I don’t believe I said that at all. The Spirit was with or on people in the OT as a general rule; indwelling as a constant experience doesn’t happen until Pentecost.
I was not aware that Calvinists held such a position as the OT indwelling of the Spirit as in the NT.
Doug
The indwelling Holy Spirit is a result of being born again, i.e., being regenerated. Calvinist doctrine demands that one be born again before one can even believe in God. Thus any in the OT who believed in God must have been born again, i.e., must have been regenerated. That is mandated by the doctrine of Total Depravity.
I wonder if part of the difficulty here is that we may be blending categories that Scripture does not explicitly equate.
It certainly seems clear that no one ... Old Testament or New ....has ever believed apart from the work of the Spirit. Abraham believed God (Genesis 15:6), and genuine faith surely required spiritual life.
At the same time, Jesus says in John 14:17 that the Spirit was “with” the disciples but would later be “in” them. That suggests some kind of shift connected to the New Covenant and Pentecost.
So perhaps we need to distinguish between:
The Spirit giving life (regeneration), And the New Covenant, permanent indwelling/sealing ministry described after Christ’s glorification (Ephesians 1:13).
Those may be closely related, but Scripture does not explicitly say they functioned identically in every era.
David’s prayer in Psalm 51:11 (“take not Your Holy Spirit from me”) also suggests that the Spirit’s presence under the Old Covenant was not described in quite the same permanent sealing language we see later.
And regarding the order of salvation, I think we should also be careful not to state more than Scripture states. The Bible
never explicitly says, “The Spirit regenerates someone months or years before they believe.” That is a theological construction, not a direct verse. While many hold that regeneration logically precedes faith, the text itself consistently presents faith and reception of the Spirit in very close connection (for example, Ephesians 1:13).
So rather than assuming Calvinism demands one conclusion, or that OT believers had no regenerative work of the Spirit, it might be more accurate to say....The Spirit has always been the source of spiritual life, but the covenantal indwelling ministry appears to reach its fullness at Pentecost.
That seems to preserve both continuity and development in redemptive history.