Bible Stories

On and after the Day of Pentecost, the Holy Spirit was very much the driving force behind the activity of the church. But who was the Spirit? Had he existed before this time?

A personality

The Spirit certainly existed before Pentecost, because the New Testament tells us that the Holy Spirit is God himself. The Holy Spirit had been active both in the life of Jesus and in Old Testament times.

In modern language, the word `spirit‘ can often mean an impersonal force or an ideal. For example, people talk about having ‘the spirit of courage’ or of doing something ‘in the right spirit‘. The New Testament does not talk about the Holy Spirit in this impersonal way, as though he was merely a force. The early Christians saw the Spirit as fully and in every sense a person, the one who guided the direction of the early church.

The Spirit in the Old Testament

In the Old Testament, God’s Spirit was active in a limited way. His work was to give people God’s power to do or say a particular thing which they could not do without God’s help. For example, God told the prophet Jeremiah to tell the people of Israel that he would punish them by allowing foreign rulers to conquer them. To speak such a message was treason, and Jeremiah needed God’s strength to have the courage to proclaim this message.

So the Spirit was given to those who were called to do a special task for God. He worked only in a few individuals, and only for limited periods of time. Some of the Old Testament prophets longed for the time when God would give his Spirit to all God’s people, and on a permanent basis. The prophet Ezekiel expressed this hope by saying:

I (God) will give you a new heart and a new mind. I will take away your stubborn heart of stone and give you an obedient heart. I will put my spirit in you and I will see to it that you follow my laws and keep all the commands I have given you.

So by giving his Spirit to people, God would not just be telling them to obey him, he would help them to do so.

Jesus and the Spirit

The four Gospel writers present Jesus as the person whose whole life was lived in the power of God’s Spirit. Luke, for example, tells us that Jesus was conceived by the power of the Spirit. At his baptism, the Spirit appeared in the form of a dove, giving Jesus God’s energy for all that lay ahead.

Jesus also said that he was able to start the work of God’s kingdom because he had been given God’s power:

The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor.

And another time, when Jesus‘ enemies said that he cast out demons by the power of Beelzebub (a Jewish name for the devil), he replied,

No, it is not Beelzebub, but God’s Spirit, who gives me the power to drive out demons, which proves that the kingdom of God has already come upon you.

The disciples and the Spirit Jesus told his disciples that soon they too would be able to receive the Spirit, and live in God’s power. He said,

If you then, though you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him!

However, it is in John’s account of the Last Supper that we see

Jesus‘ most explicit teaching about the coming of the Spirit. Jesus told the disciples that soon he would be leaving them, but that he and the Father would send them the Holy Spirit to be with them permanently – as the Old Testament prophets had hoped. The Spirit would use them to continue and extend the work that Jesus had begun.

Calling the Spirit ‘the Helper’, Jesus said these words:

I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Helper, who will stay with you for ever. He is the Spirit who reveals the truth about God.

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