“And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.”

(Genesis 1:1-2)

The Quaker philosopher, Rufus Jones, once had the impulse to start a Sunday school among the children on a small island just off the coast of Maine where he was vacationing. He saw the crowds of children and discovered there was no church on the island. So he decided to gather the children for a Sunday school.

But he had noticed that “this particular island was a tiny one, so small in fact, that the surrounding ocean could be seen from every part of it.” The little children of the island played among the scrubby trees, the sand dunes, the fishnets and lobster pots and the fishing boats along the shore. Nowhere on their island could they go to escape the sea. “It resounded in their ears when they awoke in the morning, and it was the last sound they heard as they dropped off to sleep at night. From every rock and knoll and hillock of their small domain they could see it, and taste and smell its salty tang. It was the almost exclusive source of their daily food. Their first adventure and their only excursions from home were upon its heaving surface.”

So, when Rufus Jones gathered these children of the tiny Maine island together to begin the first session of their Sunday school, he thought it would be best to start, not with some strange spiritual lesson, but with something familiar in their own experience. Therefore, he said to them: “How many of you have ever seen the Atlantic Ocean?” “If you have, please raise your hands, as I do, for I have seen it.” To his surprise, not a hand went up. They looked at him stolidly, not knowing in the least what he was talking about.

“They had been born by the shore of the Atlantic Ocean, they had lived by it and enjoyed its beauty, they had boated on it and bathed in it, been fed by food drawn from it daily, but nobody had named it to them before, or interpreted it to their minds.”

How like those children are we who live out our days with such small recognition of the fact that the tiny island of our spirit, “over which we exercise control and dominion, is ringed about and surrounded by an inner world of Spirit, from which we draw our central being and to which we owe all the functions of our reason, all the enjoyment of beauty, all our capacity for love, all our certitude of truth, all our power to expand life in ideal directions, and all our transcendent hope and faith.” (Spiritual Energies in Daily Life — Rufus Jones)

We live and move and have our being in and through and by virtue of that surrounding and enveloping sea of Spirit, and yet it is possible to live sundered from that environing life of the Spirit and to be wholly unaware and unconscious of the Near Presence.

The Bible has been called the Book of the Spirit. Its writers have been acutely aware of this surrounding, supporting, superintending Spirit. Their whole passion seems to be to give their witness to the reality and nature of this immanent and transcendent Spirit. They do not fabricate metaphysical arguments to prove logically the existence of this Supreme Spirit of the universe. Rather, they describe their experience of the varied character of the Spirit’s activity.

But to what, specifically, do the scripture writers point, as the characteristic, observable activities of the moving Spirit of God?

First, there is creation, the bringing into existence and ordering of the whole universe. This, the Bible says, is the work of the Spirit. The earliest writers of the scripture were impressed by the mystery and order of the created world about them. “What is it that ceaselessly maintains the rhythm of night and day, of spring and summer, autumn and winter, of the ebb and flow of the tides, and the rising and the setting of the sun? What is it that maintains the order of the heavens, in which the heavenly bodies abide unalterably in their own paths? … The answer of the Old Testament thinker is that the Spirit of God brought order into chaos, and maintains the order of the world.” (Barclay — The Promise of the Spirit, p. 12-13) The author of the creation story, in the first chapter of Genesis, explains it thus: “The Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters,” and the majestic procession of intelligent creation proceeded from the Creator Spirit.

The breath of life itself is breathed into all animate creatures by the moving Spirit of God. When He takes that Spirit away, the creature turns to dust.

Furthermore, according to the scriptures, it is the superintending activity of the Spirit which sustains and preserves all life in man and beasts. A young man was showing me some trophies in a hunting lodge. “That’s a caribou,” he said, pointing to an antlered head mounted above a door. Then my guide asked me: “Do you see that little hand-shaped branch from one of the antlers that protrudes down across the forehead between the eyes? Well, that is what the caribou uses to brush away the snow and ice from the vegetation on which he feeds.”

I could not refrain from asking myself: “Whence came this special piece of equipment for existence of this species living in the frozen wastelands?” No special intelligence of the caribou worked out the idea and set about growing it. The Biblical explanation would be that this special equipment had to come from a superintending higher intelligence that both cares for the caribou and his continued life and also knows what will satisfy his hunger and result in his sustenance — in short, the moving Spirit of God.

But even more wonderful for the writers of scripture than the creating activity of the moving Spirit of God is the recreating presence and power of God’s Spirit in human nature.

How account for changed men and women? What is it that turns a person from selfishness to selflessness, from cruelty to kindness, from cowardice to courage? The promise to young Saul of Kish is that “When the Spirit of the Lord has come upon you, you will be turned into another man.” (I Samuel 10:6)

The moving Spirit of God transforms the Spirit of man and the inspired writers of scripture have no confidence in any other force to recreate man. The penitent David, sorely conscious of his sins and his inability to handle the guilt and shame and power of evil in his own life, cries out: “Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me.” (Psalm 51:10)

Furthermore, the scriptures understand the moving Spirit of God to be the determining factor in the leadership of men and nations.

The  men and women who emerge in Israel’s history at times of national emergency and crisis are invariably described as those people “upon whom the Spirit of the Lord has come”, or as “people filled with the Spirit.” Gideon, Othniel, Jepthah, Sampson, Deborah, and others in the period of the Judges — an epoch of very primitive, tribal warfare — are all individuals who lead God’s people and deliver them from their enemies because the Lord has filled them with His Spirit to equip them for this service.

“The conviction of the Old Testament is that no person can do the work of God without the Spirit of God, that no one can lead others in God’s way unless that one is led by the Spirit of God. There is no greater problem today in every sphere of life than the problem of leadership. That problem cannot be solved apart from the Spirit of God.” (Barclay — Ibid. p. 15)

Some of you will remember the faint gleam of hope that was flashed into those dark and troubled days after World War II when Winston Churchill, in his famous Iron Curtain Address at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, expressed his belief that from some unseen quarter there might rise in the future some leader — perhaps in Russia, or China, or the U. S. A., or some yet unborn empire, who would become the fulcrum of destiny because the Spirit of the Lord would be mightily upon him to lift that Iron Curtain of division between the super powers of the earth. And you and I have been witnessing in the last few months the rise of those new inspired leaders who seek peace and pursue friendship among all the peoples of the earth.

“It was told of D. L. Moody that, in his early days, the thought came to him: ‘What could God do with a man if a man would submit himself wholly and entirely to the Spirit of God?’ Then came the challenge to Moody, himself, ‘Why should I not be that man?’ And history knows what the Spirit of God did with D. L. Moody. The man who is dedicated to leadership must be first dedicated to the Spirit of God. The clamant need for both church and state is for men and women who are possessed by the Spirit, for without the Spirit no amount of intellectual power, no amount of administrative ability, not even the capacity to toil, will suffice.” (William Barclay — The Promise of the Spirit, p. 15)

In the Old Testament, the moving Spirit of God is specially connected with the gift of prophecy. It is the Spirit that makes a person a prophet and gives the prophet the divine message. The Nicene Creed, in professing faith in the Holy Spirit and defining His activity, affirms: “I believe in the Holy Ghost, the Lord and Giver of life … who spoke by the prophets.”

Amos, the rough herdsman of Tekoa, insists that neither training nor family inheritance made him a prophet, but rather the unpredictable, moving, brooding Spirit of the Lord came upon him, gave him a message, and compelled him to deliver it.

Sometimes the prophet is reluctant to receive and proclaim the message the Spirit brings him, as was Jeremiah who pleads to be spared; or Isaiah who argued that the people would not listen; or Jonah who did not share God’s concern for the redemption of the wicked Ninevites.

Sometimes the given message is one of comfort and consolation and promise, as was Isaiah’s: “Comfort ye, comfort ye, my people, saith your God. Speak ye comfortably unto Jerusalem and say unto her that her sin is forgiven and her iniquity is pardoned.” Sometimes the message is one of rebuke and warning and condemnation, as was Amos’: “Ye have sold the poor for a pair of shoes — you have obstructed justice — you will be carried away into captivity.”

“But the message of the Spirit to the prophets is never an orthodox irrelevancy; it is always a tract for the times.” (Barclay — Ibid.)

And the Old Testament hope for the future is that the gift of prophecy in the coming better age will be no occasional gift of inspiration to some rare, select individuals, but the common faculty of all God’s children, as the result of God’s pouring out His Spirit upon all His sons and daughters. This Joel proclaimed in his famous declaration which Peter quoted in his sermon on Pentecost: “It shall come to pass that I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh, saith the Lord: and your sons and daughters shall prophesy, your old men shall dream dreams, and your young men shall see visions; and also upon the servants and upon the handmaids in those days will I pour out my Spirit.” (Joel 2: 28-29)

But the Bible’s description of the activities of the Moving Spirit of God goes even farther — tracing all creativity among men and women, in music and art and science and healing, and in service to the Holy Spirit of God. Bezaleel, that early craftsman, who wrought artistically in metals and woods and fabrics to fashion the house of worship for Israel in the wilderness (Exodus 31:1-5), is described as a man filled with the Spirit of God.

Whatever gift a person has of mind and heart, or brain, or hand, or eye — that gift is the gift of the Spirit of God. And it is the conviction of the inspired writers of scripture that every gift of the Spirit should be used in the spiritual service of God.

Now what should be our response — yours and mine — in the face of the massive witness of the scripture to the reality of the presence and activity of the moving Spirit of God?

One day a man whom I had just met, and who presumably was trying to introduce a topic of conversation suitable for a clergyman, said: “Did you hear that wonderful testimony of the famous comedienne, Phyllis Diller? She said she had been an atheist, and then an agnostic, but now she believed there was a spark of divine spirit in everyone. Isn’t that just wonderful?”

While I was silently pondering where the wonder of this statement could be and trying to think of some appropriate and inoffensive response to make, a friend of mine, who is a physician and was standing by listening, spoke up and said: “Well in most people it is a very tiny pinch.”

The story of the Bible is the story of spirit-filled men and women. The Spirit content of too many of us may be ever so small a pinch because we have got ourselves filled with so many alien values and motivations, but the capacity is always there. We could study the scripture more about the moving sea of God’s Holy Spirit, and pray and wait and hope that God will fill us more fully with His Spirit. For the promise of Jesus still remains: “If you, being evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to them that ask Him.”