The Mysterious Spirit of Christ: Why I Believe Rafiki is a Prophet

I have the honor to offer to you an article very dear to my heart; it was one of my first blogs, and still is one of my favorites. Perhaps I'm just running out of material, and am forced to revive old stuff. Either way, I hope you enjoy it, for the second time or the first...

I love the Lion King. I could watch it every day for the rest of my life and not get sick of it. It's one of those classics, the kind of movie that will go down in history. Few would agree with me in saying that it is the best film ever created, and I think that's very sad, because I know that it is. There is no doubt in my mind about it. I would venture to even say it is the greatest work of art in the history of mankind. Period. I love it. I also love God. And I find it ridiculous that I just used the same word to describe a movie featuring talking animals and the sovereign God of the universe. But that is beside the point.

Towards the end of the movie, there is an incredible scene where Rafiki (the crazy monkey with a blue jabooty) shows Simba that his father Mufassa is alive. He brings him to a pond and tells him to look in; Simba is dismayed though because he only sees a reflection of himself. As the monkey stirs the waters with the tip of his finger, he responds, "Looook haaauder. You see? He lives in you." Simba looks down to find not his own reflection, but that of his father, the king.

The fact of the matter is, the Lion King taught me a deep truth about the mysterious Spirit of Christ. The whole Spirit thing is kind of strange when you think about it, you know? Jesus says He is gonna send a spirit (of Himself) back to earth to live inside His believers and guide them. These things have always confused me, but lately I've been especially inrigued by the odd words of Jesus. He says in John 5:41, "I do not accept praise from men, but I know you. I know that you do not have the love of God in your hearts." Oddly enough, this passage actually shed an incredible amount of light on this subject for me. Let me explain.

Jesus is talking to Nicodemus in John 3, explaining what it means to live eternally. He says something quite odd in verse 6: "Flesh gives birth to flesh , but the Spirit gives birth to spirit." I thought about that for a while, and I came to the conclusion that Jesus lives inside of us. Not terribly profound, yet it hit me really hard when I realized it. The Spirit (of Christ; aka, the Holy Spirit) literally gave birth to Christ in us just as our mothers gave birth to us. And the process of becoming holy is Jesus growing inside of us, consuming more and more of our being.

I realize that this sounds odd, but please hear me out. I become increasingly convinced that this is true, and I think the Apostle Paul defends the concept in Galatians 2:20, "I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me." The process of us becoming holy is not us getting better; it is Christ in us becoming greater. The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace...you know the rest. So if you've ever experienced true spiritual joy, it is literally the joy of Christ (the happiest being in the universe) in you being joyful. If you've ever truly loved someone, it is literally Jesus loving that person through you. I am convinced that we can't do these things on our own.

Let's take this one step further. We are finite. I was born in 1986 and will be done with life sometime within the next 60 years or so. Christ, on the other hand, is infinite, with no beginning or end. This is significant, because our eternal life (a phrase that has become quite trite within Christian circles) is literally Christ living forever in us. Amazing when you really think about it, isn't it? We as humans do not have the capacity to live forever, yet Christ does; so when He is alive in us, we too live forever.

Let me bring these thoughts full circle to the verse I spoke of at the beginning. Jesus says He doesn't accept any praise from men. I thought this was very strange, and even a little rude; but it makes perfect sense when we put all these Biblical truths together. Jesus doesn't accept praise from men, because we are unable to sincerely praise Him. Only those with changed hearts (the Spirit of Christ now living in them) can truly worship him. For it is the Spirit of Christ in us that adores and worships the Father and Christ Himself, for only He (the Spirit) understands how infinitely worthy of praise They are. We can't see this glory on our own. In this way, we may boast in nothing, giving full credit to Jesus Christ. May we say with John the Baptist: "[Jesus] must become greater; I must become less" (John 3:30).

Look harder my friends. You see, He lives in you.

I find it hard to believe that God loves me.

I mean really believe it. To miss a few classes, forget a meeting with someone, skip devotions, put off things I know I have to get done, get angry at my roomates, neglect to call my friends from back home I haven't talked to in months, walk past a ministry sign up without feeling any desire to help...

...and still believe that God passionately loves me. The richness of Jesus' love is most fully realized in my greatest failures, for only then am I truly dependent upon His grace.

It is in these fragmented and scattered glimpses of my life that the gospel really makes sense.

The Power of Bubbles

It's hard for us to imagine a doctine such as the trinity as a comforting one, but perhaps Scripture portrays such truths to us not so we will have more to write about in our systematic theolgy books, but that we may be encouraged and given hope.

Somewhere along the way, we have forgotten that the trinity is a team. It's easy for us to pit the members of the trinity against one another, as if each one is completely univolved with or even opposed to the work of the other members. For example, we tend to think, albeit subconsciously, that God the Father was ticked off in the Old Testament, and the loving Son had to come make things right in the New Testament, and the Holy Spirit was off blowing bubbles in left field until Acts, where He gets to do fun things like appear as a flaiming tongue and kill people for not telling Him the truth (Acts 2; Acts 5).

But the truth is, each member of the trinity is deeply involved in every act of the redemptive story; each has an active and ongoing role. Granted, each gets the stage at a different moment in history: the Father in the OT, the Son in the NT, and the Spirit in Church history. But each of these could not be accomplshed by only one member of the trinity. We must remember that they are distinct, and yet they are one. In the OT, we see the Spirit in the second verse of the Bible, hovering over what would be creation; we see Him leading the Israelites through the desert and in the Ark of the Covenant. We see Jesus as well in the OT: He is the angel of the LORD that is worshipped, and some have argued that He is the High Priest Melchizadek, to whom Abraham offers his tithes (who else would the patriarch of Israel offer his tithes to but God Himself?) (Gen. 14). In the NT, we see all three at the baptism of Jesus (Matt. 3), and of course, we know that all three are at work in the Church today.

One of my professors at school made a bold statement recently: It was the Holy Spirit who rose Jesus from the dead. It sounds crazy at first, but actually fits quite nicely with concepts presented in the gospels and Acts. The Spirit was active in Jesus' miraculous virgin birth, to be sure; he was present and active in Jesus' baptism (in the form of a dove); he Himself led Christ into the desert to be tempted, and gave Him the strength to resist temptation (Matt. 4); and He was no doubt active in Christ's ministry and miraculous signs. You get this sense that Jesus, as the divine God-man, was truly quite dependent upon the Holy Spirit. I say this not to diminish His divinity, but to stress His humanity. Peter proclaims at the Pentecost, "God has raised Jesus to life, and we are witnesses to the fact" (Acts 2:32).

"And if the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead is living in you, he who raised Christ will also grant life to your mortal bodies thorugh his Spirit, who lives in you" (Romans 8:11).

I don't know about you, but I'm tired of feeling like a completely worthless, ever-failing Christian. I'm tired of feeling defeated by sin and by the seemingly insurmountable obstacles that are thrown my way. It's all sort of coming to a head for me now, and I'm finally realizing that I am incapable of winning this battle.

But the Spirit of God is capable of anything. And this Spirit who hovered over the unformed earth, who delievered and led His people from Egypt, who made the Jericho walls to crumble, who destroyed the LORD's enemies with Gideon's 300 men, who brought dry bones to life and made them into an army, who was actively involved in the virgin birth, who delivered Jesus from temptation, who led Christ to the cross, who raised Him from the dead, who is described throughout Scripture as a powerful, powerful being-this Spirit lives in me.

There is hope in the trinity, for in Christ, we are ingrafted into the story they are telling together.