Divine Fullness

Simply stated, God’s Spirit is the fullness of the divine life. When we speak of walking in the Spirit, living by the Spirit, the Spirit as a well within us giving living water, the Spirit being poured out upon us, or use any other biblical imagery, we are talking about the fullness of God’s life in and for us.

To speak of God is to name the cohesive reality and oneness of all things who is the ground of our own being. We have our being within and out of God. Therefore, to be filled with the Spirit means that we have come into the expansive experience of resting in sacred existence itself

Since our loving God is the existence from whom all exists, he must be both the beginning and end, the Alpha and Omega, and the One to whom we return. Creation is the move outward, and salvation is our journey “back” to the sacred Source of all.

By this he meant the Spirit, whom those who believed in him were later to receive. Up to that time the Spirit had not been given, since Jesus had not yet been glorified. John 7:39

If the Spirit represents the fullness of sacred life filling us so that we consciously and profoundly abide in God, we can understand why John says that the Spirit had not been given prior to Christ’s glorification, that is, his passion. The completeness of the eternal life of God comes to humanity through Jesus. All that he gives, salvation, the Spirit, and eternal life, are various ways of describing one reality. In him the divine and human are united.

The Spirit becomes so much more prevalent in New Testament than in the Hebrew scriptures, and is said to live in all believers after being poured out on Pentecost. This is because only in Jesus is the fullness of God’s own life of love revealed to us. We can now be animated in, empowered by, and conscious of living through the Spirit in ways previously not possible.

In whom you also are being built together into a dwelling of God in the Spirit. Ephesians 2:22

Paul writes that in Christ we are in the process of becoming, being built, to be the place where God dwells in the Spirit. In other words, the fullness of the life of God, represented by the Spirit, is coming more and more to reside in us.

The increasing expression of this life is what we look forward to experiencing. The Spirit may be the fullness of God in us, but we still do not connect with that reality in totality.

Paul calls the Spirit a seal or pledge of even more to come (Ephesians 1:13). Even a preliminary sharing and participation in the fullness of God’s life is enough to reorder our world, with also the promise of more to come.

The fullness of God’s life is as infinite, as unending and unfathomable, as God’s self. To live in the Spirit is to abide in the mystery of a divine life that we are experiencing, but which also exceeds our ability to fully grasp.