About the Bible: What Is the Holy Spirit? How the Third Person of the Trinity Illuminates Christ.

Phil Collins

|

January 30, 2025

About the Bible: What Is the Holy Spirit?

 How the Third Person of the Trinity Illuminates Christ

👆 - read more here ☝

Have you ever felt next to nothing in your faith? It’s not uncommon to feel despair and resignation in your relationship with God. I felt that deeply during my early adult years. The book of Psalms especially records emotions of God’s people feeling abandoned, left alone by God, full of restless anxiety.

If we live in the experience of feeling nothing from God for too long, however, we risk letting our lives slide into quiet desperation. We might become hypocrites talking about our love for God when we don’t experience it; or we might walk away altogether, saying this Christian thing doesn’t work, it’s all pretend

So where do we go for help? The Holy Spirit. Very simply, what we want and need is personal, relational comfort from God, and the Holy Spirit is the Comforter (John 14:26).

Specifically, we need to meet the Holy Spirit in the Bible. Because the more we understand about the relationship between the Holy Spirit and Scripture, the more we can become like the child in Psalm 131: filled, confident, resting contentedly in our experienced relationship with God.

Our topic then is the Bible, the Holy Spirit, and our personal relationship with Christ — a triad, which has also been called a “three-fold encounter.”

What Is the Bible?

The first part of the triad is the Bible. We’ll do this briefly.

Very simply, the Bible is God’s Word. It’s God’s communication to us. It has authority because God has authority. It’s God’s revelation of who He is and what He’s done, is doing, and will do — it’s the story of creation, the Fall, of redemption in Christ, the church, and of the coming New Creation.

In other words, the Bible is about the Gospel, the true story of Christ, and it points to Christ (John 5:39). “Ignorance of Scripture is ignorance of Christ.”

What — or Who — Is the Holy Spirit?

The second part of the triad is the Holy Spirit. The first point I want to make about the Holy Spirit is that the Holy Spirit is God, the third person of the Trinity.

The Holy Spirit Is God

In the Bible the Holy Spirit is described as God’s Spirit, as Christ’s Spirit (Romans 8:9). The Holy Spirit is fully God, worthy of praise Himself, but His primary responsibility in the Trinity is to point to Christ so that Christ gets our attention and glory.

The Holy Spirit shines a spotlight on Christ so we can be awestruck by Jesus, so we come to know, love, and follow Him.

Picture a large auditorium that is completely dark. In the back, up top, there’s a world class musician, and he’s pointing a spotlight down on his favorite world class musician on stage. The musician in the back is excited for everyone in the auditorium to meet, hear, and be blown away by the musician on the stage. That’s what the Holy Spirit wants to do for Christ, to shine the spotlight on Him (John 16:13-14). It gives Him the deepest joy to help us to see and hear Jesus.

The Holy Spirit Inspired Scripture

The second point about the Holy Spirit is that the Holy Spirit inspired Scripture. “Inspired” comes from the Latin word inspirare, which literally means “breathe into.” The Holy Spirit breathed life into the Scriptures (2 Timothy 3:16).

The Holy Spirit is the source of the Bible. If we ignore the Bible, we’re ignoring the work of the Holy Spirit, and since the Holy Spirit is God, we’d be ignoring God. Scripture is an intentional communication from one Living Person (God) to another (you and me).

This is a parallel to God breathing His life into human beings in Genesis. In Genesis 2:7 Adam became a living being when God breathed into his nostrils. The Holy Spirit, God, has also breathed His life into the Scriptures. The Bible, in some amazing sense, is a living book (Hebrews 4:12).

To tell you the truth I don’t fully understand the idea of a book being alive, but I’ve experienced it. I hope you’ve experienced this too — the Holy Spirit using the words of the Bible to speak directly to your soul so that you knew it was God speaking to you. Maybe helping you catch glimpses of God’s holiness, power, or lovingkindness. Maybe convicting you of your sins and then comforting you after you’ve confessed them. Those are very real Holy Spirit experiences, and they remind us that God is active in our lives.

When you come to God’s inspired Word, in a very real way you’re coming to God. It’s an amazing biblical truth that we have access to God, through Jesus, by the Holy Spirit, through the words of the Bible.