Who Is The Holy Spirit? (Crucial Questions, #13)

by R.C. Sproul

God is one being with three subsistences, with three distinct persons. They subsist within the being of God.

The role of the Holy Spirit chiefly and principally in the New Testament is to apply the work of Christ to believers.

But the Holy Spirit is not simply an abstract force. He is a person who empowers the people of God for the Christian life.

They were first called Christians at Antioch (Acts 11:26), but it is believed that the term was created by non-Christians to hurl derision on them.

To be spiritually dead is to be worldly. It is to buy into and follow slavishly the values and customs of the secular culture.

Nietzsche believed the biggest problem with Western civilization was the baleful influence of Christianity. He was convinced that the ethic of Christianity, with its virtues of meekness and kindness, had emasculated the human race. He felt that Christianity denied and undercut the most basic human passion of all—the will to power.

Life, Nietzsche said, is a power struggle. All of us are engaged in a competitive enterprise, seeking dominance over others.

Nietzsche called for a new civilization that would be brought in by a new kind of human being, a new kind of existential hero, which he...

Nietzsche came to the conclusion that life ultimately is nihilistic or meaningless. He believed God is dead, and since there is no God, there is no such thing as absolute goodness or truth.

The idea is that the church operates not so much as a hospital but as an army, and the Holy Spirit comes to empower and strengthen Christians, to ensure victory or conquest.

Nietzsche wanted a superman, a conqueror. He should have looked to Christ.

So, the work of the Holy Spirit supplements the work of Christ. Christ was the first Paraclete, who came to strengthen us by His atoning death. Now, the empowerment to live the life that Christ has called us to live comes to us by the Holy Spirit.

Among the persons of the Trinity, the Spirit is the principal actor who works for our sanctification, enabling the process by which we are conformed to the image of Christ and made holy.

So, a primary reason why the Holy Spirit is called the Holy Spirit is because it is His specific task to enable followers of Christ in their quest for sanctification.

The Holy Spirit never entices us to do something that is unholy. Neither does the Holy Spirit ever incline us to embrace a lie.

Was Jesus unloving when He contradicted the teaching of the Pharisees? Were the prophets of ancient Israel unloving when they rebuked and admonished the false prophets?

Contending for the truth of God is an act of love, not a sign of an absence of love. If we love God, if we love Christ, if we love the church, we must love the truth that defines the very essence of Christianity.

Thus, to say Christianity is not about propositions but about relationships is to establish an extremely dangerous false dichotomy.