Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4072. The deep things of God are the subject of one of Paul’s boldest claims about the Holy Spirit, made in passing in a letter to a fractious, spiritually immature congregation in Corinth. In 1 Corinthians 2:10 he writes that God has revealed these things to us through the Spirit, for the Spirit searches…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 4070. Trinitarian pneumatology is not an optional specialism sitting alongside the doctrine of the Holy Spirit. It is the frame within which the doctrine of the Holy Spirit must be studied at all, because the Spirit is not a topic that can be understood correctly in isolation from who He is as the third…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4069. The Spirit before Pentecost operated on a genuinely different basis from His ministry today, and understanding that difference clears up a great deal of confusion about how Old Testament believers related to God’s Spirit. The Holy Spirit was active throughout the Old Testament, not absent until Acts chapter 2. What changed at Pentecost…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 4068. The gift of healing has not ceased, but it has also never operated the way the New Testament describes at every point in church history since Pentecost, and those two statements are not actually in tension once the New Testament’s own pattern is examined closely. Even within the pages of Acts, healing clusters…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4066. A prophetic word is never simply accepted on the strength of someone’s confidence in delivering it. Paul is explicit about this: when someone speaks a word of prophecy in the gathered church, others are to weigh what has been said, testing it rather than receiving it uncritically. That single instruction from 1 Corinthians…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4065. Spiritual gifts are not an aspiration to work towards but a settled fact about every believer in Christ. That is a statement of what has already happened, grounded in the plain teaching of the New Testament, not a target you have yet to reach. To each is given the manifestation of the Spirit…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4063. Spirit filled living is commanded, not simply commended as an optional extra, in Ephesians 5:18, and Paul does not leave the command floating vaguely in the abstract for believers to guess at. Read the verses that surround it and three concrete conditions emerge clearly, conditions any believer can act on today rather than…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4062. The relationship between prophecy and Scripture is often assumed rather than genuinely examined, and the assumption usually runs in one of two mistaken directions, either treating every prophetic word as functionally equal to the Bible itself, or dismissing prophecy altogether simply because it is not Scripture. Paul gives us a considerably better way…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 4061. Whether spiritual gifts today continue to operate the way they did in the first century turns, for a great many cessationist writers, on a single disputed phrase tucked inside 1 Corinthians 13:10, and I want to examine that phrase carefully rather than simply asserting a conclusion and moving on. Paul writes that when…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4060. Spirit baptism and the filling of the Spirit get muddled together constantly in popular teaching, and the confusion is not simply academic, because getting this distinction wrong has produced entire movements built on the idea that some believers possess the Spirit more fully than others. I want to set the two side by…