The Personality Of The Holy Spirit
By R. A. Torrey
What has the Bible to say about the Holy Spirit as a person? It is impossible to rightly understand the work of the Holy Spirit, or to get into right relation with the Holy Spirit Himself and thus know His blessed work in our own souls, without first coming to know the Holy Spirit as a person.
Importance of the Doctrine of the Personality of the Holy Spirit
In the first place, the doctrine of the personality of the Holy Spirit is of the highest importance from the standpoint of worship. If the Holy Spirit is a person, and a divine person, and He is, and if you or I do not know Him as such, if we think of the Holy Spirit merely as an impersonal influence or power, as so many do, then we are robbing a divine person of the worship which is His due, of the love which is His due, and of the faith and confidence and surrender and obedience and worship which are His due.
In the second place, the doctrine of the personality of the Holy Spirit is of highest importance also from a practical standpoint. If you think of the Holy Spirit as a mere influence or power, then your thought will constantly be, "How can I get hold of the Holy Spirit and use it?" and "How can I get more of the Holy Spirit?" But if you think of Him in the biblical way, as a person of divine majesty and glory, your thought will be, "How can the Holy Spirit get hold of me and use me?" and "How can the Holy Spirit get more of me?"
If you think of the Holy Spirit as an influence or power that you are to get hold of and use, and then fancy that you have received the Holy Spirit, the inevitable result will be that you will strut around as if you belonged to a superior order of Christians. But on the other hand, if you think of the Holy Spirit in the biblical way, as a divine person of infinite majesty, who comes to dwell in our hearts and take possession of us and use us as He wills, not as we will, it leads to self-renunciation, self-abnegation, self-humiliation. I know of no thought that is more calculated to keep us humble and lowly than this great biblical truth of the Holy Spirit as a divine person coming to take up His dwelling in our hearts, and to take possession of our lives and to use us as He in His infinite wisdom sees fit.
In the third place, the doctrine of the personality of the Holy Spirit is of the highest importance from the standpoint of experience. Thousands and tens of thousands of Christian men and women can testify to an entire transformation of their experience and of their service through coming to know the Holy Spirit as a person.
Proofs of the Personality Of the Holy Spirit
One of the lines of proof of the personality of the Holy Spirit is that all the distinctive marks or characteristics of personality are ascribed to the Holy Spirit in the Bible. What are the distinctive marks of personality? Knowledge, feeling and will. Any being who knows and feels and wills is a person. Oftentimes when you say that the Holy Spirit is a person, people understand you to mean that the Holy Spirit has hands and feet and fingers and toes and eyes and ears and nose and mouth and so on. No, not at all. These are not the marks of personality; these are the marks of bodily substance.
The marks of personality are knowledge, feeling and will. Any being who knows, thinks and feels and wills is a person whether he has a body or not. You and I, if our earthly life ends before the Lord’s return, will cease to have bodies for the time being; we will be "absent from the body, and at home with the Lord" (2 Cor. 5:8), but we shall not cease to be persons. We will be persons still, even though we have no body. The marks of personality – knowledge, feeling and will – are ascribed to the Holy Spirit in the Bible.
(1) "For what man knoweth the things of a man, save the spirit of man which is in him? Even so the things of God knoweth no man, but the Spirit of God" (1 Cor. 2:11). Here knowledge is ascribed to the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is not a mere illumination that comes to your mind and mine, whereby our minds are enlightened and strengthened to see truth that they would not otherwise discover. No, the Holy Spirit is a person who Himself knows the things of God and reveals to us what He Himself knows.
(2) "But all these worketh the one and the same Spirit, dividing to each one severally even as He will" (1 Cor. 12:11). The thought is that the Holy Spirit is not merely a divine power that we get hold of and use according to our will, but that the Holy Spirit is a divine person who gets hold of us and uses us according to His will. Countless earnest-minded Christians are going astray at this point. They are trying to get hold of some divine power which they can use according to their will. While I thank God from the depth of my heart that there is no divine power that I can get hold of to use according to my will, I am still more glad that there is a divine person who can get hold of me and use me according to His infinitely wise and loving will.
(3) "And He that searcheth the hearts knoweth what is the mind of the Spirit, because He maketh intercession for the saints according to the will of God" (Rom. 8:27). Note here the expression, "the mind of the Spirit." The Greek work here translated "mind" is "phronema," and it is a comprehensive word that has in it all three ideas of knowledge, feeling and will. It is the same word which is used in the seventh verse of this chapter, where we read, "The mind of the flesh is enmity against God." The thought there is that not merely the thought of the flesh is enmity against God, but the whole moral and intellectual life of the flesh is enmity against God.
(4) "Now I beseech you, brethren, for the Lord Jesus Christ’s sake, and for the love of the Spirit, that ye strive together with me in your prayers to God for me" (Rom. 15:30). Notice particularly these five words, "the love of the Spirit." It is a wonderful thought. It teaches that the Holy Spirit is not a mere blind influence or power, no matter how beneficent, that comes into our hearts and lives, but that He Himself is a divine person, loving us with the tenderest love.
I wonder how many of you have ever thanked the Holy Spirit for His love. Do you ever kneel down and look up to the Holy Spirit and say to Him, "Holy Spirit, I thank Thee for Thy great love to me"? Yet, we owe our salvation as truly to the love of the Spirit as we do to the love of the Father and the love of the Son. If it had not been for the love of God the Father to me, looking down upon me in my lost estate, yes, anticipating my fall and ruin and sending His own Son down to this world to die upon the cross in my place, I would have been a lost man today. If it had not been for the love of Jesus Christ the Son coming down to this world in obedience to the Father and laying down His life, a perfect atoning sacrifice on the cross of Calvary in my behalf, I would have been a lost man today. But if it had not been for the love of the Holy Spirit to me, leading Him to come down to this world in obedience to the Father and the Son, to seek me out in my lost condition, following me day after day and week after week and month after month and year after year, following me when I would not listen to Him, when I deliberately turned my back upon Him, when I insulted Him, following me into places where it must have been agony for that Holy One to go, until at last He succeeded in bringing me to my senses and bringing me to realize my utterly lost condition, and revealing the Lord Jesus to me as the Savior whom I needed and induced and enabled me to receive the Lord Jesus as my Savior and Lord; if it had not been for this patient, long-suffering, never-wearying love of the Spirit of God to me, I would have been a lost man today.
(5) "Thou gavest also Thy good Spirit to instruct them, and withheldest not Thy manna from their mouth, and gavest them water for their thirst" (Neh. 9:20). Here both intelligence and goodness are ascribed to the Holy Spirit. This passage does not add anything to the thoughts that we have already had; I have brought it in merely because it is from the Old Testament. There are those who say that the doctrine of the personality of the Holy Spirit is in the New Testament but not in the Old Testament; but here we find it as clearly in the Old Testament as in the New. Of course, we do not find it as frequently in the Old Testament as in the New, for this is the dispensation of the Holy Spirit, but the doctrine of the personality of the Holy Spirit is there in the Old Testament.
(6) "And grieve not the Holy Spirit of God, whereby ye are sealed unto the day of redemption" (Eph. 4:30). Here grief is ascribed to the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is a person who loves us, a person who is holy and intensely sensitive against sin, a person who recoils from sin in what we would call its slightest forms. He sees everything we do, not only in the daylight but under the cover of the night; He hears every word we utter, every careless word that escapes our lips; He sees every thought we entertain, yes, every fleeting fancy that we allow a moment’s lodgment in our mind, and if there is anything unholy, impure, immodest, uncharitable, improper, unkind, harsh, bitter, censorious, or unChristlike in any way, in act or word or thought, He sees it and is grieved beyond expression.
How often there has come into my mind some thought or imagination, from what source I do not know, but it is a thought I ought not to entertain, and just as I was about to give it lodgment the thought has come, "The Holy Spirit sees that and will be grieved by it," and the thought has gone. With questions that come up and that some of us find so hard to settle, this thought of the Holy Spirit will help you to settle them all, and to settle them right, if you really desire to settle them right and not merely to do the thing that pleases yourself, even though it may grieve the Holy Spirit.
– Arranged from The Holy Spirit: Who He Is and What He Does by R. A. Torrey.