The Holy Spirit is not an impersonal force. The Holy Spirit is a person. As a person the Holy Spirit has a will, emotion, and intelligence. He can be angered, frustrated, grieved (Eph. 4:30). He can also be pleased and satisfied (Acts 15:28–30). The fact that the Holy Spirit is a Person has very important implications. In fact, it is one of the most important things to know about the Holy Spirit. It is because the Holy Spirit is a person that believers can experience the Holy Spirit through a personal relationship. Once again, this is an absolutely essential aspect of discovering the Holy Spirit.
Ultimately, it is our relationships with other persons that make us who we are (constitute being). There is no you without relationships with other people. This is the way God—the Three Persons of the Trinity—designed human existence to be. This is expressed in the fact of our origins—our very existence—finds itself in others (mom and dad). The belly button is the physical mark of this. Before anything else, every human being is the result of two others coming together. In every person a community represented.
Furthermore, relationships bring to life latent aspects of who we are. We find more of ourselves in others, and others in us. All of our identity, our personhood, is the result of how we relate to others. Who are we but sons, daughters, brothers, sisters, mothers, fathers, friends, enemies, spouses, teachers, accountants, etc.—everyrole is defined by how it relates to another. And, as our relationships grow, we grow with them.
When a woman has her first child, she becomes something she’s never been before: a mother. The relationship that she has with her son brings to life a new role, a new identity for the mother. The day of her son’s birth is simultaneously the birthday of her motherhood. She is someone she’s never been before. The new mother will spend a lifetime discovering what it means to be a mother in the various stages of life as the son develops. The role and function of the mother is very different in the toddler years than when the child becomes a teenager or adult. Every stage is one of discovery, both of learning of the son as he grows, but also of the mother as she grows in knowledge of what it means to be in relationship to her son. Even within the context of this one relationship the vastness of the development of the person is incalculable.
Every relationship is unique. Because every person is created in the image of God, every person is eternal, equal, and unique. Not only are we unique, but we are also infinitely complex. As such, we have to simplify ourselves to be in meaningful relationship with one another. We not only have to simply ourselves for the sake of being in relationship with others to exist in the world, but we also have to simplify ourselves for ourselves. It would just be too much to consciously compute the full expanse of the complexities of the self and function normally in society. When in a job interview, we’re not functioning in all of our identities and personality aspects at once. We are “narrowed in” for what’s needed in the context. It is by God’s grace that the Holy Spirit explores, cleanses, and redeems our depths. The indwelling of the Holy Spirit means a mysterious redemption at work beyond human cognition.
In Matthew 16:17 after Peter’s famous confession, Jesus says to Peter, “Blessed are you, Simon Bar-Jonah! For flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father who is in heaven.” In other words, understanding proper Christian teaching about the Holy Spirit is an act of divine revelation. We know what we know about God, Jesus, the Holy Spirit, and salvation because God actively reveals it. The truths of the Christian faith, while reasonable, cannot be stumbled upon merely through human reflection that lacks the illumination of the Holy Spirit by grace. Embracing Jesus as the Son of God and Savior of the world requires grace and the miraculous work of the Holy Spirit to draw people to Jesus. In John 10:3–5, Jesus says, “The sheep hear his voice, and he calls his own sheep by name and leads them out. When he has brought out all his own, he goes before them, and the sheep follow him, for they know his voice. A stranger they will not follow, but they will flee from him, for they do not know the voice of strangers.”
But what is the significance of this? The depth and the beautiful mystery of the gospel and the truth of the gospel can only be understood with the Holy Spirit’s help. The doctrine of the Clarity of Scripture is similar to this. This doctrine states that by the help of the Holy Spirit the message of the Bible is clear to those who seek to love and obey God.
In much the same way, we need the Holy Spirit’s help to understand the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit, like the Son and the Father, is a person who’s majesty and mystery spill over the banks of human reason. There are simply some things about the Holy Spirit (and theology in general), the we can say, “I know that it is true, but I don’t understand how it is true.
Because the Holy Spirit is a person, he has the liberty to choose to whom he reveals himself. It is only when we take on a heart-posture of worship, reverence, love, and obedience that the Holy Spirit guides us into truth about himself—it is within that context that he is best known.
This is why when doing theology properly, we use the word orthodoxy, which means “right worship”. It means that understanding and knowing God must be an act of humble worship. We will only arrive at the sacred truth revealed by the Trinity when our goal is to love and obey God within the context of personal relationship. We do not seek to just know about the Holy Spirit, but to know the Holy Spirit intimately and personally, which requires his willingness to reveal himself to us. It is by grace along that we can come to know him.
