Written by Nicholas T. Batzig |
Thursday, December 23, 2021
The Son of God purchased the Holy Spirit, and His regenerating work, for all those for whom He died. The Spirit now comes and fills the hearts of believers. He forms the Son of God in our hearts, even as He formed the human nature of the Son of God in the womb of the virgin. The end result is that we too become sons and heirs of God. We have new life breathed into us. 

Everybody knows that virgins don’t conceive! Mary certainly knew that. After all, she asked the Angel Gabriel at the announcement that she would conceive and bear a Son, “How can this be, since I do not know a man” (Luke 1:34)? The answer is, of course, the same as that which is given to the question surrounding the mysterious miracle working of God at creation. Here, it is the mysterious miracle working of God in the new creation. “The Holy Spirit…will overshadow you” (Luke 1:25). Just as the Spirit hovered over the waters of creation, so He hovered over the virgin Mary at the great work of bringing about the new creation through the incarnation of the Son of God. The Scriptures are replete with instances in which the Holy Spirit was actively working to foreshadow the new creation in a manner similar to that by which He had worked at the original creation. Consider the following:
Creation
“The Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters” are some of the first words of Scripture. With each creative word, the Holy Spirit was bringing about what the Father had ordained and the Son had spoken into existence. The Scriptures are clear that the Holy Spirit is the creative agent of the Godhead. Concerning all living things, we read, “You send forth Your Spirit, they are created; and You renew the face of the earth” (Ps. 104:30). The importance of the Spirit’s role in creation is understood as we consider His role in the work of the new creation.
Typical New Creation
When God destroyed the world with floodwaters (i.e. the undoing of creational blessing), He covered the world with the waters that He had separated when He created the world. With the flood, there was judgment and curse with the same waters from which life and blessing had once emerged. When God had mercy on Noah and those with him in the Ark, He sent a strong wind to blow across the face of the waters. Stephen Dempster makes the following important observation: “Following the flood, which is represented as a return to the pre-creation chaos of Genesis 1:2, a new creation occurs with the presence of the Spirit of God pushing back the primal waters (Gen. 8:1).”1 The Hebrew word for “wind” and ” Spirit” are one and the same–or, at least, have the same root. There is an intentional relation of the wind and the Spirit by our Lord Jesus in His regeneration discourse with Nicodemus in John 3.
The next typical act of re-creation (or new creation) in Scripture is the Exodus. When God brings Israel through the waters of the Red Sea, it is hard for us not to see the similarity of language between the creation account and this great typical act of redemption in the OT. We are told that God caused the waters to blow back by a strong wind . In the same way as the waters were parted at creation, so they were parted at the Exodus. Then, dry land appeared. The Holy Spirit was effecting this typical new creation. Israel coming through the Red Sea, and their enemies being destroyed in the waters (as God’s enemies had been destroyed in the flood water) was a picture of death and resurrection. There were to come through the waters and be a new people to the Lord God.
New Creation
It should not surprise us to find the Spirit at work from the very beginning of our Lord Jesus’ life and ministry. The Spirit was the One who filled Mary, Elizabeth and Zacharias as they prophesied about the Redeemer and His forerunner.
However, the great appeal to the Holy Spirit in the incarnation comes when the Angel Gabriel told Mary that “the Holy Spirit…will overshadow you.” As He hovered over the waters at creation, the flood, the exodus, so now He would come over the womb of the virgin and begin the work of bringing about the new creation through the incarnate Christ.
Sinclair Ferguson captures the relationship between the miracle of creation and the miracle of the incarnation so well when he notes:
“We are meant to be staggered…We tend to pride ourselves that we know this so well; and we say, “It doesn’t stagger me that He was virgin born.” It staggered Joseph that He was virgin born. It staggered Mary that He was virgin born. “She pondered these things.” It staggered Matthew; and, it ought to stagger us. We ought to understand that this is a singularity in the history of the universe, that this is unique, because this is Emmanuel–this is God entering our world. Of course, God has been present working in history, governing history; but what happens here is that He actually becomes part of history.
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Our goal is to work toward the right way for Christians to think biblically about angels and properly relate to them. The biblical response to these heavenly beings is somewhere between worship and obsession on the one hand, and a total denial of their existence on the other. Christians can learn from Scripture how to relate to angels as they follow the great God and Savior of the world.

What Are Angels?
While God’s word does not offer us a detailed description of how and when God made the angels, or of what exactly they look like, we can nevertheless gather truths and principles from various Scripture passages that teach us about these beings that are in eternal service of God.
You have probably seen pictures, movies, or cartoons portraying angels, but it’s likely that none of them portrayed angels in any way close to what they are actually like! What does the Bible say?
Angels are created beings. First, the Bible is clear that angels, like humans, are created and living beings, made by God. In Psalm 8, the psalmist points out that human beings have been made “a little lower” than the angels and “crowned . . . with glory and honor” (Ps. 8:5).
Angels, then, have greater glory and honor than humans; it is noteworthy that the natural human response to these beings when they appear is first fear and then worship. Nevertheless, angels were created by God, and therefore are less than God. They are another kind of living being that God made.
Angels are eternal, nonmortal beings. Jesus makes it clear that angels—unlike human beings—are eternal and nonmortal (they do not share in human institutions such as marriage, for example; see Matt. 22:30). Angels were created by God to live forever; they do not grow old and die. While it seems that angels can certainly take on physical form, they are spiritual beings.
Angels are servants of God. Primarily, angels were created by God to be his servants (we will talk much more about what their service looks like in the next section). You saw this in the passage from Revelation 22 that you read just above. John was tempted, as we discussed above, to bow down and worship the angel who was showing him this vision of heaven. The angel stopped him, though, reminding him that, although glorious, he was nothing more than a “fellow servant” of God with John (Rev. 22:9). Angels are not to be worshiped; they are servants of God, who alone is worthy of worship and praise.
Angels dwell in heaven with God. Angels, unlike human beings, never have lived on earth and never have been subject to the fall in the same way that human beings are. Angels, then, do not have sinful natures; they are not guilty of sin, rebellion, and death. We know this because they are portrayed (in Rev. 4, for example) as dwelling closely with the holy God in heaven. Sinful beings would not be able to do that! So the permanent dwelling place for angels is in heaven with God.
The Purpose of Angels
Now that we have considered what angels are, we are going to dig a bit deeper into their purpose, as we see it revealed in the Bible. We will identify several of the chief roles that we see angels filling in Scripture as they obey God and help his work to move forward in the world he made. While we are not certain about the work of angels in the world today, we can look at how they have worked throughout the history of God’s people.
Above all, the Bible presents angels to us as servants of God. This was the point that the angel in Revelation made clear to John when John attempted to worship him (Rev. 22:9). But what do these servants do? What is their purpose? In the Bible, we see them acting in several key ways:

Announcement. This is the purpose that you saw in the passage from Luke that you read just above. The angel Gabriel (one of the few angels who is named in Scripture) was sent to Mary to announce the coming birth of Jesus Christ, God’s Son.

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When women pray and prophesy in the assembly, they must do so with some sign that signifies their authority to do so. In other words, something must tell the congregation, “This woman speaking in public is not throwing off her role as the glory of man. She is still in submission to her husband (if she has one), and therefore has authority to speak.” Maybe this symbol is a wedding ring, or the way she dresses, or taking her husband’s last name (in some cultures), or a well-known demeanor of gentleness and respect.

Q: What does it mean that the husband is the head of his wife?
A: I want you to understand that the head of every man is Christ, the head of a wife is her husband, and the head of Christ is God (1 Cor.11:3).
Verse 3 outlines a series of overlapping relationships: “The head of every man is Christ, the head of a wife is her husband, and the head of Christ is God.” Anyone familiar with the scholarship on this issue knows that the little word “head” (kephale) has killed a lot of trees. Scholars, using their expertise in Greek and the latest computer software, have gone back and forth in articles and books arguing whether kephale means “authority over” or “source” (like the head of a river is its source). Others have argued that the word means “prominent,” “preeminent” or “foremost.” In the end, the context suggests that kephale in verse 3 must have something to do with authority. Roy Ciampa and Brian Rosner are right:
Even if by “head” Paul means “more prominent/preeminent partner” or (less likely) “one through whom the other exists,” his language and the flow of the argument seem to reflect an assumed hierarchy through which glory and shame flow upward from those with lower status to those above them. In this context the word almost certainly refers to one with authority over the other.1
Furthermore, we have other examples in Paul’s writings where kephale must mean something like “authority over.” In Ephesians 1, Paul says that Christ has been seated at God’s right hand in the heavenly places, far above all rule and authority and power and dominion, and all things have been placed under his feet, and he has been made head (kephale) over all things to the church (Eph. 1:20–22). The context demands that kephale refer to Christ’s authority over the church, not merely that the church has its origin in Christ. Likewise, in Ephesians 5 Paul says wives are to submit to their husbands, for the husband is the head of the wife even as Christ is the head of the church (Eph. 5:22–23). Citing the headship of the husband as a reason for the wife’s submission makes little sense if headship implies only source or origin without any reference to male leadership. Kephale, in at least these two instances in Ephesians, must mean “authority over.” And there are no grammatical or contextual reasons to think that Paul is using kephale in a different way in 1 Corinthians 11.
Therefore, we should understand 1 Corinthians 11:3 as saying that Christ has authority over mankind; the husband has authority over his wife (the Greek words for man and woman are the same for husband and wife); and God has authority over Christ. Thus, we have male and female—equal and interdependent (1 Cor. 11:11–12)—relating to one another within a differentiated order.
In previous years, some complementarians made too much of the fact that Paul relates the husband-wife relationship to the headship of God over Christ. To be sure, there is an important point to be made from the God-Christ parallel in verse 3—namely, that headship does not imply ontological inferiority. To have authority over someone—to be head of another—is not inconsistent with equality of worth, honor, and essence. But even here we should be careful to note that there is an “economic” expression of the Son in view in verse 3 (“Christ”), not an immanent or ontological expression (e.g., “Son”). We should not use the Trinity “as our model” for the marriage relationship, both because it is not necessary for complementarianism to be true and because the metaphysical inner workings of the ineffable Trinity do not readily allow for easy lifestyle applications. In fact, it is striking how the New Testament often grounds ethical imperatives in the gospel (e.g., marriage as an outworking of Christ and the church), but never in the eternal “ordering” of God.
If we are talking about the economic Trinity—the activity of God and the work of the three persons in creation and redemption—we can certainly say that the Son acts from the Father, while the Father does not act from the Son. There is an eternal ordering (taxis) of the Trinity that finds expression in time. And yet the language of the eternal subordination of the Son is not the best language to describe this order, nor do we ever see in Nicene tradition that the persons of the Trinity are distinguished by a relationship of authority and submission. Traditionally, the way in which the persons of the Godhead have been distinguished—and technically, they are distinct (which suggests three hypostases) not different (which would suggest another ousia)—is not by roles or by eternal relations of authority and submission, but by paternity, filiation, and spiration. To put it another way, the Father is the Father (and not the Son or the Spirit), the Son is the Son (and not the Father or the Spirit), and the Spirit is the Spirit (and not the Father or the Son) by virtue of the Father’s unbegottenness as Father, the Son’s generation from the Father, and the Spirit’s procession from the Father and the Son.
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