Why do so many Christians, even whole denominations
essentially ignore the Holy Spirit? Jesus said it would be better for His
disciples if He went away (John 16:7) because He would send “another Helper”
who would be “with [them] forever.” (John 14:16) Jesus referred to the coming
Helper as the Holy Spirit several times in the immediate context. True, He also
said He would come to be with believers as well as saying the Father would be
with them. Peter used the appellation “Spirit of Christ.” (1 Peter 1:11) Paul
doubles down with the terminology using “Spirit of God” and “Spirit of Christ”
in the same verse, adding to the semantic confusion. (Romans 8:9)
My lifetime interest in language, particularly when it is
Bible language, urges me to find semantic clarity. This is often elusive. What
is clear is Jesus’ implication that the Presence He promised would be
spiritual, not physical. This makes sense in the context of John’s record: the
disciples were bemoaning the loss of Jesus’ physical presence, so He told them
a spiritual presence would be an improvement. Whereas up until His ascension He
could only be in one place at a time, after He was fully glorified, He could be
with all believers all the time.
I suspect our difficulty with this concept stems from the
doctrine of the trinity most orthodox Christians adhere to. Saying that the
object of our worship is one being in three persons tends to make us humans
compartmentalize the deity. God-the-Father sits on a throne ruling the universe;
Jesus-the-Son became incarnate, then converted to a glorified state of some
sort after His resurrection; the Holy Spirit hovers about omnipresent and inscrutable
throughout the ages. This tri-furcation of the godhead is nowhere explicitly
stated in the Scriptures. In fact, the muddled language to which I referred
earlier tends toward just the opposite.
Michael Heiser makes a startling suggestion in his book, Unseen
Realm. Trying to unravel the nature of the supernatural in the Old
Testament, Heiser proposes that the Jews probably recognized several different “characters”
or persons as the One God they held in such high esteem. The Hebrew text in
various places clearly identifies Elohim, the Angel of the Lord, the Name of
the Lord, and Yahweh (transcribed as “LORD” in most English versions) as the
One God whom they worshiped. One of the most shocking occurrences has Jacob
wrestling with a “man” who is finally revealed as being “god” in some
mysterious way. Heiser says this does not diminish the essential nature of the
Jews’ monotheism at all. Rather, it reveals their understanding that the God
they worshipped made Himself known to them in a variety of ways.
What this shows us is that the Jews apparently had no
trouble dealing with a fact that Jesus stressed to the Samaritan woman at the
well: God is spirit. The failure of the Samaritans (and the Israelites at many
times) was that they tried to bind their god to a physical location. Jesus said
neither this mountain nor that can be singled out as the place where god is;
God is spirit, and as such He is non
locus orientis. Jesus implied that in times past God had in fact presented
Himself to mortals in certain locations with different manifestations. Angels,
burning bushes, thundering mountain tops each represented the Presence of God
at one time or another. “The hour is coming, and now is here,” Jesus said, when
God will no longer be identified with a location, but a condition: spirit.
(John 4:23-24)
This tells me that to ignore the Holy Spirit is to ignore
God. “Do not quench the Spirit,” Paul warned. (1 Thessalonians 5:19) The Holy
Spirit is not some third person who appeared during the time the Apostles
completed the written Word and then became subsumed in that written product. If
you can set aside the trinitarian filter that orthodoxy has laid over the
Scriptures, all sense of hierarchy in the Godhead is erased. God is fully
present in any of the manifestations he chooses to make, with the one exception
of the kenosis (emptying) Jesus underwent to become flesh, a condition which
now seems to have been left behind.
If your trinitarian understanding is not rocked enough by Heiser’s
half dozen different biblical expressions of the one God, wrestle with the “seven
spirits of God” language of Revelation 3:1. It may be more profitable to simply
stop trying to relate to God by number. I suspect that the heavenly numbering
system is not a base 10 system anyway. We will probably be as surprised about
that reality as physicists are fascinated by the discovery of perhaps ten
dimensions swallowing our simple understanding of the three-dimensional world.
A.W. Tozer asks us to “make room for mystery.” He also
quotes Augustine pleading with God: “Narrow is the mansion of my soul; enlarge
Thou it that Thou mayest enter in.” The Holy Spirit is not some scary ghost to be
avoided. Neither is He a subordinate of the “real” God. The Holy Spirit is God,
perhaps being God in His most essential nature: a spirit. The so-called
charismatics may get too familiar with the Spirit, taking Him in the same way they
take their morning coffee, but at the other extreme you have people almost
frightened of what Tozer calls a “mystery.” I think you will find God somewhere
in between the two positions. He is “unapproachable” (1Timothy 6:16), yet he invites
us to enter His presence by the blood of the Son, our Savior with confidence
(Hebrews 4:16).
Paul repeatedly urges his readers to be filled with the
Spirit; to be led by the Spirit; to walk, pray and even sing in the Spirit.
Theologians debate whether these phrases should be upper case “Spirit,” meaning
God’s spirit, or lower case “spirit,” referring to the human spirit or a state
of being spiritual. Upper or lower case, the truth is clear: God is looking for
those who will worship Him in spirit and truth. To paraphrase Augustine, our
prayer must be: Lord, enlarge my soul so that your Spirit may enter in.
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