Part 2, Chapter 04

CHAPTER IV. THE WORK OF THE SPIRIT IN CONVICTION. The work of the Holy Spirit on all those who hear the gospel deserves more particular consideration, as it affords a link of connection between those of His operations which are entirely external to the believer, as His work on Christ and His inspiration of the Scriptures, and those that are carried on in the believer’s own soul in his conversion, sanctification, instruction, and consolation. By the inspiration of Holy Scripture, the Spirit makes the message conveyed in it to be really the Word of God; and by His work of conviction, accompanying the preaching of the Word, He secures that it is known and felt by the hearers to be God’s Word to them. Without this it could have no power either to convince the mind that it is really the mind of God, or to overcome the misgivings of an evil conscience, or the alienation of a selfish and worldly heart from God. But the Spirit of God makes a direct communication between God and the soul of man; so that the gospel as it comes to us is really known and felt to be the Word of God (see 1 Thessalonians 2:13; 1 Thessalonians 1:5), not merely men speaking to us about God, but God Himself speaking to our souls. Paul seems to indicate that this is the difference between those cases in which the gospel is ineffectual, and those in which it leads to a new faith and life: and is it not really so? There are many who know the great truths of Christianity, and often hear its lessons enforced, yet show no appearance of that new life that Paul ascribes to the faith of the gospel. They do not disbelieve the truths they hear; but they receive them merely as what their ministers tell them, or what divines have drawn from the Bible, without any sense or idea that God Himself is speaking to them. Can we wonder that the gospel produces little or no effect on them? It is when men are brought face to face with God, as He has come near to us in Jesus Christ, that they are really influenced by His Word.

Now it is by His Spirit, as we have already seen, that God comes into direct contact with man: the human spirit as breathed into man by God at the first, is akin to the divine, and the Spirit of God has access to that of man. Hence even the earthly ministry of Jesus Himself the Son of God could not effectually win the hearts of men, save through the Spirit of God. He indeed perfectly revealed the Father, and in His cross revealed Him as forgiving sins, a just God and a Saviour; but it was needful that He should depart in bodily presence and come by the Spirit, that men might be brought to turn to the Father in penitence, love, and obedience. But it is by revealing Christ as the image of God to the inmost soul of man, that the Spirit of God works; He glorifies Christ, for He takes of His, and shows it to men, and that which is Christ’s includes all that the Father hath (John 16:14-15). So also Paul teaches that the Spirit reveals Christ in us, and enables us to call Him Lord, and to see in Him the glory of God, so as to be conformed to the same image (Galatians 1:16; 1 Corinthians 2:10-16; 1 Corinthians 12:3; 2 Corinthians 3:3, 2 Corinthians 3:18, 2 Corinthians 4:6).

What is meant by this may be understood if we consider how God is known by man. While there are undoubtedly evidences of the being and attributes of God in His works, that appeal to the understanding, and that can be exhibited, as they often have been, in the form of arguments; there is reason to think, that these seldom have been the earliest means of leading men to believe that God is, but that they have first come to this belief through the sense of the absolute authority of the law of duty, and of the reverence and obedience due to it. They feel themselves under law, and therefore under a Supreme Lawgiver and Judge. Thus first do we come into any personal relation to God. But the moral sense, as we know, is very apt to be blunted and vitiated. When pleasure or self-love prevails over the dictates of duty, it becomes painful to listen to the voice of conscience, and so attention is turned away from it; and by disuse the delicacy of its discernment is blunted, and the authority with which it speaks is forgotten. Thus it comes to pass that the true knowledge of God is lost, because the faculty by which it is received is disordered; and if men in this state still go on thinking and arguing about God, they are led farther and farther into error. They have no true understanding of His character, or His will, or His works; and this is what is meant by the mind being blinded, and unable to apprehend spiritual things.

Now when the mind is in this state, and both Scripture and experience declare, that the minds of all men are by nature in such a state, there is needed, in order to their enlightenment, not only the presentation of objects of knowledge, but the restoration of the power of knowing in the mind itself. There must therefore be, not merely the proclamation of the gospel to the mind, but some work on or in the mind, enabling it to see that this is indeed a message from God, and to perceive its meaning. This is the enlightening or convincing work of the Holy Spirit.

Yet this work is not the creation of a new faculty entirely absent before; it is the restoration of power to a faculty that had become blind and impotent by disuse. Now the analogy of nature teaches us, that in such cases the power is to be restored by using it so far as it remains. The faculty of moral discernment is there, though in regard to God and the things of God it has lost its power. That power must be restored by the exercise of the faculty on what it can discern. So, for example, when David had been living in sin, untouched with any sense of its evil, Nathan opened his eyes to see that, by presenting, in the parable of the ewe lamb, a case in which he still could judge correctly, and by calling him to judge in this case, enabled him to judge himself. In like manner, the Spirit opens the eyes of men to see their real relation to God, and their moral state in His sight, by setting these things before them in such a palpable way that they can discern them. “When he is come,” said Jesus, “he shall convince the world of sin, and of righteousness, and of judgment; of sin, because they believe not in me, of righteousness because I go to the Father and ye see me no more, of judgment because the prince of this world is judged.” These convictions are to be brought home to men through their knowledge of the life and work of Jesus; and the way in which this is done is shown by the record in the Book of Acts, of the fulfilment of that promise. The gift of the Holy Spirit to the disciples of Jesus on the day of Pentecost was set forth as a proof of His resurrection (Acts 2:32-33); and that again was evidence that He was Lord and Messiah (Acts 2:36). Their unbelief therefore, the guilt of which they had not moral discernment to perceive in itself, now appeared to them as crucifying their Messiah and King; and when they heard that, they were pricked in their hearts, and said, “ What shall we do?” (Acts 2:37). The Holy Spirit was convincing them of sin, inasmuch as He was manifestly working in the disciples of Jesus, and so presenting to the Jews the sin of their conduct in a way in which they could not but see it.

This, we may believe, was the use of the outward miracles that accompanied the preaching of the gospel, and also many of God’s earlier messages. They presented to the dull and hardened minds of men broad outlines and bright colours which they could discern; and by thus calling their moral judgment into exercise, made it capable of perceiving truths to which at first it was blind. But the same purpose is served, more extensively and not less effectually, by those graces and virtues of the Christian life which are the fruits of the Spirit as truly and unmistakably as the extraordinary gifts that have now ceased. These serve to convey to the minds of ignorant and prejudiced men conceptions of spiritual and divine things formerly strange to them. For example, a missionary goes to preach the gospel of Christ to the savagetribes of Central Africa, or the South Sea Islands: he tells them of the love of God to men; but they cannot take it in; they have no such feeling in their own hearts, and they can form no idea of what it is. But he lives among them, shows them kindness, bears patiently with their hostility, heals them in sickness, saves them from death; and they gradually come to see what love is, and recognising the love of man, they are led to believe the love of God. Then too they will come to see the moral evil of their inhumanity, and ingratitude, and vice; and thus their minds will be enlightened, and their consciences convinced of sin. So in other cases an inability to understand Christian doctrine may be removed, in accordance with the laws of our mental nature, by the presentation of the reality of Christian life; and this is the work of the Holy Spirit acting indirectly on the world. In this sense Christ’s disciples are the light of the world, having received light from Him, they reflect it on others. They have been raised to the position of a city set on a hill, where the light of the Sun of righteousness shines. The world is in the valley below, where that light is not seen directly; but men can see it reflected from the city that cannot be hid, and may thus be persuaded to come up thither. “ Let your light,” said Jesus, “ so shine among men, that they may see your good works and glorify your Father which is in heaven” (Matthew 5:16). So the same work of conviction, that is ascribed by Christ to the Spirit, is assigned by Paul to Christians, as having been once darkness but now light in the Lord. “ Have no fellowship with the unfruitful works of darkness, but rather even reprove them... But all things when they are reproved are made manifest by the light “(Ephesians 5:1-33). But this conviction and illumination is also ascribed to Christ (v. 14). Christ works through His Spirit in His own people, presenting Christianity to the world in such a way that men come to see things to which they were formerly blind, and to feel convictions to which they were before insensible. This is the reason why our Catechism says, that the Holy Spirit makcth “the reading, but especially the preaching, of the word an effectual means of convincing and converting sinners.” The preaching of the word, according to Christ’s appointment, is the proclamation of it by a man who feels its truth and preciousness, who is influenced by its power and trusts its promises. Hence in such preaching the word is accompanied by the living personality of a Christian man, and so the reality of Christian life is presented along with the verbal declaration of it; and the spiritual power of preaching lies greatly in the personality of the preacher as a man I of God.

We are not indeed to suppose, that it is only through His work in Christians that the Holy Spirit enlightens and convinces the world. He may exercise some direct influence upon them, though of the nature of that we can form no distinct conception; and He does work often by the Word alone, and makes it the means of giving light to those blinded by prejudice and sin. Indeed, there is reason to believe that the gospel is never unaccompanied with this work of the Spirit; and that all the convictions, relentings, misgivings, desires, and aspirations that are felt under the preaching of the gospel, are due, not merely to the truth in itself, nor to the eloquence of the preacher, but to the working of the Holy Spirit. That this is so appears from the familiar facts, that the same truths often have very different effects, not only on different persons, but on the same person at different times, so that what at one time we hear with indifference, at another time stirs us with emotion to the very depths of our soul; and that it is not always the most eloquent preachers who have been most blessed in the awakening and conversion of souls. In the way in which men are convinced of sin and awakened to see religious truth under the preaching of the gospel, there is something more than can be accounted for by the ordinary principles of logic and rhetoric: the Bible leads us to ascribe this to the Spirit of God; and we have seen that if we recognise such an agent working in the hearts of men, the facts of experience are sufficiently and naturally accounted for. God is awakening into exercise faculties dormant or diseased by disuse, in a way analogous to that in which such a process ordinarily goes on. This work of the Spirit, however, is one that may be resisted and overcome, and does not always lead to conversion. There is in the natural heart of man a tendency to resist it; for the convictions which it produces are very humbling and painful. It dispels the self-complacency in which men may have been indulging, thinking that they are tolerably virtuous, or at least not worse than others; it awakens them to a sense of ungodliness and unbrotherliness; it shows them that they ought to make a most humiliating confession of sin to God, and a most thorough change of heart and life. To this their pride, their selfishness, their indolence and love of ease, are strongly opposed; and these sometimes induce men to put away from them the unwelcome message, and to stifle the inward conviction of its truth. They may put off the consideration of the claims of Christianity, and plunge into the business or pleasures of the world; or they may set themselves in violent opposition to the gospel, and endeavour to persuade themselves that it is not true; and in some such way it often happens that convictions that were once serious and seemed to be deep pass away. When this takes place, the result is, that the heart becomes hardened until it may at last be entirely insensible and unimpressible even by the most powerful and touching appeals. This is in accordance with two general laws of our mental and moral nature. One is, that impressions in which the soul is passive, when they are not yielded to, become more and more feeble, until at length they may cease to produce any effect at all. In this way, those who hear the gospel at first with much feeling, and seem to be almost persuaded to comply with it, but yet refuse or delay to do so, will hear it again with less emotion; and if they continue to disobey the call, they may come to such a state, that they cannot feel the power of the truths that once impressed them so deeply.

Such impressions are therefore not to be trifled with. They are precious and useful as helps towards conversion, and may greatly promote our spiritual life, if they are cherished and obeyed; but their continuance cannot be counted on; and if they are neglected, they will disappear and give place to utter hardness of heart. But this is not all; for since, according to the law of habit, while passive impressions become feebler, active efforts become stronger by repetition, the effort that the ungodly mind must make to shake off impressions that are strongly made by the gospel tends, every time it is made, to become easier and more likely. Thus by a twofold process, perfectly in accordance with the ordinary course of nature, the gospel becomes to those who refuse it a means of hardening, not as it is intended to be, of conversion. This effect of the unbelieving hearing of the divine call is often spoken of in Scripture; and as it may end when it runs its full course in utter and hopeless hardness of heart, this is probably the explanation of the solemn and mysterious statements by our Lord and His apostles about blasphemy against the Holy Spirit, as a sin that has no forgiveness (Matthew 12:31-32; Mark 3:28-29; Luke 12:10), the sin unto death (1 John 5:16-17), the wilful apostasy, from which it is impossible to renew men again to repentance (Hebrews 6:4-6; Hebrews 10:26-29). When we compare with these sayings the plain and repeated statements of revelation, that Jesus Christ came into the world to save sinners even the chief, that His blood cleanses from all sin, that all men, even the most guilty, are assured of forgiveness, if they repent and believe in Jesus; we perceive that this sin is not unpardonable because of its great or peculiar guilt, but because by its nature it makes repentance and faith impossible. Hence it is not so much a definite or particular offence, as a certain frame of mind, or manner of sinning; and it is mentioned in Scripture in the obscure way that has sometimes caused perplexity, for this practical reason, that the purpose of revelation is not to make us anxiously cautious against one special sin, while comparatively careless about others; but to make us hate and resist all sin, and feel the evil and danger even of the least; since there is no form of sin, however apparently trifling, that if indulged, may not lead to that which is unto death. There is no sin that appears to worldly men more light and trivial than that of unbelief; yet nothing approaches nearer to a description of the sin against the Holy Spirit than persistent and final unbelief.

Thus we have constant need to be saying with the Psalmist, “ Who can understand his errors? Cleanse thou me from secret faults, keep back thy servant also from presumptuous sins. So shall I be upright, and I shall be innocent from the great transgression” (Psalms 19:12-13).