3. Holy Spirit and the Spiritual World

HOLY SPIRIT AND THE SPIRIT

WORLD

Your presence is duly appreciated. My subject is one concerning which there is more misunderstanding and around which there has been thrown more mysticism, than any other Bible subject. I feel very humble in approaching this study, especially when I remember that we are study-ing about the Holy Spirit. We can only know what is re-vealed about the Holy Spirit. I may not even know all of that. The Bible does not tell us all about God, all about Christ, and the Holy Spirit. God has revealed whatever is necessary for us to know about the Holy Spirit, about God, and about Christ, and perhaps all we can comprehend. In Deuteronomy 29:29 we read, "The secret things belong unto the Lord our God: but those things which are revealed be-long unto us and to our children." We want to confine our study' to the things revealed and be satisfied with that.

Mysteries In Religion

There are great mysteries connected with our religion, but they are over on the divine side. There is no mystery about what to do to be saved, how to worship and serve God, and to live the Christian life, and finally be able to go home to God in heaven. The mystery is on the divine side, and God will look after the mysteries. In 1 Timothy 3:16 he tells us, "Without controversy"--meaning without any argument, without any debate about it, there is nobody to deny it, it is admitted by all who know anything about religion--"without controversy great is the mystery of godliness." And he mentions some of those mysteries: "God was manifest in the flesh"--which certainly has reference to the virgin birth, a subject that we cannot fully comprehend; and then how that God--"was justified in the Spirit, seen of angels, preached unto the Gentiles, believed on in the world, received up into glory" great mysteries. We can believe what is said about these mysteries, but we cannot fully comprehend them.

A World of Invisible Things In the very first place, there is an invisible world. We're so prone to look at everything through material glasses and are so secular and so materialistic that it is difficult for us to conceive of a spirit world--an invisible world. But even in our world there are things which are invisible. We know about the atom and remember that the Hebrew writer said, "Through faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the word of God, so that things which are seen were not made of things which do appear." (Hebrews 11:3.) The things which are seen were made out of things which do not appear--of invisible things--and this includes the atoms, of course. Now nobody has ever seen an atom. We've been able to make bombs out of the atom. We won the last World War by using the atomic bomb, but we still have never seen an atom. Though everything is made out of atoms, we haven't seen a single atom. And yet, all of us know that they exist.

The same is true of other things that are invisible. I remember a man came from Thailand to the University of Alabama to take some post graduate work. He was a grad-uate of some university somewhere near Thailand, and being a Buddhist, he was an atheist, and was brought by a doctor's wife, who was a friend of mine, for me to talk to him. She thought I might be able to convert him. He said he could not believe in God because he could not believe in anything that he could not see. I asked him if he be-lieved that there is such a thing as an atom, and he said that he did. I said, "Did you ever see one?" He said, "No." "Well, do you have any evidence that anybody ever saw one?" He said, "No." I said, "Then, there are invisible things!" Take the subject of gravity. No one has ever seen gravity. It is an invisible thing. Yet it is connected with our world. So right here in our world there are invisible things. Also, we cannot see the wind. In John 3:8 we have a clear statement concerning the wind that the "wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth." They could not tell from which direction the wind was coming and which way it would go because of the fact that it is invisible. Had it been visible like clouds, an air-plane, or something like that, you could tell which way it was coming and which way it would go. Wind is invisible. Our very homes and lungs are filled with invisible air. There are things invisible.

Electricity is an invisible thing. You may say you see lights produced by electricity. Yes, produced, by it. But we do not see electricity. We only see its product. Electricity is invisible, and it is a great and mysterious thing, travel-ing about 186,000 miles per second, surrounding this earth at the equator about seven times in one second. There are mysteries connected with a thing that can travel that fast. But there are mysteries everywhere.

Some people refuse to believe in God because they can't see him, and reject the truth about the Holy Spirit because he is invisible, and reject the Lord Jesus Christ because he is now glorified, and has become an invisible being, as far as we are concerned. We cannot look upon his glori-ous presence with our human eyes and not be blinded as was Saul of Tarsus (Acts 26), and as was John when he beheld him in his glory when he appeared unto him (Revelation 1). There are invisible beings and things.

Gravity itself is suggested in Job 26:7 when the Lord stretched "out the north over the empty place, and hangeth the earth upon nothing." It is now hanging up in space. Here we are, millions of miles above stars and beneath stars, stars all around us millions of miles away. We are up here in orbit, going around the sun once a year, travel-ing at tremendous speed--held up by what is commonly called gravity, but the Bible calls it the power of God. "Upholding all things by the word of his power." (Hebrews 1:3.) There are invisible things connected with this world.

Even our very minds are invisible. Nobody has ever seen the human mind but that does not mean we are idiots--that we don't know anything. Nobody has ever seen a thought or an idea. But such things exist. We can see the brain, but we can't see the mind.

Right here in Dallas, once lived a preacher of the gospel and defender thereof by the name of Joe Warlick. He was about to catch a train out of the city to some point and a little boy came into the depot with a Bible under his arm. An atheist was sitting by who said, "What is that you have under your arm?" The boy said, "My Bible." "Well," he said, "you don't believe in God, do you?" "O, yes," he said, "I believe in God." "You go to Sunday School?" "Yes." "Did you ever see God?" "No." "Did you ever contact him with any of your five senses?" And he enumerated them. "No." "Well, how do you know there is a God, then?" Well, the little fellow was very much embarrassed and Warlick then took his part and said to the atheist, "Do you have a mind or are you an idiot?" He said, "That is an insulting question. Of course I have a mind." "How do you know you have a mind? Did you ever see it? Did you ever smell it? Did you ever feel it? Did you ever taste it?" and so forth. He said, "No." "Well, you are an idiot then. You can't believe in God because you have never seen him, and yet you claim to believe that you have a mind when the facts are that you have never seen it either. According to your logic and reasoning you would have to be an idiot, to be consistent." So there are those who claim they can't believe in God because of the fact they've not seen God.

There are invisible things and there is an invisible world that we cannot see. We could not see those beings with our naked eyes unless they assume some human shape or form. Scientists now tell us that there are trillions of little things in this world that we cannot see, even with our most powerful microscopes. But there is a great world of living beings which we cannot see. But we believe in them be-cause we have proof of their existence, as we have of the atom, without ever seeing one of them. So there is an in-visible world of beings, and things not visible, some in this world where we live.

God Is Spirit

Therefore, it is not inconsistent for us to believe in the Holy Spirit, an invisible being, and to believe in God and to believe in angels and spirits. Traveling in Egypt we had a guide who, immediately after we had started on our journey from Cairo to the airport, said, "I presume you are teachers." I said, "Yes, and No." "What do you mean by 'yes' and 'no'?" I said, "We are religious teachers. Three of us are preachers." (With my wife and me were our son Flavil and Brother W. Gaddys Roy.) I said, "Three of us are gospel preachers; so we're teachers in that sense."

"Yes,"-- he said, "and what church are you members of what religion have you embraced? Are you Mohammedans? Catholics?" I said, "We're not Jews nor Catholics, neither are we Mohammedans. We are trying to be Christians only, with no denominational affiliation, just following Christ as Christians ought." And he said, "I'm glad to meet you, indeed. I have been a Christian for some time." But we had not gone very far until he said, "However, concerning the matter of religion, I fear that the time is at hand when no one in all the world will any longer believe in God. We are just about to create life and if we succeed in doing so, then the idea of God will be given up by all intelligent people." I said, "I don't see how you can reach that conclusion from the premises. It takes so much intelligence to create life that we have never been equal to the task, as of now. We have never created life as of yet. We have never had enough sense to do it. It takes so much intelligence that we've never been able to create the tiniest form of life. And if we were to succeed in creating life, it would not shake my faith in the Bible one whit. It would, in fact, confirm me in the belief that all life originates in back-ground intelligence--and that no life comes by accident and chance. We've never known any life to come by accident or chance. Spontaneous generation is a mere theory. It has never been established. It is not a science. We know nothing of such, it is nothing but an unproved theory." After he had attended to our business at the airport for us he said he would go his way. But he came back in a few minutes and said, "I want to apologize for the statement I made concerning the creation of life. I have been thinking about it and I have decided, too, that if they succeed in creating life it will only prove that the first life came from a great intelligence and therefore, of God." Mr. Edwin Conklin who is a great scientist and a biologist of Princeton, made a statement that the idea that life originated from non-living matter by accident and chance, by the blind forces of nature, guided by no intelligence, is equal to the idea of the unabridged dictionary originating from an explosion in a print shop. So we can see that there is just no reason to think life came by accident and chance. There is life. There is a world, an earth, a universe, and it had to have a maker. It has every mark of divine causation and of having been designed and fashioned and made. As Paul said, "Every house is builded by some man; but he that built all things is God." (Hebrews 3:4.) If a house like this proclaims its builder, whether you have ever seen him or not, proclaims that it was designed, fashioned and made, then the world and universe proclaim their Builder. Then, of course, the existence of the world, of the universe and man and all things would proclaim a great, divine Builder equal to the task of creating all things. So there is a God.

The very first of these invisible beings introduced to us in the Bible is God. Genesis 1:1 : "In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth." And of course God is a spirit being and is an invisible being. John 4:24 : "God is a Spirit; and they that worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth." And Jesus said, "Handle me, and see; for a spirit bath not flesh and bones, as ye see me have." (Luke 24:39.) God has always been. If there ever had been a time when there was no God, there never could have been anything. If you could think of a time when there was nothing, you would be logically driven to the conclusion that nothing ever could have existed for something never comes from nothing. Something always comes from something--all the way back to the eternally existent something--God. Hence, God always has existed. Psalms 90:1-2 : "Lord, thou has been our dwelling place in all generations. Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever thou hadst formed the earth and the world, even from everlasting to everlasting, thou art God." So God is just as everlasting back the way we've come as he is the way we're going. Hence, in Romans 16:26 he is called "everlasting God."

Of course we cannot fully comprehend a being so great as God, any more than a little spider down by the railroad tracks could comprehend a great railroad system with the trains moving so rapidly where there are a hundred cars and traveling at tremendous speed. Of course a little spider wouldn't understand all that because it's far beyond his ability to comprehend. But that is not as far beyond the spider's ability as God, and the comprehension of God, is beyond our ability. So we therefore do not reject the ex-istence of God on the ground that we cannot understand him. A flea on an elephant couldn't understand the ele-phant. It would be so much larger and such a great animal in comparison with himself, so far beyond anything that he knew about other than just to merely see him to know he existed, but he couldn't comprehend him. But that wouldn't prove there's no elephant, even if the flea were to reach such a conclusion. So it is with man and God. We are nothing but fleas in comparison with God Almighty. We are nothing but dust worms of the earth, and are not worthy to be compared with our Maker.

Christ Is A Spirit Being Now

Christ is himself also a glorified being, an immortal being. You will recall that the Bible says that Christ, our Lord, is a spirit being now. "The Lord is that Spirit," (2 Corinthians 3:17) and he is no longer in flesh and blood as he once was. In 2 Corinthians 5:16, "We have known Christ after the flesh, yet now henceforth know we him no more." So we don't know Jesus after the flesh any more. He is now glorified. Paul's statement in Php 3:21 says, "He shall change our vile body, that it may be fashioned like unto his glorious body, according to the working whereby is able even to subdue all things unto himself." And so Jesus Christ is no longer a physical, material, fleshly being; but he is a great spiritual being.

Before this world ever was, Jesus was, and existed as an invisible Being. We could not have seen him with our eyes. We read in John 1:1-3, "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by him." Christ was back there before the cre-ation. "All things were made by him; and without him was not anything made that was made." And in verse 14, "The Word was made flesh"--virgin birth--"and dwelt among us, (and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begot-ten of the Father,) full of grace and truth." So he was an invisible being, and yet conscious, and of course, infinite-ly intelligent, back there before the world ever was. In John 17:5, in his prayer to the Father, he said, "Glorify thou me with thine own self with the glory which I had with thee before the world was." And in verse 24, "Thou lovedst me before the foundation of the world." So Jesus existed back there--not in flesh and blood. But finally, God prepared for him a body and he came down from heaven to live and dwell in a little virgin born body. "A body host thou prepared me." (Hebrews 10:5.) And thus Jesus took upon himself flesh to dwell among us. He came from a spirit world. In John 6:38 he says, "I came down from heaven." In verse 62 he said, "What and if ye shall see the Son of man ascend up where he was before?" He was up there before he was down here. We read in John 3:17, "God sent not his Son into the world to condemn the world; but that the world through him might be saved." So Jesus came into the world from a spirit world, from where God dwells, where the Holy Spirit dwells. And he said in John 16:7, "It is expedient for you that I go away; for if I go not away, the Comforter will not come unto you; but if I depart, I will send him unto you. And when he is come, he will reprove the world of sin" . . . and thus he goes on to describe the work of the Holy Spirit. He would send the Holy Spirit, but he himself should first ascend unto heaven. We know he safely arrived there because he fulfilled his promise and on Pentecost in Acts 2 he sent the Holy Spirit. Now, Jesus has been glorified so the Spirit could come. In Acts 2:4 we read, "They were all filled with the Holy Spirit, and began to speak with other tongues, as the Spirit gave them utterance."

Human Spirits Invisible

Also, our own spirits are invisible. Our own souls are in-visible beings. (Matthew 10:28.) Hardly a man could be found who would deny that he has a soul or a spirit, yet he has never seen it. He has never contacted it with his five sens-es. He believes it solely and only upon the statement of God's word, such as Daniel 7:15 : "I Daniel was grieved in my spirit in the midst of my body." And he believes it because of Ecclesiastes 12:7 : "Then shall the dust return to the earth as it was: and the spirit shall return unto God who gave it." Acts 17:28-29 : "We are the offspring of God," and it is our spirits which are his offspring. "We have had fathers of our flesh which corrected us, and we gave them reverence: shall we not much rather be in subjection unto the Father of spirits and live?" It is the spirit of man that is the offspring of God and causes God to love man. He is interested in man because we are thus his offspring--just like grandparents love their grandchildren, for instance. They are their offspring, and they especially love them for that reason. Remember that the spirit of man is a part of man. Some think that the soul, the spirit, is just the breath--that it is no part of man. Well, if the spirit is no part of man, then Jesus said that which is no part of man will have to have the new birth. He said, "Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God." (John 3:3.) "Except a man be born of water and of the Spirit, he can-not enter into the kingdom of God." (John 3:5.) Then, in verse 6, he said, "That which is born of the flesh is flesh; and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit." It is the spirit that is born again. But if the spirit is no part of man, then that which is no part of man is born again instead of man. And the man himself would not be born again, and could not enter the Kingdom of God. (John 3:6.) That is the uncertainty to which it leads when people begin to deny what the Bible says about the spirit.

Angels Are Spirit Beings The angels of God are spirits and are invisible beings. Of course, they sometimes assumed the shape or form of man in order to talk and converse with man. "Who maketh his angels spirits," (Hebrews 1:7) and so there are such beings as spirit beings. Remember that in Acts 23:6-8, Paul said that he was a Pharisee and the record says that Pharisees believed in angels and spirits whereas the Sadducees did not believe in either. There are people who are materialists now, like the Sadducees, and they do not believe in anything invisible except when they begin to make exceptions. Also, the demons are spirits. In Mark 5:13 they are called "unclean spirits" and also Luke 7:21. And then the angels have appeared here upon earth and have been seen. When Lazarus died the angels came and carried Lazarus to Abraham's bosom. (Luke 16:22.)

Balaam's eyes were opened so that he could see an angel that he had not been seeing. And a great warrior was per-mitted to open his eyes, by the power of God, to look on a great host of angels, and soldiers, and chariots and horses out yonder and things that he hadn't seen. And God only knows what all we could see if we had the right kind of eyes to see. (2 Kings 6:17.)

Holy Spirit Invisible The Holy Spirit, likewise now, is one of these invisible beings and we, therefore, believe in such. In Cruden's Concordance he says, "In the scripture the word spirit is taken for the Holy Ghost, the third person in the Trinity." And in the next place that the word spirit refers to the "spirit of man." The word "Trinity" of course means three. In Matthew 28:19 the Lord in giving the Great Commission said, "Teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost." And we read of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost; the three of the Trinity, in many scriptures, though not in that order all the time. In 2 Corinthians 13:14 : "The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Ghost, be with you." In Ephesians 4 we read, "There . . . is one Spirit," (verse 4) and there is "one Lord," (verse 5) and "one God" (verse 6). Well, that would be three ones together and the Trinity, the "one spirit," "one Lord," and "one God." Three "ones" make three, and thus the Trinity of the Godhead. These are united. Jesus said in his prayer for the unity of his disciples that he wanted them to be one as he and his Father are one. (John 17:21-22.) In 1 John 5:3-7 we read that the "three" bear record. There were the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit, making the three thus mentioned, again. The Godhead is mentioned three times in the scriptures and I believe the Greek word is used in another passage where the Apostle Peter says, "According as his divine power hath given us all things that pertain unto life and godliness." (2 Peter 1:3.) The three passages using the word Godhead are Romans 1:20; Acts 17:29; and Colossians 2:9. Hence, the Godhead is composed of the three persons, the three intelligent divine beings that make up the Godhead. Of course, the Father is God. The word God means Deity. Sometimes it refers to all three of the Godhead. "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth." (Genesis 1:1.) Sometimes as you'll find in that chapter, the Hebrew word for God is plural. In verses 26 and '27: "Let us make man in our image, after our likeness." And thus, God, Christ, and the Holy Spirit were involved in the creation. Christ is Deity as I showed awhile ago. He was back there at the creation. "All things are made by him; and without him was not anything made that was made." (John 1:3.) Hence, he existed before the world was. (John 17:5.) And the Holy Spirit is God, or Deity, and a real personality, or divine being, and not a mere thing like wind or electricity, or something of that sort that has no intelligence. The Holy Spirit is infinitely intelligent, as God and Christ, and as a member of the Godhead. In Genesis 1:1, we read, "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth." But in John 1:1-3 we learn that he did it through Christ. (Hebrews 1:1-2; Colossians 1:13.) The Holy Spirit created. "And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters." (Genesis 1:2.) I read from Job 26:13, "By his Spirit, he hath garnished the heavens; his hand hath formed the crooked serpent." So God garnished the heavens by his Spirit. The Holy Spirit gave laws to regulate all things. He was in the creation of man and of the earth and of all things. We read also where Elihu made the statement, "The Spirit of God hath made me, and the breath of the Almighty hath given me life." (Job 33:4.) And when it is said in Genesis 2:7 that God "formed man of the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul," the Holy Spirit had a part in that creation of man. But I read again in Psalms 104:30, "Thou sendest forth thy Spirit; they are created: and thou renewest the face of the earth." There the Holy Spirit is in creation, back there in the beginning.

The Holy Spirit Works Through Law But the Spirit gave laws, when he garnished the heavens and when God created everything through Christ, the Holy Spirit then gave laws to the creatures of the world to reproduce their kind, and gave laws to Adam and Eve to "multiply and replenish the earth." (Genesis 1:28.) He gave the seed in the vegetable world and the seed has in it the power to reproduce its kind. About nine times in the first two chapters of Genesis it is said that everything will bring forth after its kind.

The power to convert the world and to make Christians is wrapped up in the seed, the word of God. The Holy Spirit has put the power there. Jesus used the parable, "The seed is the word of God." (Luke 8:11.) "The sower soweth the word." (Mark 4:14.) There's not an idea in religion today, which is true, that is not wrapped up in the seed, the word of God. There are no direct ideas. You had just as well expect to produce a crop out here by going out to the farm and praying to God to send down direct power and operate upon the soil and produce a crop and a harvest as to expect a direct revelation of God's will to man now. He has finished his revelation. We sing the old song, "How firm a foundation, ye saints of the Lord, is laid for your faith in his excellent word. What more can He say than to you He hath said? Ye who unto Jesus for refuge have fled." So we should stay with the seed, the word of God. We should depend upon it to produce the harvest. "They that sow in tears shall reap in joy. He that goeth forth and weepeth, bearing precious seed, shall doubtless come again with rejoicing, bringing his sheaves with him."(Psalms 126:5, 6.) So there is not a true religious idea in the world not from the Bible. No man has such an idea except as he receives it from the seed, the word of God. It just narrows down to that. Everything else is false and extraneous.

Now people sometimes have imagined that the Holy Spirit was inspiring them, revealing something to them, when it was not true. I remember that I was in a discussion with Mr. Busbee of a denominational church over in Mississippi many years ago. He spoke very rapidly and in his haste he couldn't quote certain scriptures. He would get them backward and all tangled up in his haste and finally he would stop and he would say, "Help me, Holy Ghost!" And about that time, he would pick up the passage and here he would go with it and he would quote it; then say, "Thank you, Holy Ghost." He was taking the audience away with that trick. That's exactly what it was, a trick of the devil. People usually can be exposed when they get off on something like that, and I kept looking for a place to expose his trickery. Finally, he misquoted one and said, "Help me, Holy Ghost," and he imagined that the Holy Spirit had helped him and he said, "Thank you, Holy Ghost." But he had perverted it, did not quote it correctly. I turned then and read the passage and pointed out the fact that he and his Holy Ghost (?) had made a blunder and that his Holy Ghost was not the Holy Ghost. That the ghost he was depending on was another, a wicked spirit, and quoted several passages such as 1 Tim. 4:1, "The Spirit" --- that is God's Spirit--"speaketh expressly, that in the latter times some shall depart from the faith, giving heed to seducing spirits, and doctrines of devils." I said, "There it is, a 'seducing spirit.' You are under the influence of the spirit of the devil." He didn't like it, but I could not help it. I had to expose him because he had no right to resort to such trickery in the first place, to try to delude the people into thinking that he was inspired. He had claimed it and then went down. Well, he never did say, "Thank you, Holy Ghost," any more during the rest of the discussion of the three nights. The Holy Spirit is a person--a real being.

And we will take that up tomorrow evening. We hope that you will be with us. Bring your neighbors and your friends and we will study these things.

Don't forget there is a spirit world and we are deciding now where we will be millions of years from now. So to-night, will you follow the teaching of the Holy Spirit? If you already know what to do to be saved, will you do it tonight? If you don't know, come and we will be glad to help you and instruct you, from the Bible itself. We will let you read it for yourself, what to do to be saved. You can obey the gospel and go on your way tonight, saved, your name written in heaven and be under the leadership of the Holy Spirit rather than following the flesh, and go to heaven rather than perdition when you leave this world. We are going to stand and sing the hymn of invitation at this time.

QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS

Question:Had the word been translated Spirit rather than Ghost, would that not have prevented some of the confusion about the Holy Spirit?

Answer:The American Standard Version and modern translations leave out the word Ghost and put the word Spirit there. The facts are that the same original Greek word "pneuma" is translated Spirit in the King James Version in many places where it is occasionally translated Ghost. Hence, it is the same identical original word. The word used by Christ and the apostles is the same word PNEUMA--a form of the word is pneumatic. You talk about a pneumatic tire because the word pneuma primarily had reference to air and wind. But it has no such meaning in the Bible in passages ref Bring to God, the Holy Spirit, Deity. For instance, when it says, "God is a Spirit" (John 4:24), it does not mean that God is a wind or that God is just hot air. It doesn't mean that. He is a being of intelligence, Almighty power, infinite wisdom, and the like. So the correction in the translation did go a long way in get-ting people to thinking aright. At the time, however, the King James translation was made, the word Ghost carried with it the idea, largely, of guest; a visitor; one who had come to make his abode with us, and thus guest. At that time, when they would read about the Holy Ghost, it just meant a being who had come to live with man, dwell in man. So they didn't get the wrong idea back there in 1611 when the King James Ver-sion was made. A Holy Guest. But finally the word ghost came to connote in our changing, growing, language some-thing it didn't mean then. It came to mean a sort of a gob-lin or something like that--something that is mysterious in the sense that they didn't know what it was--didn't know anything about it at all. Hence, false doctrines began to develop and people began to teach accordingly. Now that we have the corrected translation, we ought to use the word Spirit as often as possible and we are not misquoting the Bible because the Lord did not write in English. But the New Testament was written largely in Greek and the Greek word, pneuma, is the word that is translated both spirit and ghost.

Question:What evidence do we have of demons at work today?

Answer: I don't know much about demons, either. All I know about them is what God says about them and may not know all of that. But remember that in Deuteronomy 29:29, God's great declaration is: "The secret things belong to the Lord our God: but those things which are revealed belong unto us and to our children." We don't have to understand demons and know all about them, tell of their origin and all of that in order to believe what God said. He says that there were demons and I do not know all of their functions, all of their activities. But there are times you read of devils instead of demons. For instance, when James says, "The devils also believe, and tremble" (James 2:19), it is translated "demons" in the American Standard Version. I gave some Scriptures tonight where the Lord spoke of these demons as "spirits." We don't know all about them. It may be, as I thought of it this night, when God sent his Son into the world that he allowed people to be demon possessed so that the Lord might have an opportunity to counteract demonaic power and to show his superiority over the demons. That's exactly what he did whether demons possessed people for that reason or not.

You remember when God called Moses, he offered some excuses and God said, What's in your hand?" "A rod." He threw it down and God turned it into a serpent before his eyes and he fled from before it. God said, "Take it by the tail." And he did. Then following those signs of which this is the first mentioned, the magicians threw their rods down and they turned to serpents. That is, it seems that they did. It may be that they even had power, that God had somehow allowed them power or they had demonaic power to turn their rods to serpents. God may have permitted such in the first century so that Christ would come and conquer the demons and old satan--overpower them. In Mark 3:22 beginning and Matthew 12:22 beginning you will find that they accused Jesus of casting out demons by Beelzebub, the prince of the demons or devils. And Jesus, in defending himself against this very dangerous doctrine, made the statement that he cast them out by the power of the Holy Spirit. "And if I by Beelzebub cast out devils, by whom do your children cast them out?" (Matthew 12:27.) Their children claimed to cast them out, also. If just the casting out of demons proves one is in league with the devil, in league with Beelzebub, in partnership with him, then your children would be in partnership with him for they claim to cast them out. With withering logic he attacked their pretense and repudiation of the miracles of the Son of God and of the gospel. And then Jesus said, "No man can enter into a strong man's house, and spoil his goods, except he will first bind the strong man; and then he will spoil his house." (Mark 3:27.) If you leave him untied, unharmed, while you're trying to take his furniture and spoil his goods, he would perhaps be striking you upon the head with a chair or something, and you will not get by with it. So you have to first bind him before you can spoil his goods. As much as to say in this little parable, "I have bound Satan and that's why I can spoil his goods. That's the reason I can cast him out." He had cast Satan out of the man born blind and unable to speak. They couldn't deny that it was a real, actual miracle and so they just impugned his motive and his power as best they could by saying that he got his power from Beelzebub, the prince of the devils. And incidentally, he could say that was blas-phemy against the Holy Spirit. In Mark 3:28-29 he said, "He that shall blaspheme against the Holy Ghost has never forgiveness, but is in danger of eternal damnation," and in verse 30 he says, "Because they said, He bath an unclean spirit." So, to accuse Jesus of casting out demons by the power of Beelzebub was to call the Holy Spirit Beelzebub, was to call the Holy Spirit an unclean spirit, and that is what blasphemy is. It is to speak against that which is sacred and holy. And so they had blasphemed the Holy Spirit. He said they were guilty of an eternal sin and would never have forgiveness in view of that fact. He, also, in this connection showed his power, of course, over the devil. Satan cannot harm us if we will follow Christ. He came to destroy the works of the devil (1 John 3:7). If we will follow him we will win, we will be victorious, and we will conquer over all the works and power of Satan. So it may be that God permitted people to be devil possessed. So Christ cast these demons out of people to show his superiority over the power of wicked spirits.

Sometimes people raise the question, "Where did Satan come from? Where did Satan originate?" First of all, it seems from the teaching of the Bible that Satan was in heaven. In Luke 10:18-20 Jesus said, "I beheld Satan as lightning fall from heaven." He was cast out. It seems that he was cast out up there because of his rebellion against God, that he was a great angel at one time, a good angel at first. We read in 1 Timothy 3:6 about an elder of the church, "Not a novice," he said (which is a young, or recent convert) "lest being lifted up with pride he fall into the condemnation of the devil." That does not mean that he would fall into the condemnation which the devil would heap upon him. For the devil would not condemn a man for being proud and haughty. He would approve of that. That passage is nearly always misunderstood, mistaught. It means, lest being lifted up with pride he would fall into the condemnation that the devil fell into when he was lifted up with pride and became haughty, conceited, arrogant, and violated the law of God in heaven. Hence, "fall into the condemnation of the devil," means the condemnation into which the devil fell through his pride. Pride and a haughty spirit go before a fall. We should look out if we are haughty and "stuck-up" and proud. Be humble and remember that God gives grace to the humble. But he resists the proud and hates a proud heart. (Proverbs 6:16-19.)

Further illustrating the matter--since this is the last --question, I will add these points here before we close that in John the ninth chapter connected with the healing of a blind man, they asked Jesus, "Who did sin, this man, or his parents, that he was born blind?" They thought it had to be one or the other--that he sinned before he was born so as to be born blind or else his parents had sinned so that he might be born blind. Jesus said, "Neither bath this man sinned, nor his parents," that he was born blind. He is not here saying that no parents have ever sinned in such a way so as to cause their children to be born blind, for many are born blind because of sins of parents, sins that brought on disease which caused blindness. They were born blind because of the parents' sins. He says that was not the case here. In this instance, God had a purpose and this man was born blind that the purpose of God might be manifested, "that the works of God should be manifest in him"--that he might be an occasion, an example so Jesus could demonstrate his great and mighty power in giving him his sight--so he could establish his claim as the Messiah, the Christ, the Son of God, the Saviour and hope of the world. Hence, God is in the background here, in his rich provisions--providence--providence, if you please. God is the one who provides. God, himself, had purposed and planned this birth to be as it was--had a child born blind that the power of God might be demonstrated in him. He did a great deal of good, maybe more good than a thousand normal people of his day, in being (what we might be pardoned for saying) the guinea pig of the occasion for Jesus to demonstrate his power as the Son of God. Christ opened the eyes of the blind. Behold the signs, said John, truly done by Jesus--besides this one. "Many other signs truly did Jesus in the presence of his disciples, which are not written in this book: but these are written, that you might believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God; and that believing ye might have life through his name." (John 20:30-31.) I think this is as far as we will go on this occasion. May God richly bless the study of his word! May we go away with reverence and a greater desire and determination to be led and guided by the Holy Spirit and to know more about how he deals with us down here in the world.