Take Not Thy Holy Spirit From Me

This is the argument I have made in more letters than I can count, to pastors and to family, and it comes down to three men and one prayer. An apostle fell from his office. A king had the Spirit of God depart from him. And another king, the one God called a man after His own heart, did the worst thing of his life and then prayed, "take not thy holy spirit from me." If David could pray that, the doctrine that says no believer ever needs to is claiming something David did not claim. But the three men are only the door. Behind them is the whole Bible's story of the Spirit: on whom He came, from whom He went, in whom He was already dwelling before Pentecost, and the one Man on whom, for the first time, He remained. That last word is where the whole thing turns. The working underneath this letter, the Hebrew and Greek and the two strongest objections against it, is on its own page: Going Deeper.

Three men

Judas was not an outsider. He was "of the number of the twelve" (Luke 22:3), chosen by Christ, sent out with the others to preach and heal and cast out devils. When "many of his disciples went back, and walked no more with him," Jesus turned to the twelve who stayed and said, "Have not I chosen you twelve, and one of you is a devil?" (John 6:66, 70). Later, "then entered Satan into Judas surnamed Iscariot, being of the number of the twelve" (Luke 22:3). And Peter says it plainly at the end: it was an "apostleship, from which Judas by transgression fell" (Acts 1:25). The Reformed answer is that Judas was never truly one of them, and Jesus' own words, "one of you is a devil," give that answer real weight. But notice what the text does not let anyone say: that he was never sent, never empowered, never at the table. He fell from something. The word is Peter's, not mine.

And was Judas damned? Most Christians say yes, and they are not being careless. Three texts carry that, and they are heavy. Jesus prays “none of them is lost, but the son of perdition” (John 17:12), and the only other man Scripture calls that is the man of sin in 2 Thessalonians 2:3. He says “good were it for that man if he had never been born” (Mark 14:21), which is a hard thing to say of someone finally saved. And Peter, in the same verse that says he fell, says he went “to his own place” (Acts 1:25), which the Pulpit Commentary calls “an awful phrase, showing that every man has the place in eternity which he has made for himself in time.” Irenaeus already put the two sayings together in the second century. This page is not arguing against that reading.

It is worth being careful with one argument that gets used for it, though. Matthew says Judas “repented himself” (Matthew 27:3), and the standard reply is that the word is metameleomai, mere remorse, not metanoeo, true repentance. The Pulpit Commentary says exactly that: it “denotes only a change of feeling, a desire that what has been done could be undone.” The distinction is real and the commentators are not inventing it. But the same verb appears six times in the New Testament, and one of them is the son in the parable who says “I will not: but afterward he repented, and went” (Matthew 21:29), the son Jesus says did his father’s will. So the word by itself cannot settle a man’s case. Whatever decides Judas, it is not that.

Where this lands is short. Scripture says he fell, that woe was pronounced on him, that he is called the son of perdition, and that he went to his own place. It does not say he is in hell, and it does not say he is not. Adam Clarke, who was no sentimentalist, called the case “at best extremely dubious.” The traditional reading is the natural one and this page does not quarrel with it. It only declines to say more than the text says, which is the same discipline the rest of this letter runs on.

And Luke sets a second man beside him in the same chapter, twenty-eight verses later, which is the comparison this argument usually skips. Satan entered Judas at verse 3. At verse 31 the Lord turns to Peter: “Simon, Simon, behold, Satan hath desired to have you, that he may sift you as wheat: but I have prayed for thee, that thy faith fail not; and when thou art converted, strengthen thy brethren” (Luke 22:31-32). Satan asked for both men. One of them was prayed for. Peter then went out and did the thing, three times, with cursing, and was restored and fed the sheep.

So what divided them was not the size of the sin, and Christ had already said what it was. “Whosoever speaketh a word against the Son of man, it shall be forgiven him: but whosoever speaketh against the Holy Ghost, it shall not be forgiven him, neither in this world, neither in the world to come” (Matthew 12:32). The Greek runs the same construction twice, the same verb and preposition and the same future passive, and changes only the object. Peter denied the Son of man, which is the half of that sentence that ends in forgiveness, and he was forgiven exactly as promised. Which is worth holding onto if you are reading this letter and afraid: the man who failed most publicly in the Gospels is the one Christ prayed for beforehand and put back to work afterward.

Saul is harder for the "never really had it" answer, because the text says the opposite. The Spirit of God came upon him and he prophesied. Then he "rejected the word of the LORD," and when Samuel asked him why, his answer is the whole story of every fall in this Book: "And Saul said unto Samuel, I have sinned: for I have transgressed the commandment of the LORD, and thy words: because I feared the people, and obeyed their voice" (1 Samuel 15:24). He feared the people. Samuel told him "the LORD hath rejected thee from being king over Israel" (1 Samuel 15:26), and then comes one of the most frightening verses in the Bible: "But the Spirit of the LORD departed from Saul, and an evil spirit from the LORD troubled him" (1 Samuel 16:14). Not "had never come." Departed. That is the same pattern as Judas, an evil spirit filling the space the Spirit left, and it is the pattern Scripture gives when a man who was once with God hardens himself against Him.

David knew all of this, because he had watched it happen to Saul from three feet away, and it is why Psalm 51 reads as it does. After the worst thing he ever did, David did not say "I am a man after God's own heart; I am secure." He prayed, "Cast me not away from thy presence; and take not thy holy spirit from me. Restore unto me the joy of thy salvation; and uphold me with thy free spirit" (Psalm 51:11-12). A man after God's own heart trembled to lose God. If David could pray "take not thy holy spirit from me" without anyone accusing him of doubting his salvation, then the believer who prays it today is in the best of company, and the one who says it cannot happen is claiming something David did not claim. The only direction that verse is allowed to point is at my own presumption. So who am I to coast?

The Spirit was never a stranger to a man

The usual reply to Saul and David is that the Spirit was different then: He came upon men in the Old Testament and comes in them now. There is something to that, and Jesus said it Himself: "he dwelleth with you, and shall be in you" (John 14:17). But read the Old Testament with the question in mind and the neat line will not hold. Start seven generations from Adam, before the flood, before Abraham, before any Law. "Enoch walked with God after he begat Methuselah three hundred years, and begat sons and daughters:" (Genesis 5:22-24), three hundred years, and then "he was not; for God took him." Hebrews says he "had this testimony, that he pleased God" (Hebrews 11:5), which the next verse says no man can do without faith. And Jude says "Enoch also, the seventh from Adam, prophesied" (Jude 14), and Peter says prophecy only ever came one way: "holy men of God spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost" (2 Peter 1:21). A man who prophesied was a man the Spirit moved. The Spirit was on a man who walked with God for three centuries before there was a Jew. And notice the word Genesis chose. "Walked with God" is the Old Testament's word for abiding: the Hebrew verb is the continual form, a walking that keeps on walking, and only two men in Scripture get it, Enoch and Noah, "a just man and perfect in his generations, and Noah walked with God" (Genesis 6:9). Many walked before God and after Him. Two walked with Him, day by day, for a lifetime, and one of them was taken up and the other carried the human race through the flood. That is what "abide in me" looked like before there was a Vine to say it. Then Pharaoh looked at Joseph and asked, "Can we find such a one as this is, a man in whom the Spirit of God is?" (Genesis 41:38). God said of Bezaleel the craftsman, "I have filled him with the spirit of God" (Exodus 31:3). Joshua was "a man in whom is the spirit" (Numbers 27:18). The Chaldean queen said of Daniel, "in whom is the spirit of the holy gods" (Daniel 5:11). In, filled, in, in. Then Luke's first two chapters, all before the cross: John the Baptist "filled with the Holy Ghost, even from his mother's womb" (Luke 1:15), Elizabeth "filled with the Holy Ghost" when the babe leaped (Luke 1:41), Zacharias "filled with the Holy Ghost, and prophesied" (Luke 1:67), and old Simeon, on whom "the Holy Ghost was upon him" (Luke 2:25). The Spirit was never a stranger inside a man. What He had not yet done, for anyone, was stay.

The Spirit who came, and went

Because the pattern of the Old Testament is that He came and went, and the going was not always announced. He "came upon" Saul and Saul prophesied (1 Samuel 10:10); and then "But the Spirit of the LORD departed from Saul, and an evil spirit from the LORD troubled him" (1 Samuel 16:14). He "came mightily upon" Samson (Judges 14:6), and then, on the last night, comes the most frightening sentence on the subject in the whole Bible: "he wist not that the LORD was departed from him" (Judges 16:20). He did not know. He went out "as at other times before" and the strength was gone and he had not felt it leave. How did a Nazarite from the womb get there? The book of Judges gives its own verdict on the whole age, twice, as its refrain: "In those days there was no king in Israel, but every man did that which was right in his own eyes" (Judges 17:6; 21:25). Samson is that sentence with a face. When his parents begged him not to take a Philistine wife, his answer in the Hebrew is literally "she is right in my eyes"; the King James gives it as "Get her for me; for she pleaseth me well" (Judges 14:3). A man set apart to God from the womb, doing what was right in his own eyes, one choice at a time, until the LORD had gone and he had not noticed. "There is a way which seemeth right unto a man, but the end thereof are the ways of death" (Proverbs 14:12). That is the man who says "once saved, always saved" and has stopped watching. Because Samson's story is not, at bottom, a story about strength. It is a story about not abiding. "Right in my own eyes" is the precise opposite of "abide in me": one is a man keeping his own counsel, the other is a branch staying in the Vine. Samson did not abide, one Philistine at a time, and the Spirit who had come upon him departed from a man who had already departed. The branch does not feel itself wither (John 15:6). It only finds out when it reaches for fruit. And yet Samson is not where his own story ends, which matters for anyone tempted to read this letter as a threat. Blind and chained and grinding in a Philistine prison, he prayed: "O Lord GOD, remember me, I pray thee, and strengthen me, I pray thee, only this once, O God" (Judges 16:28), and the strength came back, greater at the end than it had ever been in his life. Judges never says in that last scene that the Spirit returned, but it has already told us three times what the strength was: "the Spirit of the LORD came mightily upon him" (Judges 14:6; 14:19; 15:14). In this book the strength is the Spirit. And the narrator plants the sign before the prayer, in a single quiet line: "Howbeit the hair of his head began to grow again after he was shaven" (Judges 16:22). He did not merely receive an answer. He received back what had left him. And when the writer of Hebrews gathers the roll of those who lived by faith, Samson is named in it: "the time would fail me to tell of Gedeon, and of Barak, and of Samson, and of Jephthae; of David also, and Samuel, and of the prophets" (Hebrews 11:32). Named by the New Testament, after all of it. So the departing of the Spirit is a terrible thing and it is not the same thing as being cast off for ever. That is the whole point of David's prayer. A man who thought it was final would not have bothered to pray it. And "the spirit of God came upon" Balaam too (Numbers 24:2), the prophet who went for the money, so that Peter could name his road "the way of Balaam" (2 Peter 2:15). Having the Spirit come on you saved Balaam nothing. The Spirit even passed from one man to another: "The spirit of Elijah doth rest on Elisha" (2 Kings 2:15). He came on David "from that day forward" (1 Samuel 16:13), and David, who had watched Saul from three feet away, still begged Him not to leave.

Ezekiel says the same thing from the outside, without naming the Spirit, and it is worth hearing in his words because he says it twice so no one can miss it: "When I shall say to the righteous, that he shall surely live; if he trust to his own righteousness, and commit iniquity, all his righteousnesses shall not be remembered; but for his iniquity that he hath committed, he shall die for it" (Ezekiel 33:13; and the same in Ezekiel 18:24). "If he trust to his own righteousness" is Samson trusting his strength and Saul trusting his crown. And Ezekiel does not leave it there: in the same chapter he says, "Cast away from you all your transgressions… and make you a new heart and a new spirit" (Ezekiel 18:31), which eighteen chapters later becomes God's own promise, "I will put my spirit within you." The righteous who turns, and the Spirit who departs, are one event told two ways (see The Soul That Sinneth).

Whether what left Saul was the Spirit as a believer has Him, or an anointing for office, is the oldest objection to this letter and Gill makes it well. It is answered in Going Deeper.

Moses' wish, and the seventy

And yet the longing for something more is in the Law itself. When the LORD "took of the spirit that was upon" Moses and gave it to seventy elders, and two of them prophesied in the camp and Joshua wanted them stopped, Moses said: "would God that all the LORD’s people were prophets, and that the LORD would put his spirit upon them!" (Numbers 11:29). Ezekiel turned the wish into a promise: "I will put my spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statutes" (Ezekiel 36:27). Joel gave it a day: "I will pour out my spirit upon all flesh" (Joel 2:28). And Peter stood up at Pentecost and said, this is that (Acts 2:17). So it is not a different Spirit and not a different God. It is the same Spirit the seventy tasted, given now to all the LORD's people, the way Moses longed for.

The one Man on whom He remained

Between the wish and the pouring stands the Jordan. When the Spirit came down on Jesus at His baptism, John the Baptist, who had been filled from the womb himself, saw something he had never seen: "I saw the Spirit descending from heaven like a dove, and it abode upon him," and he had been told beforehand, "Upon whom thou shalt see the Spirit descending, and remaining on him, the same is he which baptizeth with the Holy Ghost" (John 1:32-33). Isaiah had promised it: "the spirit of the LORD shall rest upon him" (Isaiah 11:2). What the Baptist was given was not a feeling but a sign, and the sign was the staying. That is the hinge of the whole story, and it is the hinge of this letter. The Spirit who rests on the Son without departing is the Spirit the Son pours out on His Body. He stays on us because we are in the One He stays on. Which is exactly why the New Testament's word for the Christian life is abide: "Abide in me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit of itself, except it abide in the vine; no more can ye, except ye abide in me" (John 15:4); "the anointing which ye have received of him abideth in you… ye shall abide in him" (1 John 2:27).

The words underneath. The English flattens four different Hebrew verbs into one phrase, “came upon,” and the differences carry the argument. The table, and what it will and will not support, is in Going Deeper.

After Pentecost, the warnings got louder

The proof that the indwelling made no one untouchable is in the book of Acts itself, a few chapters after Pentecost. Ananias and Sapphira were inside the church, bringing a gift and laying it at the apostles' feet, and Peter said, "why hath Satan filled thine heart to lie to the Holy Ghost… thou hast not lied unto men, but unto God" (Acts 5:3-4), and they were carried out dead. Simon in Samaria "believed also: and when he was baptized, he continued with Philip," and within the same chapter Peter told him "thy heart is not right in the sight of God" (Acts 8:13, 21). Paul told a church full of the Spirit that "for this cause many are weak and sickly among you, and many sleep" (1 Corinthians 11:30). The same Spirit, now within, is still one who can be grieved (Ephesians 4:30), quenched (1 Thessalonians 5:19), resisted (Acts 7:51), and, by one who was "sanctified" by the blood of the covenant, "done despite unto" (Hebrews 10:29); Hebrews says outright that those who "were made partakers of the Holy Ghost" can "fall away" (Hebrews 6:4-6). The indwelling is greater than what Saul had. The warnings did not get smaller with it. They got louder.

Grieved, quenched, resisted: these are not this letter's words for the verses, they are the commentators', on every side. Chrysostom says it without hedging, and Gill, the strictest of the Reformed, concedes it in the middle of denying it.

And the end of the age

This is also where the letter touches the end times, because the sealing of the Spirit is an end-times word. "Grieve not the holy Spirit of God, whereby ye are sealed unto the day of redemption" (Ephesians 4:30). The seal is for a day, and the day is the one the whole Bible runs toward: the redemption of the body, the return, the harvest. On the timeline these pages draw, the church age is the Spirit poured out, "sealing the living, joining the dead in Christ," the one Body built up until it is complete. And Jesus' own end-times parable about the Spirit is the ten virgins. All ten had lamps; all ten went out to meet the bridegroom; all ten slept while he tarried. The difference was oil. "They that were foolish took their lamps, and took no oil with them: But the wise took oil in their vessels with their lamps" (Matthew 25:3-4), and when the cry came at midnight the foolish said, "Give us of your oil; for our lamps are gone out," and found the door shut and heard "I know you not" (Matthew 25:8-12). Oil is the Spirit everywhere in Scripture, "not by might, nor by power, but by my spirit" (Zechariah 4:6). Five virgins went out as at other times before and did not know the oil was gone. That is Samson at the end of the age, and it is the reason the parable ends with the one command the whole letter has been building toward: "Watch therefore, for ye know neither the day nor the hour" (Matthew 25:13). The Spirit who remained on Christ will present a Body to Him at the end that has remained in Him. Abiding is not a devotional word. It is an eschatological one.

The case against all of this, at full strength. Two serious objections stand against what this letter holds: that the Spirit did not change at all between the covenants, and that what departed from Saul was an office rather than an indwelling. Both are answered, with Calvin, Gill, Barnes and the Greek, in Going Deeper.

What the early church said

None of this is a private reading. Set the letter beside the Fathers this site already quotes on these passages, verbatim and public domain, and it lines up. On Hebrews 6, Chrysostom refuses to soften either the warning or who is being warned: "'Impossible.' No longer (he says) expect that which is not possible. (For he said not, It is not seemly, or, It is not expedient, or, It is not lawful, but 'impossible,' so as to cast them into despair), if ye have once been altogether enlightened… 'and have tasted of the heavenly gift,' that is, of forgiveness. 'And been made partakers of the Holy Ghost.'" Real recipients, real grace, real danger. And then the mercy in the same breath: "What then, is repentance excluded? Not repentance, far from it! But the renewing again by the laver… it is [the work] of repentance, when those who have been made new, have afterwards become old through sins, to set them free from this old age, and to make them strong" (Chrysostom, Homilies on Hebrews; see the library page). That is Samson and David in one sentence: the one who has become old through sins can be set free again, by repentance.

On "abide with you for ever," Chrysostom reads the "for ever" exactly as this letter does, as the Spirit's permanence in contrast to Christ's bodily departure, not as a guarantee laid on each man regardless: "'That He may abide with you for ever.' The Spirit does not depart even at death… the Holy Ghost will not suffer death, or go away, as He has done" (Chrysostom, in the Catena Aurea; see the library page). On Pentecost he notices the tongues "sat upon each of them," which he says means the Spirit "remained and rested," and then he draws the very condition this letter draws: "Observe, how when one is continuing in prayer, when one is in charity, then it is that the Spirit draws near" (Chrysostom, Homilies on Acts; the library page). And the Shepherd of Hermas, one of the most widely read Christian writings of the second century, holds the two sides of the door together as this letter tries to: "He who has received remission of his sins ought not to sin any more… The Lord, therefore, being merciful, has had mercy on the work of His hand, and has set repentance for them" (the library page). A believer can fall, and there is a way back. That is the whole of this letter, said in Rome around the year 140.

Where the church later divided, this page has already said: the Reformed reading that the fallen were never truly in is old enough to respect and is answered, not mocked, by Peter's word "fell" and Chrysostom's "partakers of the Holy Ghost." The letter draws no new line. It stands where the second-century church stood, and asks the reader to stand there too.

David's prayer is the believer's prayer

So what does the one He stays on do with all this? Not despair, and not presumption. He prays what David prayed. "Cast me not away from thy presence; and take not thy holy spirit from me. Restore unto me the joy of thy salvation; and uphold me with thy free spirit" (Psalm 51:11-12). Notice that David asks two things: do not take Him, and restore the joy. He is not doubting that he is God's. He is refusing to take God for granted. Paul says the same thing from the other side: "if any man have not the Spirit of Christ, he is none of his" (Romans 8:9), which is only a warning if the Spirit can be grieved out of a life. And the psalmist who knew there was nowhere to flee from the Spirit, "Whither shall I go from thy spirit? or whither shall I flee from thy presence?" (Psalm 139:7), is the same David who knew the Spirit could be asked to stay. Both are true. God will not leave the man who will not leave Him.

And for the reader who has read all this and is afraid of Samson's ending, afraid he would not feel it if the Spirit left, John gives the test, and it is not a feeling: "No man hath seen God at any time. If we love one another, God dwelleth in us, and his love is perfected in us. Hereby know we that we dwell in him, and he in us, because he hath given us of his Spirit" (1 John 4:12-13). The evidence that the Spirit remains is love, the agape that is "shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Ghost" (Romans 5:5) and that the flesh cannot counterfeit. Where that love is, the temple is occupied. Where it has gone cold, look to the oil (see What Is Love?).

Where this lands

The Spirit came on Saul and went. The Spirit came on Samson and went, and he did not feel it. The Spirit came on Judas with the twelve, and Satan entered where the Spirit had been. The Spirit came on David and David begged Him to stay, and He stayed. And the Spirit came on Christ and remained, and from Him on everyone who abides in Him. That is the whole Bible on the subject, and it says one thing to the one who has been told he can never lose what he has: abide. Not because the Spirit is fickle, but because He is holy, and He stays where He is wanted. The prayer is old and it has never been refused. Take not thy holy spirit from me. Restore unto me the joy of thy salvation. Uphold me with thy free spirit. If you want the working rather than the letter, the words, the objections and the answers are in Going Deeper.

The Holy Spirit, the whole set

These letters were written separately and belong together. Start anywhere; each one assumes the others rather than repeating them.

Related: No Man Plucks Them, What the Word Says, and What We Believe It Means, The Three Tenses of Salvation, The Security of Salvation, Which Comes First, Every Warning, Gathered, Abiding, The Holy Spirit, Perseverance, The Bored Ear, and The Harvest Is Now. Scripture from the King James Version, linked to BibleHub; the words of God are marked in gold, the words of Christ in purple.