Our part is to accept it by faith and abide in His holiness. ), but it is not explicit to us on the surface of our language as it is in the Bible. Calvary Bible College, Kansas City. For example, it can be treated as the seat of intuition (Mark 2:8), discouragement or internal despair (Mark 8:12), joy (Luke 1:47 // with “soul” in v. 46), intense affection (John 11:33), an internal sense of being in one form or another (2 Tim 1:7, a spirit of fear, as opposed to a spirit of power, love, and self-discipline), and so on. For example, in his well-known “born again” (or perhaps better, “born from above”) encounter with Nicodemus in John 3,14 Jesus uses the wind/spirit correspondence to explain the nature of spiritual birth: “What is born of the flesh is flesh, and what is born of the Spirit is spirit” (v. 6), and especially, “The wind [pneuma] blows wherever it will, and you hear the sound it makes, but do not know where it comes from and where it is going. The ultimate goal of every man is to see the face of his Creator. Consider also the watery context in Exod 14:21–22, 29 where the Lord enabled Israel to cross the Reed Sea on dry ground by sending a strong east “wind” (ruakh) to drive the waters back. For example, the scriptures are not suggesting by this analogy that God the Father somehow corresponds to our physical body. And when these Hebrew and Greek words mean “spirit,” the reference is often to the human “spirit.” Furthermore, certain passages draw out the correspondence between the Spirit of God and the human spirit, and the importance of God’s work through this correspondence (e.g., 1 Cor. “ears are uncircumcised”]; 9:25–26; Ezek 44:7). The idea is that God is totally different from us as He is spirit (John 4:24 ) and desires those who worship Him do so in spirit and in truth (John 4:23 ). This is indeed new in the New Testament. 8 . This also is new compared to Old Testament believers. The deity of Christ is also proven by a simple reason: He is the same yesterday, today, and forever (Hebrews 13:8). .” (76). Rejoice and be glad because your reward is great in heaven, for they persecuted the prophets before you in the same way”(Matt 5:11–12). The phrase holy, holy, holy appears twice: once in the Old Testament account of Isaiah’s vision of God (Isaiah 6:1-4) and once in the New Testament account of John’s vision of Christ (Revelation 4:8). Feasts of the Lord – The Hebrew meaning of Holy Convocation. What was New about the Christian Experience of God?” Ex Auditu 12 (1996) 14-28; Block, “The Prophet of the Spirit,” 40-41; and Fredricks, “Rethinking the Role of the Holy Spirit in the Lives of Old Testament Believers,” 81-104. This suggests that, at least in part, the point of the passages about the lack of the indwelling work of the Spirit in the days of Jesus arises from the fact of the cessation of prophetic activity since the Old Testament prophets. In the ancient world. The word holy is used as a synonym for His deity and calls attention to all that God is. Some have treated áelohim here as an adjective (i.e., its superlative use) meaning “mighty” or “terrible” so that the whole expression means “a mighty wind” or “terrible storm.” However, there is no other instance in the Old Testament where ru‚ah£ áelohim or any of its equivalents mean anything other than “the S/spirit of God/the Lord” or “the wind of God/the Lord.” Moreover, the adjectival use of áelohim is foreign to this chapter where the term is used so many times to mean “God,” and, in fact, serves as the primary focus throughout the chapter both conceptually and structurally. He writes: “we were all made to drink of the one Spirit.” There is a very real difference between using water for purification (i.e., baptism) and drinking it. An Investigation into the Ministry of the Spirit of God Today. Paul’s other image of the Spirit in 1 Cor 12:13 calls up another whole set of expressions in the Old Testament that serve as background for the New Testament teaching of the indwelling Holy Spirit. How do you deal with a sinning professed believer who is not a church member? They are toV pneu'ma tou' ajnqrwvpou' (to pneuma tou anthro„pou) and toV pneu'ma tou' qeou' (to pneuma tou theou), respectively. The following are good places to begin: Leon J. John’s ministry continued along this line of “ceremonial washing,” over which disputes sometimes also arose between John’s disciples and other Jews (see, e.g., John 3:25).15. We are empowered by the Holy Spirit as long as we have our sails up. God has made holiness the moral condition necessary to the health of His universe.”, R. C. Sproul: “God alone is holy in Himself. He does not need to change because He is already perfect. If the human spirit separates from the body, the body dies (to be resurrected later), but you still have the person in the form of his or her spirit. The close connection here between the four “winds” and the “breath” that gives life to the dry bones causes one to wonder if there is not a similar link between the “windstorm (hr`u*s= j^Wr, ruakh seàarah) coming out of the north” in Ezek 1:4, “the spirit” of the living creatures in 1:12, and “the spirit of the living beings” (probably better rendered ‘the spirit of life’) that animated the wheels in 1:20. This word is frequently translated as "holy," another abstract word. It is true that the pronoun “you” is plural in Ezek 36:27, but the same is true of the whole passage, including the references to changing their heart (v. 26) and so on. This accords well with the normal understanding of John 7:37–39: On the last day of the feast, the greatest day, Jesus stood up and shouted out, “If anyone is thirsty, let him come to me, and let the one who believes in me drink. Eph 4:30). The statistics used in this article are taken from Francis Brown, S. R. Driver, and Charles A. Briggs, Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament (London: Oxford Univ. The former verse refers only to man and links “breath” (neshamah) to “life,” but the latter refers to both man and air-breathing land animals and, above all, links “breath” to “spirit” (ruakh) and then to animate “life.” Moreover, according to Eccl 3:19–21, both animals and people “have the same breath [or ‘spirit,’ ruakh]” (v. 19), and “Who really knows if the spirit [or ‘breath,’ ruakh] of man ascends upward, and the spirit of the animal goes downward to the earth?” (v. 21). The fundamental (core) meaning of 40 (hágios) is "different" – thus a temple in the 1st century was hagios ("holy") because different from other buildings (Wm. Although the term “baptism of the Holy Spirit” is not used in the record of Philip’s ministry in Samaria, nevertheless Acts 8 emphasizes the importance of maintaining a direct connection between baptism “into the name of the Lord Jesus” (Acts 8:16) and receiving “the Holy Spirit” (Acts 8:15, 17). On the other hand, some passages in the New Testament, especially in the Gospel of John, seem to suggest that indwelling began in the New Testament at Pentecost. The third point is actually closely related to the second. What Does it Mean God Is Holy, Holy, Holy? They are a portrait of Christ in the Gospel of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, according to Willmington’s Guide to the Bible. esp. 15 . I will put my spirit within you; I will take the initiative and you will obey my statutes and carefully observe my laws. Matt 3:2, 8, 11; Mark 1:4–5; Luke 3:3, 8). ‘to the wind’] of the day.”, However, we also need to take seriously the fact that the vast bulk of occurrences of “the ruakh of the Lord/God” in the Old Testament refer to God’s “Spirit” understood as the person of God that corresponds to the human “spirit” in people (see the reflections on this biblical analogy in the previous section above). v. 10a). The root word for holyis qadosh (Hebrew) and hagios (Greek), which mean “set apart, sacred, sanctified.” God’s holiness includes His two essential … His people remembered the ancient times. His perfection is revealed in three Persons: Father, Son (Jesus Christ), and Holy Spirit, who share equal divine attributes. We will discuss this important verse further below. Again, this is what Moses means when he says, “Circumcise then your heart, and stiffen your neck no more (Deut 10:16 [niv]; cf. Find more Hebrew words at wordhippo.com! The Spirit of God is God, one of the divine persons of the Godhead. This may seem simplistic, but the New Testament actually sets the precedent for it in certain passages, one of the most important being 1 Cor 2:11 in its context (cited above), where the very point of the argument depends on seeing the correspondence and relationship between the Spirit of God and the spirit of man. If we use this concept when interpreting the word holy in the Hebrew Bible, then we are misreading the text, as this is not the meaning of the Hebrew word qadosh. As a human person’s spirit can be grieved, so can the Spirit of God who dwells in our human spirit and among us (see more on the matter of “indwelling” later in this essay). Hebrew ruakh is often used for elements of the human “spirit” in scripture (ca. When looking closely at the biblical passages speaking about the holy days, it appears there is one phrase that keeps repeating: “The LORD spoke to Moses, saying, “Speak to the people of Israel and say to them, these are the appointed feasts of the LORD that you shall proclaim as holy convocations; they are my appointed feasts.” (Leviticus 23: 1-2) Nevertheless, on certain points at least we can reason back by analogy from a biblical understanding of the human person as a way of approach to a good biblical understanding of the person of God, especially in terms of the “Spirit” of God as a divine person, the Holy Spirit. Even if the expression itself derives from John the Baptist, nevertheless, the idea behind it is Ezekiel’s prophecy of the Spirit of God transforming the spirit of people from death to life in the same context as God cleansing his people by washing them with clean water (Ezek 36:25–27 with 37:13–14). Understanding the OT terms “Holy Spirit” and “the Spirit of God (or the LORD)” and the theology associated with them depends on grasping the significance of the fact that, in about 40% of its occurrences, the Hebrew word “spirit” (ruakh) basically means “wind or breath,” not “spirit.” The NT word (pneuma) is also used in this way on occasion. His perfection is revealed in three Persons: Father, Son (Jesus Christ), and Holy Spirit, who share equal divine attributes. I am aware of no precedent for this analogy (water baptism > Spirit baptism) in the Old Testament or intertestamental literature.16 John seems to have coined the term as a graphic image that would serve to both compare and contrast his own ministry with that of Christ. This combination of divine activities constitutes the regenerating and renewing of peoples’ hearts and lives about which both the Old and New Testaments speak.17 In Ezekiel’s terminology it changes the heart from a “heart of stone” to “a heart of flesh” (Ezek 36:26). John the Baptist came to prepare the people for the Messiah, and he did this through water purification, a baptism of repentance (John 1:24–28; cf. Of course, in the Jewish tradition the Holy Spirit referred to in the Hebrew Bible is not taken to be the third person of the “Trinity,” so in such passages the Hebrew word is translated “spirit,” not capitalized “Spirit.”4 In general, the Jewish view is that “the spirit of God referred to in the Bible alludes to His energy (Isa 40:13; Zech 4:6).”5 Accordingly, it is recognized that “the divine origin of the spirit” is implied by the term “his (the Lord’s) spirit of holiness” (ovd+q* j^Wr, ruakh qadesho), “Yet this does not mean that the holy spirit was regarded as a hypostasis distinct from the divine presence (shekina).”6 In other words, according to the Rabbis, although the “spirit of God” is of divine origin, this does not mean that there is a “Holy Spirit” as a divine person.