SPIRITUAL DIARY FOR 6/6/2018
9:40 AM
My Worship Time Focus:
PT-1 Old Testament Saints in Transition
Bible Reading & Meditation Reference: Acts 19:1-7
Message of the
verses: “1 It happened that while
Apollos was at Corinth, Paul passed through the upper country and came to
Ephesus, and found some disciples. 2 He said to them, "Did you receive the
Holy Spirit when you believed?" And they said to him, "No, we have
not even heard whether there is a Holy Spirit." 3 And he said, "Into
what then were you baptized?" And they said, "Into John’s
baptism." 4 Paul said, "John baptized with the baptism of repentance,
telling the people to believe in Him who was coming after him, that is, in Jesus." 5 When they
heard this, they were baptized in the name of the Lord Jesus. 6 And when Paul
had laid his hands upon them, the Holy Spirit came on them, and they began
speaking with tongues and prophesying. 7 There were in all about twelve men.”
We have been talking about transition for some time now,
as we first looked at the transition of Paul, and then Apollos, and now as we
move into chapter nine we will see the transition of twelve men who, like
Apollos had only heard of the preaching, teaching, and baptizing of John the
Baptist. Luke now moves back to pick up
what was going on in the life of Paul after we saw in our last two SD’s of what
was going on with Apollos. It is good to
mention that Paul is now on his third missionary journey which we saw him start
in chapter 18 of Acts.
In verse one see the transition of Luke’s comments about
Apollos was at Corinth, and then goes on to talk about Paul as he is “passing
through the upper country came to Ephesus.
So Apollos is in Corinth and Paul is in Ephesus as he had told the
Ephesians that if the Lord wills he would come back to them and so we can be
assured that it was the will of the Lord for Paul to return to Ephesus.
Verse one ends with Paul finding some disciples while in
Ephesus. John MacArthur writes: “Much controversy surrounds the spiritual
status of these men. Those who insist
they were already Christians use this passage as a proof text for their view
that receiving the Holy Spirit is subsequent, postsalvation, or ‘second
blessing,’ experience. Such an interpretation, however, is untenable. First, it commits the methodological error of
failing to consider the transitional nature of Acts, which means that the
experiences and phenomena described in Acts are not normative for today. Second, this is a faulty interpretation
because it commits the comparative scriptural error. Other texts make obvious that this passage
cannot be used to teach that some Christians today may not have the Holy
Spirit. That would contradict the
explicit teaching of the New Testament epistles, which declare unequivocally
that every Christian receives the Spirit at salvation (1 Cor. 6:19; 12:13; 2
Cor. 6:16; Eph. 1:13), and define those without the Spirit as unsaved (Rom.
8:9; Jude 19).” If anyone wants to do
more study on this subject John MacArthur has written a book entitled “Charismatic
Chaos,” which goes into to much more detail than we have time to do at this
time.
Now one may think that because Luke uses the word “disciple”
that he is saying that they were believers.
It seems to me that Judas was labeled as disciple, and he even went out
with the twelve, and the 70 and did miracles, and yet we know that he was not a
believer in Jesus Christ for salvation.
The word in the Greek for disciple is “Mathetes” and this word means “learner”
or “follower” and it does not always in the New Testament refer to Christian. This word is used of the Pharisees having
disciples, along with John the Baptist having disciples, and of course of Jesus
having disciples.
John MacArthur quotes Commentator David Williams who
explains the significance of the question that Paul asks these twelve men: “Did you receive the Holy Spirit when you
believed?” We will end this SD with this
quote.
“His [Paul’s] criterion for
what distinguished the Christian is significant. So, too, is the way in which his question is
framed. It implies that the Holy Spirit
is received at a definite point in time and that the time is the moment of
initial belief (the aorist participle, pisteusantes,
being construed here as coincidental with the verb, elabete). The same thought
is expressed, for example, in Ephesians 1:13:
‘Having believed you were marked in him with a seal, the promised Holy
Spirit’ (cf. Acts 11:17). No space of
time is envisaged between the two events; nor is the possibility entertained of
believing without also receiving the ‘seal of the Spirit.’ (New
International Bible Commentary: Acts [Peabody,
Mass: Hendrickson, 1990] 329)
Spiritual meaning
for my life today: I have known that
this section of Acts 9 has some controversy in it, and so I am thankful that it
was explained to me from this quote and MacArthur’s commentary.
My Steps of Faith for Today: Trust the Lord to give me grace as the next
11 days will have some challenges as we will be having company for part of that
time.
Answer to yesterday’s
question: “Genesis” (38:28-29).
Today’s Bible
question: “To the children of Israel,
how did the sight of the glory of the Lord appear on Mount Sinai?”
Answer in our next SD.
6/6/2018 10:14 AM
No comments:
Post a Comment