The scriptures tells us that God created man in His own image Gen 1: 26.
The scriptures tells us that man became a living soul. Gen 2:7.
The scriptures tells us that when He created Adam He breathed into his nostrils the breath of life.
Isn’t God’s breath His Spirit? Yes.
Consider this, man the image of God was to be equipped with His Divine indwelling, ie the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit occupying the human spirit, so that sinless man would manifest the very glory of God. It was a derived glory exclusively dependent upon the Creator, the Holy Spirit within the man. The authority that the man was to exercise over the earth was the authority that was derived exclusively from his submission to God’s authority. After God created Adam, God saw that it was very good, Gen 1:31. So when God looked at the man that He had created in His perfect image He saw Himself. Very good. This therefore causes us to conclude that His intention was to indwell man by His Holy Spirit in man’s spirit in union and communion.
The human spirit is the part of us where God can live in us as He did with Adam. Man was body soul and spirit, in man’s soul was his mind, emotions and will. Man’s will was a free will. To love God because he wanted to, to obey God because he wanted to. How long they were sinless in the garden we do not know. We know the story Adam and Eve were beguiled by the serpent and deliberately went against the will of God and so they fell. The Holy Spirit left them, their spirit died became separated from God. Adam became the natural man and could no longer receive the things of the Spirit of God 1 Cor2:14. He was alienated from the personage of his creator. As the head of the race death passed upon all men. So the natural man is not what God created.
After the fall things changed, the way to God differed, for Adam and indeed all mankind their dead spirit had to be made alive , quickened, born again Ephesians 2:1 if he was to have a relationship with God again.( See December 2019 blog ). It would have to be by a sacrificial faith (a lamb, the Messiah).
That initial indwelling could never be repeated to the highest spiritual state because man now had a sinful nature to combat, the flesh, the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eye, the pride of life. The Holy Spirit now regenerates a man’s spirit but is not continuously indwelt as at first. (There were some exceptions) So man could communicate with God but not as before.
To fulfil God’s original plan and to thwart Satan we find the answer in1Cor 15:45 – THE LAST ADAM – the Lord Jesus Christ, God’s only begotten Son. Sinless, pure, Holy, undefiled, righteous. He walked with God, full of the Holy Ghost Luke 4:1in total union and communion with the Father John 8:24, 10:30. He resisted all of Satan’s beguiling temptations. He was totally doing the will of the Father as Adam was before the fall. The master, Christ is the one perfect manifestation in history of the complete work of the Holy Spirit in man. He was that sacrificial lamb. Salvation in the OT and the NT was the same until that first Pentecost Acts 2:4 when the Holy Spirit came and indwelt those regenerated souls. As it was in the beginning but there was still the flesh to contend with.
(To more fully understand the human spirit of the saved person, it is the part of us where God lives within us in the person of the Holy Spirit, so that with our moral consent (and never without it) God gains access to our human soul. This is where He Himself as the Creator within the creature can teach our minds, control our emotions and direct our wills so that He as God from within governs our behaviour as we let God be God and we bear the image of Christ, the last Adam.)
So friends if you are in Christ today you have the opportunity to experience the fullness of the Holy Spirit as you walk with God and submit yourself to His will, and bear Christ’s image. He is our pattern the firstborn among many brethren 1John 2:6.
God bless.
-Michael Whitehouse