Dennis Tuuri

# Sermon Transcript – Reformation Covenant Church
## Pastor Dennis Tuuri

As you’ll notice, the songs we’re singing today have to do with the Holy Spirit. And this text has to do with the spirit and the march of the gospel into Europe. And it’s very important that the song we just sang has tremendous biblical content to it in terms of the spirit and his work throughout all created history, both at creation and at Pentecost and then in the Old Testament, the giving of the law and also in the recreation of all things.

We’ll talk about that today based upon Acts 16:6-12. Please stand for the reading of God’s word. Acts 16 beginning at verse 6.

Now when they had gone throughout Phrygia in the region of Galatia and were forbidden of the Holy Ghost to preach the word in Asia. After they were come to Mysia, they assayed to go into Bithynia. But the spirit suffered them not. And they passing by Mysia came down to Troas.

And a vision appeared to Paul in the night. There stood a man of Macedonia and prayed him saying, “Come over into Macedonia and help us.” And after he had seen the vision, immediately we endeavored to go into Macedonia, assuredly gathering that the Lord had called us for to preach the gospel unto them. Therefore, loosing from Troas, we came with a straight course to Samothrace, and the next day to Neapolis, and from then to Philippi, which is the chief city of that part of Macedonia, and a colony, and we were in that city abiding certain days.

Please be seated. We thank God for his word. And as I said, Dave will come up now and lead us in the prayer for illumination.

Common theme in the songs we just sung. And I would have been clever. I probably could have produced an outline using just these stanzas, these songs we’ve sung so far. This last one particularly. I don’t have an outline for you today. Hopefully, you got a map. We’re not really going to be talking about it much.

We’ll just talk about it just very briefly. My subject today is going to be the Holy Spirit primarily and specifically in terms of this text—the Holy Spirit and the march of the gospel in the text specifically into Europe from Asia into Europe, but hopefully it has applications for the march of the gospel and the spirit who motivates that march and directs and guides us in it in our lives as well.

I’m going to talk about—oh, and I left my other notes away, too. What a day. Well, I think I can just go over it in my own mind without having the notes in front of me.

We’re going to talk first about the presence of the Holy Spirit. And in this text, we see the presence of the Holy Spirit. In the context of that, we’re going to talk about how God, our Savior, promised he would not leave us comfortless. He would not leave us orphaned. And these men who have their ways stopped from going into two specific areas with the gospel could have a feeling of being alone or orphaned or without the presence of the Holy Spirit.

And yet they properly interpret the Holy Spirit being the one who forbids them to go into particular regions. So we’re going to talk about the presence of the Holy Spirit. We’re going to talk about that presence not just in relationship to the saint, but to the unsaved and unregenerated as well. And not just in terms of men, but the presence of the Holy Spirit in all the created order. Not in a pantheistic sense, but in a very real sense as the giver of life and the life that we see about us in the created order.

So we’re going to talk about the presence of the Holy Spirit. We’re going to, however, put a correction to that and make sure that we don’t just see the presence of the Holy Spirit as something comforting to our soul solely. Rather, the Holy Spirit is a sovereign spirit. And so, the second thing I want to address is the sovereignty of the Holy Spirit—that the spirit does not—we are not to think of the Holy Spirit with a man-centered attitude but with a God-centered attitude.

He is the third person of the Trinity. He’s not something to make us feel better. He’s not an influence upon our lives—an abstract and personal influence. He is a person and he affects work, and that work is the work of the Savior and of the Father. And so the spirit here doesn’t do things to make Paul feel good. He does things for the march of the gospel. He is sovereign.

It is amazing that the impact of the charismatic movement, which has been a good one to help people refocus upon the person and work of the Holy Spirit, and yet it’s filled with Arminianism and Arminianistic tendencies that don’t stress the sovereignty of the spirit but rather stress the sovereignty of man—and so the spirit is some kind of aid or inducement as men produce the march of the gospel. No. The spirit is sovereign.

So we’re going to talk about the sovereignty of the spirit. We’re going to talk about the sovereignty of the spirit and the presence of the spirit here in this passage from Acts 16 being a guiding and directing spirit as well.

So, in addition to presence and sovereignty, we’re going to talk about the Holy Spirit in reference to guidance, and you could put guidance/knowledge if you’re making an outline there in your sheets. First point: presence. Second point: sovereignty. Third point: knowledge, because the Holy Spirit guides and directs the apostle here and his team to what the spirit wants to accomplish. So they interpret facts correctly.

They have an unction as we do of the Holy Spirit, and as a result we know all things in him and they understand all things on the basis of the spirit in his work. And so we’re going to talk about the spirit in reference to knowledge. Fourth, we’re going to talk about the spirit’s sovereign presence guiding and directing us to equip men for ministry, and with ministry you could put slash vocation.

So we’ve got presence, we’ve got sovereignty, we’ve got knowledge or guidance, and then the fourth thing you’d put down in your outline is vocation/ministry—that the Holy Spirit does not equip us for something other than what he has called us to do. The Apostle Paul in his vocational calling is a preacher of the gospel, and the spirit guides and directs and empowers him to the end that he preaches the gospel well.

Apostle Paul is most Paul. He is most himself when he is involved in the work God has called him to do. And that work, as we’ll see from the Old Testament, is not related simply to the preaching of the gospel but it involves, for instance, equipping men to do craftsman sort of work in the construction of the tabernacle and temple. So ministry, vocation is the fourth area in which we want to talk.

And then the final point will be that all of this is to the purpose of recreation. Recreation is the fifth word there on your outline. The Holy Spirit comes not for some abstract purpose but for a very specific concrete purpose of accomplishing what we just sang about—that this land might be purged of bitter things and this land might become once more the garden of God. And so recreation, which involves an aspect of judgment but also involves primarily the aspect of jubilee and restoration and a growing godliness in all the earth.

That is the purpose through which the presence of the Holy Spirit—a sovereign guiding presence—equips us for vocation to the end that the whole world might be made new. That the great reversal that Mary sang of in the Magnificat and we do 2,000 years later might be affected in time and in history. That is the purpose of the work of the Holy Spirit in the word in the world.

And so these songs we just sang are a good introduction to what we’re going to do. And I don’t know that I’ll get through all this today. This may take a couple of weeks, might take three weeks. I don’t know. And I’m not concerned about that. I’m concerned that we come away from this portion of scripture not just seeing some kind of odd little story about how men couldn’t go here and couldn’t go there and had to go there, but that we understand the big picture here. That we come to a renewed appreciation and praise to the Holy Spirit of God.

That we praise him for who he is and for what he is accomplishing in the context of our world. And so I want us to spend some time.

Now the other thing I want to tell you here is in a sense this is an advertisement. This sermon can be seen as an advertisement for R.G. Rushdoony’s new two-volume set—his systematic theology. I’ve read the entire section on the Holy Spirit and much of what I’ll be sharing here by way of quotes will be from Rushdoony’s work and the works that he cites as well.

I think there are many very valuable things to be learned from that section of his systematic theology and probably from the whole thing. So as you go through this, please understand I won’t be telling you “R.G. Rushdoony says this” every time I say it. There’ll be too many things here to have to do that with. But much of what I’ll tell you today has been influenced—I’ve been influenced by the work of Mr. Rushdoony and particularly his latest systematic theology, which in the providence of God somehow we’ll work through this winter, at least a group of us men. We’re not sure the vehicle yet. Okay, well let’s get started, and we’ll start with this first point, which is presence.

And I want us to see presence not first of all in the life of the believer, secondly in all men, third in all the world, and then of course essentially ending then by reminding us of his presence in our lives and the life of the apostle Paul.

So presence. Now as I said, here we read in this text that they couldn’t go certain places. And on the map that I provided for you—and I didn’t bring a copy of that up here either—but you’ll see the little lines instead of going over through the coast of the sea route to get from Antioch, Syrian Antioch, up to the places where he had gone on his first missionary journey. They go the land route. And so you’ll see the line going…

Oh, that’d be great. Thank you. Yeah, you’ll see the line that I’ve drawn into this map here in this section of the map. When you’ll see to the right hand, the bottom right hand corner by the title, you’ll see Antioch there, and that’s where they leave from to go on this second missionary journey. And they go on a land route up through—they go visit back those last four cities that were mentioned in the first missionary journey.

So he goes to Derbe first, Iconium, Lystra, Antioch Pisidia, and I don’t know if these are exactly correlative, though the line goes from there to where he was going and the spirit stopped him. But this we say we read specifically that his way was unclear. It was blocked off both to Bithynia and then also over to the other direction in Asia Minor as well. The spirit blocked him on two different occurrences.

And those blocks are put on there by those little kind of oval or semicircle lines there. That’s blocking off by the Holy Spirit of the Apostle Paul. Now imagine yourself in his position. We don’t know how the spirit made known that he wasn’t supposed to go in these regions. Something happened. People think it might have been health—it might have been storms—it might have been a lot of things. We don’t know what it was, but imagine yourself a long way from home. Now you’re going out to preach the gospel, and yet the Holy Spirit stops you from preaching the gospel. You can—when that kind of thing happens, you don’t always immediately associate it with the work of the spirit. You can feel alone. You can feel frustrated.

Some of you today perhaps feel frustrated with occurrences of the last week where the spirit has closed doors in your life, will not allow you to do things that seem so good and proper for you to do. Don’t these people need the gospel? The Apostle Paul could say, couldn’t he argue with God? Why won’t you let me go here now? These people need the gospel. And of course, they do. They will receive the gospel as well.

By the way, Bithynia, where he specifically is told he cannot go at this point in time, will later become the site of the Council of Chalcedon in 451 and the Council of Nicaea earlier than that in, I think, 325. I believe it will be evangelized. But for now, he cannot go there.

And you may have experiences in your life where you feel frustrated by not being able to do what you want to do. You may feel cut off from people, and he was certainly cut off from the people that he wanted to go and minister in the context of. We can feel alone, frightened, and frustrated frequently in the Christian life. And it’s very important that we remember at those times that our Savior tells us in the gospel of John that indeed he will not leave us comfortless.

“I will come to you,” he tells us, and he tells us it will come to us through the giving of the Comforter, the Holy Ghost. When he tells us in John 14:18 that he will not leave us comfortless, the word there is really the same word as orphaned. He will not leave us orphaned in the context of our world. He will be present with us, and his presence with us is the presence of the third person of the Trinity, the Holy Spirit.

We sing that song sometimes at communion, don’t we? “Not as orphans as Christ left us now.” And it’s a reminder to us that we’re not left alone. Though we may feel very much alone at various times, and yet God does not leave us alone.

John Calvin, again this quote coming out of R.G. Rushdoony’s systematic theology. Calvin says this about this verse, “I will not leave you orphans: This passage shows what men are and what they can do when they have been deprived of the protection of the spirit. They are orphans exposed to every kind of fraud and injustice, incapable of governing themselves, and in short unable of themselves to do anything. The only remedy for so great a defect is if Christ govern us by his spirit, which he promises that he will do.”

And to do this he first reminds his disciples of their weakness. God frequently brings us to a position of weakness in which we feel orphaned by God, bereft of guidance, so that we might come to rely upon him alone as our comforter and guidance and direction. And he promised us that indeed he has sent his spirit.

Now this is an important thing for us to dwell a little bit on. It’s easy to relate to the Son. The Son became incarnate. He took on a body very much like our bodies—two hands, two eyes, hair, the whole thing. And so we can relate to him to some degree. We know he’s the God of the universe, and that baffles us and it’s a mystery we cannot comprehend. But the incarnation makes it easy to relate.

The fact that God the Father is called the Father, and we’ve had fathers, helps us to relate. It’s a little tougher. He did not become incarnate the way the Son did. And yet we can relate to him because he is a Father and we have relationships with fathers.

But the Holy Spirit is something a little more amorphous to us, isn’t it? Impersonal. It seems. The Holy Spirit. What is that? And the names the scriptures frequently give the Holy Spirit—Advocate, Comforter, etc.—are not really personal as much as they show the effect, the function of the Holy Spirit relative to our lives. And so it can be difficult for us to really grasp the concept, to believe intellectually and spiritually the presence of the Holy Spirit in our lives. And yet we must do so because to deny it leaves us as orphans without the Son, because the Son comes to us through the spirit. And so it’s difficult for us to keep in mind, to remind ourselves, to teach our children the Holy Spirit as a person is present in the world and he’s present in our lives. And yet we must do so again and again lest we find ourselves as orphans—in fact, instead of being simply fearful of that, but to find ourselves orphans by a denial of the work of the Holy Spirit in our lives.

In another quote out of Rushdoony’s systematic theology, he quotes from Luther and he begins the quote with Luther with some words of his own. He says, “Without the spirit the best of us are orphans prone to a helplessness we will not admit, so that our best knowledge is blindness without the spirit. The spirit draws us closer to the word and to one another in him.”

And then he quotes from Luther. Luther said this:

“Thus all Christendom has this comforting promise that it will not be forsaken or left without aid and help. Even if it is bereft of all human consolation, help and assistance, still Christ will not leave it desolate and unprotected. It seems as though for a time he were leaving his church and his Christians without comfort and protection. Despite everything they feel and see, they should cling to the promise he gives them here when he says, ‘I will not stay away from you. And though I must depart from you for a little while physically, I will not remain away long. I will return to you soon and be with you forever. You shall be protected against all devils, against the world, sin, and death, and you shall live and conquer with me.’”

Now, Luther knew whereof he wrote. Luther was isolated and alone, a death penalty upon his head, excommunicated by the church, having to take refuge at a castle of a prince. He knew whereof he wrote. But he knew that though all men forsake him, yet Jesus Christ would not.

Jesus Christ has promised that we are not orphans, he will not leave us comfortless. He gives us the Holy Spirit, the Comforter, to come to us, to guide us, direct us, console us, and to call us into action for the sake of preaching the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ.

I don’t know your circumstances, but it’s important that you recognize today that if you’re a believer in the Lord Jesus Christ and have placed your faith in his work alone for your right standing with God, that he has given you his spirit on the basis of his work. That spirit is with you. You are not orphanless. You are not alone. You have a comforter given to you—the Holy Spirit.

The Holy Spirit is present in the world. But it’s interesting that we frequently, if we get a hold of that doctrine, we don’t recognize the presence of the Holy Spirit with the ungodly as well. And yet it is real.

In a correlative passage of this passage from John, and we read in John 16:7, “I tell you the truth. It’s expedient for you that I go away. For if I go not away, the comforter—that is the Holy Ghost—will not come unto you. But if I depart, I will send him unto you.”

That’s what we’ve been talking about. Christ left and he sent the Comforter. He sent the Holy Spirit, leaving us not as orphans. But the next verse, verse 8, says this:

“And when he is come, this one who is present with us, he will reprove the world of sin and of righteousness and of judgment. He will reprove the world of sin because they believe not in me, of righteousness because I go to my Father and ye see me no more, and of judgment because the prince of this world is judged.”

Conversely, he tells us in verse 13 that the spirit will guide us into all truth. As surely as the Holy Spirit is guiding and directing, is present with the Apostle Paul and company, so is he present in the world as well, in the unbelieving population and in those who reject the Lord Jesus Christ.

The Holy Spirit is no less present in that sense with those who rejected Paul at Lystra and Iconium and Derbe and Antioch, and who rejected the gospel of God. The Holy Spirit is no less present in their lives as well. But his influence in their lives is not to guide them into all truth. It is not to comfort them and solace them. It is to convict them. It is to judge them. It is to remind them of the rejection of him. And it’s to turn them into total orphans without any protection or guidance from him, but only a screaming indictment from God’s word ringing in their souls.

The Holy Spirit is present in the lives of the unregenerate as well.

Speaking of this, Rushdoony wrote, “He is thus very present—a very present work, present power, work and person of God. At every moment, at every moment it is God the spirit with whom we have to deal. Our relationship to the spirit is closer and more thorough than with our husband, wife, children, parents or friends. Our relationship to the Holy Spirit, unlike any other we have, is total. This is true of the regenerate and the unregenerate alike.

“Perhaps we need to say that the charismatics have not gone far enough. We cannot limit the spirit’s presence and power to certain meetings, moments, and events. Now, we have an event here in which it is recorded the spirit was active. But the scriptures teach that this is simply of the part for the whole, the part for the sum—the part for the whole. The spirit is active in all of our lives in the lives of the regenerate and unregenerate as well. He is the third person of the Triune God. And he works, as Rushdoony says, in the hearts of the unregenerate and regenerate alike.”

The unregenerate seeks to establish the kingdom of man. The spirit convicts them of sin and of justice and brings home God’s judgment into all their being. This is what John 16 means when he says he sends the spirit and the spirit will convict the world. The covenant people—we are guided into all truth. But those outside of the covenant, the Holy Spirit is nonetheless present. And yet he is a judging spirit against them.

Indeed, in all the created order, the Holy Spirit is given to us in scripture as the lifegiver.

And here I read from Rushdoony’s theology where he quotes a man who wrote an Old Testament theology. Vos talks about the relationship of the spirit to creation. Here we know that the Holy Spirit was present at creation, moving over the waters, bringing forth order and bringing forth life.

And Vos says this: “Since the world is placed outside of God, it is created by God. He is the creator of the world. The world is placed outside of God. We don’t believe in pantheism. The world is not an extension of God. The world is created outside of God. Understand that first. But it is because it is placed outside of God, it originated and subsists only by the life imparted to it by his spirit. Thus, it is not separated from him, although it is distinct from him.”

This is a very necessary distinction. Rushdoony writes, “It’s all the more important because the modern era has either fallen into pantheism or so separated God from the world as to make the Holy Spirit’s presence unusual or dramatic. God is not a God who is afar off. Jeremiah 23:23. Although men in their sin are inclined to think so. Psalm 10:1. The world of science has made the great cause of all a very remote or non-existent cause. Whereas the God of scripture is totally sovereign, omnipresent, and always governing in every event and second of time—always governing. This is the working out of God’s decree and providence. And the spirit is the agent of that.”

The scientific world has thus aggravated man’s difficulties in understanding the doctrine of the spirit. Because man now sees God as distant and the spirit as vague or sporadic. Other gods rule over man. Institutions and persons become the givers of life. And as a result, the doctrine of the Holy Spirit has lost its biblical force.

If you leave out God as the giver—the Holy Spirit that he puts into his creation, that he has work upon that creation to bring forth life—then you essentially turn over the giving of life to man and to man’s institutions.

The Holy Spirit is present not just in the regenerate and the unregenerate. The Holy Spirit is involved in all the workings of the creation, which is separate from God and yet it is distinct from God, but not separated in the sense that the Holy Spirit is not operative in it. The Holy Spirit is operative in it. There is no brute factuality. There is no material world that has no reference to the Holy Spirit. He guides and directs all things. Indeed, God tells us that he gives his spirit, life that is into the animals as well. And so the Holy Spirit is one who moves and brings about life in creation.

But to us, of course, those who love and obey the Lord, as we said, the importance of this first point—the presence of the Holy Spirit—the relevance of this today to us is certainly one of the most important things: to bring us comfort and advocacy in a time of difficulty or trial in our lives. But even here, God puts a distinction upon who receives that spirit. And it’s not—it is of course the difference between the regenerate and the unregenerate, the elect or those outside of the covenant community of God, those that he has called to eternal life or those he has sentenced to damnation.

But beyond that, the scriptures want us to understand that the basis of all this is law-keeping. Indeed, the scriptures tell us that we read in that same passage of John—that those who love him, those who keep his commandments, those are the ones who receive the spirit of adoption, so to speak. The spirit that guides and directs us, the spirit that comforts us.

And so we indeed are seen as recipients of the spirit because of our obedience to the law of Christ, which demonstrates our love for him. And so the Apostle Paul goes forward to distribute the relationship with the law of God to salvation and to sanctification. And he goes in the power of the Holy Spirit. And so he can see behind the workings of what some would see as brute factual—whether it’s illness on his part, storms, a vision, a feeling, an intuition, a conviction—who knows what it was. But the Apostle Paul sees behind all of that the gift of the Holy Spirit, who doesn’t leave him as an orphan and doesn’t leave us as orphans either, but comes to us and comes to us in love because of the personal work of Jesus Christ and comes to us to provide us comfort, understanding, knowing that his presence is always with us, that he will not withdraw his presence from those who profess the Lord Jesus Christ.

Rushdoony says, “The regenerate know and see the spirit and his power and witness. They are never alone. The world is never empty for them. The deadly effect of the modern world and life view has been to empty the world of God and also of all life and meaning beyond God. The result is the terror and dread of existentialism and the flight into fancy and imagination, drugs, sexual experimentalism and anything man can conceive as an answer to the void.”

“No theology can do justice to the faith which limits or silences the spirit. All such theologies smell of dust and death. Not so for us who believe. To love and obey Jesus means that we are loved by God the Father and God the Spirit. It means that we are surrounded by the love and presence of the Triune God.

“For the ungodly the world is empty and its essential fact is death—the consequence of sin. For the regenerate, the essential fact is that we live and move and have our being in the totally personal Triune God. To live in the spirit and to walk in the spirit means that all things are mediated to us by the spirit. The spirit is inseparable from God the Father and he is also inseparable now from us.”

The doctrine of the spirit, Rushdoony writes, “does not allow us to define ourselves or to number our days apart from him. To define ourselves as poor men when we have a chest full of gold is a lie. To define ourselves as alone or impotent in the face of an angry and evil world is to deny the indwelling of the spirit. To have God the spirit with and in us and as our comforter and advocate before God and man is to be indeed a child of the king and is very rich and very strong.”

Paul, while some men would see him as a poor wandering person as he moves from this district to that district, doors being closed, recognizes that he is rich in Christ. And the very fact that the Holy Spirit is closing doors even leads him to understand this is the spirit’s work in his life. And that spirit’s work is a settlement to him. It fills his life and it gives him guidance and direction and mediates love to him from the Father. And so it should be with us in the context of difficult days.

And this has been a difficult weekend for me. Some of you know why, some of you don’t. But in the midst of those sort of difficulties, and maybe you’ve had difficulties this last week, this last year, maybe it will strike this next week, when we are cut off from men, and when we face anger and wickedness of men, or when we face circumstances that we simply cannot comprehend the reason for them coming into our lives—we may never know the reason—but we should know that in all things, if we profess the Lord Jesus Christ and obey him, keep his law, that is the spirit’s work in our heart. And the spirit is there to comfort, guide and direct us and lead us into greater fruitfulness.

And so we are not alone. The presence of the Holy Spirit is an important truth for us to remember.

But as I said, the second point of the outline—the presence of the Holy Spirit is not simply there somehow to make man happy. I don’t want to leave you with that impression. It is a comfort to you. It’s a consolation to you. It should be hope to you that the Holy Spirit is present in your life. But please understand that we’re not good humanists here.

And God is not a humanist. God is not there to glorify man and to enjoy him forever. He creates us to glorify him and enjoy him forever. And so the Holy Spirit must be seen as the sovereign spirit who acts sovereignly in the power of God to affect his purposes, not ours. Paul may have felt better if he could have preached the gospel here or there, but God’s primary concern is not how Paul feels. It’s to get Paul to adjust his feelings to the sovereign God who is guiding and directing all things for his purposes, not for our purposes.

And so the second point of the outline is that the Holy Spirit is a sovereign presence, indicated by his turning Paul down in various things. Later he’ll turn him down with request of physical ailments, etc., for the sake of his purposes. He guides and directs us in this way.

Again to quote from Rushdoony: “One problem in much of Christendom today is that the Holy Spirit is tied more closely in the thinking of almost all groups with experience rather than learning and growth. It can be said rather that the true experience in the Holy Spirit is one of learning and growth. The spirit doesn’t come to affect experience in our souls as much as he comes to affect learning and growth. Now part of that is an assurance of his presence with us. But it causes us to learn and grow so that we might be more fruitful for the purposes and work of the Holy Spirit.”

Again, Rushdoony writes, “That in our day and age, we are all too little concerned with the spirit himself, which is another way of saying our concern with all three persons of the Trinity is in terms of their effect on us and their service to us. And that’s sadly true, isn’t it? We want to know what the spirit can do for us. We want to be comforted for us. We want to be able to do whatever we want to do. And so we take the doctrine of the Trinity and we take all those persons beginning with the Holy Spirit and think of him only in terms of his effect upon us. And of course, his who he is far broader than that. He is the God of all the universe. He’s the third person of the Trinity.”

Again quoting Rushdoony: “To prophesy is to speak for God. Of course the prophetic work is connected with the spirit obviously. And to predict by applying God’s word to declare that the wages of sin is death is to prophesy. The Holy Spirit works to further God’s kingdom and reign. He is God and he is God-centered in all his ways, not man-centered.”

We have a very interesting occurrence in 1 Samuel 19 with King Saul. And if you want to turn there to 1 Samuel 19 in your Bible, I want to give us a picture of the sovereignty of the spirit and that sovereignty is exercised in ways that he sees fit, not in ways that we see fit. Okay?

In 1 Samuel 19, look at verse 20. “Saul sent messengers to take David. He’s sending these guys out to get David. When they saw the company of the prophets prophesying and Samuel standing as appointed over them. The spirit of God was upon the messengers of Saul and they also prophesied.”

So see what’s going on. Saul’s sending these men off to get David to do, to take him out. And instead the messengers go out and they prophesy with the prophets that have Samuel over them guiding and directing the prophets. Verse 21. “And was told Saul sent other messengers and they prophesied likewise. And Saul sent messengers again the third time and they prophesied also.

“Well, pretty clear picture we’re getting here. Then went he also to Rama and came to a great well that is in Siku and he asked and said where are Samuel and David? And one said behold there at Naioth and Rama or Naioth and Rama. And he went thither to Naioth and Rama. And the spirit of God was upon him also. And he went on and prophesied until he came to Naioth in Rama. And he stripped off his clothes also and prophesied before Samuel in like manner. And lay down naked all that day and all that night. Wherefore they say his soul also among the prophets.”

Well, this is an odd thing happening here, isn’t it? You get the picture here. It’s kind of a strange thing. And this account has been used to promulgate doctrines of the Holy Spirit that prophecy really has its original, even biblical origins in shamanism, in ecstatic trances and utterances, and you’d go naked and do weird things. And only later, the evolutionists—the liberal critics of the scriptures tell us—only later did prophecy become ethical at all and related to some kind of standard. Before that it was just kind of a trance you would fall into. And this is seen as biblical justification for that.

But what do we have here really? What we have here is the sovereign spirit working upon men whose intent is not to glorify God and not to accomplish his will in the created order, who want to work in rebellion to the providence of God and his ordination of David in this case. Saul’s messengers—nobody, I think, would say anything other than the fact that God came upon them and overpowered them with his spirit and caused them to prophesy. With Saul, we have a little more different problem. Somehow, when it gets to Saul, well, he really was prophesying and this nakedness was part of that. Well, it was part of it, but as Rushdoony points out, it was because Saul was opposed to what God was now sovereignly having him to do.

And the spirit humbled Saul as he made him prophesy. Saul’s own flesh worked against him to the fact of him stripping off his clothes and going naked. He was naked before God and he should be naked before us in his rebellion to God. And yet the spirit worked sovereignly in his life that he might speak forth the words of the spirit.

All right, Balaam. Another case in point. We could go into it. You get the point here. The Holy Spirit is sovereign. He’s not here for our well-being. We’re here for the well-being of his purposes. And he will use us. And he will use all men. He’ll have the wrath of man to praise him. And here we have the wrath of man—Saul essentially being forced by the Holy Spirit to praise God.

The Holy Spirit is sovereign and he is a spirit of judgment as well.

Again to quote Rushdoony on this: “God the Spirit struck down Saul and his officers, humbled them, demonstrated that he could use them in spite of themselves. The behavior of Saul and his men was not normal behavior then or now. Hopefully unfortunately, today it is somewhat normal. The text tells us, calls attention to its abnormality. It was especially not the planned behavior of these men. It was alien and abhorrent to them. What is its meaning? A comparison to Isaiah 63:1 is incisive. Jesus, filled with the spirit, sings out of conquest and victory. Saul and his officers, abased by the spirit. They rejected gravel before God’s prophet Samuel and his anointed David and prophesy in spite of themselves.”

The Holy Spirit is sovereign.

As we said, and again to quote Rushdoony: “People in their autonomy all too often make their autonomy and self-will the governing fact in their lives. The Holy Spirit is thus treated as a resource, something to be exploited rather than as the commanding power and authority in their lives. But the Holy Spirit is a person, God. He delivers us. For a person created in the image of God, his deliverance is a joyful act. We cannot share in the richness of that joy if we blind ourselves to his reality as the adopting person in our lives. We are his possession when we know him as our adopting person. We can know that with Nehemiah that the joy of the Lord is our strength. A grateful appreciation of the sovereignty of the Holy Spirit leads to joy. A rejection of the spirit leads to growling and abasement at the hands of that spirit.”

So secondly, in addition to the spirit being present with us, he is present in a sovereign sense. And this sovereign way that God comes upon his people is for the purpose of work, vocation slash ministry.

Well, actually I jumped ahead one step. The third point of the outline is knowledge and guidance. As the spirit works sovereignly in the life of Paul and these men on the second missionary journey, he does so giving them an understanding, a guidance and knowledge of their affairs. He is guiding and directing them toward a particular place. And Paul and his company, Luke, who wrote the account, recognizes this. And so when they talk about this, they don’t say we just couldn’t go there. They say the spirit said we couldn’t go there. Spirit said we couldn’t go here. And then when the spirit gives the order where we are to go, they leap into action and head straight way to Macedonia.

A good plan for us: wait when the doors close, and when the door opens, move in obedience, and move quickly to obey the Holy Spirit.

But in any event, the scriptures give us the Holy Spirit as the giver of knowledge, which becomes the giver of counsel and advice and direction and guidance for our lives as well. As I said earlier, 1 John 2:20, “You have an unction from the Holy Ghost, and you know all things.”

Wescott has a commentary on this text. He says this: that the anointing refers clearly to the gift of the spirit. According to Wescott, you have an unction and in virtue of the gift of the Holy Spirit, you know all things. You have potentially complete and certain knowledge. No false teaching can deceive you if you are faithful to yourselves.

Rushdoony says, “The basic to the new life we have in Christ is the gift of the spirit. Because we have the unction or anointing of the Holy Spirit, we now know all things in principle. We have the key to all knowledge. In other words, the lordship of Christ and of the Triune God. We do not know all things in detail, but we know them in principle as a part of God’s kingdom and order. We have the key to knowledge.”

God brings us, guides us into all the truth. Remember that’s what—when we said the Holy Spirit in John 16, the Comforter will come. He’ll convict the world. But what does he do with you? He’s going to lead you into all truth. The Holy Spirit is the basis for all knowledge that you have.

I was trying to illustrate this to my children last night in the bedroom as I talked to them before they went to sleep. I turned out the lights. Dark in here, isn’t it? Yeah. What do you know about this room now? Nothing. Well, the unbelieving world is in darkness. And the spirit brings light. Jesus Christ is the light of the world. And I turn on the light switch. Now you know this room. And you have the ability, since the light is on, to investigate this room and understand its details and to know it in more thoroughness, of course, as you proceed. But the light is what you need to know the world, know this room.

Now the light is the picture of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is the unction, the anointing we have by which we can have knowledge of anything and without which we can have knowledge of nothing. And so the scriptures say over and over again that Jesus is the light of the world and that he brings us out of darkness into light. That we have no fellowship between darkness. The light has no fellowship with darkness. We’re in light. They’re in darkness.

When we reject the Holy Spirit, when we work against him, we move to a position of darkness. When we sin in our lives unrepentantly and remove ourselves to—try to—and the Holy Spirit then leaves us alone for a while, he leaves us in darkness and chaos. And there’s a lot of darkness and chaos in our world right now. A lot of it. And the only way it will get clearer is the work of the Holy Spirit.

I had a long conversation a week ago with a fellow and I thought to myself at the end of the conversation, why am I wasting my breath? Why do I think that if God’s spirit has not moved through his word in the life of this particular person, why do I think that somehow I, Dennis Tuuri, can convince this guy of anything? Well, it’s ridiculous. And yet we think that all the time. We try to use our powers of persuasion to calm people down and do this other thing instead of applying the word to the situation.

Once you apply the word, the person rejects the word, what more can be said? The light comes from the spirit and the spirit alone. The light doesn’t come from us. We may take God’s word and shine it into a particular area. Certainly, the spirit uses us in that way. The spirit’s bringing these men as light bearers to all of Europe now. And we can do that, but it’s only—the spirit is tied to the word of God. And it’s that light that we must bring to the situation. And when we do that, we bring knowledge and guidance and direction into our lives and the lives of those around us. But apart from that, it is darkness and darkness alone.

This light is the light of the law of God. There’s no distinction between the spirit of God and God’s law.

We read later on in scripture—well, let’s see, where should I go? Little reckoning here.

The relationship of this light to the commandment of God is pointed out for us in scripture. In 1 Corinthians, we read in verse in chapter 2:12 and following:

“Now we have received not the spirit of the world but the spirit which is of God that we might know the things that are freely given to us of God. Which things also we speak not in the words which men’s wisdom teach but what the Holy Ghost teacheth, comparing spiritual things with spiritual. But the natural man receives not the things of the spirit of God. For there are foolishness unto him, neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned. But he that is spiritual judges all things, yet he himself is judged of no man. For who hath known the mind of the Lord that he may instruct him? But we have the mind of Christ.”

Paul writes to the Corinthians to bring them to spiritual maturation, to help them evaluate things, discern things, bring light from the word into the context of their lives and so make legitimate and righteous judgments.

And then we have later in 1 Corinthians a specific application of this by Paul. He shines light on a particular difficulty at Corinth. And you probably know what I’m talking about here. You know that in 1 Corinthians 5:1 we read that a man has married—has his father’s wife.

Now you’ve known about everybody knows about this story. You’ve read the Bible much. You know what that guy was sleeping with his mother-in-law or stepmother, or whatever it was, how terrible that was. But let me read you a couple of comments here from a good Reformed commentator, Hodge, on this matter. It’s going to surprise you a little bit, and then it’ll surprise you the relevance of this text to the law of God and then to the light and knowledge that Paul is bringing with him as he goes spirit-led into Europe.

Hodge writes this about that text: “The offense was that a man had married his stepmother. His father’s wife is a scriptural paraphrase for stepmother. Leviticus 18:8. Remember we read that a couple weeks ago. I was going to have Leviticus 18 as the responsive reading today. I decided the language might be a little bit too adult-like for the young children or for some of us. So we didn’t do it. But Leviticus 18, you remember what that is? That’s the laws of consanguinity with blood—the laws of one flesh. You can’t marry close relatives. Okay.

“So he says that first of all, the his father’s wife is a scriptural paraphrase for stepmother. Leviticus 18:8. That it was a case of marriage to be inferred from the uniform use of the phrase to have a woman in the New Testament which always means to marry. And he cites there Matthew 14:4, Matthew 14:22 and 28, 1 Corinthians 7:2 and 29.

“So Hodge says, and Hodge was an excellent student of the languages—he says that what it means here, that he has her, always means to marry. Now that’s a little different construction you probably placed upon in the past. Hodge goes on to say that we have here therefore a clear recognition of the perpetual obligation of the Levitical law concerning marriage.

“See, Hodge says that when we get to 1 Corinthians 5 and Paul’s writing to these guys to help make spiritual discernments and judgments to bring light, what Paul relates to is not some sort of sense of personal shock that this guy would do something. He takes him to the law and says Leviticus 18 says you cannot marry your stepmother. And this guy’s actually so audacious as to violate the laws of Leviticus.

“That’s what Paul is saying here. Oh, those are the laws that Paul has taken with him into Europe. Remember, that’s what he’s delivering to the churches he’s already been to and he’s still carrying it with him. The decree of the council at Jerusalem, which talked about the validity of Leviticus 17 and 18. And so the Holy Spirit and the spiritual growth of men and discernment of them is linked in 1 Corinthians 5 to the law.

Rushdoony, he goes on to say, that Hodge’s comment is of particular interest because in his day, Hodge was against Thornwell and he took a weaker view of the force of biblical law in a contention.