CHAPTER 1
LORD AND LIFE-GIVER
The Holy Spirit is eternally at work within the Godhead, resting in the Father through the Son. In all of the external works of the Trinity—creation, providence, redemption, and the consummation—the Spirit makes the speech of the Father in the Son effective to complete the speaker’s intention. The Father’s speech never returns to him without effect because there is his Spirit who brings about within creation its “amen!” to whatever the Father has worded it to be in and for the Son.
I have two broad emphases in this study: (1) the distinctness of the Spirit’s person and work along with his unity with the Father and the Son; (2) the identification of the Spirit’s operations in Scripture not only with that which is extraordinary, spontaneous, and immediate but also—and even more frequently—with that which is ordinary, ordered, and performed through creaturely means. While reflecting on the unity of the Spirit with the Father and the Son, I want to explore the distinctness and uniqueness of the Holy Spirit’s person and work. My own experience discloses a tendency to regard the Spirit as a shadowy figure, somehow related to the other persons—at times even blurred with the more prominent identity of Jesus Christ. Much of what I have to say about the Spirit in this book will be tacking closely to the unfolding narrative of Scripture. But we have to begin with some crucial doctrinal coordinates.
“THE LORD . . . WHO WITH THE FATHER AND THE SON IS WORSHIPPED AND GLORIFIED”
We confess two chief points in the third article of the Nicene Creed: that the Holy Spirit is “Lord” and that he is the “giver of life.”1 By confessing his lordship, we proclaim that the Spirit is one with the Father and the Son both in essence and in operations. There are not three lords, but one; consequently, in everything accomplished by the triune God there is one divine work. This point is expressed in the time-honored maxim, opera trinitatis ad extra indivisa sunt—“the external works of the Trinity are undivided,” about which I have more to say below.
The Holy Spirit is Lord in exactly the same sense that the Father and the Son are the Lord. The Holy Spirit is not a divine energy or a semidivine agent but the Lord God, YHWH. The Spirit is sometimes represented as a softer aspect of the one person who is God. The Father (the one true God) seems distant in his sovereign transcendence, but the Spirit is God in his more intimate and knowable form. According to James D. G. Dunn, “the Spirit of God” in Israel’s texts “was, like Wisdom and Word, a way of speaking of divine immanence. . . .”2 In this construction, the Spirit lies on the revelational rather than ontological side of the ledger: not a distinct person of God but a way of underscoring God’s immanence. However, the Christian confession is that the Spirit is “worshipped and glorified” together with the Father and the Son, sharing in their sovereign transcendence and immanent activity in the world according to his own personal properties.3
Eager to discern the Trinity in the Old Testament, Christians often have seized upon Genesis 1:26: “Then God said, ‘Let us make man in our image, after our likeness.” Even if this verse does not yield as much as they claimed, their intuition was correct: to read the Old Testament in the light of the New. This is how Jesus interpreted Scripture (Matt 12:40; Luke 24:27; John 5:39, etc.) and the apostles as well in their preaching (Acts 2:14–36; 3:17–18; 15:13–19; 17:3; 26:23, etc.). Now that redemptive revelation has reached its climax thus far with the Father sending his Son and his Spirit into our world, we have new spectacles with which to read earlier Scripture. Hence, for example, John could begin his Gospel with an explicit echo of Genesis 1, hailing Jesus as the eternal Word by whom all things were created. This Logos motif was present already in early Judaism precisely because it was already present in the Old Testament, albeit in a more latent form.4 Similarly, the decisive outpouring and indwelling of the Spirit since Pentecost is the standpoint from which we survey the vast field of the Spirit’s operations across Israel’s history.
A clearer argument for the Spirit’s identity as a distinct person of the Godhead is found in the Bible’s second verse: “The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters.” As in other places the phrase ruakh ’elohim may be translated here “a wind from God” (NRSV, for example): ruakh may mean wind or spirit. However, it is clearly God who is the subject of the creation-forming action, and yet the Spirit is distinguished from the one who speaks creation into being. The action itself—hovering—is personal; wind blows, but it would be odd to speak of wind as hovering, with an implied intentionality. Furthermore, it is taken for granted in later revelation that the Spirit is the giver of life, as in Psalm 104:30: “When you send your Spirit [ruakh], they are created.” The Spirit is not a power emanating but a person sent.
There are clear passages in the Old Testament that indicate also the distinct personality of the “eternal Spirit” (Heb 9:14) and yet identify this distinct person as God. It is by the Spirit that Moses performs miracles (Exod 8:19) and leads the Israelites through the waters of baptism in the Red Sea. The Spirit gifts certain people for special tasks (Exod 31:1–11; 36:30–35) and comes upon prophets so that they speak the word of God (2 Sam 23:2; Isa 59:21; Jer 1:2, 8, 15, 19; 2 Tim 3:14–17; 2 Pet 1:21). The Spirit is not merely an empowerment for teaching wisdom but is himself a divine teacher. He is not merely the glory of the Lord emanating from the temple but is the Lord whose glory radiates from the temple that he indwells. He came to the temple and departed from it. He is not merely a revealing and searching power of God but is the divine revealer and searcher (1 Cor 2:10).
As we will see, it is especially in the prophets that the Spirit is both divine and personal. He is to be “poured out” in the last days upon all of God’s people, indwelling them (Ezek 37:1–14; 39:29; Joel 2:28–32). One may shield himself from power or wind, but only a person can be grieved, as the Spirit was by Israel’s violation of the covenant (Isa 63:7–14) and is today when we resist his sanctifying influence (Eph 4:30). Identified by the divine name (Exod 31:3; Acts 5:3–4; 1 Cor 3:16; 2 Pet 1:21), the Spirit also has divine attributes ascribed to him (omnipresence, Ps 139:7–10; omniscience, Isa 40:13–14; 1 Cor 2:10–11), as well as divine works (creation, Gen 1:2; Job 26:13; 33:4; providential renovation, Ps 104:30; regeneration, John 3:5–6; Titus 3:5; resurrection of the dead, Rom 8:11). The Holy Spirit is also accorded divine homage (Matt 28:19; Rom 9:1; 2 Cor 13:14). The Spirit is referred to by Jesus and the apostles as the author of Scripture as the very word of God (Mark 12:36; Acts 1:16; Heb 3:7; 9:8; 10:15; 1 Pet 1:11; 2 Pet 1:21). In fact, the phrases “the Spirit says” and “Jesus says” are interchangeable in Revelation 2:7, 11, 17, 29; 3:6, 13, 22.
Just as Jesus reveals the Father, so he reveals the Holy Spirit; the Spirit, in turn, reveals Jesus as the Mediator and the Father as “our Father” to whom we cry out, “Abba, Father” (Rom 8:15). In his farewell discourse, Jesus taught his disciples to look for the other attorney (paraklētos) from heaven. The Spirit who delivered Israel, led the people to the promised land, and evacuated the temple when the nation broke the covenant will be sent to create a holy nation from all the families of the earth. In the discourse of John 14–16, which we will consider at greater length in another chapter, Jesus underscores the equality yet distinct person of the Spirit in terms of their respective missions of “coming” and “going,” “sending,” and “coming again.” This coming and going in and out of each other in the economy of redemption reveals the perichoretic relationship of these divine persons in their eternal fellowship without exhausting that incomprehensible relationship.5
In Acts 5, Peter confronts Ananias and Sapphira by telling them that they have lied “to the Holy Spirit” (v. 3); they have “not lied to man but to God” (v. 4 ESV). In 2 Corinthians 3 the apostle singles out the Son and the Spirit as Lord: “But whenever anyone turns to the Lord [Jesus],” he says, “the veil is taken away” (v. 16). The reference is to Exodus 38 where Moses spoke to the Lord face to face without a veil. Then he turns to the Holy Spirit: “Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom” (v. 17). Both persons are mentioned in verse 18: “And we all, who with unveiled faces contemplate the Lord’s [Christ’s] glory, are being transformed into his image with ever-increasing glory, which comes from the Lord, who is the Spirit.” It is God the Spirit who unites us to God the Son and conforms us to his image.
This emphasis guards against the heresy of subordinationism, according to which the Son or the Spirit is regarded as ontologically inferior to the Father. But this classic formulation also rules out tritheism, the idea that the persons are actually three different gods whose unity consists merely in their agreement and common purpose rather than an essence that they share equally.6 The Holy Spirit is God in exactly the same way and to the same extent as the Father and the Son.
“GIVER OF LIFE”
But the truth that the three persons are one God—the same in essence—must not lead us to conclude that they are the same person. Historically, this has been the danger of modalism. Also known as Sabellianism, after the third-century presbyter associated with this heresy, modalism holds that there is really only one divine person who reveals himself now as the Father, now as the Son, and now as the Spirit. The persons are mere appearances or “masks”—like the “personas” of one actor who plays different roles. Both subordinationism and modalism are heresies that stress the unity of God at the expense of the genuine plurality of the persons.7 These heresies have had defenders throughout church history but became especially attractive in radical forms of Protestantism (Socinianism, later known as Unitarianism) and came to characterize liberal theology in the train of Friedrich Schleiermacher.
Through great struggle, the ancient church formulated a common dogma of the Trinity that eschewed these heresies. Among others, two important distinctions came into play in this formulation. The first distinguishes between the missions and processions, also known as the immanent and economic trinities.8 This does not mean that there are two actual “trinities,” but that there is a distinction between the Trinity in its internal unity and processions (which are necessary) and the revelation of the triune God’s operations in the world (which are contingent—or free).
Most basically, from the Father the Son is eternally begotten and the Spirit eternally proceeds. These are necessary acts ab intra—that is, within the life of the Trinity apart from the existence of anyone or anything external to this life (ad extra). In other words, the Father did not exist in solitude and then decide to beget the Son and the Spirit. There is no God and never has been a God who is other than the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit: necessary, eternal, immutable. In the 1996 film Jerry Maguire, the lead character (played by Tom Cruise) tells his wife, “You complete me.” But nothing in creation ever completes God. The triune God is eternally and unchangeably complete in the nature that the three persons share as well as in their mutual love and joy. The external works of the divine persons in the economy of creation, redemption, and consummation in no way constitute the identity either of the persons or the divine being that they share. God does not undergo any becoming or self-realization of his identity by his involvement in history.
But then there are the external works of the Godhead, which are freely willed, such as creation and redemption. These works are revealed in the economy of creation and grace. For example, the sending of the Son and the Spirit “in the fullness of time” is distinguished qualitatively from the eternal begetting of the Son and the procession of the Spirit. And yet, the freely willed incarnation of the Son and the outpouring of the Spirit in history are “fitting” or consonant with the eternal processions. Since it is the Son who is eternally begotten by the Father, it is fitting that he, rather than the Father or the Spirit, become flesh for us and for our salvation. But he is eternally the former even if the decision had never been made to create a world or to send the Son to redeem it. The economy—that is, what God chooses to do in history—reveals the truth about the intratrinitarian life but does not comprehend or exhaust it.
On the one hand, the immanent trinity is truly revealed in the historical economy. The missions (i.e., the sending of the Son and the Spirit) are consistent with the truth about God as he is in the eternal processions of begetting Father, begotten Son, and breathed-out Spirit. On the other hand, we cannot simply deduce the secrets of the immanent trinity from the economy. For example, the Spirit’s formative role in the incarnation does not entail that the Son proceeds from the Spirit. Nor does Jesus’s statement, “The Father is greater than I” (John 14:28), imply that the Son is inferior to the Father in eternity.
The second time-honored maxim, introduced at the beginning of this chapter, is that the external works of the Trinity are undivided. The works of the Godhead are not parceled out between the persons. Like the Father and the Son, the Holy Spirit is Lord—that is, sharing exactly the same divine essence and attributes. And the Spirit, like the Father and the Son, is engaged in every work of the Godhead. According to the doctrine of appropriations, we may refer to the Father as Creator, to the Son as Redeemer, and to the Spirit as Sanctifier. It is for the sake of instruction; one cannot say everything at the same time. Following the outline of the ecumenical creeds, systematic theologies often exhibit this pattern. However, there is always a danger in this approach of breaking this undivided-works rule. Everything that God does is done by the Father, in the Son, through the Spirit. The Spirit, too, is Lord. As we will explore, the Spirit is engaged in creation and the accomplishment of redemption as fully as in the application of redemption.
Although the works are as undivided as the persons, there are nevertheless three persons: distinction without division. The Spirit is God, but he is also uniquely the person of the Trinity who gives life. “When you send forth your Spirit, they are created, and you renew the face of the ground” (Ps 104:30 ESV); “The Spirit of God has made me, and the breath of the Almighty gives me life” (Job 33:4). The Spirit is the unsubstitutable character in these scenes, sent by the Father to create and renew.
We must therefore distinguish between essential and personal properties (sometimes called common and proper attributes). With respect to the former, the Holy Spirit is no less omniscient, eternal, unchanging, loving, just, and omnipotent than the Father or the Son. When it comes to the essential attributes, there is no difference between the persons. But there are differences in their personal attributes.9 Most obviously, the Father is unbegotten, the Son is begotten, and the Spirit proceeds. The Son and the Spirit receive their personal existence from the Father eternally. Yet they are not essentially subordinate to the Father since they share the same essence with him.
What we meet in the unfolding biblical drama is not merely three “personas” but three concrete persons; not just three roles, but three actors. We encounter the Father as the origin of creation, redemption, and consummation, the Son as the mediator, and the Spirit as the one who brings every work to completion.
There are various ways of formulating this mystery:
• The Son is the Father’s image; the Spirit is the bond of love between them. Consequently, in every external work of the Godhead the Father is the source, the Son is the mediator, and the Spirit is the consummator. Creation exists from the Father, in the Son, by the power of the Spirit; in the new creation Christ is the head while the Spirit is the one who unites the members to him and renews them according to Christ’s image to the glory of the Father.
• Or we can say that the Father works for us, the Son works among us, and the Spirit works within us.
• God’s works, both of creation and new creation, are typically described in Scripture as performed through speech, so we may also say it this way: Just as the Son is the Word of the Father and the Father (or the Father and the Son) breathes out the Spirit, all of the Father’s speech in the Son brings about its intended effect because of the perfecting agency of the Spirit. We hear the voice of the Father, but we behold God himself in the face of Christ. Jesus could even tell Philip, “Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father” (John 14:9). “I and the Father are one” (John 10:30). But the Spirit is the one who brings about this recognition within us, as Jesus goes on to point out so clearly in the following verses (vv. 15–27). The Trinitarian reference is implied in 2 Corinthians 4:6 ESV: “For God [the Father], who said, ‘Let light shine out of darkness,’ has shone in our hearts [by the Spirit] to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.”
• Or, if you will allow one more formulation: in the covenant of grace, the Father is the promise maker (Heb 6:13), the Son is the promise (2 Cor 1:20), and the Spirit brings about within us the “amen!” of faith (1 Cor 12:13).
The preceding examples of valid formulations lean heavily toward the economic trinity, that is, the distinct role of each person in every operation of the Godhead toward the world. And that is as it should be, since the weight of revelation falls on the external works of the Godhead “for us and for our salvation.”
Already in the second century, Origen explored the distinct operations of the divine persons in each external work. All people participate in the Father (as Creator) and the Son (as Logos-Word-Reason). So they have their existence and reason from them, “but a share in the Holy Spirit is possessed, we find, by the saints alone.”10 “Here we see most clearly shown that there is no separation in the Trinity, but that this which is called the ‘gift of the Spirit’ is ministered through the Son and worked by God the Father.” By the Spirit’s work, those who participate already in the Son as Logos-Reason by nature now by grace “become capable of receiving Christ afresh in his character of the righteousness of God.”11 In other words, it is the Holy Spirit who enables us to participate in the Father and the Son by grace—in a qualitatively different way than we participate in them by nature.
Offering a more fully Trinitarian account, Athanasius observed that “while the Father is fountain, and the Son is called river, we are said to drink of the Spirit.”
For it is written that “we have all been given to drink of one Spirit” (1 Cor 12:13). But when we are given to drink of the Spirit, we drink of Christ; for “they drank from the spiritual rock that followed them, and that rock was Christ” (1 Cor 10:4). . . . But when we are made alive in the Spirit, Christ himself is said to live in us: “I have been crucified with Christ,” it says, “I live, yet it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me” (Gal 2:19–20).12
Scripture gives sufficient reason to say with confidence that the persons, though distinct, are inseparable and are not different in essence. We are told that it is true but not how. “How can it be that when the Spirit is in us, the Son is said to be in us, and when the Son is in us, the Father is said to be in us?” Athanasius answers, “The presumption of insane people is to enquire into these things with respect to God.”13 Similarly, the Latin father Ambrose:
So both the Father and the Spirit sent the Son; the Father sent Him, for it is written: “But the Paraclete, the Holy Spirit, Whom the Father will send in My name.” The Son sent Him, for He said: “But when the Paraclete is come, Whom I will send unto you from the Father, even the Spirit of Truth.” If, then, the Son and the Spirit send each other, as the Father sends, there is no inferiority and subjection, but a community of power.14
It is not different works but different roles in every work that the divine persons perform. This can be something like a paradigm shift not only in our thinking but in our worship, living, and mission. As we begin to discern the Spirit’s distinctive role across the whole canvas of biblical revelation, we begin to recognize his distinctive role in our own lives. This emphasis became especially formative in the work of the fourth-century Cappadocian fathers (Basil, his brother Gregory of Nyssa, and their friend Gregory of Nazianzus). For example, Gregory of Nyssa wrote that none of the persons executes any work apart from the others, “but every operation which extends from God to the Creation . . . has its origin from the Father, and proceeds through the Son, and is perfected in the Holy Spirit.”15 The Genevan reformer John Calvin frequently repeats these Cappadocian formulas, as when he expresses it in his own words: “To the Father is attributed the beginning of action, the fountain and source of all things; to the Son, wisdom, counsel, and arrangement in action, while the energy and efficacy of action is assigned to the Spirit.”16 This has no small impact on his entire theology.
Again, for emphasis: We will have a very narrow vision of the Spirit’s person and work if we identify him only with specific works (like regeneration and spiritual gifts) instead of recognizing the specific way he works in every divine operation. In creation, redemption, and the consummation, the Spirit is the life-giver.
Let me suggest that this represents an apologetic point of engagement even with our post-Christian culture. We cannot go “down the ladder” from the Sovereign Father to the Savior, Jesus, to the supposedly vulnerable Spirit at the heart of the cosmos. The Spirit is Lord, in the same way as the Father and the Son. And yet he is also “the giver of life,” exercising his divine lordship within creation, making it fruitful, rich, and productive in the inherent capacities with which it has been endowed by the Father in the Son. Typically, green theologies today see the Spirit as the unique person for an ecological age, but this abstracts the Spirit’s fructifying and perfecting agency from that of the Father as origin and the Son as mediator. This world is the great masterpiece formed and sustained, as well as redeemed and ultimately restored, by intratrinitarian love. Creation is not necessary to God’s being or becoming but is summoned into existence and sustained by the nonarbitrary and yet utterly free speech of the triune God.
The Father is not a despotic monarch but the font of this loving enterprise, and the Son actually assumed worldly reality to himself forever. He is Immanuel: God with us. In his performance parable in John 13, Jesus washes his disciples’ feet to teach them what he is about to do for them in his death and resurrection. In contrast with the disciples’ jockeying for power like gentile rulers, Jesus says that this is what it means to say that Jesus is Lord. So the Father and the Son also reveal a sovereignty that is opposed to all earthly despotism. The Spirit is Lord and giver of life in the way that has been willed by the Father, in the Son. And yet the Spirit exercises this divine sovereignty within creation, winning creaturely consent and causing the creatures to bring forth the fruit that they have been “worded” to bear by the Father in the Son. Herman Bavinck observes that as the Father, the Son, and the Spirit, “our God is above us, before us, and within us.”17
So a lot is packed into the confession that the Holy Spirit is “Lord” and “the giver of life.” These two identifications give us our coordinates. The Holy Spirit is not merely a divine force, power, or principle; he is God and “together with the Father and the Son is worshipped and glorified.” He is not an instrument of God but is himself the Lord God along with the Father and the Son. It is he alone who makes whatever creaturely means he uses effective. As Augustine emphasized in his De Trinitate, Jesus reveals God because he is God, while also being with God (the Father), as we read in John’s prologue. Similarly, the Spirit “searches all things, even the deep things of God” because he is a distinct person of God (1 Cor 2:10).
The Holy Spirit is the one who forms a confused mass into a habitable home in creation, whose breath animates a mass of clay, turning it into “a living being” (nephesh; Gen 2:7) according to the pattern of the Son who will become incarnate. It is he who is at work within creation, within us, to sustain us in life; and it is he who gives spiritual life to those who are “dead in trespasses and sins” (Eph 2:1 KJV). Furthermore, “If the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, he who raised Christ Jesus from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through his Spirit who dwells in you” (Rom 8:11 ESV). The Father sends the Son and the Spirit for different phases of the same mission. It is not the Spirit who becomes incarnate, bears our sins, and is raised as the Head of the body (the church). And yet it is not the Son who conceives himself in Mary’s womb, or regenerates and raises our bodies in glory on the last day. In a very specific sense, the Spirit is “the giver of life” in all of God’s external works. No less than the Father and Son, the Spirit creates and saves but in a different way with different effects. Apart from the Spirit’s work within us, the Father’s work for us in his Son would not be brought to completion.
In the chapters that follow, we explore the Spirit’s perfecting agency in every external work of the Godhead—not only in redemption but in creation and in the consummation of that great work of God in the age to come.
THE HOLY SPIRIT CHANGES EVERYTHING
As I have said, we should not be looking for the works that are done uniquely by the Holy Spirit but the unique role of the Holy Spirit in every work. The Holy Spirit, notes B. B. Warfield, is “the Executor of the Godhead not only in the creation and upholding of the worlds and in the inspiration of the prophets and apostles, but also in the regenerating and sanctifying of the soul.”18 Even better is Abraham Kuyper’s expression: “We begin with the general distinction: That in every work effected by the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost in common, the power to bring forth proceeds from the Father; the power to arrange from the Son; the power to perfect from the Spirit.”19 When we explore the Spirit’s work from Genesis to Revelation, creation to consummation, a common conclusion emerges: he is the person of the Godhead who brings everything to completion. The Spirit changes everything. This will be the leitmotif of our explorations in this book.
The Perfecting Spirit
The Holy Spirit is the one who turns a house into a home—created space into a covenantal place where God dwells with his people. He separates the waters in creation so that there is dry land for this communion. He comes in judgment to Adam and Eve after their transgression of this covenant. The same life-giving Spirit who hovered over the waters to make fruitful the seas and to survey creation to add his benediction appeared in the garden to survey the situation. Furthermore, in the light of further revelation it becomes clear that the Holy Spirit is identified with judgment and justification. This is why Jesus describes the Holy Spirit as “the Advocate” (paraklētos; an attorney)—who will convict the world of sin (John 16:7–8). This is already what the Spirit is doing in the garden after the transgression of the original covenant.
The Spirit divides the waters of the Red Sea, delivering his nation while burying his enemies in watery judgment. He is associated with circumcision, the rite of “cutting off” a portion of the flesh so that the whole person will not be “cut off”—excommunicated—from fellowship with God. Similarly, in the prophets the descent of the Spirit is associated with “the last days” (Joel 2:28, fulfilled in Acts 2:17–18)—specifically, with the coming judgment that all previous judgments merely foreshadowed. A key indication that it is the last days is when the Spirit has been poured out (Isa 2:2; 32:15–16; Ezek 11:19; 36:25–27; Mic 4:1; Zech 12:10). Whenever the Spirit appears, there is a courtroom scene. Jesus even speaks of the Holy Spirit as “another paraklētos,” which is more accurately rendered “attorney” than “comforter” (John 14:16).
And now it is the Spirit who baptizes us in the waters of judgment, crucifying and raising us together with Christ. He not only rests above the tabernacle or above the ark of the covenant in the temple as a glory cloud but indwells each of God’s people as living stones of his end-time sanctuary. Even this indwelling has judicial significance. For this Paul uses the legal term arrabōn, which is a pledge or “deposit guaranteeing our inheritance” (Eph 1:14; cf. Rom 8:23; 2 Cor 1:22). The Spirit makes us witnesses in God’s courtroom of history, symbolized by the flames that appeared over the head of each disciple at Pentecost. Thus, even though they were eyewitnesses to Christ’s work, the disciples were not ready to be witnesses of Christ to the world until they had been endowed with the Spirit (Luke 24:49).
Besides the legal or judicial aspect, the Spirit’s “separating” work is identified with cleansing. Wherever the Spirit hovers, the land is made holy. This is why Moses was horrified by the prospect of the LORD refusing to maintain his presence with his sinful people. What will distinguish (separate) them from the nations as holy? Under the canopy of that hovering glory cloud, everything—from people to livestock to pots and pans—was holy to the LORD. It is by the endowment of the Spirit that David and his hosts were to continually cleanse God’s land of everything that defiles, fulfilling the mandate that God gave to Adam.
It was the Spirit who put into the breast of the prophets the longing and sure confidence of the coming of Christ. It was the Spirit who hovered over the waters of Mary’s womb so that the one whom she bore was “holy”—the “Son of the Most High” (Luke 1:32). Not only did Christ give us the Spirit; the Spirit gave us Christ. Further, it was the Spirit who equipped the Son for his mission as the Servant of Isaiah (Isa 61:1 with Luke 4:18). It was he who led Jesus into the wilderness to be tempted by Satan, and it was he who upheld the Lord in his severe trial. It was by the Spirit that Christ cast out demons and performed miracles. In fact, to attribute these works to Satan was not to commit blasphemy against Christ’s divinity but against the Holy Spirit (Mark 3:29).
By focusing only on Christ, we have too often attributed to Christ’s deity what belongs more properly to the Holy Spirit. In doing this, we also marginalize the role of Christ’s humanity in winning our salvation. Of course, he is not merely human but is as fully human as we are, yet without sin. In what he said and did, Jesus proclaimed the Father and relied on the power of the Spirit. Jesus Christ is the Son of the Father, and the Holy Spirit is the gift of both the Father and the Son.
And this same Spirit indwells us so that we say our “amen” to God in Christ (1 Cor 12:3), crying, “ ‘Abba, Father,’ ” as adopted children and coheirs with Christ (Rom 8:15; Gal 4:6). The Spirit performs the prophesied circumcision of the heart within us, cutting us off from the passing evil age—“the flesh”—and, uniting us to Christ, works within us to bear the fruit of the Spirit. He turns a house into a home. Immediately upon taking up his residence, he begins to cleanse our hearts from the defilements of sin.
In all of these ways, we see the Spirit as the one who consummates the work of the Father in the Son. And with respect to the new creation, that is why we see him poured out in “these last days,” as he vivifies dead twigs and unites them to the living vine, Jesus Christ. The Father is God for us, the Son is God with us, and the Spirit is God within us, yielding our free consent to his unfailing word. In biblical eschatology, the spatial metaphors of “below” and “above” are transformed into temporal coordinates: “this present age” of sin and death and “the age to come.” The Spirit’s descent marks the entrance of the powers of the age to come into this present evil age. Already with Christ’s resurrection-glorification in the power of the Spirit we have the inauguration of the new creation. Like Noah’s dove that brought the leafy twig as a harbinger of life beyond the watery grave, the Spirit brings us not only previews of coming attractions, but the renewing energies of the age to come.
Of course, the visible effects of this consummation will only be apparent fully and universally when Christ our Head returns bodily. Yet even now, the Spirit regenerates and gives us faith to be united to Christ for a sure resurrection in glory. The future verdict of the last judgment has been rendered in the present. We are even “justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God” (1 Cor 6:11), since it is the Spirit who gives us faith to embrace Christ and his imputed righteousness. By his own descent at Pentecost, the Spirit who was at work in Christ is now at work in us his coheirs. Through preaching and sacrament, the Spirit brings the powers of the age to come into this age of sin and death (Heb 6:4–5). We are already adopted and are being daily renewed and conformed to the image of God’s glorified Son. This is why Jesus tells us that the Spirit not only convinces of sin and judgment and righteousness but tells us of “things to come” (John 16:13 KJV). “Things to come”: eschatological completion is attributed distinctly to the Holy Spirit.
It is the Spirit who places and preserves us at the precarious intersection of the two ages, in that disorienting tension between the “already” and the “not yet.” The Spirit who refreshes the streams of everlasting joy in God’s everlasting Sabbath indwells us now so that our history is now “cut off” from the dreary genealogy of Adamic sin and death and even now our humanity is taken up with our ascended Savior into the glory of the age to come. In this marvelous unity and difference, the glory of the holy Trinity becomes the radiant vista of the life that we now live—from the Father, in the Son, and by his Spirit.
The Indwelling Spirit
In the light of this biblical-theological survey, we may draw at least two conclusions that will be retrieved at various points throughout these chapters.
First, because he is the Trinity, God’s external acts are not simply brute force upon an object. At least in the ancient world, a sovereign ruled by issuing fiats that demanded a certain response. The ruler might use underlings to carry out the orders, but the relation of ruler to the ruled was simply cause and effect. However, Israel’s God—the one true God—is tripersonal. He speaks, to be sure. However, his decrees are effective because they are spoken in his Son as mediator, and they have the Spirit as the one who works within them to win their consent. No royal minister of a secular kingdom can cause the people to acquiesce with joy to the king’s decree, but the Spirit can accomplish this because he is the king himself who opens us up to the Father’s word and the reconciling work of the Son. This Trinitarian sovereignty contrasts sharply with the gods invoked by other religions, whether polytheistic or monotheistic. The Spirit is not merely a servant of God. On the contrary, precisely because he is none other than God, he can bring the Father’s will to pass. And precisely because he is other than the Father, he can do so by working within us to win our consent. So God’s power is exercised by a word that “goes forth” from the Father’s mouth, is mediated by the Son—who himself becomes part of that history—and is “at work in you” (1 Thess 2:13) through the Spirit. This is evident not only in redemption (where the Spirit is the agent of sanctifying grace) but in creation and providence, where the Spirit is at work even in unbelievers by common grace to restrain sin and to fulfill their common callings.
Second, we learn that the Spirit ordinarily employs creaturely means in liberating creatures to “bring forth” the fruit that they have been worded to bring forth by the Father, in the Son. From the very beginning, the Spirit was at work within worldly reality, shaping and fertilizing it to bring forth specific kinds of existence, each with a life of its own and yet contributing its own part to the symphony of creation. He hovered over the waters, parted waters, came upon the prophets so that what they wrote was from God, and hovered over the waters of Mary’s womb so that what was born of her was no less than the Son of God. This same Spirit works today through the frail creaturely means of preaching, water, and bread and wine, uniting physical signs to the reality: Christ with all of his benefits. A quasi-gnostic opposition between “spirit” and “matter” has no place in a biblical identification of the Spirit and his relation to the material world. Nature is his palette. He is at home in this world, as he was in the temple and as he now is in the end-time sanctuary that he is building and indwelling.
The Spirit also illumines his church to understand and to embrace Scripture as his word, yet without coercion. Regeneration is effectual neither because of divine coercion nor human free will, but because the Spirit “works in you to will and to act in order to fulfill his good purpose” (Phil 2:13). And the Spirit does this not by acting coercively upon us nor simply by setting forth the historical narrative of Jesus but through the creaturely means of grace. Because of the Spirit, Christ himself is present among us through his word (Rom 10:8), and we are washed and fed on our pilgrim way by his sacraments.
The same Spirit who clothed the Son in our flesh has raised us from spiritual death and will also raise our bodies and glorify—indeed, deify—us. It is not a divine thing that indwells us as the guarantee of our final glorification but God himself. It was this connection with the doctrine of salvation that became one of the most important defenses among the church fathers of the Holy Spirit’s divinity: if the Spirit is not God, then he cannot glorify us on the last day.
The Holy Spirit changes everything. He is the Spirit of the future—the everlasting Sabbath—who brings us harbingers of the age to come. The Father moves toward us in his Son, even among us, and the Spirit is at work within us to unite us to Christ for justification and sanctification. As John Owen puts it, “In every great work of God, the concluding, completing, perfecting acts are ascribed unto the Holy Ghost.”20 And the Spirit accomplishes this by working, as he always had, through ordinary creaturely means that Christ ordained for giving himself to us here and now.
It will be my pleasure in the coming chapters to explore with you this “Lord and giver of life” who is God and is yet different from the Father and the Son, so that with all God’s people and heavenly hosts we can worship and glorify him together in this age and in the age to come.
1. Although the final form was established at Constantinople I (AD 381) and is therefore 29 identified technically as the Nicene-Constantiopolitan Creed, I will be referring to it simply as the Nicene Creed.
2. James D. G. Dunn, Did the First Christians Worship Jesus? The New Testament Evidence (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2010), 126.
3. Dunn emphasizes, “Notably, what we do not find is any hint that worship was offered to the Spirit of God” (ibid., 74, emphasis original).
4. Daniel Boyarin, “Logos, A Jewish Word: John’s Prologue as Midrash,” in The Jewish Annotated New Testament ed. Amy-Jill Levine and Marc Z. Brettler (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 546–49.
5. In passing it is worth observing that according to the relevant passages (especially in John 14–17), perichoresis—the mutual indwelling of the persons—is not an open relationship but refers strictly to the divine persons in their immanent relations. Contrary to Jürgen Moltmann’s thesis (Trinity and the Kingdom of God [San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1981], 172–78), perichoresis presupposes essential unity rather than being a substitute for it.
6. This tendency has been evident in recent “social Trinitarianism” advocated by Jürgen Moltmann among others. There is one God, and the Holy Spirit is as fully God as the Father and the Son. See chapter 10 for a summary of this view.
7. This is true also of Arianism, a christological heresy that denies Christ’s divinity, regarding him instead as the first and noblest of God’s creatures.
8. Bruce Marshall argues that the traditional distinction is between the processions and missions; the distinction between so-called immanent and economic trinities first appears as a category at least in the nineteenth century with Franz Anton Staudenmaier (“The Unity of the Triune God: Reviving an Ancient Question,” The Thomist 74 (2010): 8.
9. Reformed orthodox writers typically went so far as to identify these personal attributes as “incommunicable.” In other words, the Son and the Spirit can never be the unbegotten Father, nor can the Father proceed from the Spirit or the Son. Each person has a mode of existence that is his own.
10. Origen, On First Principles, trans. G. W. Butterworth (Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1973), 36–37 (1.3.7).
11. Ibid., 38.
12. “Letters to Serapion concerning the Holy Spirit,” in Athanasius, trans. and ed. Khaled Anatolios (London: Routledge, 2004), 217–19 (1.19–20).
13. Ibid.
14. Ambrose, The Holy Spirit 3.1.8 (NPNF2 10:136).
15. Gregory of Nyssa, On “Not Three Gods” to Ablabius (NPNF2 5:334).
16. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. Lewis Ford Battles, ed. John T. McNeill (Philadelphia: Westminster John Knox, 1960), 1.13.18.
17. Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: God and Creation, ed. John Bolt, trans. John Vriend (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2004), 2:260. It should be noted that I am discussing the Trinity after the attributes not because God’s unity is more important than his plurality but because it makes sense to discuss first the characteristics that each person shares as God.
18. B. B. Warfield, “Introductory Note,” in Abraham Kuyper, The Work of the Holy Spirit, trans. Henri De Vries (New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1900; repr., Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1979), xxvi.
19. Kuyper, Holy Spirit, 19.
20. John Owen, A Discourse concerning the Holy Spirit, in vol. 8 of The Works of John Owen, ed. William H. Goold, 16 vols. (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 1965), 93–99. After showing how this is true in creation, Owen displays the Spirit’s perfecting role in the new creation. It comes from the love of the Father and Christ’s mediation, but “it is the peculiar work of the Holy Spirit to make those things of the Father and Son effectual unto the souls of the elect, to the praise of the glory of the grace of God” (190).