The Thursday After

This morning (video, notes), WMB started a new series on the Holy Spirit.

Lets start with some basics – how do the Bible writers talk about God’s Spirit? Here’s a great overview video: God’s Spirit is mentioned right at the beginning – “And the Spirit of God was hovering over the surface of the waters” and then gives “breath” to humans. Ancient Hebrew has one word “Ruakh” for breath, wind spirit and mind. It seems exactly right that Gods Spirit defies easy categories and is intertwined with the ideas of wind and breath.

God’s Spirit is given in special ways to people in the old testament: Joseph, Bezalel, David, Saul, several judges (even bad ones) prophets, and famously, Jesus. So enough to get a sense of what it means to be given the Spirit of God, but not so many as to be common.

We are working up to Pentecost. The remarkable thing at Pentecost is that the Spirit of God was given widely to the believers, exactly as Jesus, Ezekiel and Isaiah had said would happen.

So what does it mean when someone has the Spirit of God? I suspect that’s what we’ll be looking at in the next few weeks.

In the meantime, here’s some ways to dig into how the bible answers that question:

• go through the “discuss” questions at the bottom of the video link.
• Check out these study notes: where is the word Ruakh used and what does it mean? and what are the activities of God’s Ruakh?
• Here is a 4-part podcast which covers this all in more detail. If you have the time, its totally worth it. Both Jon and Tim describe very different growing up experiences and how they try to make sense of how the bible talks about the Spirit. Might well fit with one per week.