Why is the Holy Spirit symbolised by wind?

Question 4149.

There is a reason the Spirit symbolised by wind runs all the way through the Bible, from the second verse of Genesis to the upper room at Pentecost, and it is no poetic accident. The biblical writers reach for wind because they are trying to describe something real about God that no tidy diagram could ever hold.

When I am asked why the Spirit symbolised by wind appears so often, I usually start with the words themselves. Both the Hebrew ruach and the Greek pneuma carry the same threefold sense of wind, breath and spirit. The original readers did not have to be taught the connection. It was sitting inside their vocabulary.

The word that means wind, breath and Spirit

In Hebrew the word ruach can mean a gale across the desert, the breath in your lungs, or the Spirit of God, and the context decides which. The same flexibility belongs to the Greek pneuma. So when a Hebrew reader met the Spirit of God in Genesis 1:2 hovering over the waters, the word already trembled with the idea of moving air and living breath. The picture and the doctrine were welded together in the language long before any theologian came along to explain them.

This matters because it tells us the wind image is not a later illustration bolted on for the benefit of slow learners. It is woven into how God chose to reveal himself. The Spirit symbolised by wind is the Spirit described in the very terms by which he first made himself known to Israel.

I sometimes put it to people like this. We are used to keeping our categories tidy, with the weather in one drawer and the soul in another, but the Hebrew mind did not work that way. When God breathed and a man lived, when God blew and the sea parted, when God came upon a prophet and he spoke, it was all the one ruach at work. The picture and the reality were never separated, so we should not be surprised that the Spirit comes to us clothed in the language of moving air.

Wind goes where it pleases, and so does the Spirit

Our Lord made the connection explicit when he spoke to Nicodemus by night. ‘The wind blows where it wishes, and you hear its sound, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit’ (John 3:8). Notice what Jesus is doing. He is not flattering us with the idea that we control the new birth. He is telling Nicodemus, a teacher of Israel, that the work of God in a human heart is as far beyond our management as the weather.

You can feel the wind. You can hear it in the trees and watch it bend the grass. What you cannot do is summon it, bottle it, or command it to blow at half past nine on a Tuesday. That is the point. The Spirit symbolised by wind is gloriously beyond our control, and any teaching that promises to put the Spirit at our beck and call has misunderstood the picture from the start. He moves as he pleases, and our part is to be found ready and responsive rather than busy trying to operate the machinery.

I have sat with believers who were worn out from trying to make God move on their timetable, and the gentleness of this image has come to them as a relief. You do not have to crank a handle. You do not have to find the secret technique that finally unlocks heaven. The wind comes from above, in God’s good time, and the most fruitful thing a Christian can do is keep the sails up and stay in the place where the wind tends to blow, which is the Word, prayer and the company of God’s people.

The wind of Pentecost

On the day the church was born, Luke tells us, ‘suddenly there came from heaven a sound like a mighty rushing wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting’ (Acts 2:2). The hundred and twenty were not asked to generate anything. They were waiting, as they had been told to wait, and the wind came from heaven. You can read more about what happened that morning in my answer on what happened at Pentecost.

I find it telling that the sound came first. Before any flame appeared over a single head, before a word of any foreign tongue was spoken, there was the roar of wind. God announced the new age of the Spirit with the one sound that everybody recognises and nobody can produce. The Spirit symbolised by wind arrived in power, and the room knew it was God and not themselves.

There is something fitting in that. The church did not talk itself into existence, nor did it organise itself into being by clever strategy. It was brought to birth by a wind that came from heaven on a morning the disciples had not chosen and could not have arranged. Every generation of the church needs reminding that its life comes from above and not from its own machinery, and the rushing wind of Pentecost is a standing rebuke to every attempt to manufacture the work of God.

Breath in the valley of dry bones

Long before Pentecost, Ezekiel stood in a valley full of bones and was told to prophesy to the breath. ‘Come from the four winds, O breath, and breathe on these slain, that they may live’ (Ezekiel 37:9). Here the wind and the breath and the Spirit run together in a single vision of national resurrection. The bones had no life in themselves. What raised them was the ruach of God blowing through the valley.

That is a picture of what the Spirit does in every conversion. We do not breathe life into ourselves any more than a corpse organises its own resurrection. The Spirit symbolised by wind is the Spirit who gives life to the dead, and the new birth is his work from beginning to end.

Notice that Ezekiel is told to prophesy twice, once to the bones and once to the breath, and the bodies do not live until the breath comes into them. The lesson is not a subtle one. You can have the whole form of religion, bone joined to bone, sinew and flesh laid in good order, and still be a valley of the dead until the Spirit of God breathes. What separates a tidy corpse from a living saint is not the arrangement of the parts but the wind of God moving through them.

The breath of the risen Lord

After the resurrection Jesus came to the frightened disciples, and John records that ‘he breathed on them and said to them, Receive the Holy Spirit’ (John 20:22). The verb John uses is the same one the Greek Old Testament uses in Genesis when God breathed into Adam the breath of life. The first creation began with God breathing into a man of dust. The new creation begins with the risen Lord breathing on his people.

So the wind picture is not only about power and mystery. It is also intimate. Wind can be a hurricane, but breath is close, warm and personal. The Spirit symbolised by wind is both the gale that shakes the house and the breath of the Saviour on the faces of his own.

I find a great deal of comfort in holding those two together. The same God who can fill a whole house with a rushing wind also leans in close enough that his breath falls on a frightened face behind locked doors. He is not only the storm out on the hills. He is the nearness of Jesus, breathing courage into people who had given up hope, and that nearness has not changed in two thousand years.

What the Spirit symbolised by wind does not mean

It is worth saying plainly that the wind image is never used in Scripture to make the Spirit impersonal. This is where some go wrong. Because wind is a force, people slide into treating the Spirit as a force, a kind of spiritual electricity to be tapped. That is a serious mistake. The Spirit is a Person who teaches, wills, grieves and intercedes, as I set out in who is the Holy Spirit.

The wind tells us the Spirit is free in his movements and beyond our control, not that he is less than personal. Hold the two together. He blows where he wishes, and he is a he, not an it. The other great symbols carry the same care, which is why I have written separately on the Spirit pictured as oil and as water.

So when you read of the Spirit as wind, let it humble you and comfort you at the same time. It humbles us, because we cannot command him and cannot manufacture his movement by any effort of our own. It comforts us, because the One we cannot command is a Person who loves us, teaches us and intercedes for us. The Spirit symbolised by wind is never a force to be harnessed for our purposes. He is a Person to be welcomed, honoured and obeyed.

So, now what?

If the Spirit symbolised by wind is beyond our control, then the most useful posture I can recommend is the one the disciples held in the upper room. They waited. They prayed. They did not try to manufacture the wind, and when it came they knew the difference.

Do you feel becalmed at the moment, as though the sails are slack and nothing is moving? That is not a reason for panic, and it is certainly not a reason to start working the bellows in your own strength. The God who sent the wind at Pentecost has not run out of breath. Keep yourself in his way, in his Word and among his people, and trust the one who blows where he wishes to fill your sails in his own good time.

Take heart in this. The Spirit symbolised by wind has not weakened with the passing of the centuries, and he still loves to surprise a waiting, praying people with fresh life when they least look for it. The same breath that filled a house in Jerusalem can fill a tired heart in your own front room, and he is no less willing now than he was then.

The wind blows where it wishes, and you hear its sound, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit. (John 3:8, ESV)