January 29, 2014
Fixer-Upper
I’m studying the Holy Spirit and in my text, A Faith For All Seasons, author Ted
Dorman said, “During his earthly Incarnation Jesus was uniquely the bearer of
the Spirit.” Subconsciously I know the Spirit dwelled in Jesus during His
earthly ministry. However, what sticks in my mind is Jesus telling his
disciples, “And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Counselor
to be with you forever— the Spirit of truth. The world
cannot accept him, because it neither sees him nor knows him. But you know him,
for he lives with you and will be in you.” (John 14:16-17 NIV) I now have this
image of the Spirit being downgraded. The Spirit goes from the earthly vessel
of Jesus, a spiritual mansion by anyone’s estimate, and has to move into a
fixer-upper, the earthly vessel of man.
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Gail;
-----Jesus was God with us. God has a Spirit, at least I guess that’s what “The Spirit of God” means. So, I would expect Jesus to bear the Holy Spirit in an unique way, since The Spirit would be His spirit, too. Of course, I only guess. Jesus could have been stitched together in the womb with a nice, new spirit all His own and as separate from the Holy Spirit as are ours. I’ve never tested this idea for sense. For it just always seemed to me that His spirit was the Holy Spirit since He was God, and the Holy Spirit is God’s Spirit.
-----I love to think about “spirit”. Not being of the material substance that are our bodies, we can not know anything about “spirit” directly through our five senses. When we want to know something about what we are unable to sense, we build instruments. Thus we discovered moons around Jupiter, myriads of oddly shaped microbes, that most stars in the sky are actually galactic systems, and that a flock of ducks on a radar screen can really be Jap Zeros. But we’ve tried and failed to build an instrument which senses a spirit.
-----Or have we? Maybe the instrument is already built and we’ve just not yet thought of it in that manner. After all, observational instruments such as telescopes, microscopes, radars, and particle colliders interact with physical effects we can not sense and translate them into physical effects we can sense. The direct effects of “spirit” somehow register upon the mind to effect the overlapping cascades of electronic signals in the brain that is our consciousness and more, which then become observable as the body behaves accordingly. I theorize the connection between a non-material spirit and the material body of the mind occurs through the strange multiple states of being the very smallest of sub-atomic particles demonstrate. But that’s all here nor there, and is even more party-talk than is the rest of what I like to say about “spirit”.
-----Anyhow, that “spirit” directly effects the body is obvious. Separate this interesting union of spirit and body and watch what happens! It doesn’t happen fast, but it happens very unbecomingly, so we’ve built morgues and stuff to deal with that effect. Or let another spirit get into the mix, however that might happen, and the body throws off a different kind of fireworks altogether. Yesterday’s news story was an Indiana family whose seven year old boy walked up a wall backwards in the presence of a social worker and her assistant (maybe the sources of the demon.) Well, even if the claim were a hoax, the many demons experienced in the Bible were not.
-----And it’s not only demons which register through the instrument the body is for observing the effects of “spirit”. We are so used to seeing people move around that we don’t even think about these movements being the effects upon their bodies of their very own spirits. But even more notable differences in actions and characteristics appear when people get all filled up with the Holy Spirit. Often the effects are so stark that it is as if another presence has come to be within the body. And maybe it doesn’t make people walk up walls backwards or anything, but it tends to extrude the very soul into very marvelous doings which help other people in real and significant ways.
Love you all,
Steve Corey
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