Wind of the Spirit

Wind of the Spirit November 18, 2015

From the first moments of the creation, the Spirit of God has been working in the world to enliven and move it. As soon as there is a heaven and earth, the Spirit of God hovers over the formless emptiness of the waters, bringing light and order and moving the creation from glory to glory. The Spirit never leaves. Without the Spirit, there is no life, there is no movement, there is no order, there is no energy, there is no creation as we know it, but only the formless void that is the definition of death.

The Spirit came and never left, and yet we periodically read in Scripture of the Spirit coming. After the exile, Ezekiel promises, Yahweh will put His Spirit into Israel and they will come back to life and return to their own land (Ezekiel 37:14). In the last days, Joel prophesies, “I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh, and your sons and daughters will prophesy, your old men will dream dreams and your young men will see visions” (2:28). The Spirit never leaves, but at the same time, the Spirit has to come, the Spirit is poured out, the Spirit arrives.

The Spirit the breath of God, His wind, His storm. The very words for “spirit” in both Greek and Hebrew mean “breath” or “wind.” As Robert Jenson puts it, “in the Old Testament ruach often appears as the breath of life, and when it is the breath of God’s life it is a creating wind that blows creatures around like leaves in a hurricane.” And Job says, “The Spirit of God has made me, and the breath of the Almighty gives me life” (Job 33:4). On Easter, Jesus breathes on His disciples, and tells them that they are receiving the Holy Spirit (John 20:22). And in His nighttime talk with Nicodemus, Jesus compares the Spirit to wind that “blows where it wishes and you hear the sound of it but do not know where it comes from and where it is going” (John 3:8). And the Spirit comes “when . . . Israel’s history gets stuck, the Spirit falls upon some poor unfortunate and makes him or her the instrument of rescue; that is, God blows Israel into motion again.”

Adam’s sin got the world stuck, but Yahweh came to the garden in the “Spirit of the day” to unstick the world. When the sons of God married the daughters of men and filled the world with violence, the Spirit strove with man, and then God sent a flood to wash the world clean. And at the end of the flood, the Wind of God hovered over the waters and made the world new. When Israel worshiped idols in Egypt, they were oppressed and enslaved, until the Spirit raised up Moses to deliver them with a mighty hand. Whenever Israel fell back into idolatry, Yahweh’s Spirit clothed a man, turned Him into a dervish, so that He could unstick Israel’s history.

Because of her idolatry and sin, Israel gets stuck, cannot move, gets paralyzed and immobilized, and at that point, it is time for the Spirit to blow them out of their rut and back into motion. It’s time for the storm to swirl around them and pushes them ahead.

The Spirit is always there, always directing and animating. But our sin resists the Spirit, and so the Spirit sometimes blows with new power, and energizes the world again. And the Spirit works in the world in this fashion because the Spirit is the one who eternally keeps the Trinity in motion. “God the Father is monarch or source not of a static divine being but of a divine life. God agitates God into being God; he breathes life into Godhead. And that agitation, that breath of life, is so perfectly the Father’s own agitation, that like the Son it is the same God as the Father.” The Father continuously breathes and blows the Spirit, so that God never gets stuck, never grinds to a halt, does not become weary or tired, neither slumbers nor sleeps. 


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