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June 19, 2005
We Believe in the Holy Spirit
Psalm 51: 1-13 / I Samuel 10: 1-12
Acts 19: 1-7
June 19th, 2005
This week I got a note from a friend who had come back from the Church of Scotland General Assembly. On the front of the card was a stylized wild goose. On the back I read that the Wild Goose is a Celtic image for the Holy Spirit. I didn’t know that. A wild goose a symbol of the Holy Spirit!
In the Gospels we read that at Jesus’ baptism the Holy Spirit descended on Him in the form of a dove. So the dove is a New Testament symbol of the Holy Spirit.
Jesus told Nicodemus that the Holy Spirit is like the wind that you can’t tell from where it has come or where it will go. The word for wind and the word for spirit here are the same. Wind is a symbol of the Holy Spirit.
At Pentecost tongues as of fire rested above the heads of the disciples who waited in an upper room. Fire became another symbol of the Holy Spirit.
The uncontrollable Wild Goose. The gentle, harmless Dove. The unpredictable Wind. Consuming Fire. It’s no wonder that at the Council of Nicea when they came to tell of the Third Person of the Holy Trinity all they wrote was, “And we believe in the Holy Spirit.” Who can describe the Holy Spirit of God? Later on, at the Council of Constantinople Church fathers added the statements that we now find in the Nicene Creed. But at first there was great modesty and reserve. Only, “And we believe in the Holy Spirit.”
Indeed, in the Bible we find more precision in describing God the Father and God the Son than in describing God the Holy Spirit.
God the Father identifies Himself to Moses as the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. He identifies Himself to Pharoah as Father of Israel: “Israel is my son.”
God the Son is the very theme of the New Testament. The Holy Spirit is always in the background in both the Old and New Testaments, as it were the inconspicuous person of the Trinity. It is no wonder that when the Church leaders first wrestled with what were the essential truths about God, when it came to the Holy Spirit they said simply, “And we believe in the Holy Spirit.”
In time modesty was to drift away as a characteristic of those who did theology. And the controversies multiplied and divided Christians as the years rolled on. I’m tempted to think that a first lesson we learn from the original form of the Nicene Creed is, “dare to be modest in defining the things of God.”
What did these early believers believe about the Holy Spirit? First, that the Holy Spirit is one Person of the Being revealed to us as God. We call the Holy Spirit a “Person,” a word that comes from the Latin word persona that meant “mask,” “personage,” “part” or “character.” An actor would wear a persona, a mask in playing a role. He could take off one mask and put on another. The meaning of the word person has changed.
We think of a person as a distinct human being. Calling the Holy Spirit the third person of the Godhead is an attempt to express this unique identity of how the one God is mentioned in Scripture.
Jesus said to the Samaritan woman, “God is Spirit.” By this He meant that God is non-material. He might have quoted Psalm 139, that tells us there is nowhere we can escape God’s presence. This could have been said of God the Father or God the Son before He was born to the Virgin Mary. But to speak of the Holy Spirit is to identify a particular persona of God. We say THE Holy Spirit, not “holy Spirit,” as it is fashionable in some circles to say today.
Second, when we say, “We believe in the Holy Spirit” we acknowledge receiving this special gift of Himself that God poured out on all who trust in Him at Pentecost. But the first Christian Pentecost was not the first time the Holy Spirit was present at least with Jesus’ disciples.
Jesus told His disciples, “I will pray the Father, and he will give you another Counselor, to be with you for ever, even the Spirit of truth whom the world cannot receive because it neither sees him nor knows him; you know him, for he dwells with you and will be in you.”
Jesus seems to say that He will ask the Father to give them something they already have, the Spirit, who dwells in them already.
Then later on, on Easter Sunday, after He had risen Jesus met His disciples as they hid in a room and said: “Peace to you; as the Father has sent me so send I you. Then He breathed on them and said to them, ‘Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven; if you retain the sins of any they are retained’.” He breathed on them the Spirit. This moment was different from the pouring out of the Holy Spirit that happened fifty days later at Pentecost. Then the Spirit came with the sound of a mighty rushing wind. Now Jesus breathed, a gentle wind of the Spirit.
This was a special moment when Jesus reproduced with them an interaction between himself and the Father before His Incarnation. Before the Incarnation we can envision God the Father saying to God the Son, soon to be born as the baby Jesus to the Virgin Mary, “Peace to you. Now go do what I bid you to do. The sins you forgive I forgive. The sins you retain I retain.”
Now Jesus reproduced the act of His heavenly Father on them, blessing them, sending them out, and breathing on them His breath. This is so suggestive, so personal an engagement between heaven and earth, between the risen Lord and these eleven men who were representative for all of us who afterward would entrust our lives to Jesus. The capstone moment was when the Holy Spirit was given to them in a special way. When the Gospel says Jesus “breathed” the Spirit on them, it gave them life. How like the story in Genesis this seems, where God breathed into Adam the breath of life.
I’m not sure what Jesus meant when He told His disciples in John 14: 16 that the Spirit was already in them. They did not yet seethe with the power they would later have after Pentecost. Some things must remain a mystery to us. Nor is it important, or perhaps good that we should understand the mysteries of God’s work with us.
There is a tendency in us all to want to dissect, to take apart and examine things, to know in detail. When you and I took biology in high school and college we were given fetal pigs and other animals to take apart in the lab. It was part of our education that was essential because it taught us things we could never learn as well by reading about them.
But with regard to the Holy Spirit, I’m tempted to think that it is vital to remember what we cannot dissect in order to know. Nor is this necessary to be available to the Spirit’s use. Knowledge is power, we say. And in this case what we do not want is any feeling of power.
Imagine a robotics engineer trying to operate those mechanical hands with the hands trying to do things on their own. Just so, what the Holy Spirit needs in us is completely supple hands, supple hearts, pliant availability for use.
Part of the mystery of the Holy Spirit is that in Old Testament times the Spirit of God was everywhere as He is today, but He seems to have only been given to certain people for particular tasks. But since the Day of Pentecost described in the Book of Acts, the Holy Spirit has been poured out on “all flesh.” That is, on us as individuals—not just of pastors or elders and deacons.
In the Book of Exodus we read that the Lord called two men, Bezalel and Oholiab and filled them with the Spirit of God—with ability, with intelligence, with knowledge and with all craftsmanship to make the Tabernacle. The Tabernacle was very important then as the place where Israel was to learn to worship the God who had made Himself known to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.
But it was also important as a symbol of Jesus who was to come. The Gospel of John tells us that “the Word became flesh and tabernacled among us.” So God specially enabled these two men for their task by sending them His Spirit.
Similarly, when prophets, priests, and kings were anointed to serve Israel, the Spirit of God was given to them in their anointing. We read this morning of Saul’s anointing, that, “the spirit of God came mightily on him.” In this case Saul showed the immediate effect of God’s spirit on Him by prophesying with a band of prophets. This must have been some sort of ecstatic expression. But it was not just a momentary exhibit of ecstasy that was given with the gift of the Spirit of God.
The prophet Isaiah wrote of the “stump from Jesse,” which we know as the Messiah-Jesus, that “the Spirit of the Lord shall rest upon him, the spirit of wisdom and understanding, the spirit of counsel and might, the spirit of knowledge and the fear of the Lord.”
This list of the “seven-fold gift of the Spirit” perhaps referred to what the Spirit of God brought to all those who were so favored even in Old Testament times. Kings, priests, and prophets need wisdom, understanding, counsel and might, knowledge and the fear of the Lord to do their work in God’s behalf.
King David feared that this Spirit, given to him when he was anointed king, would be taken from him because of his crime and sin with Bathsheba and her husband, Uriah. When David stole Uriah’s wife and used his kingly power to make sure Uriah got killed in the thick of battle, we wonder how God could ever use him again, much less make him a link in the chain of a heritage that would give the world a Savior from their sins. He prayed, “Cast me not from thy presence and take not thy Holy Spirit from me.”
But it may have been this horrible sin that taught him, “the sacrifice acceptable to God is a broken spirit and a contrite heart.”
Later on the prophet Joel prophesied that the Spirit of God would be poured out on all flesh. “ This referred to a particular moment that was fulfilled on the Day of Pentecost described in the Book of Acts. But clearly God’s gift of the Holy Spirit was much more than a one-time demonstration of spiritual power. We read this morning the story of Paul’s passing through Ephesus. We don’t know all the topics of his conversation with folk there.
But among the things Paul brings up is the question, “Did you receive the Holy Spirit when you believed?” And they replied, “We have never even heard that there is a Holy Spirit.” Clearly Paul expected that when they trusted in Jesus they received the gift of the Holy Spirit. After all, Jesus had commanded them to baptize “in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit” those who believed in Him. Paul laid hands on them and then knew they had the Holy Spirit because they got gift of tongues.
The church in Ephesus began with the preaching of the Alexandrian orator, Apollos. He taught accurately the things about Jesus, but he apparently knew nothing about the Holy Spirit.
He was told by whoever brought him to Christ, and commissioned him to preach, “You must baptize those who believe in Jesus,” and so he did, but the only kind of baptism he knew about was John’s baptism. This suggests that whoever brought the Gospel to Alexandria, his home city, did not teach about the Holy Spirit. The full Gospel did not make it to Alexandria. We don’t know who taught Apollos in his home town that was later on to become a great center of Christianity—and the scene of the controversy leading to the need for the first Ecumenical Council.
Priscilla and Aquila, a couple of Jewish Christians who came to Ephesus from Rome, heard him preach and took him aside afterward and “taught him the way of God more accurately.” How polite they were not to confront him in front of the people he served! They did not embarrass him or create a scene. How teachable his spirit was that he received their instruction!
So what do we believe about the Holy Spirit? Of course, more specifically the question is not just, “What do you think or believe, but what access does the Holy Spirit have to your life and mine?”
We cannot see or touch the Holy Spirit. His voice to us comes silently as an inward impulse. Sometimes the Holy Spirit has given special gifts to heal, or the gift of tongues or of understanding something about the future, or the special gift of wisdom. But usually the work of the Holy Spirit in us who have contrite and humble hearts is as steady and unnoticed as the beating of our hearts or the breathing of our lungs.
The Apostle Paul used the term, “Walk in the spirit.” The Spirit of God living in our hearts enables us to “walk” amid the stresses and temptations of this life with a different impulse at work in us. We are taught an aggressive spirit as we grow up in this seething world. Go for all you can get. Look out for number one. Seize the day. But walking in the Spirit responds to a different impulse, a patient impulse from God that results in “love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, adaptability, and self-control.” These are the “fruit” of the Spirit. We can quench this fruit and many Christians do because they have forgotten that a humble and contrite heart is fundamental to God having a home in our hearts. We can by force reject love, joy, peace…self-control.
I fear that the Holy Spirit is often claimed as the source of power He has nothing to do with at all. The voice of the Holy Spirit is not the same thing as a strong feeling you have in church. The Holy Spirit is not the same as an emotional high in a religious setting. It is presumptuous and perhaps dangerous to claim the Holy Spirit has told you this or that. If you think the Holy Spirit has spoken to you, savor the information in your heart and do not boast of it. Quietly obey and you will know if it was information from the Holy Spirit.
How often has the Holy Spirit been claimed as the source of behavior or thoughts that are an affront to the majesty and holiness of God?
The Apostle Paul in Roman 8: 16, “The Spirit himself bears witness with our spirits that we are children of God.” The Holy Spirit bears witness with the deepest part within us what is most important for us to believe. “You are my child.” When by faith we come to God and humbly respond to Jesus’ invitation, “Come to me and I will give you rest,” somehow God gives to us His Holy Spirit. It is in God’s hands to offer us quietly all it pleases Him to give us. Let us not ruin things by presuming to know what we really don’t know. Let us not ruin things by claiming the Holy Spirit as the animating force behind our biases and presumptions, thus bringing confusion to ourselves and to others.
It is enough, with our great forebears of the fourth century to simply say, “And we believe in the Holy Spirit.” And with this trust, let us be available for the work of the Holy Spirit, a work that can happen with those who are supple instruments for His use. The Holy Spirit may be like a wild goose, and is certainly like a dove, and like the wind, and like fire. But it is God’s to choose how He will be with us. I pray God finds us available for the indwelling and work of His Holy Spirit.
Let us pray: O Lord God, give to us in full measure your Holy Spirit. Find us fit homes in which He may live. Amen.
Stuart D. Robertson, Pastor
Faith Presbyterian Church
West Lafayette, IN 47906
Posted by faithpres at June 19, 2005 09:30 AM