A Deeper Understanding of the Holy Spirit.

The Fear of the Lord

The Holy Spirit is referred to in Isaiah 11:2 as the Spirit of the Fear of the Lord. One major misconception is the equating of the Fear of the Lord with terror. God by no means wants us terrified of Him.
God by all means wants us close to Him and wants us to ‘walk’ closely with Him. God is love, 1 John 4:8, and wants to show us love. Understanding the magnitude of God will give you a holy fear, which we should understand as a deep reverence.
God is the owner of the whole universe and the ruler of it. God set into motion all the physical laws in which me must live, i.e. gravity, physics, mathematics, time, etc.
The God I am referring to is the God of the Holy Bible. Simply put, there is no other. Isaiah 43:10 states, “Before Me there were no Gods formed, nor shall there be after me” (NKJV). So God is the only One, anything or anyone else who claims to be God is an imposter and should be regarded as such.
To further clarify, 1John 5:7 states, “There are three that bear witness in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Spirit, and these three are one” (NKJV). This is what is meant when the doctrine of the Holy Trinity is expressed, three in one. It doesn’t take a quantum leap of thought to understand that if you are missing one aspect of God then you miss the completeness of Him.
Walking with God is a communion of everyday life. When you get ‘born again’, you receive the Holy Spirit. God the Father and His Son Jesus is in heaven right now and will remain so until a different time dispensation.
Many people sing ‘since Jesus came into my heart’, but the truth is Jesus is sitting at the right hand of the Father like Stephen proclaimed when he was being stoned to death in the Book of Acts in chapter 7 verse 54. Jesus lives in a glorified human body and cannot be in two places at the same time.
After His death, burial, and resurrection Jesus ascended to the Father for a brief period of time, then appeared to the Disciples for 40 days and communed with them, teaching things pertaining to Gods’ Kingdom.
In Acts Chapter 1, He explained to them that they would soon be Baptized in the Holy Spirit. After this Jesus ascended back to Heaven in front of them. Then in Acts 1:11 two angels explained to them, “This same Jesus who was taken up from you into Heaven, will so come in like manner as you saw Him go into Heaven.”
This Baptism of the Holy Spirit is currently focused on in Pentecostal and Charismatic churches. It is taught that to receive this baptism you must first be born again and receive Jesus as your Savior.
To comprehend this we should first look at what Jesus was telling Nicodemus in John chapter three. Jesus first told him in 3:3, “You must be born again to see the Kingdom of Heaven”. Then Jesus also said, “Most assuredly, I say to you, unless one is born of the water and the Spirit, he cannot enter into the Kingdom of God.” John 3:5.
Being born of the water is simply being born of a human woman as water is present in the amniotic sac. Being born of the Spirit of God happens when a person accepts the sacrifice Jesus gave on the Cross of Calvary and asks God to come into their life. The Holy Spirit enters your spirit (will discuss more on this later) and brings you eternal life.
God made it so this would be an act of our own volition and does not violate our free will. This is the very simple version of being ‘Born Again’. This brings us to the place of ‘repenting’ of our sins against God and puts us in right standing with Him. From there we begin the process of entering into Gods’ Kingdom, in which we look to Him to coach us into righteousness.
Submitting our free wills to His rulership is the jumping off point. When we make a conscious effort to obey the rules he set forth and had them written in the Holy Bible, it is then we begin to walk with Him.
All of Gods’ Laws were written based on the love of Him, loving yourself, and loving other people. See Mark 12:30 and 12:31.
Understanding these basic precepts leads us back to the Fear of the Lord. God deserves our ultimate respect. His knowledge is so far superior to ours and capacity for thinking is so much greater than ours, our veneration is necessary.
If you had a conversation with Albert Einstein, one of the greatest minds of human existence, would you feel completely comfortable with calling him ‘Old Al’, and expecting him to feel endeared to you? If you had a conversation with your family Physician would you treat him as a drinking pal? If you were talking to a current king or president, would you belch in front of him and expect him to not be insulted?
The God, who created you deserves by His position of final authority to be treated with more respect than these humans who were created by Him and gave them their capacities.