Interestingly, Mark 15:37 puts it this way: “And Jesus uttered a loud cry, and breathed his last” (Greek ejxevpneusen [exepneusen]; note the root pneuma [“spirit”] in this verb). What concerns us presently is the fact that Jesus rebuked Nicodemus for being “Israel’s teacher” and not understanding the significance of the nature of “spirit” and the “Spirit” of God in spiritual birth into the kingdom of God (vv. The former verse refers only to man and links “breath” (neshamah) to “life,” but the latter refers to both man and air-breathing land animals and, above all, links “breath” to “spirit” (ruakh) and then to animate “life.” Moreover, according to Eccl 3:19–21, both animals and people “have the same breath [or ‘spirit,’ ruakh]” (v. 19), and “Who really knows if the spirit [or ‘breath,’ ruakh] of man ascends upward, and the spirit of the animal goes downward to the earth?” (v. 21). Note that kodesh is an adjective meaning holy that agrees with the noun it modifies. This means that what he brings with him into our lives is the full force of “the things freely given to us by God” in Christ Jesus (1 Cor 2:12). In the latter sense, the term also applies to the Spirit of God. Barclay). His perfection is revealed in three Persons: Father, Son (Jesus Christ), and Holy Spirit, who share equal divine attributes. Ezekiel prophesies as he has been instructed and the bones rattle, come together, and receive from the Lord flesh and life-giving “breath” (ruakh) from “the four winds” (i.e., the four ruakh; vv. On the latter point the connection back to Ezek 36–37 binds cleansing from impurities with vivification of the human spirit by God putting his “Spirit” there (Ezek 36:25–27 and 37:14). We need to take this biblical analogy seriously in both understanding the nature of God’s Spirit and in welcoming and engaging with his work. The Holy Spirit as the agent of Jesus’ conception through Mary springs to mind immediately. More Hebrew words for holy. David Noel Freedman (New York: Doubleday, 1992) 3.264. They allude to it on both communal and individual levels (see, e.g., 2 Cor 3:3–6 and, again, the personal individual remarks of Jesus to Nicodemus which so clearly draw upon Ezek 36). The statistics used in this article are taken from Francis Brown, S. R. Driver, and Charles A. Briggs, Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament (London: Oxford Univ. become consecrated (2), become defiled (1), become holy (1), consecrate (43), consecrated (35), consecrates (7), consecration (2), declare holy (1), dedicate (2), dedicated (8), dedicating (1), holier (1), holy (5), keep (1), keep it holy (2), keep the holy (3), made it holy (1), manifest my holiness (2), prepare (2), prove myself holy (2), proved himself holy … God has made holiness the moral condition necessary to the health of His universe.”, R. C. Sproul: “God alone is holy in Himself. 7, ed. Jesus was as fully human as he was divine.
This does not necessarily mean that there was a complete lack of prophetic activity (see, e.g., Luke 1:67 and 2:25–32), but perhaps the time from the last Old Testament prophets to the time of Jesus was like the time of Eli’s decline: “Word from the Lord was rare in those days; revelatory visions were infrequent” (1 Sam 3:1; contrast vv. The baptism of the Spirit shifts the metaphor from “wind” to “water,” the point being that physical purification by water has a corresponding reality in the purification of the human spirit through the Holy Spirit (Matt 3:11; John 1:32-34; Ezek 36). NASB Translation. Although along the way I will mention most of the important ways the term “spirit” (Hebrew j~Wr, ruakh ) is used in the Hebrew Bible, it is not my intention to provide an exhaustive or even comprehensive review of the uses of the term. 19–23) and the purpose of his baptismal water purification practices (v. 25). This is attributed to three aspects of God’s divinity: This cry holy, holy, holy revealed the same God of both testaments. The focus will be on the Old Testament patterns of expression and some of the most important passages in which they occur, but we will also follow them through into the New Testament to the degree that is possible in this short paper. For example, it can be treated as the seat of intuition (Mark 2:8), discouragement or internal despair (Mark 8:12), joy (Luke 1:47 // with “soul” in v. 46), intense affection (John 11:33), an internal sense of being in one form or another (2 Tim 1:7, a spirit of fear, as opposed to a spirit of power, love, and self-discipline), and so on. 2, 6). The Jewish leaders had sent “priests and Levites” (v. 19) to question John about who he was (vv. Block, “The Prophet of the Spirit: The Use of RWH in the book of Ezekiel,” Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 32 (1989) 36-37 and idem, The Book of Ezekiel: Chapters 1-24, New International Commentary on the Old Testament (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1997) 101.
The point is that there is a great deal of continuity from the Old Testament on into the New Testament in regard to the concept of “spirit” (including “breath” and “wind,” see more on the latter below).
In Revelation 4, the cherubim were described as four living creatures which are believed to represent four pictures of Christ: King (lion-like), Servant (ox-like), Perfect Man (man-like), and Mighty God (eagle-like). It is the same direction for us to aim for the highest standard, to be like God, as he instructed: “Be holy, for I am holy” (1 Peter 1:16). קָדוֹשׁ. Likewise, in his The JPS Torah Commentary: Numbers (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society, 1990) 87, Jacob Milgrom renders 11:17, “I will draw upon the spirit that is upon you,” and on p. 90 Moses’ statement in v. 29 is translated, “… that the Lord put His spirit upon them!” (See also Milgrom’s excursus on ecstatic prophecy and the spirit on pp. Understanding the OT terms “Holy Spirit” and “the Spirit of God (or the LORD)” and the theology associated with them depends on grasping the significance of the fact that, in about 40% of its occurrences, the Hebrew word “spirit” (ruakh) basically means “wind or breath,” not “spirit.” The NT word (pneuma) is also used in this way on occasion. Again, in 2 Pet 1:21b, Peter affirms that the Old Testament prophets “carried along by the Holy Spirit spoke from God” when they articulated the word of God we now know as the Old Testament. Namely, Moses would have his wish come true. The grammatical structure of the expression “the spirit of man” in v. 11 corresponds to that of “the Spirit of God” later in the same verse.9 This correspondence provides one of the most obvious, simple, and helpful ways of approaching the subject of God’s Spirit in the Old Testament in relation to the Holy Spirit in the New Testament. Co., 1952); and for special clarity see especially M. V. Van Pelt, W. C. Kaiser, Jr., and D. I. 2:10-12). How Can an Omnipresent God Be in Hell if that is Eternal Separation from God? Now we have not received the spirit of the world, but the Spirit who is from God, so that we may know the things that are freely given to us by God. The Hebrew names derived here come from the Salkinson-Ginsburg Hebrew New Testament (1999 edition) which I compared to F. Delitzsch's older Hebrew translation of the Brit Chadashah as well as with the Robinson-Pierpont Majority Text (1995), the Westcott and Hort NT, and the Friberg NT (UBS3/4). The point is that this kind of work of the Holy Spirit took place before the time of Ezekiel and at the time of the restoration that Ezekiel predicted. Paul’s other image of the Spirit in 1 Cor 12:13 calls up another whole set of expressions in the Old Testament that serve as background for the New Testament teaching of the indwelling Holy Spirit. Sin is anything outside the nature of God.”, A. W. Tozer: “Holy is the way God is. the spirit of the man] within him? 15 . ‘to the wind’] of the day.”, However, we also need to take seriously the fact that the vast bulk of occurrences of “the ruakh of the Lord/God” in the Old Testament refer to God’s “Spirit” understood as the person of God that corresponds to the human “spirit” in people (see the reflections on this biblical analogy in the previous section above). Finally, in the interpretation of this vision in vv. Interestingly, the Scripture mentions not only that God is holy, but also that God is holy, holy, holy. The phraseology here recalls John 7:39. Eph 4:30).
Even if the expression itself derives from John the Baptist, nevertheless, the idea behind it is Ezekiel’s prophecy of the Spirit of God transforming the spirit of people from death to life in the same context as God cleansing his people by washing them with clean water (Ezek 36:25–27 with 37:13–14).