The Spirit of Life and Death

Welcome to Bible Project Podcast. Today, we continue our conversation on the Spirit of God, or in Hebrew, Ruach Elohim. One way of defining Ruach, it's an invisible, personal, life-giving energy. It's the thing animating every living thing.

You only get two sentences into the Bible before you encounter God as Ruach, hovering over the dark abysmal waters, ready to bring order. This is the biblical portrait of God's Spirit creating and holding everything together. Ruach is intimately involved and present with all creation sustaining its existence moment to moment.

Last week's discussion oriented us to how the ancients thought of Ruach. It's the power that rushes through the trees. It's the energy we breathe into our lungs. It's the vitality that we have that lets us comprehend the world.

In the Bible, this energy is a gift. And it's the very life presence of God's self. Humans cannot exist without it. This is the biblical author's way of exploring humans as mortal, as not sustaining their own existence.

But the story of the Bible begins with an invitation to experience eternal life. Whatever immortal life that humans are going to experience is not something they have of their own nature. It's something that is given to them as a gift. Because humanity cannot exist without God's ruach, its very presence reminds us of our own frailty.

Job refers to God's breath as the only thing keeping him alive, but also it's the sign that he's not even sure how much longer he'll be alive because it's not his possession. It was something that was gifted to him. Today, we examine the inherent mortality of humans and the marvelous gift of God's Ruach.

Ruach is such an unmerited, undeserved, uncontrolled gift that it should humble me. Thanks for joining us. Here we go. Hey, Tim. Hey, John.

today we're continuing this conversation on the spirit of god yes we are and what we've attempted to do just briefly in our last conversation or not so briefly yeah try to get into the ancient imagination of this word spirit and actually this is a pillar of ours that we talk about the bible is ancient literature right and so it's an exercise of not bringing our own present day

understanding of words and concepts and imposing them on the Bible, but trying to empathetically get into the imagination of biblical authors and the way they viewed the world. It's challenging sometimes.

Yeah. It's an exercise in extreme empathy. Yeah. Yeah.

I guess it's about imagining the feelings of another person. Yeah. But this is about imagining the ideas of another person. I've actually used the phrase intellectual empathy before we talked about this.

Yeah. Yeah. So that's what we're doing specifically around the word spirit, but also our word wind and breath and perhaps even mind. And there's one Hebrew word, ruach.

So what does it mean to think of all those things together and how does the Bible use that word? And what's your summary of our conversation? One way of defining ruach, trying to capture a definition, which is like capturing water, you know, with your hand. It refers to something invisible. You cannot see it. You see its effects.

That's true of wind and breath and mind. It's personal. It's based on a conviction of the biblical authors that there is someone who is the creator of all that is and the sustainer who's intimately involved and present with all creation sustaining its existence moment to moment. So it's an invisible, personal, life-giving energy.

So life-giving means it's the thing animating every living thing. But energy is a thing animating non-living things. That is like wind in the trees. You know, wind could knock down a tree.

It can move waters. Whole bodies of water can be moved by the wind. so invisible personal life giving and animating energy yeah yeah it was really helpful for me there was a moment where you said when we think of the wind we think of something physical

because we understand the physical nature of air yeah but an ancient thinker did not it was more like a what you said like a force like we think of gravitational force or these kind of things yeah in our modern contemporary cosmology the slot that is occupied by these mysterious all-pervasive reality sustaining forces yeah gravity electromagnetic strong and weak nuclear

is the slot occupied by god's ruach in the biblical author's imagination now it's not precise It's not an exact, but it's pretty close. Because in our modern mindset, those forces may or may not point us to a person. More often, they're just stated to be impersonal laws.

So insert God's transcendent personal being into our concept of modern forces. And we're very close to the concept of Ruach in the Bible. It's pervasive. It comes from the one who is above all things.

but it also is the way that that one who is above and beyond all is personally present, sustaining everything that is. Yeah. And so this then frame invites us into some mysteries. Yeah. Which is when I see the wind moving through a tree, am I seeing God's personal energy?

or am I seeing God sending what I would call an impersonal force? Yeah, something distinct from God, right? And I want to make a clear distinction. Yeah.

And are we saying the ancient imagination is saying, yeah, there's a distinction, but don't make it so sharp. Yeah, I mean, these are almost impossible mysteries, but there has to be an absolute difference

between God and creation from one point of view. I'm not all that God is. Yeah. Like very clearly.

Yeah, okay. Ask my wife. Or my kids. You know what I mean?

Really quite a frail, mortal, fragile being on many levels. So there's an absolute distinction between me as a weak little temporary creature and the infinite, eternal creator of all. But the only way for anything temporary and finite and small and frail to exist

is to be so closely sustained and held in existence by God's Ruach that another way to say it is like the way Paul says it. In God, we live and move and have our being. In God, he says.

Or like he says in a little prayer at the end of Ephesians,