Why Jehovah’s Witnesses Are Wrong About the Holy Spirit

I’m a big nap guy. I tend to wake up around five in the morning and then get more done in three hours than most folks get done in a day. By early afternoon, however, I start to crash and am in need of a nap. Or a double shot of espresso. Preferably both.

One day, several years back, I told my wife I was going to lie down for a bit. But just as my head hit the pillow, she cracked open the bedroom door.

“Hey honey,” she said, “sorry to wake you, but there are two guys at the door with Bibles and I know how excited that gets you.”

The good woman knows me well.

The nap could wait.

It was two Jehovah’s Witnesses. Now, real quick, in case your only exposure to them is seeing sharply dressed people standing beside literature carts in airports or city centers offering free Bible studies, Jehovah’s Witnesses are a religious movement founded in the late nineteenth century that denies core Christian doctrines such as the Trinity, the full divinity of Jesus Christ, and the personhood of the Holy Spirit. In many ways, their theology revives ancient Arianism, the early heresy that denied the full divinity of Christ and was condemned by the Church at Nicaea in A.D. 325.

On this particular day, the three of us were sitting out front of my house in cheap plastic lawn chairs when one of them said something like:

“We don’t believe the Holy Spirit is a divine Person. Rather, the Holy Spirit is Jehovah God’s active force, the means by which He carries out His will and accomplishes His purposes. It is not equal with the Father or the Son, but is God’s impersonal power in action.”

At first glance, it’s understandable why someone might think this. Scripture sometimes speaks of the Spirit being “poured out” (Acts 2:17), or filling people with power (Acts 1:8). And because we can’t see the Holy Spirit, it can be tempting to think of Him as more like electricity than a person.

But when you actually read the New Testament carefully, that interpretation becomes impossible to maintain. So what follows is what I should have said to those two fellas that day, or at least what I wish I’d said more clearly.

The New Testament repeatedly attributes personal actions to the Holy Spirit.

He teaches:

“The Counselor, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, he will teach you all things” (John 14:26).

He guides:

“When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all truth” (John 16:13).

He speaks:

“While they were worshiping the Lord and fasting, the Holy Spirit said, ‘Set apart for me Barnabas and Saul for the work to which I have called them’” (Acts 13:2).

He wills and makes decisions:

“All these are inspired by one and the same Spirit, who apportions to each one individually as he wills” (1 Cor. 12:11).

He intercedes:

“The Spirit himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words” (Rom. 8:26–27).

He bears witness:

“The Holy Spirit also bears witness to us” (Heb. 10:15).

And He can even be grieved:

“Do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God” (Eph. 4:30).

Impersonal things don’t teach, guide, speak, make decisions, intercede, or bear witness. Neither can they be grieved.

But the Holy Spirit does.

And the New Testament doesn’t merely present the Holy Spirit as a person. It presents Him as divine, which is another doctrine Jehovah’s Witnesses reject.

Consider Acts 5. Peter confronts Ananias for lying about the money from a land sale: “Why has Satan filled your heart to lie to the Holy Spirit?” (Acts 5:3). Then, only a verse later, Peter says: “You have not lied to man but to God” (Acts 5:4).

Conclusion? To lie to the Holy Spirit is to lie to God. Not merely because the Spirit comes from God, but because the Holy Spirit is God.

Or consider St. Paul’s words in 1 Corinthians: “Do you not know that you are God’s temple and that God’s Spirit dwells in you?” (1 Cor. 3:16).

This is profound. In the Old Testament, the temple was the dwelling place of God Himself. Yet Paul says Christians are temples precisely because the Holy Spirit dwells within them. Paul’s point is clear: if the Holy Spirit dwells in God’s temple, then the Holy Spirit is God.

And then there’s this striking line from 2 Corinthians: “Now the Lord is the Spirit” (2 Cor. 3:17). Paul is not collapsing the Persons of the Trinity into one another, but he is unmistakably speaking of the Spirit in divine terms.

Jesus Himself also places the Holy Spirit alongside the Father and the Son in the baptismal formula: “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit” (Matt. 28:19).

Notice Jesus does not say “in the names,” but “in the name,” singular. Nor does He place the Holy Spirit alongside the Father and the Son as though He were some impersonal force.

Another thing to consider is this: the New Testament presents the Christian life not as communion with a mere force (because communion with a force is impossible), but with a divine Person who dwells within us.

The Holy Spirit is not described as some kind of spiritual electricity that God uses to zap believers with power from time to time. He comforts, convicts, guides, sanctifies, and prays within us. As St. Paul says: “The Spirit himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words” (Rom. 8:26).

There it is again. Not “itself.” “Himself.”

St. Paul could easily have spoken of the Spirit as an impersonal power. He does the exact opposite. Again and again, the New Testament writers use personal language because they understood the Holy Spirit to be a divine Person.