Grieving and quenching the Spirit may be done unintentionally by
lack of thought and prayer and hearty devotion to the Lord Jesus;
but they prepare the way and lead to intentional and positive
resistance to the Spirit.
To resist the Spirit is to fight against Him.
The sinner who, listening to the Gospel invitation, and convicted
of sin, refuses to submit to God in true repentance and faith in
Jesus, is resisting the Holy Spirit. We have bold and striking
historical illustrations of the danger of resisting the Holy
Spirit in the disasters which befell Pharaoh, and the terrible
calamities which came upon Jerusalem, and have for twenty
centuries followed the Jews.
The ten plagues that came upon Pharaoh and his people were ten
opportunities and open doors into God's favour and fellowship,
which they themselves shut by their stubborn resistance, only to
be overtaken by dreadful catastrophe.
To the Jews, Stephen said: "Ye do always resist the Holy Ghost"
(Acts vii. 51); and the siege and fall of Jerusalem, and the
butchery and banishment and enslavement of its inhabitants, and
all the woes that came upon the Jews, followed their rejection of
Jesus and the hardness of heart and spiritual blindness which
swiftly overtook them when they resisted all the loving efforts
and entreaties of His disciples baptised with the Holy Spirit.
And what on a large scale befalls nations and people, on a small
scale also befalls individuals.
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