Let's go back to the beginning, the very start of creation. We are told that God spoke our world into being. God spoke, and it was so.
Genesis 1:1-2 "1 In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. 2 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."
In the very first verse of the Bible, in Genesis 1:1, we find God creating the earth. In verse two we find the Spirit of God moving upon the face of the waters. Note, it says "the Spirit of God", not "God the Holy Spirit" - we must read what it actually says.
Now creation has been attributed to the Holy Spirit as much as to the Father and the Son, due to the above text. But what the reader sometimes fails to acknowledge is the possessive terminology used in the above verse. In this verse the possessive is used: "The Spirit of God". It does not say "God the Spirit". We read in the Psalms...
Psalms 33:6 "By the word of the LORD were the heavens made; and all the host of them by the breath of his mouth."
The Hebrew word for "breath" is "ruach", which is the same word translated "spirit". When we look at the original language, the meaning should be clear - the spirit of God is the breath of God. This is confirmed further by Jesus in the New Testament...
John 20:22 "And when he had said this, he breathed on them, and saith unto them, Receive ye the Holy Ghost."
The words "ruach" in the Hebrew and "pneuma" in the Greek both actually mean wind, breath, air in motion - the very breath of God. This is why Jesus breathes the Spirit on the disciples in John 20 - Jesus breathed His own Spirit.
Imagine the breath of the almighty God. If God has the power to create the heavens and earth simply by speaking, the power of the Spirit being breathed into a room would have been overwhelming. It truly would have been like the "rush of a violent wind."
So we see that this is not someone else. It is this same spirit that is mentioned in Genesis 1:2. It is the "Spirit of God", which can also be translated "breath of God".
It also means "life." By resemblance to breath and air in motion, it means "spirit." That's where we get the translation, and the Hebrew word contains all those different meanings. If we just leave it with our English word "spirit", we are not getting the full meaning of what the Bible is trying to describe. It's trying to describe that there's a breath involved.
So in Genesis 1:1-2, if we now use the Hebrew word for Spirit it would read...
Genesis 1:1-2 "1 In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. 2 And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Breath of God moved upon the face of the waters."
Now if the Spirit of God, the breath of God, was hovering over the face of the deep, and then God said, "Let there be light", when you speak it's through your breath that the words take form. Just imagine that: God speaking, His breath comes out, and there was light.
Let's transfer this concept into the New Testament, because we have almost the same thing where Jesus is talking about the Holy Spirit. In John He says...
John 3:6-8 "6 That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit. 7 Do not marvel that I said to you, 'You must be born again.' 8 The wind blows where it wishes, and you hear the sound of it, but cannot tell where it comes from and where it goes. So is everyone who is born of the Spirit." (NKJV)
Here Jesus is talking about the Holy Spirit, and He's saying that it's like the wind. Again it's the word "pneuma", which means "a current of air", "breath", or a "breeze", and again by analogy, "a spirit". So the Hebrew word "ruach" and the Greek word "pneuma" both refer to breath, or wind.
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