The GIFTS of the HOLY SPIRIT
in the coming Tribulation
A study by Gavin Finley MD
endtimepilgrim.org - May 2015
The GIFTS of the Holy Spirit
in the coming Great Tribulation
There is no doubt we see much "strange fire" in the New Charismatic arena today. This is certainly a great evil.
We can agree on that. "Strange fire" is a great evil, as is "strange doctrine". We can expect the Devil to get into the church
and to do his twisting work where and when he can. He seeks to be a spoiler of everything that is being used against him, both in the
realms of the Holy Spirit and also in the realms of the Holy Scriptures. Lucifer is out to mess up the spiritual gifts just as intently
as he seeks to mess up sound doctrine. The devil hates both. He fears and loathes the Elect, the people who know God and who
operate in Spirit and in Truth.
When all is said and done Satan will be brought down by both the Holy Word and the Holy Spirit of God.
The prophet Zechariah said in Zechariah 4:6,
Not by might, (military), nor by power, (politics),
But by my Spirit saith the Lord".
Both the Word of God and the Spirit of God are serious threats to the powers of darkness.
This is especially true when they operate, (as they should), in concert together
within the consecrated Christian heart.
The 5th seal end-time witness of the saints is an essential future reality. This is laid out in
Revelation 6:9,10,&11 and Luke 21:12,13,14,15,16,17,18,&19.
The devil and his underlings are shaking and trembling at the very thought of the 5th seal
end-time witness of the saints. They know it will lead on to the subsequent 6th seal, the
true blood moon, and the sign of the
appearance of the Son of Man in the heavens. This will signal their doom.
At the 7th seal it is all over for the powers of darkness, both angelic and human.
They will face the fierce anger and wrath of God. They will face the judgment of the returning Messiah.
The principalities and powers are absolutely terrified of this.
At His coming Jesus our Messiah will terminate all the works of the devil
and put an end to all the works of those evil men now ruling in high places.
Yes, there is both "strange fire" and "strange doctrine" around us right now, and more so as days grow more evil and
the nations rage increasingly against the coming Messiah. Now let's pause and think soberly about this for a moment.
Do we throw out all doctrine just because there is some "strange doctrine" in the camp.
in the face of wicked doctrines do we close up our Bibles forever
and become pot smoking nihilistic existentialists? Of course not.
Now the truth, my friends. Bad doctrine is all around us. But nevertheless, we still believe it is worthwhile
to continue to work with doctrine and seek to improve doctrine, right? That is why we meet together
with open Bibles and open hearts. We seek to refine doctrine by the Holy Scriptures and the Holy Spirit who wrote the Scriptures.
Do we flush all doctrine down the toilet just because there is some
"strange doctrine" in the camp? No, we do not. So then. Why should we flush any of the nine gifts of the
Holy Spirit down the drain just because some evil people have brought in some "strange fire"?
Those nine gifts of the Holy Spirit are established by God for our fellowship with Him.
They are also for our knowledge and discernment of things going on around us.
They also empower us to minister and to do good. The grace to do this comes not from ourselves.
It comes in though the indwelling Holy Spirit.
We are not to do any cherry picking among the gifts of God. Each one of those gifts is precious.
Imagine a great airliner with a number of engines crossing a great ocean. We would be hesitant to shut down any of
those engines just because a couple of them needed to be properly adjusted. We need all of them.
The nine gifts of grace were laid out for us by our dear Apostle Paul.
We can read about them and how they are to be used in
By what Scriptural authority do we dare to shut down ANY of the gifts of the Holy Spirit?
God had chosen each one of them to minister to His saints and through His saints.
So here we are. We are happy to discern "strange doctrine" and then "carry on" in the realms of doctrine.
But are we sure it is beyond the capability of God to give us discernment in the realms of the gifts?
Do we shut down the gifts and walk away from them just because some wolves in sheep's clothing have mishandled them?
Why do we secretly want to shut out the gifts?
Is it because we have been Hellenized? Have we locked ourselves up in a box, the box of our own rational
Aristotellian fundamentalist minds? Is our problem that we cannot or will not grapple with things miraculous?
There are games that people play. Is there another very human reason we despise the gifts of the Holy Spirit?
Is it because we think we cannot attain them?
Who told us they were unattainable? That is a lie from the pit of Hell. And lies have consequences.
Here is a fundamental truth of our fallen human nature.
People tend to despise the things they think they cannot have.
So is this why we are so much against the gifts God is offering us?
Is this why we are degrading and tossing out the gifts?
Is this why we are saying, "to Hell with them!"?
Let's consider this too. Discernment of spirits is itself one of the nine gifts of the Holy Spirit.
What are we to do with THAT gift? Shall we throw that wonderful and necessary gift of discernment of spirits
out on the garbage heap too?
OK let's get down to brass tacks and winkle out the devil in the details. Which ones of those nine gifts of the Holy Spirit
are still with us today? And which ones of the nine do we say are defunct? Which ones have Jesuit and Freemason infiltrated
Fundamentalists declared null and void? Which ones departed from us with the Apostle's and have not been seen since?
Which gifts of the ones listed above have not been seen since the first century?
Have we stopped to ask our teachers that question?
Let's consider what may really going on here. A quick study will show that we NEED every one of those nine gifts.
We shall especially need ALL of them in the
latter days.
Jesus said that we are going up before kings and rulers to bear testimony before them and will bear witness against
them in the last days. If Jesus said this then this is surely going to happen.
And even in the days of
the true latter rain in the true and genuine
End-Time Revival
running up to
days of the true blood moon the Holy Spirit will be with us in greater measure than we have ever known.
Jesus told us that when we come into the hour of our trial we were not to plan out beforehand what we were going to say.
He said that He Himself will give us His Word to speak on the occasion and right on that day.
There is a great end-time time of trial. This is written of in the Bible. So we can be sure that it will surely come to pass.
When those days come we shall need more than our Fundamentalist
Aristotelian wits about us. In those days we shall need the Holy Spirit and ALL of those nine gifts at our disposal.
And that, dear friends, is why Lucifer wants to shut them down!
So what does the Bible say will happen in the tribulation of the last days of this age? Jesus in the
Olivet Discourse
and the Apostle Paul in 2Thessalonians 2 join Moses in Deuteronomy 4:29,30,&31 to tell us there will be trials.
When the saints go up to witness these miraculous gifts will be very necessary.
The concerted miraculous action of the indwelling Holy Spirit will come to a blowout climax.
The peak of the Holy Spirit outpouring
was seen by the prophet Joel.this was described by him in Joel 2:28,29,30,31,&32.
In those coming times all the miraculous gifts tagged for the true latter days will surely be seen of men and angels.
And all these astounding wonders will surely come to pass.
For those of us who eye the finishing line spoken of in Hebrews 12:1 we have no illusions about what lies ahead.
Now is the time to wake up and smell the coffee. We are in a spiritual war. It is a race to the finish line.
The spiritual battle involves us! Our spiritual preparation is very simple. It involves the opening of our hearts.
It calls for our surrender to God in all things.
If the devil operates in the secret
places deep in the hearts of evil men then does he not want to get into the hearts of Christians as well? Does he not
seek to squash faith by inciting fear? Was it not fear and disconnection with God that caused two thirds
of Gideon's army melt away?
The devil has an agenda. And fear is the key to the undoing of many.
The enemy seeks to demoralize the saints. He seeks to promote ignorance of the marvelous
provision God has made for His Beloved. This is the divine Providence that comes by the infilling of the Holy Spirit.
Satan hates this. He wants to throw a spanner in the works. He wants to wreck the work of the Holy Spirit
in the depths of human hearts. How desperately we need His inner ministry within us as we approach the latter days!
So the sinister agenda is very clear. The devil wants to shut down
any hope we might entertain in our hearts of the wonderful miraculous provision of God by His indwelling Holy Spirit.
He wants to deny us recourse to any hope of seeing miracles, healings, deliverances,
and that special guidance and comfort God gives us by His Holy Spirit.
All those inner ministrations do not come to religious smarty-pants. They come by the unction of the Holy Spirit.
God makes it His special goal to minister deep in those humble hearts who open the door to Him.
The devil knows that very well. That is why he wants to smash all the spiritual gifts.
He wants all this spiritual armament arrayed against him gone!
But it is not going to happen. He is doomed.
Spiritual gifts are holy. They are not for prideful show by egotists.
They are to be "set apart" for God.
and they have been given to us for a purpose.
The gifts are there to strengthen the saints, especially as we come into the latter days.
In Hebrews 12:1 we see that at the end of the relay race of the saints a great cloud of
angelic and human witnesses will be gathering. They will be spectators looking in and cheering the runners
in that glorious end-time contest.
The devil is out to spread fear and doubt. He wants us to come out against him spiritually hobbled.
He will try his best to see that we are spiritually unprepared.
That is why he is spreading demoralizing lies
about a supposed cessation of the gifts.
OK let's go on from there. Direct attack on Israel or on Christians has never worked.
This tactic has always been counter-productive for the powers of evil.
So, heeding the advice of Balaam would we not expect Lucifer to quietly and
secretly infiltrate Christendom? Would we not expect him to wage a campaign of disinformation?
Would it not be expected that ol' slew-foot would
seek to mislead Fundamentalists and entice them to sabotage the end-time spiritual armory of the saints?
Let us be fair here.
Christian Fundamentalists who believe and teach the cessation of the spiritual gifts are not evil people per se.
In fact they are usually quite sincere.
They do not get up in the morning and say,
"Today I am going to be a spiritual bomb thrower.
Today by the words I speak I am going to wreck the spiritual armory of the saints!"
No, they do not. But if they have have been deceived into a wrong belief and if they end up
spreading misinformation to the saints
then they have been tools of the evil one just the same, right?
Remember, the end-time witness of the saints is part of God's end-time agenda. This 5th seal end-time witness will bring
Lucifer and his antichrist and his false prophet and his evil angelic host down, even as stars falling.
Does the devil want to try to prevent this?
You bet he does!
Now one final thing. Here below are the words of Jesus correctly laid out for us in our KJV, nothing left out
(as they did in the modern translations). (Hmmm. Why did the evil powers in the new translation committees cut
out those verses at the end of the book of Mark? These are clearly verses that speak of the miraculous.
That is a good question isn't it?
And now the big question. Here below are the words of Jesus concerning spiritual gifts. Where is the expiry date
on these gifts? Can we see an expiry date on the gifts from these words of Jesus? Does Jesus speak anywhere here
in this passage of an expiry date? Look carefully at
this verse in Mark 16:17&18 .
Some Christians are happy to discount the words of Jesus here and say, "the Gospels are for the Jews" and
the Pauline epistles are for 'the Church'". Yes, this is what these full-on dispensationalists actually believe.
But is this right? OK, let us discount the words of Jesus as quoted by Mark in the Olivet Discourse.
What about our Apostle Paul? Paul goes into great detail concerning the spiritual gifts.
But does he make any mention at all of any expiry date for any
of those nine gifts of the Holy Spirit? No, he does not.
So as we can see, there is some skullduggery going on here in this matter of the spiritual gifts.
So whose sinister influences are at work here? Who would dare to qualify and to rewrite the Bible and boldly declare in their
commentaries that the gifts ceased in the first Century? Just who were these nefarious infiltrators who spread
this demoralizing disinformation?.
Who were those voices who dared to speak out against these gifts of God Almighty?
Who were these men of the cloth who rose up to declare that the Gifts, the very ones
Jesus spoke about, to be null and void?
Well whoever they were, these were men who pushed a wicked agenda.
Whether wittingly or unwittingly they became tools of the angels of darkness. They were used by
the principalities and powers that hover over the upper hierarchies of politics and religion.
The intent of this scheme is very clear. The secret agenda was to help smash the morale of the saints. The plot was to deny the
promised spiritual equipping of the saints. The powers of darkness, angelic and human,
want to destroy the spiritual armory of the Elect. That, dear saints, is the scheme, that is the gig.
So then. Are we happy to dance like puppets on a string to these devious religious puppet-masters?
Why do we blindly follow them? Is is because these words that deny the miraculous are somehow pleasing to us?
And if denial of the miraculous is pleasing to us, why is that so? we'll look into that matter shortly.
Now we move on to the big technical or legal question.
Just when did our Lord Jesus qualify his words in the final verses of the book of Mark?
Just when did he say that the gifts He laid out here below only applied to the first century?
Chapter and verse please. And if Jesus did put a time limit on them what year was the year of their expiry?
Yes. The facts, please. What was the EXPIRY DATE of the gifts Jesus spoke of here?
Is it marked somewhere on the scriptural package? Look very carefully for it.
Do you see it?
The expiry of the ministry of the 12 Apostle's is very clear. This came at the end of the book of Revelation
at the end of the ministry of the last apostle, John.
We can see it in the last verse of the Bible. No problem there at all. There are no modern apostles.
But where in Holy Scripture do we find documentation of a first century terminus for any of the
nine gifts of the Holy Spirit? Have our Fundamentalist churchmen provided us with this info?
Where is this vital and essential Biblical documentation for the cessationism they teach?
Let's take a careful look through each verse of 1Corinthians chapters 12 and 14.
Did our Apostle Paul make mention there of any time limit on the nine gifts of the Holy Spirit?
Yes or no?
One final matter to consider. Our left brain is the platform for our rational being, right?
Here we assess incoming signals from the 5 senses and gain cognizance of things we see and think we know.
The left brain is where we place our explanations of those things we know and experience.
It is the seat of those things we deliberately do for a good direct reason.
But what about the right brain, the center of our intuition? What happens over there?
And how do we access what goes on there in any rational sort of way?
That is a bit of a challenge for the rationalistc Aristotelian Socratic
Fundamentalist mindset and for those reasoning thinking people who champion the left brain, isn't it?
But does our left brain know what is going on in our right brain?
God comes to us from another dimension. He can work in human beings in wonderful ways, and by means we know very little about.
Can we see into the next dimension? Can we access and map out the work of the indwelling Christ?
What is the "mystery of Godliness"?
And just how does God by His Holy Spirit minister to us deep down in our hearts?
Do we understand these things? No, we do not. We are frail finite beings.
So might it not be reasonable
to ask God for some help if we have problems down deep in our hearts?
If we are born-again Christians we have Christ within us. He is the hope of glory, right?
Shall we permit Him free access to work within us in our hearts and in the realms of
the Spirit. And if we do find ourselves in the tribulation of the latter days might we not be glad of His help
in the realms of spiritual intuition and spiritual discernment?
We know that God moves within our hearts. He is pervasive
throughout the universe. As we open up our hearts to Him He is pouring
out of His Holy Spirit into the very center of our lives from another dimension.
He is our Life!
As the Apostle Paul says in Acts 17:28,
"In Him we live and move and have our being".
The mystery of godliness is beyond our understanding.
Where does conscience come from, and guilt, and grief?
And from where comes the nine fruits of the holy Spirit?
From whence comes love, joy, peace, patience, goodness, kindness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control?
Such things are too marvelous for us to contemplate. But
we are called by God to walk by faith, and above all to open our hearts up to Him.
When we invite Him in our hearts and give Him access to all of the rooms of our being
He is fully capable of doing those things within us we ourselves cannot do.
He will minister down there deep in our hearts. Then He will move on out to minister in our soul and in our body.
But He can only do this IF we will ALLOW Him to do so.
We have to face the facts here. We as Fundamentalists are inclined to deny the miraculous gifts.
We are doing so for a number of reasons.
One of them is because we have a faith problem. The Bible says that "the just shall
live by faith". We walk by faith and not by sight. Faith means trust.
Do we trust God?
What if God in the pages of Holy Scripture does offer us a sign
gift or a power gift? And what if it is not on the "approved" list of our church or denomination?
What then? These are gifts God has personally ordained and set forth for us because He loves us and cares for us.
And, as we have seen, we may need these gifts in times to come!
What if God has promised to give us these gifts to equip us better for His service?
What if He has given them to help us walk in the Way laid out by. (say), the Westminster Catechism?
What if He has given these gifts for us "to know and love God and to enjoy His marvelous Presence forever?"
How do we respond to His invitation to "come up higher"? Do we say, "No thanks." and walk away?
What if there are gifts of tongues spoken of by Jesus and Paul? Do we dare just flippantly toss this holy gift
aside and declare it to be just the gibberish we see in the profane carnal religious circus?
Or might this be a gift of speaking that allows the Holy Spirit to operate deep within our heart?
Could we ever find ourselves open to the Holy Spirit and allow Him to minister there deep within?
And by this same gifting is it possible that we are speaking back to Him in ways we ourselves
by our own rational mind could not do?
What if our hearts are like the iceberg beneath the water line, the part we cannot see?
Many people, even Christians, suffer deep down in their heart.
There are matters of guilt, bitterness, PTSD, depression, anxiety, sleeplessness.
Can we trust the Holy Spirit to help us in our weakness? Can we trust Him to minister down there deep
within our heart. Can we trust Him to enter the hidden chambers of our heart with or without our rational oversight
and rational fundamentalist direction? Or are we going the way of Higher Criticism and deny the ability of
God Almighty to operate in the realms of the miraculous?
Because there is a miraculous realm.
And deep within our hearts those gifts are overseen by the miraculous ministry of the Holy Spirit,
It is by this means He can minister to us and through us in ways we never would have thought possible.
Enough sophistry. Let us be good Bereans here.
What saith the Scripture?
Likewise the Spirit also helpeth our infirmities: for we know not what we should pray for as we ought:
but the Spirit itself maketh intercession for us with groanings which cannot be uttered. - Roman 8:26
So it comes down to faith and to trust, doesn't it.
Can we trust God to give us a holy gift and not "strange fire"?
Can we trust Him to give us a fish and not a serpent?
Clenched fist Bible thumping and table thumping Fundamentalists say NO. We cannot trust God in this.
But can we?
What say you?
Some more devotional articles on apocalyptic Biblical themes
for the enquiring Christian.
A study by Gavin Finley MD
