Monday, August 24, 2009

Summary of why the Holy Spirit is not God or Even a Person

The Holy Spirit is God's active force. There is no biblical evidence that the impersonal, nameless Holy Spirit is a person. In fact, the biblical evidence supports just the opposite:

1) The holy spirit is an "IT". (Num. 11:25) Also, Acts 2:33 calls the Holy Spirit "that" (or "this" in other versions) which according to the KJV New Testament Greek lexicon is a thing, not a person: http://www.biblestudytools.com/Lexicons/Greek/grk.cgi?number=5124&version=kjv

2) "SOME" of "IT" can be PORTIONED OUT & distributed like a substance. At Numbers 11:17 we see: "I will take ['some' - NRSV, NJB] of the Spirit which is upon thee, and will put IT upon them" - ASV (compare KJV, RSV, NRSV, AT, LB, NEB, REB, NAB, JB, NJB, Beck).

3) The H.S. can LITERALLY be "pour(ed) out". In Acts 2:17,18, God pours out [ekxeo, ekxew] from [apo] his Spirit upon all people.

4) Even TRINITARIAN publications admit that the H.S. is NOT a person: "The majority of NT texts reveal God's spirit as someTHING, not someone" - New Catholic Encyclopedia, p. 575, Vol. 13, 1967."In the OT the Holy Spirit means a divine power ..." -p. 269, The Catholic Encyclopedia, 1976,"On the whole, the New Testament, like the Old, speaks of the Spirit as a divine energy or power." - A Catholic Dictionary

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There is no biblical evidence that the Holy Spirit is a third person of God:

1) Nowhere in the Bible is the Holy Spirit ever said to be an equal member of a trinity.

2) Nowhere is it mentioned in the Bible the words, "God, the Holy Spirit," or "The Holy Spirit is God."

3) There is never mentioned a vision, dream or clear description in scripture wherein God and the Holy Spirit are shown as the same person.

4) If the Holy Spirit has always been the third person in a triune God, then why did the Council of Nicaea in 325 AD disregard the Holy Spirit as a member of the Godhead when they made Jesus 'God' in 325 AD? Why did they wait until the Council of Constantinople in 381 AD to include the Holy Spirit in the formula?

5) If the Holy Spirit has always been the third person in a triune God, then why would Jews instructed in the OT scriptures and in the teachings of John the Baptist, NOT EVEN KNOW WHAT THE HOLY SPIRIT WAS? (Acts 19:2)

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As for the pronouns "He" or "Him":

Are you familiar with a language (like Spanish) which puts different endings on the same word to show number and gender? In Spanish, for example, words and names that are literally applied to persons have endings that show those persons' sex. But impersonal things are also given genders. The languages used by the inspired Bible writers do the same thing. In OT Hebrew they had only feminine and masculine endings for their words (La Sor, Vol. 2, p.75 and Gesenius, p. 222), whereas in NT Greek they had masculine, feminine, and neuter endings (p. 23, Machen).

Even though many trinitarian Bibles use the pronoun "he" to describe the Holy Spirit, the actual Old Testament Hebrew language of the inspired writers uses a feminine ending for "Holy Spirit" (whether it's `her' "personal" name or 'her' literal title or both). And they actually used feminine pronouns ("she," "her," "herself") to describe "her". So grammatically we know that to these inspired writers the Holy Spirit was either a thing or a female person. See Judges 3:10; 6:34; 1 Sam. 10:6; 11:6; and Is. 11:2 in the trinitarian The NIV Interlinear Hebrew-English Old Testament by Zondervan. It shows the literal use of feminine pronouns for the literally feminine "Holy Spirit" in the original Hebrew.'

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