ACTS 5:1-6 - God The Holy Spirit

Introduction

There was a TV show on a number of years ago that we used to watch—I don’t know if it’s still airing, but I still see clips of it surfacing from time to time. It’s called Undercover Boss. A CEO of a big company will dress up in disguise and go work at an entry-level position in his or her own company, in order to evaluate the working conditions and quality of their employees. It’s equal parts morality lesson on treating everyone you meet with dignity and respect and guilty pleasure of watching lazy or nasty managers get their comeuppance when they realize the guy they were yelling at for not serving smoothies fast enough is actually in a position to fire them.

As we begin this series on the Spirit-filled life of a Christian, I can’t help but draw a comparison with the way many Christians relate to God the Holy Spirit. There are those who name the Name of Christ who believe (and act) as though God the Holy Spirit is a force or power or energy that they can “use” to accomplish their own purposes; they act as though He were some sort of cosmic slave by which they can manipulate the world around them for their own wealth and happiness. Indeed, there are those who claim that God the Holy Spirit makes them bark like a dog or roll on the floor in hysterical laughter or cause them to spew forth streams of gibberish as some sort of private prayer language, or who claim that His power rests uniquely on them while at the same time they indulge in the most shockingly immoral or wicked behavior.

But at the same time, there are Christians who see the slanderous apostasies of those individuals and react in the opposite way—downplaying or minimizing the work of God the Holy Spirit in their lives, ignoring or avoiding talking about Him or considering His role in either their salvation or their sanctification; who are uncomfortable speaking in terms of His power working through them for life and godliness and good works.

But as one preacher so memorably said, “I will not be denied my birthright of the gift of God’s Holy Spirit because of the apostasies and errors of false teachers.” If there are those who are dishonoring God the Holy Spirit by their errors and lies, then we must not respond by functionally denying His power and His work in our lives.

And so what I am for us to do in the next several weeks is to seek to understand from God’s Word (the Book written by God the Holy Spirit!) who the Holy Spirit is and the nature of His presence and work in the world generally and in the lives of believers particularly.

And I believe that one of the best correctives that we can employ in our approach to God the Holy Spirit is to recapture the reverence for His nature that His Word demands. It’s one of the reasons I want to emphasize “God the Holy Spirit”—we need to remember that the Holy Spirit is God Himself. And so the way I want to start this series this morning is to establish that

A Christian shows REVERENCE for the MAJESTY of the Holy Spirit

I believe that when we bring our perceptions of who the Holy Spirit is and what He does into submission with what the Word of God teaches, we will avoid the ditches on either side of the road—the blasphemous slanders of charismatic false teachers on one hand and the dismissive functional atheism of cessationist Christians on the other. A reverence for the majesty of God the Holy Spirit is the foundation for our understanding of His person and work.

And so I want to consider three characteristics of the majesty of God the Holy Spirit from the Scriptures this morning. First, consider

I. The majesty of His PERSON

God the Holy Spirit is not a mere force or power that can be harnessed and used or directed like an inanimate object. He is not a manifestation of a sensation in your body or a sense of electricity or magnetism—God the Holy Spirit is a Person.

Look with me at the passage that we read a few moments ago; Acts 5:1-4. We see here that

God the Holy Spirit can be LIED to (Acts 5:1-4)

Acts 5:3–4 (ESV)

3 But Peter said, “Ananias, why has Satan filled your heart to lie to the Holy Spirit and to keep back for yourself part of the proceeds of the land? 4 While it remained unsold, did it not remain your own? And after it was sold, was it not at your disposal? Why is it that you have contrived this deed in your heart? You have not lied to man but to God.”

You cannot lie to gravity. You cannot try to mislead electricity. When you relate to God the Holy Spirit as some kind of force that can be stored up or transferred or deployed in some way you are profaning the majesty of God. Ananias (and a few verses later, his wife Sapphira) lost their lives because they disregarded the majesty of God the Holy Spirit, believing that His presence was a matter of indifference; that He was present in the form of some power to be accessed and not as a Person to honor with the truth.

He is a Person Who can be lied to—and the Scriptures tell us that

God the Holy Spirit can be GRIEVED (Ephesians 4:30; Isaiah 63:10)

In Ephesians 4, the Apostle Paul writes to believers who were careless and corrupted in their speech, slandering each other with bitterness and anger. Paul writes to exhort them to gracious and edifying speech instead:

Ephesians 4:29–31 (ESV)

29 Let no corrupting talk come out of your mouths, but only such as is good for building up, as fits the occasion, that it may give grace to those who hear. 30 And do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God, by whom you were sealed for the day of redemption. 31 Let all bitterness and wrath and anger and clamor and slander be put away from you, along with all malice.

Put away such talk, Paul says, because it grieves the Holy Spirit. The Greek word underneath the English translation “grieve” means to sadden, to pain, to distress or make sorry. Once again—you can’t make gravity sorry. You can’t make magnetism sad. The only way that these verses make sense at all is to understand that God the Holy Spirit is a person, not a force.

In coming weeks we will see many more proofs that God the Holy Spirit is more than just some power or dynamic force or ability that comes from God. The Holy Spirit teaches us (John 14:26), He instructs us (Acts 13:2), He prays for us (Romans 8:26), He convicts us (John 16:8), speaks what He hears and declares what God the Son gives Him to declare (John 16:14).

Do not diminish the majesty of the person of the Holy Spirit by treating Him as some kind of inanimate force or thing that can be manipulated. Show reverence for the majesty of the Holy Spirit in His person, and show reverence for

II. The majesty of His DEITY

As part of our worship during the Lord’s Supper we read from various historic and modern creeds of the church. In the Nicene Creed, we read of God the Holy Spirit that He is

... the Lord and Giver of life, who proceeds from the Father and the Son, who with the Father and the Son together is worshiped and glorified, who spoke by the prophets.

This is to say that we worship the Holy Spirit as God Himself. The Nicene Creed affirms this truth about the Holy Spirit because we see in the Scriptures that He displays the characteristics of God Himself—what theologians call incommunicable attributes of God;

Incommunicable Attributes of God: CHARACTERISTICS of God that cannot be SHARED or IMITATED by His creatures

So, for instance, while we are called to share God’s communicable attributes—love and grace and mercy and holiness—there are certain attributes of God that we cannot share. Attributes such as God’s omnipotence—that He can do all things—or His omnipresence—that He is at all times present everywhere, and there is no place where He is not; these are incommunicable attributes of God. We cannot be omnipresent or omnipotent.

And so when we see the incommunicable attributes of God attributed to the Holy Spirit, we understand that He is sharing in attributes that can only be true of God. So, for instance, we see in Hebrews 9 that

He is ETERNAL (Hebrews 9:14)

The author of Hebrews is comparing the blood of bulls and goats in the Old Covenant with Christ’s superior New Covenant blood—he writes in Hebrews 9:13-14

Hebrews 9:13–14 (ESV)

13 For if the blood of goats and bulls, and the sprinkling of defiled persons with the ashes of a heifer, sanctify for the purification of the flesh, 14 how much more will the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered himself without blemish to God, purify our conscience from dead works to serve the living God.

Since God Himself is the Creator and Sustainer of all things, it is impossible for creatures to be eternal; to have existed before God created the world. So since creatures cannot be eternal, and the Holy Spirit is an eternal Spirit, we understand that He is God Himself.

We see at least one other incommunicable attribute of God ascribed to the Holy Spirit in the New Testament—in 1 Corinthians 2, we see that

He is OMNISCIENT (1 Cor. 2:10-11)

Paul writes of

1 Corinthians 2:10–11 (ESV)

10 ...things God has revealed to us through the Spirit. For the Spirit searches everything, even the depths of God. 11 For who knows a person’s thoughts except the spirit of that person, which is in him? So also no one comprehends the thoughts of God except the Spirit of God.

In order to “comprehend the thoughts of God”, to fully perceive or understand all of God’s thoughts, the Holy Spirit would have to have the same capacity for understanding as the mind of God. God fully and completely understands with perfect and unerring knowledge everything that is or was or ever could be; His knowledge of the entirety of reality is utterly exhaustive. No creature could have such knowledge—only God can understand the thoughts of God.

This is why it was so unbelievably foolish for Ananias and Sapphira to think that they could deceive the Holy Spirit! There is nothing that can be known that He does not know; there is nothing that cannot be known by Him, there is nothing that can be hidden from Him or can mislead or trick Him. The majesty of the Holy Spirit is the majesty of His Deity—and Ananias and Sapphira paid for disdaining His majesty with their lives.

And yet we are shown in the Scriptures that there is a worse fate for those who disregard and malign the majesty of the Holy Spirit’s Deity. He is eternal, He is omniscient, and Jesus tells us

He can be BLASPHEMED (Mark 3:29; cp. John 3:2)

When the scribes and scholars came down from Jerusalem to investigate Jesus and His miraculous works, they came with the presumption that He was “possessed by Beelzebul, and by the prince of demons [Satan], He casts out the demons.” (Mark 3:22). In Jewish mythology, Beelzebul was said to be one of the “sons of God” in Genesis 6 that came down and produced offspring with the daughters of men, producing demonic hordes and the giant human-angel offspring known as the Nephilim.

Now we learn from John 3 in Jesus’ interview with Nicodemus that the Jewish authorities KNEW that Jesus was acting in the power and authority of YHWH!

John 3:1–2 (ESV)

1 Now there was a man of the Pharisees named Nicodemus, a ruler of the Jews. 2 This man came to Jesus by night and said to him, “Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher come from God, for no one can do these signs that you do unless God is with him.”

I want you to let that settle in for a moment. Nicodemus was “a ruler of the Jews”—he was a member of the Sanhedrin, the governing body of Jewish religion and law in Jerusalem, a man who almost certainly knew the scribes mentioned in Mark 3, and was almost certainly known to them as well.

Do you understand what this means? It means that those scribes who were coming down from Jerusalem to “investigate” Jesus’ miracles knew who He was, and still accused Him of being possessed by a demon! To slander the Holy Spirit’s work of validating the Messiah’s ministry by calling His work demonic is a sin that they could never be forgiven for. To treat the majesty of the Holy Spirit’s deity with such irreverence—to ascribe the work of the Holy Spirit to Satan—is the height of blasphemy against God. It is a sin that carries eternal consequences.

Believers show reverence the majesty of God the Holy Spirit—the majesty of His person, the majesty of His deity, and

III. The majesty of His POWER

Another one of God’s incommunicable attributes is His omnipotence—He has all power to carry out His will perfectly in every way. God the Holy Spirit demonstrates His omnipotence throughout the Scriptures; we will briefly consider two. First, we see the majesty of His infinite power

In His work of CREATION (cp. Gen. 1:2; cp. Job 26:13-14)

In the opening verses of Genesis we read

Genesis 1:1–2 (ESV)

1 In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. 2 The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters.

Here we see the creative activity of God the Father (v. 1) and God the Holy Spirit (v. 2). Thousands of years later, when John was writing the opening verses of his Gospel, he deliberately echoed Moses’ words in Genesis 1, demonstrating that God the Son was also involved in the work of creation:

John 1:3 (ESV)

3 All things were made through him, and without him was not any thing made that was made.

Father, Son and Holy Spirit—the Trinitarian work of God in creation is one of the greatest manifestations of the power of the Holy Spirit. There is a beautiful verse tucked into the Old Testament book of Job, where Job in his misery is singing the praises of God’s unsearchable majesty. In Job 26:13-14, he sings

Job 26:13–14 (ESV)

13 By his wind the heavens were made fair; his hand pierced the fleeing serpent. 14 Behold, these are but the outskirts of his ways, and how small a whisper do we hear of him! But the thunder of his power who can understand?”

The Hebrew word for “Spirit” (ruach) can also be translated “wind”. The New American Standard Version has a translation of these verses that I love—it renders these verses:

“By His Spirit He adorned the heavens… Behold, these are the mere edges of His ways, and how small a whisper we hear of Him? But the thunder of His power, who can understand?” (NASB)

I love that rendering—the Spirit of God adorned the heavens above us with mighty flaming suns, immense and distant planets, millions of whirling galaxies of a size that simply breaks our ability to comprehend—and these are the mere outskirts of His power! Beloved, this is the power of God the Holy Spirit! How can we do anything but fall on our knees to worship such majesty?

But if the Holy Spirit’s work in creation represents the mere edges of His power, surely the greatest and most glorious expression of His power is found

In His work of REDEMPTION (1 John 4:14; 1 Cor. 15:3; Galatians 4:6)

Lord willing we will spend far more time on this particular display of the majesty of God the Holy Spirit, but for now let us simply consider the role of the Spirit’s power in the plan of salvation He shares with God the Father and God the Son. The Scriptures tell us that God the Father sent Jesus into the world for our salvation:

1 John 4:14 (ESV)

14 And we have seen and testify that the Father has sent his Son to be the Savior of the world.

And we see that God the Son accomplished the work necessary for our salvation:

1 Corinthians 15:3 (ESV)

3 For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures,

And we see that it is God the Holy Spirit who applies the benefits of that salvation to us:

Galatians 4:6 (ESV)

6 And because you are sons, God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying, “Abba! Father!”

The majesty and power of God the Holy Spirit is revealed in His intimate work of redemption—to apply the benefits of the work of God the Son to believers so that they may be brought to God the Father. Your deliverance from the infinite wrath of God by the death of God the Son was mediated to you by the power of God the Holy Spirit. Each member of the Godhead was and is intimately involved in your redemption—if God the Father is the destination to which you are being brought, God the Son is the Way by which you come to the Father--and God the Holy Spirit is the car that carries you there!

This is the majesty of God the Holy Spirit—He is the One who adorned the heavens with the sun by day and the moon by night and all the uncountable billions of stars and planets and galaxies and nebulae. See this majesty all around you in the magnificence of the creation that has come about by His work: How can you belittle Him by referring to Him as an impersonal power or force? How can you speak of the One who formed the seas and the mountains and adorned the Heavens as if He were some personal power bank for you to get what you want out of life, or think that you can “channel” Him or control Him or make Him do your petty bidding?

Christian, you are called to reverence the majesty of God the Holy Spirit. Consider for a moment that, as inexcusable as the behavior of the scribes in Mark 3 was—ascribing the works of the Holy Spirit to Satan—how much more heinous a blasphemy is it to ascribe the works of Satan to the Holy Spirit?

I do not say this lightly—but we must reckon with the fact that the Scriptures clearly teach that Satan can and will counterfeit miracles to draw people away from the truth. We saw this a couple of weeks ago as Paul warned the Thessalonians about the Man of Lawlessness:

2 Thessalonians 2:9–10 (ESV)

9 The coming of the lawless one is by the activity of Satan with all power and false signs and wonders, 10 and with all wicked deception for those who are perishing, because they refused to love the truth and so be saved.

Jesus Himself warns that the presence of miracles done in His Name are no guarantee that they actually are done in His Name:

Matthew 7:22–23 (ESV)

22 On that day many will say to me, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and cast out demons in your name, and do many mighty works in your name?’ 23 And then will I declare to them, ‘I never knew you; depart from me, you workers of lawlessness.’

Say what you will about the reprobate scribes who blasphemed the Holy Spirit by attributing His work to Satan, but at least they recognized that Satan can counterfeit God’s works! I fear that too many people today have been so deceived by Satanic counterfeits that they refuse even to consider that the so-called “miracles” and “deliverances” they revel in could possibly be anything but authentication that they possess supernatural power of the Holy Spirit. But if the end of those scribes who attributed the work of the Spirit to Satan, what will be the end of those who attribute the work of Satan to the Holy Spirit? God be merciful to us!

Beloved, you are at this moment in the presence of God the Holy Spirit. The same all-knowing, all-seeing, all-comprehending God who was present when Ananias and Sapphira lied about their religious activities. Let me plead with you to consider: Are you here this morning trying to offer a lie to Him about the state of your soul? Ananias and Sapphira died because they wanted to appear more “spiritual” than they were. They wanted to be well-thought of by the other members of the congregation and the apostles. They wanted to be praised for their generosity, and were willing to lie to look good in front of others.

Don’t offer your presence here in worship on the basis of a lie. You can deceive me, you can deceive the other people here, you can deceive your own family—and maybe sometimes you can even fool yourself into thinking that you believe this. But you cannot deceive God the Holy Spirit. You come here this morning into His presence to say all the right things and agree with all the right doctrines, but the rest of your week is filled with grieving Him with your bitterness, anger wrath, malice and slander? All of your “spiritual” work is done with an eye to impressing everyone around you here so that everyone will leave you alone and not look too closely at the kind of life you lead and the habits you indulge and the places you spend your time. You cannot lie to God the Holy Spirit.

And so this is the Good News for you—this same Holy Spirit has drawn you here today so that you may come in repentance and faith to Jesus Christ! The Spirit’s work is to convict you of your sin, to open your eyes to the righteousness you need in Christ, and warn you of the judgment that awaits you if you go on rejecting Him—you have been invited here this morning by His merciful Providence so that you can bring all of your hypocrisy and all of your lies and all of your false spirituality and lay it at the feet of the One Who died and rose again so that you would be set free from it by faith. Won’t you listen to the gracious call of God the Holy Spirit this morning? “Come—and welcome!—to Jesus Christ!”

BENEDICTION

Jude 24–25 (ESV)

24 Now to him who is able to keep you from stumbling and to present you blameless before the presence of his glory with great joy, 25 to the only God, our Savior, through Jesus Christ our Lord, be glory, majesty, dominion, and authority, before all time and now and forever. Amen.

QUESTIONS FOR REFLECTION

What are the two different ways that God the Holy Spirit is dishonored by Christians today? Which of those errors are you most likely to fall into?

Why do we affirm that the Holy Spirit is a person, and not just some “force” or “power” that comes on an individual? How is God the Holy Spirit diminished when we treat Him that way?

What is the difference between “communicable” and “incommunicable” attributes of God? How does understanding these qualities help us see that the Holy Spirit is equal with God (i.e., is God Himself)?

What is God the Holy Spirit’s role regarding salvation? How does His role work together with God the Son and God the Father? Read John 16:8-14. Who is the focus of the Holy Spirit’s work? Has His power revealed the work of Christ to you for salvation?