INDWELLING, WITH OR IN?
Not recently I heard a preacher say explicitly from the pulpit that when one becomes a Christian the Holy Spirit moves inside the Christian’s physical body and takes spatial residence there. That is, the HS is actually spatially located inside the Christian’s body. I don’t happen to believe that and I wrote him saying so and offering some reasons. His response, boiled down, was that there are texts that say the HS indwells believers and one that says He dwells in their bodies [1 Corinthians 6:19—I won’t comment here on that section that is filled with difficult phrases].
My questions, of course, did not deny what the texts say—they were about how we should understand them—as a literal spatial residence or as relational metaphor that would speak of identification, temple metaphor, assurance of source of power and intimacy with God, and so forth. He insisted on the words of the text and said it was above his pay grade to explain such things. [Reminds me of the story of Luther’s pounding the table in his discussion with Zwingli and writing on it, “this IS my body”. It’s of no avail to pound and say, “I AM the door”. One doesn’t have to follow Zwingli to dispute Luther’s kind of proof.]
In any case, I let the matter drop. But then recently I heard the same preacher list his view of indwelling as the way we acknowledge the HS's presence in our lives. It's where he had it listed that seriously got my attention. It was the first on a list of how we can sin against the HS. [For example, we were told that we grieve, quench, resist the HS and when we won’t acknowledge His presence and then he briefly argued the "He's inside your physical body" notion.] That raises the stakes so I’m returning to the matter here. I am one of millions who firmly believe what the biblical witness says—the HS “indwells” Christians. That’s never the question—the NT says it’s so!
After a tendentious preamble about people he knew when he was young who just about believed the Bible is the HS we got about 5 minutes of his making his case. His making his case was 1 Corinthians 6:19 quoted [after a few sentences about an idolatrous setting, which was promptly forgotten] and the difference between “with” and “in” in John 14:17.
Just so I make myself clear. The HS is a “person”—he speaks of himself like that in Acts 13:2. He is what we for convenience sake sometimes call “the third Person in the Godhead”. Anyone who thinks the HS is the Bible is barely worth talking with. The HS does many things [comforts, encourages, enlightens, strengthens, guides, reveals, intercedes and on and on] but the HS is not the things He does—He is the one who does these things! Beethoven is not the music he wrote, Shakespeare is not the plays he wrote and the HS is not the wondrous things He brings to pass. He is God, for pity’s sake!
So what was the preamble about? We often do what the swindler Professor Harold Hill did in The Music Man. Link the trouble in River City with the pool hall and when you get people alarmed announce the cure: the people should have a school band. Professor Hill was only following a long line of speech experts—that’s the way to get people to lean your way.
In the case I'm addressing: we’ve heard this from a long line of speakers: “The trouble in the Church is that we have forgot the HS and that’s why we’re apathetic, powerless and in every other way casual and unsuccessful and it's why we don’t evangelize.” That’s part of why you have a tide of popular books called things like, The Forgotten God [meaning the HS]. In this kind of a setting we don’t have titles like The Forgotten Jesus or The Forgotten Father. We talk plenty about the Father & Son so we can’t complain about that. [Though I think there’s a case to be made for saying too little about God as distinct from (not as opposed to) the man Jesus.]
So, here’s the story “We’re feeble and struggling because we don’t talk or think enough about the HS.
The cure is to think and talk more about the HS. We need to know the HS indwells us!”
I confess to you I know a LOT of Christians and among those I don’t know a single one who DOESN'T believe that the HS indwells them.
I do remember sitting in a class listening to one hard case [a preacher, wouldn’t you know] who believed the HS didn’t influence Christians in any other way but through the biblical witness. He was wrong—I thought that then and think it now but even he didn’t believe the HS was the Bible.
But none of that has anything to do with the HS moving from outside the Christian’s physical body to inside the Christian’s physical body! That entire issue is bogus.
Even if it is true that we’re not thinking enough or not talking enough about the HS, that has nothing to do with the Spirit actually and literally and spatially dwelling inside the believer’s body. That notion is irrelevant and injurious. The claim is being made that we’re powerless and under-achievers if we don’t believe the HS is actually inside our physical bodies. That is refusing to acknowledge the Spirit’s presence in our lives.
I’m one of millions who every day either literally on our knees or with our hearts on their knees ask God [that’s Father, Son & Holy Spirit as the one true] for forgiveness and empowerment and transformation into the likeness of God who has come to us in and as Jesus Christ.
It would be a form of sin if we were to deny the presence of the Holy Spirit in our lives but it is no crime against Father, Son or Holy Spirit to deny some interpretation of His presence because under religious pressure we want to preach a mystical spatial indwelling of the Spirit.
I don’t say it is wrong to pray to the Holy Spirit! Once more, I don’t say it is wrong to pray to the Holy Spirit. The Bible is saturated with speech about the Spirit of God and the wonders He performs but nowhere in the entire Bible does anyone ever pray to the Holy Spirit as distinctively the Holy Spirit.
Is that significant? In what way?
In the NT Paul [Jesus also] asks “the Father” to send or give or strengthen by or in the HS. The Spirit is always presented as the one who does the bidding of the Father and Jesus even as Jesus is.
“But when he the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all truth for he will not speak of himself; but whatsoever he shall hear that shall he speak; and he will show you things to come. He shall glorify me; for he shall receive of mine and show it unto you.” [The word gar (for) is in the text.]
Is that text significant? How is the Spirit in this His post-Pentecostal work characterized in this text?
This isn’t the place for a discussion of Christology or Pneumatology or the “economic” Trinity but that doesn’t mean we aren’t to recognize how the Holy Scriptures speak about how the persons of the Trinity function in the unfolding of the creation/redemption work of God.
It wasn’t the Father who became incarnate. It wasn’t the Holy Spirit that became incarnate. The “Word” didn’t send the Father nor did the Holy Spirit send the Father. Neither the Father nor the Spirit died on the cross. We honor the Holy Spirit by honoring what He reveals about Himself in the biblical witness. Jesus we know, Paul we know but who are these who hand down their interpretations and say we sin if we don’t believe them? An aspect of the beauty & glory of the HS is that He chooses to take "the back seat" and take Jesus and his things and make him and them His message.
With some it isn’t enough that we all fervently believe that the Spirit of God is the Spirit of creation, revelation and Christ-honoring blessing we must believe that He is physically/spatially inside our bodies or we’re refusing to acknowledge His presence in our lives?
1 Peter 1:11 says the Holy Spirit [the Spirit of Christ] was IN the prophets and enabled them to preach the gospel ahead of time! The speaker I’m having this lover's quarrel with insisted that the word “in” is confined to something that happened after Pentecost. [See below on John 14.17.]
We were told that the Spirit was “with” the apostles and their preaching colleagues when they went out to preach [Matthew 10 illustrates]. Nothing was said about the function of the word “with” in such a setting. The speaker seemed to think that he and everyone else knew how it functioned so it’s just passed by.
In John 14:17 Jesus said the HS “lives with you” [NIV]. The speaker gave no thought to the word “with” [par] here other than to say it was different than the word “in” which of course he took to mean “inside your body”.
The argument offered was this. The word “with” means “not inside” and the word “in” means “inside”. That is, when the HS was “with” them he was spatially “outside” their bodies but when Pentecost came the HS moved spatially “inside” them.
You have to remember that the man was offering us talk about a spatial location or you won’t get the argument. Before Pentecost the Spirit was spatially outside their bodies but at Pentecost the Spirit spatially moved inside their bodies. We were assured that if we didn’t believe that that we are not recognizing the Spirit’s presence in our lives and this was one of the points he listed as ways in which we sin against the Spirit.
But the treatment of the texts used is careless even if we read it as he reads it [and he told us to pay special attention to the words “with” and “in”]. Because he already had his mind made up he reads the text like this: “he lives WITH you but he will be IN you.”
Ignoring for the moment his claim about how the words themselves function, must we read it his way? Why must we read it as stressing the two words in question? Why can’t we read it as an assurance that the future will not be different than the present? Why can’t we read it this way? “He lives with you and shall be in you in the future.” They are worried about Jesus absenting himself and he is assuring them that they need not worry—what’s ahead isn’t something they need to worry about! I think that is what he is saying.
But look. In 14:16 Jesus speaks about the future [when he personally is absent] and assures them that he will ask the Father and he will send the HS to be “with” you forever. This was to be the Pentecost onward experience, an experience the apostolic group and the entire Church of our Lord was to experience until the Story climaxes. Jesus uses “with” [meth] to speak of the age-long indwelling of the Spirit as his [Jesus’ representative] in them.
He doesn’t seem to know what our speaker knows that “with” means “outside”—Jesus should have used “in”. Let me make this clearer.
Jesus uses “with” to include “indwelling”! And our speaker says “with” doesn’t include indwelling; in fact, "with" means non-indwelling. I prefer Jesus’ view.
Then in 14:23 Jesus [again with Pentecost in view] speaks of himself and the Father coming to “make our home with the believer.”
Our speaker [telling us to note carefully the words “with” and “in”] says “with” means spatially outside and “in” means spatially inside.
But you must note what is being said underneath all these words in the context of the speaker’s message. To accept the truth of God and get the power of the HS you must believe the HS is spatially inside your body. It’s from in there that he does his work and empowers us. It isn’t enough to say He is “with” us—we must believe He spatially resides “inside” us. The speaker knows that something new happened at Pentecost but he doesn’t know what it is that is new; he only thing he knows is that before Christ the HS was “with” people but now he is “in” people.
Back to the word “with”. When our speaker insisted that prior to Pentecost the HS was “with” he doesn’t attempt to say what “with” means—he’s only sure that it means “not inside”. Yes, but what does it mean that the HS was “with” them and not inside them] when they went out on a preaching mission [say, Matthew 10]. That the HS was walking along beside them? How does the word “with” function in such a statement. Even if we were to say “alongside” the question would remain—what does that mean? The truth is it has nothing to do with spatial position or anything like it.
When Jesus said [at Pentecost] the HS will be with the Church he wasn’t talking about some mystical “outside of them” experience. When he said [of prior Pentecost experience—John 14:17] that the HS lived with them he wasn’t talking about some spatial positioning of the Spirit “outside” their fleshly bodies. He tells them that, even as he says the Spirit “lives with” them [the present indicative here of menei would speak of the continuing nature of the experience]. The HS lives “with” them has absolutely nothing to do about his spatial position outside of their bodies.
Jesus prior to the ascension says, “Look, I will be with you always, even to the end of the age.” Matthew 28:20.
Is that significant? In what way?
Even accepting that a change will occur at Pentecost [that is clearly the truth] it has nothing to with a change of spatial location. The speaker has no awareness that there could be any other sense in Jesus’ words than the one he puts in them. He has Jesus saying, “The Spirit continues to live with you, outside you of course, but come Pentecost he will shift spatial position and move inside your bodies.” This, this is what Jesus was saying? Bless me.
Words like these—a host of such words—have nothing to do with spatial or physical realities. Daily life and the biblical witness is saturated with speech that is not to be construed carelessly and in empirical terms—they are not spatial realities; they have to do with intimacy, relations, function and so much more.
Paul says the Thessalonians were in his heart! He told the Corinthians that they were in Titus’ heart. Christians are said to be in the Spirit. Christ is said to abide in us and we are said to abide in him. We are said to be baptized into Christ and into his death and we’re said to dwell in God. The Spirit is said to dwell in Christians and Christians are said to live in the Spirit. We’re told that Jesus dwells in our hearts and Jesus said he will be with us.
Depending on context these prepositions speak of beautiful and rich and varied and actual experiences that include function, intimacy and so much more. People lift us up or get us down or carry us through or in life they walk beside us; they let us in and find their way into our hearts or emotionally they turn away from us or turn toward us or we are always in their hearts and they often weep over the loss of loved ones.
Sometimes we talk nonsense; I’ve done plenty of that myself over the years. [That’s true and not just a generalized confession so I can go on and make a point! I now look back on some things I've said and wonder how I could ever have thought them to be true; and I suppose I’ll continue to do that.] I hate it but there it is.
Sometimes it’s due to laziness, sometimes due to simple ignorance, sometimes it’s due to thinking we’ve arrived and while we know we’re not infallible we aren’t aware of just how ignorant and fallible we are. We’re not just wanna-be scholars we perceive ourselves to be scholars. We invite nobody who might be our equal to test our views so we always come out on top and then we come to believe we are skilled debaters or sages and pride takes hold. The very proud are unteachable—they make generalized confessions of their limits but they don’t take correction well, don’t even take it well when they are disagreed with. Their personhood gets all tangled up with what they know or think they know. They never comes and ask, “Help me understand this.” They dabble with other people’s writing, pick up some new insights and some phrases and repeat them without having digested them. The inexperienced don’t notice and so they rarely answer back but if they were to, we the proud dabblers can always out-talk them.
Sigh.
I think this specific issue is hardly worth talking about and I think I wouldn’t have bothered with it again but then I heard the stakes were raised.
It’s so dangerous to add one more sin to the already long lists of sins of which people can be guilty. Too, it’s dangerous to make one specific form of sin to be peculiar, the “king of sins,” so to speak. It’s tragic because it makes those who struggle with that specific form of sin into….lepers, so to speak. It’s especially tragic if we do that based on a single text in the entire Bible. No wonder James says the tongue can set an entire world on fire. Where does it end, eh?
In the meantime be sure you remember this: It isn't the "indwelling" that empowers us. That's the figure of speech. The empowering one is the Holy Spirit Himself!
I might, God allowing, take this up again at some point.
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