Is the Holy Spirit Real?

I used to hardly ever read Genesis—but now it’s one of my favorite books—especially the first three chapters.  Just like any good book, an introduction is necessary and God provided this in Genesis.  It was written thousands of years before the true implications and climax to the story would occur, yet God knew what was going to happen and knew what He would need to do.

I sometimes wonder, did the events recorded in the Garden actually happen in a literal sense?  This may seem sacrilegious, but we know that the Bible is full of symbolism and imagery.  What if the story of the Garden of Eden is just that, a story?  What would that mean and how could we even know?

Non-Trinitarian groups, like Jehovah’s Witnesses, some Adventists, and about half of the Mainline Churches of Christ, don’t believe the Holy Spirit is a real thing.  They believe “spirit” is an attitude or state of mind, as in “high school spirit”; or, as with the Church of Christ, believe God’s Spirit express himself in the Bible.  I reject this.  I believe the spirit of God is a real thing.  More than just saying God is a spirit, I believe He has a spirit, and that as an all-powerful being He can be in more than one place at a time.

I once heard an argument that God and Jesus could not be that same thing because of verses like Mat 3:17, where God speaks from heaven during Jesus’ baptism.  How could God and Jesus be the same thing if God is in heaven and Jesus is on the earth?  It is incredibly humanistic and short-sighted to impose our own human limitations on God!  It’s irrational for a person to believe on one hand that God is all-powerful and created the entire universe, and on the other hand, he can only be in one place at a time.

All this to say I believe God has a spirit and that His spirit can somehow exist in multiple people at the same time.  But why would this special indwelling of God’s Holy Spirit be special to the New Covenant?  If it is sin that separates us from God and Adam and Eve had not sinned yet, then why wouldn’t God’s spirit be in them?

Before I thought in this way, I considered the Holy Spirit to be a special thing that only existed for Christians sometime after Jesus’ death and resurrection.  If I’m not mistaken, this is what most Christians believe.  When first confronted with the idea that Adam and Eve initially had this same Holy Spirit living in them, my own response and the response of everyone I’ve explained it to has been, “Oh yeah, that makes sense!”

I have moved beyond the realm of “That makes sense and maybe it’s true” to “This has to be the case.”  Here are some reasons why:

1. The Hebrew wording of Gen 1:27, “God created mankind in his own image [selem].”  The Hebrews would use this same phraseology when referring to their own children.  Even though these ancients had no knowledge of genetics, they still knew that it was not a mistake or accident that children looked like their parents.  They believed that part of the parents was literally in the child—something we now know to be true.  Therefore the reason why Adam and Eve “looked” like God was because some part of God was in them, namely, the Holy Spirit.  Furthermore, mankind was created with this intent.  When man does not have God’s spirit in them, they are incomplete.
2. The Hebrew wording of Gen 2:7, “breathed [nāpaḥ] into his nostrils the breathe [nᵉšāmâ] of life”. This is different from how he created all other living creatures.  I believe here God breathed the Holy Spirit into them.  This is very similar to John 20:22 (and not by accident), where Jesus breathes the Holy Spirit into/onto the apostles.
3. The idea that Adam and Eve could “die spiritually.” How can one die a spiritual death but not a physical death?  Gen 2:17 “for in the day [yom] that you eat of it you shall surely die.” (ESV)  I believe their spiritual death had an actuality to it—that it was the Holy Spirit which departed from them.

It is for these reasons and more that I believe the account of the Garden of Eden was real and actual, in addition to its spiritual and symbolic content.  It connects to and makes sense of Jesus’ death, resurrection, and giving of the Holy Spirit.  It is because of these things that I dogmatically accept the reality of Adam and Eve having the same Holy Spirit that we can now have.