One wind, and the Spirit it points to

Thou Sendest Forth Thy Spirit

Psalm 104 is a long, exultant tour of the created world. The poet walks through the heavens and the sea, the mountains and the springs, the wild animals and the labor of human hands, and praises God as the source and sustainer of it all. Near its close comes a verse that lifts the whole poem from mere admiration into dependence. God sends forth his Spirit, and creatures are created. He renews the face of the ground. Life is not a fund God set going once and then abandoned. It is continually given, moment by moment, from a hand that stays open. This verse belongs to a passage about how creatures live and die. The psalm has just said that when God hides his face, they are troubled, and when he takes away their breath, they die and return to dust. Then comes the turn. He sends his Spirit, and there is new life again. The rhythm of the world, its dying and its renewing, is set within the giving and withdrawing of the breath of God. Creation is held, not merely started, and it is held by a hand that gives life freely and takes it back in its own time. We will read the verse first in the plain terms of the psalm's delight in living things, and then follow honestly where its language of Spirit and renewal opens toward a larger hope.

“Thou sendest forth thy spirit, they are created: and thou renewest the face of the earth.”Psalm 104:30

The wind in Scripture

The verse sits inside a movement of the psalm devoted to the dependence of all living things upon God. The creatures of land and sea look to him to give them their food in due season. When he gives, they gather. When he opens his hand, they are filled with good. The picture is of a table constantly set, a provision that never runs dry because the provider never leaves. Against that background the psalm speaks of breath given and breath taken. When God withdraws it, life fails and returns to the dust from which it came. When he sends it forth, life springs up once more. The word for Spirit here is again ruach, the Hebrew word that means wind, breath, and spirit all at once. In this verse the range of the word is doing real work. On one level the psalm speaks of the breath of life, the animating principle that makes a creature a living thing. On another level it speaks of the Spirit of God, the personal power by which the Creator gives and renews. The Hebrew does not force the reader to choose between these, and the poetry gains its depth precisely from holding them together. The breath that fills a creature's lungs and the Spirit that proceeds from God are named by one word. The verb translated created is the same strong verb used in Genesis for God's making of the heavens and the earth. This is striking. The psalm does not merely say God keeps things alive. It says he creates, using the great creation word, when he sends forth his Spirit. Ongoing life is spoken of as a kind of continual creation. Each new generation of creatures, each renewal of the green earth after winter or drought, is God making again. The line refuses the idea of a distant Maker who wound up the world and stepped away. And then the renewing of the face of the ground. The Hebrew word carries the sense of making new, refreshing, restoring. The psalm has in view the observable turning of the seasons, the way the earth greens again after barrenness, the way new creatures replace the old. This is honest, grounded observation. But the language of renewal, joined to the sending of the Spirit, opens toward more than the seasons. Later Scripture will use the same imagery of Spirit and new life to speak of the renewal of the human heart and the renewal of the whole creation at the last. The psalm plants the seed of a hope larger than itself.

What it comes to mean

The first thing this verse teaches is that God is not only the origin of life but its constant giver. Deism imagines a Creator who set the world running by fixed laws and then retired. Psalm 104 will have none of it. The breath in every creature is on loan, sent forth by God and able to be withdrawn. This is a sobering truth and a comforting one at once. Sobering, because our life is not our own possession but a gift we cannot secure by ourselves. Comforting, because the same God who gives is faithful, and the world's continued existence is a sign of his continued care. Because the word ruach means both breath and Spirit, the verse binds together the physical and the spiritual dimensions of life. The air that fills a body and the Spirit that comes from God are not the same, yet the Hebrew names them together to teach that there is no such thing as life apart from God. Even the breath of a sparrow is a gift of his Spirit. This dignifies the ordinary world. The green of a field, the swarming of the sea, the drawing of a single breath, all of it is the Spirit of God at work. Creation is not a machine but a living gift. The theme of renewal is the verse's great hope. God does not only sustain what already is. He makes new. The face of the ground, worn and spent, is refreshed. This observed pattern in nature becomes, in the wider witness of Scripture, a parable of grace. The prophets longed for God to pour out his Spirit and make a dry people live again. The apostles proclaimed that in Christ a new creation has begun, and that the Spirit is the pledge of a renewal that will one day reach the whole cosmos. Psalm 104 does not state all of this, but its words about the renewing Spirit run in the same channel. We should be careful not to claim that the psalmist was teaching the personal Holy Spirit of the later creeds. His immediate meaning is rich and concrete, rooted in the life of animals and the turning of the seasons. Yet the church, reading with the whole Bible open, has rightly seen this verse as one of the Old Testament's clearest windows onto the Spirit as the giver and renewer of life. The reading is honest when it moves from the psalm's plain sense outward to the fuller revelation, and does not pretend the psalm says by itself everything the gospel will later make clear.