Craig virtually never publishes online book reviews, but since he made an exception for MacArthur’s Strange Fire, he agreed to provide one last exception for R. T. Kendall’s Holy Fire as well. Kendall’s book gets right what MacArthur’s book gets right without getting wrong what MacArthur’s book gets wrong.
The review appears at:
http://pneumareview.com/rtkendall-holy-fire-ckeener/
God invites us to a genuine relationship with him, empowered by his Spirit. This is not the same as mere religious rules, a contrast evident in some conflicts between Jesus and some Pharisees in his day.
True rest
In Matthew 12:1-14, a series of conflicts about the Sabbath, Jesus articulates a rest different from that of the Pharisees. The preceding context shows how this is the case. Jesus invites all the weary to come to him, promising that he will provide rest for their souls (Matt 11:28-29). In saying this he echoes a biblical promise from God, who also offered rest for his people’s souls (Jer 6:16). Likewise, both the Bible (Prov 9:5) and Jewish tradition (Sirach 24:19) depicted divine Wisdom as inviting others to come. Jesus is here the one divinely authorized to provide rest to those who come to him.
In 12:1-14, however, members of the religious elite debate Jesus over the interpretation of rest. They observe Sabbath law so strictly and literally that they risk inhibiting the rest that the Sabbath was meant to bring. Jesus prioritizes his followers’ hunger and people’s need for healing above Sabbath rules—after all, eating, health, meeting of needs contributed to rest. The Pharisees understood this for some issues as well, so Jesus challenges their inconsistency.
From what we can gather about the Pharisees from later sources, they should not have been so angry with Jesus. First of all, Jesus defends his practice based on some biblical analogies similar to the sort used by Pharisees themselves. Second, Pharisees themselves debated whether medicine could be used on the Sabbath; more lenient Pharisees allowed it. Moreover, Jesus is not even using medicine. When he heals a man with a withered hand here, he simply commands the man to stretch out his hand, which no one could consider a Sabbath violation. Pharisees debated Sabbath questions among themselves all the time, without seeking to “destroy” those who disagreed (12:14).
Yet as we recognize from our own experience today, religious people do not always live up to the best ethical ideals espoused by their teachers. Sabbath conflicts between Jesus and his critics may have simply reflected a larger array of concerns. Pharisees were respected, a sort of religious elite, and tended to be better educated and of higher status than most people. Jesus cared for the poor, the sick, the marginalized, and even sinners; he did not cultivate the favor of the elites. Jesus had not been trained in Pharisees’ traditions; in fact, at times he challenged them. Jesus was a threat to their own sense of security in their beliefs and practices—as he would be to those of many people today. Some Pharisees here therefore desire to silence him, although they lacked political power to harm him. That task would fall to the political elite—Sadducees in Jerusalem and ultimately a reluctant but corrupt governor.
Blaspheming the Spirit
In the following narrative, Matthew warns that Jesus’s Pharisaic critics come close to blaspheming against the Holy Spirit. What does that mean? Sometimes readers today fear that they have committed the offense; no one concerned about it, however, may have committed it. No one able to repent has committed an unforgiveable sin (12:31-32).
So what does this passage mean by blaspheming against the Spirit? In this context in Matthew, Jesus has been driving out demons by the Spirit of God, showing that God’s kingdom was upon them (12:28). His critics shrug off this evidence that God is with him, attributing this defeat of Satan’s kingdom to Satan himself (12:24). They thus treat God’s Spirit as a demonic spirit! These critics are rejecting not just Jesus’s own testimony, but the Spirit’s conspicuous testimony that God’s reign is drawing near in Jesus. That is, they are determined not to believe no matter what the evidence! Jesus shows why this charge cannot be correct and shows how biased they are in explaining away his exorcisms.
Matthew’s context shows us something further. Because Jesus is empowered by God’s Spirit to cast out demons (12:28), he fulfills a prophesied mission. Matthew has just quoted a passage in Isaiah about God’s servant endued with the Spirit (12:18). This servant would initially be gentle rather than like a warrior (12:19-20; cf. 11:29; 21:5). In Isaiah’s context God originally gave this servant mission to Israel, but because Israel was disobedient (Isa 42:18-20), God would raise up one within Israel to bring the nation back to him (49:5; 53:4-6, 11). The context in Isaiah further shows that the servant would bless not only his own people, but also the Gentiles (42:6; 49:6; 52:15), announcing good news of God’s reign (52:7).
How did Jesus’s critics risk blaspheming against the Spirit? They were rejecting God’s own verification of Jesus’s identity and mission. After falsely accusing Jesus, his critics have the audacity to request a “sign” (Matt 12:38)—after explaining away the signs he has already offered! The ultimate sign would be their ultimate test: “the sign of Jonah”—Jesus’s resurrection (12:39-40).
An unforgiveable sin is one in which one’s heart becomes so hard that one rejects even obvious evidence of the truth, to the extent that one cannot ever become convinced. Only God knows whose hearts become irreparably unrepentant, but when that state occurs, it can occur from persistently refusing to believe even in the face of what is obvious. Obviously no one who afterward accepts Christ has gone that far.
Inviting demons back
In the ancient Mediterranean world, people often returned charges against false accusers, and Jesus does so here. Instead of recognizing that Jesus drives out demons by God’s Spirit, his critics attribute his works to demons. So Jesus tells about a man delivered from a demon who ends up with eight demons instead of the one, and concludes, “That is how it will be with this evil generation” (12:45). Jesus has been casting demons out, but his critics are welcoming them all back in. It is thus they, and not he, who are doing Satan’s work.
The Spirit confirms that Jesus fulfills what the prophets before him promised. Those who refuse to believe him in the face of divine attestation have no excuse.
Religion by itself may not please God. What pleases God is carrying out his will, and we can do that only by his Spirit.
[Note: As a rule, Dr. Keener does not review books on this site (even his own). The site also does not usually address the sorts of issues addressed here. Nevertheless, Dr Keener is making a single exception in this case due to the very public nature of the challenge.]
While offering some very needed points, John MacArthur’s Strange Fire unfortunately extrapolates from those points to an entire “movement.” As I note below, I also believe that MacArthur suppresses some biblical truth on the basis of a postbiblical doctrine, the very offense with which he charges others.
Nevertheless, there is much to be learned from his criticisms; he has brought again to our attention some serious errors that charismatic churches must be on their guard against. I start with some agreeable points in the book and then move to points where I believe MacArthur has clearly overstepped the bounds of reason and Christian civility; there my tone cannot be as conciliatory. (All pagination in this review refers to the uncorrected page proofs that I received shortly before the book’s publication.)
Read the rest of the review at:
http://pneumareview.com/john-macarthurs-strange-fire-reviewed-by-craig-s-keener/
Did you know that we have already begun to taste the future world? We are visitors in this age; our true home is in the age to come. That does not mean that we should be irrelevant to this age; rather, it means that we should be all the more relevant, but the substance of our relevance is not following the fads, fashions and whims of our culture. Rather, we shed the light of God’s kingdom, with its transforming vision of justice, peace and righteousness, in a world that has forgotten the only true and transcendent source of hope.
Hebrews 6:5 says that those who believe in Christ “have tasted of the powers of the age to come.” Likewise, Paul declares that Christ delivered us from (literally) “this present evil age” (Gal 1:4). He also warns us not to be “conformed to this age, but be transformed by your mind being made new” (Rom 12:2). These writers were simply following what Jesus had already revealed. “If I drive out demons by the Spirit of God,” Jesus announced, “then God’s kingdom has come upon you” (Matt 12:28).
Jesus’s contemporaries were expecting the messianic king and future kingdom to come soon; they were expecting the dead to be raised and that God would pour out his Spirit. But the king, Jesus, who is yet to come, has already come the first time. Although we still await the resurrection of our bodies, Jesus has already been raised from the dead in history. And since the day of Pentecost God has been pouring out the Spirit. In the language of many scholars, the kingdom is “already/not yet”: the consummation remains future, but we are already living with some of the benefits of that future kingdom.
This future reality invades our lives by the Spirit. The Spirit is promised for the future age, but through him we can taste God’s presence and power in our lives in the present. That is why Paul speaks of the Spirit as the “down payment” of our future inheritance (2 Cor 1:22; 5:5; Eph 1:13-14). The Greek word sometimes rendered “down payment” here was used in ancient business documents for the first installment: no mere verbal guarantee, it is the beginning experience of what is promised. By experiencing the Spirit, we are experiencing a foretaste of the glories of the coming world in God’s presence.
That is why Paul wrote, “The things that eye has not seen nor ear heard, nor have occurred to the human heart—(so it is with) the things that God has prepared for those who love him. But God has revealed them to us by the Spirit” (1 Cor 2:9-10). Because the Spirit is intimate with God the Father’s heart, Paul explains, we can know God’s heart for us (2:10-16). Through the Spirit, we have a foretaste of the beautiful intimacy that we will share with God through all the ages of eternity.
We belong to a future age; let us not forget that crucial feature of our identity. The world around ought to be able to look at the church and see a foretaste of what heaven will be like. If they cannot, it is because we are living short of our birthright in Christ. May we dare to believe what God declares about our identity in Christ, as partakers of a new creation that began when Jesus rose from the dead.
Craig is professor of New Testament at Asbury Theological Seminary; he is author of The IVP Bible Background Commentary: New Testament.
Some of us feel that we have to earn our way into God’s presence when we pray—that somehow if we pray a certain way or for a particular length of time, God will start hearing us. Some even think that we lack access to God’s presence until Jesus’s return. When Jesus sent his disciples to the world, however, he equipped them with his Spirit (John 20:21-23). This is the same Spirit he had explained to them earlier, who would continue Jesus’ presence among them (John 14:2-23) and in the world (16:7-11).
Jesus begins hinting at this even before he becomes fully explicit. We typically quote John 14:2-3 as if it referred only to Jesus’ future coming: “In my Father’s house are many dwelling places … I will come again and take you to myself.” But as wonderful as our future hope is, Jesus intended something more than this here. The Father’s house is the place in his presence, and we do not belong to it only in the future. The only “coming” Jesus explicitly refers to in this context is his return to them after the resurrection to give them his Spirit (14:16-19, 23), a promise fulfilled in 20:19-23. The Greek term for “dwelling places” in 14:2 occurs in only one other text in the Bible—later in this very conversation (14:23), where Jesus and the Father will make their “dwelling place” within the believer.
If such an understanding seems difficult to us, we should remember that it was no less difficult for the first disciples. Jesus promised to prepare them a place in the Father’s presence, where he was going (14:2-4), but they protested that they knew neither where he was going nor how to get there (14:5). Jesus replied that where he was going was to the Father, and they would get there by coming through him (14:6). Today we understand that we do not have to wait for Jesus’ future return to come to the Father through Jesus; we come to him by faith when we accept him as our Lord and Savior.
In other words, we enter the Father’s presence at the moment of our conversion. Whether or not one recognizes that 14:2-3 speak of present experience, certainly 14:17 and 23 do: the Father, Son and Spirit come to make their dwelling place in believers. This means that, if you have surrendered your life to Jesus, you are in his presence this very moment. The same Jesus who taught and healed in Galilee, who washed his disciples’ feet, who died for our sins and rose from the dead, is with you right now as you are reading this article. He is with you every moment of every day, living inside you and eager to teach you his ways.
But the Spirit not only mediates Jesus’ presence to us; the Spirit also mediates Jesus’ presence to the world. Just as Jesus convicted the world of sin, righteousness, and judgment during his earthly ministry, the Spirit will continue to do so by presenting Jesus to the world (John 16:8-11). But the text also suggests that the Spirit will work especially through Jesus’ followers even to mediate Jesus’ presence to the world (15:26-27). Jesus promised to send the Spirit not to the world, but to believers (16:7); through our testimony of Jesus the Spirit would convict the world by confronting them with the presence of Jesus himself (16:8-11). Because Jesus lives inside us, we can be confident that when we live his ways and share his message, God himself will touch the hearts of the people we share with.
This is adapted from an article Craig wrote in 2004; Craig is author of The Gospel of John: A Commentary (Baker Academic).
Today as we seek to walk intimately with our Lord, we can remember an occasion in the Gospel of John where Jesus talked about knowing him. Although Jesus addressed one situation, the principles in John 9—10 apply to believers in all cultures.
When Jesus heals a man from blindness on a mandatory day of rest, some religious leaders expel the man from their community for following Jesus. Jesus then confronts these leaders in John 9:40—10:18, explaining that those who were truly Jesus’s sheep—like this formerly blind man—hear his voice. By contrast, those who try to lord it over the sheep however they see fit—like these religious leaders—are like thieves, robbers or wolves, who come to devour the sheep (John 10:1, 5, 8, 10, 12). Jesus is the good shepherd, who will lay down his life for the sheep to protect them from the robbers and wolves (10:11).
Hearers who knew the Bible well should have understood what Jesus was implying here. In Israel’s Scriptures, God is the chief shepherd, and his people Israel are his sheep; ungodly leaders who exploit the sheep would stand under God’s judgment (Ezek 34; Jer 23:1-4). It does not matter whether the religious leaders have kicked the healed man out of their religious community. The rightful shepherd declares that the healed man belongs to his sheep, i.e., is one of his people! Most scholars today believe that many members of John’s own audience had been kicked out of their religious communities for following Jesus. John recounts these earlier events about Jesus to encourage his audience that what matters is not the approval of people but the approval of the Lord himself.
The religious leaders, sure of their learning and piety, reject the faith of the man they think had been “born in sin” (John 9:34). By meeting Jesus, however, the blind man enters a relationship much more important than any of the elite members of his people could have offered him. Jesus insists that his own sheep will follow him because they know his voice, the way sheep normally follow only their own shepherds (John 10:3-4); they will not follow the voice of strangers (10:5).
Then Jesus offers an extraordinary claim: his own sheep know him “just as” he and the Father know each other (10:14-15). The same kind of intimacy that the Father has with the Son is the kind of intimacy Jesus wants us to have with him. (John illustrates this elsewhere; for example, the same Greek term is used for Jesus’ intimate position with his Father in 1:18 and for the beloved disciple’s intimate position with Jesus in the banquet in 13:23.)
Jesus was intimate with his disciples. In ancient literature, someone who shared the deepest confidences of his or her heart was a true friend; Jesus shared with his disciples whatever he heard from his Father (John 15:15). But this relationship did not vanish when Jesus ascended to the Father; he promised the Spirit, so that whatever the Spirit hears from Jesus, he will continue to make known to us (John 16:13-15). This means that we can be just as intimate with Jesus as, and experience his presence no less fully than, the disciples he walked with 2000 years ago. When we embrace Jesus as our Lord and Savior, we begin a new life of relationship with him.
Like the formerly blind man, we have entered into a relationship that matters more than what anyone else thinks of us. We may be lowly or despised in the eyes of others. But in prayer and a life of faith, led by God’s Spirit, we commune with the king of all kings. His sheep still know his voice, and we continue growing to know his voice better through studying Scripture and walking daily with him.
Perhaps thirty-five years ago, soon after my conversion from atheism, I had an unexpected experience. Reading my Bible day after day, I longed to hear God like the people in the Bible did, but I did not know that it was possible. One day the longing was so intense, and yet the Spirit sparked faith in my heart to trust God to open my ears to hear his voice. What I heard was the deepest love and kindness I had ever experienced, a love that I had never before known, a love that I yearned to reciprocate by devoting myself wholly to God’s will. Each day I was eager to spend more time learning his heart. I have not heard God as clearly in every season of my life as I did in seasons like that one, but he is eager to share his heart with us. Jesus touched me, as he touched the blind man in John 9. May we all cry out to the Savior to open our ears to hear his precious heart more and more!
Craig is author of The Gospel of John: A Commentary (Baker Academic).
When Jesus commissioned his followers, he declared, “I send you just the same way the Father sent me” (John 20:21), and empowered them by giving them the Holy Spirit (John 20:22). As Jesus’ followers today, we share the same commission to let the world know about the Lord; we also must depend on the same power of the Spirit that Jesus gave his disciples.
When one reads accounts of frontier revivals in the early nineteenth century, or spectacular “people movements” in overseas missions, one is quickly struck by how much of the success was driven simply by the uncontrollable activity of the Spirit. People prayed and labored in faith, but after they had proved their faithfulness, God accomplished miraculously far beyond what human effort could have done. If this were not true, there would be no church in the world today! And since it is true, we should seek God with the same expectancy to accomplish his purposes today.
One passage in John’s Gospel that talks about the Spirit is John 7:37-39. Here Jesus promises rivers of living water to those who believe in him; we begin to drink at the moment we first believe, but we may continue to drink and experience God’s powerful presence throughout our Christian life. (The Spirit is the foretaste of our promised future in glory; Rom 8:23; 2 Cor 5:5.)
Most scholars believe that John wrote to Jewish believers in Jesus kicked out of some of their local Jewish communities for following Jesus as their divine Lord. Thus he often contrasts the true experience of the Spirit with mere ritual. Jesus offers a baptism in the Spirit greater than John’s baptism in water (1:31-33); he values a friend’s desperate situation at his wedding more than the traditional demands of ritual water pots (2:6); he offers living water within the believer, better than Jacob’s well precious to the Samaritans (4:12-14). Jewish teachers could envision Gentiles converting to Judaism through baptism as being “reborn” into Judaism; Jesus told Nicodemus that he needed to be born from the water of the Spirit (3:3-6). Jesus rather than the healing waters of a pool healed a paralytic (5:5-9), and the Siloam pool helped a blind man only because Jesus sent him there (9:7).
Priests used the waters of the Pool of Siloam in a special ritual during the Feast of Tabernacles. After a public procession, they poured water from that pool out at the base of the altar, symbolically reenacting an expectation in Scriptures they read on the last day of that feast: rivers of living water would someday flow from God’s temple (Ezek 47:1-12; Zech 14:8). On the last day of this festival, Jesus declares, “If anyone is thirsty, let them come to me! Let them drink, whoever believes in me!” Then he refers to the very Scripture that was read on that day: rivers of water would flow from the “belly”; Jewish people considered the temple the navel of the earth. Jesus is saying, “I am the foundation stone of God’s new temple! Let the one who wills come and drink freely!” The water of which he spoke was the Holy Spirit, and would be available once Jesus was glorified (Jn 7:39).
John later explains that Jesus was glorified in part by being crucified (John 12:23-24; this echoes the Greek translation of Isa 52:13). Jesus was glorified by being lifted up on the cross, crowned with thorns and hailed “King of the Jews.” When a soldier pierced Jesus’ side with a spear, “blood and water” flowed out (19:34). The spear undoubtedly ruptured the sac around Jesus’ heart, which contained not only blood but a watery substance, but it is not hard to guess why John, alone of all the Gospels, makes a point of mentioning it. Once lifted up on the cross, Jesus offered eternal life to all. We should depend fully on this gift of the Holy Spirit he paid such a great price to provide for us.
Craig is author of The Gospel of John: A Commentary (Baker Academic).
What dynamic empowered the earliest church for mission? When Jesus came to his disciples after his resurrection, they were hiding, afraid that they might meet their teacher’s fate (John 20:19). Jesus greeted them with the typical Jewish greeting (the blessing shalom, 20:19, 21). It was more than a greeting that evening, however: it fulfilled his promise to bring them peace (14:27).
Jesus then showed them his hands and side (20:20). Soldiers often displayed their wounds to prove their loyalty; others displayed wounds to evoke sympathy. Jesus may have displayed his wounds to demonstrate that he had in fact died, hence was in fact risen (cf. Luke 23:39-40). This would make sense to the disciples, since some Jewish thinkers expected God to resurrect the bodies of the righteous in the same form in which they died before healing them. When they saw him, the disciples rejoiced: his coming fulfilled his promise to bring them joy (John 16:20-22).
Now the Lord commissioned them. “As the Father sent me,” he announced, “that is how I send you” (20:21). How had the Father sent Jesus? He sent him as his agent and representative, to reveal by both his words and life the Father’s heart for the world. As the Father’s agent, he did what the Father would have done and said what the Father would have said (5:19). As the Father’s agent, he bore the Father’s authority to perform selected signs revealing God’s character. And as the Father’s agent, he was so one with the Father’s mission that he would die to carry it out.
Jesus passes this commission on to his followers. We are his agents and representatives: we must speak his message, and our lives must let the world know that we are truly his disciples (13:35). He authorizes us to speak the message that brings people life or judgment, depending on their response (20:23). But how can we fulfill such a dramatic commission?
Jesus granted his disciples the power to carry out his commission in 20:22. As God first breathed into Adam the breath of life (Gen 2:7), Jesus breathed on them new life. He had earlier promised Nicodemus that those who were born again would be born from the Spirit, who was as mysterious as the wind (John 3:8). Now he declared, “Receive the Holy Spirit.” This was the Spirit that Jewish people associated sometimes with spiritual cleansing and often with prophetic empowerment. This was the Spirit that Jesus had promised would continue his own presence among them (14:26; 16:13-15). The Spirit was Jesus’s agent as Jesus was the Father’s agent (16:14), and the Spirit had come to live in the believers.
How can we dare to attempt to fulfill God’s mission? We must trust him and the power with which he has equipped us. As we faithfully speak and live his mission, the Spirit will make Jesus real to those whose hearts God opens. Jesus made not some but all of his followers like the prophets of old; he has called us to let the world know his heart of love.
This article is adapted from an article written for the Missionary Seer in 2004; Craig has also written The Gospel of John: A Commentary (Baker Academic).
When Nicodemus, himself a religious teacher, praised Jesus as a great teacher, Jesus revealed himself as more than a teacher. Jesus is a savior, and he confronts this religious teacher with his need for salvation. “You must be born from above,” Jesus told him (John 3:3). The Greek word for “above” can also mean, “again,” and Nicodemus supposes that Jesus asks him to enter his mother’s womb again (3:4). So Jesus explains further: “You must be born from water and the Spirit” (3:5).
Not only Nicodemus, but a host of interpreters through history, have wondered what Jesus meant. What Jesus most naturally meant in light of first-century culture Nicodemus assumed that he could not mean! When Gentiles converted to Judaism, they normally ritually immersed themselves to wash away their former Gentile impurities. According to later Jewish teachers, once a Gentile converted to Judaism they were like a newborn child, having forsaken their previous people and lifestyle and now serving the God of Israel. Had Jesus told a Gentile to be “born of water,” Nicodemus could have guessed what he meant. But he could hardly imagine that Jesus would demand the same of him, a religious Jewish teacher descended from Abraham!
Yet this is likely precisely Jesus’ point. We are not saved by our ethnicity or because we grew up in church; we are not saved even by our religious deeds. We are saved because Jesus died for us (John 3:16) and rose again. Jesus was telling Nicodemus that he had to come to God on the same terms that Gentiles did, the same terms that we all do: he had to accept God’s gift of salvation in Jesus Christ. Later, in John 8:44, Jesus argues that people who have sinned (everyone) are children of the devil, following his nature; when Jesus comes into our lives, however, we get a new nature and are born from God. We may not start off by living out that new nature perfectly, but at least we are aware that we have a new Lord.
But why does Jesus add, “born from the Spirit”? As Calvin and others have suggested, the Greek phrase here translated, “water and the Spirit,” may be what is called a hendiadys, using the conjunction epexegetically. In other words, we might translate it, “born from the water of the Spirit.” Jesus uses “water” as a symbol for the Spirit in John’s Gospel (John 7:37-39). Thus he is telling Nicodemus not that he will be saved by Jewish ritual immersion, but that he will be saved instead by a spiritual baptism by the Spirit, i.e., by the gift of God’s Spirit transforming his heart. All those who embrace Christ as savior become God’s children (John 1:12-13).
Jesus probably alludes in this context to the restoration promise of Ezekiel 36:25-27: God would sprinkle clean water on his people, put a new spirit in them, and give them his own Spirit. Thus, Jesus speaks of the spirit that is born from the Spirit (John 3:6). He goes on to compare God’s life-giving Spirit with the wind (3:8), just as in Ezekiel’s next chapter (Ezek 37:1-14).
God does not save us because we are Jewish or Gentile; God loves the entire world, including all peoples and cultures (John 3:16). All of us have sinned and left God’s way, but when we accept and trust the gift of God’s Son, he welcomes each of us as his children. May we labor until all know about him.
This is adapted from Craig’s 2005 article in the Missionary Seer; Craig has also authored The Gospel of John: A Commentary (Baker Academic), which received an award of merit in the Christianity Today book awards.
Christians honor God as Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Yet we may not always recognize the biblical foundations for what we believe.
That the Father is God goes without saying. That Jesus is divine in the New Testament would be equally obvious to its first readers, and would be to everyone today if we recognized ancient literary devices. For example, New Testament letters open with blessings from God the Father and the Lord Jesus Christ, even though ancient blessings invoked deities. Old Testament descriptions of God are often applied to Jesus (e.g., Phil 2:6, 10-11; Rev 7:16-17). Even his title “Lord” would often imply his deity no less than the title “God,” especially in passages like 1 Cor 8:5-6, which evokes Deut 6:4 (one God, one Lord). Many passages are even more explicit, such as John 1:1; 8:58; and 20:28, framing the heart of John’s Gospel.
But what about the Spirit? This is more explicit in some passages (treated below) than in some others. In contrast to Jesus’s deity, the Spirit as a divine person was not a primary issue of contention with the earliest church’s contemporaries, so it received less attention at first. Jewish people recognized the Spirit as divine, although not as a person within God distinct from the Father. In the Old Testament, God was more concerned about defining himself as Israel’s one God as opposed to the false gods worshiped by other nations. At best there are possible hints that the Spirit could be distinguished from the one whom Christians call God the Father (cf. perhaps Isa 48:16). God was schooling his people in monotheism, but the term for God’s oneness is also the term for the oneness of husband and wife (Gen 2:24). That is, the necessary emphasis on God’s oneness does not exclude the later revelation of different persons sharing the nature of the one God.
Various passages in the New Testament provide much fuller hints, connecting the Spirit with the Father and the Son in special ways that presuppose their deity (1 Cor 12:4-6; 2 Cor 13:14; Eph 4:4-6; most explicitly, Matt 28:19). Sometimes in Acts the Spirit also acts in personal ways.
That the Spirit acts as a person becomes most clear in Jesus’s final discourse to his disciples in John 14—16. This is not so much because Jesus uses a masculine pronoun for the Spirit here; the masculine pronoun fits the gender of the Greek word paraklêtos (“counselor,” “advocate,” “comforter”) used in this context. That use no more makes the Spirit male than the feminine and neuter pronouns for the Spirit associated with the feminine Hebrew (ruach) and neuter Greek (pneuma) terms for “spirit” make the Spirit female or neuter.
The reason we recognize the Spirit as personal in these passages is that he carries forward Jesus’s mission after his ascension, working as “another advocate” (John 14:16-17, 26; 16:7-15). The Spirit convicts the world concerning sin and judgment (16:8-9, 11) just as Jesus does (3:19-20; 8:46; 12:31); he acts in Jesus’ place after Jesus’s exaltation (14:16; 16:10). He comes and speaks to the disciples whatever he hears (16:13), just as Jesus did (15:15). It is not surprising, then, that once Christians began considering these questions they recognized the Spirit as a divine person like the Father and the Son.
Christians today sometimes treat the Spirit—or even the Father and the Son—as an impersonal force. But God comes to us in a personal way, a way that invites us into a personal relationship with him. As we worship God together, let us remember and embrace that invitation.
(This post is adapted from my article for the A.M.E. Zion Missionary Seer; more details are in my book Gift & Giver and in my two-volume commentary on John, both with Baker.)