1.Can We Know God?

God is infinite, and we are small; He dwells in unapproachable light (1 Tim 6:16), and no creature has ever searched Him out to the bottom. "Can you search out the deep things of God?" asked Zophar; "Can you find out the limits of the Almighty?" (Job 11:7). If we were left to ourselves, He would remain forever beyond our reach. But we are not left to ourselves, for God has chosen to make Himself known — and this is the first mercy of all theology. He reveals something of Himself to every person through the world His hands have made and the conscience He has written within: "The heavens declare the glory of God" (Ps 19:1), and "what may be known of God is manifest in them, for God has shown it to them" (Rom 1:19). This universal witness theologians call general revelation. Yet by itself it is not enough to save; it shows that God is, and that He is great and good, but not how a sinner may be reconciled to Him. For that, God has spoken further and clearer — in His written Word, and above all in His Son: "God, who at various times and in various ways spoke in time past to the fathers by the prophets, has in these last days spoken to us by His Son" (Heb 1:1–2). This is special revelation. We do not climb up to God by the ladder of our own cleverness; we know Him because He has stooped down and made Himself known. What He has revealed we may hold with confidence; what He has kept hidden we leave in reverence, for "the secret things belong to the LORD our God, but those things which are revealed belong to us" (Deut 29:29).

2.That God Is

The world itself testifies that God is, and the testimony is not easily silenced. William Paley put it in a picture that has never lost its force: if you were crossing a heath and found a watch lying on the ground — its wheels and springs fitted together, each part shaped for the working of the whole — you would never suppose it had simply happened, or had lain there from all eternity by chance. The evident design would compel you to conclude a designer, a maker who formed it for a purpose. How much more, then, the human eye, the bird's wing, the ordered march of the seasons and the stars? Design on every hand points to a Designer of surpassing wisdom and power. Conscience bears its own witness within — the sense of a law above us and a Judge to whom we must answer — and no nation under heaven has ever been found that did not reach out, however dimly, after God. These are not proofs that compel like a sum in arithmetic, and Scripture never rests our certainty upon them alone; but they leave the unbeliever, as Paul says, "without excuse." In the end our surest knowledge that God is comes not from argument but from God Himself, who has spoken and who meets the seeking soul: "For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even His eternal power and Godhead" (Rom 1:20).

3.What God Is Like: His Greatness

What, then, is God like? Scripture teaches us first of His greatness — the ways in which He is gloriously unlike us, perfections we can adore but never share. He is Spirit, not flesh: "God is Spirit, and those who worship Him must worship in spirit and truth" (John 4:24). He is infinite and eternal, without beginning or end: "from everlasting to everlasting, You are God" (Ps 90:2). He does not change — not in His being, His purpose, or His promise — for "I am the LORD, I do not change" (Mal 3:6), and with Him "there is no variation or shadow of turning" (Jas 1:17). He is present everywhere at once, so that no one can flee from Him and no one is beyond His reach: "Where can I go from Your Spirit? ... If I ascend into heaven, You are there; if I make my bed in hell, behold, You are there" (Ps 139:7–8). He knows all things — the past, the future, and the secret thoughts of every heart — for "His understanding is infinite" (Ps 147:5), and "all things are naked and open to the eyes of Him to whom we must give account" (Heb 4:13). He is almighty, able to do all His holy will: "Ah, Lord GOD! ... There is nothing too hard for You" (Jer 32:17). And He is self-existent, depending on nothing and needing nothing, the very fountain of being, who names Himself simply "I AM WHO I AM" (Ex 3:14) and who "gives to all life, breath, and all things" (Acts 17:25). He is high above all His creation — and yet, wonder of wonders, not far from any one of us.

4.What God Is Like: His Goodness

But God's greatness, standing alone, would only crush and terrify us, were it not joined to His goodness. Scripture teaches, just as surely and just as gladly, of His moral perfections — the beauty of His character. He is holy: pure, set apart, without a shadow of evil, so that the seraphim veil their faces and cry, "Holy, holy, holy is the LORD of hosts" (Isa 6:3), and He calls His people, "Be holy, for I am holy" (1 Pet 1:16). He is righteous and just: He always does what is right, His throne is founded on justice, and He "will by no means clear the guilty" (Ex 34:7). And He is good, loving, gracious, merciful, faithful, and true, as He proclaimed His own name to Moses: "The LORD, the LORD God, merciful and gracious, longsuffering, and abounding in goodness and truth" (Ex 34:6). "God is love" (1 John 4:8) — not a soft indulgence, but a holy love that seeks our highest good. Here we must take the greatest care: the two towering truths of God's character — that He is holy, and that He is love — must always be held together, for to lose either is to lose the true God. Sever His love from His holiness and you are left with mere sentiment; sever His holiness from His love and you are left with terror. Both meet, and neither is compromised, at the cross of Christ, where God is shown to be "just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus" (Rom 3:26) — where holy justice falls and measureless love saves, in one and the same act.

5.One God in Three Persons

Here Christian faith confesses something found in no other religion under heaven: that the one true God exists eternally as three persons — the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. This is not to say there are three gods; the Scriptures are unmistakably clear that "the LORD our God, the LORD is one" (Deut 6:4). Nor is it to say that the one God merely wears three masks, or plays three parts in turn — for the Father sends the Son, the Son prays to the Father, and together they send the Spirit; they speak to and love one another, and so cannot be one person under three names. Rather, within the one, undivided being of God there are three distinct persons, each fully and truly God, co-equal and co-eternal, who have loved and glorified one another from before the foundation of the world (John 17:24). The Father is God; the Son is God — "the Word was God" (John 1:1), whom doubting Thomas worshiped as "My Lord and my God!" (John 20:28); the Spirit is God — for to lie to the Holy Spirit is to "lie to God" (Acts 5:3–4). And still there is one God. We meet the three together at the Jordan, where the Son is baptized, the Spirit descends as a dove, and the Father speaks from heaven; in the Lord's own command to baptize "in the name" — one name — "of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit" (Matt 28:19); and in Paul's blessing of "the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit" (2 Cor 13:14). This mystery we cannot fully fathom, and we should not wish to worship a God small enough to fit inside our understanding. Yet it is no cold puzzle: it means that God is, in Himself and from all eternity, a fellowship of love — and that in the gospel we are drawn, astonishingly, to share in it.

6.Why It Matters

Nothing could matter more than knowing this God rightly, for what we believe about God shapes everything else we believe and are. A wrong thought of God poisons the whole stream downstream — our worship, our conscience, our hope, and our dealings with one another. A low view of Him breeds either presumption or despair; a true and high view steadies the soul in every weather. And to know Him truly is not merely to master a set of ideas about Him, but to know Him — for this is the very substance of eternal life. As Jesus prayed on the night He was betrayed, "This is eternal life, that they may know You, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom You have sent" (John 17:3). The doctrine of God, then, is no topic for the classroom only. It is the ground of all our worship, for we can rightly adore only the God who truly is. It is the steadiness of all our trust, for we lean our whole weight upon His unchanging character. And it is the very heart of the message we carry to the world — that the God who made all things has made Himself known, and calls sinners home through His Son.

7.Taking It to Heart

1.The Center of Everything

Take away Jesus Christ, and Christianity collapses; He is not one teacher among many but the very heart of the faith. The apostles never present Him as a wise man whose ideas we might adopt, but as the eternal Son in whom “all the fullness of the Godhead dwells bodily” (Colossians 2:9), the One by whom and for whom all things were made (Colossians 1:16). John tells us plainly why he wrote his Gospel: “that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that believing you may have life in His name” (John 20:31).

Two questions must therefore be answered about Him, and everything else depends on them: the question of His person — who and what He is — and the question of His work — what He accomplished. Get either wrong, and the gospel itself is lost. A Christ who is less than God cannot save; a Christ who did less than atone leaves us in our sins. So we take up each question in turn, that we may know the Savior in whom we trust.

2.Truly God

The Scriptures declare that Jesus is fully and truly God — the eternal Son, the Word who “was with God, and… was God” (John 1:1), through whom all things were made. He is not a creature, however exalted, but the Creator (Colossians 1:16); He is “the brightness of [God’s] glory and the express image of His person” (Hebrews 1:3). He receives what belongs to God alone: Thomas fell before Him crying, “My Lord and my God!” (John 20:28), and the Lord accepted the worship. He claimed oneness with the Father — “I and My Father are one” (John 10:30) — and forgave sins, which God alone can do.

Athanasius, defending this truth in the church’s early centuries, saw why so much hung upon it. Only God could undo what sin had done. A creature could not recreate a ruined creation, nor conquer death, nor bear away the sin of the world. The One who made us in the beginning is the only One who could remake us; the One who is Life itself is the only One who could swallow up death. If our Savior is to save at all, He must be God. This is not a fine point for scholars but the ground of our whole hope.

Consider what follows if this were not so. If Jesus were only a creature, then to trust Him with our souls, to pray to Him, and to worship Him would be idolatry — and the whole church, from the very first, has done exactly these things. But if He is God, then all is well: the worship the New Testament gives Him, and that heaven itself gives Him (Revelation 5:13), is His by right. The deity of Christ is not a doctrine we may take or leave; it is the difference between faith and idolatry, between a Savior and a mere example.

3.Truly Man

Yet the same Scriptures declare, just as plainly, that this eternal Son became truly man. “The Word became flesh and dwelt among us” (John 1:14). He was born of the virgin Mary and grew as a child, increasing “in wisdom and stature” (Luke 2:52). He hungered and thirsted, grew weary and slept, wept real tears at a friend’s grave, and was “in all points tempted as we are, yet without sin” (Hebrews 4:15). And He suffered and died a real death. He was not God merely appearing to be human, nor a good man merely inspired by God, but genuinely one of us.

This, too, was necessary. To stand in our place, He had to become one with those He came to save: “in all things He had to be made like His brethren, that He might be a merciful and faithful High Priest” (Hebrews 2:17). Because He shared our flesh and blood, He could die for us; because He was tempted, He can sympathize with us; because He was truly man, His obedience and His death could be counted for men. The wonder of the gospel is that the God who could not die took to Himself a nature in which He could — and did.

And so the manger and the cross belong together: the eternal Son became a son of man, so that the sons of men, through Him, might become the sons of God (John 1:12). No angel could have done it, and no mere prophet; only the God who stooped to become our brother.

4.One Person, Two Natures

How can He be both? The church has always confessed the mystery in plain terms: Jesus Christ is one person in whom two natures, full deity and full humanity, are joined — not two persons living side by side, and not the two natures blurred together into some third thing that is neither, but one Lord, truly God and truly man, forever. We cannot fully explain it, for there is nothing else like it in all the world; but we can state it clearly and guard it from the errors that would dissolve the gospel.

And here we see the wisdom of it. Our Savior had to be man, that He might truly represent us and die in our stead; and He had to be God, that His life and death might have the power and worth to save a world. Remove either, and the bridge falls. So Paul writes that there is “one Mediator between God and men, the Man Christ Jesus” (1 Timothy 2:5) — a Mediator who can lay one hand on God, for He is God, and the other on man, for He is man. The God-man is the only possible bridge between a holy God and sinful men — and in Jesus that bridge is built.

The ancient church guarded this confession against two opposite mistakes, and we must guard it still. Some so stressed His deity that His humanity became a kind of costume — but then He did not really suffer, and we are not really saved. Others so stressed His humanity that His deity shrank to a mere title of honor — but then only a man died, and a man’s death cannot atone for the world. The truth keeps both, whole and unmixed: one Person, in whom God has drawn near without ceasing to be God, and manhood is taken up without being swallowed. Hold that, and the gospel stands.

5.His Work: the Cross

What, then, did He do? First He lived the perfect life we have failed to live, keeping His Father’s law without a single fault, that His righteousness might be reckoned to us. And then He went to the cross — and there did the work that stands at the center of His whole mission. The Scriptures unfold its meaning from many sides, and we are richer for holding them together. It was a substitution: “He was wounded for our transgressions” (Isaiah 53:5), bearing in our place the penalty our sins deserved. It was a sacrifice: “the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world” (John 1:29), offered once for all (Hebrews 10:10). It was a redemption: He bought us back from our slavery to sin, not “with corruptible things… but with the precious blood of Christ” (1 Peter 1:18–19).

It was a reconciliation: through His cross our enmity with God is ended and we are brought near in peace, for “God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself” (2 Corinthians 5:19). And it was a victory: over sin, death, and the devil, disarming the powers and “triumphing over them” (Colossians 2:15). Above all, the cross is the one place where God’s holiness and His love perfectly meet — His justice against sin fully satisfied, and His love for sinners fully displayed — because He bore it Himself, in His Son, so that He might be “just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus” (Romans 3:26).

See how these pictures fit together, for no one of them says all. Substitution tells us how He saved — in our place; sacrifice, at what cost — His own blood; redemption, from what — our bondage; reconciliation, unto what — peace with God; and victory, over whom — every enemy. To press only one and forget the rest is to shrink the cross; to hold them all together is to begin to see its height and its depth. And every one of them is sheer grace, for we did nothing, and He did all.

6.His Work: the Empty Tomb

The story did not end at the grave. On the third day the tomb was empty, and Jesus rose bodily from the dead and showed Himself alive to many witnesses — to the women, to Peter, to the Twelve, and to more than five hundred at once, most of whom were still living when Paul wrote (1 Corinthians 15:3–8). Simon Greenleaf, one of the great scholars of legal evidence, examined the Gospel accounts by the strict rules of a courtroom and concluded that their testimony is of the kind an honest court would receive as true. This is no fable, but reported fact.

And what that empty tomb declares is everything. It vindicates His person, “declared to be the Son of God with power… by the resurrection from the dead” (Romans 1:4). It proves His sacrifice was accepted, for He “was raised because of our justification” (Romans 4:25). It announces the defeat of death itself, now swallowed up in victory (1 Corinthians 15:54–57). And it guarantees that all who are His will rise as He did, for He is “the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep” (1 Corinthians 15:20). Risen, He ascended to the right hand of God, where He reigns as Lord, “ever lives to make intercession” for His people as their great High Priest (Hebrews 7:25), and from where He will one day return.

This is why the resurrection was, from the first sermon onward, the very heart of the church’s preaching: “This Jesus God has raised up, of which we are all witnesses” (Acts 2:32). A dead teacher leaves only a memory; a risen Lord gives a living hope. Because He lives, His people shall live also.

7.Taking It to Heart

1.The Human Problem: Sin

We cannot understand salvation until we feel the weight of what we are saved from. God made man good and upright, in His own image, for fellowship with Himself. But our first parents, tempted, rebelled against their Maker, and through that one act “sin entered the world, and death through sin, and thus death spread to all men” (Romans 5:12). Since then the whole race is fallen — not a little damaged, but ruined at the root: “There is none righteous, no, not one… they have all turned aside” (Romans 3:10–12), and “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (Romans 3:23).

Sin is deeper than the wrong things we do; it is what we are apart from grace. Scripture calls the heart itself “deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked” (Jeremiah 17:9), and even our righteous acts, offered to buy God’s favor, are as filthy rags before Him (Isaiah 64:6). Sin is therefore three things at once: a guilt that condemns us before a holy God, a corruption that poisons our desires, and a bondage from which we cannot free ourselves. The sinner is not a healthy man who needs good advice, nor merely a weak man who needs a little help; he is, in the plain words of the apostle, “dead in trespasses and sins” (Ephesians 2:1) — and a dead man cannot raise himself. The wages of this sin is death (Romans 6:23). This is the plight that makes grace not a luxury or an improvement, but our one and only hope. Feel its weight, and the gospel becomes the best news a ruined sinner could ever hear.

2.The One Answer: Grace

To that helpless condition God gives an answer of sheer, undeserved grace. Grace is favor no one has earned and no one can repay — mercy shown to those who deserve the opposite. Salvation, therefore, is God’s free gift, not a wage we collect: “the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Romans 6:23). It comes to us not by our doing but by His: “not by works of righteousness which we have done, but according to His mercy He saved us” (Titus 3:5).

“For by grace you have been saved through faith, and that not of yourselves; it is the gift of God, not of works, lest anyone should boast.” — Ephesians 2:8–9

The hand that receives this gift is faith — and faith is not a work we perform to earn the gift, but the empty hand that takes what God freely holds out. It looks away from self and rests wholly on Christ; and because it is empty-handed, boasting is shut out altogether (Romans 3:27–28). It is worth pausing to notice that the two great voices behind this reading — John Wesley, an Arminian, and Charles Spurgeon, a Calvinist — agree here without the smallest reserve. Wesley preaches grace free for all; Spurgeon preaches salvation all of grace; and both mean the same glorious thing: that a guilty sinner is saved by God’s unearned mercy in Christ, laid hold of by faith, and never by his own goodness. Whatever else Christians dispute, this is the settled center on which the whole church stands together.

3.What Salvation Includes

This one gift of grace has many facets, like a single diamond turned to the light. In justification, God the Judge declares the believing sinner righteous — not by pretending he never sinned, but by forgiving his sins for Christ’s sake and crediting to him the perfect righteousness of Christ, so that “having been justified by faith, we have peace with God” (Romans 5:1). In regeneration, the new birth, the Spirit of God makes the dead heart alive and gives a new nature that loves what it once despised, for “unless one is born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God” (John 3:3). In adoption, God does more than acquit us; He receives us as His own children and gives us His Spirit, so that we cry, “Abba, Father” (Romans 8:15–16).

And in sanctification, He goes on, patiently and all our life long, making us actually holy — changing us “from glory to glory” into the image of His Son (2 Corinthians 3:18). One day this work will be finished in glorification, when we shall be like Him, for we shall see Him as He is. From first to last it is one seamless work of grace — begun by God, carried on by God, and one day completed by God Himself, for “He who has begun a good work in you will complete it until the day of Jesus Christ” (Philippians 1:6). Salvation is not a door we open and then walk through alone; it is a life God gives and God keeps.

4.A Debate Among Brothers

And yet, within this shared and glorious gospel, Christians who equally love the Bible have long differed over how this grace works — over how God’s sovereignty and man’s response fit together. Two great streams have flowed down the centuries: the Reformed (or Calvinist) and the Arminian. It is vital to see this rightly. This is a disagreement among brothers who are all saved by the same grace, not a battle between the church and its enemies; both sides prize the Scriptures, both exalt the cross, and both confess that no one is saved but by mercy. Here, as fairly as we can set it, is where they differ.

The fallen will. Both agree that we are lost in sin and cannot save ourselves. The Reformed hold that we are so bound that God must first give new life before anyone is willing or able to believe, and that He does so for those He has chosen. The Arminian holds that God gives an enabling, prevenient grace to all, which restores the ability to respond, so that the gospel may be genuinely accepted or refused.

Election. The Reformed hold that God chose whom He would save by His own sovereign will alone, before they were born and apart from anything in them. The Arminian holds that God chose to save all who would believe, His choice embracing those He foreknew would trust His Son.

The atonement. The Reformed hold that Christ died to secure, once for all, the actual salvation of His chosen people. The Arminian holds that Christ died for all people, so that anyone at all may be saved through faith — “the propitiation… for the whole world” (1 John 2:2).

Grace. The Reformed hold that the saving grace God gives to His own cannot in the end be resisted; it surely and sweetly brings them to faith. The Arminian holds that God’s grace genuinely enables and invites every heart, yet may be resisted and refused.

Security. The Reformed hold that the truly saved will certainly persevere and can never finally be lost. The classic Arminian holds that a believer may turn away and forfeit the salvation once received. Each side reads real texts and reasons carefully; neither is foolish, and neither is faithless.

5.Where CTS Leans — and Where We Stand Together

On these questions Chapala Theological Seminary leans, on the whole, to the Arminian side — while parting from it on the last point. We believe that God, in grace, reaches out to all and enables every sinner to respond; for Scripture says He “desires all men to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth” (1 Timothy 2:4), and the invitation is flung wide: “whoever desires, let him take the water of life freely” (Revelation 22:17). We believe His choice to save embraces all who will trust His Son; that Christ died for the whole world, not a part of it (1 John 2:2; John 3:16); and that this grace, real and mighty, can nonetheless be resisted and must never be refused — for the Lord Himself wept, “how often I wanted to gather your children together… but you were not willing” (Matthew 23:37).

Christians who agree that salvation is by grace through faith have differed over perseverance and security. Reformed Christians emphasize God’s preserving grace and texts such as John 10:28 and Romans 8:39. Many Arminians emphasize the New Testament warnings against falling away and the repeated call to continue in faith. CTS presents both concerns seriously: assurance rests in Christ and the faithfulness of God, while saving faith is never treated as irrelevant after conversion. Believers are called to continue trusting, following, and abiding in Christ.

This is not cold doctrine but the very marrow of a pastor’s comfort and courage. Because Christ died for all, we may look any sinner in the eye — the hardest case, the most hopeless — and say with full honesty, “Christ died for you; come.” Because grace can be resisted, we plead and warn, and never treat a soul as a closed book. And because assurance rests in the faithfulness of Christ rather than human merit, we can turn a trembling, weak believer away from self-reliance and toward the promises of God, while still taking seriously the New Testament call to continue in faith. Grace gives both comfort and a reason to keep trusting Christ.

We offer this as a conviction for you to weigh in the light of the open Bible, not as a wall to divide the people of God. Remember that Wesley and Spurgeon disagreed sharply on these very matters, and loved and honored one another to the end, because both bowed at the same cross and confessed the same thing: that salvation, from beginning to end, is all of grace.

6.Taking It to Heart

1.Not an “It” but a “He”

The first thing to settle is that the Holy Spirit is a Person, and not a mere force or energy that we might learn to switch on and use. Torrey pressed this point with great care, because everything else depends on it. A person is a being with mind, will, and affection — and the Spirit has all three. He has a mind, for He knows and even searches out “the deep things of God” (1 Corinthians 2:10–11). He has a will, for He distributes His gifts “to each one individually as He wills” (1 Corinthians 12:11). And He has affection, for He can be grieved (Ephesians 4:30), and Scripture speaks of “the love of the Spirit” (Romans 15:30).

He also does the works that only a person can do. He teaches and brings truth to remembrance (John 14:26); He guides into all truth (John 16:13); He speaks, and calls men to their work (Acts 13:2); He forbids and redirects the steps of His servants (Acts 16:6–7); He appoints overseers (Acts 20:28); and He intercedes for the saints (Romans 8:26). And He can be treated as a person is treated — lied to (Acts 5:3), resisted (Acts 7:51), and grieved (Ephesians 4:30). The difference this makes is enormous, and intensely practical. We do not try to harness an impersonal power for our own ends; we yield ourselves to a divine Person, that He may take us up and use us for His.

2.Truly God

And this Person is fully God — the third person of the Holy Trinity, equal in nature and glory with the Father and the Son. He possesses what God alone possesses. He is eternal, “the eternal Spirit” (Hebrews 9:14); He is everywhere present, so that David asks, “Where can I go from Your Spirit?” (Psalm 139:7); He knows all things, even the depths of God (1 Corinthians 2:10–11). He does what God alone can do, sharing in the work of creation, for “the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters” (Genesis 1:2), and it is His breath that gives life (Job 33:4). And Scripture plainly names Him God: when Peter confronted Ananias for lying “to the Holy Spirit,” he said, “You have not lied to men but to God” (Acts 5:3–4). He stands beside the Father and the Son in the baptismal name (Matthew 28:19) and in the apostolic blessing (2 Corinthians 13:14). To have the Spirit, therefore, is no small or secondary thing: it is to have God Himself come to dwell within you.

This truth is not for the lecture hall only; it is a deep comfort. The believer is never alone and never merely self-reliant, for the almighty God dwells in him by His Spirit. The same Spirit who brooded over the dark waters and brought forth a world, and who raised Jesus from the dead, has taken up residence in ordinary men and women. What can finally defeat a soul in whom God Himself has come to live? “He who is in you,” John writes, “is greater than he who is in the world” (1 John 4:4).

3.The Spirit and the Savior

The Spirit has been at work from the very beginning — moving over the waters at creation (Genesis 1:2), renewing the face of the earth and giving life to every creature (Psalm 104:30), and carrying along the prophets of old, who “spoke as they were moved by the Holy Spirit” (2 Peter 1:21). But He is seen most beautifully of all resting upon Jesus. The Lord was conceived by the Spirit (Luke 1:35); anointed by the Spirit as He came up from the waters of baptism (Luke 3:22); led by the Spirit into the wilderness and back again in power (Luke 4:1, 14); and He cast out demons “by the Spirit of God” (Matthew 12:28), for God “anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Spirit and with power” (Acts 10:38). Here is the pattern for all ministry: even the sinless Son of God did His work in the power of the Spirit. And the same Spirit who filled the Head now fills His body, the church — which is why the risen Christ told His disciples not to rush out and labor, but first to wait until they were “endued with power from on high” (Luke 24:49; Acts 1:8).

What the Lord promised, the day of Pentecost fulfilled: the Spirit came upon the waiting church in fullness, and timid men became bold witnesses who turned the world upside down (Acts 2). The age of the Spirit had come, and it has not ended — the same promised Spirit is given still to all who belong to Christ.

4.The Spirit Who Gives Life

It is the Holy Spirit who takes the great salvation Christ purchased on the cross and actually works it in us; without Him it would remain a treasure locked away and never possessed. He convicts, “convict[ing] the world of sin, and of righteousness, and of judgment” (John 16:8), pressing the truth upon a sleeping conscience until a sinner sees his need. He regenerates, giving the new birth, so that “that which is born of the Spirit is spirit” (John 3:6) and a dead soul becomes a living child of God. He indwells, coming to make His home within every true believer, whose very body becomes “the temple of the Holy Spirit” (1 Corinthians 6:19) — indeed, “if anyone does not have the Spirit of Christ, he is not His” (Romans 8:9). And He gives assurance, “bear[ing] witness with our spirit that we are children of God” (Romans 8:16), sealing us as God’s own possession “for the day of redemption” (Ephesians 1:13–14; 4:30). Conviction, new birth, indwelling, assurance — every step from the first awakening to settled peace is the work of the Spirit of God.

Notice the order and the wonder of it. First the Spirit awakens a conscience that was fast asleep; then He imparts a life that was not there before; then He moves in to stay; and then He quiets the reborn heart with the settled knowledge that it belongs to God. Not one of these is the sinner’s own doing. A man can no more convict, regenerate, or seal himself than a corpse can quicken its own heart — a birth, after all, is never the achievement of the one being born.

5.The Spirit Who Makes Us Like Christ

Nor does the Spirit stop at the new birth. Through the whole of the Christian life He is at work to make us like Jesus. He sanctifies, bearing His own fruit in us — “love, joy, peace, longsuffering, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control” (Galatians 5:22–23) — and changing us “from glory to glory” into the image of Christ (2 Corinthians 3:18). He empowers believers for witness and service, filling them for the work God gives (Acts 1:8; Ephesians 5:18). He gives gifts to His people to build up the church, “distributing to each one individually as He wills” (1 Corinthians 12:11; Romans 12:6–8). He helps us pray, for “we do not know what we should pray for as we ought, but the Spirit Himself makes intercession for us” (Romans 8:26). And He guides and teaches, opening the Scriptures and leading believers into truth (John 16:13; 1 Corinthians 2:12–13). On some questions here — the precise nature of the Spirit’s “baptism,” and whether certain gifts continue today as they did at the first — sincere, Bible-loving Christians reach different conclusions; CTS leaves each student free to search the Scriptures, while all agree on the great thing: that the Spirit truly empowers, sanctifies, and equips the church of God today.

Two cautions keep this balanced. The fruit of the Spirit is not the same as the gifts of the Spirit: a believer may have striking gifts and little fruit, or humble gifts and much fruit — and it is the fruit, the Christlike character, that most surely marks the Spirit’s deep work. And sanctification is patient work, not a single leap. The Spirit does not perfect us in an hour; He conforms us to Christ across a lifetime, often through slow growth and hard providences, until the day the work is done. So we neither despair over our remaining sin nor grow proud of our progress, but keep yielding to the One who is patiently finishing what He began.

6.Living in the Spirit

Here, then, is the great practical truth toward which the whole doctrine bends: neither the Christian life nor the church’s work can be carried on by human effort. Everything that matters — new life, holiness, power, prayer, fruit, and light in the Scriptures — comes down from the Spirit of God. This is why the New Testament does not merely inform us about the Spirit but commands a whole way of living in dependence on Him: “walk in the Spirit” (Galatians 5:16); “let us also walk in the Spirit,” keeping in step with Him (Galatians 5:25); and “be filled with the Spirit” (Ephesians 5:18). The word once spoken to Zerubbabel stands over every ministry to this day: “Not by might nor by power, but by My Spirit, says the Lord of hosts” (Zechariah 4:6). The measure of a work for God is not its cleverness, its energy, or its resources, but its humble, moment-by-moment dependence on the Spirit who alone gives the increase.

Notice, too, that the command to “be filled” stands in the present tense — not a single crisis to look back on, but a continual filling to seek again and again. Yesterday’s fullness will not carry today’s work. The wisest and most gifted servant of God is only ever as useful as he is, this hour, dependent on the Spirit; and the plainest believer, filled and yielded, can be mightily used. So we come back, morning by morning, empty and asking, that He may fill us and send us out.

7.Taking It to Heart

1.Where History Is Going

The Bible does not see time as an endless circle turning nowhere, nor as a road that fades into darkness. History is a story — and it has an ending that God Himself has fixed. From the first page to the last, Scripture moves with purpose: from creation, through the fall and the long work of redemption, toward a destined completion when God will “gather together in one all things in Christ” (Ephesians 1:10). The One who began the story will finish it, and finish it gloriously.

This is why all theology finally looks forward. Everything God has done in creating and redeeming He means to bring to its appointed end — in the return of His Son, the raising of the dead, the judgment of all mankind, and the making new of heaven and earth (Revelation 21:5). Peter calls it “the times of restoration of all things, which God has spoken by the mouth of all His holy prophets” (Acts 3:21). To study the last things, then, is not idle gazing at the horizon; it is to learn how the story ends, so that we may live now in the steady light of that ending.

For the believer, that ending is not a darkness to be feared but a promise to be lived toward; the best is not behind us, nor even merely around us, but ahead of us, held safe in the hands of a faithful God.

2.Death and What Lies Beyond It

For each of us, the first “last thing” is death — “it is appointed for men to die once, but after this the judgment” (Hebrews 9:27). Since the fall it has been an enemy, the last enemy to be destroyed (1 Corinthians 15:26); it was never part of God’s first, good world, and something in us rightly recoils from it. Yet for the believer its sting is drawn, for Christ has met it and beaten it: “O Death, where is your sting?… thanks be to God, who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ” (1 Corinthians 15:55–57).

What happens at death? Scripture teaches that the Christian’s soul goes at once to be consciously with the Lord. To be “absent from the body” is to be “present with the Lord” (2 Corinthians 5:8); Paul desired “to depart and be with Christ, which is far better” (Philippians 1:23); and the Lord promised the dying thief, “Today you will be with Me in Paradise” (Luke 23:43). This is what theologians call the intermediate state — the believer at home with Christ, and the body resting in the grave, both awaiting the resurrection; while the one who dies apart from Christ is separated from Him. Death remains an enemy — but for those who are in Christ, it is a defeated one, and its far side is not darkness but the presence of the Lord.

3.The Blessed Hope: Christ Will Return

The great forward-looking hope of the whole New Testament is the return of Jesus Christ. As the angels told the watching disciples at His ascension, “This same Jesus, who was taken up from you into heaven, will so come in like manner as you saw Him go” (Acts 1:11). He will return personally — the same Jesus; visibly — “every eye will see Him” (Revelation 1:7); and in glory — not now as the lowly Servant of His first coming, but as the reigning King, “on the clouds of heaven with power and great glory” (Matthew 24:30).

This is what Scripture calls the church’s “blessed hope” (Titus 2:13), and every branch of orthodox Christianity confesses it, however differently its members may picture the details. It is worth holding that distinction clearly: that He will come is certain and shared; exactly how the surrounding events unfold is where good Christians differ. And because no one knows the day or the hour (Matthew 24:36), the hope is meant to be lived in a posture of readiness — not a date on a calendar, but a lamp kept burning.

And why is the hope called “blessed”? Because for the church His coming is not a thing to dread but the day of all our longing — when faith will become sight, when the scattered will be gathered home, and when the suffering people of God, so often poor and persecuted in this present age, will at last see their King face to face and reign with Him. It is a hope that does its work now, in the heart that holds it: “everyone who has this hope in Him purifies himself, just as He is pure” (1 John 3:3). The one who truly waits for Christ lives differently while he waits.

4.Resurrection, Judgment, and the Two Eternities

When Christ returns, the dead will be raised — not as ghosts or bare spirits, but bodily; and those who are His will be raised in glorified bodies like His own, for He “will transform our lowly body that it may be conformed to His glorious body” (Philippians 3:21; 1 Corinthians 15:42–44). Then comes the final judgment. Every person who has ever lived will stand before God; “the books were opened” (Revelation 20:12), “for we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ” (2 Corinthians 5:10), and each one’s eternal destiny will be made known and sealed.

And there are, Scripture solemnly teaches, two eternities. For the redeemed there is a new heaven and a new earth — the very dwelling of God with His people, where He “will wipe away every tear from their eyes,” and there shall be no more death nor sorrow nor crying nor pain, for the former things will have passed away (Revelation 21:1–4). And for those who finally and forever refuse God, there is hell — a real and dreadful separation from His presence (Matthew 25:46; 2 Thessalonians 1:9). We do not speak of this to frighten or to paint lurid pictures, but because our Lord Himself spoke of it plainly and in love. Heaven and hell are not fables told to children; they are the two roads on which every human life is even now traveling — which is why the gospel is such urgent good news.

There is deep comfort here, too, for those who have stood at a grave. The bodies of believers laid in the earth are not lost or forgotten; they are as seed sown, awaiting a glorious harvest, for “the dead in Christ will rise first” (1 Thessalonians 4:16). And for the one who is in Christ, that day of judgment holds no dread of condemnation, for “there is therefore now no condemnation to those who are in Christ Jesus” (Romans 8:1) — his sins were judged already at the cross. He comes to that great day not as a criminal to sentencing, but as a child welcomed home.

5.The One Debated Question: The Millennium

Revelation 20 speaks of Christ and His saints reigning for “a thousand years,” and it is over the meaning and the timing of that reign that sincere Christians most differ. CTS holds no partisan position on it. Here, fairly, are the main views its shelf sets before you, each held by godly students of the same Scriptures.

Premillennial (in both an older “historic” and a later “dispensational” form): Christ returns before the thousand years, and then reigns upon the earth for that age, after which come the final judgment and the new creation. Those who hold it point to a natural reading of Revelation 19–20, where the Lord’s appearing is followed by the reign. The dispensational form adds a fuller scheme, with a distinct future for national Israel.

Amillennial: the “thousand years” is understood as a symbol of the whole present age, in which the risen Christ reigns with His saints between His two comings; He then returns to the judgment and the eternal state. Those who hold it note Revelation’s heavily symbolic language and the New Testament’s picture of one great return rather than two stages.

Postmillennial: through the spread of the gospel the world will be increasingly brought under Christ’s rule — a long “golden age” of gospel success — after which He returns to the judgment and the eternal state. Those who hold it point to the promises that the knowledge of the Lord will fill the earth and that Christ must reign until His enemies are made His footstool.

Related questions — the timing of the “rapture,” a coming tribulation, and the place of Israel — are answered differently within these views, especially among premillennialists. On all of this the seminary leaves you free before the open Bible. But do not miss how much is not in dispute: that Christ will return in glory, that the dead will be raised, that all will be judged, and that God will make all things new. That is the settled hope in which the whole church stands together, whatever the chart on the wall.

6.Ready and Waiting

The doctrine of the last things was never given us to feed idle speculation or endless argument, but to change how we live today. It calls us to be ready — watchful and holy, our lamps trimmed and burning, since “the Son of Man is coming at an hour you do not expect” (Matthew 24:44). It calls us to work — to warn and win the lost while it is still day, for “the night is coming when no one can work” (John 9:4). And it calls us to hope — to comfort one another, and the grieving, with the sure word that the King is coming and every tear will be wiped away; “therefore comfort one another with these words” (1 Thessalonians 4:18).

So the study of the end is intensely practical. It steadies the suffering, who know their trouble is light and momentary next to the weight of glory to come. It sobers the comfortable, who are tempted to live as though this world were all. And it lifts the eyes of the whole church to its returning Lord. Fittingly, the last word of the whole Bible is a prayer for that day: “Amen. Come, Lord Jesus!” (Revelation 22:20).

7.Taking It to Heart