Union with Christ - The Coming of the Spirit, Part IV

The coming of the Spirit has reference first to Jesus Himself; The Spirit was the divine power behind His conception, and the Spirit indwelled and empowered Him for His messianic mission. Jesus is preeminently the Man of the Spirit, and this truth is foundationally important to understanding the significance of His work for the human race. Jesus is the Man of the Spirit, but He is so as the Last Adam. He is the prototype and fountainhead of a new, consummate humanity that, like Him, is characterized by the indwelling presence, power, and leading of the Holy Spirit. As the Last Adam and Man of the Spirit, Jesus is the inaugurator of the Age of the Spirit - the new creational reality in which the promise of sacred space is finally being realized. This sermon is the first of two examining Pentecost as the formal point of inauguration of the Age of the Spirit. With the outpouring of the Spirit on that day, the renewal and transformation secured by Christ's atoning death - and evidenced first in His own resurrected, glorified humanity as the "firstfruits" of the new creation - began to manifest itself in the emergence, by the Spirit, of a new humanity bearing the likeness of the Last Adam, the Man of the Spirit.