The Beautiful Gospel Promise

Have you planned anything significant lately? A party, a house rehab, or maybe a work project? Entering into a project or event without a plan is a sure way to fail. But after the plan comes the sourcing. When I served as the director of women’s ministry at church, our team developed a detailed plan based on our vision of the event. Then we entered into the sourcing—who was going to do what, or where someone would find what we needed—and who was that someone? Finally, the day came when the event took place, and all our plans and sourcing were put into action. Unlike us, God supernaturally plans his work and knows that he alone is the source of the power for delivery of his plan. Many of us have heard that God the Father planned our salvation—the incarnation, crucifixion, resurrection, and ascension of his son. Christ was the source, the who, and the what when he lived a perfectly obedient life. He continued to carry out God’s plan when he submitted himself to sinful people—to be crucified as our righteous substitute on the cross. After he was resurrected and ascended into heaven, the Holy Spirit applied God’s plan of salvation to us by giving us faith to respond to Christ’s invitation to receive his atoning work on the cross for our sins. God also has a master plan for our lives if we submit to him, which is sometimes called predestination. I shy away from that term—it seems to cause either confusion or animosity. But I like this quote from Redeeming God’s website: “Two of the key passages about predestination are Romans 8:29-30 and Ephesians 1:4-11. In both cases, Paul is pretty clear that predestination is about God bringing people to be conformed to the image of His Son (Romans 8:29), and that election and predestination are most properly understood in connection with being made holy and blameless before God (Ephesians 1:4-5)…God chooses, elects, predestines, predetermines, decides, foreordains, commits Himself to make sure that every person who believes in Jesus for eternal life, will finally and ultimately be glorified into the image and likeness of Jesus Christ.” (1) God’s plan for this Jewish girl was to be born into a family with an Orthodox Jewish mother and a Reform Jewish father. She was brought up in the Jewish faith and attended temple every Friday night after honoring the Sabbath traditions at home. However, her religion became meaningless to her. When she left home to attend college, her mother chose a small school with a significant Jewish population. She rebelled and followed Zen Buddhist practices for most of her college years. In her senior year, she stopped meditating as a Buddhist. She tried out the Bahai faith, followed by numerology and astrology, looking for self-fulfillment. Later, she attended Christian Science services and followed Mary Baker Eddy’s false interpretation of the Bible. Still unsatisfied, she studied the Kabbalistic form of Jewish mysticism. When that yielded nothing of practical value, she gave up on religion. In 1983, this Jewish woman attended an EST Seminar for personal transformation. But, about two weeks before, she heard the true, biblical gospel through evangelist Billy Graham via a televised broadcast of his crusade. For two consecutive nights, she viewed the crusade, including his gospel invitation, with a strong, confusing emotional reaction. Then, during the EST Seminar, instead of participating in the visualization exercise, she had an encounter with the Holy Spirit, leading her to receive Christ’s invitation to come to him for salvation. The Spirit completely emerged me in his grasp, as he led me to tell the entire audience that “I just received the Lord Jesus Christ,” much to my surprise! Then he led me to study the New Testament Gospels continually, with a deep love for God’s Word which continues to this day.

The Old Testament Promise

I have since learned that God has some very creative ways of bringing his Jewish people into the kingdom through his Holy Spirit—even with dreams or visions—supporting the Old Testament promise. Turning to the OT book of Joel, After describing the judgment coming in the “Day of the Lord,” Joel describes God’s mercy toward the remnant of his people, saying, “And it shall come to pass afterward, that I will pour out my Spirit on all flesh; your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, your old men shall dream dreams, and your young men shall see visions. Even on the male and female servants in those days I will pour out my Spirit” (Joel 2:28-29). “When Joel says that God will pour out his Spirit on all flesh, he means that God will draw near to men and women and make himself known and felt in a powerful way. There is a great difference between perceiving a lake at a distance and being immersed in the lake. So there is a great difference between experiencing God as a distant object of knowledge and being immersed in his presence…When God draws near to a person by his Spirit, he does so to reveal himself. He aims to be known as God, not as a psychic phenomenon or some indescribable fantasy. Therefore when he pours himself on us by his Spirit, he stirs up in us true images and conceptions of his beauty and power and mercy and truth and holiness and greatness, and he quickens our affections to respond properly to all that we see. It is unthinkable that a person could be, as it were, soaked by the presence of the infinite and holy God and not be moved deeply. If you are not often moved deeply by the self-revealing presence of the Judge of the world and the Lover of your soul, then pray for the fulfilling of Joel 2:28 in your experience, and set your gaze firmly on God’s beauty in Scripture.” (2) May we be more willing, as those who are saved in Christ, to be filled by the Holy Spirit to the fullest extent in our present circumstances and stage of life. 

Saturated with the Holy Spirit 

“Joel goes on to say that when God makes himself known and felt in people’s lives, this can manifest itself in three ways: they may dream dreams, see visions, and prophesy (Joel 2:28). What a person dreams about is a sign of what his mind is saturated with. What looms up in his mind’s eye while strolling alone signals whether he is soaked in God. And you can usually tell whether a person has been drenched with the Spirit by whether his mouth is given to declaring the excellencies of God. When God almighty pours himself into an individual, the inner life is changed; it is filled with God. And since the mouth is simply the pressure valve of the inner life, when the inner life is full of God, the mouth prophesies. We must not think of prophecy mainly as prediction…Prophecy, as it is used here I think, is primarily verbalizing the great things you have seen of God for the sake of ‘upbuilding and encouragement and consolation,’ as Paul says in 1 Corinthians 14:3. Joel…is looking to a day when men and women everywhere will be so filled with God that they catch visions of him in the daytime, dream about him at night, and speak of him continually with their mouths…Would that all the Lord’s people were prophets! Would that all the people at Bethlehem were prophets! So saturated and soaked with God, so filled with God in the inner life that we would constantly speak to each other of the excellencies of our Maker and Redeemer and Friend…it is not the Spirit of God that seals your lips and makes you think that praise and exhortation is a private affair. ‘Do not quench the Spirit, do not despise prophesying…’ (1 Thessalonians 5:19–21). God declares, ‘I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh, and your sons and your daughters will prophesy…A friend of mine, Mark Noll [wrote]… something about [Jonathan] Edwards …which I want so much to be true of me, and which I pray will be true of all of you. He said, ‘Jonathan Edwards was a thoroughly God-besotted individual’” (3)

God communicated his plan of salvation, the good news of the gospel of Jesus Christ, to people through whom the Holy Spirit will work. Let’s pray to be more willing, as those who are in Christ, to be saturated by the Holy Spirit to the fullest extent, so “that according to the riches of his glory he may grant you to be strengthened with power through his Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith—that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may have strength to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.” (Ephesians 3:14-21)

Related Scripture: Isaiah 65:1; Ezekiel 33:11; Matthew 14:28–31; 1 Timothy 2:1-6; 1 Peter 3:18-22.

Notes:

1. Myers, Jeremy, “Redeeming God, What I Believe About Predestination,” https://redeeminggod.com/on-predestination/

2. Piper, John, Desiring God, “This is What Was Spoken by the Prophet Joel”— https://www.desiringgod.org/messages/this-is-what-was-spoken-by-the-prophet-joel)

3. Piper, Ibid.

April 4, 2024