Wind, the Hovering Symbol of Creation

Loving God Up Close: Rekindling Your Relationship with the Holy Spirit
by Calvin A. Miller, M.Div., D.Min.

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And the earth was without form and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters (Gen. 1:2, KJV).

This verse describes the creation as a watery chaos confronted by the Wind of God. The verse could just as adequately read, The Wind of God began to move upon the face of the waters. The Wind here broods like a hen over an unhatched cosmos, waiting to see what this unformed universe will hatch. It is the brooding Wind that sits and moves and hatches and gives life. The Wind becomes the hovering symbol of creation.

In a loftier and more personal sense, the Spirit now hovers over prodigal and useless lives to transform them into servants and ministers. The Holy Spirit is ever creating and recreating us in the likeness of Christ, as the Wind of the Spirit begins to blow.

Philippians 2:5 exhorts us to have the mind of Christ. Now minds and brains are not the same things (all of us know people who have the one and don't seem to have the other), but if we take Paul seriously here, we must think of the brain as the vehicle and the mind as the driver.

Brains operate at various speeds. When the brain oscillates at 5-8 cycles per second, the Theta state, the person who owns that brain is driving very slow indeed. In fact, 5-8 cycles per second probably indicates that the owner of that brain is comatose and very near to death. When the brain speeds up to 9-14 cycles per second, the Alpha state, the person is enjoying some healthy sleep. When the brain speeds up to 15-40 cycles per second, the Beta state, the person has reached a state of creative rest. The Beta state is true Sabbath. We are in his presence and at peace. Here we are so "with God" that our conversation with him is entire. We are in rapt oneness with God. Artists create best with the mind at rest, allowing them to access their most creative talents. In this Beta state sculptors sculpt, painters paint, and poets exude odes and sonnets.

But the Beta state has an even greater attribute. In this state of mind we are most apt to enter into reverent contemplation of the Spirit of God. In other words, here is where the Wind blows, and the Spirit comes to help us create even as we worship. Here is true inspiration (and remember, the word inspiration is the Latin equivalent of the Greek word, pneuma), in which the ability to create is breathed into us. Here God creates beauty through us, by the same principle of "inbreathing" he has always used to make his world and his saints more like himself.

WIND, A SYMBOL OF LIFE COMING

And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul (Gen. 2:7, KJV).

If the wind symbolizes the coming of creation, in salvation it certainly symbolizes the coming to life. In this passage the word ruach once again is used as the breath or wind of life. God calls humankind into existence by the blessed coming of the wind. The breath of God creates life. How consistent is this image of wind with that of the Spirit!

African lore teaches that all lion cubs are born dead. They would remain that way, except that the Great Lion King of the Jungle comes and breathes into the dead cubs' nostrils the breath of life and so the cubs begin to live. This picture faintly echoes the ruach of Genesis 2:7. The newly created Adam is lifeless, and only the breath of God can call him to life. And so the breath of God does exactly that.

The same thing can be said of the breath (the ruach) as it calls the dead of Ezekiel 37 to life. The prophet sees a large valley in which heaps of dry bones have come together to form a vast sea of skeletons. God asks Ezekiel, "Son of man, can these bones live?" (v. 3) Then as the winds of God begin to blow, flesh covers the skeletons. Yet they remain breathless corpses.

"Then he said unto me, Prophesy unto the ruach, prophesy, son of man, and say to the ruach, Thus sayeth the LORD God; Come from the four winds, O breath, and breathe upon these slain, that they may live" (v. 9, KJV). At the word of the prophet, the bones begin to live. The Wind ever brings the life.

One of Paul's contemporaries was a man named Apollos. Like many modern preachers, Apollos saw little evidence of the life-creating pnuema or ruach in his ministry. He preached to great crowds who seemed enthusiastic about his sermons, but his words lacked real life because they were void of the Holy Spirit. In Acts 19:1-2 Paul asked some of Apollos' confused converts if they had received the Holy Spirit since they believed. After sitting under Apollos' sermons, his disciples felt baffled by the term "the Holy Spirit." They had never heard the words. Second Corinthians already had been written by then, but apparently Apollos had not taken the time to read it. (Reading seems not to have been his forte.) But there it was-I Corinthians 2:12: "We have not received the spirit of the world but the Spirit who is from God, that we may understand what God has freely given us." (NIV) Apollos' sermons neither invoked nor experienced the Holy Spirit-the changing Wind of God.

Are American preachers serving the Wind of Acts 2? In most cases, it seems not so. It has been years since George Barna gave us a picture of what Americans think of American preachers:

Only 51 percent of evangelicals think they hear excellent preaching.

Only 42 percent of mainline denominationalists think their preacher is excellent.

Only 34 percent of Catholics think so.2

Ian Pitt-Watson once said, Predicatio Verbi Dei est Verbum Dei-"The preaching of the words of God is the Word of God."3 Who can deny it? So to stand in a holy moment and speak what God wants said is to wear the prophet's mantle.

I am convinced that while most people don't know how to clearly articulate what they want out of church. If they could put it into words, they would say that they long to feel the force of an Acts 2 Wind. They want Christ to permeate the sermon because already he has so permeated the life of the preacher. We cannot get Christ in the sermon by consciously working at upping the word count of the name "Jesus." No, the issue of sermonic power is far simpler than that. The preacher must hunger for Jesus. When the preacher gets hungry for Jesus, the hunger of those who come to church will automatically be sated.

Unfortunately, Apollos still lives. He thrives. The absence of the Spirit in our sermons should embarrass us. In the hunger for something substantial, the Apollos School of Homiletics has brought to pass the chilling words of Amos:

"The days are coming," declares the sovereign LORD,
"when I will send a famine through the land-
not a famine for food or a thirst for water,
but a famine of hearing the words of the LORD.
Men will stagger from sea to sea and wander from north to east...
but they will not find it" (Amos 8:11-12, NIV).

There exists one valid question for anybody's church: "Have you received the Holy Spirit since you believed?" How can we tell whether the Holy Spirit is present? Well, who can describe every aspect of the way he works?

When the Spirit first came in Acts, his coming seemed to be marked by a kind of madness, of babbling in languages the Jews had never learned and acting rather like they were drunk. Perhaps they were-inebriated by the Spirit. Paul summons us to such intoxication when he says, "And be not drunk with wine, wherein is excess; but be filled with the Spirit" (Eph. 5:18, KJV).

Heady inebriation, this Spirit intoxication! I find it a most glorious addiction. One sip and I am a pneumaholic who must have more of the Pneuma! I may not be wholly doctrinal or crisply theological, but I am alive and my life is in the Wind, Wind that blows to disorient my propriety. This Wind scatters the paper trails of my lifeless way of life and my empty ambitions. One of the evidences of the Spirit's presence is what might be called the coming of a glorious chaos!

Remember that in the aftermath of any wind comes chaos. But in the church, chaos may actually be a life sign. The life of the Wind is rarely in things well ordered. Programs and organizing are not necessarily signs of life. The Wind brings things too glorious to be organized. And this Wind is the crying need of churches that think they can organize their way to success. Overplanning may be a symptom of decay, not of health. Chaos-when God flies at us too fast to measure or structure-may be a symptom of vitality. How extensive is this chaos of glory!

I will long remember a service in a small church in Benaue of the Philippines. At the conclusion of the meeting, forty or fifty people crowded forward to the altar. The pastor and I were the only counselors. I felt smothered by the chaos of those desiring healing and those seeking a new life in Christ. One man asked me to pray for his healing-something foreign to my denominational experience. But in the madness of so many, and being driven by the Spirit, I prayed for his healing. I don't know if he was healed, but the light in his face following my prayer told me that prayer itself is a kind of healing. Two hours later, I had to admit that I had never seen anything so glorious or so chaotic.

Think of the aftermath of Peter's sermon in Acts 2. Three thousand people cried out to be saved! The population of the church grew from 120 members to three thousand in thirty minutes' time. The baptism service must have lasted far into the night! But then, the church is most remarkable when the glory is too vast to organize. This is one of the most powerful evidences that God is involved, when circumstances move too fast to be organized. Such events mark the nearness of his presence-the nearness of the pneuma, the ruach, the Wind of God.

In every great awakening when the Wind begins to blow, participants feel the event is too real to leave. People arrive early and stay late. God, who has never been to them as interesting as their culture, becomes all-enthralling. They want him, crave him, and the Wind brings a refreshing to the deserts they foolishly once called worship. And so they forsake that dead togetherness they mislabeled "joy" when they remained more in charge of things.

JESUS AND NICODEMUS AND
THE WIND OF MYSTERY

When Jesus calls on Nicodemus in John 3, the Master likens the Holy Spirit to the wind. Listen to his key phrases: "The wind blows wherever it pleases. You hear its sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going" (John 3:8, NIV). In this passage, Jesus uses the symbol of wind to speak of the mystery of God. While we alluded to this in the introduction, we must pass the truth once again. Without this incredible mystery, the church loses the spell of her intrigue. People feel drawn to this intrigue. Like the tractor beam of a Star Trek spaceship, we find ourselves drawn into the arena of his activity.

The new literature of church growth often counsels us to believe that churches grow when congregations become public relations experts. We have only to smile incessantly and pump a few hands, and presto! Mega-church! Everyone on the church staff is encouraged to keep smiling and shake as many hands as possible. We believe that when we get good enough at public relations, the church will grow. This bears some truth, but it is weak truth. When churches grow only because of their "let's be the friendliest place in town" mystique, it is weak growth indeed-a pitifully weak substitute for the involvement of the Spirit.

When churches grow because those who attend feel spellbound by the mystery of things they cannot understand, however, the church is impelled toward glory and it grows with an otherworldly vitality. And that sort of vitality is the only kind that counts.

Years ago I found myself in bed one late Sunday midnight, just lying there, looking up at the ceiling and smiling. I asked myself the reason for this stupidity. The only answer that came to me was that I had been smiling all day, and this was the most reasonable thing I could do. I just couldn't stop smiling, since I had been doing it all day long. I was doing it out of some notion-false indeed-that if I smiled enough, the church would grow. In my own mind, I was the source of good times and sweet rapport. How much I had to learn!

Unless the Spirit provides this intrigue and warmth, we create only bogus hype.

LET US WELCOME THE WIND

The wind is the symbol of God the Holy Spirit. All that is vital relates to that Wind. All that is Holy. All that is mystery and intrigue.

It is time that we welcome the Wind. It is time that we seek a vital chaos! Only then may we sing the anthem of the church's continuance in the world:

Breathe on me, breath of God,
Till I am all thine own,
Until my will is lost in thine,
To live for thee alone.

Copyright © 2004 by Calvin Miller.

About the Author

Dr. Calvin Miller is a theologian, pastor, writer, and painter. His more than thirty books include The Singer Trilogy, an allegory on the life of Christ that is currently celebrating its twenty-fifth anniversary in print, The Book of Jesus, and his most recent title, Into the Depths of God. Calvin Miller presently serves as professor of preaching and pastoral ministries at Beeson Divinity School in Alabama, where he and his wife make their home.