The series on “Creeping Calvinism,” provides more information about the book, Evangelistic Women, which also contains errors concerning the Holy Spirit. The author erroneously states: “We hinder our ministries when we suppress the Spirit,” which is followed by the following quote from 1 Thessalonians 5:19: “Do not put out the Spirit’s fire.” The author does not say what version she is using, although two dozen could be listed that she did not reference. She assures her readers that another version uses quench. Actually, most translations have quench because that is the meaning of the Greek word. However, she adds that it means to “put out the Spirit’s fire” (26).
The fact of the matter is that the Greek word translated “quench” is found eight times in the New Testament. The first time it refers to Jesus not quenching a smoking flax (Matt. 12:20); the second reference is to the five virgins whose lamps had “gone out” (Matt. 25:8). Three times Jesus referred to hell as a place where “the fire is not quenched” (Mark 9:44, 46, 48). In Ephesians 6:16, the shield of faith is able “to quench all the fiery darts of the wicked.” In Hebrews 11:34, heroes of the faith “quenched the violence of fire….” None of these refer to the Holy Spirit; the fires referenced are all different. The idea that Paul is writing that brethren should not “put out the Spirit’s fire” is not the meaning at all.
The only passage that comes close to saying such a thing is Jeremiah 20:9; the prophet was so discouraged about preaching that he had determined to quit. “But His word was in my heart like a burning fire shut up in my bones; I was weary of holding it back, and I could not.” The key word is like. In 1 Thessalonians 5:19, what is being held back is inspiration, which is a compulsion—like a fire. Kittel writes the following: “Paul is rather warning of a deliberate suppression of the extraordinary operations of the Spirit in the congregation…” (VII:168).
The author of Evangelistic Women instead thinks of the quenching that the “people who do this know the Spirit lives within them, but the Spirit does not affect them because they keep Him suppressed” (26). This was not the meaning when Paul wrote it, nor is it the meaning now. Brother Thomas B. Warren likewise believed that quenching the Spirit referred to a refusal to use miraculous gifts in the first century. He further comments: “Today, the Holy Spirit speaks to no one in a miraculous way, but only through the Word (the Bible). Today, one can ‘quench’ the Spirit by rejecting the Word…” Studies in 1, 2 Thessalonians, Philemon, edited by Dub McClish (199). The only way Christians can quench the Spirit today is by rejecting what He revealed in the Word.