3.2 Are Spirit

© 2017 Christ Revealed Bible Institute

The words that I speak to you are Spirit and they are life (John 6:63b). If Jesus is every word God speaks, then Jesus is also saying that the words of the Bible are Spirit and they are life. The words of the Bible are Spirit. What does that mean?

We speak… in words… which the Holy Spirit teaches, comparing spiritual things with spiritual. …The things of the Spirit of God… are spiritually discerned. He who is spiritual judges all things… We have the mind of Christ (2 Corinthians 2:13-16 – condensed). I have condensed these verses only so that we can see the exact positive that Paul is saying.

The Mind of Christ. What is the realm of Spirit? And how are words Spirit? Now, both Jesus (the flesh profits nothing) and Paul contrast this mind of the Spirit with human intellect. Whatever “words are Spirit” might mean, we know that God has set this realm of understanding in opposition to the normal thinking processes of the human intellect. Yet Paul also says that God has given us the “mind of Christ.” And John said that Jesus has given us an understanding, that we may know Him who is true (1 John 5:20). That word, “understanding” is the Greek for “through-mind.” In other words, the mind of Christ is Spirit-known meanings coming through, not from, our human understanding.

Air. God has given us two significant metaphors to understand Spirit, let’s explore both of them. The first metaphor that enables us to understand Spirit is air. We live always entirely in the air; we breathe air into us every moment. Our bodies extract oxygen from the air, the element that allows the body to burn the fuel extracted from our food; in other words, the air gives us life and power. Without air we are dead in just a few minutes. Air is inside of us and outside of us at the same time; we live and move and have our being inside of air.

Water. Water is the same for fish as air is for us. Yet water is a bit thicker; we can swim in water. We are also made up 80% of water; we drink water into ourselves every day. When we thirst, our thirst is for water. Water is the molecule of life. When we think of life, we think of the water of life. When we think of water, we think of bubbling springs and soaring fountains. We think of rivers. We bathe ourselves with water, every day, inside and out, actually. Water carries dirt off our skin; water carries poisons out of our blood.

A Person. And all of these things we think of when we think of air and water, all of these are an attempt by God to cause us to know, at least a little bit, what His Spirit is. Yet that Spirit is also a Person. When we breathe, we are breathing in a Person. When we bathe, we are washing ourselves with a Person. (I am speaking figuratively, that is, the physical actions point us directly to what this Person is doing in our lives.)

But there is something else that this Spirit is and does, something phenomenal. The Spirit of God in which we live every moment also carries words inside Himself, the words of God that sustain us every moment. – Sustaining all things by the word of His power (Hebrews 1:3).

Words. But before we can know how Bible words are Spirit, we must first know what words are. Words in themselves are metaphors. That means, a word, whether it be a sound moving through the air or a series of ink lines on a page, is nothing in itself. Rather, a word carries the idea of meaning. For instance – cat, the letters c-a-t are just marks on this page; the word itself is not a living breathing cat. Yet, when I, the speaker, think about my cat, I have a definite meaning in my mind. I speak the word “cat” to you and that word, passing through the air, carries the meaning of “cat” that I hold in my mind into your mind as well.

Carriers of Meaning. Thus the word “cat” conveyed to you enables both of us to share the same thought. A word, then, is the carrier of meaning from one mind to another mind. When one human thinks of ideas and turns those ideas into words, and those words are received by another who then understands in their minds what the first person means, that is called human wisdom or the natural mind. Typically, that’s how we all live and function in this world.

BUT – God, in His Being and Person, is unknown to us. God is Spirit – and the human mind does not know Spirit. Yet God speaks words that are Spirit, unknowable by the human intellect.

Air Vibrations. Consider air as the carrier of words. I have an idea in my mind, and I want you to share that idea together with me. Therefore, I send that idea to my voice box, which vibrates against the air in specific sounds. The air takes those vibrations into itself and carries them, as vibrations, to your ear. Your ear “reads” the vibrations in the air and sends that information to your brain. As you interpret those words you have heard, now you share my idea with me. The air, carrying the vibrations of the words, has become those words in air form.

More Vibrations. The words are air. Words also travel through water in a similar way.  Scientists have begun to learn that dolphins speak together in a language and each has a life-long name. Those dolphin words travel through the water just as our words travel through air as air vibrations.

We could even go further in our modern world. Inside the air in which we live are multitudes of high-frequency radio waves and microwaves. Each band of frequency is filled with words and pictures, conversations and music. The meaning, that is, the “words,” was first converted into energy waves, and then carried to a receiver.

From God to Us. Thus we understand that Spirit functions in the same way. God’s words are carried to us, Person to person, through Spirit, with God’s Holy Spirit serving as the carrier of frequency, the pacing or marking of the sounds, the distinctions of meaning. If someone attempts to speak in a vacuum where there is no air, no sounds are created. In that state, the meaning cannot be carried from one mind to another. Without Spirit, the words of the Bible cannot carry the meaning of God from God into us. Those words must become the wavelength that is Spirit as they pass, not from the Bible, but from God to us.

Spirit as Ink. Here is another picture of the same principle. Clearly you are an epistle of Christ, ministered by us, written not with ink but with the Spirit of the living God, not on tablets of stone but on tablets of flesh, that is, of the heart (2 Corinthians 3:3).

Here, Paul is comparing the function of ink directly with the function of the Spirit of God. In other words, just as ink outlines the distinction of lines that we read as “words,” so the Spirit serves as the distinction of words, God’s word, upon our hearts. The Spirit is the ink that marks the words that carry God’s meaning, that is, the Lord Jesus Christ, upon our hearts.

Words Becoming Life. When Jesus said, “The flesh profits nothing,” He was drawing a sharp distinction between two minds. His offense against His disciples was part of drawing that clear distinction, not just in their minds, but on their hearts.

Human intellect reading the Bible to “figure out God’s wisdom for us,” is like trying to hear words sent through a vacuum. Those words are not from God Himself in Person.

Only a mind filled with the Holy Spirit of God, a mind breathing and swimming in that Spirit, can hear God speaking through the words of the Bible. It is only the immediate power and presence of a Personal Holy Spirit that can make those words become life in us.