THE COMING OF THE HOLY GHOST.

It is a stupendous conception that in the last two thousand years iniquity has grown so awful, and the world-situation so critical, that a Person of the Godhead has had to be locally resident on the earth, to hold the world for God. When our Lord left the earth, the Holy Ghost came, and when the Holy Ghost leaves with the rapt, the Lord will return. In the shock of the events about us, and with - dare I use the words? - a restiveness of the Spirit, expressed in sudden gusts of revival which possibly portend the immense movements of the Holy Ghost that are yet to come, and not knowing the cataclysms immediately ahead, it is vital that we should get back to our stupendous truths and bedrock facts.

Power fell in the Upper Room (Acts 1: 8). A whole world to be evangelized; an entire Temple to be quarried out of the black marble of every race; all Hell to be held back for at least two millenniums: nothing short of the descent of a Person of the Godhead could accomplish such a task. For Christ’s men and women were not to be passive recipients, but radiant distributors; not static disciples, but dynamic apostles: so the power descended from God; not generated, but received; not an enlargement of natural capacities, but an enduement with supernatural equipment: for the power was a Person. He arrives as “a rushing of a mighty wind” (Acts 2: 2). As wind, in His secret, invisible motions - so invisible that the world disbelieves what it cannot see (John 14: 17), but the Church feels the full impact of His power: as wind, blowing into the soul with the indescribable freshness of God - fresh as Atlantic breezes, or the airs off a glacier: as wind, in His sudden gusts, sudden conversions, sudden revivals - for no man or nation is free from the surprises of the [Holy] Spirit: as wind, for He is the oxygen of man, and His sovereignties are the hurricanes none can handle.

So in the person of the Holy Ghost there descended into the Church, and abides in it, an enormous reservoir of life; and the descent of the [Holy] Spirit was marked by a burst of conversion never exceeded in the history of the world. “There were added unto them in that day about THREE THOUSAND souls” (Acts 2: 41). The Rabbis hold that Pentecost fell on the day on which the Law was given at Sinai: if so, the designed contrast of the Law and the Gospel is wonderful; for when the Law was founded, three thousand souls were slain in one day (Ex. 32: 28); when Grace was founded, three thousand were made alive in one day. Moses tells what we ought to do, and it ends in death: Jesus sends the [Holy] Spirit to do it, in us and through us, and it ends in life. Why does such enormous power reside in the Church for life? Because the Holy Ghost is God. No coming of a spirit could give [spiritual] life: none but Deity can regenerate - the Father quickeneth (John 5: 21), the Son quickeneth (John 5: 21), the Spirit quickeneth (John 6: 63): so the Psalm, foretelling the miraculous gifts and orders conferred by the ascended Christ, adds “that the Lord God might dwell among them” (Ps. 16). Until the Holy Ghost arrived, we read of no tortured consciences, no broken hearts, no sobbing multitudes. God has in Himself mighty reservoirs of conversion and when God came into the Church, in its very first day, the Church multiplied twenty-five fold. John Elias, preaching at Pwllheli, in Wales, a district in low spiritual ebb, chose as his text “Let God arise and let His enemies be scattered”; and his words rushed from him like flames of fire, and 2,500 souls were added to the churches around as a consequence of that one sermon. But the number of Pentecost was not reached. The local church is the universal Church in miniature; and those three thousand, drawn “from every nation under heaven,” foreshadowed the Church of all ages in whose midst is an enormous reservoir of life.

A second inexhaustible reservoir of power resident in the Church in the person of the Holy Ghost is the power for sanctity: the descent of the [Holy] Spirit was marked by a collective sanctity without precedent and without repetition in the history of the world. “As many as were possessors of houses or lands sold them, and distribution was made unto each, as anyone had need” (Acts 4: 34). An entire Church, some five thousand souls, voluntarily abandons its whole property for love’s sake; a Jewish Church, to whom, of all races, this triumph of grace was most miraculous; “a company,” as Calvin says, “of angels rather than men.” The burst of love was so warm, the urge of the [Holy] Spirit so mighty, the heaven in the heart so complete, that “not one” - in all these thousands – “said that aught of the things that he possessed was his own, but sold them, and laid the prices at the apostles’ feet.” Nor is it only love, the first fruit of the Spirit: joy is named again and again, even at prison doors (Acts 5: 41). So it was in the Indian Revival: “From 10 a.m. until midnight” - except for meals – “twelve solid hours the church was crowded: scores of men were almost beside themselves with spiritual ecstasy. It was a sight never to be forgotten to see such a vast assembly beside themselves with joy.” So we might run down the whole gamut of the fruit of the Spirit - love, joy, peace, long-suffering, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, meekness, temperance (Gal. 5: 22): the reservoir of potential sanctity lodged in the Church has never been fathomed, and never even known.

Not only was the arrival of the Holy Ghost marked by a burst of conversion without a parallel, and a degree of collective sanctity never equalled before or since: it also introduced a reservoir of fearful disciplinary power; and the Spirit acted with a severity as appalling as any in the whole history of the Church. “Ananias fell down and gave up the ghost: Sapphira fell down immediately at his feet and gave up the ghost” (Acts 5: 5, 10). The [Holy] Spirit’s action becomes deeply more significant when we compare it with judgments on unbelievers. Simon the Magician and Elymas the Sorcerer, as unsaved and therefore less responsible, escape with a far lighter doom: in the very heart of the Church’s dawn, God, locally present, so judged the secrets of the assembly as to inflict an instant death-penalty on leading members of the Church of Christ. It was proved, once for all, what the Church is - a community in which is the Holy Ghost, locally resident; a fellowship of awful purity, to which we belong with joy and trembling; inexhaustible, imperishable, dangerous; no empty shrine, but - if approached Uzzah-like - an intolerable outburst of Shekinah glory. The results were glorious. “Of the rest durst no man join himself to them”; hypocrites and idlers and the merely curious were warned off; the Church was no longer water-logged by unconverted church officers and ungodly ministers: “howbeit the people magnified them” for the world knows a God-indwelt Church, and believes in a God that loathes hypocrisy: a church can lose in numbers and gain in power: “and believers were the more added to the Lord, multitudes” - the sole occurrence of the plural in the New Testament – “both of men and women.” Two deaths produced multitudes of lives: by this, appalling church-discipline of the Holy Ghost, a great Gospel-flood swept multitudes to Christ: both Church and world were solemnized, subdued, and provoked to consecration, devotion .and life.

So the Holy Ghost has descended into the Church never to be dislodged: His coming, like the Second Advent, was, and will be again (Joel 2: 28),* secret, yet instantly apparent; expected, yet utterly dateless: and as the Lord’s sign is a Star, for He is the Light of the world; so the Spirit’s sign is a Tongue, for He is the transmitter of God’s whole mind in every language of earth. “When the waves of the last agony of a submerging world break, yet once more, and louder than ever, goes forth the call of a vast and infinite compassion.”

[* All arguments that would destroy the possibility of revival before the Parousia would, in 1500 A.D., have proved the huge awakening of the Reformation equally impossible.]

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CHERITH

Beloved, should the brook run dry

And should no visible supply

Gladden thine eyes, then wait to see

God work a miracle for thee:

Thou canst not want, for God has said

He will supply His own with bread.

His word is sure. Creative power

Will work for thee from hour to hour,

And thou, with all Faith’s Host, shalt prove

God’s hand of power, God’s heart of love.

Fukein, China. Margaret E. Barber.