The Breath of God

“He breathed on them and said, Receive ye the Holy Ghost.” John xxi. 22.

I^nHE air we breathe is one of the most refined and yet most necessary and powerful of all the elements of nature. We have learned through the progress of modern science that it is as material and substantial as the ground upon which we tread, or the rocks and solid mountain, although in a much finer and fluid state. It can be compressed into liquid form until it becomes more powerful than dynamite. It contributes much of the life of plants and animals and as the enveloping atmosphere of our globe radiates to us the solar heat and light and forms a curtain of defense between us and innumerable perils from the countless fragments of disrupted worlds that are ever floating around us in space. It lends itself with great propriety and forcefulness to the illustration of spiritual truth and it is one of the most striking symbols of the Holy Spirit.

This is implied in the symbolic act of the Lord Jesus in connection with our text, when ‘‘He breathed on them,’’ or perhaps breathed before them, and said, “Receive ye the Holy Ghost.” The latter interpretation has in it a very impressive suggestion. By the act of exhaling and inhaling the air through His lungs He gave them an object lesson of the way in which we may receive the Holy Ghost. Breathing out our old natural life with one exhalation, and breathing in the new spiritual life from the Holy Spirit with the next inhalation. This really expresses the highest attitude of the abiding life.

I am breathing every moment,

Drawing all my life from Thee.

Breath by breath I live upon Thee,

Blessed Spirit, breathe in me.

I am breathing out my own life
That I may be filled with Thine,

Letting go my strength and weakness.

Breathing in Thy strength divine.

The other interpretation of this beautiful text links our spiritual life and our spiritual anointing most intimately with the Lord Jesus Himself. The Holy Spirit is the Spirit of Jesus and by this symbolic act He transferred His very Spirit to the disciples and passed over His vital breath into their being. Thus He identified the Spirit with Himself as well as Himself with them. And thus He taught us as well as them that we are never to try to receive the Holy Spirit apart from Jesus, but by fellowship with Jesus and by breathing in His own very life. Jesus is the One that baptizeth with the Holy Ghost, and while this is true in the first bestowing of the Spirit, it is also true in every successive infilling of His blessed presence. Hlow exquisitely the figure suggests such intimacy with our blessed Saviour that we receive the very kiss of His lips and the very breath of His being.

The same figure is used in many other references to the Holy Spirit. The Pentecostal outpouring was accompanied by the ‘’sound of a mighty rushing wind from heaven.’’ How tremendous is the power wrapped up in the winds of heaven! What more forcible figure could be employed to denote the resistless energy of the almighty Spirit! The same figure was also employed by the Prophet Ezekiel in the Vision of the Dry Bones, where he summons the Spirit to “come from the four winds and breathe upon these slain that they may live.” The representation here is the Spirit of Life as the mighty breath of God. We are carried back still farther by the figure to the morning of creation when “the Lord God breathed into Adam’s nostrils the breath of life and he became a living soul.” Our breath is so identified with our life that when we cease to breathe we cease to live. But our life did not come to us in the first instance as a mere animal impulse, but from the very breath of the Creator. And so our spiritual life is as directly supernatural and divine. Ezekiel’s prophesying could bring about the physical reconstruction of the forms of men, but there was no life in them. It was when the Spirit came from the four winds that they rose up and stood upon their feet an exceeding great army. Man’s teaching and preaching can produce certain social and ethical transformations but cannot give true spiritual life. There are lots of churches like Ezekiel’s dry bones after they were reconstructed, or Coleridge’s Dream of the Ancient Mariner; but there is a dead man in the pulpit and there are only dead men and women in the pews.

Our Lord refers in the third chapter of John to the agency of the Holy Spirit in the new birth under the figure of the air or wind. ‘’The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, and canst not tell whence it cometh or whither it goeth: so is every one that is born of the Spirit.” The operations of the Comforter, like the wind, are mysterious and hidden. We know them by their effects. We cannot trace the working of His hands but we can see and feel the purity, the peace, the joy, the love and the fruits of blessing on every hand that follow that working.