Taste and See that the Lord is Good

I've been thinking about Heb 6:4-8 NASU which reads:

For in the case of those who have once been enlightened and have tasted of the heavenly gift and have been made partakers of the Holy Spirit, and have tasted the good word of God and the powers of the age to come, and then have fallen away, it is impossible to renew them again to repentance, since they again crucify to themselves the Son of God and put Him to open shame. For ground that drinks the rain which often falls on it and brings forth vegetation useful to those for whose sake it is also tilled, receives a blessing from God; but if it yields thorns and thistles, it is worthless and close to being cursed, and it ends up being burned.

Here the writer of Hebrews is attempting to define what marks a Christian. Five things are listed:

1. enlightened
2. tasted the heavenly gift
3. partaker in the Holy Spirit
4. tasted the good word of God, and
5. tasted of the powers of the age to come.

The question is, how do these concepts relate to each other? Do they all refer to the same thing, are they sequential, or something else?

Enlightened must refer to coming into a knowledge that you didn't have before. A light bulb just turned on over your head. The same writer uses this term to refer to conversion in Heb 10:32. Paul in Eph 1:18 prays that the eyes of our understanding be enlightened. So not only does this term relate to conversion, but to our ongoing relationship with the Lord. John 1:9 tells us that Jesus is the true light that enlightens (gives light to) every man. It means to receive the knowledge of the truth. So being a Christian means being enlightened.

To what does 'tasting of the heavenly gift refer'? Justification - the forgiveness of sins - is a gift. Salvation is a gift. The Holy Spirit is a gift. The gifts of the Spirit are a gift. Jesus himself is God's gift to us. We are to eat his flesh and drink his blood, metaphorically speaking of course. So it could relate to communion. Maybe our attention needs to be on tasting instead of gift. Since in Heb 2:9 Jesus tasted death for us all, tasting cannot mean a brief, shallow, experience. Peter tells us (1Pet 2:3) that we have tasted the kindness of the Lord. The Psalmist (Ps 34:8) exhorts us to taste and see that the Lord is good. To taste is to experience, to know through experience. We've tasted - experienced - the salvation that God has given to us in Christ. It would be hard to nail it down any finer than this. But notice the emphasis on taste - experience.

A partaker in the Holy Spirit is someone who has experienced the Holy Spirit. The Samaritans and the Ephesian disciples lacked this, and it was noticeable. We are all given the Holy Spirit to drink, but drink we must. And when we do drink, we experience.

Tasted the good word is to experience the gospel.

And taste the powers (dunamis) of the age to come. This seems to refer to those powers or gifts of the Spirit that the Spirit gives to us all. I like what Hughes says in his commentary on Hebrews. "These powers may confidently be identified with the signs, wonders, and miracles mentioned earlier in 2:4 as accompaniments of the preaching of the gospel. They are the dynamic evidence of the activity of the Holy Spirit within the community of believers, manifested particularly perhaps in miraculous healings and deliverances. As such, moreover, they testify to the fact that "the age to come" is already upon them, since its powers are operative in their midst."

It seems that according to the writer of Hebrews that the baptism in the Holy Spirit is part of what makes a Christian a Christian. Yet so many have not drunk what they have been given to drink. Or maybe the land that drinks is not producing fruit? I hope not. Like the writer goes on to say, we are convinced of better things of you. The exhortation is to experience what God has given. Mental assent is not what it is all about. A theoretical belief is inadequate. Experiencing the reality of salvation, the gospel, and the Holy Spirit is our portion of the edible God.

Worship or Worshipers?

I don't think that God is so interested in being worshiped, like some egomaniac, but in worshipers. God knows that when you begin to see Him as He is, the only response is worship. In finding worshipers, God finds those who see Him. And only those whose hearts are pure will see Him.

Particle or Wave, Part 2

Nowhere is the particle or wave dichotomy more evident than in the different stories that John in his gospel and Luke in the book of Acts give for the reception of the Spirit. All throughout the gospel of John the Holy Spirit is given prominence. Jesus promised the Apostles (and through them us) another Advocate or Comforter just like him. By this name Jesus was referring to the Holy Spirit. John 7:39 even makes mention of the Spirit not being given yet because Jesus is not yet glorified. Thus John builds an expectation of a reception of the Holy Spirit to continue Jesus’ work in the world with and through the disciples.

This expectation reaches a climax when Jesus, after his resurrection but before the ascension, breathes on the disciples in a prophetic act and commands them to receive the Holy Spirit. If they did receive it then, then the disciples received the Spirit again after Jesus’ ascension as recorded by Luke. Putting John and Luke side by side produces two receptions of the Spirit by the disciples. Many modern commentators try to harmonize these two stories by making what John wrote a metaphor for what happened in Luke/Acts. By my way of thinking this is very unlikely because it runs uncaringly over the plain meaning of John’s words.

Yet this leaves us in the uncomfortable position of having the disciples receive the Holy Spirit two times, the second of which was called the baptism in the Holy Spirit by Jesus as written by Luke. So far every resolution that tries to harmonize these two stories is based on speculation. I do not mean by this that these two stories cannot be harmonized. I just mean that without interviewing both Luke and John personally the harmonization may be beyond our grasp. So I am not saying that different authors of books in the Bible have conflicting theologies. I am just saying that from our view of 2000 years later we do not have enough evidence to produce a full harmonization.

But we can still draw insight from this. We have two different stories regarding the reception of the Holy Spirit that are treated as harmonious. I find evidence for this kind of two and three part harmony all throughout the gospels. Jesus Himself was conceived by the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit mediated the presence of the Father and the Son to Mary. Christians too are born of the Spirit when they receive Jesus. One cannot say that a person born of the Spirit does not have the Spirit. Remember how tricky it is that Jesus could be both in heaven and in our heart at the same time. If Jesus is in our hearts through the Spirit, then the Spirit must be there too. Yet receiving the Spirit, personally, is different than receiving Jesus. Yet by receiving Jesus we also get the Father and the Spirit.

In John 14:23 (NIV) Jesus replied, "If anyone loves me, he will obey my teaching. My Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our home with him.” So when we get the Son we get the Father too. But it is the Spirit who mediates both the Son and the Father to us, making them present within.

Whew, this is a puzzle. One for all and all for one!

Lake Louise Michigan

Here is a story of something that happened to me regarding the outpouring of the Holy Spirit.

In the summer of 1972, I was a camp counselor at Lake Louise in northern Michigan. It was a Baptist camp for 7th and 8th graders, both boys and girls. An ordinary camp with exercises first thing in the morning, games, food-like-stuff to eat, swimming, campfires, all with very normal people. At the Wednesday night campfire we were singing “Give Me Oil in My Lamp’, (you know the song about gas in the Ford™) a song that must have been sung billions of times at campfires all over the world, when one of the counselors started yelling at the top of his lungs that God was pouring out His Spirit. He kept repeating this at the highest of volumes.

I was near the outer edge of the group and watched to see what would happen. Within seconds two things started to happen. The first was that all the young kids that I could see began to either cry, or hold onto one another, or fall on the ground, or pray, or speak in tongues (that is a language they did not know). It was very chaotic and the leader looked panicked. At the same time it also began to rain. I looked up and saw no clouds overhead, but I did see a few off to the side in the moonlight. I wondered where the rain was coming from.

After a while the leader got us all back to our cabins. The boys in my cabin were writing a group poem to Jesus on a long length of paper towel. The boy next to me just said out loud, to no one in particular, “I get it now. Jesus is God.” You could hear shouts from one cabin to another of “Jesus is Lord”, or “Praise God!” These were 12-14 year old boys. Normal, fun-loving, physically hyper, trick playing, boys. No one coached them. It just poured out of them.

The next morning, the camp director, who was a conservative Baptist pastor from Bad Axe, Michigan, cornered me and one of the other counselors and accused us of being ‘holiness’. No, I said, I am a Christian. I didn’t know the terminology. He told us that there was going to be a meeting for all the counselors shortly and that we must attend.

At the meeting, he was very upset. The camp had gotten out of control. Kids were doing crazy things, like having spontaneous prayer meetings without counselors present. Who knows what trouble they could be getting into? What would their parents think?

We got into a discussion if what had happened was from God or not. At the end of the meeting the director agreed to pray and ask God if what was happening was from God or not.

All I remember is that I was abnormally tired that afternoon. My arms and legs felt like lead wire. I had made my way to the front door of my cabin and I was just standing there. The camp director was slowing walking over towards me. As he came close I noticed that it looked like someone had thrown a bucket of water onto his face. He explained that he had been crying. Then he just told me that he never had understood the power of prayer. When he asked in prayer if this episode the night before was from God or not, he evidently experienced the same thing all the kids had. Then he knew it was indeed from God.

Other remarkable events continued to happen that week. Some girls wanted me to come to a prayer meeting they were having in the dinning hall. About 6 kids or so were there. As we prayed I had a vision of Jesus. I remember wrapping my arms around his knees as he stood in the center of our group. It was like a waking dream, only additionally tactile. I could see and feel, yet it was like a dream, only I was awake. I now call it a vision. I remember that when he put his hand on my shoulder I cried and cried because I knew that he knew me as I was in the very depths of my heart and loved me.

Another time my friend, George, and I were leading the kids through a hike in the woods. We were chatting as we walked. Suddenly my friend turns to me and asked me if I had just said “Oregon”? No, I responded, why? His face blanched and he said that God had just spoken to him out loud and told him to drop everything he is doing and go to Oregon.

Years later I met people who were affected by that camp meeting. One of the girls who was at the camp later came to our church in Port Huron. She told of how when she went home what had happened to her happened also to her parents. They wound up going into the ministry because of it. The pastor from Bad Axe was called to account for the stuff that happened at the camp. His congregation voted 51% for him and 49% against him. He left, I do not know where.

A Particle or a Wave?

We have to take things to where the evidence leads us. When people studied light they came up with conflicting models as to what is light. Some evidence would give us the impression that light is a point, a photon. Some experiments would seem to prove this. Other experiments seem to prove that light acts like a wave by traveling omnidirectionally. But something cannot be in two places at the same time, can it? Yet the facts about light merely expose our presuppositions and our ignorance as to what light really is. To our way of thinking it acts like both a wave and a particle, yet also in our way of thinking that is not possible. But it is, so we must be ignorant of something.

Many of the teachings we get from scripture are like this. So when we add up all the evidence we get a picture of something we have a hard time conceiving. Like is Jesus actually a true human in every way, or is he God's only son, the exact image of God Himself, eternal creator and Lord of all? All the evidence points to the inescapable conclusion that the answer is yes. But that conclusion takes us beyond our past experience to something that looks like a contradiction. It is not truly a contradiction, it only appears so because of our ignorance.

What about the trinity? How could one be three and three be one? All our analogies look weak. The water vapor, water, ice trinity has only one point of correspondence - three different modes of the same molecule. But the Father - Son - Spirit are not three different modes of God. They are three different beings who are individually and corporately the one God who made it all. That stretches our understanding a bit, doesn't it.

This kind of thinking is not knew. Most world views have some way of unifying contradiction. Yin-Yang is well known as the two sides of the same thing. Though what the thing is is hard to explain or imagine. Explaining it as in evil the seeds of good are sown and in good the seeds of evil are sown is inadequate. It is inadequate because the fields of good and evil must be defined by some objective standard which is assumed. This relates to the eating of the fruit of the tree of good and evil as seen in the book of Genesis. Human nature is defined by its drive to put everything into the categories of good and evil. The most you can say for the Yin-Yang concept is that it clearly defines human nature after the fall.

Yet the scripture keeps pushing us further than where our experience has gone. This is how we grow in understanding. I do not intend to say that contradiction is the evidence of truth, as some mystical world views would have it. I say that contradiction, by itself, proves nothing. This is because contradiction can either be the proof that something is not true or the evidence that we have misunderstood something. How can we tell which it is? By how much faith we have in our evidence. (Just because we have faith in our evidence does not, by itself, make something true. Yet we have no other option open to us. So the perception of truth becomes an hermeneutical issue. It becomes an issue of how we understand, how we interpret, evidence.)

So is receiving the Spirit a particle, a single point in time, or a wave affecting many points at the same time? Yes. We receive the Spirit when we receive Jesus. Yet can we receive the Spirit at another point too. It seems our understanding of the Spirit needs growing.

My Limp, part 2

From the best that I can determine, neither the Evangelical approach - which gives priority to Paul - nor the Pentecostal approach - which gives priority to Luke/Acts - can answer all the questions. It is neither either, nor neither or. So many of the teachings of scripture can only be parsed so far and then they appear to lose coherency. I doubt if it really does lose coherency, it is just that our presuppositions are more likely to interfere the more finely we chop the meaning of words. This is because by finely chopping we get into areas where we cannot triangulate our position without depending on conjecture. It is like building a tall tower with a tiny flaw in the foundation. After a while the tower will tip over as inaccuracy after inaccuracy is piled on top of one another.

The scripture makes it very clear that the world in it's wisdom cannot know God. Cannot is the operative word. One reason is that worldly wisdom teaches that truth is perceived through doubt. By doubting we test the veracity of something or someone. We doubt until we are convinced. But when doubt ends we do not have the truth, but faith. Only by faith is truth perceived. Doubt left to itself will continue to doubt. Doubt cannot recognize truth because it can always come up with another reason to doubt. Whatever someone believes can always be doubted by another. Only faith can end doubt.

So this is why I limp. My natural self, my worldly wisdom, cannot find for me a stable position. I can always find more things to question. And so can you. Yet my encounter with God has given me a staff of faith to lean upon.

I accept both Paul and Luke's testimony regarding the Spirit. I have some ideas as to how their differences can be reconciled, but nothing that is a sure thing. My experience with the Holy Spirit has taught me of it's reality and the reality of Jesus.

I invite one and all to set aside doubt and by faith receive the truth. Will all you questions be answered? No. But how can doubt be set aside? By believing that God indeed loves you and has reconciled himself to you. Be reconciled to him.

My Limp

Now you can see my limp. After all this thinking, I’m left pretty much where I started. The teaching that the baptism in the Holy Spirit is the same as conversion is only partially convincing. It can only become convincing if conversion is viewed as something other than a single point in the journey of a believer. The verses that say that if we confess with our mouth and believe in our heart that Jesus is Lord is sufficient for salvation cannot then be made to cover the whole concept of conversion. There needs to be a baptism in water and a baptism in the Holy Spirit to further the process. Acts 2:38 describes Peter’s message in response to the question of what shall we do. Repent, be baptized, and receive the Holy Spirit. Yet is this conversion?

What of all those people, true believers and lovers of God, who have not done these three? What of the Quakers who do not believe in a literal water baptism? Paul wrote that “Don't you know that all of us who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? We were therefore buried with him through baptism into death in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, we too may live a new life. If we have been united with him like this in his death, we will certainly also be united with him in his resurrection. For we know that our old self was crucified with him so that the body of sin might be done away with, that we should no longer be slaves to sin— because anyone who has died has been freed from sin.” Rom 6:3-7NIV Can we then say that those who are not baptized do not have new life, cannot be free from sin, and will not partake of the resurrection? The controverted passage in Mar 16 that tells us that those who believe and are baptized will be saved. Are we to tell the Quaker that they are not saved, not yet converted?

Peter, at the home of Cornelius, said after the Spirit had been outpoured, what prevents us now from baptizing these who have received? Was Cornelius and those with him not yet converted? Did they need water baptism to complete their conversion? Why baptize them? They had already received the Spirit. What more do they need?

Yet there is a good reason to be baptized – we are commanded to. I will not say to the Quaker that they are not saved. But I will say that Jesus told us to baptize the nations in making disciples of them in Mat 28:19. You want to be a disciple? Be baptized. I will not speculate on the nature of the relationship between God and the one who, for whatever reason, is not baptized in water. That is stepping onto God’s toes – this is the area of God’s responsibility, not mine.

So too with those who have simply confessed their faith in Christ Jesus, obeyed Jesus’ command and have been baptized in water, I will not say that their conversion is lacking completion. But I will say that God has provided more for you than what you already have. Yet if you don’t know or do not believe you will not receive all that God has promised.

I like the way Luke describes the encounter between Apollos and Priscilla and Aquila. ‘Meanwhile a Jew named Apollos, a native of Alexandria, came to Ephesus. He was a learned man, with a thorough knowledge of the Scriptures. He had been instructed in the way of the Lord, and he spoke with great fervor and taught about Jesus accurately, though he knew only the baptism of John. He began to speak boldly in the synagogue. When Priscilla and Aquila heard him, they invited him to their home and explained to him the way of God more adequately’ (accurately, carefully). Acts 18:24-26 NIV

Here was a guy who taught accurately and with great fervor, with great results, about Jesus. Yet he only knew the baptism of John. A few short verses later we see that Paul finds some other disciples who are in the same condition – they knew only John’s baptism. Their inadequacy was that they had not received the Spirit when they believed. So Paul re-baptized them in the name of Jesus and laid hands on them for the reception of the Spirit. Do you think that Luke wanted us to see the connection? It is hard to imagine that he didn’t. The implication is that Apollos needed the same correction as those disciples Paul met up with.

You know, we may approach the scriptures as a discerner of truth, but, in the end, the scriptures will be used to discern the truth about us. God has promised much for us in His word. The Spirit is even called the Spirit of promise, that which the Father has promised. So I will not judge your relationship with God. That is none of my business. But God has provided more in the Spirit than what many of us have received. This includes all – even those who claim their baptism in the Holy Spirit and speak in tongues. The Corinthians had the Spirit but really needed a large dose of wisdom. What are we willing to receive? As Paul says, what do we have that we did not receive? And all is ours. So let’s quit quibbling about each others standing in Christ and look to our own life. Are you walking in the fullness of the Spirit, using the gifts that God has given to you to build up the body of Christ (the baptism in the Spirit is for or unto the body of Christ), or are you hardening your heart in unbelief? If you have received the Spirit, then do what the Spirit desires. If you have not received the Spirit, receive it. “How much more will God give the Spirit to those who ask him” writes Luke in Lk11:13. The point isn’t to divide the body of Christ into the have’s and the have-not’s, but that we all might have all that God has given to us all.