Take Not Thy Holy Spirit From Me

This is the apparatus for Take Not Thy Holy Spirit From Me, kept on its own page so the letter can be read straight through. Nothing here is a summary. It is the Hebrew and Greek the letter rests on, the two strongest objections against it stated at full strength, and the answers, including the places where the objection wins something and we say so.

If you have not read the letter, start there. This page assumes it.

How Scripture says “came upon”

The English flattens this. “Came upon” does duty for four different Hebrew verbs, and the differences are the argument. Anyone can check these; the word and its number are given so you can look at them yourself.

Gideon is the one nobody mentions. “The Spirit of the LORD came upon Gideon” is, in the Hebrew, the Spirit clothed itself with Gideon. The verb is the ordinary word for putting on a garment, and the direct object is the man. Gideon is what the Spirit wore. It is the same picture Paul reaches for from the other side when he tells us to put on Christ (Romans 13:14), and it should make us slower to talk about the Spirit as a force we are given the use of.

And here is why the sign was the staying. Isaiah did not promise that the Spirit would come on the Messiah. Coming was ordinary; it had happened to judges and kings for centuries. Isaiah promised nŭaḥ, that the Spirit would settle down and stay. So when the Baptist is told to watch for the One on whom the Spirit descends and remains, he is being told to watch for Isaiah’s word coming true in front of him. He saw it, and the Greek he reports it in, menō, is the same word John will use forty times for the Christian life: abide.

What this does not prove, and we will not claim. It is tempting to say the Spirit never stayed on anyone before Christ. Scripture will not carry it. The seventy elders already had nŭaḥ, the resting word, and of David it is said outright that the Spirit came on him “from that day forward.” What is new at the Jordan is not that the Spirit stayed, but that the staying was promised of the Messiah and identified by a witness, and that from Him it is poured out on a whole Body rather than resting on one man for one work. That is a smaller claim than the one usually made here, and it is the one the text supports.

Here the Reformed reader will bring his best verse, and it deserves to be met head-on: "I will pray the Father, and he shall give you another Comforter, that he may abide with you for ever" (John 14:16). For ever. Read who it is said to and what comes next. It is said to the disciples together, the Body that is about to be born, and the promise is that the Comforter will never be withdrawn from the Church the way He was withdrawn from Israel's kings; He abides with the Body for ever because He abides on the Head for ever. Then, in the very next chapter, Jesus tells each of them how they share in that: "Abide in me, and I in you… If a man abide not in me, he is cast forth as a branch, and is withered" (John 15:4-6). John 14:16 is a promise to the Vine. John 15:6BH is a warning to the branch. They are not in tension; the second is how the first reaches you. And John says both in a single sentence in his letter: "the anointing which ye have received of him abideth in you… and even as it hath taught you, ye shall abide in him" (1 John 2:27). The Spirit's abiding and yours are one abiding, seen from two ends. It is the same "for ever" as the doorpost in Exodus, where the servant who says "I love my master… I will not go out free" is the one of whom the Law then says "he shall serve him for ever" (Exodus 21:5-6); the for-ever follows the free staying, and never precedes it (see The Bored Ear). That is not a different working of the Spirit. It is the only working He has ever had: He stays where He is wanted, and He has been wanted, without interruption, in one Man.

The strongest objection, and good men make it

Everything above can be answered, and it is worth hearing the answer at full strength before reading another line. The objection runs: it is the same Spirit, He has not changed, and He was really and truly in men before Christ. Anyone who says otherwise has made the God of Israel stingy and turned the Old Testament saints into people who were merely visited.

And that objection has the texts. Pharaoh, of all people, sees it in Joseph: “Can we find such a one as this is, a man in whom the Spirit of God is?” (Genesis 41:38). God says it of Joshua: “Take thee Joshua the son of Nun, a man in whom is the spirit” (Numbers 27:18). David, in the psalm this page is named for, is not asking to receive the Spirit. He is asking to keep Him (Psalm 51:11), which means he has Him.

And the plainest one is in the New Testament, written by an apostle about the men of the old covenant:

Of which salvation the prophets have enquired and searched diligently, who prophesied of the grace that should come unto you: Searching what, or what manner of time the Spirit of Christ which was in them did signify, when it testified beforehand the sufferings of Christ, and the glory that should follow.

— 1 Peter 1:10-11

Which was in them. Not with them, not upon them. The Pulpit Commentary will not let the phrase be softened, and names the man it is arguing with:

The apostle says that the Spirit of Christ dwelt in the prophets. The words pneuma Christou cannot mean “the Spirit which bears witness of Christ,” as Bengel and others… The prophets felt within them the working of the Spirit. They knew that the mysterious voice which filled their souls was his voice.

— The Pulpit Commentary, on 1 Peter 1:11

And then the argument the apostle himself makes on the day everything supposedly changed. Peter does not stand up at Pentecost and announce something new. He stands up and says “this is that which was spoken by the prophet Joel” (Acts 2:16). Continuity is his case. The Spirit falling on the hundred and twenty is the same Spirit Joel promised, given to the same God’s people, in fulfilment and not in replacement.

So the objection stands where it is aimed. There is one Spirit, He does not change, He was truly in men before the Jordan, and a page that suggested otherwise would be wrong.

The verse that sounds worst, and the word that is not in it

The verse anyone will reach for on the other side is this one, and it is worth printing whole with the sentence it explains:

He that believeth on me, as the scripture hath said, out of his belly shall flow rivers of living water. (But this spake he of the Spirit, which they that believe on him should receive: for the Holy Ghost was not yet given; because that Jesus was not yet glorified.)

— John 7:38-39

Read flatly, that says the Spirit was not there, and everything in the section above is overturned. But look at the Greek and the flat reading disappears. The clause is oupō ēn Pneuma, three words: “the Spirit was not yet.” There is no word for given. Translators supply it, and many Bibles print it in italics or brackets to say so, because the sentence is unfinished without something.

Now notice what that means. Read absolutely, “the Spirit was not yet” is impossible; He moved on the face of the waters in the second verse of the Bible. So the sentence cannot be read absolutely, and every translator in English has known it. That is why they all reach for a word. John is speaking comparatively, the way Scripture often speaks when it sets the new covenant beside the old.

Calvin says exactly this on the verse, and he anticipates the objection before making it:

We know that the Spirit is eternal; but the Evangelist declares that, so long as Christ dwelt in the world in the mean form of a servant, that grace of the Spirit, which was poured out on men after the resurrection of Christ, had not been openly manifested. And, indeed, he speaks comparatively, in the same manner as when the New Testament is compared to the Old. God promises his Spirit to his elect and believers, as if he had never given him to the Fathers. At that very time, the disciples had undoubtedly received the first-fruits of the Spirit; for whence comes faith but from the Spirit? The Evangelist, therefore, does not absolutely affirm that the grace of the Spirit was not offered and given to believers before the death of Christ, but that it was not yet so bright and illustrious as it would afterwards become.

— John Calvin, on John 7:39

Whence comes faith but from the Spirit. Abraham believed God, so the Spirit was at work in Abraham, and Calvin will not pretend otherwise to win the point.

Two prepositions, in one sentence, to men who already had Him

Here is the change stated by Christ Himself, and it is worth reading slowly because everything turns on two small words:

And I will pray the Father, and he shall give you another Comforter, that he may abide with you for ever; Even the Spirit of truth; whom the world cannot receive, because it seeth him not, neither knoweth him: but ye know him; for he dwelleth with you, and shall be in you.

— John 14:16-17

“With you” is par’ humin, from para, beside, in the presence of. “In you” is en humin, from en, within. Two different prepositions, in one sentence, about the same Spirit and the same men, spoken to disciples who plainly already had Him alongside them. Whatever else is going on, Christ is drawing a line and the English keeps it.

And the verb is the one this page has already been following. “Dwelleth” is menei, the present tense of menō, the same word John used at the Jordan when the Spirit descended and abode upon Him, and the same word Christ uses in the upper room for the branch that abides in the vine. The Spirit is already abiding beside them. He will be within them.

Poured out, and the tenses tell the story

One Greek verb carries the pouring, ekcheō, the ordinary word for pouring out wine or money or blood. Follow its tense through the New Testament and the shape of the thing appears without any argument being made:

Future, then done, then done and standing. That is one act widening, not a series of separate visits. And the astonishment at Caesarea is the proof that the widening was the surprising part: “they of the circumcision which believed were astonished… because that on the Gentiles also was poured out the gift of the Holy Ghost” (Acts 10:45). Nobody was astonished that God had a Spirit. They were astonished at who was getting Him.

The witnesses on this, and they are not the ones you would pick

“For the Holy Ghost was not yet given, because that Jesus was not yet glorified” (John 7:39) is the verse held against everything on this page, and it deserves the best answer available rather than ours. Augustine takes it up directly in On the Trinity, and asks the question in the form that settles it: “And that which the evangelist says, ‘For the Holy Ghost was not yet given, because that Jesus was not yet glorified;’ how is this to be understood, unless because the special giving or sending of the Holy Spirit after the glorification of Christ was to be such as it had never been before?” Not absent before and present after. A giving unlike any giving there had been. That is the whole distinction this page has been arguing, made in the fourth century by a man who had no modern debate to win.

And it is worth knowing who else assumes it, because they agreed on almost nothing else. When Bellarmine sets out the controversy over whether the sacraments of the old law justified, he lists what every party already grants, and then quotes his opponents at length: Calvin, that the notion “as if those adumbrated nothing but the grace of God, but these confer it present, is utterly to be exploded”; Luther, that the old signs carrying a promise were “true Sacraments, and equal to ours as to efficacy.” Bellarmine himself argues they justified by the faith of the receiver in a Messiah still to come, not by the rite. Three men who spent their lives contradicting one another, and the disagreement is over the mechanism. That grace was given, and men were justified, and the Spirit was at work before Christ came, is the shared floor none of them thought to defend, because in the sixteenth century nobody was attacking it. Bellarmine’s chapter is on this site in our own translation: De Sacramentis II.12.

Ezekiel, who says both halves

If the Spirit can depart, two questions follow at once: can He come back, and does it matter where a man stands at the end? Ezekiel answers both, and he does not soften either.

He can come back, and the return is promised rather than hoped for. “A new heart also will I give you, and a new spirit will I put within you: and I will take away the stony heart out of your flesh, and I will give you an heart of flesh” (Ezekiel 36:26). David had prayed exactly that, centuries earlier and in the same order: “Create in me a clean heart, O God… take not thy holy spirit from me” (Psalm 51:10-11). A new heart, and the Spirit kept. Ezekiel turns the prayer into a promise. And the wicked man is not written off: “when the wicked man turneth away from his wickedness that he hath committed, and doeth that which is lawful and right, he shall save his soul alive” (Ezekiel 18:27).

And where a man stands at the end is what counts. Ezekiel says this in the hardest way available, by having God quote His own promise and then withhold 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). God said surely live, and the man dies. Not because the word failed, but because it was never a guarantee detached from the walking. The escape route is closed one verse earlier: “neither shall the righteous be able to live for his righteousness in the day that he sinneth” (Ezekiel 33:12).

Paul states the same test in one line, in the present tense: “if any man have not the Spirit of Christ, he is none of his” (Romans 8:9). Not had. Have. And the Lord Himself put the emphasis on the finish rather than the start: “he that shall endure unto the end, the same shall be saved” (Matthew 24:13).

Two honest cautions, because this passage is not a free win and it should not be presented as one. First, Ezekiel 18 and 33 are addressed to a nation about life in the land, and a careful reader can hold that they concern temporal judgment and covenant standing rather than a man’s eternal destiny. That reading is available in the text and we will not pretend otherwise. Second, and this cuts our way least of all, Ezekiel 36:27 does not stop where the verse before it does: “I will put my spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statutes” (Ezekiel 36:27). Cause you to walk. Read plainly, that is God undertaking the walking as well as the giving, which is one of the better verses on the other side of this argument, and anyone quoting 36:26 without it is quoting half a sentence.

Hebrews uses one word twice, and the second time it adds an if

The hardest verse in this argument is not a verse about the Spirit departing. It is a verse about how much a man can genuinely have and still walk away. “For it is impossible for those who were once enlightened, and have tasted of the heavenly gift, and were made partakers of the Holy Ghost, and have tasted the good word of God, and the powers of the world to come, if they shall fall away” (Hebrews 6:4-6). Five things, and not one of them is described as counterfeit. Enlightened. Tasted the heavenly gift. Made partakers of the Holy Ghost. Tasted the good word. Tasted the powers of the age to come. The Greek for tasted is geusamenous, the ordinary word for tasting food, used of Christ Himself tasting death (Hebrews 2:9), which nobody reads as a sample He did not really swallow.

The usual answer is that these men only appeared to have it. That answer has to survive one more sentence from the same writer, three chapters earlier, using the same word. “Partakers” in 6:4 is metochous. In Hebrews 3:14 the writer says: “For we are made partakers (metochoi) of Christ, if we hold the beginning of our confidence stedfast unto the end.” The same word, one letter apart, of the Holy Ghost in the one place and of Christ in the other, and in the second the writer attaches the condition himself. Being a partaker of Christ is defined, by Hebrews, as a thing held fast to the end. He says it again eight verses before: “whose house are we, if we hold fast the confidence and the rejoicing of the hope firm unto the end” (Hebrews 3:6).

Which is why the warnings in that letter are shaped the way they are. They are not written to frighten outsiders into coming in. They are written to people who have really had something, by a man who thinks they might really let go of it, and their force depends on both halves being true. All five of them, with the assurances quoted just as fully beside them, are gathered on their own page: Every Warning, Gathered.

And this is the same shape Ezekiel drew above. The end is what counts. Ezekiel says it of a righteous man who turns; Hebrews says it of a man who has tasted; Paul says it in the present tense, “if any man have not the Spirit of Christ, he is none of his”; and Christ says it plainest of all, “he that shall endure unto the end, the same shall be saved.”

So what actually changed, and where we leave it

Three things can be said and this site says all three.

He is the same and He has not changed. One Spirit, eternal, at work in Abraham’s faith and in the prophets’ searching, and Peter’s own word for Pentecost is this is that.

He is poured out on far more. Moses wished for it, Joel promised it, Peter announced it, and at Caesarea it reached the nations. That is a change of scope and it is enormous, and it is the change Scripture itself makes most noise about.

And the terms are not identical. The Spirit departed from Saul and David prayed not to lose Him, and no believer after Pentecost is ever told to pray that prayer, because the promise is now “that he may abide with you for ever.” Christ says with you and in you in one breath to men who already had Him.

Where honest readers divide is the third one. Some read with you / in you as a real relocation, the Spirit moving from alongside to within, and the permanence as genuinely new. Others read it as intensification, the same indwelling made full and open, which is close to how Calvin reads John 7:39, not brighter in kind but brighter in degree. The first reading takes the prepositions at full weight; the second takes 1 Peter 1:11 at full weight. Both are trying to keep a verse the other has to explain.

This page does not settle it, and would rather say so than manufacture a verdict. What can be said without strain is that the Spirit did not change, the arrangement did, and that the arrangement now rests on a Person rather than on a performance: He abides on the Body because He abides on the Head. Pray about the rest, weigh the texts yourself, and if you end up holding it as a mystery rather than a conclusion, you are in older company than either side of the argument.

A third answer, and it is Gill’s

There is a reply to all of this that deserves stating properly, because it is not the lazy one and it comes from a serious man. It is not “Saul never had the Spirit.” It is that what Saul lost was an anointing for office and not the Spirit as a believer has Him. John Gill puts it exactly there:

But the Spirit of the Lord departed from Saul: as a spirit of prophecy as at first, as a spirit of wisdom and prudence in civil government, and as a spirit of fortitude and courage, as the Targum.

— John Gill, on 1 Samuel 16:14

Prophecy, statecraft, courage. Read that way, Saul lost a throne and the equipment that came with it, and proves nothing about anybody’s salvation. Albert Barnes points the same direction from the other side of the verse: of the Spirit coming on David he notes it is “the exact phrase used of the Judges and Saul,” the judge’s equipping for a task, not a formula for conversion. It is an old argument and it is usually made in defence of eternal security, because if Saul only lost an office then the most alarming departure in Scripture stops being alarming.

Four things stand against it.

What Saul was given was not described as equipment. “The Spirit of the LORD will come upon thee, and thou shalt prophesy with them, and shalt be turned into another man” (1 Samuel 10:6), and then, in the narrative, “God gave him another heart” (1 Samuel 10:9). Another heart is not a job description. It is the language Ezekiel uses for the new covenant itself: “A new heart also will I give you… and I will put my spirit within you” (Ezekiel 36:26-27).

What replaced it was not unemployment. “The Spirit of the LORD departed from Saul, and an evil spirit from the LORD troubled him” (1 Samuel 16:14). An office can be taken away and leave a man in peace. Tertullian, reading this verse, does not treat it as a demotion at all but as a man handed over: the sinner given to the adversary “as though he were an executioner to whom belonged the inflicting of punishment, as in the case of Saul.”

Saul does not describe it as an office. At the end, in the dark, he says it himself: “God is departed from me, and answereth me no more, neither by prophets, nor by dreams” (1 Samuel 28:15). Not my anointing. Not my kingdom. God.

And David does not pray as a man worried about his job. He had not lost his throne and was in no danger of losing it when he wrote the psalm this page is named for, and he puts the petition in company that decides the question: “Cast me not away from thy presence; and take not thy holy spirit from me. Restore unto me the joy of thy salvation” (Psalm 51:11-12). Presence, Spirit, salvation, in three consecutive lines, from a man who had just watched what happened to his predecessor.

Gill can answer that last one, and honesty requires saying so: he would hold that David lost the joy and never the salvation, and that the holy Spirit in view is the anointing on the king. That reply works on Psalm 51 alone. It works less well once “another heart” and “God is departed from me” are on the table with it.

And there is an answer that does not need any of that to be settled. Grant Gill everything. Say the Spirit rested on Saul for an office and now indwells the believer, and that these are not the same arrangement. The warning gets heavier, not lighter. If the Spirit could depart from a king on whom He rested for a season, and if a man after God’s own heart still trembled at the thought of losing Him, then a believer in whom He dwells has more at stake and not less. That is the shape of Hebrews itself, which argues from the lesser to the greater at every turn: if the word spoken by angels was stedfast, how shall we escape; of how much sorer punishment. The distinction Gill draws is real, and it points the opposite way from the use usually made of it.

Which is why this page will also say plainly what the other side has, and it is not nothing. “I give unto them eternal life; and they shall never perish, neither shall any man pluck them out of my hand” (John 10:28). That verse is not to be explained away, and The Security of Salvation takes it at full strength. No one is plucked. The question every warning in Scripture raises is a different one, and Christ does not answer it there: not whether a hand can take you, but whether a man can let go. The hand that holds you was never a cage.

The letter itself, which this page is the working for, is Take Not Thy Holy Spirit From Me.

Why this argument is really about the warnings

It is worth being plain about what is at stake, because the Saul question is rarely asked for its own sake. If the Spirit could depart from a man God had given another heart, then the New Testament warnings about Him are warnings, and not descriptions of people who were never really there.

And those warnings are addressed to believers, in the imperative, about the Spirit specifically:

Quench not the Spirit.

— 1 Thessalonians 5:19

And grieve not the holy Spirit of God, whereby ye are sealed unto the day of redemption.

— Ephesians 4:30

Nobody commands a man not to quench something he cannot quench. And Hebrews will go further, to people who “were made partakers of the Holy Ghost” (Hebrews 6:4), and to a man who “hath done despite unto the Spirit of grace” after being sanctified by the blood of the covenant (Hebrews 10:29). Stephen says the same of a whole nation: “ye do always resist the Holy Ghost” (Acts 7:51).

So this page holds what it has held throughout, and the Saul narrative is part of why. The Spirit could depart, and the New Testament never says He now cannot; it says He abides, and then spends five books telling believers not to quench, grieve, resist or do despite to Him. A reading that makes Saul a story about employment has to make those five books stories about people who were never listening. That is a great deal of Scripture to spend on a hypothesis.

None of which is said to frighten anyone. The promise is real and it is the first thing on this page: “that he may abide with you for ever.” A man cannot mislay the Spirit, and nobody wakes up accidentally in Saul’s position. What Scripture describes is a long hardening in a man who kept choosing against what he knew, and the mercy is that Saul had years of warnings and David, who sinned worse in a single night, was restored. The prayer at the head of this letter is the right response to all of it, and it is David’s, not ours.

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.

Back to the letter: Take Not Thy Holy Spirit From Me. Related: The Security of Salvation, Every Warning, Gathered, Words That Carry the Freight, The Spirit Isn’t Always Tidy. Chrysostom, Tertullian, Calvin, Gill and Barnes quoted verbatim from the public-domain editions in our library. Hebrew and Greek checked against the BibleHub interlinear and the public-domain lexicons; Scripture from the King James Version.