Whooah

 I started posting this on Facb but they cut me off ...

My sister wrote me a scripture note on an Index card which she'd mailed out to me. It's of Philippians chapter 4, vss 4 through 7. The last part is transcribed a little ambiguously... I think it rightly says "And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus". But the word "the" looks like "He"... But isn't THE Holy Spirit a "He"? (I was actually just thinking the other day about why He is The Holy Spirit rather than Mr. Holy Spirit or ... something... The word "the" implied an inanimate object. Or, in certain contexts it can describe a facet of a person...like "The leg we had to cut off is not going to be able to be re attached, but he will be fine" -- the "he" there not referring to the leg but rather the person who had been endowed with a leg and subsequently charged with the task of figuring out how to make do without it; the "heart" of "him", you could say... The Holy Spirit being referred a The backs up my suspicion that The Holy Spirit is not an eternal presence. I don't have any reason to think The Holy Spirit is going to be gone ever, but I don't think The Holy Spirit is as distinct a presence as God The Father or Jesus The Son. I should probably emphasize I'm not declaring some kind of doctrine. I don't believe The Bible is very clear on this but it seems quite possible that The Holy Spirit might be basically a manifestation of God The Father and Jesus, given to each of His people... When His people are fully saved and in paradise without temptation and evils, what will The Holy Spirit be? It's almost impossible to answer that with any guarantee of accuracy. It's like trying to describe a sound you've never heard. Or trying to hear a sound you literally cannot hear. I had a glimmer of an idea for a scifi story along that thought several years ago, on the notion that if the laws if physics on another planet were entirely different than that of Earth, not just gravity, but all of it,

if we survived the trip, somehow it another, if there were other life forms there, but we couldn't see or hear them... because we're basically looking with eyes that are designed to examine and interpret THIS set of physics.

a total side note from the original notion...but anyway....