The Spirit: The Third Person of the Triune God

Recently, in God's good providence, I've gotten to know fairly well a man who is a Jehovah's Witness.  And after speaking with him regularly for a number of weeks about Christianity, I'm more attuned to seeing crucial things in crucial passages of Scripture.  I'm noting awesome realities in my regular reading with greater sensitivity, things so easy to pass over.  Here's one from this morning's devotions:

"But one and the same Spirit works all these things, distributing to each one individually just as he wills" (1 Cor. 12:11).  Remembering, not forgetting (as always), the context, we read here of the grace-gifts that the Spirit apportions to believers.  And how does he do this?  He does this "just as he wills" or "even as he desires."  The personality of the Spirit is obviously in view.  Only persons exercise volition.  And as John Owen points out on this text, only a person can exercise the choice and judgement and freedom requisite for distributing variously to individuals according to good pleasure.  The Spirit's deity is also in view, for only one who is divine may distribute supernatural gifts sovereignly, that is, as he pleases.  So here, in one, short little text, we have the deity and personality of the Spirit, seated in a broader context that affirms that there is one God (8:6).  In the more immediate context, the deity of the Spirit and the unity of God are affirmed: it is "the same God who works all things in all" (12:6).  So unitarianism is out.  Tritheism is out.  Modalism is out.  And ten thousand other heresies. 

And since theology is indubitably for doxology: All praise be to the three-in-one and one-in-three God, Father, Son, and Spirit, who lives and reigns forever, one God, world without end. Amen!

I love the Bible.  It's so clear, so bright.  Hold fast to its plain teachings, and you'll never be led astray.