The Truth About The Holy Spirit
September 12, 2021
The Truth About The Holy Spirit, (Edited)
Oh my dearest, beloved, righteous God in heaven. You know how many times I have prayed to understand the truth regarding Your Spirit. You know that I have yearned and craved and suffered anxiety and emotional turmoil, as I studied and meditated about Your Spirit. Oh God, You know that I have never been satisfied with the churches teachings regarding this reality. Please please please, pour out the true undiluted, complete truth about Your Spirit as “it” relates to Yourself. Let us not be in darkness regarding this understanding any longer. Please grant us eyes to see and ears to hear about this great great mystery Father, in Jesus Christ name……………amen amen amen, amen amen amen, and amen.
Introduction:
The first thing I will say is that the Holy Spirit is not an “it”! You may notice that I emboldened that little word in my opening prayer, so that I could deliberately shoot down that notion in my opening statement. And I intend to prove it from the scriptures, and by Godly reason too, but not right out of the gate. We will get to it in this article at the right juncture. I’m trying to find the correct place to begin. That’s always a challenge; where to begin? (Please Lord). First of all, we will be going way outside the box again, for that is where the truth lies. With all due respect to “the box”, we have been digging around, and shuffling the metaphorical dirt around, and sifting it again and again, long enough. If we want to discover the hidden gems of truth that God has reserved for this time and place in man’s journey towards immortality, we must be daring enough to leave the box. The box is tradition, and complacency, and unwillingness to be brave, and take the risk. But, I’ll ask, what risk? And I’ll answer, the same kind of risk the Israelites would not take, when God commanded them to enter and take possession of the promised land. Yes, very similar indeed, and let’s not do that again. So we will be leaving the box of traditional understanding and teaching, and will once again be watching for when God uses His unique methods of communication, which He chose to use in recording His Word for us. These are such things as figures of speech, metaphors, analogies, duality’s, early and latter day fulfillments, physical and then spiritual parallel meanings, imagery, riddles, symbols, sometimes enigmas, and various other methods.
I am not sure what I will be writing either. I have some ideas since I have been striving with this subject for quite a while now. I know I will be challenging the Church’s official teaching, but not without due respect, and explanation of why the true church teaches what it teaches, (some of which may be my own opinion too). For instance, in my opinion, HWA (acronym for Herbert W Armstrong throughout), was not only our teacher of truth, but he also became a defender of truth, also going on offence when he deemed necessary, to shoot down, or debunk heresies that were coming in from the spiritual left, such as the Protestant born again heresy, or the Catholic Trinity heresy. And I believe that his passion to perform these duties, may have caused him, and us, to go too far to the right in defending truth, and also stimulated us (as an institution), to become “rigid” and “formed”, and stuck in a “box” of tradition, (so to speak). This may have been the subtle work of the devil also, (but I don’t mean to imply that the devil was taking advantage of HWA’s mind per-say, but instead working in the minds of his underlings, who in HWA’s latter years, had free reign in what they wrote and taught, and I’m referring mostly to the apostates).
I would like to draw a spiritual comparison between something that needs fixing, and then gets fixed, only to get defiled, (or broken), all over again? I know that God draws a parallel between the physical Jews who went into exile in Babylon, where they learned their lesson over a period of 70 years, and then returned to Jerusalem and Judea somewhat repaired, only to mess it up with a man made religion, which in due time became Judaism. And the parallel is the latter day church, which got set back on track by God through HWA, only to become disappointing in God’s eyes over a period of time, so much so, that He allowed the devil to attack the church, and shatter it, and splinter it, and divide it, and send it into an exile of sorts for a stipulated period of time. (It is only fair to mention that it was predicted by God some 2500 years ago though). But let’s just consider this parallel for a bit. Let’s go back to the remaining people of God just before Jerusalem fell to the Babylonians. Jerusalem was occupied with the remaining Jews, Levite’s, Benjaminite’s, and other stragglers who had not been sent into exile yet. They were compared by God to the bad figs of Jeremiah 24. (The good figs were already in captivity in Babylon). The bad figs would ultimately be killed in the Babylonian onslaught, or be of the relatively few “lucky ones”, who would go to Babylon, and meet their demise there, either sooner or later, and maybe even be granted mercy upon repentance. And along with the good figs, they could be salvaged, so to speak. And the whole lot of them went there because of idolatry, and spiritual adultery committed against God, and Sabbath breaking and more. But while they were there, through a process of time and learning the hard way, they got rid of their adulterous ways, and their idolatry. And there they rededicated themselves to God’s commandments, and there was a certain spiritual cleansing that went on. (Even the first types of Synagogues got their start there since there was no temple anymore). And we can only wonder which humans God used to spearhead this in bringing it about. It was not likely Daniel who was already very busy working for God on the International scene in the courts of the emperor’s, (if you will). Ezekiel might have had some what to do with it in helping them to repent, (if you recall the times the elders of the Judean captivity sat before him seeking God’s word). But there is no mention in Ezekiel of the national transformation from idolatry to returning to God, (before entrenchment to Judaism). In all likelihood, God used Jehozadak, the father of Joshua the high priest, and various other priests and Levites to bring them back to purer religion, (as in, “return to Me and I will return to you”). The point of this is that it was a pleasing correction for a time, and although not pure pure pure, it was a great improvement. But in due time, it became defiled from within, by the craftiness of the devil, and resulted in the self righteous false piety of Judaism.
Now let’s look at the parallel to God’s church in the modern era. In similar fashion, God brought a people back to Himself in the latter days, through HWA. Through HWA, God gave us many basic truths that were lost for hundreds of years, and a precious group of God’s people grew rapidly in the USA, and then the rest of the world as the church grew. And an institution was created which at first was wholesome, good and precious. But over a short period of time, just like the initial revival of the physical Jews in Babylon, the spiritual Jews of the modern age also became defiled by the secret desires and motives of men from within, and unbeknownst to them, they were responding to the enticements of the devil. And what formed in its place was something that God was not pleased with. It was not clear to us because it also feigned righteousness and false piety, but God allowed it to be all but destroyed by the devil from within by evil men in high places of administration and leadership. This we call the apostasy of the WCG. And the remnant was scattered into smaller and larger groups, but with most returning to a spiritual Egypt, where as God said in Jeremiah 44:11-14, they would surely perish. Once you have been rescued from Egypt, it is blasphemy against the Holy Spirit to return to Egypt. (Let’s also understand that a return to Egypt must be a complete return, for some in Jeremiah found their way out of it still, as have some in the latter day parallel). But a complete return to Egypt, is a mockery of God’s mercy, which none of us deserve in the first place. God told the Israelites, that returning to Egypt would result in death, and He told it to the Jewish remnant who Jeremiah and Baruch were amongst after the destruction of Jerusalem also. And the message is the same for spiritual Jews and Israelites as well, except that we understand that in type, and as is said in Hebrews 6:4, since we have tasted the heavenly gift, and were made partakers of The Holy Spirit, it is a spiritual death that we are talking about this time around. This contrast is to show how good things can start, and then if we are not very very careful, they can so quickly become defiled. It is evil, and the work of the devil. Just like a physical infection or virus works, the devil tries to penetrate and divide what I will call, “complete constructs”. The constructs can be physical like the human body, or they can be figurative, like the subject of truth. They can be more than one body, like a church, or figurative, like the whole bible. Whether physical or figurative, the attack on the complete construct is very similar. It is to penetrate, enter in, corrupt, defile, reprogram for destruction by process, and if there is no overcoming counter attack, realize victory; that being “evil defeating good”. He is evil. He is bad. He is wrong. He is death. And I don’t only say and mean that figuratively, but somewhat literally too.
To explain that, we will have to go outside the box. From outside the box then consider: Sometimes we just say things; (like maybe when we’re talking about someone), and we might say, “that guy is so evil”, or just, “he is evil”. When we do this, we are not actually speaking literally, but figuratively, and more correctly, we would usually intend that; “he is practising evil”, or “behaving evil”, as opposed to “he actually” IS “evil”, as in “literally”.