The Holy Spirit as Translator

Being a Christian is an odd paradox. The weaker and more useless I feel, the more likely God is to use me; but if I figure I’m capable of turning the world around and doing great things, the more likely He is to set me on a shelf and pick someone else.

I know this doesn’t make much sense to most people. I’ve discovered that if I try to explain it to someone who does not know God, they say. “Oh, you really are talented and you are just being humble” or they look at me as if I am speaking Greek. That is because, “The natural man does not receive the things of the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him; nor can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned” (1 Corinthians 2:14).

What is foolishness and unexplainable does have an explanation though. The best I can come up with is that ‘speaking Greek’ idea. Suppose a person could be fitted with an electronic language module. If they only spoke and understood English, a Japanese module would suddenly make them able to speak and understand Japanese, or Greek, or whatever language the module was designed to convey.

In the spiritual realm, the natural person cannot understand or receive the ideas and words of God because He speaks a foreign language. That person needs a language module and He has provided one—the person of His Holy Spirit.

1 Corinthians 2:9,10,12 explain it, “Eye has not seen, nor ear heard, nor have entered into the heart of man the things which God has prepared for those who love Him. But God has revealed them to us through His Spirit. . . . Now we have received, not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit who is from God, that we might know the things that have been freely given to us by God.” (Italics mine)

Because of the Holy Spirit, the things of God make sense to those who know and love Him, but I need to remember an important word in this explanation: freely. Freely means that I didn’t do anything to earn or deserve the Holy Spirit or to be able to grasp and understand anything that He reveals or ‘translates’ from God to me. Without Him, I am clueless.

Christians are not a special elite class who somehow gain an ‘in with God’ and thus become party to His thoughts and plans. In fact, 1 Corinthians 1:26-29 says, “For you see your calling, brethren, that not many wise according to the flesh, not many mighty, not many noble, are called. But God has chosen the foolish things of the world to put to shame the wise, and God has chosen the weak things of the world to put to shame the things which are mighty; and the base things of the world and the things which are despised God has chosen, and the things which are not, to bring to nothing the things that are, that no flesh should glory in His presence.”

No matter how powerful the Spirit works through His people, it is still the Spirit. If I get on some high horse thinking I am a spiritual hot shot, my power supply is cut off. The only way to keep it is to remember the truth about myself. In the things of God, I am weak, foolish, low, and nothing, even though God tells me that “in Christ I can do all things.”

My devotional guide says that God hides His truth from the ‘strong’ so that His Word does not become a study book or that reading it becomes an intellectual or academic exercise. Instead, He uses it to speak each day to the needs of His people. His ‘language’ plus the translating power of the Holy Spirit mean that I hear from Him every day according to my particular situation and in keeping with the status of my relationship with Him. His words are sometimes a puzzle (reminding me to get connected with my ‘module’), often a surprise, never what I could predict, but always right on target.