Indwelling and Filling of the Spirit
Romans 8:9–11
We're in Romans, chapter 8, and we've been going down through Romans 8 looking at this contrast between those who are living according to the Spirit and those who are living according to the flesh. The flesh is just another term the Apostle Paul uses for describing the sin nature. The sin nature is just as powerful, just as evil, just as wicked, just as deceptive in the believer as in the unbeliever. That's one of those factors that some Christians just have a very, very tough time dealing with.
Within the history of Christianity there have been two ways of dealing with it. Number one, if you're still committing some sins that culture in that time period has deemed the most wicked, evil, terrible sins, then you've lost your salvation. You're just committed some act that too great for the grace of God. That God somehow forgot to take care of at the cross or something like that. That usually goes by one of two names: Pelagius and Augustine.
Historically Pelagius was an English monk who was Augustine's opponent. If you read Augustine, you think he's just about as messed up as Pelagius was but Pelagius believed that everyone was born with just as pure a soul as Adam was created with. They chose to sin and they chose to be saved. It was purely a works salvation and then you could choose to commit sins that would cause you to lose your salvation. Augustine's answer was an almost fatalistic view of salvation that later took another form as Calvinism. There are a lot of similarities.
The Calvinists/Armenian debate that occurred at the end of the 16th century, early 17th century, rehashed a lot of the same ideas and we continue to fight those same battles today. The Calvinists started an Augustinian camp that goes to the opposite extreme. It's not that you lose your salvation; they just say you weren't truly saved to begin with. Both sides failed to understand the principle of the total depravity of man, even though that's a major watchword for Calvinists and Augustinians. They think that it's not that regeneration gives birth to a new entity in your soul, in the inner part of your being as we believe, but what regeneration does it sort of takes away some of the power, some of the ability, of the sin nature. That's how they define regeneration. It's not that you gain new capabilities, and a new life, and a new relationship with God but you lose the capacity to be as bad as you were before you were saved. That's really how they define regeneration.
I remember about twelve or thirteen years ago reading an excellent scholarly article, not that I agreed with it but it was well researched and well argued, by a former classmate of mine in the doctoral program at Dallas Seminary who was dealing with that whole kerfuffle about Lewis Sperry Chafer who at that time had still not started Dallas Seminary. He was a budding theologian and he wrote "He Who is Spiritual" and it was reviewed by a man who was considered the greatest living theologian, Benjamin Breckenridge Warfield, who was the head of the theology department at Princeton. Warfield just took young Chafer to task for that book because it was contrary to what was taught in the Reformed or Presbyterian theological camp. Chafer was an ordained Presbyterian.
So Warfield just went after it but in this article by this classmate of mine, going through it what really struck me was that in his conclusion he said that a lot of what Chafer said was really good but [there's always a 'but' that comes after that], but he just had a low view of regeneration. He didn't understand how regeneration limited the sin nature. That was one of those sentences you read that makes a light go off and you suddenly realize why a lot of people think the way they think. It's because they mis-define certain terms or they've got some bad theology in there.
So all of that is crucial for really understanding what's going on here, why different Christians believe different things about the Christian life and it comes down to usually theological deductions that are imposed on the text, rather than looking at what the Scripture says and studying it. Some of this takes a lot of time. It's not as simple to study. You can't just look at what it says necessarily, what it says on the surface, because a surface reading of chapter 8, out of context, may look as if Paul is contrasting the regenerate with the unregenerate when he uses phrases like "walking according to the flesh" or "those who are in the flesh" versus those in the Spirit. It sounds at a certain superficial level if you don't study out those phrases as they are used by the Apostle Paul, especially in his formative epistle, Galatians, which is what we looked at last time showing that conflict between the Spirit and the flesh.
((CHART)) I developed this chart years ago to show that there are two types of believers who are laid out in Romans, chapter 8. There are always two different kinds of people being talked about, those who are being successful and those who are failures. There are two lifestyles that are being described in Romans 8:4, "that the righteous requirement of the Law might be fulfilled in us who do not walk according to the flesh but according to the Spirit." The successful believer is the one who lives and walks according to the Spirit and not according to the flesh or the sin nature.
Then there's a contrast of two different ways of thinking in verse 5, "For those who live according to the flesh..." Living and walking are parallel concepts. It's a synonymous parallelism between verses 4 and 5. Verse 4 uses the concept of flesh versus Spirit. Walking is just a metaphor for how people conduct their lives. The successful believer operates on God's way of thinking, which is derived from the Word. The Word gives us the principles and the promises and as we meditate on it, it changes our frame of reference for thinking. It doesn't just happen. God wants us engaged in constantly reading and studying because that's the only way we really process what is there. It's not like God giving us a systematic theology book where everything is outlined and organized and laid out in ten points, where once you read it and memorize it, you're good to go and you can go home and not read it anymore. But you have to constantly go back to the Bible.
Each time we go back and reread and study, as we've studied in other parts of the Bible and bring that information with us back to a fresh reading of Romans 6–8, then all of a sudden we begin to see things in these chapters that we haven't seen before. So that is how it develops our thinking. We have two ways of thinking, either according to doctrine or Divine viewpoint as expressed in Scripture or human viewpoint, paganism. In verse 6 there are two results laid out, "For to be carnally minded is death..." When you're living and walking according to the flesh, the result is death. Not eternal death but a death-like existence in the life of the believer because he continues to live as if he is spiritually dead so he produces a death-like life.
Now we're going to see a lot of this in our approaching study of Proverbs on Sunday morning because you see a lot of contrasts in Proverbs, between the wise and the fool. The path of the wise leads to life and the path of the fool leads to death. Again, in that context it's not talking about eternal death. It's the consequences of living according to wrong understanding of reality. So as verse 6 continues, "but to be spiritually minded is life and peace." Failure leads to a life of emptiness and death. For a while it may not seem empty. I think a lot of us may have had situations or evangelism opportunities where we talk to someone who's not a believer and you say, "You know you can't really be happy without Jesus or without doctrine." And they're as happy as they can be. For example, if they think that they can be happy with a lot of good food, a lot of good wine, and if they have that, they're just as happy as can be. Until something happens in life that shows that a lot of good food and a lot of good wine just really can't get them through the difficult times of life. And that's when the props are knocked out from under them. But for many years as we've studied in Romans, they have suppressed the truth in unrighteousness, lived on the basis of a fantasy and they think they're happy. It's a pseudo-happiness, a temporal happiness but it has no real depth to it.
Paul talks about two attitudes toward God in verse 7, "Because the carnal mind is enmity against God." This is when the believer is living in accordance to the sin nature; he's in rebellion against God. He's hostile to God because the carnal mind cannot subject itself to the Law of God. It's in hostility to the Holy Spirit. So the contrast here in verse 8, "So then, those who are in the flesh cannot please God." When a believer learns the Word and he's walking by the Spirit, his life pleases God.
There's a contrast we'll see in the upcoming verses, two different kinds of sons in verses 14 and 16. Those who are sons indeed in verse 14, "For as many as are led by the Spirit of God, these are sons of God." Verse 16, "The Spirit Himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God." So we are sons indeed, verse 14, but those who never grow stay children. They never mature.
Then we'll see two kinds of heirs, those who are both heirs of God and those who are heirs of Christ. The failures are only heirs of God. They're not heirs of Christ. So that chart contrasts the two kinds of believers. What kind of believer do you want to be? Do you want to be a believer who is successful in this life and that's defined by God's standards for success? Or are you going to be a failure? You may be a success in the world's eyes but a failure in God's eyes. That's the only success or failure that really matters. So the issue is learning how to live, to walk according to the Holy Spirit.
Now we come to verse 9. Last time I just passed through verses 9, 10, and 11 real quickly. Now I want to come back and just camp out on a couple of key doctrines in verses 9, 10, and 11. One of the things that I pointed out again and again is that Romans 6 grounds the Christian life on this event called the baptism by the Holy Spirit. We've gone over that so many times. It's not in the Old Testament. No believer, no saved person, in all of the centuries prior to the day of Pentecost in A.D. 33 ever experienced the baptism by the Holy Spirit as identification with Christ in His death, burial, and resurrection because it hadn't happened historically so it never occurred.
Once that occurred, other things came along with that baptism with the Holy Spirit. That baptism, that identification with Christ in His death, burial and resurrection, dealt with sin in a way that had never been dealt with before so that the individual believer could be sanctified positionally in a way that had never occurred before in history. Completely set apart to God.
This is related to another ministry of God the Holy Spirit, His indwelling ministry. That is related to His work in positional sanctification of making us a temple. That's a concept that I don't think we have explored enough in the history of Christianity. What it means that each of us as a believer is a temple. The Greek word there is naos [naoj] which is the same word used to described the inner sanctum, the holy of holies, in the tabernacle or the temple in the Old Testament which is the specific area where God dwells. No one could come in there except for the high priest to go into the holy of holiest and only other priests could go in occasionally to the outer part which was the holy place.
It's important to follow the grammar today. We live in a day when a lot of people don't want to pay a lot of attention to grammar and it's very important because there's some confusion over this. Most of you have been fairly well taught but it might surprise you that even among some of the people, the pastors that we know and love don't always get this right because there's confusion here. I have spent some time having some discussions with them on this. I don't know how successful I've been but it's a little bit dicey at times. We all get influenced by other people we read and study. The verse reads, "However you are not in the flesh but in the Spirit, if indeed, the Spirit of God dwells in you." So what we have here in verse 9 is a conclusion built on a conditional sentence. The conditional sentence is "if indeed the Spirit of God dwells in you."
In Greek there are different ways you can express what's called a hypothetical or a condition. If you go to the store tonight, you're going to get wet. Well, that is a statement that the first part is assumed to be true. If you go to the store tonight, you're going to get wet. Why? Because it's raining outside. You have statements similar to that in Scripture where the first part is assumed to be true. For example, where Satan is tempting the Lord Jesus in the wilderness he said, "If you are the Son of God..." He uses this first class condition and he is accepting the truth that states "and you are the Son of God."
Then you have another way of expressing a condition that says, "If, and we're going to assume it's not true." And you might say something like, "If President Obama was a committed Christian, then he would not be hostile to many foundational principles in the Constitution." You're making an initial statement, "If it were true" but you're really saying it's not true. There are many kinds of those conditions stated in the Scripture.
A third kind that we normally think of when we state some kind of condition is, "If and we really don't know if something is true or not or is going to happen or not." This is like 1 John 1:9, "If we confess our sins..." Maybe you will; maybe you won't. It could go either way. So there are those three different ways to express conditions in the Greek. In the English we only express it by the word 'if' and that doesn't necessarily convey the nuance or the meaning that's there in the Greek.
The meaning here in this 'if clause' in verse 9, "If indeed [and it's true] the Spirit of God dwells in you." Paul is assuming the indwelling of the Spirit of God in his audience. Now as you look at this in the English, asking a rhetorical question, you have 'you'. Is the 'you' singular or plural? In English it's difficult to tell because the translators didn't come from south of the Mason-Dixon line and they don't distinguish between you [singular] and y'all [plural]. Or even all y'all which is the plural of y'all. So this is significant. Is he talking about you as an individual or y'all as a group?
Where I'm going with this and I want to clarify this tonight is that there are those who teach that when you get into the indwelling passages of the Holy Spirit in 1 Corinthians 3: 16 and specifically some in 6:19, they say that what Paul is doing is talking about the corporate whole of the Church. It is the place that the Spirit of God has made a temple. I'm going to show you tonight that that's not true. I remember one time sitting down and having a good discussion about this with Jim Myers in Kiev, one of the first years I went over there. We were talking about 1 Corinthians 3:16 and why that shouldn't be taken to be a corporate thing although a lot of people take it that way. He said, "If you didn't have 1 Corinthians, how would you prove the indwelling of the Holy Spirit?" The answer Romans 8:9, "...and the Spirit of God dwells in you." And this is a foundation you can't really debate at all.
God the Holy Spirit indwells inside each of us as believers. What's important, though, is we have to look at this plural pronoun. I'm belaboring this because I think if we understand the plural pronoun here we'll understand why the plural pronoun in 1 Corinthians doesn't mean the corporate entity of the local body of Christ. And it gets into some interesting grammar. If we are to translate this correctly we would translate it, "However y'all are not in the flesh" and the "are" there in the English is the present active indicative and the second person plural. Notice. A plural verb, y'all are. You have a repetitive second person pronoun. You don't have to put the second person plural pronoun into the Greek grammar. It's embedded within the verb itself but when you add the pronoun you're just emphasizing it even more. So it's emphasizing the plural pronoun aspect. Y'all definitely are not in the flesh but in the Spirit, if the Spirit of God dwells in you. So both of these are plural. Paul is talking to a group.
Many times when I'm speaking to a group and I say y'all need to read your Bibles. I'm not saying you need to read your Bibles as a group and you understand that. When I say y'all need to read your Bibles I mean you as a group of individuals, every individual within that group, needs to read their Bible. What's funny is that people have come to this and they read the y'all as if its talking about a corporate entity and the corporate entity is where the Spirit of God dwells, not in each individual. I went back and looked at one point at every verb leading up to 1 Corinthians 3:16 and I looked at all the injunctions or commands that were there and it's obvious that Paul gives all these commands as plural, all through 1 Corinthians. He addresses the congregation through plural pronouns and plural verbs. But he's speaking about individual application. The plural indicates he's talking to a group of people but a group of individuals, each of which has to fulfill the command.
So when Paul says, "The Spirit of God dwells in y'all," he's not talking about when the church comes together as a body it becomes the temple of God. That's very important to understand. Another little thing I want you to understand here because this is one of those fun little things in grammar that I like to talk about every now and then and tweak a few people in the congregation. That's also fun. We have some people here who we love to get down and dirty with on minor points of English grammar. It's a lot of fun. "However y'all are not in the flesh but in the Spirit if indeed the Spirit of God dwells in y'all but if anyone..." Wait a minute. What's that word?
"Anyone?" We've shifted our pronoun from a plural pronoun to a singular pronoun because even in ancient Greek and ancient Hebrew, as well as ancient English going back to the 1300's, there are examples where plural pronouns are used to refer to individuals. Every now and then people get a little bit uptight over that. I have a tendency to do this. I don't know where I picked it up. But this is a classic problem of whether when we refer to either a singular noun or a singular pronoun is it proper to refer back to it with a plural pronoun, especially the third person plural pronoun, 'they'.?
I will read from a couple of acceptable sources here. First of all this is from the word usage on Wikipedia in their dictionary. It says, "Now the usage of the third person pronoun 'they' to refer to a singular noun or pronoun is attested to as early as the 1300s in English. [It's all through the Greek and Hebrew in the New Testament, by the way. So it's good enough for the Holy Spirit it better be good enough for you.] Many admired writers have used 'they', 'them', themselves', and their' to refer to a singular noun such as one or a person or an individual and each. Thackeray, for example, wrote in Vanity Fair in 1848, "A person can't help their birth." [That grammar is just sacrilegious to some people.]
And more recent writers, such as George Bernard Shaw and Anne Morrow Lindbergh have also used this construction in sentences, such as 'to do a person in means to kill them'. [See, you have 'a person', singular noun but 'them refers back to it as an indefinite plural.] Another example is 'When you love someone you do not love them all the time.' [someone is a singular noun, them is a third person plural. This is not part of just English. It's part of every language, I think, in order to avoid certain difficult constructions.]
This writer says this is wide spread and can be found in such mainstream publications as The Christian Science Monitor, Discover, and The Washington Post. The usage is so common in speech that it generally passes unnoticed in speech. However, despite the convenience of the third person plural forms as substitutes for generic 'he' and the structurally awkward forms like 'his or her' many people avoid using 'they' to refer to a singular antecedent [that's the preceding pronoun], out of respect for the traditional grammatical rule concerning pronoun agreement.
Most of the usage panelists reject the use of 'they' with a singular antecedent. 82% find the sentence, "The typical student in the program takes about six years to complete their course work" as unacceptable." However, that kind of phraseology is used in the Bible constantly. According to Oxford Dictionaries and their guidance on this topic, "It's often important to use language which implicitly or explicitly includes both men and women making no distinction between the gender. This can be tricky when it comes to pronouns. In English a person's gender is explicit in the third person singular pronoun such as 'he', 'she', 'his', 'hers'. There are no personal pronouns that can refer to someone as opposed to something without identifying whether that person is male or female. So what should you do in sentences such as these? If your child is thinking about a gap year, then _____ can get good advice from this website. So should that be 'he', 'she' or 'he/she' in the blank? Another example: A researcher has to be completely objective in ______ findings. Should it be 'his', 'her', or 'his/her' [which is where we're going to with this silly gender-neutral language]?
The Oxford dictionary goes on to say, "In the past people tended to use pronouns like 'he', 'his', 'himself' in situations like this but now they need to be gender-neutral." So they come down to saying, "You can make the relative pronoun plural rewording the sentence as necessary by saying, 'If your children are thinking about a gap year, then they can get good advice from this website. Or if your child is thinking about a gap year, they can get good advice from this website." They conclude by saying "You can use the plural pronouns, 'they', 'them', 'their', etc. despite the fact that they are referring back to a singular noun." So that is the conclusion of the Oxford Dictionary style sheet. I think that ends the discussion.
We have this same kind of problem here. We have this discussion of 'y'all', a plural pronoun and then its shifting to 'anyone', a singular pronoun in "does not have the Spirit of Christ he [another singular pronoun] does not belong to Him." The 'you' is plural; the 'he' is instantiating that in showing that it has individual application. And so this is important to see these kinds of distinctions because if you're not careful, and you're splitting a grammatical hair too fine, you can end up in heresy by thinking that because its plural, it's talking about a group that becomes a temple of the Holy Spirit, rather than opposed to each individual within the group.
So let's look at what the Bible teaches about the indwelling and the Holy Spirit. First of all at the instant of salvation every believer is both filled and indwelt by God the Holy Spirit. You don't feel it. I didn't feel it. We don't experience anything. Our blood pressure doesn't go up. Our heartbeat doesn't increase or decrease. We don't have palpitations, flushing of the skin, a rush of joy. Some people might. But it's not normative. It's not something everybody experiences. It would be related to other factors leading up to the point of conversion. But this is one of many, many things that happen at the point of salvation that are not part of an experience. We receive the imputation of Christ's righteousness. We don't feel anything. We don't suddenly feel that your soul is seared with moral purity as you receive the righteousness of Christ. There's no feeling there. It's just stated in Scripture. The only way to know about it is to study the Word of God so we know about it. The reason a lot of people don't know about it is that they don't study the Bible. They're afraid to. Usually because the pastor is doing things that aren't Biblical and they don't want anyone reading the Bible. So at the instant of salvation, every believer is both filled and indwelt by the Holy Spirit. These are not the same thing but they are related.
The second point is that the indwelling is a permanent non-experiential reality that establishes the foundation for absolute or positional sanctification. That simply means that at the point of salvation we are all set apart positionally. We're given a new identity, a new position, a new legal standing in relation to God. That's positional and sanctification has to do with being set apart for the service of God. As an unbeliever we are in the kingdom of Satan. We have nothing ruling our nature except the sin nature and so we're not usable by God at all. There has to be a righteous transformation that changes our identity and puts us in a new place so that we can potentially serve God. That is called positional truth or positional sanctification. We see this embodied in two verses. In 1 Corinthians 6: 19 and 20 Paul says, "Or do you not know that your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit who is in you, [see its possible for Christians to not know this which is what he has already stated in 1 Corinthians 3:16]?" One thing that is instructive is that I went back and did a word search on soma –[swma]which is the Greek word for body. If you look at soma as it is used by Paul in this first epistle to the Corinthians it's never used of the collective body except when it talks about the body of Christ. It's always defined in the context. When its talking about the body related to the individual it always has this individual nuance to it unless it is clear from the context and the concept of the body of Christ hasn't been introduced in this epistle yet. "Do you not know that your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit which is in you..."
So the Holy Spirit is in you and this connects these two ideas which is so important. "whom you have from God and you are not your own?" So, see, this is what Paul talks about in Romans 6 where he says we shift from being a slave to sin to a slave to God. We're not our own. We're never our own person. We're never free to do our own thing. We either do Satan's thing or God's thing but we're never doing our own thing. The explanation why we're not our own is, "For you were bought at a price, therefore glorify God in your body and in your spirit, which are God's." This isn't just an abstract doctrine. It has a significance that every day because we're a new person, we have a new identity, a new positional reality, we are to glorify God in our body and in our spirit, both physically and mentally, we are to glorify God. All of that, the body, as well as the Spirit, is God's.
One of the reasons Paul puts that in is because in Greek culture there had been this influence from Platonism from the last four hundred years that the body was really insignificant and it was tied to the earth. It was just basically morally corrupt and could not be of any value and the real value was in the spiritual realm. Here Paul makes it very clear that Platonism is just a bunch of bunk because the body and the soul have been bought at a price. So body and soul together can serve God. This comes from this permanent non-experiential indwelling.
Third point about the indwelling and the filling of the Spirit is that the indwelling of the Spirit never before occurred in human history, and it is unique to the Church Age. You don't have it in the future, in the Tribulation. You'll have it in a different, expanded form, a much more robust form, in the Messianic Kingdom, the Millennium following the second coming of Christ when the New Covenant goes into effect with Israel. But what we have now is similar to, but not the same as what will happen when the New Covenant comes into effect in Israel and Judah. So the indwelling of the Holy Spirit never occurred before in human history.
When you think about the Old Testament, fewer than a hundred people had any relationship with God the Holy Spirit. Some who were filled were people like Aholiab and Bezaleel who were the craftsmen who were responsible for all of the metal work, all the woodwork, all the furniture design, and the construction for the tabernacle. Later then all those doing all that work for the Temple. You have the prophets, you have some of the kings, but the ministry of the Holy Spirit in the Old Testament is primarily related to enhancing their leadership ability over the people of God. It is not related to their spiritual life at all. You just have to get that notion completely out of your head. It had nothing to do with David's spiritual life. It had nothing to do with Solomon's spiritual life. It had nothing to do with Moses' spiritual life. It had to do with enhancing their leadership role within the theocracy of Israel. Period.
And it doesn't have anything to do with how spiritual or spiritually mature that Old Testament believer was. So we're going to look at some of these examples so you'll understand this. I want you to look at some of these in context. Let's go back to Exodus 31. This is repeated later on when it comes into practice as there's a lot of original instruction and then later a subsequent fulfillment in Exodus so there's a lot of repetition. God tells them to go build something and later on it describes them building it, so you get it twice. In Exodus, chapter 31, this is a description related to the construction of the tabernacle and the artisans. "Then the Lord spoke to Moses, saying, "See, I have called by name Bezaleel the son of Uri, the son of Hur, of the tribe of Judah." The reason that genealogy bores you and shouldn't is because it locates this as a real person. If you read legendary, mythological stuff it doesn't lock down the person in terms of their genealogy as a real time individual who lived at a specific time and place in history. So "Bezaleel is the son of Uri, the son of Huri, of the tribe of Judah. And I have filled him with the Spirit of God, in wisdom..." Notice God says I filled him with the Spirit of God in wisdom.
Now when we look at that and the way its written in the Hebrew it looks like he's got something similar to the filling of the Spirit that we have in the New Testament because of the similarity of the word 'fill'. But these are already gifted artisans who are being filled with the Spirit of wisdom. Now here the Spirit is described in terms of what it produces in terms of wisdom. This is a word we're going to spend a lot of time on in our study in Proverbs. Its the Hebrew word chokmah which has as its core meaning the idea of skill, producing something of value, producing something that's beautiful, producing something that's wondrous.
In some contexts when its talking about wisdom in relation to life, it means living well, living in a way that brings glory to God and creates a beautiful, magnificent life, based on the grace of God and the wisdom of God and the revelation of God. Here it is a spirit of skill at what they're producing. They are skillful seamstresses, they are skilled when they're making furniture, their metalwork and their woodwork. All of that. So when you look at Exodus 31:3, He's giving them a Spirit of wisdom, the Holy Spirit is behind it. It's not a filling by means of the Spirit like you have in Ephesians 5:18 but it is the giving of the Spirit which fills them with skill in their area of production. So verse 3 should be understood, "I have filled him with the Spirit of God, that is giving them wisdom, knowledge and all manner of workmanship." It's not a spiritual thing; it is a skill thing in terms of what they're going to produce in the production of the tabernacle.
In verse 4 the purpose is "to design artistic works, to work in gold, in silver, in bronze, in cutting jewels for setting, in carving wood, and to work in all manner of workmanship." I don't see anything here like the filling by the Holy Spirit. I don't see character transformation. It's not about spiritual growth there. It's about being able to produce in wood, silver, gold, bronze, something of beauty, something of glory. That was the role of the Holy Spirit there. It's not related to spiritual life.
Now let's turn over to another example, a couple of books over in the Pentateuch, to Numbers 11. Now this is another one of those situations where we see a lot of rebelliousness on the part of the Exodus generation with their complaining, griping, and grumbling. Of course, none of us ever do that! Verse 1, "Now when the people complained it displeased the Lord..." That's one of those commands that's repeated in the New Testament when the Lord says to do all things without grumbling or murmuring in Ephesians 5 as a reminder to all of us of that. "Now when the people complained it displeased the Lord, for the Lord heard it and His anger was aroused so that the fire of the Lord burned among them, and consumed some in the outskirts of the camp." Divine discipline bringing death on more of the Exodus generation. God says that none of them were going to get into the land alive so there were these various judgments that occurred that took additional level of life. "Then the people cried out unto Moses and when Moses prayed to the Lord, the fire was quenched. So he called the name of the place Taberah..." There's this ongoing complaining there.
Then as you go through the chapter this is where Moses begins to delegate authority to the seventy elders. In verse 16, "So the Lord said to Moses: 'Gather to me seventy men of the elders of Israel, whom you know to be the elders of the people and officers over them; bring them to the tabernacle of meeting, that they may stand there with you." So we're going to bring in this new leadership group that you're going to delegate responsibilities to and then God says in verse 17, "Then I will come down and talk with you there. I will talk of the Spirit that is upon you..." This is the Holy Spirit. Notice it's not in you, but upon you. It's the Hebrew preposition auwhich always means upon. It's from an external point of view. Not the preposition bu which means inside of but au which means upon or above. "... and will put the same upon them and they shall bear the burden of the people with you, that you may not bear it yourself alone."
When this occurs they prophesied. Now what exactly does that mean? Did they foretell the future? Did they preach a sermon? There's one passage in Chronicles that uses the term 'prophesy' in relation to singing praise to God. I think that's probably what is meant here. Miriam prophesied before the Lord and then she sang a hymn back in Exodus 14 so I think there is a meaning of prophecy that is singing praise to God. I think that's what happens here.
So all of them that are there praised God but they didn't all come out of the camp. There are two that haven't come out yet. They're back in the camp and they're known as Eldad and Medad. So in verse 25, "Then the Lord came down in the cloud, and spoke to him, and took of the Spirit that was upon him and placed the same upon the seventy elders, and it happened when the Spirit rested upon them, that they prophesied, although they never did so again." Another example of things that happen in the Scripture that are one-time events that are not to be seen as on-going events. This is like the gift of tongues and miracles and healing in the 1st century. They were just defined and set up to be temporary gifts as the foundation of the Church. In verse 26, "But two men had remained in the camp; the name of one was Eldad and the name of the other Medad. And the Spirit rested upon [not in] them. Now they were among those listed, but who had not gone out to the tabernacle; yet they prophesied in the camp..." God is identifying who the leaders are by this manifestation as a result of the Spirit coming upon them.
Then we had Balaam. Balaam, who is doing everything he can to earn his ill-gotten gains from Balak and he's even hired to curse Israel. He can't do it but the Spirit of God comes upon him. So it's not related to his spiritual condition. Balaam, I believe, was a believer but he's disobedient the whole time. So the Spirit of God comes upon and uses even carnal, pagan believers to accomplish His purposes.
And no book shows that better than Judges. We have that kind of thing happening again and again to the judges. The Spirit of the Lord came upon Othniel in the fight against Cushan, which defied the King of Mesopotamia. The Spirit of the Lord came upon Gideon in Judges 6:34. The Spirit of the Lord came upon Jephthah. He's the one who made a rash vow and ended up sacrificing his daughter for an offering to God. Judges 13:25 and 14:6 talk about the Spirit of the Lord coming upon Samson. Samson was a brutal, violent, womanizing, rebel against God 98% of the time in his life and yet God still used him because that's how things functioned in the Old Testament economy.
We see another example of this with Saul. 1 Samuel 10: 6, "And the Spirit of the Lord will come upon you [speaking of King Saul] and you'll prophesy with them and be turned into another man." That indicates that he's regenerate, by the way. Then in 1 Samuel 10:10, "When they came to the hill there was a group of prophets to meet him and the Spirit of God came upon him." Notice it's always upon, upon, upon; it's not in. You didn't have indwelling like there is now. And then the Spirit of the Lord leaves him in 1 Samuel 16:14, "But the Spirit of the Lord departed from Saul, and a distressing spirit from the Lord troubled him." He comes under Divine discipline. The Spirit of the Lord left him. It was temporary. It was only for key leaders to enhance their leadership ability in relationship to the theocratic kingdom or theocracy of Israel and it was a temporary bestowing of the gift.
This is why after David sinned with Bathsheba he prays to God in his confession for God to cleanse him of his sin and "create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a steadfast spirit within me. Do not cast me away from your presence and do not take your Holy Spirit from me." See, this is not a prayer for us today. He doesn't want God to turn His back on him like God did with Saul and give the blessing to another dynasty or another house and take the Holy Spirit away from David like he had taken the Holy Spirit away from Saul. I'm amazed how many people decide they want to teach something different on that, even today.
So the Old Testament did not have a permanent giving or bestowal or gifting of the Holy Spirit. There's no indwelling of the Holy Spirit and the ministry of the Holy Spirit in these examples was not for their spiritual growth or their spiritual life. Now our Lord prophesied that there would be a unique coming of the Holy Spirit future to His ministry. In John 14:16 he says, "And I will pray the Father, and He will give you another Helper, that He may abide with you forever, even the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive because it neither sees Him nor knows Him but you know Him for He dwells with you and will be in you." So this is the indwelling of the Holy Spirit prophesied by the Lord.
At this point the indwelling is for the purpose of making the body a temple, an inner sanctum for the indwelling of Jesus Christ. In the Old Testament temple the naos is constructed and once it's constructed the presence of God takes up its abiding presence inside the naos. So this is the analogy. The believer, therefore, is set apart bodily in this life from unbelievers. There are no sacred buildings, only the human body.
In 1 Corinthians 6:19 and all through that chapter, starting in 6:12 Paul is talking about things that believers should participate in and should not participate in and in verse 15 he says, "Do you not know that your bodies are members of Christ?" The term bodies here is talking about the individual body. "Shall I then take the members of Christ and make them members of a harlot? Certainly not!" He's talking about the physical, human body, not used metaphorically to refer to a corporate entity. Verse 18, "Flee sexual immorality; Every sin that a man does is outside the body, but he who commits sexual immorality sins against his own body." Again, he's talking about the individual physical body. Verse 19, "Or do you not know that your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit who is in you, whom you have from God, and you are not your own? For you are bought with a price; therefore glorify God in your body and your spirit, which are God's."
Then we go to 1 Corinthians 3:16. This comes immediately after Paul's description of the judgment seat of Christ and the destruction of the wood, hay, and straw and rewards for the precious stones. He says, "Do you not know that you are the temple of God and that the Spirit of God dwells in you?" He's talking to the whole group so he uses y'all but he's referring to the individual. "Do y'all not know that you [each individual within the group] are a temple of God and that the Spirit of God dwells in you? If anyone defiles the temple of God, God will destroy him for the temple of God is holy, which temple you are." So this indicates this temple sanctifying ministry of the Holy Spirit.
Point number 6 is that the Indwelling of the Spirit is a permanent relationship not affected by carnality or spirituality. Whether you're obedient or disobedient, you are permanently set apart to God. But the filling of the Holy Spirit is something that is temporary. When we sin, it breaks that fellowship and that ongoing harmony; the filling operation of the Holy Spirit stops. The pause button is hit and is recovered only when we confess our sin.
The seventh point: the indwelling is based on the grace provision of God. God, out of His character has given this wonderful provision for us. It's not based on our volition but the filling of the Spirit is. If we choose to sin, we break that filling ministry of the Holy Spirit and we have to confess in order to recover it.
The eighth point: indwelling is related to the body and the temple sanctifying aspect of the Holy Spirit's ministry. It's our entire person because the body is the dwelling place of our soul and spirit whereas the filling of the Holy Spirit is the role of the Holy Spirit in teaching and filling the believer's thinking and soul with the Word of God. Now when we stop walking by the Spirit; that gets put on hold.
Ninth point: filling is lost or put on hold when the believer sins but the indwelling continues because it is for a different purpose. It's related to our permanent position in Christ. And then what we're going to see next time is that the indwelling of the Holy Spirit is different from the indwelling of Christ. That doctrine is doubted. I can't believe how many Biblical scholars say that the term 'the indwelling of Christ' is just another way of talking about the indwelling of the Holy Spirit when that's clearly not true in Scripture. So we'll tackle that next time because it's all part of our study to understand Romans 8. We are indwelt by the Holy Spirit. That's the foundation for the spiritual life.
