The Deity and Personality of the Holy Spirit

The deity and personality of the Holy Spirit is a great topic to consider. Yet often Christians do not do so. Sometimes they think of his gifts and other times they may focus on his fruit. But do they take time to worship him as God, to wonder and marvel at who he is?

The deity

The Holy Spirit is named in the baptismal formula at the close of the Gospel of Matthew as one of the three divine persons in the Trinity. He is equal with the other two as far as divine attributes are concerned. The divine attributes can be classified in several ways, but one classification is known as the incommunicable and the communicable attributes. The incommunicable are attributes that only God has while the communicable appear in creatures, whether angels or men. The incommunicable attributes are God’s eternal existence and the three omnis – omnipresence, omniscience, and omnipotence. Does the Bible say that the Holy Spirit has them?

The writer of Hebrews says this in Hebrews 9:14: ‘how much more will the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered himself without blemish to God, purify our conscience from dead works to serve the living God.’ Each of the divine persons is mentioned in that verse about the cross. Christ is mentioned, the Spirit is mentioned, and the Father to whom Christ offered himself is mentioned. One may wonder why this attribute of the Spirit is mentioned here. I suppose one answer is that the Spirit has always been with the Son and with the Father, and whatever view we take of the meaning of Christ’s cry of forsakenness, it cannot mean that God was not there. It is a weak illustration, but when we are in a crisis, it is often longterm friends who come to our aid. In a far higher sense, that was true of the suffering Son.

About omniscience, how much does the Spirit know? The answer is everything. A reference that refers to it is 1 Corinthians 2:10-11: ‘For the Spirit searches everything, even the depths of God. For who knows a person’s thoughts except the spirit of that person, which is in him? So also no one comprehends the thoughts of God except the Spirit of God.’ It would be a phenomenal ability to know all the thoughts of one person, it would be a much greater ability to know the thoughts of every person who has every lived, and every angel who has ever lived, but only God can know all the thoughts of God. Paul does not mean that the Spirit searches the thoughts of God occasionally, or indifferently, or slowly, or carelessly. Instead he searches them constantly and fully and reveals them to us gradually.

Regarding omnipotence, how much power does the Holy Spirit have? He has the power to bring about the creation as we see at the beginning of Genesis One where we are told he was hovering over the unshaped mass at the beginning. He has the power to bring spiritually dead sinners to spiritual life and then to renew their characters in the image of Jesus and bring them to perfection. Think of how many persons he is doing that to today all over the world. He, with the Father and Jesus himself, was involved in the resurrection of Jesus. He makes the grass grow, brightens the world with flowers, controls the oceans. We read about those divine actions in Psalm 104, where in verse 30, the author of the psalm says this: ‘When you send forth your Spirit, they are created, and you renew the face of the ground.’ Spring time is, we may say, Holy Spirit time.

Regarding omnipresence, David in Psalm 139 asks these great questions: ‘Where shall I go from your Spirit? Or where shall I flee from your presence? If I ascend to heaven, you are there! If I make my bed in Sheol, you are there! If I take the wings of the morning and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, even there your hand shall lead me, and your right hand shall hold me.’ No matter how high he goes, the Holy Spirit is there; no matter how low he goes (to the realm of the dead), the Holy Spirit is there; no matter how far away he goes (what did David mean by the uttermost parts of the sea, perhaps the Atlantic beyond the Mediterranean or the Indian ocean where trading took place), the Holy Spirit would be there. Even if he went where no-one else would be, the Holy Spirit would be there.

I would refer to one last detail about the deity of the Holy Spirit, and it is the story of Ananias and Sapphira. Luke records about them these solemn words: ‘But Peter said, “Ananias, why has Satan filled your heart to lie to the Holy Spirit and to keep back for yourself part of the proceeds of the land? While it remained unsold, did it not remain your own? And after it was sold, was it not at your disposal? Why is it that you have contrived this deed in your heart? You have not lied to man but to God’ (Acts 5:3-4). Note who Peter says that they lied to? They lied to the Holy Spirit which was the same as lying to God. The twofold connection proves the deity of the Holy Spirit, a divine person who is worshipped, feared and served.

His personality

Scripture uses different ways of showing the personality of the Holy Spirit. One way that it does so is by telling us what he does with a person with whom he is in a relationship. In Romans 15:30, Paul refers to the love of the Spirit, which may mean the love he gives to his people or the love that he has for his people. Given that Paul connects the love of the Spirit with the Lord Jesus Christ it looks to me that he had in mind what each of those divine Persons does in the lives of believers. So I want us to think about how the divine Spirit shows his love for his people. Before I consider some of those ways, let me repeat a comment I read on that verse in Romans: ‘For that Holy Spirit to dwell in our sinful hearts he must be loving indeed!’

One way by which the Spirit showed his love was by regeneration when in a moment he made us spiritually alive. Before then, we were spiritually dead. Such death shows itself in sinful activities. But in a moment, the lifegiving Spirit changed us. People have discussed what is the greatest moment of divine power that a Christian experiences from the Holy Spirit. To put it in human terms, is it harder to make a dead person do something or to make a living person do something? Surely it is to make a dead person live. Regeneration is a miracle, but it is a miracle performed by the Spirit who loves us.

Paul mentions a second way in which the Holy Spirit shows his love when he says in Ephesians 1:13: ‘In him you also, when you heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation, and believed in him, were sealed with the promised Holy Spirit.’ Paul there is using as an illustration the common practice at the time of a merchant sealing a box with his mark so that a person would know who the box belongs to when it reached its destination. Of course, those seals were inanimate and said nothing at any time. In contrast, the Holy Spirit is alive. Imagine that the seal on the box could speak. The box is on a boat taking it to a customer across the sea. When it reaches the harbour, the customer comes to the boat and tells one of the crew that he is looking for a box sent by a merchant. On hearing this comment, the box shouts out, ‘I am over here.’ Of course, that could never happen in the natural world. But what about in the spiritual world. The seal we have is with us always and he is always alive, and he delights to tell us who we belong to. Surely that is an expression of the love of the Spirit for those who have believed in Jesus.

Paul says something else about the Holy Spirit in the following verse in that passage when he writes that the Holy Spirit ‘is the guarantee of our inheritance until we acquire possession of it, to the praise of his glory’ (Eph. 1:14). The word ‘guarantee’ in the sense used here means that the Holy Spirit is a sample of a future experience. It was used of the firstfruits of the crop that would yet be harvested. A person can go and visit a relative who wants to show him what he owns. Maybe he has a huge fruit farm. As you go along the road, he gives you an orange, a pear, an apple, and says to you I have thousands of trees who produce huge numbers of those fruits. As you eat the fruit, you are receiving guarantees that he has a fruit farm. In the Christian life, we receive samples of the life of heaven such as peace and joy which the Holy Spirit gives to his people. He is constantly telling his people what the heavenly home is like.

What else does the Spirit of love do? A chapter that says a great deal about the personality of the Holy Spirit is Romans 8. We can take two examples of his loving actions from that chapter. The first one is Paul’s comment that the Holy Spirit witnesses with our spirits that we are the children of God. The witness seems to be connected to the strong cry of ‘Abba, Father,’ that Paul mentions in that passage: ‘For you did not receive the spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received the Spirit of adoption as sons, by whom we cry, “Abba! Father!” The Spirit himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God (Rom. 8:15-16). He strengthens our awareness of this precious relationship of belonging to the family of God.

In that same chapter, Paul mentions another action of the love of the Spirit when he says that the Holy Spirit groans with us. ‘Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness. For we do not know what to pray for as we ought, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words’ (Rom. 8:26). In the chapter we have three groanings: the groaning of creation, the groaning of the believer, and the groaning of the Holy Spirit. The groaning concerns the future, as we can see from Paul’s words that the groaning is like the pains of childbirth that produces a baby. Something wonderful is groaned for, and it is not only the creation and the Christian that is longing for that incredible future when sin will be gone.

There are other biblical descriptions of the actions of the love of the Spirit in the experiences of believers. There is the guidance that he provides, there is the illumination that he gives as we read his Word, there is his role as the Comforter, the one who comes alongside us and accompanies us as we journey. There is also the response of the Spirit when he is grieved with his people, but even then he brings us to confess those sins and to receive the cleansing of the blood of Christ.

The deity and the personality of the Holy Spirit is a vast subject and we have only travelled along the surface of what the Bible says about it. But we have seen enough to say what a great blessing it is to know him, the eternal, omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent Spirit who, regarding his people, regenerates, seals, guarantees, witnesses and groans.