For so long the Spirit worked in hidden ways among a chosen few; now He openly demonstrates His power, working powerfully in the lives of many and helping the church to grow as a kingdom of faith and love and holiness that one day will fill the earth. He does all this in the name of Christ — on His behalf, for His glory. The Spirit inspires joy, peace, righteousness, and the witness of the love of God in our hearts. He labors among the followers of Christ with the joy and abandon of a hind let loose.
The night on which He was betrayed, Jesus spoke to His disciples about the dawn of a new day that would be heralded by the Holy Spirit’s coming to dwell in them (John 14:17). Jesus says in John 16:8, “When he is come, he will reprove the world of sin, and of righteousness, and of judgment.” [This article is the substance of an address given for the Philadelphia Conference of Reformed Theology (PCRT), 2010, in Sacramento, California and Greenville, South Carolina. I wish to thank Ray B. Lanning for his assistance on parts of this article.]
This new day is the period of time in which God the Holy Spirit dwells in believers and the church in the full measure of His divine Person and in abundant demonstration of His divine power. Sent by the Father and poured out by the Son, the Spirit’s commission is to sanctify believers to be members of Christ, dwelling in them and applying to them what they already have in Christ, namely, the washing away of their sins, the daily renewing of their lives, and all the other benefits purchased for them by Christ’s redemptive sacrifice on the cross.
Ten days after Christ’s ascension to heaven, the Holy Spirit was poured out on the disciples gathered in Jerusalem on the feast day of Pentecost. Christ had prepared the apostles for what would happen to the church. So now, as the sound of a mighty, rushing wind filled the meeting place and tongues of fire appeared to hover over every head, believers knew that they were being filled with the Spirit. They began to speak in many languages, “out of every nation under heaven.”
The prophetic words of Christ were being fulfilled: the church was baptized with the Holy Spirit, and her members received power from on high. The age of the Spirit had begun! To understand this phenomenon, let us examine the age of the Spirit from three perspectives: the Spirit’s work in prior ages, the Spirit’s work in this present age, and the Spirit’s work particularly in revival.
The Spirit’s Work in Prior Ages
A superficial reading of the New Testament might lead some to conclude that the presence of the Spirit in the church and in the world was something new. The same mistake is often made regarding what Christ calls “the new covenant in my blood.” It is easy to separate the New Testament from the Old and conclude that a great gulf exists between the two. Some Christians speak of Pentecost as “the birthday of the church,” as if there were no visible church in the world prior to that time. Worse yet, some speak of the Jewish church of the Old Testament as something radically different from the Christian church of the New, as though each had nothing to do with the other.
That is simply not so, for the person and work of the Spirit are introduced to us already at the dawn of time. The earth was shrouded in darkness and a flood of great waters, but Moses tells us, in Genesis 1:2, “The Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.” The verb “moved upon” can be translated as “hovering” in the sense of shaking or fluttering, like a bird hovering over its nest. In fact, Deuteronomy 32:10–11 uses the same verb when it speaks of an eagle hovering over its young, tending to their every need. In His capacity as “Lord and Giver of Life,” the Spirit was fully present and active at the beginning to enact the astonishing results demanded by the various creative “fiats” of God. Psalm 104:30 says, “Thou sendest forth thy spirit, they are created: and thou renewest the face of the earth.” In particular, the Spirit filled the earth, the seas, and the dry land with all kinds of living things. We may thus speak of the biosphere, or realm of life and living things that cover the earth, as the great creation of God the Holy Spirit (cf. Job 26:13).
In our creation, the Spirit was also present as the “Breath of Life,” or the breath of God that proceeded from the Father and the Son. When breathed into the nostrils of the divinely sculpted but lifeless form of man, the Spirit transformed a creature of dust and earth into a living being (Gen. 2:7). Job 33:4 says, “The spirit of God hath made me, and the breath of the Almighty hath given me life.” Thus we owe our life and the life of every other living thing as much to the power and creativity of the Holy Spirit as we do to the hand of our Maker and Father in heaven.
Man is a created being and therefore has no life in himself. He cannot beget himself, nor can he generate or sustain his development to maturity. He cannot keep himself alive or deliver himself from the power of death. For all this we must depend upon the grace of God, and, in particular, upon the work of the Holy Spirit. When God withholds His grace, we decline and die; when He sends forth His lifegiving Spirit, we and all living things are quickened again and flourish by the same power that gave us life at the beginning (Ps. 104:30).
So wherever there is life, the Holy Spirit is at work. David lived in a world pervaded by the presence of the Holy Spirit, for he says in Psalm 139:7: “Whither shall I go from thy Spirit? Or whither shall I flee from thy presence?” But the Spirit is more than power. As a person, He possesses the intelligence and the wisdom of God. As the source of “all holy desires, all good counsels, and all just works,” He is at work in the minds and hearts of human beings everywhere. All valid insights into the nature of things, philosophical or scientific; all skills, whether manual, mechanical, or creative; all discoveries, inventions, or works of art; and everything that blesses the life of mankind reveal the presence and work of the Holy Spirit throughout history. The Spirit distributes gifts of statesmanship and craftsmanship that extend beyond man’s natural capacity.