The Personhood of the Holy Spirit

.... Okay, now let’s talk about the Divine claims of the Holy Spirit. But before we can really approach this, in light of what modern day Arians have said, we first have to prove that the Holy Spirit is an actual person; because, if you’ll remember, modern Arians such as the Jehovah’s Witnesses or the Way International say that the Holy Spirit is impersonal, a Divine force, a creative power, a Divine influence, or something like that. So the first thing that we have to do is prove that the Holy Spirit is a person and not simply an impersonal force.

.... Throughout Scripture, personal pronouns such as ‘He’ and ‘Him’ are always used when referring to the Holy Spirit. A good passage in which to see this is John 16:7-14.

.... Now a reciprocating point, which really adds up to the same thing, is that nowhere in Scripture is the Holy Spirit ever referred to as an ‘it’, as modern day Arians would claim. However, I was looking at a Jehovah Witness publication not too long ago, and they claim there is a passage in John 14 in which the Holy Spirit was referred to as ‘it’. And they say ‘Trinitarian translators have purposely mis-translated that passage to cover this fact!’

.... Here we have another Jehovah Witness trick, and frankly, this one is known as ‘lying’. Because I looked at that passage in the original Greek manuscripts and the personal pronouns really are being used throughout, rather than the impersonal ‘it’.

.... Now understand me – a lot of the people who are involved in the Jehovah’s Witnesses are sincere. But the people whom they receive their doctrines from – the national leaders themselves – they are not sincere. We only have to take a look at their own version of the Bible, The New World Translation, to prove this point. If you don’t believe me, just ask them who did their translation work and what their scholarly credentials were, and you’ll find that they won’t tell you! They’ll claim that their silence is due to ‘modesty’ but the truth is quite otherwise. In reality they are concealing their own questionable translation practices. Still, if you search long enough you’ll find out that the people who ‘translated’ their version of the Bible didn’t even speak the original Greek language! In fact only one of the five, a man named Freddy Fronz, had spent any time in college, and he had only spent a single semester. He dropped out in 1918 when their founder, Charles Taze Russell, announced that Jesus was returning in that year. But anyway, let’s not get too far off track with this tangent . . .

.... Throughout Scripture, personal pronouns are used in referring to the Holy Spirit: the pronouns He, Him or His; and the impersonal pronoun ‘it’ is never used in reference to Him. But actually, we can make an even better point of it than that. Because deeper, personal distinctions are shown pertaining to the Holy Spirit, and they settle the matter quite pointedly.

.... In Scripture, the Holy Spirit is shown to have a mind (Romans 8:27). He is shown to have a will (1 Corinthians 12:11), and He is shown to have infinite understanding (Isaiah 40:13-14; 1 Corinthians 2:10-11). He is also shown to have emotions such as grief and love in Isaiah 63:10; Ephesians 4:30; Romans 5:5; 15:30). Furthermore, He speaks to us, for instance, in Acts 13:2-4.

.... Now when someone has a mind, they have a will, they have emotions, they have understanding, and they speak -- these are traits that only be associated with an actual personality and not with some nebulous, impersonal sort of thing as a ‘power’ would be, an ‘it’. So I hope this establishes that the Holy Spirit is an actual person and we’ll be talking about Him more in the next section.