The exhortation, “Grieve not the Holy Spirit of God, whereby ye are sealed unto the day of redemption,” is addressed to believers; as was the declaration, “Ye did always resist the Holy Ghost,” uttered to rejecters of Christ. We cannot say that the unconverted grieve the Holy Ghost, since to grieve a person implies the existence of affection in the heart of him grieved, towards the one occasioning the sorrow. A stranger may set us at defiance and resist us, but were a near friend to do this, he would grieve us as well.
The words, grieve not, also show to us distinctly the personality of the Holy Spirit.
If He were merely an influence, He could not be said to be capable of feeling. We may resist the influence of the sun, but we cannot grieve an influence. We do well to consider that the Holy Spirit is a person, even as the Father and the Son are persons. The person of the Son was seen when upon the earth; and the Lord tells us, if the world would not receive Him whom it saw and heard, that it could not receive the Holy Spirit, “because it seeth Him not, neither knoweth Him.” (John 19:1717And he bearing his cross went forth into a place called the place of a skull, which is called in the Hebrew Golgotha: (John 19:17)).
As Jesus when here dwelt with His disciples, so does the Holy Spirit now dwell with God’s people. But with this difference, the Lord remained not always with His disciples. He has returned to heaven, but the Holy Spirit dwells in the hearts of believers. The Lord Himself explains this saying, “He dwelleth with you, and shall be in you,” and “He shall abide with you forever.”
The Holy Spirit does not leave His people. “I will never leave thee nor forsake thee,” is as true of God the Holy Spirit, as of God the Father, and God the Son. “He shall abide with you forever,” Jesus said. Believers by unholiness grieve the Holy Spirit, who dwells in them. The Indweller sees every working within the innermost chamber of their hearts, and no secret can be hidden from Him who searches us through and through. And when we speak of sins, we mean more than gross, outward sins, we mean heart sins, thought sins, which neither eye nor ear of man knows.
The Holy Spirit brings the Word home to our hearts, He enlightens our minds and explains its truth to us, and thus we are not ignorant of God’s thoughts. But if, wishing to escape the cross, which the practical living out of that Word entails, or, if ignoring the plain meaning of Scripture because we are wise in our own conceits, we neglect the truth, then again we are grieving the Holy Spirit of God, whereby we are sealed to the day of redemption.
Yet how gracious are the words, for the Spirit, whom we are enjoined not to grieve, is He who has sealed us to the great day of resurrection glory, when in body and in soul perfect, we shall sin no more and grieve the Spirit no more.
Thus the exhortation carries with it claims upon the affections of God’s people in a remarkable way.
The love of the Holy Spirit to the children of God is unmeasured, and the exhortation is, grieve Him not, because He has set you apart for the eternal glory, it would be opposed to the teaching of the epistles to say, grieve Him not lest He should depart from you. It is a word appealing to the grace of God within the heart, and not to a legal mind.