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The Spirit in the Old Testament
Well, so far in this series, we’ve talked about the person of the Spirit, and we’ve started to think about the work of the Spirit, first in the life of Jesus, and then in the life of the early church. Very obviously, we’ve started in the New Testament. We started with the Gospels and Acts, rather than with Genesis and Joel.
(0:28 – 1:41)
And while that’s a reasonable approach to take, at some point, we need to step back and consider what comes before, because after all, four-fifths of our Bible is the Old Testament. And so, the question actually arises, what was the Spirit doing before the birth of Christ? To put it in a kind of blunt way, was the Holy Spirit active in the Old Testament? Or was the Holy Spirit working minimally in the Old Testament? Or was the Holy Spirit really doing nothing at all? Was the Spirit just waiting for the day of Pentecost? I was thinking a bit like when you’re sitting in an airport departure lounge, and you’ve really got nothing else to do but wait for the flight to leave. Is that really what the Spirit was doing, just waiting for the day of Pentecost to come? I’m conscious as we begin that this could seem like an academic question to us, because we are a New Testament church.
(1:42 – 2:10)
And so, you might be asking, well, why does it matter what the Spirit was doing in a bygone era? Well, here are a few reasons that I thought of in answer to that question. Number one, if you care about the person of the Spirit, you should care about the history of the Spirit. So, in human terms, if we care about a person, we take the trouble to learn their history.
(2:11 – 4:01)
And it would be strange to say that we honour the Spirit, but we have no interest in his backstory. That was the first thing that occurred to me. The second reason is a bit more practical, and it’s that pondering the Spirit in the Old Testament will actually help us to reflect on the unity and development of the Bible.
So, an important question that every Bible reader asks at some point is, how does the Old Testament and the New Testament fit together? Yes, it’s all one grand story, but are there developments in the way God chooses to operate when I turn the page from the Old Testament to the New? You see what I’m saying? It’s one continuous story, but does everything just work and apply in the same way in the Old Testament as in the New? It’s a difficult and deep question, but thinking about the Spirit’s role in the Old and New Testament might nudge us a little closer to the answer of how these two testaments connect. So, number one, we care about the person of the Spirit. Number two, we want to read our Bibles better.
And number three, which I hope won’t sound too strange or odd, it’s that studying the Spirit in the Old Testament can create a sense of affinity with Old Testament believers but also show us the privilege we have. It’s easy to feel a sense of distance from Old Testament saints. It can seem like they lived in a very different time and in very different circumstances.
(4:03 – 4:27)
And yet something that can close that sense of gap is to realise that Old Testament saints knew something of the Spirit of the Lord. Now, they did not have a clear understanding of the Trinity in the Old Testament. That becomes much clearer when we come into the New Testament.
(4:29 – 5:58)
And yet they weren’t unfamiliar with the idea of God’s Spirit. If you sat in a Bible study with an Old Testament Jew and you mentioned God’s Spirit, they would know what you were talking about. And that helps me to have a closer affinity with Old Testament believers while also feeling the privilege of living in the last days in which the promises of Christ are being fulfilled.
Now, that’s a long introduction, three reasons, but it’s also my attempt to keep you listening for the next 20 minutes. I want you to see that this isn’t academic. And as we turn to the subject, the breadth of it is vast.
There are roughly 100 references to the Holy Spirit in the Old Testament. We’re not going to go through every one of them. What we’re going to do is focus on three main things that the Holy Spirit was up to in the Old Testament period.
What was the Spirit doing B.C.? Let me suggest three main things. First of all, He was creating and sustaining. One main thing the Spirit does in the Old Testament is creating life and sustaining life.
(5:59 – 6:33)
We often think of the Holy Spirit in terms of things like salvation, proclamation of the gospel, the formation and empowerment of the church. And of course, these things are all true. But in the first chunk of the Bible, the first thing the Holy Spirit is involved in is creation itself.
Let’s open our Bible to Genesis 1 verse 1 and the second verse as well. Very well-known verses. And we’ll see the Spirit here.
(6:34 – 6:50)
In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was formless and empty. Darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.
(6:51 – 7:59)
This is the first translation of the word Spirit. Some of you will know that comes from a Hebrew word, the Hebrew word ruach, which I always think sounds like it’s a word that’s originated from the highlands rather than Hebrew, ruach. Ruach appears 400 times in the Old Testament, and it can mean different things.
Sometimes, it simply means the spirit or the breath of a human being. So, you have a ruach, a spirit. Other times, we can see in the context, it’s clearly referring to the cosmological phenomenon of breath or wind.
But as I said earlier, on about 100 occasions, the ruach, the spirit, is clearly referring to the Spirit of God. And I think that’s even implied here. I mean, we have the phrase Spirit of God, but notice what the Spirit is doing.
(8:00 – 9:14)
The Spirit of God was hovering over the waters. Not blowing over the waters, like the wind of nature, but hovering over the waters. It’s a picture of a bird hovering above, poised and ready for action.
The picture is of an intelligent spirit who is ready to swoop into action to create life and order out of the chaos. And so, the capital S Spirit is directly involved in creation. God the Father is creation’s source.
God the Son is creation’s word. And God the Spirit is creation’s operative power, who powerfully brings into being the word of God the Son and the will of the Father. And it’s not only that the Spirit gets things going, but very importantly, the Spirit keeps things going.
(9:15 – 10:02)
Turn with me briefly to Psalm 104. Psalm 104. It’s the kind of psalm, when you read it quickly, you may make the assessment that it’s a psalm about creation.
But I think actually, it’s more a psalm about sustaining life, not just making life. Look at verses 27 to 30. All creatures look to you to give them their food at the proper time.
When you give it to them, they gather it up. When you open your hand, they are satisfied with good things. When you hide your face, they are terrified.
(10:04 – 15:14)
When you take away their breath, they die and return to the dust. And it goes on. When you send your Spirit, they are created, and you renew the face of the ground.
Do you see there that it’s not just that the Spirit gets things going, but the Spirit keeps things going. That’s Amos is saying, if the Holy Spirit stopped working in the world for a second, there would be no renewal of life and breath and food and water and everything else that makes life what it is. Without the Holy Spirit, the season of winter would never turn over to spring.
Do you see how wrong it would be to say the Holy Spirit wasn’t doing much in the Old Testament? If that was the case, the universe would stop existing. And can you also see, and this is where we start to think about connections, the continuity, but also the kind of elevation. Can you also see that it’s obvious then that the Holy Spirit in the New Testament is going to be the one that gives life, because that’s what he’s always been doing, giving physical life.
And so as we come into the New Testament, he’s the one who gives spiritual life. So that’s the first thing the Spirit is up to in the Old Testament. Let’s move on to a second thing.
The second thing the Spirit’s involved in was empowering and enabling. Now, we should be familiar with the idea that the Spirit empowers and enables his people. The Spirit empowers God’s people for acts of service and acts of witness, and God’s Spirit enables Christians to bear fruit, the fruit of godly character, that would be impossible in their own strength.
This is a fairly 101 idea when we think of Christian living. But actually, in the Old Testament, there was also a certain amount of empowering and enabling believers. And I want you to give you just a smattering of examples of this, and I want you to think about what were the commonalities and the situations in which God’s Spirit enabled people.
Here are some of the people that the Spirit is said to have empowered, and I’m just going to give you the references for you to jot down. In Numbers 11, 70 elders were appointed to assist Moses in the governing of a vast people. There was this position of leadership and wisdom and organisation.
And the Bible says they were given the Spirit of the Lord to help them do that task. In Exodus 31, a man named Bezalel was empowered with the Spirit, along with his fellow craftsmen, to construct the tabernacle, the place of worship. Now, that was actually a very practical skill, of course, but it was a very important building that was being made.
And so God gave the Spirit to enable them to do that practical task Successfully. In Deuteronomy 34, Joshua, the successor of Moses, is filled with the Spirit to lead God’s people into the promised land, with all of the challenges that that was going to bring.
In that context of conflict, the Spirit of God enables them. In Judges 6, Gideon is clothed with the Spirit of the Lord. He’s one of the judges who were leaders in Old Testament times when there weren’t kings.
And he’s clothed, we’re told, with the Spirit of the Lord to lead God’s people against the Midianites. In Judges 13-15, Samson, very famous Old Testament character, is empowered by the Spirit to have supernatural strength to overcome God’s enemies. In 1 Samuel 10 and 11, Saul, the first king of Israel, is given the Spirit to lead God’s people in a way that honours the Lord.
Of course, if you know the story there, he rebels against the Lord, and the Holy Spirit is then taken from Saul, and everything falls apart. But in 1 Samuel 16, David succeeds Saul. And David is really the paradigm for kingship.
(15:14 – 16:50)
He’s the model of it in the Old Testament. And we’re told that he too is filled with the Spirit. And even though he sins against the Lord in a grievous way, we know that his sins are forgiven, and the Holy Spirit is not taken from David.
And so, at least in his lifetime, his whole kingdom doesn’t crumble because of the Spirit of the Lord. And of course, there are many other examples that we could look at in the work of the prophets. In Ezekiel 2, for example, the Spirit strengthens Ezekiel to hear God’s Word and to proclaim God’s Word.
So here are a whole list of people that God in the Old Testament empowers by the Spirit in the Old Covenant era. But what do you notice about them? What’s in common with all of them? Let me suggest three things that all of these people I’ve mentioned have in common. Number one, they are all leaders.
Number two, they are all doing highly important tasks. And number three, the presence of the Holy Spirit is not necessarily permanent. Who are these people? Prominent craftsmen making the tabernacle, the judges who ruled the people, the kings who ruled over the nation, the prophets who alone spoke God’s Word to the nation.
(16:52 – 18:18)
These are not nobodies, but important somebodies playing significant roles in the advancement of God’s kingdom in their time. The legal and spiritual leaders of the people being given God’s Spirit to advance God’s kingdom. But by contrast, under the New Covenant, and as we think about what’s the difference when we get to the New Testament, the promise of Joel as we saw last week is that all of God’s people, all of us, will be given the Spirit of the Lord.
The young as well as the old, the important people and those who may be seen as less important. And it won’t just be for the most significant tasks, like building a temple, or leading a nation, or fighting a foreign oppressor. But because the Holy Spirit lives in us at all times, He is with us to help us even with the so-called ordinary things of life on the Monday to the Sunday.
And there’s also a permanence that comes with the giving of the Spirit in the New Testament. None of us needs to worry like David that the Holy Spirit might be taken from us. Isn’t that wonderful? The Holy Spirit is the permanent possession of every genuine believer.
(18:20 – 19:00)
Are there any other differences between Old Testament saints and New Testament believers? I thought it just would be worth mentioning this, that within discussions about these things among Bible-believing Christians, there’s a bit of debate around whether Old Testament believers were indwelt by the Holy Spirit. Did the Holy Spirit actually come and live within them? Or is that something that only happens in the New Covenant? Did the Spirit empower them but not indwell them? Some people say, yes, the Spirit did both. And other people say, no, the Spirit empowered them but didn’t indwell them until the New Covenant.
(19:03 – 22:17)
My own reading of it is, I do think something very new is happening in the New Covenant. I do personally think that New Testament believers are indwelt in a way that’s not true in the Old Testament. Because in Ezekiel, there is a promise of a new heart, a whole new inner transformation that just wasn’t true for the Old Testament saint in the same way.
But wherever you land in that murky question, the idea of believers being empowered for ministry is not new. And yet as Christians today, we should really see the privilege of living in the time that we do. Well, let’s move on to our third thing before we come to communion.
What was the third thing that the Holy Spirit was doing in this time? Thirdly, the Spirit was prophesying and speaking. The Spirit of God has always been speaking out the Word of God. Another thing that those people we mentioned earlier mostly had in common, not all of them, but most of them, whether it was Moses or David or the prophets, is that many of them were spokesmen for God.
Many of them received the Spirit specifically so that they could speak out God’s Word faithfully, and so that they could write down God’s Word in a faithful way. And we read about this in 2 Peter 1, if you want to turn there just for a moment. It’s just a single verse, but quite an important verse to have as part of your theology as a Christian, in 2 Peter 1, verse 21.
Because it says something about the formation of Scripture, and it says something about the work of the Holy Spirit to guarantee that. And he’s speaking here of Old Testament prophecy, and we’re told that prophecy never had its origin in the human will, but prophets, though human, spoke from God. Now, how did they speak from God? This is the key point.
What enabled them? What guaranteed that they spoke from God? As they were carried along by the Holy Spirit. The prophets like Moses, David, Isaiah, and so on spoke God’s Word because the Spirit gave them the impulse to do so. The Spirit empowered the very process that led them to writing down the Scriptures.
This is a verse in the New Testament that’s telling us that the Old Testament is divinely inspired. And the argument for inspiration is that it wasn’t just a bloke or a guy coming up with his own ideas. The Holy Spirit was orchestrating and directing the entire process.
(22:19 – 23:31)
And so the question then follows, okay, so if the Holy Spirit is speaking in the Old Testament and causing all this stuff to be written down, what is He speaking? What is the message of the Holy Spirit in the Old Testament? What’s He saying through the prophets? Well, I guess a whole bunch of things. But I want to just finish on two dimensions, two main things as we think about particularly the prophecies that were spoken. Number one, the Holy Spirit was speaking ahead about Jesus.
He was speaking ahead about Jesus. Think about the prophets. What are the prophets doing? The prophets are called, some people have called them the covenant enforcers.
They basically come along and they say to Israel, listen, here’s God’s law given to Moses. Here’s what God asked you to do, but you’re not doing it. They enforce the law.
They show people that they’re not meeting the standard of the law. But when you read the prophets, what’s the answer to that? I mean, part of it is, of course, repent and change your ways and get back to the law. That’s part of it.
(23:32 – 25:31)
But there’s also a recognition in the prophets that telling the people to pull up their bootstraps isn’t going to do it, isn’t going to achieve it. And so this is the point at which the prophets begin to prophesy the new covenant and a greater fulfilment that’s going to sort out this mess of their hearts. And the answer, of course, is the sending of one who will bring about a revolution of the heart.
The sending of the Son, the sending of the Messiah, the Spirit anointed Messiah, as we thought about just a week or two ago from Isaiah 42, Isaiah 61, and then fulfilled in the baptism of Jesus as the Spirit comes down on Him. As we heard a few weeks ago, that is not just an incidental point in the story. It’s not just a little, you know, an interesting incident.
It’s the fulfilment of all the promises. It’s the moment where Jesus is being identified on earth as the final Saviour King who has finally come to sort out the mess. And that then is the basis on which the same Spirit-filled Messiah will then be able to pour out that same Spirit upon the church and pour out all of His saving benefits upon those who believe.
And so this is the great message at the heart of the prophets. Ultimately, the Spirit is speaking ahead of Jesus. We talk about this, don’t we, the Spirit testifying to Jesus.
But He’s already doing that in the Old Testament. He’s already preaching Christ. But there’s also another aspect to it, isn’t there, as well.
(25:32 – 27:49)
Because not only is the coming of Christ predicted, but also, again, as we saw last week, there’s the promise of the people of Christ, the promise of the church. And so not only is it Jesus Himself who’s spoken of, but this new people, this recreated people with new hearts, with the law of God written on their hearts, with a whole new destiny and a whole new inheritance, not a future of judgement, but a future of glory and a future in the family of God. All of that is promised in the prophecies of the Old Testament.
We don’t have time to go to those various passages, but you can look many of them up yourselves. Well, as we come to the end of this fairly brief study, in one sense, I want us to leave here tonight not only with a clearer view of what the Spirit’s doing in the Old Testament, but maybe also with a firmer view of the value of the Old Testament as a whole. It’s four-fifths of God’s Word, and it’s to be taken as seriously as we take the last fifth of it, and as we consider that whole idea.
Of course, we need to set the Old Testament in its context. We need to wrestle with it in places, but we need to take it just as seriously as we do the New Testament. And so if you are a Christian and you’ve been a Christian for a number of years, but you haven’t really started to get stuck into the Old Testament, then I would strongly encourage you to do so.
Maybe pick a book in the Old Testament. Maybe one of those prophets that particularly point forward to Jesus. Buy an accessible study guide, or have a good study Bible that gives you notes at the bottom that you can look at, and start to enjoy the first volume of what the Holy Spirit said about Jesus.
(27:51 – 28:55)
Do you see just how much the Spirit was up to in the Old Testament? You know, as I studied this, I was actually staggered by the amount that the Spirit does prior to Jesus coming. Creating and sustaining, empowering and enabling, prophesying and speaking. And believe me, there’s a whole bunch of other stuff that I left out tonight, but those are some of the main things.
I hope you sense both the continuity that we have with Old Testament saints, that they actually enjoyed many of the same privileges. Not in quite the same way, but they did enjoy many privileges. Privileges of the Spirit.
But I also hope you sense the real privilege you have of living in this time when the Holy Spirit has been poured out upon His church. We are living in days that our Old Testament brothers and sisters longed to see. Let me just pray for a moment.
(28:59 – 29:42)
Father, lead us now by the Holy Spirit to focus our attention on the One that He proclaimed. We thank you so much for the Spirit-anointed Messiah, the One who fulfils all of these promises. The One who has sent the Spirit upon the church.
The One who has softened our own hearts, opened our eyes, opened our ears, so that we can see and hear and understand the good news about Jesus. May we come to this table with a sense of thankfulness and gratitude. And we ask this in Jesus’ name.
Amen.
The post The Spirit in the Old Testament appeared first on Greenview Church.
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By GreenviewChurchWell, so far in this series, we’ve talked about the person of the Spirit, and we’ve started to think about the work of the Spirit, first in the life of Jesus, and then in the life of the early church. Very obviously, we’ve started in the New Testament. We started with the Gospels and Acts, rather than with Genesis and Joel.
(0:28 – 1:41)
And while that’s a reasonable approach to take, at some point, we need to step back and consider what comes before, because after all, four-fifths of our Bible is the Old Testament. And so, the question actually arises, what was the Spirit doing before the birth of Christ? To put it in a kind of blunt way, was the Holy Spirit active in the Old Testament? Or was the Holy Spirit working minimally in the Old Testament? Or was the Holy Spirit really doing nothing at all? Was the Spirit just waiting for the day of Pentecost? I was thinking a bit like when you’re sitting in an airport departure lounge, and you’ve really got nothing else to do but wait for the flight to leave. Is that really what the Spirit was doing, just waiting for the day of Pentecost to come? I’m conscious as we begin that this could seem like an academic question to us, because we are a New Testament church.
(1:42 – 2:10)
And so, you might be asking, well, why does it matter what the Spirit was doing in a bygone era? Well, here are a few reasons that I thought of in answer to that question. Number one, if you care about the person of the Spirit, you should care about the history of the Spirit. So, in human terms, if we care about a person, we take the trouble to learn their history.
(2:11 – 4:01)
And it would be strange to say that we honour the Spirit, but we have no interest in his backstory. That was the first thing that occurred to me. The second reason is a bit more practical, and it’s that pondering the Spirit in the Old Testament will actually help us to reflect on the unity and development of the Bible.
So, an important question that every Bible reader asks at some point is, how does the Old Testament and the New Testament fit together? Yes, it’s all one grand story, but are there developments in the way God chooses to operate when I turn the page from the Old Testament to the New? You see what I’m saying? It’s one continuous story, but does everything just work and apply in the same way in the Old Testament as in the New? It’s a difficult and deep question, but thinking about the Spirit’s role in the Old and New Testament might nudge us a little closer to the answer of how these two testaments connect. So, number one, we care about the person of the Spirit. Number two, we want to read our Bibles better.
And number three, which I hope won’t sound too strange or odd, it’s that studying the Spirit in the Old Testament can create a sense of affinity with Old Testament believers but also show us the privilege we have. It’s easy to feel a sense of distance from Old Testament saints. It can seem like they lived in a very different time and in very different circumstances.
(4:03 – 4:27)
And yet something that can close that sense of gap is to realise that Old Testament saints knew something of the Spirit of the Lord. Now, they did not have a clear understanding of the Trinity in the Old Testament. That becomes much clearer when we come into the New Testament.
(4:29 – 5:58)
And yet they weren’t unfamiliar with the idea of God’s Spirit. If you sat in a Bible study with an Old Testament Jew and you mentioned God’s Spirit, they would know what you were talking about. And that helps me to have a closer affinity with Old Testament believers while also feeling the privilege of living in the last days in which the promises of Christ are being fulfilled.
Now, that’s a long introduction, three reasons, but it’s also my attempt to keep you listening for the next 20 minutes. I want you to see that this isn’t academic. And as we turn to the subject, the breadth of it is vast.
There are roughly 100 references to the Holy Spirit in the Old Testament. We’re not going to go through every one of them. What we’re going to do is focus on three main things that the Holy Spirit was up to in the Old Testament period.
What was the Spirit doing B.C.? Let me suggest three main things. First of all, He was creating and sustaining. One main thing the Spirit does in the Old Testament is creating life and sustaining life.
(5:59 – 6:33)
We often think of the Holy Spirit in terms of things like salvation, proclamation of the gospel, the formation and empowerment of the church. And of course, these things are all true. But in the first chunk of the Bible, the first thing the Holy Spirit is involved in is creation itself.
Let’s open our Bible to Genesis 1 verse 1 and the second verse as well. Very well-known verses. And we’ll see the Spirit here.
(6:34 – 6:50)
In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was formless and empty. Darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.
(6:51 – 7:59)
This is the first translation of the word Spirit. Some of you will know that comes from a Hebrew word, the Hebrew word ruach, which I always think sounds like it’s a word that’s originated from the highlands rather than Hebrew, ruach. Ruach appears 400 times in the Old Testament, and it can mean different things.
Sometimes, it simply means the spirit or the breath of a human being. So, you have a ruach, a spirit. Other times, we can see in the context, it’s clearly referring to the cosmological phenomenon of breath or wind.
But as I said earlier, on about 100 occasions, the ruach, the spirit, is clearly referring to the Spirit of God. And I think that’s even implied here. I mean, we have the phrase Spirit of God, but notice what the Spirit is doing.
(8:00 – 9:14)
The Spirit of God was hovering over the waters. Not blowing over the waters, like the wind of nature, but hovering over the waters. It’s a picture of a bird hovering above, poised and ready for action.
The picture is of an intelligent spirit who is ready to swoop into action to create life and order out of the chaos. And so, the capital S Spirit is directly involved in creation. God the Father is creation’s source.
God the Son is creation’s word. And God the Spirit is creation’s operative power, who powerfully brings into being the word of God the Son and the will of the Father. And it’s not only that the Spirit gets things going, but very importantly, the Spirit keeps things going.
(9:15 – 10:02)
Turn with me briefly to Psalm 104. Psalm 104. It’s the kind of psalm, when you read it quickly, you may make the assessment that it’s a psalm about creation.
But I think actually, it’s more a psalm about sustaining life, not just making life. Look at verses 27 to 30. All creatures look to you to give them their food at the proper time.
When you give it to them, they gather it up. When you open your hand, they are satisfied with good things. When you hide your face, they are terrified.
(10:04 – 15:14)
When you take away their breath, they die and return to the dust. And it goes on. When you send your Spirit, they are created, and you renew the face of the ground.
Do you see there that it’s not just that the Spirit gets things going, but the Spirit keeps things going. That’s Amos is saying, if the Holy Spirit stopped working in the world for a second, there would be no renewal of life and breath and food and water and everything else that makes life what it is. Without the Holy Spirit, the season of winter would never turn over to spring.
Do you see how wrong it would be to say the Holy Spirit wasn’t doing much in the Old Testament? If that was the case, the universe would stop existing. And can you also see, and this is where we start to think about connections, the continuity, but also the kind of elevation. Can you also see that it’s obvious then that the Holy Spirit in the New Testament is going to be the one that gives life, because that’s what he’s always been doing, giving physical life.
And so as we come into the New Testament, he’s the one who gives spiritual life. So that’s the first thing the Spirit is up to in the Old Testament. Let’s move on to a second thing.
The second thing the Spirit’s involved in was empowering and enabling. Now, we should be familiar with the idea that the Spirit empowers and enables his people. The Spirit empowers God’s people for acts of service and acts of witness, and God’s Spirit enables Christians to bear fruit, the fruit of godly character, that would be impossible in their own strength.
This is a fairly 101 idea when we think of Christian living. But actually, in the Old Testament, there was also a certain amount of empowering and enabling believers. And I want you to give you just a smattering of examples of this, and I want you to think about what were the commonalities and the situations in which God’s Spirit enabled people.
Here are some of the people that the Spirit is said to have empowered, and I’m just going to give you the references for you to jot down. In Numbers 11, 70 elders were appointed to assist Moses in the governing of a vast people. There was this position of leadership and wisdom and organisation.
And the Bible says they were given the Spirit of the Lord to help them do that task. In Exodus 31, a man named Bezalel was empowered with the Spirit, along with his fellow craftsmen, to construct the tabernacle, the place of worship. Now, that was actually a very practical skill, of course, but it was a very important building that was being made.
And so God gave the Spirit to enable them to do that practical task Successfully. In Deuteronomy 34, Joshua, the successor of Moses, is filled with the Spirit to lead God’s people into the promised land, with all of the challenges that that was going to bring.
In that context of conflict, the Spirit of God enables them. In Judges 6, Gideon is clothed with the Spirit of the Lord. He’s one of the judges who were leaders in Old Testament times when there weren’t kings.
And he’s clothed, we’re told, with the Spirit of the Lord to lead God’s people against the Midianites. In Judges 13-15, Samson, very famous Old Testament character, is empowered by the Spirit to have supernatural strength to overcome God’s enemies. In 1 Samuel 10 and 11, Saul, the first king of Israel, is given the Spirit to lead God’s people in a way that honours the Lord.
Of course, if you know the story there, he rebels against the Lord, and the Holy Spirit is then taken from Saul, and everything falls apart. But in 1 Samuel 16, David succeeds Saul. And David is really the paradigm for kingship.
(15:14 – 16:50)
He’s the model of it in the Old Testament. And we’re told that he too is filled with the Spirit. And even though he sins against the Lord in a grievous way, we know that his sins are forgiven, and the Holy Spirit is not taken from David.
And so, at least in his lifetime, his whole kingdom doesn’t crumble because of the Spirit of the Lord. And of course, there are many other examples that we could look at in the work of the prophets. In Ezekiel 2, for example, the Spirit strengthens Ezekiel to hear God’s Word and to proclaim God’s Word.
So here are a whole list of people that God in the Old Testament empowers by the Spirit in the Old Covenant era. But what do you notice about them? What’s in common with all of them? Let me suggest three things that all of these people I’ve mentioned have in common. Number one, they are all leaders.
Number two, they are all doing highly important tasks. And number three, the presence of the Holy Spirit is not necessarily permanent. Who are these people? Prominent craftsmen making the tabernacle, the judges who ruled the people, the kings who ruled over the nation, the prophets who alone spoke God’s Word to the nation.
(16:52 – 18:18)
These are not nobodies, but important somebodies playing significant roles in the advancement of God’s kingdom in their time. The legal and spiritual leaders of the people being given God’s Spirit to advance God’s kingdom. But by contrast, under the New Covenant, and as we think about what’s the difference when we get to the New Testament, the promise of Joel as we saw last week is that all of God’s people, all of us, will be given the Spirit of the Lord.
The young as well as the old, the important people and those who may be seen as less important. And it won’t just be for the most significant tasks, like building a temple, or leading a nation, or fighting a foreign oppressor. But because the Holy Spirit lives in us at all times, He is with us to help us even with the so-called ordinary things of life on the Monday to the Sunday.
And there’s also a permanence that comes with the giving of the Spirit in the New Testament. None of us needs to worry like David that the Holy Spirit might be taken from us. Isn’t that wonderful? The Holy Spirit is the permanent possession of every genuine believer.
(18:20 – 19:00)
Are there any other differences between Old Testament saints and New Testament believers? I thought it just would be worth mentioning this, that within discussions about these things among Bible-believing Christians, there’s a bit of debate around whether Old Testament believers were indwelt by the Holy Spirit. Did the Holy Spirit actually come and live within them? Or is that something that only happens in the New Covenant? Did the Spirit empower them but not indwell them? Some people say, yes, the Spirit did both. And other people say, no, the Spirit empowered them but didn’t indwell them until the New Covenant.
(19:03 – 22:17)
My own reading of it is, I do think something very new is happening in the New Covenant. I do personally think that New Testament believers are indwelt in a way that’s not true in the Old Testament. Because in Ezekiel, there is a promise of a new heart, a whole new inner transformation that just wasn’t true for the Old Testament saint in the same way.
But wherever you land in that murky question, the idea of believers being empowered for ministry is not new. And yet as Christians today, we should really see the privilege of living in the time that we do. Well, let’s move on to our third thing before we come to communion.
What was the third thing that the Holy Spirit was doing in this time? Thirdly, the Spirit was prophesying and speaking. The Spirit of God has always been speaking out the Word of God. Another thing that those people we mentioned earlier mostly had in common, not all of them, but most of them, whether it was Moses or David or the prophets, is that many of them were spokesmen for God.
Many of them received the Spirit specifically so that they could speak out God’s Word faithfully, and so that they could write down God’s Word in a faithful way. And we read about this in 2 Peter 1, if you want to turn there just for a moment. It’s just a single verse, but quite an important verse to have as part of your theology as a Christian, in 2 Peter 1, verse 21.
Because it says something about the formation of Scripture, and it says something about the work of the Holy Spirit to guarantee that. And he’s speaking here of Old Testament prophecy, and we’re told that prophecy never had its origin in the human will, but prophets, though human, spoke from God. Now, how did they speak from God? This is the key point.
What enabled them? What guaranteed that they spoke from God? As they were carried along by the Holy Spirit. The prophets like Moses, David, Isaiah, and so on spoke God’s Word because the Spirit gave them the impulse to do so. The Spirit empowered the very process that led them to writing down the Scriptures.
This is a verse in the New Testament that’s telling us that the Old Testament is divinely inspired. And the argument for inspiration is that it wasn’t just a bloke or a guy coming up with his own ideas. The Holy Spirit was orchestrating and directing the entire process.
(22:19 – 23:31)
And so the question then follows, okay, so if the Holy Spirit is speaking in the Old Testament and causing all this stuff to be written down, what is He speaking? What is the message of the Holy Spirit in the Old Testament? What’s He saying through the prophets? Well, I guess a whole bunch of things. But I want to just finish on two dimensions, two main things as we think about particularly the prophecies that were spoken. Number one, the Holy Spirit was speaking ahead about Jesus.
He was speaking ahead about Jesus. Think about the prophets. What are the prophets doing? The prophets are called, some people have called them the covenant enforcers.
They basically come along and they say to Israel, listen, here’s God’s law given to Moses. Here’s what God asked you to do, but you’re not doing it. They enforce the law.
They show people that they’re not meeting the standard of the law. But when you read the prophets, what’s the answer to that? I mean, part of it is, of course, repent and change your ways and get back to the law. That’s part of it.
(23:32 – 25:31)
But there’s also a recognition in the prophets that telling the people to pull up their bootstraps isn’t going to do it, isn’t going to achieve it. And so this is the point at which the prophets begin to prophesy the new covenant and a greater fulfilment that’s going to sort out this mess of their hearts. And the answer, of course, is the sending of one who will bring about a revolution of the heart.
The sending of the Son, the sending of the Messiah, the Spirit anointed Messiah, as we thought about just a week or two ago from Isaiah 42, Isaiah 61, and then fulfilled in the baptism of Jesus as the Spirit comes down on Him. As we heard a few weeks ago, that is not just an incidental point in the story. It’s not just a little, you know, an interesting incident.
It’s the fulfilment of all the promises. It’s the moment where Jesus is being identified on earth as the final Saviour King who has finally come to sort out the mess. And that then is the basis on which the same Spirit-filled Messiah will then be able to pour out that same Spirit upon the church and pour out all of His saving benefits upon those who believe.
And so this is the great message at the heart of the prophets. Ultimately, the Spirit is speaking ahead of Jesus. We talk about this, don’t we, the Spirit testifying to Jesus.
But He’s already doing that in the Old Testament. He’s already preaching Christ. But there’s also another aspect to it, isn’t there, as well.
(25:32 – 27:49)
Because not only is the coming of Christ predicted, but also, again, as we saw last week, there’s the promise of the people of Christ, the promise of the church. And so not only is it Jesus Himself who’s spoken of, but this new people, this recreated people with new hearts, with the law of God written on their hearts, with a whole new destiny and a whole new inheritance, not a future of judgement, but a future of glory and a future in the family of God. All of that is promised in the prophecies of the Old Testament.
We don’t have time to go to those various passages, but you can look many of them up yourselves. Well, as we come to the end of this fairly brief study, in one sense, I want us to leave here tonight not only with a clearer view of what the Spirit’s doing in the Old Testament, but maybe also with a firmer view of the value of the Old Testament as a whole. It’s four-fifths of God’s Word, and it’s to be taken as seriously as we take the last fifth of it, and as we consider that whole idea.
Of course, we need to set the Old Testament in its context. We need to wrestle with it in places, but we need to take it just as seriously as we do the New Testament. And so if you are a Christian and you’ve been a Christian for a number of years, but you haven’t really started to get stuck into the Old Testament, then I would strongly encourage you to do so.
Maybe pick a book in the Old Testament. Maybe one of those prophets that particularly point forward to Jesus. Buy an accessible study guide, or have a good study Bible that gives you notes at the bottom that you can look at, and start to enjoy the first volume of what the Holy Spirit said about Jesus.
(27:51 – 28:55)
Do you see just how much the Spirit was up to in the Old Testament? You know, as I studied this, I was actually staggered by the amount that the Spirit does prior to Jesus coming. Creating and sustaining, empowering and enabling, prophesying and speaking. And believe me, there’s a whole bunch of other stuff that I left out tonight, but those are some of the main things.
I hope you sense both the continuity that we have with Old Testament saints, that they actually enjoyed many of the same privileges. Not in quite the same way, but they did enjoy many privileges. Privileges of the Spirit.
But I also hope you sense the real privilege you have of living in this time when the Holy Spirit has been poured out upon His church. We are living in days that our Old Testament brothers and sisters longed to see. Let me just pray for a moment.
(28:59 – 29:42)
Father, lead us now by the Holy Spirit to focus our attention on the One that He proclaimed. We thank you so much for the Spirit-anointed Messiah, the One who fulfils all of these promises. The One who has sent the Spirit upon the church.
The One who has softened our own hearts, opened our eyes, opened our ears, so that we can see and hear and understand the good news about Jesus. May we come to this table with a sense of thankfulness and gratitude. And we ask this in Jesus’ name.
Amen.
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