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5. Cessationism hinders repentance and diminishes the ability of followers to perceive the love and glory of God
One of the ancillary but still very dangerous problems with a doctrine that purports to limit the power of the Holy Spirit has to do with repentance. For those people who are victimized by persistent sin, including addiction, the standard model of Christian repentance – conviction, contrition, turning away from sin and toward God – will not work. People who are addicted to substances or habitual misbehavior are not able to turn away from sin and are ashamed to turn toward God. Human will fails, and we need the Spirit's help. Teaching people the Holy Spirit is less than all-powerful and eager to help them seems like spiritual malpractice, particularly when the truth is that the Holy Spirit will slowly start taking things away from them until they have no more opportunity to engage in the sinful conduct (broke, incarcerated or dead) and/or their misconduct no longer grieves God (self-declared soulless satan-worshiping wretch).
The belief that the working of the Holy Spirit is limited to a mysterious and imperceptible changing of a personal preference is completely untrue and very dangerous. In reality, the Spirit uses every means at His disposal to hammer the truth into a believer, including, in my experience, physical health, mental health, all the forces of nature, the criminal and civil justice systems, everything and everyone you love, and total strangers.
Someone has to go first, so here it is. I spent forty-years as a person addicted to, among other things, road rage. Three years ago it took the Holy Spirit about a minute to cure me. On the way to the freeway onramp a young guy in a pickup going an insane speed cut me off. He cut right across my front bumper and then did it to several other cars on his way to the freeway. Angry, I hit the gas and caught up to him (cutting in front of those very same people). He got on and cut somebody else off to merge, but the freeway was at a dead stop and he wanted to get back to the right. Guess who was there to stop him from merging back to the right, crawling right along next to him?
I enjoyed seeing him cussing me out and giving me the single-finger salute. So I rolled down my window to tell him that what goes around comes around, and that was when I saw her for the first time. It was like she materialized right in front of my eyes in his passenger seat, a young woman with the saddest face you've ever seen, holding a baby in her arms. "My baby is sick," she said to me.
I was crushed. And I knew instantly it was the Holy Spirit stomping on my heart, crushing the anger and self-idolatry out of it. Think of all the millions of variables He had to control and align to make sure I was there for precisely that moment. And it worked. I haven't had a single moment of road rage since, regardless of the provocation. I can't get that young mother out of my head.
I tried to tell that young guy I was sorry, but he was out of his head, almost hysterical. I let them in and they pulled off the freeway onto the shoulder, where they tried to give the baby some water, or revive it. As tears leaked from my eyes, I knew the Spirit wanted me to stop and help them but I was too scared of having to take a beating against which I would not have dared to defend myself.
If I was a non-believer, or I had been trained to believe the Holy Spirit "doesn't work like that," I might have concluded it all happened by random chance, that we are all "Fortune's fools." Good thing I was neither. There have been countless other interventions by the Spirit, some even wilder. My point is that if you train a would-be repentant believer to wait for the quiet little mouse of the Spirit to imperceptibly work mysterious magic by changing his preferences, when the devil has a death-grip on his aorta, windpipe, brain stem and spine, that believer is going to die.
What he has to do instead is look inside himself, with help if necessary, find every idol, and let the Holy Spirit destroy it. All of the pride and rage and lust and resentment and pain and grief he is holding inside, that he slurps from time to time to feed the creature he believes he is, has to go. All of the excuses he makes for his perversions have to go. The twisted evil creature inside him has to die, or he will. And, here's the point, if the would-be repentant believer has been trained not to see the might of the Spirit, how will he have the confidence in Him necessary to let his old self die?
Another deadly byproduct of cessationism is that it teaches a wrongly eviscerated form of Christianity, one in which the Holy Spirit Himself has been excised. This couldn't be happening at a worse moment of human history. Baal and Ashtaroth call and beckon and scream at us from everywhere our eyes may fall – phone screens that go everywhere with us, computer screens, TV screens, movie screens, classrooms, textbooks, perfume and shoe ads, the nightly news – but our God is on mute? From my experience, a fair practical summary of Christian life is "submit, submit submit because you can rely, rely, rely on Jesus." The more you submit the more you will look like Jesus to God, which is a good thing. With God all things are possible. Ask (for what is good) and you will receive (what is good). It is a terrible blow to the faith to cause Christians to doubt these things. If we live inside that doubt, we are nothing but "Fortune's fools" who see Shakespeare in Love instead of God in Love.
Again, I was saved from that doubt by the persistence of Christ and the Holy Spirit. I was a "natural Christian," not chained to any bad teaching. But how many people have fallen victim over the centuries? How many have been shamed, shunned, excommunicated, banished, beaten or burned at the stake for having learned or heard directly from God? I can think of twelve right off the bat. How many others have given in and by an exercise of their own will turned themselves upside down by banishing the Holy Spirit from their hearts and minds and filled the vacuum instead with the world (created by the God but now presided over by satan) in which science (created by God but now run by satan) screams that the totality of our existence (created by God but now dominated by satan) is owed not to God but to the dark chaotic randomness that is the doctrine and home of satan?
A believer in such a distant God expects less from Him, if anything at all. So why rely on Him or ask anything of Him? Why pray at all? Even though prayer is Christian power, and God's favorite humans (e.g., the Jews, who had the Urim and Thummim that functioned like a hotline to God) regularly fell on their faces before him (e.g., Moses) and sought his advice in everything (e.g., David) even in their most dire moments (e.g., Jesus), cessationism discourages prayer for personal favors (hopefully salvation is not such a favor), lest we turn into those "bad" people who follow the "prosperity gospel" and turn God into a "cosmic vending machine." One can find plenty of cessationism on Youtube preaching that prayer should not be overly-repetitive or overly-long or overly-sentimental or overly-personal and that it should follow a structure to be effective (although you can find a smattering of testimony to the contrary, that when a cessationist needs God, even for something personal and mundane, he knows that fervent, incessant, personal prayer is what works). How do they know what God prefers? Are there statistics on answered prayers, like batting average or yards per completion or free throw percentage?
To me, cessationism looks like neo-pharisaicism, the main purpose of which is to sew the Temple veil back together. It seems to me that the "prophecy" of cessationism (don’t ask for a favor or sign or instruction from God because He can't or won't answer that kind of prayer) becomes self-fulfilling: God might not answer a prayer that isn't prayed (I say "might not" because He will do what He wants, including saving me out of the church of atheism), and might be reluctant to answer a prayer from someone who follows a doctrine that teaches him not to rely on God by going to Him first, seeking His help first, asking His direction and guidance first in everything no matter how intimate or personal or sentimental. Even if He chooses to answer the prayer of such a person, will that person be able to see or hear or feel or understand His answer? Or is such a Christian who expects no answer likely to end up believing he received no answer?
As part of the Great Commission, Jesus promised believers power. (KJV, Mark, 16:17-18). In fact, He promised so much power He also was inclined to caution that on the last day He will turn away "many" who did nothing more than wield the flashy power of spiritual gifts such as exorcism, prophecy and miracle working, but did not do His Father's will (Notice the word "many," as in "many" played with the toys but did not submit) (KJV, Matt. 7:21).
Cessationism insists it does believe in miracles, but the way it is said suggests large-scale MIRACLES like the Red Sea parting thousands of years ago during the age of the prophets, or Jesus' MIRACLES. The bulk of the doctrine, which is the part that is preached and emphasized, states emphatically and categorically that with the completion of the Protestant Bible the Holy Spirit no longer bestows the spiritual gifts on the rank and file, and to believe or claim otherwise is to be non-Christian.
The problem is, doesn’t this train and condition followers to reject the supernatural, a rejection which is tragically ironic given that we all agree that believers are lived-in by the Holy Spirit? And doesn't that become highly problematic in our present reality, where church attendance and belief in the divine on the one hand are declining, while on the other anti-Christian persecution and the army of the enemy are rising? We all agree the outcome of the war is known, and we can rejoice in that certainty. But how many casualties will there be? Shouldn't we want to lose fewer rather than more?
No amount of evangelism will sell a religion that is missing its God. And who can blame those Christians who soldier on for being lukewarm? Sensory-deprived Christians do not see the miracles performed by God for believers and non-believers alike every single day. Sensory-deprived Christians do not see the miracle of their own existence, or the providential arrangement of circumstance for them. Nor do they perceive MIRACLES, when something like the Red Sea parting occurs right in front of them for everyone to witness. They don't fully perceive God's love. They are either choosing to be, or are taught to be, Henslowes ("I don't know, it's a mystery).
(concluded in part 4)
One of the ancillary but still very dangerous problems with a doctrine that purports to limit the power of the Holy Spirit has to do with repentance. For those people who are victimized by persistent sin, including addiction, the standard model of Christian repentance – conviction, contrition, turning away from sin and toward God – will not work. People who are addicted to substances or habitual misbehavior are not able to turn away from sin and are ashamed to turn toward God. Human will fails, and we need the Spirit's help. Teaching people the Holy Spirit is less than all-powerful and eager to help them seems like spiritual malpractice, particularly when the truth is that the Holy Spirit will slowly start taking things away from them until they have no more opportunity to engage in the sinful conduct (broke, incarcerated or dead) and/or their misconduct no longer grieves God (self-declared soulless satan-worshiping wretch).
The belief that the working of the Holy Spirit is limited to a mysterious and imperceptible changing of a personal preference is completely untrue and very dangerous. In reality, the Spirit uses every means at His disposal to hammer the truth into a believer, including, in my experience, physical health, mental health, all the forces of nature, the criminal and civil justice systems, everything and everyone you love, and total strangers.
Someone has to go first, so here it is. I spent forty-years as a person addicted to, among other things, road rage. Three years ago it took the Holy Spirit about a minute to cure me. On the way to the freeway onramp a young guy in a pickup going an insane speed cut me off. He cut right across my front bumper and then did it to several other cars on his way to the freeway. Angry, I hit the gas and caught up to him (cutting in front of those very same people). He got on and cut somebody else off to merge, but the freeway was at a dead stop and he wanted to get back to the right. Guess who was there to stop him from merging back to the right, crawling right along next to him?
I enjoyed seeing him cussing me out and giving me the single-finger salute. So I rolled down my window to tell him that what goes around comes around, and that was when I saw her for the first time. It was like she materialized right in front of my eyes in his passenger seat, a young woman with the saddest face you've ever seen, holding a baby in her arms. "My baby is sick," she said to me.
I was crushed. And I knew instantly it was the Holy Spirit stomping on my heart, crushing the anger and self-idolatry out of it. Think of all the millions of variables He had to control and align to make sure I was there for precisely that moment. And it worked. I haven't had a single moment of road rage since, regardless of the provocation. I can't get that young mother out of my head.
I tried to tell that young guy I was sorry, but he was out of his head, almost hysterical. I let them in and they pulled off the freeway onto the shoulder, where they tried to give the baby some water, or revive it. As tears leaked from my eyes, I knew the Spirit wanted me to stop and help them but I was too scared of having to take a beating against which I would not have dared to defend myself.
If I was a non-believer, or I had been trained to believe the Holy Spirit "doesn't work like that," I might have concluded it all happened by random chance, that we are all "Fortune's fools." Good thing I was neither. There have been countless other interventions by the Spirit, some even wilder. My point is that if you train a would-be repentant believer to wait for the quiet little mouse of the Spirit to imperceptibly work mysterious magic by changing his preferences, when the devil has a death-grip on his aorta, windpipe, brain stem and spine, that believer is going to die.
What he has to do instead is look inside himself, with help if necessary, find every idol, and let the Holy Spirit destroy it. All of the pride and rage and lust and resentment and pain and grief he is holding inside, that he slurps from time to time to feed the creature he believes he is, has to go. All of the excuses he makes for his perversions have to go. The twisted evil creature inside him has to die, or he will. And, here's the point, if the would-be repentant believer has been trained not to see the might of the Spirit, how will he have the confidence in Him necessary to let his old self die?
Another deadly byproduct of cessationism is that it teaches a wrongly eviscerated form of Christianity, one in which the Holy Spirit Himself has been excised. This couldn't be happening at a worse moment of human history. Baal and Ashtaroth call and beckon and scream at us from everywhere our eyes may fall – phone screens that go everywhere with us, computer screens, TV screens, movie screens, classrooms, textbooks, perfume and shoe ads, the nightly news – but our God is on mute? From my experience, a fair practical summary of Christian life is "submit, submit submit because you can rely, rely, rely on Jesus." The more you submit the more you will look like Jesus to God, which is a good thing. With God all things are possible. Ask (for what is good) and you will receive (what is good). It is a terrible blow to the faith to cause Christians to doubt these things. If we live inside that doubt, we are nothing but "Fortune's fools" who see Shakespeare in Love instead of God in Love.
Again, I was saved from that doubt by the persistence of Christ and the Holy Spirit. I was a "natural Christian," not chained to any bad teaching. But how many people have fallen victim over the centuries? How many have been shamed, shunned, excommunicated, banished, beaten or burned at the stake for having learned or heard directly from God? I can think of twelve right off the bat. How many others have given in and by an exercise of their own will turned themselves upside down by banishing the Holy Spirit from their hearts and minds and filled the vacuum instead with the world (created by the God but now presided over by satan) in which science (created by God but now run by satan) screams that the totality of our existence (created by God but now dominated by satan) is owed not to God but to the dark chaotic randomness that is the doctrine and home of satan?
A believer in such a distant God expects less from Him, if anything at all. So why rely on Him or ask anything of Him? Why pray at all? Even though prayer is Christian power, and God's favorite humans (e.g., the Jews, who had the Urim and Thummim that functioned like a hotline to God) regularly fell on their faces before him (e.g., Moses) and sought his advice in everything (e.g., David) even in their most dire moments (e.g., Jesus), cessationism discourages prayer for personal favors (hopefully salvation is not such a favor), lest we turn into those "bad" people who follow the "prosperity gospel" and turn God into a "cosmic vending machine." One can find plenty of cessationism on Youtube preaching that prayer should not be overly-repetitive or overly-long or overly-sentimental or overly-personal and that it should follow a structure to be effective (although you can find a smattering of testimony to the contrary, that when a cessationist needs God, even for something personal and mundane, he knows that fervent, incessant, personal prayer is what works). How do they know what God prefers? Are there statistics on answered prayers, like batting average or yards per completion or free throw percentage?
To me, cessationism looks like neo-pharisaicism, the main purpose of which is to sew the Temple veil back together. It seems to me that the "prophecy" of cessationism (don’t ask for a favor or sign or instruction from God because He can't or won't answer that kind of prayer) becomes self-fulfilling: God might not answer a prayer that isn't prayed (I say "might not" because He will do what He wants, including saving me out of the church of atheism), and might be reluctant to answer a prayer from someone who follows a doctrine that teaches him not to rely on God by going to Him first, seeking His help first, asking His direction and guidance first in everything no matter how intimate or personal or sentimental. Even if He chooses to answer the prayer of such a person, will that person be able to see or hear or feel or understand His answer? Or is such a Christian who expects no answer likely to end up believing he received no answer?
As part of the Great Commission, Jesus promised believers power. (KJV, Mark, 16:17-18). In fact, He promised so much power He also was inclined to caution that on the last day He will turn away "many" who did nothing more than wield the flashy power of spiritual gifts such as exorcism, prophecy and miracle working, but did not do His Father's will (Notice the word "many," as in "many" played with the toys but did not submit) (KJV, Matt. 7:21).
Cessationism insists it does believe in miracles, but the way it is said suggests large-scale MIRACLES like the Red Sea parting thousands of years ago during the age of the prophets, or Jesus' MIRACLES. The bulk of the doctrine, which is the part that is preached and emphasized, states emphatically and categorically that with the completion of the Protestant Bible the Holy Spirit no longer bestows the spiritual gifts on the rank and file, and to believe or claim otherwise is to be non-Christian.
The problem is, doesn’t this train and condition followers to reject the supernatural, a rejection which is tragically ironic given that we all agree that believers are lived-in by the Holy Spirit? And doesn't that become highly problematic in our present reality, where church attendance and belief in the divine on the one hand are declining, while on the other anti-Christian persecution and the army of the enemy are rising? We all agree the outcome of the war is known, and we can rejoice in that certainty. But how many casualties will there be? Shouldn't we want to lose fewer rather than more?
No amount of evangelism will sell a religion that is missing its God. And who can blame those Christians who soldier on for being lukewarm? Sensory-deprived Christians do not see the miracles performed by God for believers and non-believers alike every single day. Sensory-deprived Christians do not see the miracle of their own existence, or the providential arrangement of circumstance for them. Nor do they perceive MIRACLES, when something like the Red Sea parting occurs right in front of them for everyone to witness. They don't fully perceive God's love. They are either choosing to be, or are taught to be, Henslowes ("I don't know, it's a mystery).
(concluded in part 4)
