Job 32:8 But there is a spirit in man: and the inspiration of the Almighty gives them understanding. Read text thus, "There is a spirit in man, and the in-spirit-ing of the Almighty giveth them understanding." The spirit in man is that special apartment of his nature which has been contrived and fitted for personal intercourse between him and God. The spirit in man is to the great inbreathing of God what the lungs are to the circumambient air. It is the element of our being that establishes in us religious possibilities. "There is a spirit in man," and like every other instinct of our being, it stands to us authoritatively, and lays its mandate upon us imperiously. We are religious by nature. It is just this faculty divinely wrought upon, and this string divinely played upon, that really composes the strength and tenacity of our religious convictions. The inspiration here has to do, in a purely general way, with God's own personal communication of Himself to us, and, at the spirit point of our being, imparting unto us the energies of His own wisdom, holiness, and power. It is not our concern to understand how this is done. The first office work of inspiration is to create in us fresh personal vigour and new spiritual animation. Character cannot be constructed. It cannot be put together. It needs first of all a principle that is animated, and one, therefore, that is animating. It was an impulse more glowing, determined, and passionate than anything we are possessed of naturally. We need nothing so much as a determining life force at the core of character, an impulse from out the very soul of God, that shall hold us in its warm, steady, and irresistible grip, and impel us with a momentum that has the very pressure of Jehovah in it. And all of this is a draft upon the Divine inspiration. This may seem to be what theologians call "regeneration." The new man, the new life, is only another name for character wrought out at the determining impulse of a Divine inspiration. What we need first of all is not to act like Christ, but to have exactly the same Divine Spirit working at the core of our lives that worked at the core of His, and then acts will take care of themselves. All true manliness grows around a core of divineness. Virtue is safe only when it is inspired. Another office work of inspiration is to create in us fresh and vivid perceptions of the Divine truth. We need as much inspiration to read the Bible as its authors needed to fit them to write it. No Christian creed is ever constructed. It is the form in which a man shapes his own experiences of the things of God, and of his own soul. As we go on to know the Lord, our creeds will change. Christian thinking will continue growing better, deeper, truer, so long as Christians, along the luminous path of God's self-revelation to them, continue getting into the deeper things of God and the closer intimacies of God. And further, the inspirations of the Almighty are suited to become to us qualification for all kinds of holy doing. We make toilsome work of being good, because we do not let the inspirations of God work in us: and we make irksome work of doing good because we do not let the inspirations of God work through us...Our common and comprehensive need is of the inspiration of the Almighty, the direct breathing into us of the breath of God, with all the wisdom, holiness, and power which such a Divine afflatus involves, that whether we speak, be it by word or act, we may speak as the oracles of God; and whether we minister, we may do it as of the ability which God giveth: that God in all things may be glorified through Christ Jesus. (Charles H. Parkhurst, D. D.) Parallel Verses KJV: But there is a spirit in man: and the inspiration of the Almighty giveth them understanding.WEB: But there is a spirit in man, and the breath of the Almighty gives them understanding. |
    |