The Mystery of the Holy Spirit Pt. 2

I’m definitely not a scholar of the Hebrew language or of any language…or of anything really, now that I think about it. But I am kind of a word guy. So I feel like I learned something helpful about the Holy Spirit by taking some time to study the Hebrew word, “Ruakh.”

Ruakh means breath, wind, and Spirit. It means all 3 things…and not in a way that’s like a quirk of language. Like for some reason, in English, the word “nail” somehow means both a small, metal fastener you hit with a hammer and the weird, kind of hard things we all have at the tips of our toes and fingers. Or how the word “trunk” somehow means the thing at the back of your car where you put stuff, the bottom part of a tree, and the clothes a dude wears when he goes swimming. Those are just quirks of the English language that those same words mean so many different things. Ruakh isn’t like that. It means breath, wind, and Spirit, because in the minds of the Ancient Israelites all of those things were actually connected. They were all one concept.

The ancient Israelites, as all ancient people, were very connected to the world around them, to God’s creation, much more than we are today. Today, we have a more scientific, observational, more disconnected relationship with nature. The Ancient Israelites understood that they had breath inside their bodies and that they breathed it out into the world and that there was breath out in the world that they breathed into their bodies. It was this mysterious, invisible breath that connected them to all of creation. And they noticed that other people, too, breathed in and out in the same way. And the animals. And even the trees seemed to breathe as the wind moved through their branches. They understood that the breath in their bodies and the wind that shook the trees were both the same thing. And then beyond that, they realized that when they stopped breathing, when they stopped sharing breath with all of creation, they died. That was the end of life. So this mysterious, invisible breath that connected them to all of creation was also a life-giving force. It was nothing less than the Spirit of God – the force that animates and connects all things and brings meaning and purpose and movement into the world.

So breath, wind, and Spirit are all the same thing. They are all the presence of God, the life-giving work of God on Earth. And the paths and patterns of the wind are mysterious, beyond the realm of human control and understanding – just as the ways of God are beyond our control and understanding.

At least, that’s the origin, the wellspring, of our understanding of what and who the Spirit is.