Well now that I don’t have to preach on anything but what I want to preach on since I finished the New Testament, I find myself all over the place trying to decide what to preach on in sequence…a new kind of experience for me and I’m working on some kind of sequence that makes sense over the future. But I am sort of at the liberty point of my life where whatever is on my heart is where I can go, and this is a wonderful opportunity for me. And there is a subject that has concerned me for a long time and I have wanted to address this subject but it hasn’t been a part of preaching through the gospels in the way that it can be now and that is the subject of the Holy Spirit…the Holy Spirit.
After all the emphasis of so many years, 25 years of preaching through the four gospels, and much emphasis, of course, on the person of Christ as it should be, much emphasis on the character of God, and the nature of God as manifest in Christ and is seen elsewhere in Scripture, it is time now to give honor to the third member of the Trinity, namely the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is the most forgotten, the most misrepresented, the most dishonored, the most grieved, the most abused and I might even say the most blasphemed of the members of the Trinity. That’s a sad thing.
When our Lord cleansed the temple in John 2, He said that He was, in a sense, fulfilling the attitude of David from Psalm 69, “Zeal for Your house has eaten Me up, the reproaches that fall on you are fallen on Me.” And what our Lord was saying was when God is dishonored, I feel the pain. “You have taken My Father’s house, which is to be a house of prayer, and turned it into a den of robbers. You’ve corrupted My Father’s house. You’ve blasphemed My Father’s name. You’ve dishonored My Father.” Continue at John F. MacArthur
1 comment:
"The Holy Spirit is the most forgotten" -- isn't this a rather obvious symptom of the verse that declares blasphemy against the Holy Spirit unforgivable? The obvious outworking of this is "Hmm, to be safe and make sure we don't blaspheme the Holy Spirit, lets not say anything on this subject at all." Now that's quite logical. Of course the Catholic who made up that verse was trying to discourage us from ever noticing or taking serious any contradictiosn in the New Testament -- we're supposed to be scared to point out how Paul misuses Old Testament texts in Romans 3 or Romans 9, scared that it might be "blasphemy against the Holy Spirit" to do so, and thus so scared we keep our mouths shut. But it doesn't work that way. Instead, what do we keep our mouths shut about? The Holy Spirit. But we continue to question the verses that are clearly wrong, including this very verse. That Catholic failed in his mission. Its very detrimental to the "Trinity" to have it have a person in it about whom you had make sure you saw absolutely nothing more than the name lest you accidentally blaspheme and commit an unforgivable sin -- no wonder so many people oppose the doctrine of the Trinity.
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