SPIRIT BORN

Jesus says [to Nicodemus], "The wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes.  So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit." (John 3:8)

Listen to the wind, Nicodemus.  Listen to the wind.

Again, and again, in both the Old and New Testaments, God's Spirit -- the Holy Spirit -- is described as being like the wind.  Both the Hebrew of the Old Testament (ruach) and the Greek of the New Testament (pneuma) employ a word that can mean wind, breath, or spirit.  When the writer of Genesis explains our divine origins, he tells us that God breathed into the human nostrils the breath of life (Genesis 2:7); that is, God inspirited us.  When the Holy Spirit entered our world in a new way on the Day of Pentecost, one of the manifestations of the Spirit's coming was "a sound like the rush of a violent wind" that filled the house where the believers were sitting (Acts 2:2).  Even so, when Jesus wanted Nicodemus to understand how he could be born from above, Jesus said that it was like the wind.  You might not understand it, and certainly you couldn't control it, but you could feel its reality.

-- J. Ellsworth Kalas in “New Testament Stories from the Back Side”

#4342