This is part 11 of the One God Over All class.
Who or what is the spirit of God? It won’t do to read later tradition back into the scriptures. Rather, we need to see how the bible itself talks about the holy spirit. To get at that answer we’ll take a look at a couple of bible dictionaries along with dozens of texts. Next we’ll explore how the spirit solves the problem of a God who is both transcendent and immanent. Lastly, we’ll briefly examine three commonly misunderstood texts, including lying to the spirit in Acts 5.3, blaspheming the spirit in Matthew 12.31, and how Jesus talks about the spirit in the upper room discourse (John 14-16).
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Wonderful teaching, Sean. What to do about Christians, who say the Baptism of the Holy Spirit and speaking in tongues is of the devil? Matt 12:31-32 What translation are you using? My NASB does not read the same, and I would like to follow along with the same translation as you.
Interesting presentation but we should not pray to Jesus.
http://sahidicinsight.blogspot.com/2010/11/john-1414-to-me-or-not-to-me-that-is.html?m=1
https://fosterheologicalreflections.blogspot.com/2021/11/the-probability-of-reading-me-in-john.html?m=1
http://newworldtranslation.blogspot.com/2018/03/john-1414-and-missing-me.html?m=1
M,
How do you account for the early Christian practice of “calling on the name of the lord,” i.e., Jesus? The phrase is well-known established prayer language taken from the OT.
PS: did you know that redeemed Israel is said to be worshiped and prayed to according to Isaiah 45:14?
Many translations hide this fact by rendering both the Hebrew and Greek as “plead” or “supplicate.” Only the NET as far as I know has “pray.”
I’m loving this series!
Regarding John 14–16, this is the first time I’ve heard of the option that “the holy spirit” might be Jesus speaking of himself in the third person. It’s an intriguing idea, and does answer some otherwise puzzling statements. I’m going to have to ponder that idea for awhile.
It just occurred to me that this interpretation would provide us some illusory common ground with trinitarians — we would both consider the “Spirit” to be the third person. (They would consider him to be the third person of the trinity. We would consider him to be the third person of Jesus, grammatically speaking.) Just trying to build bridges where I can, Sean. 🙂
Hi Paul… very late to the discussion as I just found this website and go to an evangelical church, but I’ve been struggling with the Trinity concept for a long time and has caused me much agony of heart and soul and mind. The agony coming from a place that I might be outside of the pale of what is believed to be the Trinity, as in three separate persons as in if you can imagine, three human beings talking together in a room, which I believe is the way most evangelical see the Trinity. From my reading of the Scriptures, I see the Holy Spirit has the spirit of the father and the spirit of the son.
The night I became a believer I had prayed by myself in my room and asked Jesus to help me and save me. Two weeks later, my heart was born in me about Scriptures like the two on the road to Emmaus… not the Mormon in the bosom. I hear the voice in my mind and heart saying “Just Believe”. I was blown away because I knew what the words meant. I simply just believe that Jesus is who he says years and that God exists, and that Jesus died for my sins, and I just have to believe it with all my heart and the Scriptures were open to me.
to this day, I say that on that night, Jesus spoke to me directly by his spirit, meaning he didn’t appear in front of me, but he spoke to me through his spirit, the spirit being him. As Paul says the Lord is the spirit. Therefore, I believe that the Holy Spirit is the spirit of the Father and of the son. Am I wrong?
Paul,
Some trini scholars would agree with this interpretation. The NET Bible on John 14:18 says that “it may well be that another Johannine double meaning is found here, so that Jesus ‘returns’ to his disciples in one sense in his appearances to them after his resurrection, but in another sense he ‘returns’ in the person of the Holy Spirit to indwell them.”
Hence, John identifies the parakletos with the resurrected, “super-exalted” Jesus in 1 John 2:1.
For more check out our many videos on this topic: https://www.youtube.com/c/FocusontheKingdom/search?query=parakletos