The Person and Work of the Holy Spirit Lesson 9 end, 10 begin

All right, well, let's jump on these last two questions and then my good old boy is gonna take over. Good old boy. Do you like that? Are you gonna like that? Good old boy. Hey, I'd love to be called a good old boy. No, that's because you're from Texas. That's true. A redneck. Well, that's also true. What else do you want to call me? Because I might just say that's true. All right, so question number five, we got five and six left.

What would the leaving from the believer by the Holy Spirit mean? We've touched on some of this, but I think it's worth getting through a little bit more. So what would the leaving from the believer by the Holy Spirit mean? It's kind of a reverse We got a quiet room. Communion?

Well, you know, as far as I understand what the question is, I'm thinking it would mean that Christ's work was ineffective and that it is really not possible for anyone to be saved. The whole Bible would become a work of fiction in that case. Did I understand the question?

Yeah. Denial of Christ's work and our eternal undoing. Yeah, we can't. Eternal undoing. I think that I think that's an interesting. Way of thinking about it because. So grieving the Holy Spirit, does that mean that he leaves us at that point in time or? Absolutely not. Use fellowship.

Yeah. i couldn't hear you so i mean we'd just lose the fellowship yet okay yet that's what i was thinking you're saying Well, I think it's a hypothetical. And it's in there because, like in the book of Hebrews, Paul presents a hypothetical that had to do with a believer who was Jewish.

If you went back to the temple services, what would the consequences of that be? I mean, they were so horrific. He's trying to encourage them to stay the course. And he ends up by telling them, well, you would have no more sacrifice for sins because of Christ's one and done sacrifice. Well, the question here is a hypothetical. What if that were possible? What would it look like? It's not possible. But is it OK to entertain them? Go ahead. I was just saying the contrast is helpful because you have to reverse the entire, you have to deny the work of Christ in order to have that situation be the case.

There's nowhere in the scripture that says that that seal will be unsealed, right? So we talked about that last week. So, yeah, and I'm sure you mentioned the internal undoing. That's straight out or right out. the book there such a good way of thinking about all of the promises that we have in christ uh... and in this case we're talking about the ceiling of the holy spirit but you have to have an internal undoing to lose salvation to lose the holy spirit to not have Some people think about being in the favor of the Lord or those kinds of things. That's an internal undoing. And it's sealed by the Spirit, which is what this lesson is all about. Well, let's look at question number six.

Can somebody grab 2 Corinthians 5.5 for me? Yeah, I got that. And the one who prepared us for this very purpose is God, who gave us the Spirit as a down payment.

Down payment. Yeah, so we've used the word earnest before. Down payment. Pledge. Yeah, I like that word better. Just because it's permanent, right? Down payment, we do that all the time, so it feels like sometimes it's, eh, you put a down payment on something. It's not a bad term, but earnest is probably the one that seems to be the most. We've been put in escrow until closing.

That's right, James. Yeah, well, also maybe the word promise. I mean, we can do a little gymnastics around some of the actual words there, but. There's a. He has made an earnest to fulfill his promise and his promises based on the work of what the Lord Jesus did on our behalf. it from from the most strong believer to the weakest believer the promise is the same and that's something that's really important for us to think about because as we look at one another uh... and we try to interpret what each of us are all going through uh... same with your fellow believing friends uh... the promise is the same It's absolutely the same. Jim, another word to describe that is a guarantee. You know, a guarantee is only as good as the person who guarantees, who is doing the guarantee. God is doing the guaranteeing. How more secure can you be with that? That's right. Yeah, thanks Jim. I think that's really important.

There's an absolute guarantee from the Lord himself and some other words that come to mind are just the word pledge. He's pledged to make sure that we are an inheritance of the family of God. He's made a pledge. He's made a promise. He's made an earnest. He's made, yeah. And that's all to fulfill what he said he would do. So, yeah.

One of the reasons for this question, I think, has to do with the society we live in is so subjective and so feeling-based that Lots of believers think that if they change their mind or they do some awful sin or they start to feel like they might not be saved, that they're not saved, like they have anything to do with it.

Let me ask that question. Do you have anything to do with it after faith? If we did, we'd be all on bad straights. Yeah, I've used the term that if you don't make it to heaven after you believe, then it's God's fault, not yours. Yeah. We tried it ourselves and it's just put us in hell. Yeah. It just doesn't work.

Yeah, it's interesting how all of the emphasis and all of the onus goes on God and His work. You know, he's gracious to tell us that he's giving us a guarantee, because God doesn't need to tell us that. He's spoken it, and he's the eternal creator. But his grace, he knows we're human, and we love that word guarantee. And, you know, it's like, thank you for explaining it even more, God, you know?

Yeah. That's good, Jim. Yeah, that's really good. Well, I'll close there and hand it over to you, Mike. OK, so does everybody have the questions for Lesson 10? You know, I think I sent out two copies, one with six questions and one with seven. Did I do that? I got the one with seven. You got the one with seven? Yeah, I did.

OK. When you're busy sometimes, you forget where you were. By the way, in the last question of Lesson 9, it says, and what does it mean? I put down, it is a partial payment that when received, guarantees the full payment in the future. Right. It has to be received. If it isn't received, then there's no future full payment.

You know, do you remember, for all you Jewish scholars, What was the feast that the Jews had that would give you this similar idea? It was the Feast of the Firstfruits. That you would offer to God the first part of the crop and it was a guarantee, or not a guarantee, but it was an example of what the rest of the crop was going to be.

And so this principle has been in play for quite some time. And now, with the work of the spirit in us, it shows that if the earnest is part payment and kind, what's the rest of the payment? It's receiving our spiritual bodies and being with Christ forever. Yeah, more and more and more. So what do you have, a couple of fingers recreated now in Christ, and then the rest of it gets done when you go to be with the Lord?

So Romans 8.23 says what?

Not only this, but we ourselves have the firstfruits of the Spirit. The firstfruits of the Spirit. As we eagerly wait for our adoption, the redemption of our bodies. So the Holy Spirit reminds us in his word that we are the first fruit. We're the ones that was the first part of the crop. And it's the Holy Spirit who did the harvesting. And he's the one that's guaranteeing that the rest of the crop is gonna be just like the first fruit, okay?

It's kind of another word that Rideout uses is the word foretaste. He says that, so now the spirit is the foretaste. Here is this wild, wilderness world of the joys and delights of heaven. Every view of the love of God, every unfolding of his grace, every manifestation of the beauties of Christ, all of the sweets of a quote, the fellowship of kindred minds, these and all else, of the precious witness of the Holy One, are foretaste of the coming feast." That's really cool the way he says it. Yeah, that's cool. Foretaste versus, in contrast to feast. Yeah.

So a lot of what the believer, the growing believer, I think, experiences is really a foretaste of what it's going to be like 20, I was going to say 24-7, but there is no 24-7 in eternity. It's going to be a permanent situation where that never ceases. Never ceases.

What do you think about this? Do you think God really likes to kind of show us what's coming? Somebody in the class could answer. I think he does. I really do. It's like I my thought was is that you know, sometimes you buy a present for like your wife or your husband or your children or grandchildren and and you hit on just the right thing and so you buy it and you wrap it up and you you can't wait to give it more than they can't wait to receive it and so I think that's the way the He just can't wait to shower the whole thing on us.

And it helps a believer to know how anxious God is, if you can use the word anxious, to bless us. He's always trying to do that more and more all the time. And I think sometimes we miss it because we're too much wrapped up in our own self. what life is going to be like in eternity, face-to-face with the Lord Jesus. I love that verse out of 2 Corinthians, that it has never entered into the mind the things that God has in store for those who love him. And most believers stop right there, and the next verse says, but God has revealed them unto us all the time. He's always trying to reveal what's in store. So let's talk a little bit about the seal. What is a seal on a document? What does it mean?

And do we have such a thing today? So if, you know, I mean, I love this kind of stuff because I was a realtor for all these years. My whole life was revolved around writing contracts, you know. and closing them. That was the most important part, was to close them. So what about this seal or guarantee? If you get a document with a seal on it, what do we call that today?

Notarization. Yeah, it's a notary public. And what? It's somebody has guaranteed your signature or verified that it is you. And you know, if you're in a, in that part of the world where you're checking signatures or looking for verification of signatures, a notary public is a very serious job if you have one, if you have become one of those. You have to guarantee, you walk in the bank and you say, look, I wanna notarize this document. You have to sign and then they compare signatures. You have to show an ID and they keep a record that on such and such a date you came in and there was a, a signature entered into their book and they have to sign so that the seal or the document is authentic. They stamp it. They stamp it, they put a seal on it. And if you go down to the courthouse and look at documents, every single one of them has that stamp on it.

Otherwise, it's not considered, you know, you can challenge whether it's valid or not. Not that even the valid ones get challenged. But in the days of Samuel Rideout, though, I think that there was the signet seal. You know what that was like? It was like a ring that had an impression on it and they put a drop of wax on the end of the document and then he pressed the seal in there and then that sealed the document and especially if it was an enclosed document, it couldn't be opened up unless you broke the seal. Well in this case, you can't break the seal because the Holy Spirit himself is in fact the seal on the document, the seal on the guarantee. For the Christian, the seal indicates our security.

Yes. And a guarantee that God is going to fulfill all that he has said. Yeah. All the things he's reserved for us in heaven, which he tells us. You know, I think that's right. In my experience, when you talk to believers and you're encouraging them, A big part of encouragement is to show them what God says about salvation and what they have as a believer.

So many believers are so ignorant of what they have, where they are, and how God has blessed them. They just are ignorant. Especially if you're involved in any sort of Reformed theology that's law-based, there is no focus on what has already been accomplished by the Lord. Yeah, there isn't, there's no security. And when you think about it, if I'm going to start my own denomination, I'm going to figure out a way to not have all the security there.

So you have to keep coming to me and writing checks or doing something so that I can give you a little more security every week. And so you're hoping to make it to the end. It's the imprint on the seal that the authority, shows the authority of the person sealing. You know, but in our society today, like in our, our government comes out, our politicians come out and they make all kinds of proclamations and guarantees.

And we look at them now, we're so callous, we think, well, that's a bunch of smoke, you know, they don't mean a word. And so I was just going to say the word, the word ignorant, I mean, it's not a choice in the sense of someone not wanting to understand. It's just that they don't understand until they do, right? So, because that word comes out a little, yeah, it comes out a little harsh in some cases, but what you're meaning by that is they don't understand, right? They don't have the knowledge yet.

No, that's really right. And so for the most part, I think believers are ill-informed or uninformed. Yeah. I think so. Yeah. I think so because it seems so easy to talk to somebody by just I always admired Hal Malloy. You'd go to Hal Malloy and you'd say, well, I have this problem.

And usually, there was a lot of ignorance associated with it. And the first thing he would say is, hallelujah. And then he would say, let's go into God's word and see what he has to say about this. And what was great about that is that, where were we doing? We were looking for the guarantee. That's why you don't ever get away from the word of God. You let God talk. And where he says, well, here's what I've done, and here's what I guarantee. Let God talk? Yeah. How many times did we not let God talk? Lots. Lots.

I wrote, the seal on a document gives the full authorization of the one in authority and all the power at his disposal to carry out what is in that document. then the seal wouldn't mean a whole lot. No, it wouldn't. But we're talking about God. He has all the power in the universe at His disposal, and He's going to use all that power to carry out what He has promised in His seal of the Holy Spirit.

I think that's exactly right, and don't you find it interesting? that the Holy Spirit or God has involved us in the process. Not only are we to be settled down in the fact that our salvation is secure. But we're involved in the process of edifying somebody else to bring them along, too. I think that's amazing that God would get us involved like that.

He does, though. That's the way the body of Christ works. Isn't that what teaching is? Partly. Teaching is part of it. I'm going to talk about it later, about spiritual gifts and what they're really designed to do. They're designed for this great word called edification. And there's teaching and prophesying and knowledge that all go into that. And it's a persuasion thing.

Are you fully persuaded about whatever the issue is that you're dealing with today? we were talking on Wednesday night about in Hebrews chapter 10, that Christianity is based on faith and the word of God. Judaism was based on all kinds of earthly physical stimulus that you could see and feel and smell and be involved in.

So when a believer who was Jewish started to want to stick his toe back into the temple, the temptation was really, really strong because faith isn't about feelings, it's about the facts of God's word. And so it makes it difficult for a believer sometimes just to trust God and what he says. And we're always asking him to somehow give me a feeling or verify emotionally what I'm reading or what I know what God's word has to be. And not that he won't do that, but faith hasn't one thing or another to do with feelings. The feelings come after, not before.

So that's the point of what we're talking about in terms of a seal. Question three. Which is of more authority? I don't know if I can say that word. Authentication. What has more authority or authentication? The document or the seal? And Rydow gives Esther chapter 8, verse 8. Somebody look that up and read it. It'll probably take you two minutes to find it. Chapter 8, verse 8.

You may write in the king's name. Yeah, you may write in the king's name, whatever pleases you. Concerning the Jews and seal it with a royal signet ring a document written in the king's name and sealed with a royal signet Ring cannot be revoked so question Which is more important the document or the seal seal seal? Yeah, well that's a seal.

There's no authority to back up the document. That's exactly right and so is the information in the document important and Yeah, sure is. But the authentication of it is the seal. And that's what the Holy Spirit's job is. His job is, you know, the Lord Jesus said, I'm going to send a comforter and he's going to remind you or teach you everything that I told you, show you. Well, his job is the authenticator. He's the persuader.

He's the one that says, look, everything that the Word of God has said to you is absolutely true, and I'm the seal. I guarantee it. Mike, I read that a little differently. In the second part of Esther, it says, Whatever is written and sealed, no one can revoke. So I think they go together. Yeah, they do. Written and sealed. That's where I'm at too, Jimmy. I was thinking the same thing. So my question is not relevant then. No, it's a good thought. I mean, it's important.

The finality of the seal is the most important part, but there has to be the document that precedes it. So, which is more important? It's hard to kind of say. I mean, if it weren't sealed, then yeah, it's just a piece of paper. I was thinking about, it's like the life of Christ, and then you have the death, burial, resurrection. So, which is more important? And that's kind of where I was going with my thinking, but maybe it's...

No, I understand. The person and work of Christ is the most important part, objectively, positionally. But I, as a believer, if I read in Romans 8, 9, if any man does not have the spirit of Christ, he's none of his. But what I learn is that I belong. Christ. And the Spirit of God is the persuader. In other words, Jim, are you persuaded that you're saved? JD? Are you persuaded you're saved? I'm absolutely persuaded. Who persuaded you?

The Holy Spirit. Sure. Was the document of the Word of God the information you needed, but without the spirit, would you have been persuaded about that? No. That's the question, I think, that I'm asking. And maybe, I mean, maybe they go together. I don't think you can separate them, because it's important for the believer to be objective in the word, but also subjective in terms of his faith. unmovable faith. And that's something I, like the Spirit of God has not ever persuaded me that you're saved. I think you are. I'm sure you are. But it's it's not it's not our job to know about the heart of another right man, so to speak but Yeah, I like the way you said that I that that was only I was just kind of piggybacking on no, that's good Yeah, that's good in Esther's case.

I If there had been no seal, it wouldn't have amounted to anything. You guys hear that? Yeah, it wouldn't amount to anything. If there had been no seal, then the word of God wouldn't amount to anything. And if there would have been no document, the seal wouldn't have been important.

That's right. That's exactly right. That was good. I appreciated that. Like Jim was saying, the decree was written in the name of the king. It wasn't written by the king himself. He had professionals who drew it up. You know, a document, no matter how well written, if it isn't sealed, it's ineffective. But a document that is not well written, I don't care how many seals you've got on it, it's not going to accomplish that much. It's not clear.

So, you know, we have the Bible as a written document from God. He wrote it, and we can take it as truth, absolute truth. And He sealed it by the Holy Spirit. Yeah, that's a good point. Yeah. That's a really good point. that men were ordered to be removed by the Holy Spirit. Right. Down what God said. Right.

Yeah, it's interesting too, you know, I keep, I got this Hebrew thing in my mind. Imagine being a Jew in 60 AD and someone gives you the gospel of Jesus Christ and you believe it. And you're thinking, is the seal broken on the other deal? Is this the real deal? How do you get persuaded? And that's what Romans 9, 10, 11 is all about, to explain, well, the seal really isn't broken.

The Jews have just been set aside, and God is going to fulfill everything that he said to them. But there's this intervening thing called grace in the body of Christ. that is now what we're doing, which is actually a greater thing. And the writer of Hebrews' whole argument is based on that premise, that this is a much better thing, and that it would be really stupid for you, stupid is the right word, to go back to the lesser thing when he gave you more this time. And so just because you might feel or see or smell all of these stimuli that come from Judaism. And that's why you see in a lot of contemporary churches, you see lots of stimulus.

You know, they try to appeal to every sense they possibly can, rather than just giving you the word of God and inviting you to just believe it and depend on the spirit of God. So it's it seems from a worldly standpoint, that Christianity is really boring. But all of you who have been down the road a ways recognizes that there just isn't any lifelike walking with the Lord. That's true. OK. So Rydot sums this question up by saying, but as we have seen, the Spirit's seal is given upon faith in Christ. So. No, that's enough on that question. Okay, question four. How are we doing time-wise?

In Leviticus 8.23 and 14.14, describe what the blood and the oil represent. So let's just do part of this.

Let's read Leviticus 8.23 and somebody else read 14.14. 823 is and Moses slaughtered it and took some of its blood and put it on the lobe of Aaron's right ear and on the thumb of its right hand. Everybody hear that? Yeah. Yeah. Okay. 1414. The priest shall then take some of the blood of the guilt-offering, and the priest shall put it on the lobe of the right ear of the one to be cleansed, and on the thumb of his right hand, and on the big toe of his right foot.

So, Riteout takes out of those two verses. He says a beautiful illustration of this occurs in the Levitical ordinance of the Old Testament. In the consecration of the priest, and that's what he's talking about. In the restoration of the leper, the blood of the sacrifice was put on the ear and hand and foot, making the whole man redeemed. After this application of the blood, they were sprinkled with oil, a type of the spirit.

There's so much in the Old Testament that are examples of what the Holy Spirit, what his role is and what he does now, that it's kind of cool to dig it out and a guy like Rideout who sees, he's probably an Old Testament scholar, sees all these things in the Old Testament that I would have jumped right over. I wouldn't have seen them at all. And so that's kind of cool that everything that God did in the Old Testament was sort of a foreshadow of what he was going to do spiritually in the body of Christ and in the age of grace.

So let's quit. Go ahead. How do you, so the blood of Christ that we were completely covered in the blood of Christ, right? Or how does it relate back to the thumb? I mean, it's like, cover me all up, please, right? Yeah, that's right. That's exactly right.

And that's why Judaism is a lot of a symbol, symbolic, in the blood. It's like the high priest going into the Holy of Holies once a year to sprinkle blood around on the Ark of the Covenant. It represents the fact that that blood covered the sins of Israel for a whole year. Well, if you had to keep all the blood that they sacrificed in one year, you'd have gallons of it. And so it's representative. Yet with the Holy Spirit, the Holy Spirit's not representative.

He's the real thing. So he is the sprinkler, maybe put it that way. Okay, we'll pick up there next week. Let's pray. Dear Father, how we thank you for your word, how careful you are to precisely transcribe what you mean about the person and work of your son, and that you, not only that, but that you have a guarantee in place, your spirit, who is the author, authenticator of the entire salvation package. And we thank you for that. We pray in your son's precious name. Amen.