The Holy Spirit Revealed in the New Testament
Luke 1:35
And the angel answered and said to her, The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; therefore also the holy thing which is born will be called the Son of God.
2 Corinthians 3:17
And the Lord is the Spirit; and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom.
In the entire Old Testament, the title "Holy Spirit" cannot be found. ("Thy holy spirit" in Psalm 51:11 should be "the Spirit of Thy holiness" according to the Hebrew, and "his holy Spirit" in Isaiah 63:10-11 should also be "the Spirit of His holiness." See Darby's New Translation.) This title, "Holy Spirit," began to be used in the New Testament when the Lord Jesus was about to be brought in and incarnated in the womb of Mary (Luke 1:15, 35; Matt. 1:18). The title, Holy Spirit, therefore, has something to do with God mingling Himself with man. In the Old Testament, there was not such a mingling, although many times the Spirit of God came upon the prophets and certain other persons. At that time God was only God, and from God, the Spirit of God came down. He was God only, nothing more. But in the New Testament, the Triune God—the Son, with the Father, in the Spirit—became incarnated in man. He lived upon this earth for thirty-three and a half years, experiencing all of human living. He passed through death, conquering and subduing it, and entered into resurrection, with which, as we have seen, is glorification. Through all these experiences the Spirit of God came to us as the Holy Spirit, including all the elements of divinity, humanity, human living, the effectiveness of death and the power of resurrection.
We must realize that the Holy Spirit in the New Testament is different from the Spirit of God in the Old Testament. The Spirit of God in the Old Testament was only of one element, divinity, because He was solely the Spirit of God. But the Holy Spirit today in the New Testament is of many elements, including the divine nature, the human nature, the effectiveness of Christ's death, and the power of His resurrection. Andrew Murray in his book The Spirit of Christ says:
The Spirit of God as poured out on Pentecost was indeed something new. Through the Old Testament He was always called the Spirit of God or the Spirit of the Lord; the name of Holy Spirit He did not yet bear as His own proper name. It is only in connection with the work He has to do in preparing the way for Christ, and a body for Him, that the proper name comes into use (Luke 1:15, 35). When poured out at Pentecost, He came as the Spirit of the glorified Jesus, the Spirit of the Incarnate, crucified, and exalted Christ, the bearer and communicator to us, not of the life of God as such, but of that life as it had been interwoven into human nature in the person of Christ Jesus. It is in this capacity specially that He bears the name of Holy Spirit..
The All-Inclusive Spirit of Christ,16-18, by Witness Lee.
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