Grappling With Understanding

While I'm having this stream of consciousness thing going, I often think about what the apostles knew and what they didn't know at the time of their writings. If I lived to be three hundred, I doubt that I could amass what they knew of the Lord if I strained to work at it all day long. I have often wondered what sort of time passed before they had a handle on the 'three-in-one nature' of God. Surely, it took some time for them to get a handle on it. Before the New Testament, the Holy Spirit was seen either as God's spirit, in the way that we each have a spirit, or as His alter ego. When Moses wrote of the Spirit of God moving over the face of the waters in Genesis 1, I don't think that we can take for granted that he had any understanding of the Trinity.

Luke wrote in Acts chapter 2, that the each of the apostles on the day of Pentecost had the Spirit "poured out" on him. I don't believe that the apostles actually believed that the Holy Spirit was liquid in nature. This is descriptive language, I believe, to illustrate "a filling" of the believer with God's presence. Luke wrote shortly after that in Acts 4 that the believers were enabled by the Holy Spirit to speak in other tongues. That is more than any liquid substance is capable of.

I believe that because of their knowledge of the Old Testament writings, as they had been taught, that their understanding of the nature and role of the Holy Spirit was progressive for them, just as our own understanding of Him is. It would be difficult for any one man to have had what could be called a thorough understanding of these things at the time of Pentecost certainly, and after that for some time to come. Who knows how much, for His marvelous purposes though, what God revealed to his apostles and prophets?

In any event, the task of seeing the bigger spiritual picture has fallen on the church, on each of us, to understand all of the New Testament, hand in hand with the Old Testament, regarding the Trinity, in all truth, and in a way that is complimentary to that revealed information. I don't think it's a stretch to say that the apostles had to grapple with the doctrine of the Trinity, as it took several centuries for the church itself to define the doctrine.