(3) In empowering them to speak: "Then Saul, who also is called Paul, filled with the Holy Ghost, said" (13: 9).
(4) In sustaining them in persecution: "And the disciples were filled with joy and with the Holy Ghost" (13: 52).
(5) In setting the Divine seal upon their {161} ministry among the Gentiles: "And God, which knoweth the hearts, bare them witness, giving them the Holy Ghost, even as he did unto us" (15: 8).
(6) In counseling in difficult questions of missionary policy: "It seemed good to the Holy Ghost and to us" (15: 28).
(7) In restraining the missionaries from entering into fields not yet appointed by the Lord: They "were forbidden of the Holy Ghost to preach the gospel in Asia. . . They assayed to go into Bithynia but the Spirit suffered them not" (16: 6, 7).
Very striking is this record of the ever-present, unfailing, and minute direction of the Holy Ghost in all the steps of this divine enterprise. "But this was in apostolic days," it will be said. Yes; but the promise of the Spirit is that "He shall abide with you for the age." Unless the age has ended he is still here, and still in office, and still entrusted with the responsibility of carrying out that work which is dearest to the heart of our glorified Lord. Who can say that there is not need in these days of a return to primitive methods and of a resumption of the Church's primitive endowments? The Holy Spirit is not straitened in himself, but only in us. If the Church had faith to lean less on human wisdom, to trust less in prudential methods, to administer less by mechanical {162} rules, and to recognize once more the great fact that, having committed to her a supernatural work, she has appointed for her a supernatural power, who can doubt that the grinding and groaning of our cumbrous missionary machinery would be vastly lessened, and the demonstration of the Spirit be far more apparent?
[1] Of course Catholic writers claim that the pope is the "Vicar of Christ" only as being the mouth-piece of the Holy Ghost. But the Spirit has been given to the church as a whole, that is to the body of regenerated believers, and to every member of that body according to his measure. The sin of sacerdotalism is, that it arrogates for a usurping few that which belongs to every member of Christ's mystical body. It is a suggestive fact that the name klêros, which Peter gives to the church as the "flock of God," when warning the elders against being lords over God's heritage, now appears in ecclesiastical usage as the clergy, with its orders of pontiff and prelates and lord bishops, whose appointed function it is to exercise lordship over Christ's flock.
[2] By the candlesticks being seven instead of one, as in the tabernacle, we are taught that whereas in the Jewish dispensation, God's visible church was one, in the Gentile dispensation there are many visible churches; and that Christ himself recognizes them alike.—Canon Garratt, "Commentary on the Revelation," p. 32.
[3] "The Work of the Holy Spirit in Man," by Pastor G. F. Tophel, p. 66.
[4] It was impossible up to the time of the glorification of Jesus to pray to the Father in his name. It is a fullness of joy peculiar to the dispensation of the Spirit to be able to do so.—Alford.