Who the Holy Spirit Is: The Spirit in the Trinity
An orientation: how we know the Spirit, His place in the triune Godhead, and His central work of glorifying Christ
1. The Forgotten Person of the Godhead
For a long time it seemed that the Holy Spirit was the forgotten member of the Trinity. We sang freely of the Father who made us and of the Son who saved us, but the Spirit was seldom named and even more seldom understood. That has changed in our day. Turn on a religious broadcast and you will almost certainly hear the Spirit mentioned. Charismatics, cultists, and the older denominations alike now speak much of His person and His work. But more talk has not always meant more light. A great deal of what is said about the Spirit is confused, and some of it is plainly wrong. He remains the most misunderstood Person of the Godhead. The reason is not that the subject is unimportant but that it is one of the most difficult in all the Bible, and difficult things are easily mishandled. So the place to begin is not with our experiences or our feelings, but with the Word of God. Jesus said of the Spirit, "He will guide you into all truth" (John 16:13), and that is exactly what we will ask Him to do through these chapters.
2. How We Know Each Person of the Trinity
There is a simple pattern worth fixing in your mind at the very start, because it explains how this whole course is built. We come to know God the Father chiefly through His attributes. We say that He is holy, eternal, almighty, and all-knowing, and by stacking up those great qualities we form some idea of who He is. We come to know God the Son chiefly through historical events. He was conceived, born, baptized, tempted, crucified, raised, and taken up; you can lay His life out on a calendar and walk through it. But we come to know God the Holy Spirit chiefly through His activities, through what He does among us and within us. That is why, when the Bible speaks of the Spirit, it most often describes His work. He testifies of Christ; He convicts the world of sin; He teaches the people of God; He helps us when we cannot pray; He produces fruit in the character of believers; He distributes gifts to the church. Each of those activities is like a window, and it is through the windows that we will come to see the Person. If you want to know the Spirit, you must watch Him work.
3. One God in Three Persons
We worship one God, and yet He is three Persons, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. We will never fully take the measure of this mystery, but we can state it plainly and we can guard it carefully. The three are not three gods; that would be the error of polytheism, and the Bible will not allow it. "Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one" (Deuteronomy 6:4). Neither are the three merely three masks or three roles that one Person wears in turn, now appearing as Father, now as Son, now as Spirit. The Father is not the Son, and the Son is not the Spirit; they are three distinct Persons who together are the one true God. Watch how the Lord Jesus sets their names side by side as equals. He commands that disciples be baptized "in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit" (Matthew 28:19); it is one name, shared by three Persons. The apostle Paul closes a letter with the same threefold blessing: "The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with you all" (2 Corinthians 13:14). And the Spirit is no latecomer to the Godhead. He was there in the beginning, for "the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters" (Genesis 1:2) before ever a creature drew breath. He is eternal, equal, and fully God; we will prove His deity more fully in a later chapter. For now it is enough to set Him in His rightful place, full and equal within the one Godhead.
4. The Three Persons in One Scene
Nowhere does the Trinity stand out more clearly than at the baptism of Jesus. The Son came up out of the Jordan, and "the Spirit of God descending like a dove and alighting upon Him" (Matthew 3:16), while from heaven the Father's voice declared, "This is My beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased" (Matthew 3:17). In that single moment all three Persons are present and active at once: the Son in the water, the Spirit upon Him, the Father speaking over Him. No one Person crowds out the others, and no one of them is merely a costume worn by another. Here is the living God we worship, three Persons working together in perfect harmony, and the Spirit takes His own place in the scene as surely as the Father and the Son take theirs.
5. Why the Spirit Is Hard to Study
Of all the doctrines of Scripture, this is one of the hardest, and we ought to admit it honestly rather than pretend otherwise. Part of the difficulty lies in us. We are not purely spiritual beings; the Spirit is. When we try to speak of Him, the best we can do is reach for parallel pictures, bringing Him down to something near our own experience, and even then we cannot quite lay a finger on Him. Studying the Holy Spirit is something like trying to look straight at the sun. The sun blinds us with its own light, for our eyes were never made to gaze upon it. Yet in the light of the sun we are able to see everything else; we could see nothing at all without the very light we cannot look upon. So it is with the Spirit. He does not put Himself on display. Instead, as Jesus promised, "He will glorify Me, for He will take of what is Mine and declare it to you" (John 16:14). We cannot stare at the Spirit directly, but He floods the room, and in His light we see Jesus clearly.
6. The Spirit Is the Spirit of Christ
On the night before the cross, Jesus comforted His troubled disciples with a promise. "I will pray the Father, and He will give you another Helper, that He may abide with you forever" (John 14:16). The little word "another" carries more weight than it appears to. In the Greek there are two words that may be translated "another": one of them means another of a different kind, while the other means another of the very same kind. Jesus deliberately chose the second. The Helper He would send is the same kind of Person as Himself, which is why the Spirit can rightly be called the Spirit of Christ. Consider what this means. Had the Lord remained bodily with His disciples, He could be in only one place at a time. But the Spirit He sends can fill believers in every land at once. He is sent by the Father and by the Son, and He carries on the work of Christ wherever the people of Christ are found. He never draws attention to Himself. His most distinctive labor is to glorify the Son and to make Him real and near to us.
7. The Test: He Testifies of Christ
If you carry away one sentence from this entire course, let it be this one. Jesus said of the Spirit, "He will testify of Me" (John 15:26). That is the primary work of the Holy Spirit in this present age: He testifies of Christ. His ministry is Christ-centered through and through, for He always points away from Himself and toward the Son. This gives us a reliable test for every claim made in the Spirit's name. A word, a movement, a feeling, or a teaching that draws people to Christ and bows them before Him as Lord bears the marks of the Spirit of God. A word that exalts a man, or a method, or even a religious experience above Christ does not bear those marks, however loud or impressive it may seem. "No one can say that Jesus is Lord except by the Holy Spirit" (1 Corinthians 12:3). Keep your eye on what the Spirit actually does, and you will not be easily fooled about who He is or what is truly His work.
8. Yield to Him
We cannot manufacture the Spirit's work, and we dare not despise it. He stands ready to convict, to teach, to comfort, and to lead, but He will not force the door; even God will not override the heart that bolts Him out. The Christian who longs for God to possess him completely learns to follow the Spirit's leading gladly. If you are unsure what to believe, let the Spirit teach you; if you are unsure where to go, let Him guide you, "for as many as are led by the Spirit of God, these are sons of God" (Romans 8:14). The aim of the chapters ahead is not to make you an expert about the Spirit, as though He were a subject to be mastered and set aside. The aim is to bring you gladly under His gracious influence, that He might do in you the one thing He most delights to do, which is to show you Jesus.