"Where can I go from Your Spirit? Or where can I flee from Your presence?" (Ps. 139:7).
From Genesis on, we see the Holy Spirit as active. He endows men with gifts of service, anoints for particular tasks, sustains creation and creates new life. But who is this mysterious figure? First, He is divine. Just as the Father and the Son are one in substance, so the Spirit is one with them. He is not subordinate to the others in an ontological sense—He is pure, holy, and divine. This fact has received little challenge throughout history.
His distinctiveness as a person, however, has been hotly debated. But the Scriptures maintain that He is His own distinct person. He is said to possess personal attributes of intelligence, an individual will, and the power to act. He, as a person, can be grieved, dishonored, loved, and sinned against. Passages such as John 16:13, 1 Corinthians 2:10, 12, and 1 Corinthians 12:11 support such statements. The Holy Spirit is not an emanation from God without distinct personality of His own. Quite the contrary. Like the Son and the Father, He exists as His own person within the Godhead.
The nature, therefore, of the Spirit is divine and personal. But what about His function? We learn from Scripture that He is the breath of life. In redemption, He applies the work accomplished by the Son and ordained by the Father. In this capacity, the Spirit proceeds from both the Father and the Son. He is directed by them to accomplish His tasks. This does not make the Spirit inferior any more than the Son, who is obedient to the Father, is inferior. Herman Bavinck writes, “The Holy Spirit sustains the same relation to Christ as does Christ to the Father. Just as the Son has nothing and does nothing and speaks nothing of Himself, but receives everything from the Father; in the same manner the Holy Spirit takes everything from Christ. As the Son declares and glorifies the Father, so the Holy Spirit declares and glorifies the Son.”
We must remember, therefore, that the Spirit does nothing contrary to the Word. This holds significant implications as we implement the teaching of Christ in our lives. We can never say the Spirit wants us to do something contrary to what Christ has revealed in His written Word. To say this would be to divide that which is indivisible.
With New Age religion rampant today, a lot of people talk about a “force” that guides them. Some even refer to that force as the Holy Spirit. Why is it important to remember that the Holy Spirit is a person, not just a force of energy? Meditate on the truth that a personal being directs your life, not an impersonal force.
