The Holy Spirit...

"It is the Holy Spirit’s determined delight to reveal this reality, this union, in us, inside our own blindness.

The Spirit’s mission is not to create a relationship between us and Jesus, as if that union were not already made real in our rejection of our Lord. The Holy Spirit does not come to us from the outside, as if the Spirit were absent in the incarnation as a mere spectator watching the Son as he bowed before our hatred.

The Holy Spirit was indivisibly one with Jesus as he experienced our wrath. And thus the Spirit moves not from absence to presence, but from union with us in our darkness in Jesus to the work of revealing this union in us in our fallen minds. In oneness with Jesus in his oneness with us, the Holy Spirit comes to us to reveal the truth of all truths—to lead us to acknowledge and embrace Jesus as our Creator and Lord, salvation and life, the true and only source and meaning of our humanity. As the Spirit leads us to discover Jesus himself within us and inside the great illusion, we behold the one whom we have pierced and encounter the real gospel—the limitless mercy of the Triune God—which both shocks and relieves us in our self-incarcerating pride and overwhelming anxiety. In so doing, the Spirit reveals a reality for us to believe, a reality that we can rest in and allow to silence our guilt and shame, our fear and forlorn sense of worthlessness. As we discover that we rejected and damned Jesus, and that this Son is indivisibly one with his Father, we see that in the very event of our shameful crucifying of Jesus, the Father was not abandoning Jesus or us, but accepting and embracing us as his beloved children in our unspeakable waywardness. And as we discover that the Holy Spirit was indivisibly one with Jesus as he submitted himself to us in our dastardly unbelief, we begin to see that the Holy Spirit has made our traumatized, fear-stricken souls, our self-righteous, blind and obstinate hearts the very Temple where the Holy Spirit chooses to dwell in infinite, creative joy, and power, and endless gifts. Indeed, here we see that as we rose against and snuffed out the Father’s Son, we unwittingly offered—from the pit of our insane and faithless apostasy—the one true and faithful Son as our response to the Father. The discovery of this Father and this Son and this Holy Spirit in us has the actual authority and weight with our souls to free us from our self-loathing and allow ourselves precisely as guilt-ridden, shame-riddled covenant-breaking sons and daughters to be loved by the Father himself, prodigals stunned by the abounding goodness of our Father’s heart and inspirited by the staggering love and humility of our brother Jesus.