Strange Fire: The Danger of Offending the Holy Spirit with Counterfeit Worship

by John F. MacArthur Jr.

Those who worship God must do so in the way He requires, treating Him as holy.

The Holy Spirit—the glorious third member of the Trinity—is no less God than the Father or the Son. Thus, to dishonor the Spirit is to dishonor God Himself. To abuse the Spirit’s name is to take God’s name in vain. To claim He is the one who empowers self-willed, whimsical, and unbiblical worship is to treat God with contempt. To turn the Spirit into a spectacle is to worship God in a way that He deplores.

“It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God” (Heb. 10:31).

On the other hand, the modern Pentecostal and Charismatic Movements2 have pushed the pendulum to the opposite extreme. They have fostered an unhealthy preoccupation with supposed manifestations of the Holy Spirit’s power. Committed charismatics talk incessantly about phenomena, emotions, and the latest wave or sensation. They seem to have comparatively little (sometimes nothing) to say about Christ, His atoning work, or the historical facts of the gospel.3 The charismatic fixation with the Holy Spirit’s supposed work is false honor. Jesus said, “When the Helper comes, whom I shall send to you from the Father, the Spirit of truth who proceeds from the Father, He will testify of Me” (John 15:26). So when the Holy Spirit becomes the focal point of the church’s message, His true work is undermined.

The real Holy Spirit is not an electrifying current of ecstatic energy, a mind-numbing babbler of irrational speech, or a cosmic genie who indiscriminately grants self-centered wishes for health and wealth.

It is a sad twist of irony that those who claim to be most focused on the Holy Spirit are in actuality the ones doing the most to abuse, grieve, insult, misrepresent, quench, and dishonor Him. How do they do it? By attributing to Him words He did not say, deeds He did not do, phenomena He did not produce, and experiences that have nothing to do with Him. They boldly plaster His name on that which is not His work.

Here’s the point: we can’t make God into any form we would like. We cannot mold Him into our own image, according to our own specifications and imaginations. Yet that is what many Pentecostals and charismatics have done. They have created their own golden-calf version of the Holy Spirit. They have thrown their theology into the fires of human experience and worshipped the false spirit that came out—parading themselves before it with bizarre antics and unrestrained behavior. As a movement, they have persistently ignored the truth about the Holy Spirit and with reckless license set up an idol spirit in the house of God, dishonoring the third member of the Trinity in His own name.

By elevating the authority of experience over the authority of Scripture, the Charismatic Movement has destroyed the church’s immune system—uncritically granting free access to every imaginable form of heretical teaching and practice.

The incredible irony is that those who talk the most about the Holy Spirit generally deny His true work. They attribute all kinds of human silliness to Him while ignoring the genuine purpose and power of His ministry: freeing sinners from death, giving them everlasting life, regenerating their hearts, transforming their nature, empowering them for spiritual victory, confirming their place in the family of God, interceding for them according to the will of God, sealing them securely for their eternal glory, and promising to raise them to immortality in the future.

Dry wells, fruitless trees, raging waves, wandering stars, brute beasts, hideous stains, vomit-eating dogs, mud-loving pigs, and ravenous wolves—that is how the Bible describes false prophets (cf. 2 Peter 2; Jude). The New Testament reserves its harshest words of condemnation for those who would falsely claim to speak revelation from God. And what the Bible condemns we must also condemn—doing so with equal vigor and force. But apply those same epithets to today’s false teachers, and you’re likely to be labeled as uncharitable or even unchristian. The ecumenical spirit of the age shrinks back in cowardice from the clear denunciation of error, even when Scripture explicitly warrants it.

The New Testament repeatedly warns that the false prophets who are most dangerous are the wolves who come in sheep’s clothing or disguise themselves as angels of light in order to permeate their lies. They would never overtly deny Christ or oppose the Holy Spirit. Rather, they come in Christ’s name and claim the Holy Spirit’s authority. They infiltrate the church by pretense and subterfuge. This is where they do their real damage.