Tongues of Fire–the Coming of the Holy Spirit

Welcome back to Gnostic Insights. Today I would like to share some information with you about the Holy Spirit. What is the Holy Spirit? You know, the Holy Spirit is considered part of the Trinity of God the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. One God, three-in-one, is how the Christians put it. But what does that mean? What is the Holy Spirit to us if we’re seeking gnosis?

Jesus said to his disciples, “You will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria and to the ends of the Earth” (Acts 1:8).

That’s us. We’re at the ends of the earth here, right? So Jesus promised that the Holy Spirit would come to the believers and would be a witness to the Christ. The Jews were gathered in Jerusalem to celebrate the festival of Shavuot, which was the giving of the commandments to Moses on Mount Sinai. So it was one of the major festival times, and there were a lot of people gathered. Jesus had been crucified during the Passover festival, and this is the next festival, which was about 40 days afterwards. And so when Shavuot, or what we call Pentecost, came, the disciples were all gathered together in one place. They were confused, lost, disheartened. The man that they had thought would bring the kingdom back to Israel was dead and crucified, and they just didn’t know what they were supposed to do about it.

In Acts 2 verse 2, it says, “When the day of Pentecost came, they were all together in one place. Suddenly a sound like the blowing of a violent wind came from heaven and filled the whole house where they were sitting. They saw what seemed to be tongues of fire that separated and came to rest on each of them. All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues as the Spirit enabled them.

Now, they were staying in Jerusalem, God-fearing Jews from every nation under heaven. When they heard this sound, a crowd came together in bewilderment because each one heard their own language being spoken. Utterly amazed, they asked, aren’t all these who are speaking Galileans? How is it that each of us hears them in our native language? They asked one another, what does this mean?” And others in the crowd, it says, made fun of them and said, ah, they’d had too much wine.”

Peter stood up, raised his voice and addressed the crowd. And he said,

“In the last days, God says, ‘I will pour out my spirit on all people. Your sons and daughters will prophesy and your young men will see visions. Your old men will dream dreams. Even on my servants, both men and women, I will pour out my spirit in those days and they will prophesy. I will show wonders in the heavens above and signs on the earth below, blood and fire and billows of smoke. The sun will be turned to darkness and the moon to blood before the coming of the great and glorious day of the Lord. And everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.’”

A lot of people think that we may be in the end days right now. I don’t think we have seen the sun turned to darkness and the moon to blood yet, so I don’t think we’re in the final roll-up. That is a signal we’re supposed to look for before the coming of the great and glorious day of the Lord. That is the second coming of Jesus, which is what Christians are waiting for. And Peter here was quoting the prophet Joel from the Old Testament.

And in verse 37 it says, “When the people heard this, they were cut to the heart and said to Peter and the other apostles, ‘Brother, what shall we do?’ Peter replied, ‘Repent and be baptized, every one of you, in the name of Jesus Christ, for the forgiveness of your sins. And you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. The promise is for you and your children and for all who are far off, for all whom the Lord, our God, will call.’ With many other words he warned them and he pleaded with them, saying, ‘Save yourselves from this corrupt generation.’”

But what is that Holy Spirit? I used to think it was just that great rush of wind, that swoosh, kind of a like a ghostly power that settled on people and filled them with the Holy Spirit. But now, after reading the Tripartite Tractate and considering this gnosis for several years, I think that the Holy Spirit is the coming of the Third Order of Powers. The First Order of Powers were the original Aeons—that is, the differentiations that are within the Son of God and that coexist with the Son. It’s the infinite number of variables of all possibilities of God. The Second Order of Powers is us. We are an order of powers.

We’re part of the original power coming from the Father and through the Son and then through the Aeons. And we are literally the fruit of the Aeon Logos. He had the fractals of all the Aeons inside of him, and we are the fruit of those fractals after Logos returned back to the Fullness.

And then the Third Order of Powers is what came along with the manifestation of the Christ, first in the heavens and then on Earth. And Christ is not an Aeon; Christ is not the Son. Christ is the Third Order of Powers. And all of those that come with the Christ are Third Order Powers—that is, all of the variables that make up the Christ. The Pleroma of the Christ is the Third Order of Powers. We are the fruit of the Pleroma of Logos, the Second Order of Powers. The First Order of Powers was the Pleroma of the Son. And Christ is the Third Order of Powers. He’s a different entity than the Father and the Son. He is the Pleroma of the Holy Spirit.

Christ was formed in order to save us from the Fall and to save the Demiurge from the Fall. The Christ, the Third Order of Powers, is the most powerful being in the material world. He has all of the mojo of the Son, all of the mojo of the First Order Powers, all of the Aeons put together with the consecration or the will of the Father. He is anointed for a special task of bringing us all home and rolling up this material creation and bringing us into what is called the third economy or the final economy. We’re in the second economy now. The first economy is the hierarchy of the Fullness, where the Aeons live. The material cosmos is the second economy, or you could call it the second ecological system. And then there’s going to be a third economy, and that is when everyone who has been alive down here below, everyone who has been birthed into this material existence as a Second Order Power and melded to the Fall, will come home to the ethereal plane.

When the fiery tongues came down and set upon everyone who was in that upper room at Pentecost, each of the disciples and the followers who were in that house, that was their Third Order Power alighting upon their heads. When Jesus was baptized by John the Baptist at the very beginning of his ministry, Jesus came to his cousin John, who was baptizing people in the river, and he asked to be baptized. And John said, “No, no, I’m not even worthy to carry your sandals. I can’t baptize you. You’re the anointed one.” And Jesus said, “No, you have to baptize me. It’s all part of the plan.”

And after Jesus was dunked in the river by John, and he rose up out of the river, it says that the Holy Spirit alighted upon his,( alighted means landed), landed upon his head like a dove. So when this Holy Spirit came to Jesus, then Jesus was anointed and walking around with all of the powers of the Third Order on display within him. He was the first of the human Second Order Powers who to be anointed by the Holy Spirit. Of course, Jesus is more than a Second Order Power. He’s always been the manifestation of a Second Order Power plus the Third Order of Powers. And we call that the Christ. We say Jesus Christ, but he’s actually called Jesus the Anointed, and the anointing was the Holy Spirit. To be anointed signifies a special set-apart status for fulfilling a particular purpose or calling. And the calling of Jesus was to round us all up and bring us home. The Greek word chrio means to consecrate or set apart for sacred use. So when we say Jesus Christ, we’re saying Jesus the anointed, who has been set apart for sacred use. And he was the first to be anointed by the Holy Spirit.

Now, the reason why everyone broke out speaking in tongues that everyone in Jerusalem could understand, they said, “Hey, I thought all these people were from Galilee. How is it that they’re speaking our language?” And there were hundreds of languages being represented because it was a huge pilgrimage to Jerusalem for Pentecost. Well, the reason why is because the Holy Spirit knows everything, and it empowered each of those disciples of Christ to be speaking in a way that others could understand.

So suddenly, all of a sudden, whether you spoke Hebrew or Greek or then any of these hundreds of other languages, you could understand for the first time the message that Jesus was preaching. Now, in what are called Pentecostal churches nowadays, Pentecost being that time when the Holy Spirit came to speak to everyone, came to inhabit everyone, Pentecostal churches continue to speak in tongues. But the problem is that generally nobody else can understand what they’re saying. When people speak in tongues, it sounds very Middle Eastern, but it’s not like they’re speaking in French or German or Spanish, where anyone can understand them, or even English. They’re speaking in this, what is fairly unintelligible, mystical, Middle Eastern type of tongue. But back in the original Pentecost, everybody was speaking in such a way that everyone could be understood. So what are the functions of the Holy Spirit as taught by Jesus?

First off, it says in John 14:17, “Even the spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive because it sees him not, neither knows him, but you know him, for he dwells with you and shall be in you.”

 So we are baptized in the Holy Spirit. We who have decided that Jesus was the anointed Third Order Power who came to Earth to bring us Second Order Powers home, which is the Gnostic gospel, we invite the Third Order Powers to come and take up dwelling inside of ourself. So now we’re not just the one Self, which is a reflection of the Son of God, and we’re not just the ego, which is a reflection of our Second Order status. We then also have a Third Order Power overlaying both of those. And the Third Order is the most powerful force in this cosmos. We have all necessary power once we invite the Third Order Powers to take up dwelling.

If your ego is sitting on the throne of your soul, as we say, then you’re just being pushed about by every whim and desire of the material world. You’re being influenced by influencers. Your focus is on yourself, your body, your looks, what you’re eating, what you’re wearing, where you’re going to go, how you’re going to have fun. That’s your egoic Second Order nature. Your First Order nature is to have the Son of God foremost in your mind. And I think that’s what the prophets of the Old Testament had—the Son sitting on their throne. So they were receiving truth, even though the Third Order of Powers didn’t come until Jesus came. But we’ve got a Third Order of Powers.

And in John 14:26, it says, “But the Comforter who is the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, he shall teach you all things.”

So accepting the Third Order Powers brings comfort. Why wouldn’t we want to have comfort? What’s the point of lying down here bleeding and suffering and being worried and frightened? There’s no point to it at all. You don’t gain any brownie points through suffering. We are called to be full of joy. The Holy Spirit brings us that comfort and he comes in the name of Jesus the Anointed.

And it says, “He shall teach you all things.”

Well, how would the Holy Spirit teach you anything? Because the Holy Spirit is the embodiment that knows everything. He’s ethereal. He’s preexistent. He knows the Father. He knows the Son. He knows all of the Aeons. He was in on all the conferences on how to get us out of this sticky mess we found ourselves in. So he comes to teach us what we need to know to extricate ourselves from this material morass in which we find ourselves.

In John 14:26, it says, “After, he shall teach you all things and bring all things to your remembrance, whatsoever I have said to you.”

Now, usually the Christians limit that to whatever Jesus said to them. But in the Gnostic Gospels, we’re called those of the remembrance.  That’s what we’re known as, because when we’re born into this world, we carry with us the memory of the ethereal plane, but we forget it, just like the Demiurge. We’re a fractal replication—each of our lives is a fractal replication of the fall of Logos, the splitting into the good thought and the egoic thought, and then forgetting about the ethereal plane. That’s the lot of the Demiurge. We are in the same spot. We tend to forget what we were born with.

So we’re not born as a blank slate, a tabula rasa. We are born with the full remembrance of all of the powers and the glory of God and our home on the ethereal plane, which resembles paradise. That’s why all humans have a similar dream of paradise. That’s the remembrance. So when we accept the Holy Spirit, it reminds us; we are no longer forgetful. Now we accept the remembrance that we were born with again.

That’s why somewhere it says, (I don’t have the quote in front of me), but there’s practically an infinite way to express being fallen. There’s an infinite way to be confused, but there is one way to come home. There’s one place that we will return to.

So we have a myriad of confusions down here when we have forgotten, but when we remember, we get back on that glory beam, as I like to call it, and that is the one way up. That’s what one way means. Now the ordinary conventional Christian way of understanding that one way is to say that you have to profess belief in Jesus Christ because that is the one way—that Jesus is the gatekeeper to heaven. Yes, Jesus is the one way to heaven, but that doesn’t mean that you need to know that, that you need to recognize that. Someday you will, because it says “every knee shall bend, and every tongue shall confess that Jesus the Anointed is Lord.”

But if you don’t do that before you die, if you don’t acknowledge that Jesus is the Anointed one, that just means you’re going to have a harder time after you die. You’re going to have to go through some of those bardo-type experiences we talked about last week. So yeah, Jesus the Anointed is the one way, and that was his job, and it is finished, whether or not you believe it. But you’re not going to go to hell if you don’t.

John 15:26 says, “But when the Comforter is come…” so it’s the Holy Spirit, the Comforter, and I think that each one of us has a Third Order Power that is assigned to us. There is a Third Order Power for every Second Order Power, and that is our salvation. That is what unlocks the full remembrance and the full understanding of truth down to the cellular level.

So, when your Third Order Power has come, “whom I will send unto you from the Father,” says Jesus, “even the Spirit of truth, who proceeds from the Father, he shall testify of me.”

And they do personify the Holy Spirit, so it’s not just a force or a power. It is always personified. It’s always He. So this Third Order Power will guide us in everything we need to know. It’s the Third Order Powers that bring us all our gnosis. My Third Order Power comes to me with everything I need to know. I have different misunderstandings of things than you do. We’re all individuals. We all make our own mistakes. We all wander off the path in our own way. As I said, there’s almost an infinite variety of ways to go wrong, but the Third Order Power is our touchstone. It’s our truth teller. It testifies of the Father. It reminds us of paradise.

Then John 16:8 goes on to say, “When he is come,” that is the Holy Spirit, your Third Order Power, “he will reprove the world of sin.” That is, he’ll scold them. He’ll take it away. He’ll denounce the world of sin. “The sin is because they do not believe on me,” he says. “Righteousness, because I go to my Father and he will see me no more. Judgment, because the prince of the world is judged.”

And here’s one of the heresies, of course. “The prince of this world,” is it Satan? Well, there’s no character called Satan, actually, in the Greek. It’s the Accuser. So Satan, his job is to whisper how lousy you are, to whisper how worthless you are, and stupid, and that you’ll never make it to heaven. That’s the job of the Accuser. But the prince of this world, that’s the Demiurge. That’s the king of this world. This Accuser is his main henchman, his archon.

John 16:13 says, “However, when he, the Spirit of Truth, is come, he will guide you into all truth, for he shall not speak of himself, but whatsoever he shall hear, that shall he speak.”

So the Third Order Power is never serving itself. It’s not here for its own glory or for its own aggrandizement. It comes to share the truth with us. That’s all. He wants to guide you into all truth. And we call ourselves Gnostic, or if you’re on the Gnostic path and you’re looking to unlock your gnosis, that is truth. The path to this truth is the Holy Spirit. And if you hate Jesus, and you hate these things like the Holy Spirit… well, those are unhelpful memes that you picked up along the way because your original spirit knows the Fullness of God. It is undeniable because it is inherent within your Second Order nature. In any event, why would you reject the Holy Spirit? He reflects the full truth of the ethereal plane. And the Anointed One came in particular to save us, in particular to save you, to help you, to reveal to you your gnosis. So if you hate the Christ, well, you have wandered away from the right path. I don’t know what you would rather believe than believe in the Anointed Power and the Holy Spirit who came for you.

In John 16:15, it says, “All things that the Father has are mine, (that is, the Anointed’s) therefore, said I, that he shall take of mine, and shall show it unto you.”

So your gnosis is being revealed by the Comforter, and that is why it is comforting.

Next week we will discuss the Holy Spirit some more and we will look at the gnostic meaning of Mark 3:28 and Matthew 13:49. What exactly is blasphemy against the Holy Spirit and why is it said to be inexcusable? What’s the gnostic take on that? Is anything unforgiveable?

Until next week, onward and upward, and God bless us all.

Have you purchased your copy of A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel yet?

Widely acclaimed as the most approachable gnostic text ever written. Based upon the Tripartite Tractate of the Nag Hammadi scriptures. Dr. Ropp’s specialty is bringing ancient texts to life in understandable language.