Personality and Deity of the Holy Spirit Series
The Holy Spirit is Called God
We will end this series with a very well-known passage from Acts 5. But first, a little background. In Acts 4, Luke describes how the believers in that early church treated one another. Acts 4:32, “All the believers were one in heart and mind. No one claimed that any of their possessions was their own,…
In the Name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit
R.A. Torrey asserts, “The name of the Holy Spirit is coupled with that of God in a way it would be impossible for a reverent and thoughtful mind to couple the name of any finite being with that of Deity.”[1] He quotes 1 Corinthians 12:4-6: “There are different kinds of gifts, but the same Spirit…
Is it God, or is it the Holy Spirit?
This indicator of the deity of the Holy Spirit may be a bit subtle, but in his Great Doctrines of the Bible, William Evans offers the following for consideration. Under his proofs for the deity, he says: “Passages which in the Old Testament refer to God are in the New Testament made to refer to…
The Holy Spirit Performs Divine Works
The title above is a fancy way of saying that the Holy Spirit does things that only God can do. Since that’s a broad subject that would take a whole lot of books to explore, we will concentrate very briefly on only three works: creation, the inspiration of Scripture, and giving life. Let’s look at…
The Holy Spirit Displays Divine Attributes
One of the indicators we have in Scripture to show that the Holy Spirit is God is that He displays several key attributes that belong only to God. In brief, the Holy Spirit is eternal (He had no beginning, and will never end); He is omnipresent; omniscient; and omnipotent. What are the Holy Spirit’s…
The Deity of the Holy Spirit
In the first few articles in this series, we followed several lines of evidence to show that the Holy Spirit is a Person. We move now into the biblical evidence that this same Holy Spirit (also called the Holy Ghost) is a full member of the Trinity along with the Father and the Son. What…
The Holy Spirit Can be Grieved
Francis Chan comments, “For a long time whenever I read that we are not to grieve the Holy Spirit (Isa. 63:10; Eph. 4:30), I thought that was a bit of an exaggeration. It almost seems sacrilegious to say that I could grieve God. Who am I to have such power over the Spirit?”[1] In our…
The Helper
I’ve spent quite a bit of time recently reading and researching for my upcoming series on the Personality and Deity of the Holy Spirit. One of the books I’m reading is Elmer Towns’ excellent book, The Ultimate Guide to the Names of God. It is chock full of great thoughts. Three of Dr. Towns books have been combined into this Ultimate Guide: My Father’s Name, The Names of Jesus, and The Names of The Holy Spirit.
I Believe in the Holy Spirit
Okay, why do some version of the Creed say Holy Ghost and others say Holy Spirit? Donald Cole explains, “In the Apostles’ Creed, the term is ‘Holy Ghost,’ but ghost is an Anglo-Saxon word, now considered archaic. Holy Spirit is correct.”[1] The important thing we need to address in this article is that the Holy Spirit is fully a…