The sermons ofPeter McKnight

The Holy Spirit and the Bible

The Holy SpiritJohn 16:7 (approximate)Erindale Bible Chapel, Mississauga, Ontario

Wouldn’t it be great to have been alive when Jesus walked this earth? Wouldn’t it be great to have been in his band of followers? To see his miracles? To hear him teach? Just to be with him around the table, and be able to ask him questions, and bask in the warmth of his personality? Wouldn’t that be wonderful?

Well, this may come as a surprise to you, but Jesus Himself said that it is better to be alive now – after he has gone back to heaven – than to be alive during his earthly ministry.

John 16:7 But I tell you the truth: It is for your good (NASV – it is to your advantage) that I am going away. Unless I go away, the Counselor will not come to you; but if I go, I will send him to you.

In other words, it is for our benefit that Jesus went back to heaven. It is for our good that we can be his followers now, in A.D. 2002, not A.D. 32. Why? It’s because now we have the Holy Spirit, the Counselor, in our lives. He’s the one who makes all the difference! That’s why Jesus could say…

  • After I go back to heaven, you’ll do even greater things than I do… (John 14:12)

  • You shall receive power after the Holy Spirit comes upon you, and you will be my witnesses… and as you go and make disciples, I will be with you always, even until the end of the age. With you in the person of the Holy Spirit… (Acts 1:8; Matt. 28:19-20)

  • You should be glad that I am going back to the Father… (John 14:28)

The Holy Spirit is a full-fledged member of the Trinity, but he sometimes seems to be the forgotten member of the Trinity, even though Jesus himself said that it’s better that you have him than that you have me. We need to get to know the Holy Spirit better.

Q. Why do I need to know the Holy Spirit? Isn’t it enough to know Jesus? All this talk about the Holy Spirit makes me nervous. I don’t want to become one of those holy rollers I’ve heard about!

A. We need to get to know the Holy Spirit better for three reasons…

1. Because the Holy Spirit is God, that’s why. He is not just some impersonal force, or power supply that we need to live the Christian life; he is God himself living within us. The Holy Spirit is a person with personality; in fact, He is the most personal, intimate member of the Triune God. Theologian Millard Erickson puts it this way…

“The Holy Spirit is the point at which the Trinity becomes personal to the believer. We think of the Father as transcendent and far off in heaven; similarly, the Son seems far removed in history and thus also relatively unknowable. But the Holy Spirit is active within the lives of believers; he is resident within us.”

Think of him this way (although this definition is inadequate theologically): the Holy Spirit is the most personal side of God. This is not God in his role as King of the Universe; this is not God in his role as suffering servant hanging on the cross; this is God in his role as Friend, Comforter, and Counselor; the God who loves me so much that he wants to take up residence in my life.

A while ago, someone asked me “Is it proper to pray to the Holy Spirit?” (This person had been taught that we should only address our prayers to God the Father in the name of Jesus the Son.) My answer: “Of course it is. The Holy Spirit is God living in us. Prayer is just talking with God. So why wouldn’t we talk to him?”

2. We also need to know the Holy Spirit because we are living in that period of human history when the Holy Spirit plays a more prominent role than do the other members of the Trinity. We are now living in the Age of the Spirit

  1. Old Testament – from the time of the patriarchs, God the Father was on center stage in his dealings w. Israel

  2. Gospels – God the Son was on center stage in his earthly ministry, his death, and resurrection – about 33 years.

  3. Church Age (Pentecost to the present) – God the Holy Spirit is on center stage as he indwells believers and energizes the church – almost 2,000 years – so we need to get to know him!

3. We need to know who the Holy Spirit is and what He does because we live in a culture that places a very high stress on the individual, and on that individual’s personal experience. In many ways, personal, subjective experience has superceded truth, or taken on the role of truth in our society.

Now the Bible says that it is through the Holy Spirit that we personally experience God’s presence in our lives. But we need to be careful here: careful that our experience of God is not merely subjective. Our experience of God needs to be objectively rooted in the Scripture – where God teaches us about who the Holy Spirit is, what His ministry is, and what he wants to do in our lives. The objective truth of the Bible needs to be the standard by which we interpret our personal experience with God; not vice versa.

In our experience-driven society, though, it shouldn’t be surprising that some Christians go to extremes in their emphasis on the Holy Spirit. They have almost become fixated on him in their yearning to experience God. And this has led to some bizarre practices and expressions, and then a twisting of the teaching of the Scriptures in order to try to make their personal experiences fit into the Bible. I believe that this is a dangerous trend among evangelicals today.

But there are other Christians and churches who have gone, in reaction to these excesses, to an opposite and equally wrong extreme: they have deliberately underemphasized and downplayed the Holy Spirit and his ministry to the point where their expression of Christianity has become legalistic, lifeless, and sterile; it is missing that rich, experiential dimension of healthy Christianity.

It is my desire that here at Erindale, we find a proper balance.

  • We want to honor the Holy Spirit by recognizing who He is and what He wants to do in our lives.

  • We want to give Him freedom to work His work in us and through us as individuals and as a church.

  • We do not want to limit him by imposing man-made rules on what He can or cannot do. We don’t want to quench the Spirit’s fire!

  • But we also want to honor the teaching of the Word of God

  • We want to submit ourselves to the factual, objective truth that God has given us in the Bible with regards to the ministry of His Spirit.

  • We want the Bible to be our template for living the Spirit-filled life

When we honor the Word of God, we are honoring the Spirit of God, and vice versa! The two always flow in the same direction. They are never in conflict. You’re never going to find the Holy Spirit telling you to do something that contradicts the Bible. And you’re never going to find the Bible’s teaching putting a lid on the Holy Spirit’s ministry.

Why is that? Because the Holy Spirit is the author of the Bible.

The Holy Spirit was intimately involved in every step of the creation of the Bible. And we want to look at that today.

Have you ever thought about how the Bible came to be? Well, the Bible started out as a thought in the mind of God. And through a process called revelation, God communicated it to certain people (the Biblical writers – people like Moses, David, Ezra, Luke, and Paul). He communicated truth that was unknown and unknowable.

  • Truth about himself

  • Truth about ourselves

  • Truth about the past, the present and the future

  • Truth about spiritual things

Revelation: The process by which God reveals to the human authors of the Bible truth that was previously unknown and unknowable.

Q. How did God do this?

A. Well, it says in Heb. 1:1 In the past God spoke to our forefathers through the prophets at many times and in various ways…

God’s revelation came to these special people in various ways:

  • Angels

  • Dreams

  • Visions

  • Miracles

  • Natural phenomena

  • Audible voice

  • Inner voice

  • Various other ways

And revelation always resulted in God transmitting his thoughts into the minds of the human authors of Scripture. Paul was one of those authors as he wrote about revelation…

1 Corinthians 2:9-10 “No eye has seen, no ear has heard, no mind has conceived what God has prepared for those who love him” — but God has revealed it to us by his Spirit.

Ephesians 3:5 (The mystery of Christ) was not made known to men in other generations as it has now been revealed by the Spirit to God’s holy apostles and prophets.

Revelation was how God conveyed his thoughts into the minds of the human authors of Scripture; it was the first step in the creation of the Bible. And it happened because of the work of the Holy Spirit.

The next step was that God moved these select individuals to take pen in hand and write down his thoughts—to record them in written form so that they could be preserved. Now that introduces an enormous problem…

Q. How do we know they did it accurately? How do we know they didn’t botch it? How do we know that what these people wrote down was exactly the thoughts of God?

If you’ve ever had the experience of sitting in a classroom taking notes from a lecturer, you know that you may entirely miss some of the things the lecturer says, and you misunderstand others. As you furiously scribble away, you re-interpret things, you re-state things in your own words, and you do so in a way that may even misrepresent what the lecturer was really trying to say. How do we know that the authors of Scripture didn’t do that?

A. The Bible says that God, in the person of the Holy Spirit, stepped in to make sure that that didn’t happen. And the process he used was a process that we call inspiration.

Inspiration: The process by which the Holy Spirit superintended the human authors of the Bible so that what they wrote was a true and faithful record of God’s revelation. This means that the Holy Spirit inspired the very words of Scripture in the original manuscripts. Each and every word, indeed each and every letter or stroke of the pen, as Jesus said in the Sermon on the Mount, was inspired by God.

2 Peter 1:21 For prophecy never had its origin in the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit.

2 Timothy 3:16 All Scripture is God-breathed (KJV – given by inspiration of God) and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness

So the Holy Spirit superintended the human authors as they wrote. But the amazing thing is that He allowed the personalities of those authors to come through and be a part of the final product. He didn’t just dictate what they should write, as though each of them was nothing more than a tape recorder, or a dictation machine. No, the Holy Spirit allowed their human characteristics to come through, but not in such a way as to allow error into God’s revelation.

So far, we’ve seen that the Bible has come from

  1. A thought in the mind of God, to…

  2. A thought in the mind of the human authors of Scripture, to…

  3. The words of the original manuscripts of the Bible…

And we’ve seen that the Holy Spirit has been intimately involved in the process of revelation and inspiration. What’s next?

Well obviously, we don’t have the original manuscripts of the Bible today – we don’t have in a museum somewhere an actual document called Paul’s Letter to the Romans with Paul’s signature on it. (That, by the way, is why scholars sometimes refer to the original manuscripts as the autographs – it’s the actual original document that the author signed.) The original manuscripts would have worn out pretty rapidly through reading and re-reading. So naturally, they were copied. But this was long before the age of the photocopier, or the printing press, so these copies had to be done by hand.

You say: Aha! There’s the weak link! There’s the fatal flaw! How do we know that the copiers of Scripture did their job properly? Have you ever tried to hand-copy a hand-written document of several thousand words length? I doubt it! How do we know that the copiers didn’t mess up: miss a line, miss a paragraph, miss a page?

Furthermore, how do we know that they were always honest? Maybe some of them decided to leave out certain sections of the Bible that they didn’t agree with, or perhaps add some sections that they thought should have been in there in the first place? How can we be confident of their integrity and their fidelity to the originals?

Well, this is a fascinating study, and one that we don’t have time to cover in any depth today. It is called textual criticism, and in a nutshell, it can be summarized this way:

Textual Criticism: If you have many copies of an original document, but you do not have the original itself, you can determine the content of the original by comparing the copies.

e.g. If you have 100 copies of a document, and only one of them has a certain sentence in it, but the other 99 do not, you can be quite confident that that sentence was not in the original. Someone had to have added that sentence somewhere along the way and thus corrupted that copy. The witness of the 99 similar copies weighs against the one deviant copy.

Another factor that comes into play is the age of the copies. If you know that a certain copy of a document is almost as old as the original itself, that means that that copy had to have been done quite early in the process. In fact, it may be only one or two copies removed from the original. You would conclude that there hadn’t been very much opportunity for mistakes to creep in that early in the process. So you would give that early copy a weight of authority beyond that of a copy that was, say, 50 generations removed from the original autograph.

Now here is something very significant: the more copies of an original document you have, the better the science of textual criticism works. And the more ancient those copies are, the better yet, because you have more opportunity for comparing the copies, and more confidence that because you are working with early copies, they are that much more likely to be faithful to the original.

And on this score, the Bible has provided the textual critics with an embarrassment of riches. We have far, far more ancient copies of the Bible than we have of any other document from ancient times. The number of ancient manuscripts and fragments of the Bible is staggering; it runs into the tens of thousands, and more are being discovered year by year through the careful work of archaeology.

Q. You might ask: Why go to all that trouble? Why didn’t God just preserve the ancient autographs for us?

A. Because of our tendency to worship holy relics. If we had an original autograph of the book of Genesis, signed by Moses, you know what we would do with something like that? We would make an idol out of it; we would fight wars over it; men would kill one another in order to possess that precious artifact. We would make a talisman of it; a good luck charm. And in the process, we would ignore its message in our greed to possess it.

I believe that the Holy Spirit ensured that so many manuscript copies of the BIble would be preserved from ancient times, so that we could know with certainty what was in the original, and have confidence in the reliability of the Scriptures.

With this enormous body of evidence to work from, textual critics have established that we know with 99.9% certainty the exact contents of the original manuscripts. There are no surprises waiting to be discovered; no “lost books” or hidden passages that will suddenly overturn the doctrines of the Christian faith.

So the science of textual criticism gives us confidence that our modern Hebrew and Greek versions of the Bible are an exact rendition of the original autographs.

But you say: Wait a minute! Did you say modern Hebrew and Greek versions? I don’t read Hebrew or Greek – I read English! How do I know that my English Bible is a correct translation of the Hebrew and Greek?

Well, this opens another fascinating field – the art and science of translation. There is no book in the world that has been translated into more languages than the Bible. There are literally thousands of translations of the Bible! And the work of Bible translation goes on today, because languages are always changing. The English language has changed dramatically in the last 400 years – that’s why the King James Version sounds so strange. It was translated not long after Shakespeare was writing his plays.

Translators talk about the source language and the receptor language. The aim of a good translation is to capture the meaning of a document that is written in the source language so that you can express it naturally and accurately in the receptor language. Translation is not about the transfer of words; it’s about the transfer of meaning.

There will never be a final, definitive English language translation of Scripture, because the English language is constantly evolving, as is the culture of those who speak English. The same is true for every other language on planet earth. This means that every generation or so, we need to keep producing new versions of the Bible in the various languages of the world.

And a good Bible translator needs to understand not only the source language and the receptor language, he or she needs to understand a lot about cultural anthropology so as to be sensitive to the cultural issues involved in the work of translation.

(There’s an excellent article on Bible Translation in one of the recent issues of Christianity Today, which you can find in our library.)

So we have come from a thought in the mind of God, to the mind of the human author of Scripture, to the original autographs of Scripture, to the copies of those originals, to the translations of those copies into our various modern languages. And we have seen that the Holy Spirit of God has been integrally involved in this process.

There’s one more step to be made. I am sitting at my desk with my Bible open. Or I’m sitting in church listening to a preacher preaching a Bible message. What has to happen in order for me to understand what I am reading, or what I am hearing?

Well, not surprisingly, the Holy Spirit has to step in and do something special in order to complete this final, most important link in the chain.

What he does is called illumination. Illumination is when the Holy Spirit enables me to understand and accept and believe the thoughts of God that are expressed in the Bible.

Illumination is the process by which God the Holy Spirit opens the mind of the human reader of the Bible to understand and accept God’s revelation.

As human beings, we cannot understand the true meaning of the Word of God unless we rely on the Holy Spirit. That’s why Jesus said to his disciples…

John 16:13 But when he, the Spirit of truth, comes, he will guide you into all truth.

In 1 Cor. 2, Paul talks about the Holy Spirit’s role in both the process of revelation and illumination…

1 Corinthians 2:9 “No eye has seen, no ear has heard, no mind has conceived what God has prepared for those who love him” — but God has revealed it to us by his Spirit.

That’s revelation; that’s God making known by His Spirit what was previously unknown and unknowable. Then Paul goes on…

1 Corinthians 2:10-12 The Spirit searches all things, even the deep things of God. For who among men knows the thoughts of a man except the man’s spirit within him? In the same way no one knows the thoughts of God except the Spirit of God. We have not received the spirit of the world but the Spirit who is from God, that we may understand what God has freely given us.

One of the reasons that God gives us His Spirit is so that we can understand the message of the Bible. That’s why John says in…

1 John 2:20 But you have an anointing from the Holy One, and all of you know the truth.

Let me give you a personal anecdote here. I invited Jesus to come into my life when I was 8 years old. But as a teenager, I went through a period of rebellion and wandered far away from God. Oh, I still went to church, but I found it boring. And I never read my Bible. I was mad at God, mad at the world.

But then, when I was 18 years old, God really spoke to me about the way I had been living. I was sick of being an angry young man with a chip on my shoulder, sick of living that way, in sullen rebellion against God. So I surrendered my life to him. I asked him to forgive me for the way I had been living, for wasting those 10 precious years of my life. And I asked him to fill me with his Holy Spirit in obedience to…

Ephesians 5:18 Do not get drunk on wine, which leads to debauchery. Instead, be filled with the Spirit.

Something radical happened to me that day. I did not overnight become a new person, but the first thing I noticed was that I was hungry for God’s truth. I picked up my little-used Bible and began to read. And you know what? It made sense to me – I found myself understanding it. And when I went to church, I found myself listening with growing interest to the Bible messages. I even began to take notes during the sermons!

And I found myself wanting to learn more and more of the Bible. So I decided to enroll at Ontario Bible College – not to become a pastor, just to learn more of the Bible.

You know what was happening? The Holy Spirit was finally able to do a work in my life. He had been in my life ever since I became a Christian at 8 years of age. But for the first 10 years, I had quenched his fire, I had kept him down, I had grieved him by my own stubbornness and rebellion. But now he was finally free to do what he had come to do.

I don’t know where you’re at this morning. It may be that the Holy Spirit has total freedom in your life to do what He wants to do. Or maybe you are like I was. You are mad at God over something, and you’re not going to let him have control of your life.

One of the great barometers of where you are at spiritually in relation to the Holy Spirit is your attitude toward the Word of God. Do you love the Word of God? Do you read your Bible – do you hunger and thirst for its truth? Or is it for you a closed book?

The Holy Spirit wants to do so much for you. But he can only do it if you let him.