God the Spirit: Revealer of Wisdom and Resurrector of the Dead

The Holy Spirit is easily the most misunderstood and neglected person of the Trinity.

Many mistake the Spirit as little more than an impersonal force. Others relegate him to the realm of sensational or mystical experiences. The Reformed tradition in which I stand frequently tends to neglect the work of the Spirit out of a desire to avoid Charismatic or Pentecostal error.

The Bible teaches that the Holy Spirit is the third person of the Godhead who plays a critical part in Christian discipleship. First Corinthians offers at least two compelling reasons to affirm the Spirit’s deity.

Robert Ingersoll, known as the Great Agnostic, once asked, “Is it possible for the human mind to conceive of an infinite personality? Can it imagine a beginningless being, infinitely powerful and intelligent?” He stood in a line of sceptics and agnostics who claimed that it is folly to think we can know God.

Religion is built around the quest to know God. We cannot properly worship what we do not know. Different traditions approach this quest in different ways. Mysticism offers experiences. Reason offers systems. The Bible insists that these efforts are futile apart from divine revelation. And it teaches that the one who reveals God to us is God himself—in the person of the Holy Spirit.

In 1 Corinthians 2:9–16, Paul offers an argument for the Spirit’s role as the divine revealer of truth. Embedded within his argument is a fundamental claim about the identity of the Spirit. For Paul, the Spirit’s ability to reveal God is inseparable from the Spirit’s identity as God.

Paul cites Isaiah 64, capturing the inaccessibility of what God has prepared for those who love him: “What no eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the heart of man imagined, what God has prepared for those who love him” (v. 9). God’s saving purposes are not merely difficult for human beings to discover—they are impossible. No amount of observation, experience, or imagination can arrive at God’s wisdom. It lies beyond us.

This is not simply a statement about human intellectual limitation. It is a statement about the nature of God himself. God is not merely more complex than we are; he is other. The creature, however gifted or brilliant, cannot fully grasp the Creator’s mind. Left to ourselves, we are not merely uninformed about God—we are incapable of knowing him.

But God, who wants to be known, has revealed himself, and has given his Spirit to illumine the understanding of his people.

The things we cannot grasp by our own ability “God has revealed to us through the Spirit. For the Spirit searches everything, even the depths of God” (v. 10). The word “searches” does not suggest that the Spirit is somehow investigating what he does not yet know. On the contrary, it conveys exhaustive, intimate familiarity. David described the Lord as the one who “searches all hearts and understands every plan and thought” (1 Chronicles 28:9). Jesus Christ is the one who “searches mind and heart” (Revelation 2:23). In the same way, the Spirit has full and unhindered access to God’s being, mind, and purposes.

Paul presses this in v. 11: “For who knows a person’s thoughts except the spirit of that person, which is in him? So also no one comprehends the thoughts of God except the Spirit of God.” A person’s inner life—motivations, fears, private reasoning—is known fully only to that person. An outside observer can guess, infer, or speculate, but cannot truly know another person from the inside.

Paul applies this logic to God. The depths of God are known only to the Spirit of God. The argument carries enormous theological weight. If only God’s Spirit knows God from the inside, then the Spirit is not a creature standing outside God and peering in. He is not an angelic intermediary with privileged access. He is not an impersonal force. He is, in the most proper sense, internal to God. He shares the divine nature. He is God. The Spirit can reveal God because the Spirit is God. To grant the Spirit’s revelatory capacity is to grant his deity.

In the same letter, Paul offers a second theological affirmation of the Spirit’s deity. In an extended discussion on the reality of resurrection, he writes, “Thus it is written, ‘The first man Adam became a living being’; the last Adam became a life-giving spirit” (15:45). In drawing a contrast between Adam and Christ—between the old humanity and the new—he makes a fascinating claim about the Spirit.

Adam, according to Genesis 2:7, “became a living being” when God breathed into his nostrils. But his life was dependent on his Creator.

Christ is different. The last Adam—Jesus Christ—did not become a living being; he “became a life-giving spirit.” He is not a receiver of life, but the giver of it. He is not dependent upon another for his existence, but the very source from which resurrection life flows to others.

Giving life, of course, is a divine prerogative (1 Samuel 2:6; Genesis 2:7; Ezekiel 37:12–14). Creatures do not give life; God does.

When Paul says that the risen Christ became a life-giving spirit, he is ascribing to Christ Godhood. But what does this have to do with the Spirit? The consistent testimony of the New Testament is that the Holy Spirit is the one through whom the life of the risen and glorified Christ reaches his people.

Paul makes the connection explicit in Romans 8:11, where he writes: “If the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, he who raised Christ Jesus from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through his Spirit who dwells in you.” The Spirit is the agent of resurrection, both present and future. He is the one who now imparts to believers the firstfruits of the life to come, and he will be the one who raises their mortal bodies at the last day. That is divine work.

Importantly, as we return to 1 Corinthians 15, the resurrection is to embodied life (vv. 44–45). The resurrected body is different in that it is suited for eternity (“spiritual”) rather than time (“natural”), but it is a physical body nonetheless.

In this way, the Spirit is doing something that only the Creator can do—not reversing creation, but completing and glorifying it. He is not merely a power at work in the world. He is the God through whom new creation comes into being. For now, we live in a natural body in time, subject to weakness, decay, and death. At the resurrection, we will receive a spiritual body, perfect in every way, free from this life’s consequences of sin.

This means that the Spirit, in his present indwelling work, functions as a pledge—what Paul elsewhere calls a “guarantee” or “down payment” (2 Corinthians 1:22; 5:5; Ephesians 1:14). The Spirit is God’s own pledge that he will complete what he has begun.

This gives the Christian life both its present shape and its future hope. Presently, the Spirit is at work in believers through the word, prayer, and fellowship, conforming them to the image of Christ. At the resurrection, the Spirit will complete what he has begun, raising mortal bodies in imperishable glory and presenting a people fully conformed to the Son of God.

The Holy Spirit is not a force or a power. He is not merely God’s influence at work in the world. He is the divine person who reveals God to his people and through whom the life of the risen Christ—the life-giving last Adam—reaches his people. He reveals who God is and gives what only God can give: life from the dead. In doing these things, he bears witness to his own identity as the living God.