Podcast: What Is Blasphemy against the Holy Spirit? (Fred Sanders)

January 15, 2024 by: Crossway

This article is part of the The Crossway Podcast series.

Questions about the Holy Spirit

In this episode, Fred Sanders answers questions about the Holy Spirit: what does it mean to blaspheme the Holy Spirit? Why did Jesus call that sin “unforgivable”?

The Holy Spirit

The Holy Spirit

Fred Sanders

In this addition to the Short Studies in Systematic Theology series, Fred Sanders teaches readers how to hold a proper understanding of both the person and power of the Holy Spirit, exploring his role in both the Old and New Testaments. 

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Google Podcasts | RSS

Topics Addressed in This Interview:

00:45 - Is the Holy Spirit a He, a She, an It, or Something Else?

Matt Tully
Fred, thanks so much for joining me again on The Crossway Podcast.

Fred Sanders
Thanks for having me. It’s good to talk to you.

Matt Tully
Yeah, it’s fun. We’ve discussed the Trinity in a previous episode a couple years ago now, and today we’re going to dig into the Holy Spirit. The first question might strike some as a silly question, perhaps, or a weird question, but I’ve heard people say this. It’s a question that a lot of average, normal Christians would actually have at some point and would wonder how to answer. Is the Holy Spirit a he, a she, an it, or something else? How should we refer to the Holy Spirit?

Fred Sanders
It’s a good question. I think this is an area where you can trust your English Bible translation and go with he. For most people, that’s kind of a common sense, Oh, good. I sort of felt like I should call the Spirit he anyway.

Matt Tully
That’s probably the default, but then we read certain books that present the Holy Spirit in a certain way, or even just want to preserve the fact that he doesn’t have a gender like Jesus does, and so we think, Is it an it, perhaps?

Fred Sanders
So much of this is determined by the context from which you’re coming to the question. And if I could just mention two contexts in my own upbringing. I grew up Pentecostal in the Foursquare Church, and if in those settings you referred to the Holy Spirit as it, that was a dead giveaway that you were not born again. Anyone who doesn’t know that the Holy Spirit is someone personal and dares to say it has obviously blown it, and we need to help that person right away come to an experiential understanding of this somebody.

Matt Tully
Right, like there’s a theological significance to that mistake.

Fred Sanders
Yeah. But then, of course, I went off to grad school—I was in the city of Berkeley for that—and there you have more of these other concerns that you’ve raised about like, Yeah, you used a personal pronoun, but you used a gendered personal pronoun. So are you saying that the Holy Spirit is male?

Matt Tully
The interesting thing there is the Son, incarnate as Jesus, has an actual, literal physical gender to him. So that makes some sense why we call the Son a he. The Father is presented as Father in the Scriptures very explicitly, so the he makes sense there. But the Spirit it’s a little less obvious in Scripture.

Fred Sanders
I think that’s right. I have learned over the years that in places where the Holy Spirit is less obvious, less clear, less concrete, where he talks about himself that way, or the Bible describes him that way, that can strike us as an irritation. Like, I wish the Spirit would behave clearly, like the other two persons of the Trinity. But you’ve got to push through that and get to God’s revelation is perfect, so this must be a feature, not a bug, as programmers would say. The ambiguity must be something good. If I were to say what’s good about the ambiguity in this case, it would be that it reminds you that in no case, neither with the Father nor the eternal Son nor the Spirit, are you in fact talking about maleness.

Matt Tully
So then what is the significance of the fact that Scripture does though use that pronoun he in reference to all of those persons?

Fred Sanders
In the cultures of Scripture we’re talking about, you don’t have a non-gendered way of talking about personal agency, and so that’s the default.

04:13 - What Is the Role of the Holy Spirit?

Matt Tully
I want to jump into that broader issue you talked about of the ambiguity, or the lack of some clarity at times, when it comes to the Spirit. Of all the persons of the Trinity, it seems like the Spirit’s role and function in salvation history and in our own lives, even as Christians, often feels (at least to many Christians) to be the most opaque. You have, I think, an interesting take on that. How would you reflect on that fact?

Fred Sanders
If you push through and get to why that’s an advantage instead of a disadvantage, right?

Matt Tully
That would be one way you would kind of push against the kind of easy critique of say, evangelical Christians, that we kind of don’t know the Spirit and we should know the Spirit more. You don’t see that as a wholly bad thing.

Fred Sanders
That’s right. Some people should know more about the Spirit and should even talk more about the Spirit, but not everybody should. Some people are actually living fine, functioning, flourishing Christian lives, in touch with biblical revelation and really pursuing knowledge of God, and are talking about the Spirit in the same proportion that Scripture talks about the Spirit. Which you can’t really say that’s a C minus. They must be doing it right.

Matt Tully
Unpack that. How would you describe how Scripture talks about the Spirit?

Fred Sanders
I think the Spirit talks—well, it is the Spirit because that’s the divine author of Scripture. Scripture talks about the Holy Spirit less than the Father and Son, less concretely than the Father and the Son, and later than the Father and the Son. That is to say, the scriptural pattern is to build a foundation of talking about the Father and the Son, and then to add to that the discussion of the Holy Spirit. Now here’s the trick with that, and I can give examples of that. Broadly, the structure of Romans is kind of a lot about the Father and then a lot about the Son, and the Spirit is mentioned a few times, but then in chapter eight, just comes on and takes over. Maybe even more clearly, John’s Gospel, which is the greatest one thing to read on the doctrine of the Trinity, John’s Gospel starts with, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” It’s this dyadic. There are two terms there: the Word and God. You go round and round that circle, and John instructs you in how to think about that. Then, the story starts and it’s all about the Father and the Son, the Father and the Son, the Father and the Son. A few references to the Spirit, but it’s not really until around chapter 14 when the Holy Spirit really comes to the foreground of Jesus’s teaching. Partly because by John 14, Jesus is already thinking about going away to the Father and not abandoning us, but sending us another comforter.

Matt Tully
So is there a sense in which the Spirit’s role in salvation history really comes to the fore after the Son leaves the earth?

Fred Sanders
Jesus is a helper, which we know because he says he will send another helper. Of course, the Spirit’s work comes to the fore there because it’s then working on the foundation of the finished work of Jesus Christ. The Spirit has always been everywhere, doing anything God does, just like the Son of God has always been everywhere, doing everything. But the incarnation is special. Similarly, on the basis of the finished work of the incarnate Christ, the Spirit is present in a new and special way.

07:27 - Is the Holy Spirit Active in the Old Testament?

Matt Tully
Let’s dig into that right there as well. We know that the Holy Spirit is active in the New Testament. In the writings of the New Testament we see him very clearly there, even if it isn’t as common and as often as we hear of the Father and the Son. But sometimes I think Christians wonder about his presence in activity in the Old Testament before Christ’s coming. It feels much less clear, I think, to most of us, than it does in the New Testament. Speak to that a little bit. We have our systematic category that yes, he has always been there, he’s always been active, but do we actually see him in the Old Testament, or is that just something we have to assume was going on?

Fred Sanders
This is a huge and great topic. we do see the Spirit of God in the Old Testament. You notice I didn’t call him the Holy Spirit because the Old Testament doesn’t put that adjective in front of that noun very often to pick out what we would call—I’ll just say it—anachronistically, the third person of the Trinity. Clearly not an Old Testament way of talking. But the adjective “holy” in front of the noun “Spirit” is only like twice in Isaiah and once in Psalm 51. And in the case of Psalm 51, it’s not very clear that it doesn’t just mean the spirit of God’s holiness, because it’s a repentance psalm.

Matt Tully
It’s not clearly a different person than the Father.

Fred Sanders
The Isaiah passage is clearer I think because God is speaking in the first person there and saying, I will be with you. My own presence was with you. And then it talks about the sending of the Holy Spirit. So it’s clearly divine identity, but some mode of God’s presence. It doesn’t quite say another person because, again, that’s not an Old Testament way of talking.

Matt Tully
Would you say that we could get a fully orbed Trinitarian theology, including the Holy Spirit as a distinct person, from the Old Testament itself? Or do we need the New Testament revelation to actually help us understand that?

Fred Sanders
I think we need the New Testament revelation in order to understand it. I always appeal to what B. B. Warfield said about the Old Testament, which is that it’s a chamber, richly furnished but dimly lit. Of course, you don’t just have the Old Testament by itself; you have it with the New Testament. And the New Testament is the light, which then shines back onto the Old Testament. So what I like about Warfield’s thing is the furniture is all there in the Old Testament, but the lights aren’t on.

Matt Tully
But once you turn the lights on, you can see, *Oh, wow. Yeah. This is supported.

Fred Sanders
This is, I think, especially nice with the Holy Spirit because the Spirit of God, the Spirit of the Lord—there are all these different Spirit phrases. The word “spirit” is definitely an Old Testament word. It becomes the name that is specifically picking out this person, which then in retrospect, you look back on the Old Testament and say the Spirit of God on the face of the waters and the Spirit of the Lord and my Spirit that I will send out. There aren’t nineteen spirits; these are all unitively pointing to the person who gets the new covenant name, the Holy Spirit. It’s not an old covenant name.

10:32 - Who Is the Holy Spirit, and What Does He Do?

Matt Tully
Just to take a step back a little bit, if you’re talking to a seven-year-old child—a small child—how would you answer the simple question, Who is the Holy Spirit? What does he do?

Fred Sanders
I’d be laying down a foundation here for catechesis, knowing that a kid that age is going to understand something at the moment and is going to memorize some words and begin to infer some connections, and you can build on it later.

Matt Tully
So one point, then, in saying that is just that you can’t think in terms of a single, concise definition and think that’s sufficient.

Fred Sanders
Yeah, that’s right. When you’re talking about communicating with young people, it’s a process.

Matt Tully
But then communicating something about the Trinity is a process.

Fred Sanders
Yep. I would actually say that the Holy Spirit is God, the third person of the Trinity. Obviously, they’re not going to take all that in right now, but they’ve got hooks now in their mind to say, Oh, right. We keep talking at church and I keep reading in the Bible about the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit.

Matt Tully
So then how would you summarize what this Holy Spirit does?

Fred Sanders
When I start unpacking this sort of in a catechetical way, by which I mean when I can establish the categories from Scripture but arrange systematically in such a way that this is going to provide advanced organizers into which Christian understanding can grow as it matures—I’m going to talk about the life of God always being, in all things, from the Father, through the Son, in the Spirit. I’m going to try to not talk too much about the Father and the Son here and say that the “in the Spirit” part really has the force of meaning completed in the Spirit, reaching its fulfillment in the Spirit, being perfected in the Spirit. That everything God does, God does from the Father, through the Son, in the Spirit.

Matt Tully
So let’s briefly unpack each of those prepositions that you’re using, distinct with each person. We talked about some of this in our last conversation about the Trinity as a whole, but I think it’s helpful to summarize some of that same ground as we then zero in on the Spirit more. What does it mean to talk about things being from the Father?

Fred Sanders
It means that in the life of the Trinity the Father is the source of everything. One of the rules is you can’t talk about a particular person of the Trinity if all you talk about is the divine essence. If you’re going to say like, The almighty one. Oh, wait. That’s all three of them. The holy one. Oh, wait. That’s all three of them. In order to actually pick out one person, you can only do it by relating that person to another person. There’s nothing I can say about the Father—

Matt Tully
Because all the divine attributes are true of all of them.

Fred Sanders
That’s right. You could talk all day and say wonderful things about God but never succeed in picking out the Father until you say, Well, he’s the Father of the Son.

Matt Tully
The distinction is only relative to each other.

Fred Sanders
Yep. When you draw a circle on the board and say, Okay, here’s the Father, and then you write things in it like almighty, you have to go, Well, actually, yes, but Almighty applies to all three of them. Right. But if you write that he has the attribute of fatherhood, that sticks and identifies only the Father. But what you’ve done is you’ve smuggled in relation to the Son. Because fatherhood isn't like this abstract principle he has.

Matt Tully
There’s got to be a son for you to be a father.

Fred Sanders
In the eternal life of the Trinity, everything is from the Father in that sense. The Son is from the Father, the Spirit is, in a different way, from the Father. There are technical terms—

Matt Tully
Eternally.

Fred Sanders
Yep. Eternal generation in the case of the Son and eternal spiration in the case of the Spirit. Spirate is kind of this ugly English word that, clearly, we just got from the Latin word for Spirit.

Matt Tully
The question I had is that’s probably a term that maybe someone has heard of eternal generation vis-à-vis the Son, but spiration sounds very foreign and odd and not something that we’re hearing in church very often.

Fred Sanders
You could say it’s biblical to talk about the Spirit being eternally breathed forth from the Father. The Spirit is the breath of God, and that’s what Spirit means.

Matt Tully
So how do we hold to that very orthodox view and not fall into this idea of thinking that somehow the Father made the Spirit, or he’s a creation in a certain sense?

Fred Sanders
Here’s the nice thing about that: to know the Father—of course, you only know him in relation to the Son and the Spirit, as the source of the Son and Spirit—and then the other thing that the Father is the source of is creation. Everything comes from God. In the creed we learn to say, “I believe in God, the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth,” but we don’t mean that the Father alone made heaven and earth, because we also know the Son is the maker and the Spirit is the maker. The one Triune God is the maker of heaven and earth. What we’re doing there, when we identify the Father as the maker, is we’re doing a technical move called appropriation, where we take something that is the work of the whole Trinity (creation) and we appropriate it to the Father, specifically because it reminds us of the Father’s personal identity in the Trinity. Just as the Son and the Spirit are from the Father, creation, being from God, reminds us of this from-ness. And so we appropriate it. Now, we don’t all know we’re doing that when we talk. We’re just talking about the Bible and the creed when we say, “God the Father, maker of heaven and earth.” But if I ask you the Socratic—

Matt Tully
I don’t think most Christians are saying, I’m appropriating right there.

Fred Sanders
That’s right. I am performing the theological act of appropriation. But it is, in fact, what we’re doing. It’s what the Bible’s doing. In the Torrey Honors College I teach Socratically all the time, and so I could ask Socratically—

Matt Tully
That just means it would be a question and an answer.

Fred Sanders
Question and answer.

Matt Tully
Can you give an example of what that would be?

Fred Sanders
So if you say, I believe in God, the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth, and I say, Do you mean that the Son is not the maker of heaven and earth?

Matt Tully
Your students are like, No. No.

Fred Sanders
Exactly. It’s a leading question in the sense that I think you know the whole picture, and I think here’s what you mean. Let me put that to you in a question.

16:36 - The Danger of Geometricizing

Matt Tully
Interesting. I’ve heard some Christians today, arguably following in the footsteps of someone like Saint Augustine or others in church history, who will sort of want to define the Holy Spirit as the mutual love shared between the Father and the Son. They’ll draw on certain passages of Scripture that they would say kind of suggest that. Are you familiar with that view? If so, how would you think about that? Is there merit to that way of conceiving of the Spirit?

Fred Sanders
Yeah, there is merit to that. I think it’s in the fact that the Scripture presents the Holy Spirit third. I think “third person of the Trinity,” though it’s obviously not a biblical phrase, really captures something deep about how God instructs us about Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

Matt Tully
There’s a certain progression to how maybe we should even think about or learn about these persons.

Fred Sanders
Yep. So even though it’s true that when you think of the Father, you ought to also always think of the Son and Spirit, that’s not self-evident in the name Father. In fact, there’s this kind of dyadic tendency to think of Father and Son—that’s a pair that naturally goes together. The thing about the Spirit coming third is when you think about the Holy Spirit, it’s obvious, it’s evident, that you must always also think of the Father and the Son. You’ve got to think of who is the Holy Spirit? Well, he’s the Spirit of the Father, he’s the Spirit of the Son, he’s the Spirit of the Father and the Son. This is the great benefit of teaching on the Holy Spirit is it really lands the plane. Teaching on the Spirit really closes the loop and completes the teaching on the Trinity. In some sense, you draw the equilateral triangle and label the corner’s Father, Son, and Spirit, and it seems like you should be able to start anywhere and get a full teaching on the Trinity. But in fact, in the order of revelation, it’s when you complete the story with reflection on the Spirit that the whole Trinitarian thing really comes to life for you.

Matt Tully
That’s interesting. It connects to what you were saying before about just, in some ways, observing and acknowledging the validity of what revelation is actually revealing about these persons and the order in which they’re revealed and the extent to which they’re revealed. I think that’s something where we can have our systematic categories, and so we feel like each should receive the same focus, as maybe revealed to the same extent, but it seems like you’re kind of advocating for a certain respect for just the way God chose to reveal these things to us.

Fred Sanders
Obviously, I love systematic categories, and I’m going to draw that triangle, and I’m gonna keep doing it.

Matt Tully
There’s value in that.

Fred Sanders
Oh yeah. There is a false geometricization, though, of our way of organizing the thought. And what I mean is, once you draw the triangle—and it’s helpful—but you can start to treat it as if the three corners ought to be talked about in the same way. And in the sense that the Spirit is fully God and is not the Father or the Son, of course that’s true. But you don’t want to take that triangular template and then start judging everybody by using it. If your pastor talks a lot about the Father and the Son in a sermon, you don’t want to take out the triangle diagram and say, Pastor, you neglected the Spirit.

Matt Tully
To take a concrete example of that, I know some people, for great reasons, will make a point to, whenever they pray, they pray to all three persons of the Trinity. They want to make a point of emphasizing that every time. What do you think about that? Is that a good thing that you should always do? Or is that sort of falling into this trap?

Fred Sanders
It could be falling into the trap of artificially sort of geometricizing things, getting fooled into thinking that since Father, Son, and Spirit are all co-equal and co-eternally God, they should get the same amount of attention. So there’s nothing wrong with praying to the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, or the Father or the Son or the Holy Spirit. The rule is you can pray to anyone who’s God.

Matt Tully
Well, that was another question. I’ve heard Christians make the case that, and I think it was an argument from Scripture itself, that it’s maybe not appropriate to pray to the Holy Spirit.

Fred Sanders
So here’s the thing about that. It is true that most biblical prayer is directed to the Father, and it is directed to the Father in the name of the Son. But there is also prayer to the Son in Scripture. In fact, some of theologians would say the real test of your orthodoxy is, Do you believe Jesus is God? Then you will pray to him. Because if you just kind of like formally acknowledge he’s God but won’t pray to him—

Matt Tully
If you won’t pray to him, what’s that say?

Fred Sanders
Exactly.

Matt Tully
I think often people will point the Lord’s Prayer where Jesus explicitly instructs his followers, This is how you pray, and he prays to the Father.

Fred Sanders
If you want an A on the theological exam—What is the direction of Christian prayer?—it is to the Father, through the Son, in the Spirit. But notice I used that phrase before: everything is from the Father, through the Son, in the Spirit. That’s the direction of God’s work towards us. If you’re talking about our response to God, empowered by God, then it’s gonna be to the Father—it’s the reversal of from the Father—answering from the Father. Our access to God is to the Father, through the Son, in the Spirit. Now, it’s that “in the Spirit” part that you realize “in the Spirit” means that I might not be as actively aware of the spirit, because the Spirit’s neither the target I’m aiming at nor the means through which I get to it, but the sort of environment or circumstance in which I aim at that target through that medium. And then the last thing to say is there just are no biblical examples of prayer to the Spirit.

Matt Tully
But you would say that doesn’t mean it’s inappropriate to do so?

Fred Sanders
That’s right.

Matt Tully
That’s where our systematic categories can help us keep straight that, no, this is God.

Fred Sanders
You can pray to anyone who’s God, and so that means you can pray to the Father, the Son, or the Spirit. And you can also pray to God in general. It’s not like that’s going to go to the dead letter office in heaven.

Matt Tully
You got the mailman in heaven saying, Well, which person? I don’t know where to send this.

Fred Sanders
I’m pretty extremely Trinitarian, but if I see something going wrong in traffic and I just suddenly hold my hand up and say, God, protect that person, you could freeze frame that, pull me out of it, and ask me in detail, Which person of the Trinity were you talking to? I would say, I was not having any conscious Trinitarian thoughts.

Matt Tully
And that’s okay.

Fred Sanders
That’s okay. You are talking personally to God. Not because God is four persons or something like that.

Matt Tully
I think it’s a helpful emphasis because when you think of Trinitarian theology, often the emphasis is on the threeness. But Trinitarian theology is also emphasizing the oneness.

Fred Sanders
I will say on prayer to the Spirit, you could take a very—I don’t know if you call it fundamentalist—you could take a very literalist approach to this and say, Since there is no prayer to the Spirit in Scripture, I will not pray to the Spirit. I think that’s overly tight. That’s extreme. But I think it’s Graham Cole who points this out, that broadly you want your prayer life to have the proportions of Scripture. And so if over the course of time—

Matt Tully
On a number of fronts, probably.

Fred Sanders
On a number of fronts, yes, but on Trinitarian front, you’d want to say you should mostly pray to the Father. And you should sometimes pray to the Son. And you should not that often pray to the Holy Spirit. And when you do pray to the Spirit, you should probably do it in a more formal context where you’re doing something like, In the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit. You’ve got kind of a liturgical, or elaborate, setting in which all these things are made present somehow. Though that doesn’t rule out just like asking the Holy Spirit to be present with us.

Matt Tully
So that’s something that families listening tonight, you could feel free to pray to the Spirit tonight over dinner.

Fred Sanders
You want to have your eye on the big picture though. Overall, am I praying to God in Scripture proportions? So, I would say it would probably be wrong in some way to pray exclusively to the Holy Spirit as the main staple of your prayer diet. I would just say, if you’re not choosing to follow Scripture’s proportions, what proportions are you choosing to follow? Where are you getting that and why?

24:37 - What Does It Mean to Be Indwelled by the Spirit?

Matt Tully
Maybe a few other common questions about the Spirit that I think come up that I’m sure you get asked often. What does it mean to be indwelled by the Spirit? It’s a phrase that we throw out a lot, and I think all of us have maybe a vague sense. And then there’s probably even certain traditions within Christianity that have a more specific understanding of what that would look like or mean. But how do you see that phrase?

Fred Sanders
I take the basic idea of indwelling of the Spirit to be synonymous with salvation. It’s a matter of intimate communion with God that’s happening at the deepest level, at the level of union, as the Puritans would distinguish between union and communion. Union is like the foundation of you being united to God through the work of God. Communion is actually your devotional life. Did you pray, or are you feeling the presence of God?

Matt Tully
So would you connect the idea with the indwelling of the Spirit, in a systematic way, with this concept of union with Christ?

Fred Sanders
Yes.

Matt Tully
Those are kind of both speaking about the same thing?

Fred Sanders Those are very close. They’re the same thing, but maybe under different aspects. We could distinguish truths about them, but they’re pointing to the same kind of saving.

Matt Tully
What are some of the most common misunderstandings of the indwelling of the Spirit that you’ve encountered?

Fred Sanders
Well, to put it off in a subsequent way, as if we have such a thing as salvation, and then later on you add to it this expansion pack of being filled by the Holy Spirit. I had a Pentecostal upbringing, and I’m very comfortable in charismatic circles, though I am not Pentecostal or charismatic. There can be a tendency there to sort of misspeak and make it sound like phase one of the Christian life is Spirit-free. Phase two, that you can trade up to or add on, is Spirit-filled. And I think, well, I understand why people talk like that, because thank God there are these breakthrough moments in Christian experience where your eyes are reopened and you understand something. I got saved at about age sixteen, and about a year later I came to a new understanding of grace that was so earth shaking that I looked back on my past year and thought, Have I actually been Christian? If I didn’t understand what I now understand twelve months later, did my so-called conversion really count? I didn’t know anything! Then, a year later it happened again and I thought, I’m not sure I’ve been a Christian the last two years. After a while you start to realize, Wait, maybe you just grow in your understanding.

Matt Tully
So, there are these moments when the Spirit, through the word and other things, can reveal things to us in a powerful way.

Fred Sanders
There’s a moment of intimacy and nearness that throws a whole new light on everything you’ve been doing, that makes you think in retrospect, I was doing the right thing, but going through the motions, but now I get it. People want to say maybe that was the baptism in the Spirit. Maybe that was the real indwelling of the Spirit. And so I think a lot of times people will mislabel that and sort of grab a biblical phrase and apply it.

Matt Tully
So it’s not about diminishing that real experience that we can have, but it’s just saying that’s not what Scripture means when it says we’re indwelt.

Fred Sanders
Yeah.

27:35 - Is the Holy Spirit in My Heart?

Matt Tully
I think one other question about indwelling that people often wonder about is is there a physical, local sense to that where the Spirit is in me? He’s in my heart, and he’s indwelling me. Is there a physical dynamic, or a geographic dimension, to it? Or is that pushing the metaphor too far?

Fred Sanders
I think it’s pushing the metaphor too far. I don’t think God changes location.

Matt Tully
He’s kind of everywhere

Fred Sanders
So I think the same rules would apply there as when you think about the presence of God in the Spirit in the temple. In what way is the God of Israel present in the temple? You don’t want to say that he physically changed location, that he went from heaven to earth in such a way that he stopped being in heaven and instead crossed a span of space and took up residence. That’s not happening.

Matt Tully
But there was a sense in which the temple—the Holy of Holies—was a unique physical space that manifested his presence differently?

Fred Sanders
Oh yeah. It would be silly to turn away from the temple and look up into the sky and say like, The omnipresence of God is just as great there as in the temple. There’s a particular, covenantal, intentional presence and manifestation there that you can’t just explain away by appealing to divine omnipresence.

[00:28:55]
Matt Tully
Another topic related to the Spirit that can be quite controversial are the gifts of the Spirit mentioned in passages like 1 Corinthians 12. Different Christians will understand these in different ways, but broadly speaking, how do you understand this concept of spiritual gifts?

Fred Sanders
I want to connect this to the other thing I wanted to say about the indwelling of the Spirit, and that is that it’s different on the two sides of the covenantal divide. In the old covenant, the Spirit of the Lord is active among his people, and even seems to be at work in the people of God in particular ways. But there are standard limitations you put on it, like it seems to be, in many ways, episodic and focused more on leaders appointed for a purpose. We can kind of walk through the biblical—

Matt Tully
Read the stories of David.

Fred Sanders
But that in the New Testament, there’s an indwelling of the Spirit sort of on a permanent foundation. There are various ways we could talk about that, but the main things and the plain things here—the clear thing is, well, of course the new covenant indwelling of the Spirit is on the basis of the finished work of the atonement. The work of the Son is accomplished, and the result of that is the indwelling of the Spirit in a new covenant way. There’s a range of opinions on that, and it seems to always come down to proportions. How much was the Spirit in the people of God under the old covenant, and how much? I would use the language of permanent and covenantal indwelling on the basis of the finished work.

Matt Tully
It’s normative for Christians in the New Testament with the new covenant.

Fred Sanders
And it’s the subject of teaching. That’s the foundation, for me, for talking about the gifts of the Spirit. In the letters of Paul is where you mainly get this teaching about a special equipping that the risen Lord gives his people in his church to carry out the works of ministry.

Matt Tully
So these are gifts from Christ—that’s how Scripture speaks of it—but they’re in some way empowered or enabled through the Spirit?

Fred Sanders
Yes, and they are acting out a fellowship in the Holy Spirit for the building up of the body of Christ. There are three major blocks of teaching on spiritual gifts in the New Testament, and I tend to take Ephesians 4 as the foundational one.

Matt Tully
Do you view the list of spiritual gifts that we see in the New Testament as kind of exhaustive? This is the list, so now take your spiritual gifts inventory test and you’ll know which ones you have. Or is it representative?They’re not as locked in as you might make it out to be.

Fred Sanders
That’s a good question. I take it to be representative rather than exhaustive. I think that your particular spiritual gifting emerges in the context of congregational push and pull. You figure out what you’re good at, how does it align with your natural gifts? Where does it cross purposes with your natural gifts? And you’re sort of like out beyond what you could do on your own, but God blesses it for the benefit of others. I’m not a big believer in spiritual gifts inventories. I’ve used them, I’ve taken them, and I’ve even administered them in various settings. But I just take them as a starting point for getting some categories out there so you can start to be alert to how God uses you to build up others.

Matt Tully
But really the best way to understand your spiritual gifts would be just get plugged into a local church and start serving?

Fred Sanders
Yes.

32:14 - What Is Blasphemy against the Holy Spirit?

Matt Tully
Maybe a final question, and maybe one of the most common questions I’m sure that you hear about the Holy Spirit. What is the unforgivable sin of blasphemy against the Spirit that Jesus warns us against in Matthew 12?

Fred Sanders
That’s a great question. The main right way to answer that is to open up to Matthew 12 and to go to those passages and really check them out in context, because there is something about the ministry of Jesus Christ, at the point that it is in his conflict with the Pharisees, that is really important there in Matthew in particular. But sort of at the broad, systematic level, I think what’s going on with that really strong language—

Matt Tully
Well, and the reason we ask the question is because it seems like the rest of Scripture speaks about sin as always forgivable. In Christ, through faith, we can always be forgiven no matter what we’ve done. And yet there’s this one spot where Jesus utters these words of “unforgivable sin.” That can be a little scary sounding because it’s so category-breaking for us.

Fred Sanders
And even there Jesus says all sins can be forgiven.

Matt Tully
Right. Even he makes that contrast.

Fred Sanders
Even blasphemy against the Son, but not against the Spirit. So Jesus himself recapitulates the main teaching of Scripture, when he then goes on to make this exception. Which by the way, I think it’s the only place where the Son and the Spirit are contrasted to each other in the teaching of Jesus. So it’s a fascinating passage.

Matt Tully
He’s elevating the Spirit, in a sense. He’s saying he’s very important, you know?

Fred Sanders
The last thing I want to say before I give my answer to this is that it is a haunting passage, and it can be sort of weaponized, I think, against doubting Christians. Doubting Christians can self-weaponize it against themselves.

Matt Tully
They can worry that they’ve done this.

Fred Sanders
We bought a cabinet one time, a little metal cabinet that goes in a workshop, and I had it in my workshop in the garage for a while. When you open the front door, inside of it someone had written, “Unforgivable sin: blasphemy against the Holy Spirit” and a Bible verse. It’s just this haunting thing where I think, Some guy had this in his workshop and wrote this in there.

Matt Tully
He was worried about it and wanted to remember.

Fred Sanders
Did he write it because he thought he committed it, and he wrote it in the inside of a cabinet in the basement? Was he just thinking about it? Was it on the radio? I don’t know, but it makes you wonder.

Matt Tully
That’s heavy.

Fred Sanders
Yeah. The depth, the heaviness of this. This guy I never met must have pondered it. Here’s what I think’s going on. I think you’re right to point out that it sort of elevates the Spirit. It picks out the Spirit as special. You can even blaspheme Jesus, and that can be forgiven. That’s very bad, but that can be forgiven. But not this. This gets to the place of the Holy Spirit in the divine life. Remember that everything is from the Father, through the Son, in the Spirit. “In” has that sense of finalized, perfected, consummated, completed, so that when you get to the work of the Holy Spirit that’s where it all pays off. That’s where everything from the Father and everything through the Son comes to rest in the Holy Spirit. And there’s some kind of finality there that I think Jesus is picking out about the work of the Holy Spirit. I think that’s what’s going on there in the idea that the blasphemy of the Holy Spirit is unforgivable. It’s not so much that there’s this one act that you can commit that’s—

Matt Tully
I think that’s probably the question people have is, What would it look like for me to blaspheme the Holy Spirit, so that I can avoid it?

Fred Sanders
Or on the other side, there’s this really sad phenomenon a few years ago of people with a Christian upbringing deconverting and making YouTube videos of themselves saying the phrase, I do hereby commit the blasphemy, and saying a bunch of bad things about the Holy Spirit so that they could have it on YouTube and prove that they were utterly unredeemable and they had no chance. With those people, I think they should not do that, but I also think you did not succeed there in committing an act that God himself cannot undo and cannot forgive you of. Instead, it’s talking about a state of, when all is said and done, when all everything from the Father and through the Son has come to rest in the Spirit, and to blaspheme that, there is something final about that. The other thing I think it gets to is when we confess Christ, we are not doing that just in the gumption of our own effort. We are seeing Christ as who he is and confessing who he is, and we are doing that by divine power. That is to say we’re doing that in the Holy Spirit. Paul says in another context, “No one can say Jesus is Lord, except by the Holy Spirit.” So if the Spirit is the very one through whom we can make saving confession of who Christ is, then what do you say about blaspheming that one? You’re backing out of your own confession and cutting out the ground under your own feet.

Matt Tully
For the Christian listening right now who would say, Sincerely, I trust in Christ. I believe in his finished work. I’m seeking to honor God. I’m not perfect. I make mistakes. I sin all the time. Do they need to worry about accidentally, or falling prey to, this sin of blaspheming the Holy Spirit?

Fred Sanders
I don’t think they do. Especially if they’re thinking of it as an event or as an action they can take. I think that what’s happening there is, I’m convinced it’s a form of spiritual warfare where Satan is bringing to mind whatever random Bible verse he can lay hold of for this agenda of undermining your confidence. You see it in a work like Bunyan’s. He just goes through one tormenting doubt after another, and as soon as someone explains a Bible verse to him, he just finds another one. And he finds this one and he finds whatever verse will do to undermine his confidence.

Matt Tully
That’s so helpful. Fred, thank you so much for taking the time to help all of us, perhaps, understand the Spirit a little bit more, and more importantly, appreciate him and his work and our lives. We appreciate it.

Fred Sanders
Thanks for having me on.

Popular Articles in This Series

View All

Podcast: Help! I Hate My Job (Jim Hamilton)

January 06, 2020

Jim Hamilton discusses what to do when you hate your job, offering encouragement for those frustrated in their work and explaining the difference between a job and a vocation.

Crossway is a not-for-profit Christian ministry that exists solely for the purpose of proclaiming the gospel through publishing gospel-centered, Bible-centered content. Learn more or donate today at crossway.org/about.