The Anointed One, Who Anoints

  

John testified saying, I have seen the Spirit descending as a dove out of heaven, and He remined upon Him. I did not recognize Him, but He who sent me to baptize in water said to me, He upon whom you see the Spirit descending and remaining upon Him, this is the One who baptizes in the Holy Spirit. I myself have seen and have testified that this is the Son of God. John 1:32 – 34.

 

O my, where to begin? Jesus is the Christ, the Messiah, the Anointed One – and yet there is such confusion surrounding the anointing of the Holy Spirit, there is confusion surrounding Jesus Christ as the Anointed One and the One who anoints. All four Gospels tell us that the One upon whom the Holy Spirit descends and remains is the One who baptizes with the Holy Spirit, with Matthew and Luke adding “and fire.” (Matthew 3:11; Mark 1:8; Luke 3:16).

 

The Anointed One is the One Who anoints. We use the name Jesus Christ, but we pay little attention to the name; Jesus speaks of the One who saves, Christ speaks of the Anointed One who anoints. While John the Baptist recognized Jesus as the Messiah who anoints by the Holy Spirit descending and remaining on Jesus, we don’t appear to do that – we have any number of ways in which we recognize Christ, but strangely the Anointing doesn’t seem to be one of them, and when it is one of the ways we recognize Christ, it is often secondary, tertiary, or worse.

 

Can it be said that we truly recognize Christ if we substitute other forms of recognition in place of the Holy Spirit?

 

We recognize Christ (we think we do) by political position, by worldview, by tradition, by liturgy, by particular experiences, by a list of dos and don’ts, by religious jargon, by dress codes, by nationality…what can you add to this list? We may even say we recognize Christ by certain doctrines, forms of teaching and preaching, or various catechisms and confessions. But do we recognize Jesus Christ by the Anointing? Do we recognize Him by the Anointing that remains upon Him and by that same Anointing into which He immerses (baptizes) us?

 

Jesus Christ is revealed by the Holy Spirit, by the Anointing; and may I gently suggest that without the Anointing that everything else, no matter how good and right they may be in their proper place (and some of the aforementioned may have no proper place!), can be but dead letter and old wineskins.

 

Flesh and blood did not reveal Jesus Christ to Peter (Matthew 16:17), nor will flesh and blood reveal Jesus Christ to us. If we are indeed in Christ then we have “an anointing from the Holy One” (1 John 2:20). “By this we know that we abide in Him and He in us, because He has given us of His Spirit” (1 John 4:13). “We know by this that He abides in us, by the Spirit whom He has given us” (1 John 3:24b).

 

Paul writes, “Now He who establishes us with you in Christ and anointed us is God, who also sealed us and gave us the Spirit in our hearts as a pledge” (2 Cor. 1:21 – 22).

 

In Romans 8:14 we read, “For all who are being led by the Spirit of God, these are sons of God.” What does this look like in our lives? In the lives of our congregations?

 

It may be fair to say that our experience often reflects that of the disciples of Ephesians 19:2 who said, “…we have not even heard whether there is a Holy Spirit.” For while we may have heard of the Holy Spirit, functionally and experientially we seem to do fine without Him.

 

Our koinonia with the Holy Spirit should be palpable, just as should our koinonia with the Father and our Lord Jesus Christ. To be sure this palpability may not be what we think it should look like; for we are called to submit to the Holy Spirit, not to engage in a paganism that seeks to manipulate God the Holy Spirit or to manipulate others into particular spiritual expressions.

 

And this leads me to what Jesus Christ says on the matter of the Spirit’s work in our lives: “The wind blows where it wishes and you hear the sound of it, but do not know where it comes from and where it is going; so is everyone who is born of the Spirit” (John 3:8). Let’s also not miss John 3:6, with its echo of John 1:13, “That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit.” And let’s add John 6:63, “It is the Spirit who gives life; the flesh profits nothing; the words that I have spoken to you are spirit and are life.”

 

Back to John 3:8, we “do not know where it [the wind] comes from and where it is going.”

 

One of the beauties of the Gospels is that Jesus interacts with people in any number of ways; He says one thing to the rich young man, another thing to the woman caught in an adulterous act, and yet another thing to a raving lunatic among the tombs. Would it not be foolish to devise a teaching, a system of thought, that insisted that in sharing the Gospel that we must adopt the approach of Jesus to Nicodemus to the exclusion of His approaches to all other people in the Gospels? (Now that I’ve written this it occurs to me that some of us have done this very thing – I certainly did in a particular season of life).

 

What then, can we learn from Jesus’ own ministry and from what Jesus says concerning the Holy Spirit in John 3:8? I think we can learn that just as Jesus manifested His love and grace in myriad ways toward people, that the Holy Spirit manifests Himself in myriad ways with people When Jesus says “you do not know” in John 3:8, it seems to me that Jesus means “you do not know.”

 

Yet we want to ignore this, just as we want to ignore Jesus when He says that “…you do not know which day your Lord is coming” (Matthew 24:42). We read these words about our Lord’s coming and promptly set out to identify the day and hour of His coming. We read our Lord’s words concerning the moving of the Holy Spirit and we promptly set out to define and dictate what God the Holy Spirit will do and what He won’t do, how God the Holy Spirit will manifest Himself and how He won’t. (To be sure, Paul gives guidance in 1 Corinthians chapters 10 – 14 concerning what our response to the Holy Spirit ought to look like as the People of God.)

 

I’ll come back to this in the next post, but let me conclude with this thought:

 

Jesus Christ is the Anointed One who anoints, He baptizes with the Holy Spirit and with fire. Ought we not to be looking for the anointing of the Holy Spirit in order that we might see Jesus Christ revealed? Ought we not to be imploring God to infuse us with anointed lives? Ought we not to be crying out for our congregations to be anointed and filled with the Holy Spirit? Ought we not to resolve to cease being armchair quarterbacks, engaging in endless speculation about God the Holy Spirit, and get in the game?

 

Is the Anointing a living experience? If we are in Christ, then we are in the Anointed One and the Anointed One is the One who anoints.

 

O dear ones, this world needs to hear the authoritative Voice of God through His People. The Church needs to hear its preachers and teachers speak as the oracles of God, as men and women with authority and not as the scribes (Matthew 7:29; 1 Peter 4:11).

 

“For the Kingdom of God does not consist in word but in power” (1 Cor. 4:20; see also 1 Cor. 2:1 – 5).