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Bible Notes: Spirit
Originally appeared on spirituality.com
Hebrew: Deut. 6:4 Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God is one Lord:
This is the central pillar of Biblical theology, even according to Jesus. It might simply mean that Israel had one deity. In that age there were many gods by many names, so it was not exactly a statement that the LORD is the only god. Even the word “monotheism” was not coined until 1660 during the English Enlightenment when rational Christian thinkers began to debate whether God is purely a Spirit or is the totality of material things. Nathan MacDonald, Deuteronomy and the Meaning of ‘Monotheism,’ Tubingen, Mohr Seibeck, 2003, 62. The ancient Israelites were in some ways more simple and poetic. This is a strange sentence in Hebrew because it lacks a verb. KJV has added the verb “is” in italics to show that it was not in the original language. Thinking ever more simply, more anciently, we should ask if the LORD himself is the verb. Does this greatest command simply say that the LORD our God is the one causal form of being? The one Person who is Principle? We are touching the profound inkling of an entity who is all activity without any corporeal basis, like a bush that burns—but is never consumed.
Greek: Acts 1:2 Until the day in which he was taken up, after that he through the Holy Ghost had given commandments unto the apostles whom he had chosen:
This Greek sentence is interesting because of its scrambled word order. If it is translated in the order the words actually occur, it would read “until the day/ he gave commandment unto the apostles/ through the Holy Ghost/ whom he had chosen/ he was taken up.” It is no wonder that English translations render this in several ways, but represent Jesus giving commandment to his apostles through the Holy Spirit before he ascended. In Luke 24:49 , Jesus says that after he is taken up, they would receive power, and in Acts 2 they received the Holy Spirit after they returned to Jerusalem. The impression given by the actual order of the phrases is that there was a close relationship between his spiritualization and their spirituality. Perhaps the best solution for the theology of Luke that is yet true to Greek grammar is to read on from verse 1 as follows: “The former treatise The author is referring to the Gospel of Luke, which is the first of two volumes, and Acts is the second. have I made, O Theophilus, of all that Jesus began both to do and to teach until the day he was taken up, commanding his apostles (whom he had chosen) through the Holy Ghost.” At least from a theological point of view it makes sense that when Jesus was totally spiritualized by ascension, so too, the apostles began to be guided by the Holy Spirit. For the Greek scholar, the justification for this translation would be that the participle “commanding” does not denote action antecedent to the main verb “he was taken up,” but the inception of the new action of commanding through Spirit was either coincident with or after Jesus ascended. The reason for preferring either of the more rare possibilities is because the author of Luke/Acts naturally would have agreed with his own teaching that the disciples received the Holy Ghost after Jesus ascended. Science and Health points out: “A condition precedent to communion with Spirit is the gain of spiritual life.” (72)