Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4131. The new heart and new spirit in Ezekiel 36 stand at the very heart of what the new covenant promises and the Spirit accomplishes. “I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit I will put within you. And I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4130. The Joel 2 Holy Spirit prophecy is one of the most significant in the entire Old Testament. “And it shall come to pass afterward, that I will pour out my Spirit on all flesh; your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, your old men shall dream dreams, and your young men shall see…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4129. The sevenfold Spirit in Isaiah 11 is not a reference to seven separate spirits but to the Holy Spirit in the fullness of His Person and ministry, described through seven distinct dimensions of divine working. Isaiah 11:2 is one of the most richly packed prophetic verses in the entire Old Testament, and it…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4148. The Spirit symbolised by fire is one of the most dramatic and recurring pictures in Scripture, reaching its most famous expression at Pentecost, where “divided tongues as of fire” appeared and rested on each of the believers gathered in the upper room (Acts 2:3). Fire runs through the biblical story as a consistent…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4147. The Spirit symbolised by a dove is one of the most visually arresting pictures in the whole New Testament, appearing at the precise moment of Jesus’ baptism when “the heavens were opened to him, and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and coming to rest on him” (Matthew 3:16)….
Reading Time: 10 minutesQuestion 4146. The names and titles of the Holy Spirit in Scripture are far more numerous, and far more theologically loaded, than most believers realise, and working through them carefully is one of the best correctives I know to the modern tendency to treat the Spirit as a vague spiritual influence rather than the fully…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4145. The liberty of the Spirit in 2 Corinthians 3:17 is the freedom Paul says belongs to everyone in whom the Holy Spirit dwells, a freedom from the old covenant’s condemning, veiling, life-denying power, and from the despair of trying to please God through a law that could only ever expose sin without removing…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4144. The ministry of the Spirit in 2 Corinthians 3 is Paul’s description of the new covenant he has been entrusted to preach, a covenant written not on stone tablets but on human hearts by the Spirit of the living God, and one that produces life rather than condemnation. “He has made us ministers…
Reading Time: 7 minutesQuestion 4143. The spiritual man and natural man in 1 Corinthians 2 are Paul’s two categories for describing how human beings relate to the things of God, and the difference between them is not intelligence, education or moral effort but whether or not a person has the Holy Spirit. “The natural person does not accept…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4142. The continuous filling of the Spirit is exactly what Paul has in mind when he writes “be filled with the Spirit” in Ephesians 5:18, and the Greek grammar behind that command tells us something the English translation, on its own, can easily miss. The verb Paul uses is a present tense, passive, imperative….