The Holy Spirit loves messes. How do I know? Because of the second verse of the Bible: “The earth was formless and void, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was moving over the surface of the water” (Gen. 1:2). At creation, as the Holy Spirit was lingering over the formless nothingness, God spoke into being the world as we know it. The Spirit of God loved the chaos to life and transformed it from a mess to magnificence. To this day, that is how He operates.

So the most basic answer to the question, “How does the Holy Spirit move?” is that He hovers. He stays over something until He chooses to move on, having completed His inspection or implementation. That’s how He moves.

Bible scholars call the first time something is mentioned in the Bible “the law of first mention.” The first time you find something stated in Scripture fixes its characteristics from that point forward. In the verse above, which is almost the very first verse of the whole Bible, we see that the Spirit of God moves. All the time, He keeps moving across the face of the earth, and He brings light into darkness wherever He goes. He didn’t stop moving that way after the earth was created, because He is constantly renewing the face of the earth, along with the hearts of the earth’s inhabitants.

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