Hello everyone and welcome back to Deeper Waters where we are diving into the ocean of truth. We’ve been going through the Watchtower booklet of “Should You Believe In The Trinity?” We’re not covering that Jesus never claimed to be God as I believe that has been sufficiently dealt with. Instead, I plan to move on to covering the doctrine of the Holy Spirit. According to the Watchtower, the Spirit is not a person but is rather God’s active force.
In Genesis 1:2, the Spirit of Jehovah is to be over the surface of the waters preparing the acts of creation. Granted, this could work fine with an active force, but it could also work fine with a personal “force.” What the Watchtower will have to do is to both demonstrate that there is positive evidence in Scripture that the Spirit is non-personal, and also deal with all the positive evidence that the Spirit is personal.
The Watchtower also tells us that the Spirit came upon people as a form of enlightenment. Now that’s not the term I’d use, but there is really no quibble here. It was often noted in the Old Testament when the Spirit came upon someone so that they were prepared to do something unusual for God.
This also includes the recording of Scripture which the Watchtower tells us. Orthodox Christians also agree that men wrote from God as they were guided by the Holy Spirit. The Spirit moved through each writer to bring about what God wanted us to have. Again, we have total agreement with this.
The Spirit we are told also led Jesus into the wilderness after baptism which is an important point. Because God is directing someone to go somewhere, that does not mean it’s all going to be a bed of roses. The Spirit is not meant to be an antidote to suffering but a relief that one has in suffering.
The Watchtower fortunately also includes Psalm 139 but has an interesting take that God’s Spirit can reach anywhere. At this, I would disagree since Witnesses I know do not agree with omnipresence. It’s not that God can reach everywhere but that He is everywhere in the sense that He is the cause of the existence of every place.
We find the same thing when we get to the idea of power beyond normal which the Watchtower covers next. The Watchtower asks if a divine person entered Samson and caused him to defeat the lion. If they mean in the sense of possession as in demon possession, I would not think so. If they mean the Spirit gave some of His power to Samson in some sense, then yes. Just saying that the Holy Spirit caused Samson to do this does not argue against the personhood of the Spirit.
Do we have arguments against that? Yes we do. Those are in the next section however. This post is simply to lay down some groundwork. There are areas of agreement and it’s good to bring that up with the Witnesses you know. It’s where there are differences that the problems emerge, and we’ll cover that tomorrow.
Support Deeper Waters on Patreon!
