I used to spend a lot of my spare time out bodyboarding.
Surfing lying down basically, surfing for the uncoordinated… but not necessarily
unbalanced. That meant you’d spend quite
a bit of time sitting in the water a couple of hundred meters off shore waiting
for the next wave. One of the most
amazing things when we were in the Bay of Plenty and in the Hawkes Bay were the
Gannets. They would circle and circle, high in the sky, effortlessly and then
suddenly their wings would fold back and they would dive straight down into the
water after a fish, just a flash of white and gold then Splash! Other times as
a wave rose and began to crest and you were paddling out to catch it, along the
wave would come a Gannet, gracefully gliding across the face of the wave, ridding
the air flow pushed up in front of it, with just the tip of its wing touching
the water. Spectacular and beautiful.
That is some of the images that play in my mind as I read
the first few verses of the creation narrative in Genesis and it talks of the
Spirit of God, hovering over the waters, over the formless earth waiting for
God to speak and for it all to come into being.
Today we are starting a series of sermons looking at the
Holy Spirit in the Hebrew scriptures, what we call the Old Testament. It’s
going to be a journey from the spirit of God hovering over the water in Genesis
to the fulfilment of the prophecy in Joel chapter 2 that God would pour out his
Spirit on all people, which was fulfilled at Pentecost and is the reality we
live in, in our Christian walk today. We are God’s Spirited people, he has
poured out his Spirit on us. We are called to be filled with The Holy Spirit.
I want to start with just a brief introduction to this
series… This is the fifth Pentecost series I’ve preached here at St Peter’s,
looking at what the scriptures say about the Holy Spirit. It’s important to do
this because of two things. The church
suffers from insufficient teaching on the Holy Spirit; so we see it is an add
on in our creeds and statements of faith, all this stuff about God and Jesus oh
and we believe the Holy Spirit, and we can think that instead of being
important and central to our faith and life that it’s an add on, an optional
extra for the super spiritual, kind of like leather upholstery in a car, rather
than God’s very presence and power in our lives. Secondly as a church we also
suffer from over teaching on the Holy Spirit. But we’ve kind of left to others
to do, so we equate it with the excesses of the more out there fringe elements,
the chandelier swingers, show men and charlatans, and because of that we can
get put off encountering and knowing and living
our faith by the Spirit moving in our lives.
We are looking at the Holy Spirit in the Old Testament,
because it’s easy to think that the Holy Spirit simply pops up at Pentecost, or
maybe just starts hanging round in Jesus life. But the Holy Spirit is how God
has been active in the world from the beginning. It is how God has spoken and
directed his people, redeemed, enabled and equipped them. We often don’t notice
it in the Old Testament because it is hidden in words and metaphors, for
example around the time of the exile the hand of God is a popular way of
expressing the Presence and working of the Holy Spirit… by looking at the Holy
Spirit in the Old Testament it allows us to have a good basic understanding of
the Spirit, see how Jesus had made a difference and look at the Spirits work in
our own lives. We are going to do some
theology, some biblical study and hopefully allow ourselves to be open more to
the Spirit’s presence and moving.
I am going to start this series at the beginning, and if you
don’t mind me quoting Julie Andrews ‘that’s a very good place to start’. In the
creation story in Genesis chapter one we see that after God had created the
universe and all that is in it, we are told that the Spirit of god hovered over
the formless waters. It’s not a full blown trinitarian statement, but it tells
us that God’s Spirit or what we know as the Holy Spirit was present at the
beginning and involved in God’s creation process.
That calls us to do some theology… The question is often
asked what or who is the Holy Spirit and the short answer is that the Holy
Spirit is God, part of the triune God who has revealed God’s self to us as
Father, Son and Holy Spirit. We see the Spirit there in the beginning, as the
Holy Spirit is God and shares with God the attribute of being eternal, without
beginning or end. The Holy Spirit shares with God the attribute of creation as
well. The prelude to John’s gospel tells us that the word, which he latter
identifies with Jesus was with God in the beginning and bought everything into
being. The whole of the Godhead is
involved in creation. Now it’s hard to
use a metaphor to explain the trinity without falling somehow into one or other
error of doctrine. But let me use the idea of speech as a way of explaining
that. As genesis tells us that God said and it came into being. When I say
something, there is the idea and purpose that comes out of my mouth, then there
are the words that conveys that idea constructs it and finally if you were to
somehow see the disturbance in the air you could see how those words are
carried into reality by sound waves. It’s not perfect, but it gives us a way of
being able to think of the triune God speaking forth creation. The point I want
to reiterate is that the Holy Spirit is the third person of the God head. When
we come to the new testament epistles we will often see Paul speaking about
such things as salvation or sanctification, that is our being made mature in
Christ, and we see that he will speak of the Father and the Son, Jesus Christ
and the Holy Spirit being involved in those actions.
The other thing we see from this Genesis story is that the
Holy Spirit is the means by which God is active in his creation. This is not as
I keep on saying a distant disinterested deity but a God who is present and
work in his creation in history. God works out God purposes and plans through
the work of the Holy Spirit. The Hebrew word that we’ve been translating
hovering can also have the connotation of the Spirit of God stirring the
waters. Stirring them up. It is a
picture like our gannet or more biblically like a mother eagle in Deuteronomy
32:11 God talks of his care for Israel like being an eagle that stirs up its
nest, to push its young out to learn to fly and then hovers over them and will
not let them fall, but will catch them before they fall to the ground and bear
them up. It is very much the picture of God’s Holy Spirit at work in Human
history.
I’m about to go splash like those gannets and go off the
deep end here. What science observes as natural selection and animals adapting
can also be seen as the work of the Holy Spirit, as God’s providence. In psalm
106 it talks of God making environments for each animal to enjoy and flourish
in, and I believe part of that is that God shapes animals for the different
environments they live in. It does not stop it being a natural process, I’m not
anti-science I’m pro God’s providential grace.
As we journey through the whole of the sweep of scripture we
see God at work in history by the Holy Spirit, the calling of Abraham, the way
in which joseph says that while his brothers had sold him into slavery God was
able to use that for good. Moses encounters God at the burning bush and is told
to go into Egypt. Leaders are raised up Kings anointed prophets sent to speak
God’s word. In Isaiah we see it on an even bigger scale as Darius the Persian
king is spoken of as God’s servant, the rise and fall of empires, God’s spirit
at work. Around the life of Jesus and then the life of the church. In the book
of ACTS there is a pattern of the church settling down and being happy where it
is at, in Jerusalem doing very well thank you, 3000 converts one week and 5000
the next, but they are not fulfilling Jesus commission of going and being
witnesses to Samaria and to the ends of the earth persecution is stirred up and
the people go out, the church does not fall but it learns to fly, you can see
it repeated and again. This year marks the 500th year of the
reformation, you can see the spirit at work there too, stirring up a reemphasis
on the saving work of Jesus Christ. God is still stirring up the church in our
own time. In the face of secularism in the west we are being challenged and
called back to what is real and important. We are being asked to move from
being comfortable in our society to being uncomfortable and concerned again
with the least and the lost, not to enjoy the favour of our society but to add
some salt and flavour.
Even in our own lives we can look back and see how God has
been at work by his Holy Spirit in the way things have happened, maybe you have
those aha moments when you recognise God’s hand at work, as we’ll see later
God’s hand is another way of talking of the Holy Spirit.
Now it would be easy to think perhaps that the Holy Spirit
is like some force. Like the idea of the force that Star Wars popularised,
which is just a reimagining of a pagan idea of a impersonal spirit or force at
work in the universe. But that is not the case. Our God is a personal God,
sentient and knowable. As we move through scripture we can see that we can know
the Holy Spirit, we can have a relationship with the Spirit, in our passage we
had read from the book of Galatians the Christian life is describes as a
process of us walking with the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit leading and guiding
us, revealing the scriptures to us.
I want to pull that involvement of the Holy Spirit in
creation and in God’s providence out of the realms of theory and theology to
how it works its self out in our lives today. Yes the Holy Spirit is how God
moves on a large world stage but also it is how God works in your life day to
day.
You see Jesus has made all the difference and as Paul puts
it in 2 Corinthians you and I are new creation, because of Christ’s life and
death and resurrection. John’s gospel starts with Jesus involvement in creation
and his narrative of the resurrection brings out the idea of new creation when
it starts on the first day in the garden. The reality is that God is renewing
his creation through Jesus Christ. As we have been forgiven of our sins our old
life has gone and we are made new. But as we saw in creation the whole of the
God head is involved in this new creation.
In the passage we had read from Galatians we see that in the
fact that as we allow the Spirit to work in our life, open up the scriptures
and apply them to our lives, draw us into a closer relationship with Jesus
Christ, convict of wrong doings and help us to live different lives that new
creation is taking shape. It bears fruit
in our lives fruit that is love, patience, joy, peace, goodness, faithfulness,
generosity, gentleness and self-control. The shape of this new creation in us
is Jesus shaped fruit, Jesus flavoured fruit. Through that and having that
lived out as more and more people come to know Jesus Christ and are filled with
God’s Spirit we will see creation transformed as well.
We’ve seen what Genesis has to say about God the Holy Spirit
and how the Spirit is involved in creation, history, our story and our new
creation. The Key difference as we will see a we continue in our exploration of
the Holy Spirit in the Old testament is that the Spirit moves from hovering
over to being poured out on all. It easy for us perhaps to think of God’s
Spirit out there somewhere hovering over, we may realise that God is not
distant disinterested but that is how we like to think of the Spirit. Like with
the gannets at the beach we can admire the beauty and splendour and
gracefulness of their flight, out there beyond the break, but the wonderful
reality is that Jesus Christ has made it possible for The Holy Spirit to dwell
in us, to fill us with the presence and power of God, that is the new life in
Christ, the new creation we are part of. My hope as we move on in this series
is that you may know that presence more and more in your life and walk with the
spirit.
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