Within (Part 3)

The Father is outside the universe, bigger than everything in it, and yet turned toward the people he made. The Son entered the universe, fully God and fully human, living a life that could be touched and followed and witnessed. He died and rose and ascended.

And then his disciples were left standing there, watching the sky.

If you read the end of Luke’s Gospel, the disciples return to Jerusalem after Jesus ascends, and they are described as being filled with joy. Which seems like the wrong response. The person they had given everything to follow was gone. But they had been told to wait, because something was coming.

The third part of the refracted light is the Holy Spirit, the third person of the Trinity, the one whose work is to get inside.

What Jesus said was coming

The night before he was crucified, Jesus told his disciples that he was leaving, and he knew it would feel like abandonment. So he said this: “I will ask the Father, and he will give you another advocate to help you and 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)

The word translated “advocate” is the Greek parakletos, which can also mean comforter, counselor, or helper. It is someone called alongside you. Jesus is telling his disciples that what is coming is not a doctrine or a set of instructions or even a memory of him. What is coming is a person, and that person is going to live inside them.

What makes the Holy Spirit different from what came before is this. The Father relates to creation from outside it. The Son entered creation from outside it, lived in it for a specific time, and then ascended. The Spirit does not come from outside and visit. The Spirit comes to stay, and the place he stays is not a building or a city but a person.

Romans 8

Paul’s letter to the Romans spends a lot of time on this. In chapter eight he writes: “You, however, are not in the realm of the flesh but are in the realm of the Spirit, if indeed the Spirit of God lives in you. And if anyone does not have the Spirit of Christ, they do not belong to Christ. But if Christ is in you, then even though your body is subject to death because of sin, the Spirit gives life because of righteousness. And if the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead is living in you, he who raised Christ from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies because of his Spirit who lives in you.” (Romans 8:9-11)

Paul says the Spirit of God lives in you. He says the same Spirit who raised Jesus from the dead is living in you. This is not a poetic description of feeling spiritually inspired. Paul means it literally. The third person of the Trinity takes up residence inside the people who belong to Christ.

This is the most intimate move in the whole story. The Father is over everything. The Son walked among people for thirty-odd years. The Spirit moves in.

The problem of presence

It is worth asking what it means for a person to be inside you when you cannot see or hear or physically locate that person.

The Spirit is not a feeling, though he can produce feeling. He is not a vague spiritual energy, though people often talk about him that way because it is easier than saying what he actually is. He is a person, which means he has will and intention and character. Paul describes the Spirit searching and interceding, which are not things that feelings do. Jesus describes him as a teacher who will “guide you into all the truth.” (John 16:13)

What the Spirit does is apply everything the Father intended and everything the Son accomplished to the specific life of a specific person. The Father designed the rescue. The Son executed it. The Spirit delivers it, personally, to you.

This is also why the Spirit is the one who makes it possible to actually know God and not just know about him. The Father outside the universe and the Son who walked in Galilee are both real, but they are not immediately present to you in the way the Spirit is. The Spirit is the reason that a relationship with God is not a historical exercise or a set of beliefs held at arm’s length. It is something happening in you, right now, whether or not you feel it on any given day.

Spirit

The Holy Spirit is the third distinct person of the Trinity. He is not the Father, and he is not the Son. He is not a force that the Father and Son emit, and he is not the spiritual version of Jesus after the resurrection. He is his own person, with his own distinct role, who has always existed as part of the one God.

What is distinctive about the Spirit’s role is where he works. The Father acts from above. The Son acted from alongside. The Spirit acts from within. The same God who sits outside the universe and the same God who walked inside the universe now lives inside you, if you are willing to receive him.

That is not a small claim. It is, if anything, the most personal claim the whole Bible makes about God. All the bigness of the Father, all the humanity of the Son, concentrated and present inside the life of a person who might be feeling nothing in particular on a Tuesday afternoon.

The Spirit does not depend on your feelings to be real.

One light

The prism separates one light into three. The Father is outside, the source. The Son entered, the bridge. The Spirit remains within, the presence.

Three persons. One God. Three ways the same God has engaged the world he made and the people he made for it.

The point of this series was never to fully explain the Trinity, because the Trinity cannot be fully explained. It can only be believed, and then lived with, and then slowly understood more as you go. What the picture of the prism is meant to do is help you see that the three are not three different gods competing for the same title, and they are not one God wearing three different hats. They are three distinct persons who share a single being, each relating to you differently, each real.

The Father knows your name. The Son knows what it costs to be human. The Spirit knows what is happening inside you right now.

That is who Christians mean when they say God.