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Jim's PERSPECTIVE

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September 23, 2014

And the angel answered and said unto her, “The Holy Ghost shall come upon thee, and the power of the Highest shall overshadow thee: therefore also that holy thing which shall be born of thee shall be called the Son of God.” Luke 1:35

For me, the essence of the Christian religion is the Incarnation. And it is impossible to consider the Incarnation apart from an understanding of the Holy Spirit. In all four gospels, John the Baptist preaches the coming of the Christ, declaring that “the one who is to come” will baptize with the Holy Spirit (Matthew 3, Mark 1, Luke 3, John 1). The angel comes to Mary and tells her that she will conceive by means of the Holy Spirit. Zechariah and Elizabeth are both filled with the Holy Spirit and prophesy concerning God’s promised Advent (coming).

We have said, and we have heard it said by others, that the doctrine of the Holy Spirit is neglected in the church. One would wonder why, since the New Testament has so much to say about it. When I use the pronoun “it,” I mean the subject, or the activity, of the Holy Spirit. The actual Person of the Holy Spirit is, well, a person. Many of us know that. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that we have been taught that, having learned in Sunday School and in church, or through our parents and/or others, about the concept of the Holy Spirt within the context of the Trinity. Therefore we know a number of ways to express the persons of God: Father, Son, Holy Spirit, the Three-in-One. A favorite way, for me, to express this relationship is to say, “God the first time, God the second time, and God the third time. But who is the Holy Spirit (at least doctrinally)?

Article IV of the Discipline of the United Methodist Church states that
The Holy Ghost, proceeding from the Father and
the Son, is of one substance, majesty, and glory
with the Father and the Son, very and eternal God.

In other words, what God reveals is true of the Son and the Spirit; what Jesus reveals is true of the Father and the Spirit; and what the Spirit reveals is true of the Father and the Son. The Holy Spirit is not to be thought of as some numinous, ghostly power. To understand the assertion that God is Spirit, this must be understood in the context of who Jesus is. Put simply, the Spirit is undoubtedly the Spirit of Jesus Christ. “The Lord is the Spirit” (2 Corinthians 3:17) is to be regarded as self-evident in that through Jesus Christ the Spirit has entered human history as the heir of the Old Testament promise. But this does not mean that Jesus as the Holy Spirit is a “new,” so to speak. When we say God became Christ, we are not denying the Spirit’s pre-existence. Rather, we say that the second person of the Trinity was Incarnate.

It is the primary role of the Spirit to make Jesus real, available, and present (John 16:13- 15), and to “witness with our (human) spirits” (Romans 8:16). The Spirit is the power whereby God makes himself known in the here and now. By means of the Spirit, God is able to identify with us in our contemporary circumstances. Thus, one understanding of the Spirit is that of a Comforter (John 14). As the Spirit, he is truly Emmanuel—God with us. While God the Holy Spirit is “as close as breathing,” and comes to invite, engage, participate, convict, and woo us in love into fruit-bearing union with Jesus (John 15), he never forces us to respond.

Not the least important aspect of the Spirit of God is that the Spirit comes to assure the believer that he or she is a child of God. Romans 8 declares that it is the Spirit who puts the spirit of adoption within our human hearts that allows us to call God “Abba,” or, roughly translated from the Aramaic, “Daddy.” This simply means that because of the Spirit’s affirmation of our standing with God, we have the right, not only to be called “children of God” (1 John), but to be on the most intimate terms with God.

The reference to the Holy Spirit means that God did not stop with just the sacrifice Jesus makes at Calvary, or even with his resurrection and ascension. For God to have made this his goal would suggest that human comprehension of God would consist of reliance on some objective, mental assent to what God has done. Instead, through the promise of the Holy Spirit to indwell believers, God becomes a bridge to other human beings, showing that his goal is the fulfillment of human possibility and individual identity. “This is the mystery hidden for ages and generations but now made known to his saints...which is Christ in you, the hope of glory” (Colossians 1:26-27). What God does in Jesus, Jesus, by means of his Holy Spirit, does in us: he births himself. It is a mystery, and, for me, the most exciting one.

All this said, the previous “explanation” of the Holy Spirit is theological and doctrinal. But to ask who the Holy Spirit is in the context of actual experience (read: sense experience) is an altogether different conversation.

The idea that an infinite Creator could—or would—come to live in human flesh is an idea that is repugnant, philosophically and conceptually to a great many people in the world. For example, in Eastern thought, the notion of an individual soul—the Atman—being absorbed back into the Brahman (because it is seen, after “enlightenment,” as identical with the Brahman) is good and acceptable. That would be analogous to a drop of water being re-absorbed into the ocean. However, the reverse understanding, that the Brahman in its fullness would live in a contingent, finite being is incoherent and unacceptable, and makes as much sense as saying that the ocean would fit in a glass. But Christians say, without apology, that God comes to live in human flesh.

Atheists (God does not exist), agnostics (one cannot know whether God does or doesn’t exist), materialists (matter is all there is; there is no energy apart from matter), dynamists (energy is all there is; matter is a myth), philosophers who deny the existence of universals (independently existing metaphysical entities not subject to change), would all deny the Incarnation on intellectual grounds.

Dr. Michael Shermer, one of today’s leading atheists/skeptics has gone around the country “demonstrating” through the use of electrodes attached to a certain lobe of the brain— and “proving” in his understanding—that the sensation of apprehension of non-physical entities can be simulated through the manipulations of electrical currents. When I heard an NPR rebroadcast of a segment of one of those “demonstrations,” I had to laugh out loud because it immediately occurred to me that all he has succeeded in proving is that humans have, built into our brains, an actual facility for apprehending—via sensual experience—non-physical entities. He neither proves nor disproves the existence of the entity itself. But kudos to Dr. Shermer for proving that humans have the capability of discerning through sense experience the Holy Spirit when he chooses to come to them. I already knew that, though, as well as do others.

Many Christians will testify to the same experience, in varying modes of expression, of the sensation and awareness of the Holy Spirit when he comes. When I mention “varying modes of expression,” however, I mean to suggest that there is no one “right” way to experience God and that no experience is comprehensive or all-compassing. No one receives or comprehends or apprehends God is his entirety. And furthermore, I emphatically do not intend to imply that the Holy Spirit is to be thought of metaphorically. I once had a parishioner tell me that he thought of the Holy Spirit as “Spirit de Corps,” or something like “school spirit,” and he even went on to say that he felt that a church with “a lot of spirit” would be a good example of a “Holy Spirit church.”

I think not. Jesus said that the purpose of the Spirit of God is to make Him known and to lead us into all Truth because He is truth. This is how He states it in verses 13 through 15 of the 16th chapter of John’s gospel:

When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth; for
he will not speak on his own authority, but whatever he hears he
will speak, and he will declare to you the things that are to come. He
will glorify me, for he will take what is mine and declare it unto you.

Jesus also said that nature of the Spirit of Truth is to convince (“convict” in King James parlance) the world of sin, righteousness, and judgment. Put another way, it is to know the nature of what sin is, the nature of what righteousness is, the nature of what judgment is. And to put us in touch with the truth about ourselves, in my opinion, is a big-ticket item in terms of what the Holy Spirit comes to do. Without the revelation of the Spirit of God in my own life, I would not even realize that I needed a Savior, or that there even is one. But there is one “whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees him nor knows him.” (John 14:17). But he can be seen and known when—and only when—he reveals himself. And those of us who see and know have access to this knowledge because he has made himself known to us, not because of anything that we are or do to merit such favor.

Believing/trusting in Jesus, walking in Jesus, abiding in Jesus, is the exact same as believing/trusting in the Spirit, walking in the Spirit, abiding in the Spirit. All this is merely a tiny understanding of the Incarnation, Emmanuel, God with us and God in us. All I can say is, “Glory, Amen, and Thank You, Jesus.”

  
 

 

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