Who Is The Holy Spirit

Who Is The Holy Spirit? 

Nathan Smalley -- June 14, 2026

Supporting Text: Gen. 1:1, 

The Nature of God

The nature of God can truly be an enigma (something or someone that is mysterious, puzzling, or impossible to understand).  I know that He is the Creator of the Universe (Gen. 1:1) and that He is love. I know that He demonstrated that love in taking on flesh to live amongst us and then die on the Cross for our sin. Certainly, there are things that we can know about God. He provides us with that knowledge of who He is and the love that He has for us in the Scripture. When we accept Him as our Savior we then can experience first hand that love and peace that He offers. 

Still though, there is so much about God that I do not understand. Then again, how can the finite (the limited) ever truly can completely understand the infinite (the unlimited)? When it comes down to it that is what makes Him God and me a man. 

One of the most fascinating aspects of God is that He is Triune. Meaning that He is one God in three persons. We call this the Trinity, the collective name given to the three persons in God: The Father, The Son, and the Holy Spirit. You may be asking, "how can God be one, yet three?" You could think of this like a three leaf clover. It is one object, yet has three distinct leaves or for a more technical scientific answer we can understand that there is water yet itself can exist in  multiple states of matter (e.g., liquid, solid, gas, etc..). 

Let's first take a look at the Scripture to see what it reveals about the Nature of God and then we will look breifly at the Creeds (a formal, concise statement of the shared beliefs of a religious community). From there we will specifically start looking at the third person of the Trinity that we know as -- The Holy Spirit. 

Deuteronomy 6:4 (ESV):  Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one.

As you can tell from Deut. 6:4 it declares that the LORD (Jehovah) is one. What does one mean though? Is it completely one as we tend to think? The Hebrew word is "echad" meaning properly united, that is one. We find the first use of echad back in Genesis 2:24 where it is declared that man and woman are to become "one flesh." This not only defines an intimate physical union, but also of a unified convenantial relationship. This means that Echad carries a sense of a "unified singularity."

We can further carry this idea in the first name ascribed to God in the Bible from Genesis 1:1:

Genesis 1:1: In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. 

Here the word for God is "Elohim." Grammatically, this presents us with a plural that functions as a singular. 

While diving into a word study can be immensily helpful, it is always needed. There are many times throughout the Scripture that we can see the concept of Triune Godhead playing out throughout the Scripture. 

Genesis 1:26 - Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.”

Genesis 11:7 - Come, let us go down and there confuse their language, so that they may not understand one another's speech.”

There are more Old Testament (OT) passages that describe this, such as in the book of Isaiah . For instance, Isaiah 6:3 makes a threefold declaration that God is, "Holy, Holy, Holy." Even more striking though is Isaiah 48:16:

Isaiah 48:16 - Draw near to me, hear this: from the beginning I have not spoken in secret, from the time it came to be I have been there.” And now the Lord GOD has sent me, and his Spirit.

We also find numerous passages in the New Testament (NT) such as: 

Matthew 3:16-17 - And when Jesus was baptized, immediately he went up from the water, and behold, the heavens were opened to him, and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and coming to rest on him; and behold, a voice from heaven said, “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased.”

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.

Note: I will omit 1 John 5:7 as it was not found in the first two editions of Erasmus' text. The simple reason. Not one Greek MSS of 1 John that Erasmus examined contained it. He found it only in the Latin Vulgate.  Edward Lee and Diego Lopez Zuniga attacked him for not including the passage and encouraging "Arianism." Erasmus responded by saying that if he had found it in "one" of the Greek MSS, he would have added it!

Creeds

When you think of the Holy Spirit what is the first thing that comes to mind? 

Do you think first of some ethereal divine force that is God's power or do you think of Him as a person -- being God Himself. The third member of the Triune God-Head. Often times