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Quenched

By on December 13, 2010 in Theology
Parched in Spirit

“Likewise, the Holy Spirit is a fire dwelling in each believer. He wants to express Himself in our actions and attitudes. When believers do not allow the Spirit to be seen in our actions, when we do what we know is wrong, we suppress or quench the Spirit. We do not allow the Spirit to reveal Himself the way that He wants to.

To understand what it means to grieve the Spirit, we must first understand that this indicates the Spirit possesses personality. Only a person can be grieved; therefore, the Spirit must be a divine person in order to have this emotion. Once we understand this, we can better understand how He is grieved, mainly because we too are grieved.

Ephesians 4:30 tells us that we should not grieve the Spirit. We grieve the Spirit by living like the pagans (Eph 4:17-19), by lying (Eph 4:25), by being angry (Eph 4:26-27), by stealing (Eph 4:28), by cursing (Eph 4:29), by being bitter (Eph 4:31), by being unforgiving (Eph 4:32), and by being sexually immoral (Eph 5:3-5). To grieve the Spirit is to act out in a sinful manner, whether it is in thought only or in both thought and deed.

Both quenching and grieving the Spirit are similar in their effects. Both hinder a godly lifestyle. Both happen when a believer sins against God and follows his or her own worldly desires. The only correct road to follow is the road that leads the believer closer to God and purity, and farther away from the world and sin. Just as we do not like to be grieved, and just as we do not seek to quench what is good—so we should not grieve or quench the Holy Spirit by refusing to follow His leading.”

– C. Stanley

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Theater of Order

By on August 17, 2010 in Cosmology, Theology

Today I spent time going through Ligonier’s lecture on causality or the nature of cause and effect. That with every effect in this physical universe, there must be a cause. R.C. Sproul proceeded to refute each argument about the idea that there are some effects without a cause. And that more specifically, according to Hume, all effects are simply a series of events ‘in contiguity’.

Sproul contends that with every effect, there’s something that sets it in motion. That something must at some point exist independent of a cause to produce an effect. To forward the thought that there is no separate being outside of what it takes to produce cause and effect, Hume’s idea is a self-spawned point of convenience. Or at best, a misunderstanding about the nature of God and His independence from the dimension of time. Contrary to Hume’s view, God is not somehow co-mingled with “everything” or put into effect by some cause.

Rather, it’s logically accurate to conclude that you can not expect to see anything come out of nothing (i.e., the law of contradiction). Or, more specifically, concerning Creation and the existence of God, something out of nothing when God is independent of time and our physical universe. God isn’t required to exist through external cause. God is an eternal being. An uncaused cause. For us, God is the first cause, either through order not understood or otherwise.

Universe & Causality
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