Episode Transcript
[00:00:03] Speaker A: Welcome to the leaders notebook with Dr. Mark Rutland. Dr. Rutland is a world renowned leadership expert. He is a New York Times best selling author and he has served as the president of two universities. The Leaders Notebook is brought to you by Global Servants. For more information about Global Servants, please Visit our website, globalservants.org Here is your host, Dr. Mark Rutland.
[00:00:25] Speaker B: The topic for this series is the person and work of the Holy Spirit.
I want to take time with it.
So what we're going to do is this.
Instead of me trying to handle this as a sermon every night, I'm going to teach and I'm going to be sensitive to the time. I have a clock right in front of me for those of you who are Baptists. You'll be relieved to know the pastor can see the clock.
And when I come to the end, I'll stop.
I'm not going to try to finish the sermon. I don't have to do three points on a poem. I can. I'll stop when it's the end of the lecture. And then next Wednesday night I'm going to start right there.
We'll go through a lot of things while we talk about it. Who is the Holy Spirit? We'll talk about the Holy Spirit in the Old Testament. We're going to talk about the, the understanding of what it means to be filled with the Holy Spirit baptism of the Holy Spirit. We'll talk about the gifts of the Spirit in some detail from a very practical standpoint. And I hope that this series will be useful to you. You may have friends or acquaintances that are perhaps not as familiar with the person and ministry of the Holy Spirit as you are. You may have people from more traditional denominations. Why don't you invite them to come and be a part of this teaching series?
Understanding and telling them this. This is going to be safe territory.
We're not going to, we use the snakes on Sunday morning, but we, but we don't bring on Wednesday night. Okay.
All right. If you have your Bibles. Now, I'm not going to do a lot of Bible searching, but there are some verses that are important to us. So take your Bible and turn to the book of Genesis if you will. The very first chapter of the Book of Genesis.
In the beginning.
In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth.
And the earth was without form and void.
And darkness was upon the face of the deep.
And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.
And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.
The Holy Spirit is therefore before the eyes of the reader of the Word from the very start of the book.
There is only one verse of scripture in the whole Bible which can even vaguely say comes before the mention of the Holy Spirit.
So from the very second verse of the first book of the whole Bible, we have a sense that there is this person called the Holy Spirit.
So let's just delve into that for a little bit. In the first place, I never quibble with people in common conversation. When people are talking and they say refer to the Holy Spirit as it, I don't. It's not my job to go around correcting people's English.
But properly we should say he him because he is personhood. He is the spirit of God.
Now in the Hebrew Bible, the Holy Spirit spirit is ruach, if you're writing in English is R U A C H ruach.
It can be translated wind or breath or spirit.
The corollary in the Greek New Testament is numa. P N E E U M A numa from which we get a lot of English words. There are a lot of English words that are based on pneuma. Pneumonia is. Is an affliction of what, your breath.
A pneumatic tools. Pneumatic drill operates on the power of compressed air.
In, in the New Testament, at the death of Jesus it says and Jesus gave. In the King James Bible it says Jesus gave up the ghost.
Okay, so that there's a lot of confusion around that the word ghost. A ghost is a spirit.
So that's old English to talk about the ghost. He gave up the ghost. What does it mean?
It means he dismissed his spirit from his body.
So it is unclear whether it means he breathed his last breath.
Did his spirit leave? Did his breath leave?
Or the. The English vernacular, he gave up the ghost. Even still older Americans still say that more often about their businesses than their bodies.
So the, the two words in Greek, numa, wind, blood, breath or spirit.
In Hebrew, ruach and the holy Spirit. Kadesh means holy, so Ruach Kadesh, the Holy Spirit.
The breath of God or the wind of God.
So what do we see in this passage from Genesis then?
It is a scene from George Lucas most extravagant fantasy.
The, the.
The abyss, the boiling, troubled, seething nothingness.
No order, no light, no structure.
The nothingness of nothing and moving over Says in the. In the English Bible it says the Holy Spirit or the spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. The problem is English is a little bit of a flat language. Hebrew is much more nuanced. But English is a good language for engineering. Sometimes it's not a good language for theology.
But the word moved doesn't tell you anything about the emotion
[00:06:53] Speaker A: move.
[00:06:53] Speaker B: I move from here to there. It doesn't tell you anything about how I feel.
But suppose there's a young mother and her two year old is lost somewhere in the house.
So she moves from room to room, calling out, Johnny, Johnny, where are you? Where are you?
I could say she is brooding from room to room.
In my view, far be it for me to argue with the King James translation of the Bible, but in my view the word moved should be properly rendered bruited.
So the Spirit of God, one translation, one modern translation, uses the word hovered. I don't like it because it sounds like a helicopter, but it means that the Holy Spirit broods, restless, seeking, searching over the. Over the.
The abyss.
Moving, searching, restlessly, brooding.
And then inside the enclosed society of the Godhead, the Trinity of God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, one God.
But inside that divine society of three.
One of the functions of the Holy Spirit, between the Spirit of God and God the Father is reportage.
He reports to God the Father.
So he is saying, this is not like us.
This is not like us.
We are light and order and creativity and power and holiness. This is dark and seething.
This is, this is the boiling abyss.
So this is going on inside God, that the Holy Spirit is brooding restlessly.
Now don't ever let that picture get out of your mind because it is actually characteristic of one of the major functions of the Holy Spirit.
The Holy Spirit is constantly brooding, seeking, searching, moving restlessly. Not just in a house like this, certainly here, but moving, but also all throughout all the world.
There is no crack house in Atlanta where the Holy Spirit is not there, hovering over that violent, chaotic abyss, brooding from room to room, seeing the. The sin and the wickedness and the brokenness and reporting inside to God the Father. This is not like you.
This is not like you. This is dark, send the light.
This is chaotic sin order.
This is, this is unregenerate sin, creativity.
Until that reportage between the Holy Spirit of God and God the Father. Until finally the pressure builds in God the Father Almighty. And he says, all right, let there be light.
And the light comes upon. Imagine the explosion of that moment.
Steven Spielberg in his, in his wildest imagination could never reproduce that.
But it begins with the Spirit of God brooding, restless over the face of the abyss, constantly reporting to God.
Now we do not know until Let there be light.
We do not know how the unregenerate darkness, how the uncreative abyss Felt.
We have no emotional response of that.
But upon. Upon the darkened life, when the Holy Spirit broods and hovers over that life and invades and reports to God inside.
Because that life is not an abyss of darkness, but a person.
So the personhood of the Spirit of God brooding over an uncreative darkened life, there is a sense of something happening.
We call it conviction.
The Holy Spirit's activity on that darkened life.
That life feels that, senses that, and it feels.
It doesn't feel good because I. I can be used to the darkness in which I live. And the life feels invasive. The light feels invasive. I can be used to the death and violence and order and creativity and discipline. Winces me. Just the sense that something is happening.
I know who comes out to a teaching on the Holy Spirit on Wednesday night. I'm not.
But can any of you even remember when you weren't a Christian?
Can you remember standing in the back row of a camp meeting while somebody's giving an altar call and you're standing there saying, I don't believe this. I don't believe in God. I don't believe in salvation. I don't want this. But you're gripping the pew till your knuckles turn white and you're resisting.
What I would ask, are you resisting?
If it isn't real, why is it hurting you?
That is the exerted pressure of the scout of God.
Now, there is a way to understand. I wonder if we.
I'm not trying to single anybody out, but I wonder if we have any attorneys present. Do we have any lawyers in the house?
No, no. I'm just going to see if we started out with a miracle.
No, I asked that because everybody gives lawyers a hard time, and so do I.
There's nothing easier than hitting an easy target. But there is a way in which I can explain to you the character and nature of the. Of the Trinity as lawyers.
The.
The Holy Spirit is God's lawyer with us.
He is the Paraclete, the counselor.
And that's. That's another word for lawyer. If you. If you have a friend who's a lawyer. I have a wonderful friend in Florida who's my lawyer. When I greet him, I always say, hey, counselor.
But the paracletos, the paraclete, the Holy Spirit is God's counsel with us.
Jesus puts it in that way. He will teach you.
He'll talk to you. He'll challenge you. He'll rebuke you.
He'll comfort you.
He is called the comforter.
You know this. All these celebrity trials, you see where the, you know, the celebrity is indicted, and then they'll come down the courthouse steps and the paparazzi are all there snapping pictures and everything. You see the lawyer with his arm around his client, and he's pushing his way through the crowd, and he's whispering to the lawyer, don't say anything. I got that. Whispering to his client, don't say anything. I got this. I got this. And then he looks at the crowd and he says, we look forward to having our day in court when I will prove that my client is pure as the driven snow.
Actually, that's the ministry of the Holy Spirit with us.
He is God's lawyer with us.
He pleads God's case.
He pleads God's case, and he comforts us.
Who is our lawyer with God?
Jesus.
So actually, you can explain the second two persons of the Trinity as lawyers. Lawyers love that. Everybody else hates it, but Jesus is my lawyer with God and the Holy Ghost is God's lawyer with me.
Now, now, that sort of gives us an initial sense of who the Holy Spirit is.
A second verse of Scripture is still, while you're still there in Genesis, if you will turn to chapter two and verse seven.
And the Lord God formed man out of the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life.
Man became a living soul.
So remember what I said. Ruach can be translated breath or spirit or wind.
So the Holy Spirit brooding over the face of the abyss, you could say the wind blew in a longing and aching.
When God formed man, his body is perfectly formed. All the internal organs are there. Everything is present.
But personhood is missing.
Life is missing.
So imagine the sense in which it is an anthropomorphism. An anthropomorphism is a kind of a humanoid picture of God.
So God is not a man didn't lean over and put his mouth on Adam's nose and breathe. But it's the picture of what happened, that the same spirit that brooded over the face of the abyss now comes inside Adam and now becomes not simply wind, but the breath of life.
So the Holy Spirit is the Lord, the giver of life.
So having said all that, then let's deal with something that probably would not have to deal with anywhere except among Pentecostals.
And that's the issue of Holy Spirit or Holy Ghost.
Okay, there is absolutely no difference.
But sometimes folks that are a little more to the traditional side, they feel like somehow or another you're a liberal if you say Holy Spirit.
It's strange. I was educated in the United Methodist Church, where the liberals didn't believe in the resurrection, in the Pentecostal world, the liberals carry their Bible under their left arm instead of under their right.
But Holy Ghost, that's a perfectly okay way to say it because the Bible says it that way. Sometimes.
Sometimes.
Sometimes the Bible says Spirit, sometimes the Bible says the Spirit of God, sometimes the Bible says the Holy Spirit, sometimes the Bible just says the Spirit. But it's all the same. There is no distinction between the Holy Ghost and the Holy Spirit.
Don't, don't let yourself get caught up on quibbling over, over non essentials like that.
And a brother that confronted me at a place where I was. He had a book he had written. He wanted me to read this book, like looked like it was about 300 pages. He said, would you read this book? I said, well, tell me what it's about. And he said, he said, it's a book about whether or not people are baptized with the Holy Spirit or in the Holy Spirit or it's the baptism of the Holy Spirit. He said, I hear people say it all the time. Wrong. They hear it wrong all the time. And I, I want to straighten that out. He said, will you read my book? I said, frankly sir, I won't read your book.
There's no use to give one to me. I'm not going to read your book.
Listen to me, friends. If your theology hangs on a preposition, it's too frail.
Baptism of the Holy Spirit. Baptism in the Holy Spirit. Baptism with the Holy Spirit. This, this is an absolutely idiotic argument and one from which I have excused myself entirely.
Now, how else is the Holy Spirit referred to in scripture?
Here's an interesting one, because it doesn't seem to connect the idea of wind, breath or spirit at all.
And he is often referred to as, amazingly, the finger of God. El dedo de Dios, the finger of God.
If you have your Bible still open, turn to Exodus chapter 8 and let's look at verse 16 through 20.
And the Lord said unto Moses, say unto Aaron, stretch out thy rod and smite the dust of the land, that it may become lice throughout all the land of Egypt. And they did so. For Aaron stretched out his hand with his rod and smote the dust of the earth. And it became lice in man and in beasts, and in all the dust of the land became lice throughout all the land of Egypt. By the way, just in pausing, does that just seem like an absolutely horrible plague?
That's just horrible.
Don't mess with God and The magicians did so with their enchantments to bring forth lice. But. But they could not. So there was lice upon the man and upon beast. Then the magician said unto Pharaoh, this is the finger of God.
This is the finger of God.
In other words, we may be able to duplicate with cheap ledger domain, to a certain extent, we may be able to match trick for trick with Moses.
Remember, Moses threw his down, his rod down, it became a snake. The Egyptian magicians threw their rods down, they became snakes. Moses snake ate theirs, which is.
That's sort of like LSU and Clemson, but. But still, but still they did to a certain extent duplicate the trick. Do you see that?
But this one, they can't. And they identify the. They identify it as the finger of God. In other words, what they say is this.
We can't even match this. This is the Holy Spirit.
This is the Holy Spirit. Now why do we say that? The finger of God. That phrase there, that. And again, remember the word I gave you? Anthropomorphism. That, that anthropomorphic word, the finger of God, God really doesn't have finger, but that finger of God, Why is that? How do we know that's the Holy Spirit? Because also in the, in the Exodus story, in Exodus 31 and in Deuteronomy, chapter 9, we won't go look all those up. The law of God is written in the Ten Commandments with the finger of God.
The finger of God. Also in Daniel, do you remember at Beltesh, at Belshazzar's party, when he brings in the prostitutes and, and they're going to have a. Basically have an orgy in there, and then they want to insult God, so they bring the, the holy laver and all of those things that they had stolen from the temple in Jerusalem, and they bring them in so that they can drink wine out of the holy vessels and humiliate the God of Israel. And it says that a finger appears and writes in the wall of the. Of the palace. Many, many. Tekel Ufarzan, you have been weighed in the balance and found wanting. And your kingdom will be divided and given to the Persians.
The finger of God.
So this is, this is a fascinating conundrum for us, the Holy Spirit.
We're moving toward wrapping this up, so stay with me.
The Holy Spirit is the Spirit of life, the Lord, the giver of life.
He is the Holy Spirit. He's the breath of God.
He wants to bring life and liberty and joy.
Where is the phrase the finger of God used again?
Luke, chapter 11.
Luke, chapter 11. Jesus is casting demons out of a young man who is. Has been rendered mute. He can't talk because the demons hold him in mute condition.
Jesus cast the demons out. And the Pharisees say, sure, he can control the demons. They work for him.
He's. He's in touch with Beelzebub, the Lord of all the demons.
And, and Jesus deals with them in this way. He says, look, let's suppose that I did cast the demons out because I'm in touch with Beelzebub.
Don't you see this? Then you don't have to worry about the devil because the devil's casting the devil out.
He says, you don't. You don't need to worry about the devil. A house divided cannot stand.
If I'm casting demons out with demons, how does that make any sense?
Then he says, but by whom do your sons.
Not sons, as in the blood sense, but by whom do your followers, your disciples, by whom do they cast the demons out?
Well, the answer is, they can't do it at all.
So he convicts them of their powerlessness, their impotence before the supernatural world.
If I've cast. Even if I cast them out with the devil, by whom do your disciples cast them out?
And then he says, but if I with the finger of God have cast out these devils, if I with the finger of God have cast out these devils, then the kingdom of God has come upon you.
Now that turn of phrase, the kingdom of God has come upon you is not a happy phrase.
Does. It's not like I would say the kingdom of God has come to you to come upon you is the kind of phrase that you would use for.
Okay, there's a criminal who's committed a robbery, and the police are searching for him. And he goes to hide in the bushes.
The police are searching for him and they come upon him.
That's the phrase Jesus is using.
If I have cast these demons out by the power of the spirit of God, then that's proof that the kingdom of God has come upon you. In other words, he says, you're busted.
You are busted.
The unity, the ministry of God, the creative power of God the Father, the delivering and gracious ministry of the Son through the power of the Holy Spirit.
I do these miracles through the finger of God.
Now, if you've begun to see it, now you see that that presents us with an apparent contradiction.
And here it is.
If the finger of God writes the law, and the law would bring us under bondage, if we are under the law to keep kosher to circumcise our sons on the eighth day, to do all those things, that's bondage.
But the grace of God. Thanks be to God who giveth us the victory. We are set free from the bondage of the law.
Don't you see it?
How can the finger of God write the law and then set us free from the law?
Jeremiah tells us, henceforth, I will no longer write the law in tables of stone.
I will write the law in flesh, inside your spirit.
So the Holy Spirit hasn't changed jobs.
He still writes the law.
He just doesn't write the law in tables of stones so that they fall on us and crush us.
He doesn't write the law so that if we come out from under the tables of stone, we are outlaws.
Our relationship with the law either condemns us to bondage or to being outlaws.
But he says, the finger of God will come and write the law within you, so that the work, the primary work of the Holy Spirit is to recreate his own nature.
The Holy Spirit is the Spirit of holiness.
Romans, chapter one. The Spirit of holiness which raised Christ Jesus from. From the dead.
So the finger of God that wrote judgment on Belshazzar's wicked party.
The finger of God that wrote the law in tables of stone on the Holy Mountain. Imagine what that must have been like when Moses is watching God as the Spirit of God comes.
Thou shall love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, mind and soul and strength.
But we no longer live under that law.
God says, I'm not going to take the law away.
I'm going to change where I write it.
Now I'll write the law within you, so that sanctification, rather than being slavish obedience to a set of rules, now becomes the outworking in the extremities of our lives of an inward new reality. The Spirit of God has now written something in us.
We're going to be talking in future weeks about the baptism of the Holy Spirit.
Yes, the baptism of the Holy Spirit is about power. We're going to talk about that. Yes, the baptism of the Holy Spirit is about.
Is about gifts. We're going to talk about that.
But if we comprehend the baptism of the Holy Spirit absent sanctification, we have missed the whole point.
If you seek the baptism of the Holy Spirit just because you want the gifts in your life, that's like putting electricity in your house because you think the switch plates are pretty.
What God wants to do is turn the lights on.
What God wants to do is change us here.
So I'll close with this and then we'll take a few minutes and see if you have questions. I was preaching at a Methodist church in Cartersville, Georgia, as a matter of fact, some years ago, many years ago, and the morning service was like more like this night service revival. And in the morning we had Bible study.
And I said, were there any questions about last night? And there was quite a turmoil in the room because I preached that night before on the baptism of the Holy Spirit in a Methodist church.
So finally an older man in the room stood up and he said, I got something I want to say. He said, what this preacher said is not strange this happened to me.
He said, I am the freest man in Cartersville, Georgia.
He said, I'm a born again Christian, but I can do anything I like and still be a Christian. Well, they just got upset. They said, you can't say that you can't do anything you like and be a Christian. You can't do that. He said, yes, I can. I do anything I like and I'm a Christian. They said, well, how does that work? He said, 40 years ago at the Indian Springs camp meeting, God changed my liker.
He said.
He said, I don't like the stuff I used to like.
He said, I can do anything I like.
But he said, I just don't like this stuff. My liker has been changed.
The law of God does not stand over against us in tables of stone to judge us as he judged Belshazzar.
He writes the law inside of us, the finger of God, the breath of God.
He says, come alive in newness of life and the Holy Spirit flows out from us.
Amen.
[00:32:18] Speaker A: You've been listening to the Leader's Notebook with Dr. Mark Rutland. Be sure to subscribe, rate and review today's podcast. You can follow Dr. Rutland on Twitter at drmarklet Rutland or Visit his website, Dr.markrutland.com Join us next week for another episode of the Leader's Notebook.
