Episode Transcript
Carey Griffel: Welcome to Genesis Marks the Spot, where we raid the ivory tower of biblical theology without ransacking our faith. My name is Carey Griffel. And as promised last week, today we are going to talk about Jesus in relation to the temple and I still think that these ideas are going to start resonating with us as soon as we are thinking in terms of temple as a protective structure. Because of course, in the New Testament, we have such a complex matrix of ideas that are connected in the Messiah. This is, of course, by design in Scripture, by design by the human authors, by the ultimate author, God. And we have all of these threads that culminate in Christ.
[00:00:59] And as is our wont here in Genesis Marks the Spot, we're gonna be very careful to untangle some of those threads. But at the same time, we also have to let them be tangled up together in places that the New Testament authors also tangle them up. So when we're talking about the temple, and we're talking about the presence of God, and we're talking about the Spirit, and we're asking how all of that culminates in the Messiah, and how all of that then gets played out in the church, we have a whole lot of background to this and a whole lot of related questions. So I took a lot of time to really try to consider exactly what angle I wanted to approach this topic at because there really is a lot of different ways we could look at it. But ultimately, what I settled down into is the question of, yes, we have a lot of detail. Yes, we have a lot of themes we can track, a lot of scholarly information we can get into, but at the end of the day, the real question is, why does it matter to the Christian life? Why does it matter that we understand these things?
[00:02:12] What impact does it have for us? What impact does it have for our theology? And so on. So that is the angle I'm going to try to come at this with these questions today. Because there's a lot of questions that we can have when it comes to Jesus and the Spirit, and why Jesus is described as a temple, and why the community of Christians, both individual as well as collectively, why they are also described as a temple. Now it's true that probably a lot of that has nothing in particular to do specifically with what we're talking about in the Refuge Series, because the Refuge Series is about protection against enemies, against judgment, and so on. And that's kind of generally the theme of why would somebody need refuge? Because there is some form of thing that they need protection from. And it is not necessarily the case that temple imagery always or necessarily enters into that conversation. It is true that in the Old Testament we have the temple as a very protective structure. It is seen as the refuge, as well as God Himself being seen as the refuge.
[00:03:36] And somehow those two things are connected. And we talked about that last week. And so I think that if you just listened to last week's episode, and then you went and read the New Testament, and you even just considered the actual approach of what was going on in the first century, and the coming of the Messiah and things like that, then we have some very strong conceptual ideas that are very exegetical, that do culminate in Jesus in a whole bunch of different ways. And so I don't really think I need to make the case again that being in Christ is something that is a refuge for us genuinely. It's not a refuge for us against God. But the fact that the Messiah came to rescue us, to deliver us, to release us from the bonds of dominion that we are under so that we can be under only God's dominion. So all of those things kind of play into the picture of all of this, okay? And I think that is very easy for us to see once we've sat with the ideas a little bit.
[00:04:49] So I'm not gonna really try to repeat all of what I just said in last episode, which basically kind of boils down to the fact that God is our savior. God is our rescuer. It is God that we have peace and rest and inheritance through and in. And for the Christian, we really don't have a problem with the Father, the Son, and the Spirit having to do with that. They each play into that. And they each have relationships with us, although they are slightly different relationships, right? Because only the Son came to earth incarnate as a man. And it is the Spirit's influence that we feel and experience today in our Christian lives. But the Spirit is also connected to both the Father and the Son. And so what the New Testament provides us is not just a rehashing of the idea that God is our refuge, but the fact that we now understand that there are three members of the Trinitarian Godhead.
[00:05:55] And so as I was thinking of the connection of Jesus and the Spirit and the church and the practical fallout of that, why it actually matters that we understand any of that, what struck me is that the core of that is about understanding something very important about God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit and their relationships. And because we're talking about embodied templeology, I guess we could call it, we can also discuss why Christians talk about their bodies as a temple and how we talk about it. Are the ways that we discuss that in our churches actually coming from Scripture, or are we implying some things that Scripture doesn't actually say? Because I've heard Christians routinely say that our bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit, and so therefore, we should take care of our bodies. We should listen to the Spirit's guidance. We should expect help to interpret the Bible. We should draw upon the spiritual power that the Spirit provides to us, and we should look inside ourselves for assurance that God is present.
[00:07:13] I've heard all of these ideas and more, and, okay, first of all, I'm not gonna debunk these ideas, okay? Because most of those have a place in broader Christian theology. I'm not saying that they don't. But I do think there is a potential problem that they can make the indwelling of the Spirit sound as though God has installed a spiritual assistance package inside each believer with a bunch of information, direction, power, and reassurance, and we can call upon that whenever we need. And it kind of functions as not a real relationship, but just something that we get. And I think that the New Testament's temple indwelling texts are describing something a lot more relational than, "Well, I'm gonna get some help from God because I want it, and I'm going to ask for it in this specific case." Again, not saying that that might not happen, that God doesn't help us in our times of trouble, in our times of need, and our need of guidance and things like that. But the New Testament connects the Spirit's presence with identity and specifically Jesus' identity and also with the action of the Father and the giving of the Spirit.
[00:08:38] And it's also connected to resurrection life, participation in Christ, adoption, holiness, reconciliation between people and specific groups of people, as well as the creation of a new sacred community that is found within Christ. So to me, the important question is not just what does the Spirit do for me? Although again, that can be part of what we're doing as Christians, because we do get things and benefits from God. We do get gifts. We do get blessings. But I think we should also ask, what relationship now exists because the Spirit has been given? And why is it structured in the way that we see it in the New Testament? Why does this relationship run through the Spirit and Jesus to the Father?
[00:09:35] Okay, so that's kind of part of what I wanna think about today. Now, of course, it all begins with the Messiah. And one of the best places to look at this from is starting in John chapter one, where we have the word becoming flesh, the word tabernacling among humanity. That verb activates Israel's divine dwelling tradition, and John immediately associates that embodied dwelling with the manifestation of glory. And of course, we've talked before about how glory and the Spirit are connected. All right, so here we have a verb. The verb is not a noun, so this is not saying Jesus is the temple. It is saying that Jesus tabernacles. So the very idea of the incarnation is drawing upon the concept of sacred space and God's dwelling and so on.
[00:10:35] Now we can get into a lot of details about if this replaces Jerusalem's temple and the functions there and so on. But I think we need to be a little bit careful because during Jesus' lifetime, and even after that for several years, the Jerusalem temple was still functioning. Even Jesus' followers still went to the temple and did temple things. So replacement is a little bit too blunt. But we do have very clearly the presence of God, the glory. We have context of worship, holiness, life, and access. And those are concentrated and reconfigured in Jesus.
[00:11:22] The first chapter of John also makes Jesus a heaven and earth meeting place. John 1 verse 51 talks about the heaven opening and angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of Man. Of course, we know the Son of Man is Jesus, but this is calling back to that incident with Jacob where he had the dream and he had the stairway and the angels of God were going up and down on it. And he gets a vision of Yahweh who is standing beside him. Now, if Yahweh is standing somewhere, then we can presume that this is the second power of heaven or the manifestation of the Son. And that is all within the context of the angel of the Lord and theophanies in the Old Testament. But the broader conceptual point I'm trying to make here is that Jesus is now associated with the place or the event where heaven and earth meet directly.
[00:12:23] Okay, I want to read a part of chapter two in the Gospel of John. Verses thirteen through twenty-two say, quote, "And the Passover of the Jews was near, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem. And he found in the temple courts those who were selling oxen and sheep and doves, and the moneychangers seated. And he made a whip of cords, and drove them all out of the temple courts, both the sheep and the oxen; and he poured out the coins of the moneychangers and overturned their tables. And to the ones selling the doves he said, 'Take these things away from here. Do not make my Father's house a marketplace.' His disciples remembered that it is written, 'Zeal for your house will consume me.' So the Jews answered and said to him, 'What sign do you show to us, because you are doing these things?' Jesus answered and said to them, 'Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.' Then the Jews said, 'This temple has been under construction forty-six years, and will you raise it up in three days?' But he was speaking about the temple of his body. So when he was raised from the dead, his disciples remembered that he had said this. And they believed the Scripture and the saying that Jesus had spoken." End quote.
[00:13:47] Okay, so here we have the famous picture of Jesus getting angry. At least this is the idea that he's angry. He's at the temple, and he's mad at what's going on, so everybody is thinking that the whole thing is about the Jerusalem temple, but John tells us that Jesus was speaking about the temple of his body. Jesus does not merely claim authority over the temple, but his body is identified as the sanctuary that can be destroyed and raised. What's interesting to me is that he talks about destruction and raising, but they don't seem all that concerned about the destruction. They're more amazed at the idea that the temple could be built within three days. But anyway, they obviously missed his point. But I think one of the things we can see here is that the identity of Jesus with the temple cannot be separated from his death and his resurrection. So the new locus of divine presence is not just God who is here and he avoids death. It is the embodied Son whose death and resurrection become the decisive temple event.
[00:15:02] And it is interesting that John places this so early in the gospel because this allows the identification of Jesus with the temple to inform later material about worship, about feast days, about water even, living water, and glory, and access, and the whole constellation of ideas here. Because then when he talks to the Samaritan woman in chapter four and they're talking about where are we supposed to worship, then we've already seen that Jesus has revitalized the location without turning it into a disembodied or internal activity. Because Jesus is really real, he's standing right there And later on, his followers are going to be described literally as his body. So there is a direction of these ideas, there's a culmination in what Jesus does with his death and his resurrection, and how followers are supposed to follow that. Worship remains always directed to the Father. And in John 4, it's characterized by spirit and truth. And spirit should not be reduced to something that is just non-physical or non-real in some sense, as though sacred space has simply ceased to matter. John has just located temple identity within Jesus' body. The geography is reconfigured around divine presence in the incarnation in Jesus and the spirit-enabled worship that follows from that. Now we can kind of debate truth and spirit here and the paraclete passages of the New Testament and all of those things. We can have conversations and some disagreement with that. But what is clear is that neither Jerusalem nor Gerizim can continue as an exclusive geographical center once the embodied Son has become the temple.
[00:17:11] But Jesus, the Son, the incarnate second person of the Trinity, still receives the Spirit. And so this is a really big question and confusion for a lot of people, and understandably so. Let's go ahead and read John 1:29-34. This passage is in the context of John the Baptist, and it says, quote, "On the next day, he saw Jesus coming to him and said, 'Look, the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. This one is the one about whom I said, After me is coming a man who is ahead of me because he existed before me. And I did not know him, but in order that he could be revealed to Israel, because of this, I came baptizing with water.' And John testified, saying, 'I have seen the Spirit descending like a dove from heaven and remaining upon him. And I did not know him, but the one who sent me to baptize with water, that one said to me, The one upon whom you see the Spirit descending and remaining upon him, this one is the one who baptizes with the Holy Spirit. And I have seen and testify that this one is the Chosen One of God.'" End quote. Okay, so from the context of the other Gospels, we understand this moment to be the baptism of Jesus and the Spirit descending on him.
[00:18:41] And in the other Gospels, we have Jesus, we have the Father speaking, we have the Spirit coming down like a dove. We have all three members of the Trinity being manifested. But there's a thing that's really interesting here. The Spirit descends, but also remains on Jesus. And that verb matters because the Spirit does not just touch Jesus for a moment, but remaining upon him is the sign by which Jesus is identified. So there's a second part here, and that is the one upon whom the Spirit descends and remains is the one who then baptizes with the Holy Spirit.
[00:19:24] Now, we know that Jesus didn't go around baptizing a whole lot of people directly, so the baptism with the Holy Spirit has to mean something other than Jesus going around doing something physical to everyone around him. All right, so if we kind of framed this out, Jesus is identified through two things, through the fact that he receives and bears the Holy Spirit, but he also gives that Spirit. So there's two frames that are related here. Jesus has the Spirit, and the Spirit remains on him, then Jesus is able to give that Spirit out. He bears the Spirit in an abiding and a distinctive way for him because nobody else is gonna be the Messiah. And because of that, he will give the Spirit to others. So within frame semantics, this is two frames, but they are interrelated and connected. It is understandable that it produces awkward questions for Christian theology, because if Jesus is the incarnate Word and the embodied locus of divine presence, then what is accomplished by the Spirit descending upon him and remaining?
[00:20:43] Does that mean that Jesus lacked something? Or does it mean that it's only a public illustration for our benefit, like it is only a sign? I think that both questions begin with a false competition between Jesus' deity and his Spirit-filled life. The Old Testament expectation of the Messiah already makes Spirit endowment intrinsic to his vocation. It is intrinsic to the priestly aspect of what he does, but also the prophetic aspect of what he does. And not to get into this today, but I find it really interesting that we have the Son of Man as a title for Jesus, right? And I do think it calls back to the Book of Daniel, and possibly the Book of Enoch. But when it comes to calling back to, say, the Book of Ezekiel, where we have son of man context as well, a lot of people wanna say that the Son of Man there is just about being human. Anyone can be called a Son of Man, and I'm not so sure about that.
[00:21:58] I think that Ezekiel himself is called the Son of Man not just because he's human, but because he also had connections with the Holy Spirit. I will just leave that point for you guys to consider and move into Isaiah. Isaiah chapter 11 describes the shoot from Jesse receiving the Spirit of Yahweh in wisdom, understanding, counsel, might, knowledge, and fear of the Lord. And we're not talking just generic spiritual power because the king who gets anointed judges righteously. He refuses false judgment, and he acts justly for the poor and the vulnerable. So the frame in Isaiah 11 is Spirit-given royal capacity that produces a government that is in alignment with Yahweh. And basically, this is the correct ordered world.
[00:23:01] And Isaiah chapter 42 brings the context up again. We have the Lord's servant who is chosen, who has God's Spirit on him. And again, he will bring justice forth to the nations. Another connection we have is Psalm 2, with the kings of the earth versus the Son. So the baptismal language in the New Testament about the beloved Son and divine pleasure, that must be understood in this Old Testament connection with royal sonship in Psalm 2 and servant language in Isaiah 42, and so on. We see it again in Isaiah 61, the Spirit of the Lord anointing, bringing good news. And good news is, of course, gospel. And that good news is about justice, binding up the brokenhearted, proclaiming release to the captives, proclaiming the year of Yahweh's favor, which is about the year of Jubilee, and so on. All of that is exceptionally messianic because Messiah, after all, directly means anointed one. And so it is really essential to see that the Spirit is embedded in Jesus' messianic identity, but I also think that the messianic profile is never, ever about just a mere human. Yes, humans can be a messiah. Humans can be anointed. Humans can be chosen for particular reasons. But of course, as Christians, as followers of Jesus, we understand that Jesus is the anointed one who is also God.
[00:24:47] And so I think that when we look at these passages, we shouldn't just use them as proof texts of, "Look, Jesus really is the Messiah." Because we also have the connected idea that Jesus isn't just a Messiah, but he's the divine Messiah. He is God now in human flesh. And when we bring that into the question, then we need to start looking at Christology and the relationship of Jesus with the Father and the Spirit. And so the coming of the Spirit on Jesus is not just something that happened in real human time. I mean, it is something that happened in real human time, and the incarnation is something that happened in real human time. From our chronological perspective, we have a before the incarnation and an after the incarnation. And so things that happen during Jesus' life here on Earth don't necessarily always have anything to do with that eternal perspective of the relationship of God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit together in eternity. But at the same time, we also understand that the incarnation is the full revelation of God on Earth.
[00:26:14] Right? So Jesus is the God-man, and He is the express image of the Father. The ultimate revelation of God to us is in Jesus in His incarnation. So because of that, when we see Him relating to the Father and the Spirit, it is not just that we have revelation in the New Testament about who Jesus is. We also have relationship of the Father and the Spirit and their relationships together. Remember I started this episode with why does this matter? And I think this is a large reason of why it matters, because our Christology matters. The way that we understand God matters. Our picture of the Trinity matters.
[00:27:01] Now, I'm not saying that you have to have a correct view of the Trinity in order to be saved or even to be a follower of Christ. If you've listened to my past history and my faith story and things that I've talked about in relation to groups like the LDS Church, I think that there is Christian and there is non-Christian, and that there are groups that want to be Christian, but they can't quite make it over into the Christian bucket because they don't affirm the things about the Messiah that they need to. That doesn't mean they can't be followers of Messiah or are mistaken or are deceived or so on and so forth. So this isn't about you have to understand it in order to be saved. But to me, this is about you ought to understand it because this is simple discipleship. This is the revelation of God to us. And even though we may not understand that immediately, we may not understand it completely, it is basically the project of the Bible, and the Christian life to understand God better. That is the purpose of the revelation, or at least one of the purposes.
[00:28:21] Because, you know, I'm not going down the it's a relationship, not a religion idea, because I think it's both. But the relationship aspect matters a lot. And you don't have a relationship with someone simply because you know their attributes, and you can describe them. You have a relationship with someone because you learn about them, because you're curious about them, because they tell you more about them as you interact. And that is the story of the New Testament. We get more and more information within revelation through time in the Bible because people are interacting with God in a way that does that. I think that sometimes Christians actually take it a little bit too far. And we end up not seeing the revelation that was already there in the Old Testament. Because I think a lot of this already was active and present to people in a lot of times and places prior to Jesus, at least in some form. Jesus is the full manifestation and revelation of that. And because of that, we also have the understanding of who the Spirit is and understanding of who the Father is. There are things we did not know about them before Jesus that we know now that we know Jesus.
[00:29:47] All right, so back to the idea of the Messiah as being endowed with the Spirit. The restoration promises that are given within the prophets do extend the Spirit beyond the ruler to the renewed people. That's exactly what we see in Jesus as well. Ezekiel 36 connects the Spirit with cleansing, a new heart, covenant obedience, and restored habitation. And that within the context of what we can see as baptism as well. Ezekiel 37 connects Spirit with life from death and the reconstitution of God's people. Joel chapter 2 also talks about the Spirit on flesh and being poured out.
[00:30:35] Isaiah chapter 32 and chapter 34 connect Spirit with fruitful habitation, with justice, with covenant identity, and a renewed people. So the prophetic expectation of the Messiah is not two unrelated events, like we have one Messiah who's filled with the Spirit, and later on, we have other Spirit-filled individuals. But it's a complete picture. The Spirit-endowed Messiah is the agent through whom the restoration and the Spirit-renewal of the people arrive. The Spirit coming upon Jesus at his baptism is not only a sign, although it is that, and it's not just a momentary thing that happens during his baptism, but it is part of this entire story of Jesus's life that leads to the giving of the Spirit to the church.
[00:31:33] I mentioned already about Jesus' baptism in the Synoptic Gospels, like in Luke chapter three, for instance, where we have, of course, Jesus, and the descending of the Spirit, and the heavenly voice that represents the Father. So this is quite obviously Trinitarian. That is very obvious for a lot of people. But it's also messianic in the wider prophetic sense. And it reveals all three of the members of the Godhead. This is not a picture of Jesus becoming divine or becoming the Son at his baptism. But it is part of the inauguration of the phase of his public vocation in which his Sonship and his messianic commissioning and the endowment of the Spirit become manifest together. And it kind of kicks the whole thing off, right? So after the baptism in the Book of Luke, in chapter four, we have a sequence here. We have Jesus, who returns from the River Jordan full of the Holy Spirit. He is led in the Spirit into the wilderness. He returns to Galilee in the power of the Spirit, and he reads Isaiah sixty-one. And that announces the fulfillment of that Spirit-anointed messianic mission. Then we could go into Matthew chapter 12 verse 28, where we have an explicit attribution of Jesus' defeat of demons to the Spirit of God. And that victory is evidence that God's kingdom has arrived.
[00:33:11] Now we might think, well, of course Jesus can defeat demons because he's Jesus. And yet he is invoking the Spirit of God in that action. The parallel of that story in the Book of Luke uses the finger of God. And lest we get a little bit confused on our frames here, that is referring to the Father. And that kind of highlights one of the problems we have within Trinitarian discussions is, again, frame collapse. When we use the word God, what do we mean? Do we mean the Trinity as a whole? If so, then why does Jesus use the term God? Of course he's speaking Greek and not English, but you understand what I mean. Jesus uses this word in order to reference the Father. And so probably a really good episode of Frame Semantics later on could be about talking about the frame of God. Are we talking about, again, the Trinitarian reality of all three, Father, Son, and Spirit? Or are we talking about God the Father? In short, we have all three of them acting, but they're not all doing the same thing. God the Father acts, as Jesus acts by the Spirit. Each of them act, but they don't act in the same way.
[00:34:37] Acts 10:38 says, quote, "Jesus of Nazareth, how God anointed him with the Holy Spirit and with power, who went about doing good and healing all who were oppressed by the devil because God was with him." End quote. If we don't understand the frames being activated here, and if we just presume that the word God means the Trinity, then this passage, and many like it, get really confusing, or else we may start to think that Jesus isn't God, or that Jesus had to become divine, or something like that. But again, I want you to notice in Acts 10, verse 38, we have Jesus, we have God, we have the Holy Spirit. All three of them are involved in what's going on, but in different ways because they each have their own part to play within the relationship and the actions.
[00:35:41] Now, I haven't mentioned anything in particular regarding Trinitarian theology in the historical Christian circles. But I have talked about this a little bit before, not to the point that I could, and not to the point I probably will in the future. But I will point you back to my episode about the monarchy of the Father. And this is something that I think a lot of evangelical Protestant type people either don't understand or just flat out don't accept. The most brief explanation of all of that, that I'll give you here today, is that the idea of the monarchy of the Father is that the Father, the Son, and the Spirit are all related in different ways because the Father begets the Son, not in a creational sense, but this is kind of the best language we have for it, I guess.
[00:36:39] I don't know. I don't know how to explain that. This is not about Jesus being created, but it is about Jesus' sonship in relation to the Father. And so the Spirit comes from the Father in a different way than the Son does. Now, in a lot of Protestant theology, because of what is called the filioque, there is the idea that the Spirit proceeds from both the Father and the Son. And that kind of makes the dynamic wonky, because if the Spirit is coming from the Father and the Son, then the ways that we see this described in the New Testament start making not a whole lot of sense. And I argued in that episode that it really does make more sense to see the sending of the Spirit by Jesus in a way that is related to Jesus' mission as the Messiah. In other words, Jesus sends the Spirit not in an ontological way, not from eternity past, but as part of his mission as Messiah on the earth.
[00:37:47] Okay, so I'm sure many of you now have a whole bunch of questions and maybe just straight up confusions, and again, I think we will probably be getting into a lot more Trinitarian ideas and conversation in the future, especially in regards to the Spirit. And that's something I've promised for a while that I've touched on here and there, but haven't really dug into. So future warning, I don't know when exactly, don't know how long it will take, but we will eventually get to that. And for those interested in that as well, I will also give a plug for my biblical theology community, which there is a link to that in my show notes. It's called On This Rock. And we are going to be starting to talk about the Trinity very deeply in there. Now, full transparency, there are places in On This Rock that are behind a paywall. It's only, like, $5 a month, but the Trinitarian discussion will largely be in the free space. So feel free to just come join us for that if that's what you're interested in. But I really deeply appreciate all of you guys who support me there because that platform is not free, and I do add a lot of work to it, so it takes up a lot of my time.
[00:39:08] But at any rate, we are going to be doing a very slow go-through of Trinitarian ideas, kind of in the same vein of what I do here in this podcast, meaning that we will look at the information in context, and we will also kind of weigh the context towards priority for earlier texts in church history. Not that we have to discount later texts, but we have to understand those later texts as not coming directly from Scripture, but from their own stream of tradition. That doesn't have to be a bad thing, but it should be a transparently obvious thing. And when we do that, we may understand that some ideas in Christian theology in some areas are just flat out wrong in comparison to the Bible. So anyway, that's just what we're gonna be doing there. And if you're interested in that, come join me there. I'm sure there will be episodes here that are going to stem directly from that study as well.
[00:40:15] All right, so understanding this connection of Jesus and the Spirit in kind of a more Trinitarian sense, then that's going to make a little bit more sense of how we have the Spirit-bearing divine Son who becomes the Spirit-giving Son in that messianic profile. And this is where the church ties into the picture. But not only that, we also have the gift of the Spirit tied to glorification. John 7, verses thirty-seven to thirty-nine say, quote, "Now on the last day of the feast, the great day, Jesus stood and cried out, saying, 'If anyone is thirsty, let him come to Me and let him drink. The one who believes in me, just as the Scripture said, out of his belly will flow rivers of living water.' Now He said this concerning the Spirit, whom those who believed in Him were about to receive. For the Spirit was not yet given, because Jesus had not yet been glorified." End quote.
[00:41:20] Okay, so here we have an invitation for the living water. It's in the context of a feast, which is a temple setting, and John explicitly interprets the water as the Spirit whom believers would receive. Ezekiel 47 and related eschatological temple water traditions provide an important background to all of that, because life-giving water flows from the divine dwelling and transforms what it reaches. And so John's statement that the Spirit was not yet can't really mean that the Spirit didn't exist or had never acted or wasn't there at all, because we have the Spirit on Jesus in John 1. The thing that was not yet is the promised post-glorification gift of the Spirit to believers in its new eschatological relation to the crucified and risen Jesus. In other words, the thing that hadn't happened was the giving of the Holy Spirit through baptism. People were baptized, but there was gonna be a change in the meaning of that because it would be a Spirit-anointed baptism.
[00:42:35] And then of course, we have Acts chapter two, starting in verse thirty-two says, quote, "This Jesus, God raised up, of which we all are witnesses. Therefore, having been exalted to the right hand of God and having received the promise of the Holy Spirit from the Father, He has poured out this that you see and hear. For David did not ascend into heaven, but he himself says, 'The Lord said to my Lord, sit at my right hand until I make your enemies a footstool for your feet.' Therefore, let all the house of Israel know beyond a doubt that God has made him both Lord and Christ, this Jesus whom you crucified." End quote.
[00:43:22] So God raises Jesus. Jesus is exalted to God's right hand. And again, this context of God here is the Father. The exalted Jesus receives the promised Holy Spirit from the Father. Jesus pours out the Spirit. The visible and audible events of Pentecost here are the evidence of Jesus' exaltation and messianic lordship. And the one who received the Spirit for his incarnate messianic vocation now receives from the Father and pours out the promised Spirit upon the restored people.
[00:44:00] We need to look at passages like this, not with our own framing, but within the framing that is within the text. What we have here in Acts 2 and many other places is not just one God and Jesus and a Spirit. This is not saying that Jesus and the Holy Spirit are also not God. But, I'm honestly a little bit hesitant to talk about a hierarchy because when we hear hierarchy, we get some ideas of our own in mind regarding that, right? So it's not that you have God the Father who's just the highest God, and then Jesus who's lower than that, and the Spirit who's lower than that. That's not really the way we should see this as. We should see this as the relationship of those three are being manifested and described in this reality that the people are seeing, and also that the people are participating in. So if we want to understand the Trinity, personally, I don't think we should go with all of the really bad analogies that basically end up describing the Trinity in heretical ways. If you try to describe the Trinity in relation to something that is in creation, it's just not really gonna go that well. Not that you can't do it without qualification, but the fact that you need qualification means that people are gonna just misunderstand it. I think a better way of trying to wrap our minds around the Trinity might possibly be just understanding how these relationships are expressed here in the New Testament.
[00:45:46] I think that frame semantics is going to help us here. It is not that Jesus is not God, but there is a relationship between Jesus and God the Father and the Holy Spirit. And that relationship gets expressed very consistently. If you track all of this through the New Testament, you will see the same things and the same descriptions over and over. And we can't get to something like polytheism or tri-theism or Jesus as a created being when you take this whole picture together. I know people love all of the little diagrams and analogies and trying to explain it in other terms. But if we just described it like this: We have God the Father who sends the Son. We have the Spirit who proceeds directly from God the Father. It is described that way in the New Testament. He is described as proceeding from the Father, not the Father and the Son. And yet Jesus can still send the Spirit because he is the Messiah who is anointed with the Spirit. And so because he was anointed with the Spirit in time, he can send the Spirit in time.
[00:47:06] Both Luke 24 and Acts 1 describe the Spirit as the Father's promise and as power for witnesses. The disciples don't become additional little mini Messiahs in Jesus' unique sense, but their mission participates in his because the Spirit-anointed Messiah creates a Spirit-empowered witnessing people. So Pentecost is not just the day on which a whole bunch of people receive a personal spiritual resource. It's the public extension of the Messiah's Spirit to the Messianic community. All right, so let's go back into temple theology here. John chapter 14, we have Jesus saying that he's gonna ask the Father who is going to give them another advocate, the Spirit of truth. So even though Jesus is leaving, they will not see Jesus on earth anymore, that does not mean that they are abandoned, because Jesus asks the Father, and the Father gives the Spirit. But the Spirit is also sent by Jesus because Jesus is the incarnate Messiah.
[00:48:21] And then we have this picture of Jesus being in the Father, the disciples in Jesus, Jesus in the disciples, and the Father and Son come and make their dwelling with the one who loves Jesus. All of that follows the promise of the Spirit's indwelling. And so divine presence that was located in Jesus' body is no longer merely in Jesus' human body. Through the Spirit, believers participate in the Son's relation to the Father and become the place of the Father-Son dwelling. Okay, so let me try and unpack that a little bit more, because I think this is kind of the crux of what I'm trying to describe today in this episode.
[00:49:10] So we have the Father, the Son, the Spirit. The Son is the one who is sent to Earth incarnate as a man by the Father. He is empowered by the Spirit, and this is also described as a reality from the Father. Without taking away the fact that the Spirit is also called the Spirit of Christ. But it is the Spirit of Christ in the sense that Christ is the Messiah. He is the one who is the rescuer. And so of course, the Spirit has to be from Him because Jesus is the one who is saving us, and the Spirit participates in that by being sent to believers. And there is a mutual indwelling that happens. It is not just that we are indwelt by the Spirit, but we also are in Christ. And by being in Christ, we participate in the relationship that Jesus has with the Father. Look, I'm not promising that this is super simple or that it's easy to wrap our minds around, but just follow the language of the New Testament. The temple theology that we have, especially in the Book of John, develops this way, from Jesus as the living temple to the believing community as a living locus of divine dwelling.
[00:50:33] And that includes dwelling, it includes relationship, and this whole picture can be described in different ways as well. Like in John 15, we have the metaphor turning to vine and branches, but the participatory dimension remains. Disciples abide in Jesus, Jesus abides in them. Fruitfulness depends on that reciprocal relationship. So this is what it means to be in Christ. It describes dependence, shared life, belonging, fruitfulness, and an ongoing participatory relationship. And that isn't a thing without the Spirit either. And so the action of the Spirit is crucial here as well. John 15:26 tells us that Jesus will send the Advocate from the Father. So this is the sense in which the Spirit comes from Jesus. John chapter 16 tells us that Jesus' departure is actually a really good thing for the people because then they will have the Spirit.
[00:51:42] All right. So let's get back to some of what I talked about at the beginning, about the way that we talk about the indwelling of the Spirit and the purpose of it. In these passages, there is a sense of empowerment with the Spirit, a sense of being able to live out something. The renewed community in Christ is seen as a reality that isn't going to fail, unlike previous communities that have been organized around God. Now again, I don't wanna put down any of the ideas that people have. Okay, let me backpedal that a little bit. I don't wanna put down most of the ideas that people will put out about the consequence and the result of spirit indwelling. But I do want to suggest that we should be really careful with every passage that brings it out and actually ask, what does the passage say?
[00:52:39] So I'm not saying that we can't say that the Spirit has something to do with independently witnessing to us, like our interpretation of what we're reading in Scripture and the things that we understand. There is room to say that the Spirit does those kinds of things for us. That the Spirit can guide people to truth, for sure, absolutely. But at the end of the day, I think a lot of what we need to take from this, it is not just so that we get some benefit that is useful to us in our life today. Although again, it can be that. But it is the inheritance idea. Everything belonging to the Father belongs to the Son. Therefore, the Spirit's reception from the Son remains rooted in the Father-Son relationship. Father, Son, and Spirit aren't just interchangeable. The Father sends and gives. The Son requests and sends. And then the Spirit comes, remains, teaches, testifies, and glorifies the Son. But those are not unrelated divine projects. They all have to work together. And so this is why Trinitarian theology becomes necessary.
[00:54:01] And in my opinion, some of the Trinitarian theology that has been developed provides some really useful guardrails for us because the external acts of the triune God are not divisible into competing sources of divine power. But there are foregrounded some personal relationships within those where the Father sends, the Son is sent, He is incarnate, the Spirit descends, and the exalted Son pours out the Spirit. Okay, so I know for some of you who are not into Trinitarian theology, it's kind of a lot, and I'm trying to avoid the more technical ideas here and kind of point you to the conception that if you want to understand the Trinity better, go into Scripture where we actually have it described, and look at the frames involved. What does each one do? How do they relate? And in places, where does the frame actually collapse together? Because worship is directed toward the Father, but we also see worship of the Son. And so how do we put all of those together in a coherent theology.
[00:55:15] All right, so I won't spend a whole lot of time here about this, but I do want to touch on how the church becomes the temple, especially in the letters of Paul. Paul doesn't just jump from temple building to individual Christians without anything in between. He actually has, again, a relational movement within this. Because people are joined to Christ, the Spirit constitutes them as one body. Through Christ and the Spirit, they gain access to the Father, and the reconciled people are built together as God's dwelling. Okay, so this is kind of the picture of union with Christ and participation.
[00:56:00] We go from the body of the Messiah to the body of the church, and it's about identity, but that identity is consistently derivative. There are so many places I could go in Paul's letters for this, but let's look at Ephesians chapter 2. I'm going to read verses 11 through 22, which say, quote, "Therefore, remember that formerly you, the Gentiles in the flesh, the so-called uncircumcision by the so-called circumcision in the flesh made by hands, that you were at that time apart from Christ, alienated from the citizenship of Israel and strangers to the covenants of promise, not having hope and without God in the world. But now, in Christ Jesus, you, the ones who were far away, have become near by the blood of Christ. For he himself is our peace, who made both one and broke down the dividing wall of the partition, the enmity in his flesh, invalidating the law of commandments in ordinances in order that he might create the two in himself into one new man, thus making peace, and might reconcile both in one body to God through the cross, killing the enmity in himself. And coming, he proclaimed the good news of peace to you who were far away, and peace to the ones who were near, because through him we both have access in one Spirit to the Father. Consequently, therefore, you are no longer strangers and foreigners, but you are fellow citizens of the saints and members of the household of God. Built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus himself being the cornerstone in whom the whole building joined together grows into a holy temple in the Lord, in whom you also are built up together into a dwelling place of God in the Spirit." End quote.
[00:58:05] Okay. So that's a long and a bit of a complicated passage. But let me just point out a few things here for you. We have the beginning of this passage with Gentile alienation. They're separated from the Messiah. They're alienated from Israel. They're strangers to the covenants of promise, without hope, without God in the world. So again, I want to point out that God here is not Trinitarian God. It is God the Father. And in Christ, the ones who were far away from God the Father become near because of the blood of the Messiah, who breaks down the walls of division. And the major picture here is reconciliation between Jew and Gentile. So reconciliation is not just between us and God, but it's hostility between people. And we have Trinitarian grammar where we have "through Christ," "in one Spirit," "to the Father." So "through Christ" preserves the Son's mediating and salvific work, "reconciling all things in one Spirit" makes the Spirit absolutely integral to the common access. And "to the Father" gives that access the covenantal destination, and provides a place where we become in relationship to the Father what Christ already is.
[00:59:35] So the social and the spatial identity of the alienated become fixed within this situation, right? So the church is not the temple merely because individuals who each contain the Spirit happen to assemble together in one room. The Spirit creates a reconciled people whose shared access to the Father is through the Son.
[01:00:01] There are ethical considerations about that. When we say that we are the temple of God, yes, we are individually the temple. And that does mean that we ought to treat our bodies well. We get that idea spread throughout Scripture in many ways. But temple identity includes peace and the death of hostility. If the people who are supposedly God's dwelling preserve the divisions that Christ has done away with, then the contradiction is not just a failure of being nice to each other or whatever. It violates the social reality of the temple image itself. Okay, so here's where we enter into the refuge idea again. But here we aren't provided refuge to hide from something. We aren't provided refuge against God. We are provided refuge in a way that dismantles and destroys the hostility between humanity. That is itself a form of refuge.
[01:01:09] Now, if we went into further letters of Paul, I think there's quite a bit more we could say about it. We have Spirit indwelling connected very deeply with Christ and the resurrection, especially in places like Romans 8. We have many places in the New Testament where the Spirit and the Father are connected to Jesus' resurrection. And we might even be able to tease out a little bit of a continuity where first we have identification, and it is that identification and that situation that is meant to then be the catalyst for our actual just actions and our moral actions as the body of Christ. Like, we don't get our act together and then get identified with Christ. But it's the opposite way. We get identified with Christ, and that is what enables us to get our acts together. This is why we have all these letters from Paul, who is chastising the church. He's not telling them that they aren't in Christ. He's not telling them that they aren't saved. He's not telling them they're not the church. He's saying, "Look, you guys are the church, and because of that, there is a reality that ought to be lived out within it. And some of that reality is, again, relational." So we see the Trinity acting in history in salvific ways. And because of that, there is a reality of the church within that. Not that suddenly because we are indwelt by the Spirit, we no longer sin and we are just perfect people.
[01:02:49] But no, we are indwelt with the Spirit. We are the body of Christ. And within the relationships in the church (like bodily stewardship? Actually correcting each other), that is part of being the body of Christ. That is part of what Christ has done. And so, you know, sometimes it's really easy to see the passages about the Spirit, and to see the promises that we are given and that can be very difficult to reconcile with the Christian life that we see around ourselves because we are imperfect. We don't really get along like we should, especially since we're in Christ. And this isn't a matter of just pull yourself up by your bootstraps and do better. The church is a communal reality because we help each other do better. And we're able to do that because we are reflections of Christ. We are the image being conformed to Christ. We're not done yet. We're working on it. That is a process, but it is a reality that is happening. And sometimes it's a reality that we don't like because it's not happening quickly enough, or it's not happening in the exact way we want to see. But if that's the case, if something around you that you are able to influence or speak into out of love, if that's going on, then I hate to tell you, but it's kind of your responsibility to speak up, to live into that in a real way, in a way that Christ actually shows us.
[01:04:25] All right, so sorry about this. I was gonna get more into the context of the framing of being hidden in Christ. Didn't end up with a lot of time for that. But it's also not really all that difficult to see. The basic point I wanted to bring out regarding the hiddenness in Christ is that just because we see the word hidden doesn't mean we have the same refuge frame at play. Because quite often, what we see with the hiddenness is more about revelation. We aren't hidden in Christ to avoid bad things. In fact, being in Christ might sometimes mean that unfortunately we experience more bad things. But in short, the frame of hiddenness can also be a frame of mystery to revelation. A great place to look at is in the book of Colossians. Just read the whole thing and see how much it talks about mystery and wisdom and how all of that does connect to the fullness of deity dwelling bodily in Christ. But this book is not connecting that directly with temple language, even though, again, it's still participatory.
[01:05:42] In chapter 3, verse 3, "The believer's life is hidden with Christ in God." But that life is about resurrection. So again, we're kind of crossing streams here. We have very similar language to other passages that are about the temple and about the Spirit and about resurrection. And it's not that that's not connected, but the hiddenness here, again, is not being hidden in Christ so that, for instance, God doesn't see our nastiness. It's actually the opposite. When we are hidden in Christ, we are to become just. We are to become like Him. Again, participatory and not substitutionary.
[01:06:28] All right. I'm gonna go ahead and wrap up for this episode. But I hope you guys enjoyed this exploration into these ideas. I hope it gave you some things that you can go research on your own, think about, and so on. As always, if you have any questions, feel free to reach out to me. You can find me through my website at genesismarksthespot.com. You can find me in my biblical theology community, and again, I would love to have you all there to talk about the Trinity. If you wanna come and join us, this is what I want you to do. Without referencing pastors or commentaries or theologians, I would love you to write out your current conception of the Trinity. How would you describe it? That's your assignment. Now, I'm not saying you can't use the information that pastors and theologians have given you. But I think for yourself, and this is mostly for yourself, I think it would be really useful for you to just write it out yourself. How do you describe it?
[01:07:37] It can be wrong. It can even be heretical because as we learn more, we can get less wrong. A heretical conception is only wrong if you dig down into it and refuse to change when you're shown evidence that you should. All right. So just gonna leave all of that with you today, and appreciate you listening, appreciate you sharing this episode as well as others. And thanks once again to those of you who support me through Patreon, PayPal, and my biblical theology community. Deeply appreciate all of you. And I look forward to talking to more of you. But that is it for this week, and I wish you all a blessed week, and we will see you later.
