Part II Doctrine
XX. THE GIFT OF THE HOLY SPIRIT
Judges 14:1—6; Isaiah 63:10—14; Wisdom of Solomon 7:22—8:1;
John 14:16—17; 16:13;
Romans 8:5—17; 1 Corinthians 12:7—11
The greatest blessing which comes to those who have been redeemed by Christ and are justified by faith in his redeeming power is the gift of the Holy Spirit. We have previously seen how men of the Old Testament
came to realize that no one could achieve holiness without this gift (Ps.
51:10f); how they had come to believe that in the future God would make His Spirit available to everyone (Joel 2:28f); and how that hope was fulfilled on the day of Pentecost (Acts 2:1—4). The New Testament regards the age of the Spirit as already present and sees the
Christian—the new man of the new age—as one who lives in the joyful consciousness of possessing the Spirit.
Unfortunately a good many Christians no longer have a clear
understanding of what it means to have God’s Spirit dwelling in them and no real comprehension of what the Spirit is. As with so many other concepts in our religion we need to go back to the Old Testament to see what the words originally meant. Our first selection (Judges 14: 1—6) takes us to a book which at first glance seems to have very little
theology in it and to a strange story which bears all the marks of an ancient folk tale. Its hero is Samson, a kind of Hebrew Hercules or Paul Bunyan, remembered more for his deeds of strength than for his acts of piety. This particular story tells how he became enamored of a Philistine girl and went down from his hills to the plain to win her for his wife. On the way, it is said, a young lion met him and, when it roared, "the Spirit of the Lord came mightily upon him, and he rent him as he would have rent a kid" (v. 6). The story seems about as remote from the thought- world of the New Testament as one could get and yet it tells us the first, and most essential, thing about the Holy Spirit, which is that He is the giver of strength. Later on the Hebrews would come to understand that this means moral and spiritual, rather than merely physical, strength, but in the Samson story the doctrine appears in its earliest form. Primitive as the story is, it shows that when the Bible speaks of God’s Spirit it means that power from God which makes men able to do what they could not do by their own unaided might.
In Isaiah 63:10—14 (some parts of which are difficult to understand) at least two more things are evident. One is that the Spirit gives not only strength but guidance, for the whole passage is concerned with God’s guidance of His people through the desert at the time of the Exodus. The other is that the Spirit is not simply an impersonal force, like electricity, but is something like a person, since it is said that men can grieve it (v.
10;: KJV "vex"; cf. Eph. 4:30).
The third passage (Wisdom 7:22—8:1) comes from the Apocrypha, the link between the Old and New Testaments. Here we find the Old
Testament conception of Wisdom, which the New Testament sometimes
connects with the work of Christ, used as a synonym for the Holy Spirit (as became common in later Christian theology). Combining ancient Hebrew ideas with the language of Greek philosophy, the author describes how Wisdom, or the Spirit, which is the very image of God Himself (vv. 25ff), pervades and sustains all things (22—24; 8:1) and
"entering into holy souls . . . maketh them friends of God and prophets"
(27).
According to the Fourth Gospel (John 14:16f), Jesus promised his disciples that after his departure he would send them "another
Comforter," the Holy Spirit, who would continually instruct and guide them (16:13). The Spirit would no longer be the occasional possession of a few choice souls, but would be freely given to all those who live by faith in Christ.
St. Paul, of course, has more to say about the Christian life as a Spirit- filled life than any other New Testament writer. In Romans 8:5—17 he describes various aspects of it. It is, first of all, a life in which men are ruled by God’s Spirit rather than by their gross physical passions (vv.
5—9). (When Paul speaks of "flesh" and "body" he does not mean to suggest that the material body is evil in itself; it is evil, for him, only when it is allowed to usurp the place which properly belongs to the Spirit.) In the second place, life in the Spirit is a life in which
immortality has already begun (10f); heaven is a present fact (10), not simply a future hope (11). And, finally, it is a life in which men live in the full and joyful assurance that God is their Father (14—17).
In I Corinthians 12:7—11, Paul is not concerned so much with the inner life of the Spirit-filled man as with its outward manifestations. All Christians possess the Spirit, he says, and all have some special gift which proves it. Such gifts are to be used for the benefit of the Christian community and not merely enjoyed privately and selfishly (v. 7). The particular gifts he mentions—healing, the power to perform miracles, the gift of tongues—are those most characteristic of the church to which he is writing. But there is an infinite variety of such gifts and all are valuable. In a passage we shall read later (I Cor. 13), St. Paul says that the greatest of all gifts is the power to love. The most important gifts of the Spirit are certainly the moral gifts, the capacity for faith, courage, goodness and love to a supernatural degree—that is, beyond the ability of ordinary unredeemed men. All Christians have, potentially, at least one of these gifts; our obligation is to use them—for the sake of Christ and the brethren.