Hello everyone and welcome back to Deeper Waters. I do ask for your continued prayer. I am working through something right now that should be a growing and learning process and that involves dealing with some misconceptions I realize I’ve been carrying with me for some time. I do pray that God will give me the strength and courage I need and I ask my readers to pray with me and rest assured that God knows the most pressing need on my heart right now. For now, let us go to the text. Tonight we’ll be in Hebrews 10:15-17.
15The Holy Spirit also testifies to us about this. First he says:
16“This is the covenant I will make with them
after that time, says the Lord.
I will put my laws in their hearts,
and I will write them on their minds.” 17Then he adds:
“Their sins and lawless acts
I will remember no more.”
The writer has been talking about the superiority of Christ in the new covenant. However, integral to that is the work of the Holy Spirit. Too often in Protestant churches, aside from charismatic ones, we have ignored the person of the Holy Spirit. For those of us who are not charismatics, one thing we can learn from our charismatic brethren is that we need a doctrine of the Holy Spirit.
As this is a Trinitarian commentary, we are to show the deity and personality of the Holy Spirit as well to demonstrate the doctrine of the Trinity. Jehovah’s Witnesses, for instance, deny both of these seeing the Holy Spirit rather as God’s active force. Now I do see the Spirit usually as God’s manifest power at work, but that does not deny his personality or deity any more than the Son being the Wisdom of God denies his personality or deity.
In tonight’s passage, we are told that the Holy Spirit stated the truths that Christ came to fulfill. What is interesting about this first is the casualness with which the Spirit is said to have said these things. There is no need to explain who the Spirit is to these listeners. They automatically seem to understand that where Scripture speaks, one also has the voice of the Holy Spirit.
The reference is again to Jeremiah 31, which was also referred to in Hebrews 8. This is the passage about the new covenant. Notice that in this passage, we are told about the new covenant that YHWH is making with his people. YHWH has always been the one who makes covenants, which is what interested us when we looked at the person of the Angel of the Lord in the Old Testament.
What we have here then is that the Holy Spirit is involved in this as well just as the Angel of the Lord, who we saw as the pre-incarnate Son, is. Thus, when a covenant is made, it is a covenant that is made by a person who is ontologically God, which would mean either the Father, Son, or Spirit.
In conclusion, this is a passage that testifies not only to the personality of the Spirit as he is speaking, but to the deity of the Spirit as well. Where Scripture, the Word of God, speaks, he speaks. Where a covenant is made, he makes the covenant. The Spirit has the ontological nature of God.
We shall continue tomorrow.
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