• Abraham Kuyper lamented at the end of the nineteenth century, “Even though we honor the Father and believe on the Son, how little do we live in the Holy Spirit! It even seems to us sometimes that for our sanctification only the Holy Spirit is added accidentally to the great redemptive work.” p. 16
  • I have two broad emphases in this study: (1) the distinctness of the Spirit’s person and work along with his unity with the Father and the Son; (2) the identification of the Spirit’s operations in Scripture not only with that which is extraordinary, spontaneous, and immediate but also—and even more frequently—with that which is ordinary, ordered, and performed through creaturely means. p. 29
  • Everything that God does is done by the Father, in the Son, through the Spirit. p. 35
  • What we meet in the unfolding biblical drama is not merely three “personas” but three concrete persons; not just three roles, but three actors. We encounter the Father as the origin of creation, redemption, and consummation, the Son as the mediator, and the Spirit as the one who brings every work to completion. p. 36
  • The Son is the Father’s image; the Spirit is the bond of love between them. Consequently, in every external work of the Godhead the Father is the source, the Son is the mediator, and the Spirit is the consummator. Creation exists from the Father, in the Son, by the power of the Spirit; in the new creation Christ is the head while the Spirit is the one who unites the members to him and renews them according to Christ’s image to the glory of the Father. p. 36
  • Or we can say that the Father works for us, the Son works among us, and the Spirit works within us. p. 36
  • The same Spirit who clothed the Son in our flesh has raised us from spiritual death and will also raise our bodies and glorify—indeed, deify—us. It is not a divine thing that indwells us as the guarantee of our final glorification but God himself. It was this connection with the doctrine of salvation that became one of the most important defenses among the church fathers of the Holy Spirit’s divinity: if the Spirit is not God, then he cannot glorify us on the last day. The Holy Spirit changes everything. He is the Spirit of the future—the everlasting Sabbath—who brings us harbingers of the age to come. The Father moves toward us in his Son, even among us, and the Spirit is at work within us to unite us to Christ for justification and sanctification. As John Owen puts it, “In every great work of God, the concluding, completing, perfecting acts are ascribed unto the Holy Ghost.”20 And the Spirit accomplishes this by working, as he always had, through ordinary creaturely means that Christ ordained for giving himself to us here and now. It will be my pleasure in the coming chapters to explore with you this “Lord and giver of life” who is God and is yet different from the Father and the Son, so that with all God’s people and heavenly hosts we can worship and glorify him together in this age and in the age to come. p. 46
Categories: