the apostles…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 4105. laying on hands by the apostles, rather than the moment of their belief, is what Luke tells us the Samaritans in Acts 8 were actually waiting for before they received the Holy Spirit, and the gap between believing and receiving has puzzled careful readers for as long as the passage has been studied….
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4103. Spirit baptism and water baptism are related closely enough in the New Testament that Christians regularly confuse the two, but they are not the same event, and keeping them distinct actually protects both doctrines rather than diminishing either. Spirit baptism is the Spirit’s own act, placing every believer into the body of Christ…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 4102. receiving the Spirit is exactly what the disciples appear to be doing on resurrection evening, when Jesus breathes on them behind locked doors and says, ‘Receive the Holy Spirit,’ and yet the scene raises a genuine puzzle that deserves careful, patient handling rather than a quick answer. John records the moment in a…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 4101. Spirit indwelling and whether it can ever be lost is not an abstract puzzle for theologians to argue over on a wet afternoon. It reaches directly into how a believer sleeps at night. Someone who believes their salvation depends on sustained spiritual performance lives in a fundamentally different psychological and spiritual state from…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4100. The Spirit in salvation does far more work than most believers realise, and most of it happens before we are even aware anything is happening at all. Salvation is the work of the whole Trinity: the Father who planned it, the Son who accomplished it at the cross, and the Holy Spirit who…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 4099. Receiving the Spirit is exactly what Paul asks these Ephesian men about in Acts 19:2, and the answer they give has been fought over ever since, mostly by people looking for support for a doctrine Luke was not trying to teach. “Did you receive the Holy Spirit when you believed?” Paul asks, and…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4098. The fruit metaphor Paul chooses in Galatians 5 was not his only option, and that is worth sitting with for a moment. He could have written a list of virtues, a framework every educated reader in the Greco-Roman world would instantly have recognised from Aristotle and the Stoics. He could have described the…