Honor, serve, and obey your parents, with liberty and justice for all. I’m trying to recite Martin Luther’s explanation of the Fourth Commandment. Unable to recall all the words I added in part of the Pledge of Allegiance.
Raised in the home of a fine Lutheran pastor, we memorized and were tested on the Lord’s Prayer, the Apostle’s Creed, the 10 Commandments, and more. I went on to a very prestigious university, where I won the award for the Senior Engineering Design project of the year. Despite a Christian upbringing, several degrees in science and engineering, and a high GPA, I didn’t understand things of the Spirit. What happened?
In the last blog, we divided the human composition into body, soul, and spirit. What does the Bible tell us about the spirit?
We have body, soul, and spirit as we saw from 1 Thessalonians 5:23. I partitioned spirit out from the soul; however, these elements of our makeup are closely connected. Recall Hebrews 4:12.
Our bodies are material, enabling us to connect with the material world we live in. Our spirits are immaterial, giving us the capability to connect with the immaterial spiritual world. Christians operate in two realities: Our physical reality and a non-material, spiritual reality. Our minds interact with the physical world through our bodies, and they interact with the spiritual realm through our spirits.
Recall, God’s fundamental nature is spirit John 4:24. When Jesus’ lived on our planet, he had added to his divine nature, a physical body. Jesus’ earthly body could only be in one place at a time. After Jesus departed our world, he asked the Father to send the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is not bound by time and space. As Jesus told his disciples in John 14:18, “I will not leave you as orphans; I will come to you.” In simple, almost crude terms, think of the Holy Spirit as the worldwide wireless Jesus network.
The best analogy I have is a cellphone or smartphone. These devices communicate back and forth to cell towers, without wires, using radio waves. The frequencies of radio waves are lower than visible light, so you can’t see them. These invisible waves are capable of passing through solids and moving around corners. They are a reality. Though we cannot see them, we can see the results in the information received and transmitted from our phones.
Our spirits are what allow us to connect to God. We receive and transmit content back and forth with God through the spiritual realm. No monthly fees, no network downtime, and unlimited bandwidth. Typically, we don’t see the interactions in the spiritual realm, but you can see the results in a believer’s changed behavior. The way to connect with the God found in the Holy Bible is through your spirit. Your spirit to God’s Spirit.
Before we can operate in the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit’s spiritual realm, we need to become indwelt. If you are a Christian, you are, by definition, indwelt. Note that if you meet someone for the first time on an airplane and tell them that you are indwelt, they may change seats. A more accepted term is born-again.
We return to the smartphone analogy. In general, your smartphone can’t connect to a wireless network until it is activated. Sometimes you have to activate your phone yourself; other times, your provider takes care of the activation step. In short, activation turns on your service. Similarly, to connect to the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, we need to be spiritually activated.
1 Corinthians 2:10-13
10 these things God has revealed to us through the Spirit. For the Spirit searches everything, even the depths of God. 11 For who knows a person’s thoughts except the spirit of that person, which is in him? So also no one comprehends the thoughts of God except the Spirit of God. 12 Now we have received not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit who is from God, that we might understand the things freely given us by God. 13 And we impart this in words not taught by human wisdom but taught by the Spirit, interpreting spiritual truths to those who are spiritual.
The theologian Gordon Fee writes, “God’s wisdom can only be known by God’s people because they alone have the Spirit.”
Fee continues, “The absolute key to understanding God’s wisdom lies with the spirit. The basis of the argument that follows is the Greek philosophic principle of “like is known by like,” that is, humans do not on their own possess the quality that would make it possible to know God or God’s wisdom. Only “like is known by like”; only God can know God. Therefore, the Spirit of God becomes the link between God and humanity, the “quality” from God himself who makes the knowing possible.”
As 1 Corinthians 6:17 states, “But he who is joined to the Lord becomes one spirit with him.”
The unaided, non-born-again individual cannot know the things given to us by God. This premise sounds harsh, but it is the truth that the Bible teaches us. The passage in 1 Corinthians 2 explains why, as a young man, I didn’t understand things of the Spirit.
In the next blog, we will look at the Holy Spirit in more detail.