(Archive) The evolution of holly spirit.

One news item (in Chinese) from web caught my attention, and triggered some thinking about the evolution of "holly spirit" concept.

http://news.wenxuecity.com/messages/200906/news-gb2312-873714.html

Of course, the holly spirit concept itself never changed, I mean the evolution of my own perception of Holly Spirit.

When I first heard Christian teaching about Holly spirit, I was thinking holly spirit was something through miracle. Like the way the spirit symbolized by a dove entered Jesus' body after he got baptized. It’s some kind of special "spirit" with special power that came from God.

Later, when I read Genesis, when Adam and Eve ate the fruit, then they started to know evil from good, then I thought mind that tells good from evil must be the holly spirit. God has been putting the holly spirit in our body since the very beginning of our creation; but we were not able to appreciate it and actually use it to do our judgment.
More latter, I realized, knowing the good from evil does not really help much, if we do not behave accordingly. Then for a very long period, I have been thinking, God gave us instinct to distinguish good and evil, but holly spirit give us courage to stay with good and fight with evils that come from outside and inside. Holly spirit is something that turns our good thinking into actions.

Finally another question comes, is the instincts of our judgment of good and evil always right? A real evil man might have been thinking that what they were doing were right. Then according to the above theory they should have been following their “holly spirit”. Then Adolf Hitler will also have a lot of excuses to go to heaven. There must be something wrong. I am not totally against Adolf Hitler go to heaven, but that must come from mercy and forgiveness of God and other people, not in this way.

When reading the above posting, it reminded me of the prostitute that got saved from being stoned by Jesus. Stoning the prostitute was the law, do things according to the law must be a very righteous thing to do. But there are something else more important from Jesus than the law, but it could not be written in the law. That is love.

This is why Jesus said that he did not come here to destroy the law but to fulfill the law. The missing part in the law was love.

Love has more rich meaning than righteousness.

But why when Jesus remind people about the unseen part, people actually followed. This was not because Jesus had the supper power to control people’s mind. (He might had the power, but I doubt he actually used it.)

The reason is that the spirit of love is already planted by our creator deep in our mind. We just did not realize it. That is like the mustard seed talked in the Gospel. Jesus came here gave us sunshine and water, so that it started to grow. He knew our seeds better than ourselves because he came from God.

So holly spirit is something about love. It has more content than righteousness. It's the mind of caring about others but not only ourselves. It reminds us to make the right choice when we are in the party privileged. Even when it seems like the privilege is from the law by God.

So when the land of Israel was first given to Israelite, sure everything was from God's will. (At least they believed so at that moment.) Did that mean they had the right to take the unmarried girls and kill all the men, boys and married women? Their sin was because they only saw the law but had forgotten love.
In the story mentioned in the Gospel, when people caught that prostitute, for sure they could stone her. That was the law, but the law was not everything.

When I read the paper mentioned at the very beginning, I deeply felt guilty for our privileges we got in this world from God. I was deeply impressed by the story told through the Gospel from Jesus.

Another story, I remember one year after Virginia shooting at VT, people built a monument to memorize the dead. Among the names appeared on the wall, the killer's name was also listed. And people actually even put flowers there. At the moment, I was thinking, if he could see this scene from somewhere, he might want to redo his video again to confess his sin.

Indeed the killer should be punished and condemned, but us, as normal people, should the tragedy trigger some thinking inside of ourselves. Sure all the victims in the shooting were innocent, but at least they have been happy during their (short) lifetime in this world. But look at this poor little Korean boy, I doubt he ever had one day of happiness during his childhood. Whose fault was it after all?
Love means caring for others. Love means understanding and forgiving. Love makes us rethink about what to do when we think God blessed us (for what). Love gives the power to forgive when the law says punishing.

God sowed a tiny seed inside our mind. But we never cared about it, and we never noticed it. It’s like a mustard seed hide deep inside the soil.

Jesus’ teaching is like shower and sunshine, with the Gospel teaching the seed start to grow. Finally it blossom into a beautiful flower.

The flower is so beautiful that I said to myself: it does not belong to me, but my whole body, everything from me, have to belong to her.

It is indeed beautiful experience, but which part of this process should be called Holly Spirit. I really cannot tell.

Who cares!