The Wonder of the Holy Spirit

Last week, we finished a series on encounters with Jesus after the resurrection. In the last one, we saw the disciples encounter with Jesus as He ascended to heaven. Before His ascension, He said to them:

but you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you shall be My witnesses both in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and even to the remotest part of the earth.

(Acts 1:8)

He had told them to wait for the arrival of the Holy Spirit. For the next few weeks we are going to take a look a little more at the arrival of this One who Jesus promised. Before we dive into what Jesus said about the Holy Spirit and the arrival, today I want us to understand who the Holy Spirit is.

We will be exploring more about the character of the Holy Spirit later in this series, but for now it’s important to understand that the Holy Spirit is God. The word “Trinity” is not found in Scripture, but we find the concept communicated in many places in Scripture. In Deuteronomy 6:4, God explicitly tells His people to:

Hear, O Israel! The Lord is our God, the Lord is one!

The idea that we worship one God was firmly established here and throughout Scripture. At the same time, we see throughout Scripture that this one God is three persons. We get our first glimpse of this in the very beginning in Genesis 1:26a when we read:

Then God said, “Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness;

While we don’t see the specific three persons mentioned in this verse, the choice of pronouns definitely begins to point to that. In the book of Isaiah, part of the prophecy that is shared becomes more explicit about the three persons. In Isaiah 48:16-17a as Isaiah is sharing God’s message, we find this:

Come near to Me, listen to this: From the first I have not spoken in secret, From the time it took place, I was there. And now the Lord God has sent Me, and His Spirit. Thus says the Lord, your Redeemer, the Holy One of Israel,

In this verse we start getting the first glimpse of the one God we worship and serve defining Himself  as three: the Lord God, Me, and His Spirit. We have come to know the three as the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. That language comes from passages in Matthew and Luke when Jesus was baptized and there we really get to clearly see this Triune God. In Luke 3:21-22 Scripture says:

Now when all the people were baptized, Jesus was also baptized, and while He was praying, heaven was opened, and the Holy Spirit descended upon Him in bodily form like a dove, and a voice came out of heaven, ‘You are My beloved Son, in You I am well-pleased.’

Jesus Himself repeated this idea in this language to His disciples as He gave them The Great Commission in those final days before His ascension. In Matthew 28:19, as He begins the Great Commission, check out how He commands His followers to baptize people:
Go therefore and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit,

This had become such a common understanding in the early church that Paul closed one of His letters to the Corinthians saying,

The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit, be with you all.

(2 Corinthians 13:14)

While this concept of the Trinity had become and is still the common understanding of the God we serve, that doesn’t mean it is easy to comprehend. Over the years, many different illustrations have been used to try to explain the Trinity: from Saint Patrick’s shamrock, to an egg, to different forms of water, and many more. Unfortunately, all of these examples fall short and are incorrect in some way. The God we worship and serve, the God who loves us so much that He sacrificed His Son to restore our relationship with Him, is bigger and more unique than anything our minds can comprehend. I for one am so thankful for that. While it can be a struggle to explain and understand this and other things about God, I find it comforting that I can’t fully explain God. If I fully understood everything there was to know about Him, it doesn’t seem like He would be much of a God.

As we begin this series on the Holy Spirit, I am thankful for this and each person of the Trinity. Embracing this foundational aspect of the nature of God, is crucial to our faith and understanding of the significance of the arrival of the Holy Spirit in the New Testament. I am thankful that despite our inability to fully grasp the magnitude and awesomeness of God with our finite minds, the Holy Spirit walks alongside us illuminating the thoughts and the words of God to little by little each day as we dwell in Him.