The Holy Spirit
Readings: Romans 8. 9-17, John 15. 26 – 16.15
Who is the Holy Spirit? And how does the Spirit draw us into the life of God?
We’re on the sixth part of our series on the Nicene Creed and we finally come to the Holy Spirit. And in the original version of the Creed, as agreed at the Council of Nicea in 325, it ended like this ‘and his kingdom will have no end. We believe in the Holy Spirit’… That’s it. It ended there. But a generation later, with things slightly settled down on the person and role of the Son, new errors were popping up, these to do with the person and role of the Holy Spirit.
And so, at the first council of Constantinople in 381, the Creed was expanded to counter these errors. ‘We believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life, who proceeds from the Father and the Son. With the Father and the Son he is worshipped and glorified. Who has spoken through the Prophets’. And then it continues with some doctrines about the church which we’ll come to over the next two weeks. So technically the official name for the Creed we say at every Eucharist is the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed. But having said that once I agree that just calling it the Nicene Creed is much easier each week.
What all of this affirms is that the Spirit is fully God, just as the Son is fully God. That he is not an impersonal force or power, but a person. This section is once again affirming Trinitarian orthodoxy. Because the Holy Spirit is fully God he is worshipped and glorified as God, just as we worship and glorify the Father and the Son. Once again it counters modalism, the idea that God just presents himself with different faces or in different roles, by speaking of him as proceeding from the Father and the Son. Not the same person as the other two, but nevertheless one God.
As an aside ‘who proceeds from the Father and the Son’, ‘and the Son’ is the most controversial part of the Creed. Whilst the Apostle’s Creed simply gathers the persons of the Trinity, the Nicene Creed relates them to one another. The Son proceeds from, comes forth from, the Father. The Spirit proceeds from the Father [and the Son]. But in the original version of the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed it didn’t say ‘and the Son’, it was added in the West in the late 6th Century. And whilst we all agree that the Spirit is one person of the Trinity, and proceeds from the Father, the Eastern Orthodox church disagree that he also proceeds from the Son, and it eventually was a contributing factor in the great schism where Western and Eastern Christianity split in 1054. So sometimes you’ll see that bit bracketed or missed out entirely, particularly in contexts with Eastern Orthodox Christians present.
So what is the role of the Spirit? Well the Creed gives us two answers ‘the Lord, the lifegiver’ and ‘who has spoken through the prophets’.
So first he is the Lord, in the same way that both the Father and the Son are each Lord. It’s a statement of his equality much like that statement on how he is worshipped and glorified with the Father and the Son. But ‘the lifegiver’ is a wonderful statement isn’t it. The Spirit is the one who gives life. Your mind will perhaps go back to creation with the Spirit hovering over the waters. Right there at the start the Spirit is there, bringing life. And because he is God, fully and completely God, he is the very source of life itself.
And that matters, really matters. Jesus in that Gospel reading promises to send us another advocate, another one like him, who will be God with us, except this advocate will be God dwelling within us. To be a Christian is not just to have the Son with us and alongside us, but to have the Spirit of God, the Holy Spirit, within us. And if the Spirit, like the Son, is fully and completely God, then we have not missed out because we haven’t met Jesus face to face yet like the Apostle’s did, instead we have what the people of the Old Testament longed for, God dwelling within us. And we need him there to bring life.
Because as I said a few weeks ago, and as Paul reminds us in that passage from Romans today, we were once dead in our sins, and so what we desperately need is life, and so we need the lifegiver. Whilst our bodies are still dying, we need the one who can bring our souls alive. And that is the Spirit. As Professor Mike Reeves notes ‘We can’t raise ourselves to heaven by our own efforts, the problem runs deeper, we’re dead. So we need the Son to come for us and for our Salvation and rescue. We who are spiritually dead need life given to us, we need the Spirit, the one who hovered over the waters of creation. And he can only do that if he is God the author of life, Lord and lifegiver’. Saved by the Son, brought alive by the Spirit.
The Spirit is the one who makes the Christian alive. The one who raises us from the death of sin to the life of Christ. It is the Holy Spirit given to us who breathes life back into us. In giving us the Holy Spirit, God is raising us to life again, life in him, life without end. The very Spirit of life who hovered over the waters of creation now dwells in you, bringing you new life, renewing and restoring you. Isn’t that amazing. And not only is he bringing us new life, he is also the one who communicates Christ to us.
Now, in the Creed it speaks of how the Spirit spoke through the prophets. In the past, under the old covenant the Holy Spirit was given to specific people for specific tasks. Given to leaders and Kings like Moses or David to equip them for their work. Given to the craftspeople and artisans who worked on the Tabernacle and later the Temple. Given to the prophets to speak God’s words to the people. Given to specific people for specific tasks. And the Creed is keen to affirm this because some were saying that the Spirit was a creation of the Son. But in pointing backwards they affirmed the Spirit has always been at work.
But they were also trying to counter ‘Montanism’, a Christian sect which really liked the Spirit because it gave them license to build a new movement. It fuelled their belief that their so called inspired, ecstatic prophecies replaced and fulfilled the doctrines proclaimed by the Apostles. Their belief was that the Spirit spoke directly through their prophets, overriding what had come before. In other words they believed Spirit was leading them somewhere new, beyond what the Scriptures taught, beyond what the Apostle’s had handed down. Perhaps a warning to us of labelling everything new, every new idea as ‘where the Spirit is leading us’. So because of this context the Creed takes a more conservative view of the role of the Spirit in the here and now, speaking only of his prior role.
But we know that since Pentecost the Spirit has been poured out on all believers. And the Spirit is the one who communicates Christ to us. Who speaks to us now. As Jesus says in verse 26 of the Gospel today the Spirit ‘will testify about me’ and in verse 12 the Spirit will ‘speak only what he hears’ and again in verse 14 ‘he will glorify me’. The Spirit is all about Jesus, speaking of Jesus to us, speaking Jesus’ words to us, bringing him glory and praise. The Spirit is all about Jesus. Indeed Paul uses the terms ‘Spirit of God’ and ‘Spirit of Christ’ interchangeably throughout our passage from Romans, precisely because the Spirit is all about Jesus. The Spirit isn’t here to do a new thing, going beyond what Jesus has accomplished, but rather leading us into, and pouring into us the finished work of Christ. He will never lead us anywhere Christ has not already led us, speak contrary to what God has already spoken through the Bible. Rather he speaks to us and in us to bring that word alive for us. Just as the Spirit spoke once through the prophets, so now he speaks to every believer of Jesus. Speaking to us about ‘sin and righteousness and judgment’ and what these things now mean for us in Jesus. The truth of them which the world overlooks or ignores.
So the Spirit brings life, and the Spirit speaks to us of Jesus. And finally the Spirit brings us into God’s family. Paul tells us in that passage from Romans that if we have the Holy Spirit we belong to Jesus. The Spirit testifies that we belong to him. But more than that, verse 14, it is the Spirit who makes us children of God. Not just belonging to him but adopted as his children. It is the Spirit who enables us to call God Father. It is by the Spirit we are adopted, and by the Spirit we cry out Abba! Father! And it is the Spirit who assures us that, like all children, we are therefore heirs, heirs of the coming kingdom, of the age to come. The Spirit given to us testifies to us, reassures us, that our inheritance is coming, everlasting life in a world made perfect and new.
So, it truly matters that the Spirit is fully God, just as the Son is. It’s not a point on which we can agree to disagree. Because the Holy Spirit brings us life, and as the giver of life himself he gives life without end. He speaks to us of Jesus, and being himself one person of the Trinity of which Jesus is also a person he truly does speak as Jesus does. And he brings us into the very life of God, as children and heirs. And he can’t do any of that if he’s not fully God.
As Athanasius, the 4th century Bishop of Alexandria, put it in his third discourse against the Arians (the Arians being those who, if you remember from the first few weeks of this series, began the controversy that saw us needing this Creed) he wrote ‘we, apart from the Spirit, are strange and distant from God, and by the participation of the Spirit we are knit into the Godhead’. Without the Holy Spirit we are distant from God, far from him, estranged even, and yet through the giving of the Spirit, God has knitted us into the Godhead. Through the Spirit dwelling within us we are drawn into the very life of God himself, intimate, close, not just with, in. And you can’t get closer than in. Through the Spirit we know Jesus as our most intimate companion, the God of the universe as Father, the Spirit speaking and praying for us, on our behalf. To be a Christian then is to be caught up into the very life of God.
My brothers and sisters. Saved by the Son, brought alive by the Spirit, adopted by the Father. That’s the life of the Christian. What the Creed speaks of when it speaks of God is the one who is truly for us. And the one into whose life we are caught up when we place our faith and hope in Jesus. And the Spirit is the one who communicates God to us, both his words and his life. By the Spirit we are no longer distant from God but as close as you can be, awaiting the day when all shall be made new. And so in the Spirit’s power let us rejoice in him. Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit, as it was in the beginning is now and shall be forever.
Amen.