Marks of having received the Holy Ghost.
ACTS xix. 2.
_Have ye received the Holy Ghost since ye believed?_
TWO different significations have been given of these words. Some have supposed, that the question here put, is, Whether these disciples, whom St. _Paul_ found at _Ephesus_, had received the Holy Ghost by imposition of hands at confirmation? Others think, these disciples had been already baptized into _John_’s baptism; which not being attended with an immediate effusion of the Holy Spirit, the Apostle here asks them, Whether they had received the Holy Ghost by being baptized into JESUS CHRIST? And upon their answering in the negative, he first baptized, and then confirmed them in the name of the LORD JESUS.
Which of these interpretations is the most true, is neither easy nor very necessary to determine. However, as the words contain a most important enquiry, without any reference to the context, I shall from them,
_First_, Shew who the Holy Ghost here spoken of, is; and that we must all receive him, before we can be stiled true believers.
_Secondly_, I shall lay down some scripture marks whereby we may know, whether we have thus received the Holy Ghost or not. And
_Thirdly_, By way of conclusion, address myself to several distinct classes of professors, concerning the doctrine that shall have been delivered.
_First_, I am to shew who the Holy Ghost spoken of in ♦the text, is; and that we must all receive him before we can be stiled true believers.
♦ duplicate word “the” removed
By the Holy Ghost is plainly signified the Holy Spirit, the third Person in the ever-blessed Trinity, consubstantial and co-eternal with the Father and the Son, proceeding from, yet equal to them both. He is emphatically called Holy, because infinitely holy in himself, and the author and finisher of all holiness in us.
This blessed Spirit, who once moved on the face of the great deep; who over-shadowed the blessed Virgin before that holy child was born of her; who descended in a bodily shape, like a dove, on our blessed LORD, when he came up out of the water at his baptism; and afterwards came down in fiery tongues on the heads of all his Apostles at the day of Pentecost: this is the Holy Ghost, who must move on the faces of our souls; this power of the Most High, must come upon us, and we must be baptized with his baptism and refining fire, before we can be stiled true members of CHRIST’s mystical body.
Thus says the Apostle _Paul_, “Know ye not that JESUS CHRIST is in you, (that is, by his Spirit) unless you are reprobates?” And, “If any man hath not the Spirit of CHRIST, he is none of his.” And again, says St. _John_, “We know that we are his, by the Spirit that he hath given us.”
It is not, indeed, necessary that we should have the Spirit now given in that miraculous manner, in which he was at first given to our LORD’s Apostles, by signs and wonders; but it is absolutely necessary, that we should receive the Holy Ghost in his sanctifying graces, as really as they did: and so will it continue to be till the end of the world.
For thus stands the case between GOD and man: GOD at first made man upright, or as the sacred Penman expresses it, “In the image of GOD made he man;” that is, his soul was the very copy, the transcript of the divine nature. He, who before, by his almighty fiat, spoke the world into being, breathed into man the breath of spiritual life, and his soul was adorned with a resemblance of the perfections of Deity. This was the finishing stroke of the creation: the perfection both of the moral and material world. And so near did man resemble his divine Original, that GOD could not but rejoice and take pleasure in his own likeness: And therefore we read, that when GOD had finished the inanimate and brutish part of the creation, he looked upon it, and beheld it was _good_; but when that lovely, God-like creature man was made, behold it was _very good_.
Happy, unspeakably happy must man needs be, when thus a partaker of the divine nature. And thus might he have still continued, had he continued holy. But GOD placed him in a state of probation, with a free grant to eat of every tree in the garden of _Eden_, except the tree of knowledge of good and evil: the day he should eat thereof, he was surely to die; that is, not only to be subject to temporal, but spiritual death; and consequently, to lose that divine image, that spiritual life GOD had not long since breathed into him, and which was as much his happiness as his glory.
These, one would imagine, were easy conditions for a finite creature’s happiness to depend on. But man, unhappy man, being seduced by the devil, and desiring, like him, to be equal with his Maker, did eat of the forbidden fruit; and thereby became liable to that curse, which the eternal GOD, who cannot lie, had denounced against his disobedience.