The Cradle Of Christian Truth: Apostles’ Creed (Part 14)—I Believe in the Holy Spirit

by on May 6, 2025 | Comment

I lived in New Zealand for a few months during college for a mission trip. We went to help a church start outreach efforts on the nearby university campus. One day, we attended an event where various organizations set up tables to introduce themselves to students. I ended up by the table for the Mormon church, trying to share the gospel with them. As I walked up, the other visitor at their table was arguing with them about some doctrinal points.

When he turned to go, I introduced myself, thinking he might be a good connection for the church to know. He started grilling me about the gospel. His final question was: What happens when you have faith? I said, “Well, you’re justified by Christ, enter relationship with him, and start to walk the Christian life.” He said, “No,” which caught me off guard. Instead, he said, “You speak in tongues because every true Christian must have a testimony that matches the Apostles’ testimonies.” He assumed that receiving the Holy Spirit must manifest itself in this special way.

I had some snarky comeback about how he had not been on three missionary journeys, so his testimony did not match the apostles’ either. But the point is that, throughout the world, many people assume that the Holy Spirit is mostly about an ecstatic experience. Lots of churchgoers think the Spirit just means producing certain emotional experiences or heightened levels of sensation.

The Holy Spirit is a person, however. He is the third person of the Godhead, to be worshipped and loved. He does work upon God’s people and produces true effects of salvation in our lives. But if we speak about the Holy Spirit in a way that makes him appear more like a non-descript mystical and experiential force abstractly affecting us, we have neglected the essential truth that he is a person who works to achieve certain purposes for and in God’s people.

The Apostles’ Creed summarizes the basic Christian belief about the whole Bible. Given that the Creed is Trinitarian, arranged under the headings of what we believe about the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, Christians affirm that the whole Bible is about the Trinity. The Old and New Testaments both teach us about Father, Son, and Spirit, as well as about the story of redemption grounded in Christ. Under each statement of belief in each person, we also confess some of the works we most associate with that divine person.

As we begin reflecting upon the section about the Spirit, note how this most ancient affirmation of our faith is in tension with modern sentiment about what the Spirit’s work means. We confess our belief in the Spirit, then immediately state our belief in “the holy catholic church.” The ancient Christian confession is that the Spirit’s primary work is to build the universal church.

The spread of the church by the power of the preached gospel is the fundamental mark of the Spirit’s ongoing work. It is not the case that the church is a human work we build with creativity and worldly ingenuity which the Spirit might then bless with some sort of experience in the church’s midst. The church itself is the Spirit’s work as he creates and gathers God’s people through and around the means of grace for the glory of God and our good. The main point is that the Holy Spirit is the divine person who helps us know Christ.

The Person

We first need to establish the Spirit’s identity and the Scripture’s attestations for the Spirit’s deity. Even from the Scripture’s outset, the Spirit is present as bound into God’s identity and yet as a distinct person. Genesis 1:1–2 says, “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters” (emphasis added). At creation, God was the only being who existed, but God’s Spirit was there with distinct personhood.

One feature we have seen in Mark’s Gospel is that Mark repeatedly takes something from the Old Testament referring directly and exclusively to God and puts Christ in God’s position. For example, when Jesus walked on water, Mark pulled from Job and Isaiah which say that God alone treads upon the waves. By seeing Christ in God’s position, Christ is displayed as the second person of the Trinity, God the Son.

From the New Testament vantage, Paul implemented the same approach, portraying the Spirit as we know him in the new covenant as present in God’s role in the old covenant. This is sort of the reverse tactic from the approach to Christ. For Christ, the New Testament presumes the Old Testament background about God’s identity, then reveals Christ with that divine identity so that we know to experience Christ as God. For the Spirit, the New Testament presumes experience of the Spirit as God, then shows how he occupied God’s role in the Old Testament too.

So, in 2 Corinthians 3, Paul contrasts the new covenant ministry with the old covenant ministry. In verses 12–18, he compares the boldness we have as new covenant Christians with the veiled experience of God that old covenant believers had. Moses wore a veil so that people could not fully see the Lord’s glory. The payoff is in verses 14 and 16: “Only through Christ is [the veil] taken away. . . When one turns to the Lord, the veil is removed.”

So, you have to go to God, who came in Christ, to see the Lord’s glory. We learn what it means to encounter God in this way in verses 17–18: “Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. And we all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another. For this comes from the Lord who is the Spirit” (emphasis added).

The Lord God is the Spirit. The Spirit’s presence means that God is present because he is God, the third person of the Trinity. So, to have faces unveiled in Christ is to behold the Lord’s glory in the Spirit. The person of the Spirit is the third member of the Godhead, God the Spirit.

The Pouring Out

This Scriptural background helps us understand the significance of Acts 2:1–13. While the disciples waited in Jerusalem as the angels had directed them upon Christ’s ascension, the Spirit came visibly from heaven—an unveiled appearance—and rested upon each of them. They were then filled with the Spirit as he was poured out in this event that expanded the sphere of redemption to include people from all languages rather than just those from Israel.

This event is profound in the history of salvation. Think back to Genesis 11 and the Tower of Babel. As the people acted for their own glory and worked to build a tower to the heavens, God cursed them:

And the Lord came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of man had built. And the Lord said, “Behold, they are one people, and they have all one language, and this is only the beginning of what they will do. And nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them. Come, let us go down and there confuse their language, so that they may not understand one another’s speech.” (Gen 11:5–7)

But after Christ rose from the grave for our reconciliation with God and ascended to heaven to intercede for his people, the Spirit came at Pentecost to roll back the curse. He started with the curse of Babel. Speaking in tongues was not meant as a personal experience; it was not for the speaker’s benefit. Tongues were certainly not in languages that could not be understood.

When the disciples spoke in tongues, people of all languages were reunited in the gospel. What is the purpose of this event though? We have to tie it to 2 Corinthians 3 where we learned that the Lord is the Spirit. To encounter the Spirit is to encounter the glory of God. The Spirit comes as an encounter with God. The Spirit is the way to encounter the Lord now that Christ has ascended.

Back to our initial reflection, what did the Spirit do as he came? Were tongues a standalone experience for the emotional fix of the speaker? No—as people understood the gospel by the Spirit’s power, Peter went on in the next section of Acts to preach the first Christian sermon. In other words, the Spirit did not come for emotional increase but to enable gospel proclamation and to make it effective. The pouring out of the Spirit empowers the church to do the church’s work: Word, sacrament, and prayer ministry.

The Provision

We also need to make sure we keep the Spirit tied into God’s Trinitarian life. Even as we have thought about the Spirit and his work, we might easily start to think about the Spirit as kind of the rogue member of the Trinity, bandying about to make things happen when he decides to show up. Nothing could be further from the truth. There is a profound reason the Spirit was visibly poured out on the tails of Christ’s ascension.

Although we considered it from another angle, we need to return to John 14:16–19, where Jesus says to his disciples,

I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Helper, to be with you forever, even the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees him nor knows him. You know him, for he dwells with you and will be in you. I will not leave you as orphans; I will come to you. Yet a little while and the world will see me no more, but you will see me. Because I live, you also will live.

The Spirit comes as the provision of Christ for his people. Jesus is in heaven pouring out the Spirit. Whenever the Spirit empowers the means of grace, Christ is pouring out his Spirit to make himself known.

The Spirit is bound into the Trinitarian life, coming to us so that we are never without Christ and even making us able to see him through the means of grace. As Christ explained in John 16:13–15,

When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth, for he will not speak on his own authority, but whatever he hears he will speak, and he will declare to you the things that are to come. He will glorify me, for he will take what is mine and declare it to you. All that the Father has is mine; therefore I said that he will take what is mine and declare it to you.

The Spirit guides in truth because the Trinitarian work of God comes from the Father through the Son and is applied by the Spirit. The Spirit glorifies Christ. All theologies that suggest we can have a conscious experience of the Spirit that is something other than knowing Christ fundamentally misunderstand the Spirit’s work who comes to glorify Christ.

The Spirit is the gospel messenger taking us to Christ himself. Christ gave the Spirit to us to help us. The Spirit helps us by taking us to Christ who carries us before the Father. We are in this beautiful position of being handed around, so to speak, by the Trinity. Christ gave himself for us to forgive our sins as we believe in him. Then Christ gives himself to us in the Spirit. Then the Spirit takes us back to Christ that we might know him more fully. And Christ takes us before the throne of his Father that we might be fully accepted in God’s sight because of Jesus.

In a game of hot potato, the point is that we do not want the potato. When the Father, Son, and Spirit pass you around, however, it is because they each want you. Each is fully God and God has fully wanted you, and so has planned, purchased, and made provision for your redemption that we might be his forever.

©Harrison Perkins. All Rights Reserved.

You can find the whole series here.

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