But this He said of the Spirit, whom those who believed in Him were about to receive; for the Spirit was not yet, for Jesus had not yet been glorified.

The verse above is John 7:39 as it appears in the Standard Version of the New Testament; when it says “the Spirit was not yet,” that is a literal translation of the Greek (cf. the RcV and YLT versions). However, almost all major translations (e.g., KJV, NKJV, NASB, ESV, LSB, and NIV) add the word “given” in this verse, even though that word is not in the actual Greek of the New Testament, so that it reads, “the Spirit was not yet given.”

This reading, however, misses the point this verse is actually making, which is in fact quite a crucial point in the New Testament. That is, the Spirit we receive today is not only the divine Spirit of God that we see in the Old Testament; it is also the Spirit of a man, Jesus, who was incarnated in the flesh, lived a perfect human life, and then died on the cross for our sins and and resurrected in glory.

This is the fulfillment of the Old Testament type of the ointment used for anointing the tabernacle, which is a picture of the Spirit. That ointment included not only the oil, but also several different spices, “compounded according to the work of a perfumer” (Ex0. 30:22-25). These spices signified different aspects of the Lord’s human experience. For example, the myrrh signified the Lord’s death (Matt. 2:11, John 19:39). So today, when we touch the Spirit, we experience the Lord’s death working within us.

So, the New Testament speaks not only of “the Spirit of God” (1 Cor. 7:40), but also of “the Spirit of Jesus” (Acts 16:7), “the Spirit of Christ” (Rom. 8:9), and “the Spirit of Jesus Christ” (Phil. 1:19). Of course, these are not several different Spirits, but rather, different aspects of the one Holy Spirit we as the believers receive today from God in Christ, a Spirit who is now both human and divine, just as Jesus Himself is both human and divine.

In our previous Note in this series (“The Lamb, the Serpent, & the Seed” • 5), we considered how the Lord died as “a grain of wheat” to release His divine life so that we, His fellow human beings, could receive it (John 12:24). This is really what John 7:39 is explaining to us: Jesus had to go through the process of death and resurrection for us to receive His divine life.

Andrew Murray, in his comments on John 7:39, is one who stresses the importance of taking this verse as written, rather than adding the word “given.” As he explains,

From His nature, as glorified in the resurrection and ascension, His Spirit came forth as the Spirit of His human life, glorified into union with the divine, to make us partakers of all that He had personally wrought out and acquired, of Himself and His glorified life. He could now communicate what previously had no existence—a life at once human and divine.
— The Spirit of Christ, chapter 5, “The Spirit of the Glorified Jesus.”

And that is why John 7:39 truly says, “the Spirit was not yet, for Jesus was not yet glorified.”

Sent to our mailing list on
—  19 October 2024 —