The Importance of the Spirit’s Work
But is the work of the Holy Spirit really important? Important! Why, were it not for the work of the Holy Spirit there would be no gospel, no faith, no church, no Christianity in the world at all.
In the first place, without the Holy Spirit there would be no gospel and no New Testament.
When Christ left the world, he committed his cause to his disciples. He made them responsible for going and making disciples of all the nations. “Ye. . . shall bear witness,” he told them in the upper room (Jn 15:27 KJV). “You will be my witnesses. . . to the ends of the earth,” were his parting words to them on Olivet, before he ascended (Acts 1:8). Such was their appointed task. But what sort of witnesses were they likely to prove? They had never been good pupils; they had consistently failed to understand Christ and missed the point of his teaching throughout his earthly ministry; how could they be expected to do better now that he had gone? Was it not virtually certain that, with the best will in the world, they would soon get the truth of the gospel inextricably mixed up with a mass of well-meant misconceptions, and their witness would rapidly be reduced to a twisted, garbled, hopeless muddle?
The answer to this question is no—because Christ sent the Holy Spirit to them, to teach them all truth and so save them from all error, to remind them of what they had been taught already and to reveal to them the rest of what their Lord meant them to learn. “The Counselor ... will teach you all things and will remind you of everything I have said to you” (Jn 14:26). “I have much more to say to you, more than you can now bear. But when he, the Spirit of truth, comes, he will guide you into all truth. He will not speak on his own; he will speak only what he hears” (that is, he would make known to them all that Christ would instruct him to tell them, just as Christ had made known to them all that the Father had instructed him to tell them: see Jn 12:49-50; 17:8, 14), “and he will tell you what is yet to come. He will bring glory to me by taking from what is mine and making it known to you” (Jn 16:12-14). In this way “he will testify about me” (to you, my disciples, to whom I send him); and (equipped and enabled by his testifying work) “you also must testify” (15:26-27).
The promise was that, taught by the Spirit, these original disciples should be enabled to speak as so many mouths of Christ so that, just as the Old Testament prophets had been able to introduce their sermons with the words, “Thus saith the LORD Jehovah,” so the New Testament apostles might with equal truth truth be able to say of their teaching, oral or written, “Thus saith the Lord Jesus Christ.”
And the thing happened. The Spirit came to the disciples and testified to them of Christ and his salvation, according to the promise. Speaking of the glories of this salvation (“what God has prepared for those who love him”), Paul writes, “God has revealed it to us by his Spirit. . . We have. . . received. . . the Spirit who is from God, that we may understand what God has freely given us. This is what we speak [and, he might have added, write], not in words taught us by human wisdom but in words taught by the Spirit” (1 Cor 2:9-13). The Spirit testified to the apostles by revealing to them all truth and inspiring them to communicate it with all truthfulness. Hence the gospel, and hence the New Testament. But the world would have had neither without the Holy Spirit.
Nor is this all. In the second place, without the Holy Spirit there would be no faith and no new birth—in short, no Christians.
The light of the gospel shines; but “the god of this age has blinded the minds of unbelievers” (2 Cor 4:4), and the blind do not respond to the stimulus of light. As Christ told Nicodemus, “No one can see the kingdom of God unless he is born again” (Jn 3:3; compare v. 5). Speaking corporately for himself and his disciples to Nicodemus and to the whole class of unregenerate religious people to which Nicodemus belonged, Christ went on to explain that the inevitable consequence of unregeneracy is unbelief—“You people do not accept our testimony” (Jn 3:11). The gospel produces no conviction in them; unbelief holds them fast.
What follows, then? Should we conclude that preaching the gospel is a waste of time and write off evangelism as a hopeless enterprise, foredoomed to fail? No, because the Spirit abides with the church to testify of Christ. To the apostles, he testified by resealing and inspiring, as we saw. To the rest of us, down the ages, he testifies by illuminating: opening blinded eyes, restoring spiritual vision, enabling sinners to see that the gospel is indeed God’s truth, and Scripture is indeed God’s Word, and Christ is indeed God’s Son. “When he [the Spirit] comes,” our Lord promised, “he will convince the world concerning sin and righteousness and judgment” (Jn 16:8 RSV).
It is not for us to imagine that we can prove the truth of Christianity by our own arguments; nobody can prove the truth of Christianity except the Holy Spirit, by his own almighty work of renewing the blinded heart. It is the sovereign prerogative of Christ’s Spirit to convince men’s consciences of the truth of Christ’s gospel; and Christ’s human witnesses must learn to ground their hopes of success not on clever presentation of the truth by man, but on powerful demonstration of the truth by the Spirit.
Paul points the way here: “When I came to you, brethren, I did not come proclaiming to you the testimony of God in lofty words or wisdom.... My speech and my message were not in plausible words of wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power, that your faith might not rest in the wisdom of men but in the power of God” (1 Cor 2:1-5 RSV). And because the Spirit does bear witness in this way, people come to faith when the gospel is preached. But without the Spirit there would not be a Christian in the world.
Packer, J: "Knowing God"
