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 - Endorsed - Indifferent - Contested
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Name:Daniel
Home: Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada
About Me: I used to believe that evolution was reasonable, that homosexuality was genetic, and that people became Christians because they couldn't deal with the 'reality' that this life was all there was. I used to believe, that if there was a heaven - I could get there by being good - and I used to think I was more or less a good person. I was wrong on all counts. One day I finally had my eyes opened and I saw that I was not going to go to heaven, but that I was certainly going to suffer the wrath of God for all my sin. I saw myself as a treasonous rebel at heart - I hated God for creating me just to send me to Hell - and I was wretched beyond my own comprehension. Into this spiritual vacuum Jesus Christ came and he opened my understanding - delivering me from God's wrath into God's grace. I was "saved" as an adult, and now my life is hid in Christ. I am by no means sinless, but by God's grace I am a repenting believer - a born again Christian.
My complete profile...
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Daniel's posts are almost always pastoral and God centered. I appreciate and am challenged by them frequently. He has a great sense of humor as well.
- Marc Heinrich
His posts are either funny or challenging. He is very friendly and nice.
- Rose Cole
[He has] good posts, both the serious like this one, and the humorous like yesterday. [He is] the reason that I have restrained myself from making Canadian jokes in my posts.
- C-Train
This post contains nothing that is of any use to me. What were you thinking? Anyway, it's probably the best I've read all day.
- David Kjos
Daniel, nicely done and much more original than Frank the Turk.
- Jonathan Moorhead
There are some people who are smart, deep, or funny. There are not very many people that are all 3. Daniel is one of those people. His opinion, insight and humor have kept me coming back to his blog since I first visited earlier this year.
- Carla Rolfe
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| Double Crucifixion. Part XII - What is a Partaker? |
If you haven't done so already, you may want to read the posts which preceded this one (for some context):
I, II,III, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII, IX, X, and XI.
We started looking at the shopping list in Hebrews 6:4-6, to determine, honestly and with all care, whether the hypothetical person being described is supposed to represent a genuine believer or not.
The criteria we hope to examine today is this one:
He or she was *made* a partaker of the Holy Spirit (...whatever that means)
The word translated "partaker" here describes a participant in something, or perhaps (by extension) an associate or partner of someone. I think partaker is a good translation of the word (in that it envelopes much of the semantic range) so I am not going to fiddle with it as though there was some nuance we could be overlooking in the word - I don't think there is. Partaker means, plain and simple, one who partakes of something.
Yet we should answer the thought - what is he a partaker of or in?
Now, those who only read scripture in English may balk at that. What?? It says right there that they partake of the ...H-o-l-y ... S-p-i-r-i-t. I mean, how much can you read into that?
Well, That's English for you. Take a look in your translation and see if you can find even one possessive apostrophe "s". No? Why is that? Did God inspire a whole tome without using the possessive case even once? No, that would be ridiculous. It has become an English biblical translation standard to translate every possessive using the "of a/the" construct. That is, rather than translate a phrase as "He was Bob's son", they translate it as, "He was the son of Bob" That's great because we all understand that "the son of Bob" is synonymous with "Bob's son" - but some confusion may arise when we read greater meaning into the word "of" than is implied by the possessive. Consider the expression "he does not have the love of God" Does this mean that the man does not have a love for God, or that the man does not have God's love?
We want to avoid that sort of ambiguity in our interpretation here, so I will word it so that it is less ambiguous in English:
Having been made the Holy Spirit's partakers.
If we are sloppy in our English - that is, if we slur the meaning of words on a daily basis, we are likely to read "partakers of" as being synonymous with "partakers in" - that is, we would be [1] removing the force of the possessive that -is- in the original language and replacing it with a preposition that adds a direction to the thought that isn't there in the original text. It is not partaking "in" - and though it is sometimes our habit in English to relax our grammar for the sake of color, we ought not to do so here. The preposition, "in" carries with it a force that cannot be injected into this thought without compromising it. We simply cannot add words and thoughts to scripture that aren't there.
Now the next question is who made us the Holy Spirit's partakers? Us or God? That opens its own can of worms, that I won't bother addressing, because the point we are pursuing is not supported one way or the other. If God makes us the Holy Spirit's partakers, or we make ourselves the Holy Spirit's partakers - at the end of the day we are still partakers that are owned by the Holy Spirit.
The real question before us then is whether we ought to describe the Holy Spirit's partakers as Christians or not.
Let's consider how the Holy Spirit drove Jesus into the wilderness upon His baptism - no the water one, but the dove one. The Holy Spirit descended upon Jesus, and immediately He drove Jesus into the wilderness. A lot of Christian's don't stop to think that Jesus walked in the Spirit, lived in the Spirit, and <gulp> obeyed the Holy Spirit, and because they don't think about that, they have a hard time understanding what it means to walk in the "way" - Jesus has gone before us in the way we are to go. But that is another post altogether.
What we want to focus on here is that when Jesus chose the twelve, including Judas Iscariot, the son of perdition, Jesus was obeying the Holy Spirit. It cannot be otherwise. Even if we are new to the idea, or reject it for some other reason, it cannot be that Jesus, being God, would make a choice that was out of step with God the Father or God the Holy Spirit; so whether we understand things in the same way or not, this we must agree - the God chose Judas Iscariot to partake in the ministry, even though Judas remained a son of the devil.
From this we reason that whatever it means to be the Holy Spirit's partaker, a good case can be made to show that it doesn't necessarily mean the individual who becomes the Holy Spirit's partaker -must- be a wheat, for Judas demonstrates that one can certainly be the Holy Spirit's partaker and be a tare.
Thus, on this point, even though I am inclined personally to think that the Holy Spirit's partaker is more likely to be a wheat, yet because I want to be fair and honest, I have to conclude that this condition remains inconclusive - it doesn't prove one way or the other the authenticity of the hypothetical person's faith.
One can certainly argue that the son of perdition (Judas) was the Holy Spirit's partaker.
t isn't that we are partaking "in" the Holy Spirit, as we might infer from a sloppy slurring of English |
posted by Daniel @
9:00 AM
 
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