The Spirit And The Wind

John 3:7–8 (ESV) —  Do not marvel that I said to you, ‘You must be born again.’  The wind blows where it wishes, and you hear its sound, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.”

Acts 2:1–2 (ESV) —  When the day of Pentecost arrived, they were all together in one place.  And suddenly there came from heaven a sound like a mighty rushing wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting.

An interesting and important little Biblical factoid is that in both Hebrew (the original language of the Old Testament) and in Greek (the original language of the New Testament), the word for “spirit” can also be translated (depending on context) “wind” or “breath”. It’s often, though not always, clear from context which meaning is intended, and so in our English translations this is not much of an issue. Still, in some biblical passages, our English-based thinking might mean we miss a subtle allusion that the Bible is making. 

These two passages are both pretty good examples of that. 

Our Inability To Assess the Holy Spirit

In John 3, Jesus is having a discussion with Nicodemus about salvation and eternal life. We don’t even get 4 verses into this discussion and we can already sense Nicodemus was really struggling to accept what he was hearing. Jesus wasn’t just tweaking Nicodemus’s worldview. He was pretty much completely disassembling it and building it all over again. 

One of the first assumptions that seems to have gotten knocked down and rebuilt was an assumption that believers have a mystical ability to perfectly detect, discern and explain what the Holy Spirit is doing. John 3:7-8 gives us a necessary corrective. Jesus says our understanding and experience of the Holy Spirit is not so different than our understanding and experience of the wind. 

I’ve actually studied wind and meteorology. Admittedly, this was at a very low level. It was a “Great Courses” DVD we picked up at a library book sale, but in my defense, the course was taught by an actual, university level Doctor of Meteorology. He seemed to have a pretty good set of explanations for why wind does what it does, but after he got done going through the 4 or 5 macro forces that cause and influence wind, I was still baffled. He then described a whole bunch of other, local forces that also affect the wind, and I began to understand why so many wind forecasts had caused my spraying plans to get turned upside down. 

We know wind exists. We even have times when we have a pretty good idea what the wind is doing. But in truth, we rarely know what caused the wind, where it came from, how long it will last, and if it’s going to get stronger, weaker, or change direction. And we are entirely unable to stop, start or change the wind. The wind blows where it wishes, and we walk in that experience, but we certainly don’t understand it. 

The experience of the Holy Spirit’s power is not so different, so says Jesus. If we had not been given the Sacraments as God’s testimonies to us that the Holy Spirit’s saving power has touched us, we would be left puzzled and anxious. We would have no more insight into the state of our salvation than we have into the forecast of the wind. 

God’s Declaration About How (Or Where) To Understand The Holy Spirit

The Holy Spirit is Himself God. This means He obviously and necessarily is too big for us to fully comprehend.  Not only should that not be disappointing to us, that should seem like good, albeit kind of foundational news. We don’t want a God that is so small He’s easy to comprehend. Besides being a logical impossibility, it would also mean He’s way too weak to trust. 

The Holy Spirit, however, is hugely powerful and fully capable of operating way beyond our comprehension. He must reveal Himself to us for us to “get it.” 

That’s a huge part of what was happening on that first day of Pentecost. At the end of our last newsletter article I mentioned that we would take some time looking at the other miraculous signs that God did on that day. The first one on that day, before the tongues of fire and before the preaching in all the languages of the world, was a mighty sound from heaven, like a rushing wind. 

The purpose of the wind was possibly just to get the attention of as many people as possible. Even today, it would be very challenging, if not impossible, to just generate a sound that would sound like a heaven-sent derecho. This sound would probably have been immediately terrifying, and then perplexing to the people of Jerusalem. Usually the sound of strong wind is a sound of destruction. In this case, it was not. 

In fact, the Bible is filled with stories of God using wind as an instrument of destruction against His enemies. God used a wind to blow locusts into Egypt (Exodus 10:13) and used wind to create an escape route for Israel (Exodus 14:21, 15:10). Apparently, at some point, God shattered the ships of Tarshish with wind (Psalm 48:7), and threatened to do the same to Jonah’s ship (Jonah 1:4). In all these instances, The Lord: The Giver and Protector of Life was at work. The Holy Spirit was accomplishing God’s purposes, and He was using wind to do it. 

Similarly, there are other scriptural references to wind that show God using wind for less wrathful purposes. God used wind to dry the ground after the great flood (Genesis 8:1), used wind to blow quail to Israel for them to eat (Numbers 11:31), and Job even says “By His wind, the heavens were made beautiful” (Job 26:13). 

Sometimes God transparently and obviously uses wind to accomplish His purposes, and the day of Pentecost was no different. 

What was different, though, was how God used it. This time instead of using the power of the wind, God used the sound. Similarly to how the Holy Spirit used the sight of the flaming tongues instead of the heat, the miracles on the day of Pentecost were designed to point to the real power at work that day: the preaching of the Gospel. 

The fire and the wind were signs intended to show people where to look and listen. These signs were God declaring “this is where the Holy Spirit is at work.” These were similar to the signs God gave when the Mosaic Tabernacle (Exodus 40) and Solomon’s Temple (1 Kings 8:1-21) were blessed by God with powerful signs. 

The difference with the Pentecost signs, though, was that they didn’t point to a building. They pointed to a people. The mighty rushing wind sound got everyone’s attention, and the tongues of fire showed them all where to look. When it was time for God’s New Temple on earth to proclaim the Gospel, the signs pointed to it. Without those signs, we would have been as lost as a man standing in a forest trying to figure out where the wind was going to come from next. 

The mighty rushing wind on the day of Pentecost was a sign to the world that if you want to understand what the Holy Spirit is up to, you need to listen to the message proclaimed from the Temple of God on earth: the Christian Congregation. There, where the Gospel is proclaimed, is where we come to understand what the Holy Spirit is up to.