How did Jesus walk on water? How did he feed five thousand with five loaves and two fish? How did he raise Lazarus from the dead?

Unless we have been carefully taught, many Christians would be quick to say simply, Because he is God! And he truly is. But is that how the New Testament answers these questions? If we follow the emphasis of the Gospels, we might say that what Jesus’s miracles show is that he is God, but how he, as man, performs these wonders, is not quite as simple as we may assume.

In particular, what are we to say about the many texts that testify to the Holy Spirit’s presence in the human life of Christ? Did Christ, in his humanity, actually need the Holy Spirit if he performed such signs simply by virtue of his divinity?

When we recognize the surprisingly recurrent theme of the divine Spirit’s relationship to the divine Son in his humanity, we might understand Jesus (and the Gospels) better, and freshly marvel at what grace Christ offers us in the gift of his Spirit.

Jesus and the Spirit

First, let’s rehearse the string of biblical texts that lead us to what is often called a “Spirit Christology” — which is simply a term for recognizing the critical part played by the person and work of the Spirit in the person and work of Christ.

Sinclair Ferguson observes three distinct “stages” in the life of Christ, through which we might acknowledge the Spirit’s relationship to the Son (The Holy Spirit, 38–56). Those stages are as follows, with key texts.

1. Conception, Birth, and Growth

As we know from some of our favorite Advent readings, the Holy Spirit is present and pronounced in the angelic announcements to both Mary and Joseph. How will it be, asks Mary, that I, a virgin, will conceive and bear a son? “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you” (Luke 1:35). So too in Matthew’s account about Joseph, the Spirit both frames the report and is explicit in the angelic announcement (Matthew 1:18, 20).

Yet the Spirit is not only present, and explicit, at the conception and birth of Christ, but also specifically prophesied by Isaiah, seven centuries prior, as “resting upon” the coming Anointed One: “The Spirit of the Lord shall rest upon him, the Spirit of wisdom and understanding, the Spirit of counsel and might, the Spirit of knowledge and the fear of the Lord” (Isaiah 11:2).

“God’s word notes again and again the power of the Spirit as Christ’s inseparable companion.”

Now in Jesus of Nazareth, the long-promised shoot from the stump of Jesse has come (Isaiah 11:1), and “the Spirit of wisdom and understanding” upon him is seen even as early as age 12 as Jesus listens in the temple to the teachers and asks them questions. “All who heard him were amazed at his understanding and his answers. And when his parents saw him, they were astonished” (Luke 2:47–48).

Even in childhood, as Jesus “increased in wisdom and in stature and in favor with God and man” (Luke 2:52), he was not on his own but had the Spirit as his “inseparable companion,” as the great Cappadocian theologian Basil of Caesarea (c. 330–379) captured it so memorably.

2. Baptism, Temptations, and Ministry

Isaiah’s prophesied anointing with the Spirit comes to the fore again at the outset of Jesus’s public ministry, beginning with his baptism. The forerunner, John the Baptist, tells of a coming Spirit-baptism that John’s water-baptism anticipated (Luke 3:16). But first, before baptizing others in the Spirit, Jesus himself will be the preeminent Man of the Spirit. When Jesus “had been baptized and was praying, the heavens were opened, and the Holy Spirit descended on him in bodily form, like a dove; and a voice came from heaven, ‘You are my beloved Son; with you I am well pleased’” (Luke 3:21–22; also Matthew 3:16).

Here at the outset of his public ministry, the Spirit descends on him with new fullness for his unique calling, and the voice from heaven first connects the Anointed of Psalm 2 with the Suffering Servant of Isaiah 42. The Servant — and Son — not only enjoys God’s full favor, but he is also the one of whom it is said, “I have put my Spirit upon him” (Isaiah 42:1).

Freshly endowed with (“full of”) the Spirit, Jesus then goes to the wilderness. Not only is he “led by the Spirit” (Luke 4:1; Matthew 4:1) into the wilderness, but as Mark reports, “The Spirit immediately drove him out into the wilderness” (Mark 1:12), not as a retreat but as an advance in war, to encounter the enemy and beginning taking back territory.

Once Christ has returned, victorious in his wilderness test — in the power of the Spirit (Luke 4:14) — he comes to Galilee and to his hometown of Nazareth. In the synagogue, they hand him in the scroll of Isaiah, and what does he read, as the first public act after his baptism? He begins with Isaiah 61:1: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me . . .” (Luke 4:18).

Jesus’s ministry then unfolds in the subsequent pages as by the Spirit he proclaims good news to the poor, liberty to the captives, recovery of sight to the blind, freedom to the oppressed, and the year of the Lord’s favor (Luke 4:18–19; Isaiah 61:1–2). Jesus will testify that it is “by the Spirit of God that I cast out demons” (Matthew 12:28). By the Spirit, he teaches with unusual authority. Fully man, he is fully dependent on his Father — having come not to do his own will but the will of him who sent him (John 6:38). And as Peter one day will summarize his life, in telling his story to Gentiles, “God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Spirit and with power” (Acts 10:38).

In the words of John 3:34, and Isaac Ambrose (1604–1664), Jesus “received the Spirit out of measure; there was in him as much as possibly could be in a creature, and more than in all other creatures whatsoever” (Looking unto Jesus, 280).

3. Death, Resurrection, and Ascension

Significant as the testimony is about the Spirit’s work in Jesus’s childhood and ministry, we might expect that when he comes to die, and rise, and ascend, we would hear about the Spirit here too. Indeed we do. According to Hebrews 9:14, Jesus offered himself for sins at the cross “through the eternal Spirit.” As he set his face like flint toward Jerusalem, mounted the donkey on Palm Sunday, confronted scribes and Pharisees, and prayed with “loud cries and tears” in Gethsemane (Hebrews 5:7), Jesus was anointed, sustained, and strengthened by the Spirit to the end. And beyond.

In his resurrection, Jesus was “vindicated by the Spirit” (1 Timothy 3:16). As Paul writes in Romans 1:4, Jesus “was declared to be the Son of God in power according to the Spirit of holiness by his resurrection from the dead.” And promising a coming of, and baptizing with, the Holy Spirit (Acts 1:5, 8), Jesus ascended to heaven (Acts 1:9), to be glorified at God’s right hand, where he then would pour out the Spirit on those who believe (John 7:37–39; Acts 2:2–4, 17, 33). Amazingly, then, Peter would preach, “Repent and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins, and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit” (Acts 2:38). Now, to receive Christ is to receive the Spirit, and vice versa.

In fact, the Holy Spirit has become such an “inseparable companion” for Christ that we find a striking identification of Jesus and the Spirit in the letters of Paul (1 Corinthians 15:45; 2 Corinthians 3:17–18). Not only is the Holy Spirit now “the Spirit of Jesus” (Philippians 1:19; also Acts 16:7), but the glorified Christ and the poured-out Spirit can be spoken of interchangeably, as in Romans 8:9–11: Christians “have the Spirit of Christ,” and in the Spirit, “Christ is in you.”

Jesus Did Not Cheat

Now back to our original question: How did Jesus walk on water, multiply loaves, and raise the dead? The New Testament witness to the Spirit as Christ’s “inseparable companion” and source of divine power is too pronounced to ignore. Jesus, the God-man, apparently needed the Spirit. The terms of the incarnation, in honoring the fullness of humanity, were that the second person of the Trinity did not immediately provide divine power and help to the human Christ. Rather, he did so mediately through the Spirit. It was the great Puritan theologian John Owen (1616–1683) who perhaps first ventured the formulation that now has stood for almost four centuries: “The only singular immediate act of the person of the Son on the human nature was the assumption of it into subsistence with himself” (The Works of John Owen, 3:160).

“Jesus, the God-man, apparently needed the Spirit.”

In other words, the eternal Son’s only direct act on his human nature was uniting that humanity to himself in the incarnation. “Every other act upon Christ’s human nature,” writes Mark Jones, “was from the Holy Spirit. Christ performed miracles through the power of the Holy Spirit, not immediately by his own divine power” (The Prayers of Jesus, 23). As Jones comments elsewhere, “Christ’s obedience in our place had to be real obedience. He did not cheat by relying on his own divine nature while he acted as the second Adam” (Puritan Theology, 343). The Holy Spirit has accompanied, supplied, and carried the Son in his human nature from conception to childhood to ministry, to the cross and resurrection, and now in his glory, fully endowed as the Man of the Spirit at God’s right hand.

Spirit of Christ in Us

Why make a point of what some might perceive as a technicality? Why note, as Kyle Claunch does, this “marked contrast” between the New Testament emphasis and “the tendency of post-biblical authors, who appeal to the deity of Jesus as the explanation for the extraordinary features of his life and ministry”?

For one, a Spirit Christology demonstrates the genuine humanness of Christ, which is vital not only for our imitation of his life, but even more for his perfect human life to count savingly and uniquely in the place of us sinners. Also, observing the critical place of the Holy Spirit with respect to the humanity of Christ helps us understand the Bible. From Isaiah, to the Gospels and Acts, and the Epistles, God’s word notes again and again, as we’ve seen, the power of the Spirit as Christ’s inseparable companion. If we want to know and understand God’s word, we will not want to read a phrase like “by the Spirit” as white noise but with meaning.

Finally, a Spirit Christology shows us, in a secondary sense, what is possible in us by the same Spirit who dwells in us — not mainly in terms of being the Spirit’s channel for displays of extraordinary power (though we might grow to be expectant of more than we have), but most significantly in terms of holiness and spiritual joy. Jesus was and is unique. The power of the Spirit in his human life pointed to his uniqueness as God. Still, the same Spirit who empowered Jesus’s earthly life, and sacrificial death, and triumphant resurrection, has been given to us today as “the Spirit of Jesus” (Acts 16:7). He not only works on us, and through us, but dwells in us (Romans 8:9, 11; 2 Timothy 1:14). He has been given to us (Luke 11:13; John 7:38–39; Acts 5:32; 15:8; 1 Thessalonians 4:8). We have received him (John 20:22; Acts 2:38; 8:15, 17, 19; 10:47; 19:2; Romans 5:5; 8:15; 1 Corinthians 2:12; 2 Corinthians 5:5; 1 John 3:24), to glorify the Son (John 16:14).

The very power of God himself, in his Spirit, has come to make himself at home in some real degree, and to increasing effect, in us. We are his temple, both individually and collectively (1 Corinthians 3:16; 6:19), and a day is coming when we, like Christ, will reign in glory, fully endowed with the Spirit, to enjoy life, and God in Christ, beyond what we’ve even imagined so far.

A Calvinist friend once asked me what writing projects in history currently occupied my attention. I hesitated to answer as I was certain he would find my present historical focus quite outré. But answer I did (and I was not wrong about the initial response).

I told him that I was writing a variety of essays on the theology of color — not the question of race, I was quick to add, but actual colors. By that point, I had written essays on the colors white, red, and pink, and was hard at work on the color green in the literary corpus of Jonathan Edwards, who believed that green was God’s favorite color. My friend looked at me with some amazement, and I could sense from his face that he thought my interests quite odd.

This small exchange made me realize that for far too many, being a Calvinist was mainly about soteriological matters and not the glory of God in the entirety of life.

Studying in the Spirit

My conversion took place in the mid-1970s in a North American evangelical world convulsed by what has come to be called the Charismatic Movement. I encountered the movement early in my Christian life, and it gave me an abiding interest in the person and work of the Holy Spirit. It should not be surprising, then, that when it came to my doctoral dissertation (written at Wycliffe College and the University of Toronto), I could think to study only something in the realm of the Spirit (pneumatology).

Ultimately, my thesis dealt with what some might regard as an arcane topic: the Pneumatomachian controversy in the fourth century, which was centered on debates about the deity of the Holy Spirit. Specifically, I examined how Scripture shaped the way that two fourth-century Greek theologians, Athanasius of Alexandria (c.299–373) and Basil of Caesarea (c.330–379), thought and wrote about the Spirit’s godhead.

When I graduated from the University of Toronto with my doctorate in 1982, I was extremely blessed to be hired to teach church history at Central Baptist Seminary in Toronto.

What Five Points?

Ted Barton, the academic dean responsible for hiring me, was a tremendous mentor in the first few years of my teaching. When he interviewed me, he asked me, among other topics, what I thought of the “five points of Calvinism.” Amazingly, despite the fact I had earned a doctorate in church history, I had no particular knowledge of these doctrines.

I told Ted that if he let me know what they were, I would be able to answer his question. He said that was fine and quickly passed on to another question without giving me any particulars about these doctrines. The school had been having some problems with Calvinism, and in Ted’s mind, it must have been a good thing that I had no idea what these doctrines were! Within a few years, though, the doctrines had become a very familiar part of my Christian world.

During the 1980s, as I read Puritan authors like John Owen (1616–1683) and Banner of Truth books like The Grace of God in the Gospel, I came to a careful consideration of Reformed truth. Most significantly, at some point in the academic year 1985–1986, I encountered the Calvinistic writings of the Particular Baptist Andrew Fuller (1754–1815).

Fuller not only deepened my understanding of Calvinistic truths about salvation, but he also deepened my commitments as a Baptist (some who become Calvinists gravitate to paedobaptism). He did this by showing me, first of all, that Baptists had a rich heritage: his literary corpus is a robust collection of spirituality, rich in Christ-centeredness and crucicentric, ardent about holiness and the importance of the affections, and aflood with love for the lost, family, and friends.

I had questioned why on earth God had saved me among Canadian evangelical Baptists whose heritage seemed to be limited to an embattled and fissiparous Fundamentalism. Fuller, whose thought drew from the minds of men like John Owen and Jonathan Edwards, showed me that Baptists had a far deeper lineage than the twentieth century.

Ideas in Stone and Color

Most importantly, though, Fuller’s overriding passion to live his life full-out for the glory of God has been central to my own spiritual formation as a Christian and as a historian. For me, that passion for the glory of God in all of life has involved a keen interest in art and architecture.

Now, while Fuller helped me understand that all of life must be lived for the glory of God, he himself could be quite dismissive of various fields of human endeavor. For instance, on one occasion, a friend — probably James Hinton (1761–1823), the Baptist minister of Oxford — was taking Fuller around Oxford University and showing him some of its architectural features. After a while, Fuller apparently turned to his friend and suggested that they return to Hinton’s dwelling to discuss justification by faith, which was far more interesting to the Baptist pastor-theologian.

Well, I think Fuller was wrong to be so dismissive of architecture, which has rightly been described as ideas in stone. As a Reformed church historian, my interests, research, and writing need to take in all of life and not just theology proper, for the simple fact that the entire universe and its various elements are of deep concern to their Creator. He made them and moment by moment sustains them. A growing philosophical interest in the subject of aesthetics helped to make me aware that, in addition to questions of truth and goodness (on which Reformed thinkers and theologians have spent so much time and effort), we who confess divine sovereignty in every sphere of life need to spend energy and time reflecting on the impress of divine beauty on our world.

And here, Jonathan Edwards, the theological mentor to Andrew Fuller, has been enormously helpful. His linkage of the Holy Spirit to divine beauty brought together my interest in things pneumatological with this fascination with created beauty and color — even if I dissent from his estimation of God’s favorite color!

And as to God’s favorite color, that glorious refraction of white light called the rainbow might well offer a clue.

“The world is charged with the grandeur of God.” Perhaps you’ve encountered this famous line penned by Gerard Manley Hopkins. Hopkins aimed all of his poetry at helping people see that we live in a world drenched in divine delights — a world that everywhere reveals the glory of God. That is a wonderful reality, but for the child of God, the wonder goes even deeper.

For the Christian, the glory revealed in the world is not the glory of some generic deity; it is the goodness of our happy Father. “The earth is full of the lovingkindness of the Lord” (Psalm 33:5 NASB). And so, the pleasures we experience in the world are paternal pleasures. The beauty of the world is our Father’s smile in stuff. And, wonder of wonders, our Father delights in our delight in his gifts. Like a happy dad on Christmas morning, the Father of lights lavishes on us all things richly to enjoy so that we might be happy in the Giver of all good things (James 1:17). Who then could resist reveling in the pleasures of God?

We do — daily! Like fussy children, aren’t we often too greedy or self-focused or distracted to enjoy our Father in his gifts? Consider yourself for a moment. Did you enjoy the sunrise this morning? I’m not just asking if you saw it. No, did you marvel as the sun vaulted the horizon? Did you delight in the fanfare of light and color? Or maybe you’re not the “outdoors type.” In that case, did you find pleasure in a cup of coffee? Or the comfort of a good pair of socks? Or the smile of your child? Did you really attend to any of our Father’s gifts?

As you can see, there is a reason C.S. Lewis called enjoying God the difficult discipline of hedonism. Joy is hard work, but eternally worthwhile. In Letters to Malcolm, Lewis writes, “We may ignore, but we can nowhere evade the presence of God. The world is crowded with Him. He walks everywhere incognito” (101). And pleasures are his footprints, reminding us that he is here. “Pleasures are shafts of the glory as it strikes our sensibilities” (121).

So, if Lewis is right, if we can nowhere evade the presence of God, then how do we so often — consciously or unconsciously — evade the pleasures of God? How are we so easily distracted from enjoying our Father’s gifts? Lewis gives three reasons well worth pondering.

Greed

Lewis starts with low-hanging fruit: greed. Why? Because greed corrupts the pleasures of God by seizing them in degrees, times, or manners outside of God’s design. We are all prone to wander into those wonderless sins.

Greed is a scaly beast. It stashes and hoards and sleeps on treasure. Greed is always hungry, always demanding more. Lewis calls this the demand of Encore. That fatal word encore knows no boundaries. It recognizes no proper times or rhythms. It always overeats. It loves to say “just one more.”

Unfortunately, almost all of our consumer society aims to allow us to demand encore in a voice that cannot be gainsaid. And the dragon fusses — and fusses loudly — if the demand is denied. Yet Lewis doubts that God ever fulfills this desire for encore. “How should the Infinite repeat Himself? All space and time are too little for Him to utter Himself in them once” (35). Ironically, the demand for encore is too easily pleased! God wants to give more than we desire to get. How many present pleasures do we render rotten by demanding again and again what God once gave?

But greed does not always announce itself in fire and destruction. Perhaps the sneakiest form of greed comes when we use God’s gifts without enjoying them for what they are, giving no heed to what Lewis called “the quiddity” of things (Surprised by Joy, 244). When we indulge this form of greed, we force honey to school us about wisdom without ever actually tasting the honey-ness of honey (Proverbs 24:13–14). We order birds to soothe our anxiety without ever delighting in bird-ish beauty (Luke 12:24). We close the sun into the classroom of theology without ever basking in his sunny glory or his Eric-Liddell-like delight (Psalm 19:5). We should delight that things are before we seek to use them. As Chesterton once said, we must take fierce pleasure in things being themselves. Here there be pleasures the dragon never knows.

“God is eternally, graciously, stunningly generous with his pleasures.”

God is eternally, graciously, stunningly generous with his pleasures. The daily sunrise says so. And as Thomas Traherne — who was one of Lewis’s great inspirations — points out in his book Centuries, we are not yet nearly as happy as he means us to be. What an antidote to sticky fingers, the itch for encore, and the pragmatic misuse of God’s good gifts!

Self-Focus

According to Lewis, the wrong kind of attention also distracts us from the pleasures of God. He explains that this kind of attention subjectifies pleasures. It turns from the sunrise (the object) to try to see what’s happening in me (the subject).

We’ve all had the experience of turning inward to grasp a feeling only to have it slip through our fingers. I suspect this dynamic is often at the root when Christians struggle with assurance. A saint looks inward to find evidence of faith and discovers faded footprints in the sand because his gaze has left the object of faith. He has ceased to attend to Christ.

Pleasures, just like faith, are object dependent. When you stop looking at the sunrise to ask, Am I really enjoying it? you lose the whole pith and pleasure of the sunrise. Thus, self-focus, the wrong kind of attention, can gut the pleasures of God. This scoliosis of the soul can be traced right back to the garden, which led the ancients to call man homo incurvatus in se — man bent in on himself. So, how do we become unbent?

Ultimately, only the Spirit of God can rip our attention off self and rivet it on God. But Traherne provides a way to act that miracle: lose your “self” in wonder. “When you enter into [God’s world],” Traherne writes, “it is an illimited field of Variety and Beauty: where you may lose yourself in the multitude of Wonders and Delights. But it is a happy loss to lose oneself in admiration . . . and to find God in exchange for oneself, which we then do when we see Him in His gifts, and adore His glory” (9). Childlike wonder crowds out selfishness and makes room for divine pleasures to enchant us to God.

Familiarity

Finally, Lewis warns that inattention is the greatest enemy to the pleasures of God because, over time, we fail to see what we see. Like an old bungee cord, our senses become slack — our vision veiled by familiarity. What we once enjoyed with assiduous attentiveness soon fades to the background like art on a hallway wall. Traherne warns us, “The most beautiful object being always present, grows common and despised. . . . Were we to see it only once, that first appearance would amaze us. But being daily seen, we observe it not” (65). In our fallen state, the current of human sensibility ever drifts toward this negligence.

Let me try to prove this. Have you walked past a tree today? Did you see it? If you’re like me, you didn’t even notice. But what a fantastic work of the triune imagination. This star-powered wood-tower becomes a pillar of Eden in summer, a heaven-high flower in fall, a snow-robed statue in winter, and a living signpost of hope in spring. Just imagine a world without trees! Yet we observe them not.

Just here, the poets are so helpful because, as Samuel Taylor Coleridge explains, poetry aims to “give the charm of novelty to things of every day . . . by awakening the mind’s attention to the lethargy of custom, and directing it to the loveliness and the wonders of the world before us, an inexhaustible treasure” (Biographia Literaria, 208). Poetry — perhaps preeminently — arrests our attention and helps us savor the pleasures of God.

The Psalms do this so well. These inspired poets awaken us to men that bear fruit like trees (Psalm 1:3), to the sun that runs across the sky like a giddy bridegroom (Psalm 19:5), to the moon and sundry stars that hold court at night (Psalm 136:9), to wind heaped up in heavenly storehouses (Psalm 135:7), and, of course, to the sea, that fathomless playground of Leviathan (Psalm 104:26). In this theatre of glory, we shall never starve for want of wonders. If we had but Spirit-opened eyes, we would out-awe the angels. “The real labor,” according to Lewis, “is to remember, to attend. In fact, to come awake. Still more, to remain awake” (Letters to Malcolm, 101).

The pleasures of God are good — in the full, fat, dripping sense of the word — but they require work. Joy is indeed a difficult discipline. Greed, self-centeredness, and the relentless pull of inattention constantly creep in and cut us off from divine delights. Therefore, Traherne exhorts us, “Apply yourself vigorously to the enjoyment of [God’s world]” (63).