Chapter Seven: The Second Distance: The Spirit in the Few

For most of the Old Testament, the Spirit of God coming upon a person was the exception, not the rule — and this is worth feeling before it is analyzed, because most readers have never been told it. He came upon the judge for the hour of deliverance, upon the king at his anointing, upon the prophet for the burden of the word. Samson, Saul, David, Isaiah — chosen vessels, a handful of names across fifteen centuries, while the people watched from a distance. An ordinary Israelite — a farmer in Galilee, a mother in Bethany — did not expect the Spirit of God to rest on them. That was for others. The nearest most would ever come to the presence was the outer court of a temple they could not fully enter.

Moses felt the ache of it centuries early. When Joshua urged him to silence two unauthorized prophets, Moses answered with a longing: I wish that all the LORD's people were prophets, that the LORD would put his Spirit on them! (Numbers 11:29 NET). It was a wish. It hung in the air for more than a thousand years.

Then the prophet Joel was given to see it coming:

"I will pour out my Spirit on all kinds of people. Your sons and daughters will prophesy, your old men will dream dreams, your young men will see visions. Even on male and female servants I will pour out my Spirit." — Joel 2:28-29 (NET)

All kinds of people. The lowest social rung named explicitly, so no one could mistake the scope.

And then a morning came in Jerusalem — the feast of Pentecost, fifty days after the Resurrection, the events recorded in Acts 2. The Spirit fell on the gathered disciples, a crowd assembled in confusion, and Peter stood up and explained what they were seeing by reaching back to that ancient promise: this is what was spoken about through the prophet Joel. With those words the age of reservation ended forever. Pentecost was not the founding of a new spiritual aristocracy with apostles where the prophets had been. It was the abolition of the aristocracy altogether. The Spirit who had rested on a handful of the chosen across fifteen centuries was poured out on everyone who would come.

Stop and make it personal, because the whole point is personal. The Spirit who hovered over the waters at creation; who came upon David when Samuel poured the oil; who carried Isaiah into the throne room and put the live coal to his lips — that Spirit, the very same, now dwells in you. Not a lesser portion. Not a diluted version for the rank and file. Him. The reservation is over, and your name is inside the words all kinds of people. What Moses wished for across a thousand years, you woke up with this morning.

Which is why it should grieve us, gently but truly, when the church drifts back toward the old arrangement — the Spirit concentrated in the anointed figure, the gifted one, the man or woman with the platform, while the people gather to watch and receive. The gifted are real, and they are gifts; Ephesians 4 says exactly that. But the moment the gifted one becomes the channel — the moment the believer's living access to the Spirit rises and falls with somebody's tour schedule — the clock has been turned back past Pentecost, and the people of God are watching from the outer court again, as though the veil had never torn.

Cyril of Jerusalem told his new converts the truth that breaks that arrangement: the Spirit comes to each and abides undivided — as fully present with the least visible believer as with the most celebrated. And the lives Leona Choy gathered in her book Powerlines say the same thing by their sheer ordinariness. A shoe salesman. A kitchen worker. A circuit preacher on the frontier. A small-town pastor in South Africa. The Spirit's great witnesses have rarely been the spectacular. They have been the available.

You do not need the anointed figure to come to town. The anointing came to your town when you believed, and took up residence, and has been waiting — patient as He always is — for you to live like it is true.