John the Baptist was filled with the Holy Spirit during his whole life because he was loved by parents who, like Hannah, Abraham, and Sarah, had longed for a child during their whole adult lifetime. Having suffered in the flesh and spirit they had completely ceased from self, and could be perfect parents. No self-indulgence, self-pity, self-exaltation, or selfishness marred their parental upbringing of John. They perfectly represented God to him. They perfectly represented the God of love; and the baby, the child, the youth, and man, had responded in kind. Under the barrage of love, John surrendered to all the Law that his parents had trained him up in. The Law was written in his heart, and there the holy presence of God abode and was shed abroad in his heart.
Sin was not wholly expunged from John, he being subject to the fallen nature of every descendant of Adam. But, his constant effort was repentance to God and faith in His mercies, a consistent repentance for his weakness and failures, and an effort for the expulsion of his sins. And he always knew that, like his loving parents had ever been to him, the God of heaven could be gracious toward his lack when no one else could be gracious toward him, that his God could accept him when no one else could, that his God could be patient with him when no one else could be, that his God loved him when no one else did. By faith he saw the invisible character of the King, and was humbled by the sight. God was his Rock, rock-steady like no man could ever be for John, making his spirit rock-steady in holiness like the holy Spirit of his God
The Holy Spirit is the holy presence of God abiding in His children. It is not another person in a trinity god, but an experience, a state of being, a transformation. It is redemption. The holy Spirit is encapsulated in the holy word of God that has found lodgment in the soul, written there by its Redeemer. The holy Spirit of God in the holy words of God in the soul is His means for purifying the soul through truth. “Sanctify them through thy truth: thy word is truth.” (John 17:17). “If ye abide in me, and my words abide in you, ye shall ask what ye will, and it shall be done unto you.” (John 15:7).
“Fathers and mothers were to instruct their children that the law of God is an expression of His character, and that as they received the principles of the law into the heart, the image of God was traced on mind and soul.” The Desire of Ages. p. 69.
“Every child may gain knowledge as Jesus did. As we try to become acquainted with our heavenly Father through His word, angels will draw near, our minds will be strengthened, our characters will be elevated and refined. We shall become more like our Saviour. And as we behold the beautiful and grand in nature, our affections go out after God. While the spirit is awed, the soul is invigorated by coming in contact with the Infinite through His works. Communion with God through prayer develops the mental and moral faculties, and the spiritual powers strengthen as we cultivate thoughts upon spiritual things.” Ibid. p. 71.
The holy Spirit uses holy truth, being, as it were, present with those words, and giving them power to quicken the whole soul, mind, and body, and to redeem the soul. The Spirit has access to the person through the conscience. And as the word of truth comes into contact with, and attaches to, the spirit in the conscience, the presence of truth there can only result in “sanctification of the [s]pirit, unto obedience and sprinkling of the blood of Jesus Christ.” (1Pet. 1:2).
“But we are bound to give thanks alway to God for you, brethren beloved of the Lord, because God hath from the beginning chosen you to salvation through sanctification of the [s]pirit and belief of the truth; whereunto he called you by our gospel, to the obtaining of the glory of our Lord Jesus Christ.” (2Thess. 2:13,14). I decapitalize “Spirit” because King James’ translators were working with Koine Greek, which was written in all lower case letters, and they used their best knowledge of the gospel to capitalize words that had divine significance.
But they also worked under the strong Constantine-like demands of an unanointed, Evangelical King, whose fractionalized kingdom, like Constantine’s, was being destablized because of conflicting religions. So, King James, as did Constantine the Great, used religion to cement his realm together again. The translators therefore were subject to the King’s erroneous requirements of interpretation. He had neither the interpretive skill and knowledge of the educated Koine scholars, nor the anointing of the persecuted Puritan preachers, to demand his spin on the new translation.
Therefore there is an obvious unhealthy bias in favor regarding the Spirit in the King’s authorized New Testament and a prejudice against the Old Testament in regard to God’s holy Spirit. We see this in that His Spirit must be manipulated into a person. “The Spirit of Him that raised Jesus from the dead”, “His Spirit”, was always slanted to invent a Spirit with its own personality, person, and place in a trinity of Gods. This was not intended by Paul and the apostles and prophets, as can be seen by a candid reading of Romans 8:11. “But if the Spirit of him that raised up Jesus from the dead dwell in you, he that raised up Christ from the dead shall also quicken your mortal bodies by his Spirit that dwelleth in you.”
And the prejudice can be further seen in the translation of God’s Spirit in the Old Testament.
“Create in me a clean heart, O God; and renew a right spirit within me.
Cast me not away from thy presence; and take not thy holy spirit from me.
Restore unto me the joy of thy salvation; and uphold me with thy free spirit.” (Psa. 51:10-12).
[Note that the “Holy Spirit” was neither capitalized nor given third person attributes. It was clearly God’s possession, a faculty of His omnipotent mind, the expression from His very being, a function for the restoration of David’s joy, His healing property for David’s salvation. The parallelism of verse 11 equates “thy holy spirit” to “thy presence”, and verse 12, “thy free spirit” to “thy salvation”. To David “thy holy spirit” was no different than “a right spirit” and “a clean heart”, in verse 10. This is because our spirit under the stronger influence of Christ’s Spirit, and His Spirit dominated by His Father’s greater SPIRIT, is the Spirit proclaimed by the Bible. As it is written in 2 Corinthians 6:17, “He that is joined unto the Lord is one spirit.” (Notice Paul here utterly rejects any third being of a trinity usurping the blessed experience of the holy union between the converted soul and its God. The third entity within the triune Godhead must be the synergistic atonement of the Father with a newly reconciled child of Adam through His one, only begotten God-Man.) Romans 8:16 also makes this plain. “The Spirit itself beareth witness with our spirit, that we are the children of God.”)]
In those early days of the Reformation, so surrounded by dark ages of devilish papal heresies, its understandable that the blasphemous trinity god would naturally still be perpetuated by the clearest minds of religious scholarship, even by both opposing factions of the gospel.
