Sellers’s Baptismology, Part 5: Identification with the Holy Spirit, Who Produces an Attitude of Submission to the Kingdom

503 Chestnut St., Winnetka IL, the building where Otis Q. Sellers lived in 1935 (before moving to Grand Rapids, MI in 1936) and wrote “The Glory of the One Baptism.”

The first way to submit was to accept John’s baptism, a water ceremony God gave him to perform. God regarded Israelites who underwent it as submissive to the Kingdom. They thereby incurred responsibility, and failure to meet it entailed dire consequences.

To illustrate this, Sellers invoked the military recruitment drive in the United States that began after Pearl Harbor. Millions of civilians became, by a solemn ceremony, oath, and profession of submission, members of the U.S. military. “In this oath there is a promise of submission. So, once a man steps forward, raises his right hand, repeats the oath, he becomes identified with the military, he is no longer a civilian.” Any transgressions he might commit are adjudicated by the system of military, not civilian justice.

Jesus underwent John’s baptism because He wanted to be identified with Israel’s submissive ones: “I do not seek my own will, but the will of him who sent me (John 5:30); “My food is to do the will of Him who sent Me and to accomplish His work (John 4:34). John’s ceremony didn’t add to this submissiveness, but it did identify Him with those who were submissive, thereby “fulfilling all righteousness” (Matthew 3:15).

John the Baptist was a divinely commissioned herald. It was his duty to announce what God told him to announce. He would have been unfaithful if he had changed the message by addition, omission, or alteration. The first word of his proclamation was μετανοεῖτε (metanoeite). This means “be submitting,” and it indicates a state or condition, something that would be true of them every day of their lives.

Submission is an attitude toward God that His Spirit produces in men.

Sellers believed that “no phrase in the Bible . . . has been more misused, abused, and misunderstood than John’s simple promise concerning the Lord Jesus Christ: ‘He shall baptize you with the Holy Spirit and with fire’ (Matthew 3:11)”:

The history of religion will reveal that it has ever been the tendency of men to work up and produce some grandiose and pretentious emotional experience, then give it the name of something else that is set forth in the Word of God. . . .

Even so it is with the phrase “baptism in the Holy Spirit.” Many indeed have led themselves to believe that this phrase is the promise of an unusual, highly emotional, religious experience that comes to men, bringing to them some great, out-of-this-world power resulting in such manifestations as making unintelligible sounds, having convulsions of the flesh (head-jerking, eye-rolling), falling over in a faint, all of which are supposed to result in a victory over sin so complete that one will never sin again.[1]

Another misrepresentation is that baptism was a blessing that Israel had never before given, which makes a mystery out of how those who heard John understood what he meant by μετανοεῖτε (metanoeite; or the Aramaic original). Being merged with or related to the Spirit of God was not something new for the people of Israel. After all, Sellers asks, where did the 39 books of the Old Testament come from? Peter gave the answer: “Holy men of God spake as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit” (2 Pet 1:21).

He [Peter] identifies the utterances of these men as being from the Holy Spirit made by men who were permeated by the Spirit of God, even as the dye permeates the cloth into which it is dipped. The writers of the Old Testament were identified with the Spirit of God in their utterances.

When patriarch Joseph was made prime minister of Egypt, “he served the people as a man related to God’s Holy Spirit (Genesis 41:38).

In Exodus 31:3 we have God’s word for it that He had filled Bezaleel with the Spirit of God. This was what made him the artisan and craftsman that he was. This man was identified with the Holy Spirit and the beautiful things he made were the work of God’s Spirit (Exodus 35:31). In Judges 3:10; 6:34; and 14:6, 19 we find that Othniel, Gideon, and Samson were identified and merged with the Spirit of God, and it was this relationship that made them able to do what they did as judges in Israel. It was God who raised them up and it was God who identified them with His Spirit.

By the Holy Spirit David said “the Lord said to my Lord, Sit thou on My right hand, till I make thine enemies thy footstool” (Mark 12:36).

Identification with the Holy Spirit had been the privilege of many. Thus, when the people of Israel heard John declare that the Lord Jesus would baptize (identify) them with the Holy Spirit, they knew what He was promising them.

In a few years, however, they learned what that would mean for them: “Ye shall receive power, after that the Holy Spirit is come upon you and ye shall be witnesses unto Me, both in Jerusalem, and in all Judea, and in Samaria, and unto the uttermost part of the earth” (Acts 1:8).

. . . the Spirit of God comes upon men, is put within them, fills them, and becomes identified with men in order that these men may do the work God wants done or accomplish the purpose He has in mind. . . . God’s Spirit may even come upon evil men for a time in order to accomplish the divine purpose. See 1 Samuel 19:20, 23.

Those who were identified with the Holy Spirit spoke and acted on God’s behalf.

They were mediators between God and men.[2] Of course, this was not in an unlimited way. Obadiah was related to the Spirit of God and he produced a book of one short chapter. Isaiah by the Spirit of God produced a book of sixty-six chapters. Both did what God wanted done.

No more, no less.

When the 120 disciples were identified with the Holy Spirit on the day of Pentecost, God made this fact and relationship manifest by a sound (blast) from heaven, and individual tongues like as of fire. This company, being filled with the Holy Spirit, began to witness, speaking in the various languages that were common to the devout Jews who were out of every nation (Acts 2:5). This amazed all the people and prompted them to inquire as to what all this meant. Peter supplied the answer by declaring that Jesus whom God had raised from the dead had received the promise of the Holy Spirit and had shed forth that which they were now seeing and hearing (Acts 2:33). The results were the proof that these 120 disciples were individually and personally identified with the Spirit of God.

In Antioch, a dispute arose over circumcision (Acts 15), a contingent of believers led by Paul and Barnabas went up to Jerusalem to put the matter before the apostles and elders. They responded with a letter to the Antiochan brethren which declared that “It seemed good to the Holy Spirit, and to us, to lay upon you no greater burden than these necessary things” (Acts 15:28).

Thus these men identified themselves with the Holy Spirit, which they had every right to do. He had spoken to them, and they in turn were speaking for Him. If they had not been speaking the truth, this being the Acts period, they would have died then and there, even as Ananias and Sapphira in Acts 5.

To be continued.

Notes

[1] “Identification with the Holy Spirit,” Seed & Bread, No. 138, March 10, 1981

[2] There’s only one such mediator today. 1 Timothy 2:5.

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