The birth of the church universal, the Holy Spirit launching the message of Jesus Christ into the world through a newly empowered people. And here we see the bookends of Pentecost and the return of the King Jesus. We live in that time in between, in the church age. As we look to the reading of God’s word, if you please join with me in prayer.
God, our helper, by your Holy Spirit, we ask you to open our minds so that as scriptures are read as your word is proclaimed, that we may be led into your truth and taught your will. And all of this for the sake of Jesus Christ our Lord, in whose name we now pray. Amen.
Looking at Acts chapter 1, beginning in verse 4: And while staying with them, he, Jesus, ordered them not to depart from Jerusalem, but to wait for the promise of the Father, which he said, you heard from me, For John baptized with water, but you will be baptized with the Holy Spirit not many days from now. So when they had come together, they asked him, Lord, will you at this time restore the kingdom to Israel? He said to them, it is not for you to know the times or seasons that the Father has fixed by his own authority. But you will receive power, and the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in Judea, in Samaria, and to the end of the earth. Acts 2.
When the day of Pentecost arrived, they were all together in one place. And suddenly there came from heaven a sound like a mighty rushing wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting. And divided tongues as of fire appeared to them and rested on each of them. And they were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues as the Spirit gave them utterance. Now there were dwelling in Jerusalem Jews, devout men from every nation under heaven.
And at the sound, the multitude came together, and they were bewildered because each one was hearing them speak in his own language. And they were amazed and astonished, saying, ‘Are not all these who are speaking Galileans? How is it that we hear each of us in his own native language?’ The word of the Lord.
Disney has made sure that most of us know the story of King Arthur and the sword in the stone. But something you may not know about King Arthur, about the legends, is the role of Pentecost in them. It was Pentecost Sunday that the sword was pulled from the stone and Arthur was made king. It was Pentecost Sunday that King Arthur gathered the Knights of the Round Table and made a covenant with them as they swore what was called the Pentecostal Oath of Allegiance. It was also the anniversary date of his wedding to Guinevere.
Now, I’m not suggesting that King Arthur has anything to do with Pentecost. Rather, it’s the meaning of Pentecost that shaped the legends of Arthur. In our day, Pentecost is virtually invisible in our Christian tradition, but that has not been the case through the centuries. It has always been actually a very important part of the Christian tradition and the understanding of Pentecost going into the world and all of its implications. It was the launching, of course, of the good news of Jesus.
Without which you and I would be subjected to the powers and the principalities of darkness, without which you and I would still be in our sins without any hope. At Pentecost, the light of Jesus went out past Palestine and into the whole world. The age of the church was started, and a new community was formed under a new covenant. And yes, it’s connected and flowing from the old, but it’s under The Lordship of the once and future King Jesus. And because Jesus has sent his people to be witnesses to the world, we must go forth as his empowered people to be a part of his ever-expanding presence.
And Pentecost is the beginning of that. It was one of the great feasts of the Old Testament, the Feast of Weeks, where the, the Israelites were required to come to Jerusalem to sacrifice. It was 50 days after the Passover. The name Pentecost is simply the Greek word meaning 50. And so they celebrated the ingathering of the harvest.
But it was also the celebration of the giving of the law at Mount Sinai. Pentecost fell on a Sunday, and that’s no accident. It’s another reason why the first day of the week is established as the new Lord’s Day, the Christian Sabbath. Jesus rose on Sunday. Pentecost was poured out on Sunday.
The old gave way to the new. For Christians, Pentecost is celebrating the coming of the Holy Spirit upon the disciples as the ingathering of the harvest of the nations. Pentecost transforms the ministry of Jesus into the mission of the church. It sends God’s people into the world as Christ’s very presence to the world. And we have to be careful not to get sidetracked from this mandate.
And we see here before us in the event of Pentecost, there’s many Old Testament types or parallels that speak to all that God is doing. And these types, these signs and symbols are throughout this account. We’re gonna talk about them just broadly. It’s kind of a shotgun effect of all the different things that we see. And Acts begins with Jesus about to ascend to the Father.
He has been with them. His disciples since the resurrection for about 40 days. And here in verse 4 of chapter 1, while staying with them, Jesus ordered them not to depart from Jerusalem, but to wait for the promise of the Father, which he said, “You heard from me.” They’re waiting for this promise. And then in chapter 2, when the day of Pentecost arrived, they were all together in one place. This promise was being fulfilled on Pentecost.
And you say, well, why wait until Pentecost? Why not just get things started immediately? The Father has been orchestrating all of human history to its appointed end. He’s bringing all the threads together in the person and work of His Son Jesus. Everything at its appointed time.
And of course, as I said, Pentecost is celebrating this ingathering of the harvest. And we know that Jesus, the Passover Lamb, is sacrificed so that by His blood, sin is atoned for, death is conquered, and now the nations are being gathered in the harvest. Pentecost is the official transition from the Old Testament to the New Testament.
Darrell Bock put it this way, he said, the bridge from the old era to the new is crossed when Jesus brings the Spirit. Jesus’ ministry is the connecting point. A new era has has begun. And the coming of the Spirit tells us that Jesus has been enthroned on high. The day of judgment is yet to come, but that day of salvation is now for all who come to him.
And the proclamation of the good news of Jesus will continue until the very end. And in the first century, Pentecost also took the celebrations— they mentioned— of the giving of the Law of Moses at Mount Sinai. And if you recall, Moses alone, he ascends the mountain. In that account, we are given The image is of fire, wind, a divine tongue. There’s a tempest.
There’s smoke going up. The Lord is thundering from Sinai. And Moses then comes down and he brings the law. He descends with tablets of stone. When Christ ascended, he sent the Spirit in fire, wind, and human tongues.
And now the law is written on our hearts. As a gift of his Spirit. Pentecost, the New Covenant promise begins its fulfillment, and we see that in, in these three signs. Verse 2: Suddenly there came from heaven the sound like a mighty rushing wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting. This, this wind— in Hebrew, Greek, and Latin, the word for spirit is the same word for breath and for wind.
In context tells you the meaning. The idea here of the wind of the Spirit coming upon them. Even here we see a celebration of a re-creation, and the Spirit is present. Back in Genesis 1, it says that at the beginning of creation we read, “And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters.” The Spirit, the breath of God. And the Lord, he spoke creation into existence, and here in Acts 2, We have the recreation.
All that God is doing is being reformed, redone from the fall. And fire is a symbol of God’s presence and judgment. And here in verse 3, divided tongues of fire appeared to them and rested on each one of them. You see the presence of God in the burning bush in Exodus 3. Each person has this symbol, for each person has a Holy Spirit dwelling in them.
Hebrews 12 quotes from Deuteronomy 4, and our God is a consuming fire, presence and judgment. And John the Baptist, he looks at both of these things, which actually gets separated out in Pentecost. In the Gospel in Luke 3, John, speaking of Jesus, said, Jesus will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and with fire. His winnowing fork is in his hand to clear the threshing floor, to gather the wheat in his barn, but the chaff he will burn with unclean toucheable fire. So John is seeing all this is one event, and now we see that this is actually stretched out.
We have the bookends of Pentecost and Christ’s return in judgment. And here then, the appearance of these many tongues of fire indicates, unlike the temple, which is just a single location, the Spirit now is dispersed into each believer. Each person now is the temple of the Holy Spirit. And finally, languages. Verse 4: They were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues, other languages, as the Spirit gave them utterance.
And there were dwelling in Jerusalem Jews, devout men from every nation under heaven. And at the sound, the multitude came together, and they were bewildered because each was hearing them speak in his own language. And then verses 9 to 10 goes on to list 16 different nations that are mentioned. And with the speaking in tongue, which simply means they spoke in, in foreign languages, we see the reversal of the Tower of Babel. From a confusion of languages comes the Spirit transcending languages to unite people together under the message of the gospel.
In Genesis, in chapter 10, we get this long list of the various nations, and then in Chapter 11, we get the confusing of languages, of Babel. We see everything that they’re doing. Humanity is coming together in a godless cause to make their name great, separate from God, and God scatters them because of it. And now he’s drawing humanity together to unite them under the name of of his great son, Jesus. People spoke and they were bewildered because they could not understand.
And now they’re bewildered because they do understand. God has done something great. A reversal has taken place. The Lord begins to heal this division. He reunites us around himself.
And of the many things that that tells us is that there can be no racism, No nationalism in the kingdom of God because we are united together by the Holy Spirit. Christianity is truly a world religion. And we hear that, we say that, but don’t let that go by you too quickly. In Islam, the Quran has to be in Arabic for it to be the Quran. A translation is not technically the Quran.
And the culture has to conform to basically 7th century Arabia. For it to work. Now, the Hindu religion also is not really found much outside of India. Buddhism is also fairly circumscribed geographically. But from its inception, Christianity was global.
The scriptures were translated into whatever language they went. There was no one language to contain it. Every tribe and tongue and culture the gospel went into and they translated it. And part of the work and the task of missionaries have been translating the Bible into new languages. That it is not just a Jewish religion, a Mediterranean religion, it is global.
And that speaks to the task at hand, not only of bringing the good news of Jesus into these cultures and languages, but it’s the going. One writer said it this way. He said the whole point about Pentecost was that the disciples up till then are hiding away in the upper room. They were blown out into the street by the rushing wind to speak the truth of God, of Christ, in public. A timid, hiding people now empowered and blown out into the streets to publicly declare Jesus.
And that’s exactly what happens. Peter goes out to tell all these bewildered and perplexed people exactly what’s going on. In verse 22, he said, Men of Israel, hear these words: Jesus of Nazareth, a man attested to you by God with mighty works, wonders, and signs that God did through him in your midst, as you yourselves know— this Jesus, delivered up according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God, you crucified and killed by the hands of lawless men. God raised him up. Loosing the power, the pangs of death, because it was not possible for it to hold him.
And Peter walks them through the scriptures to tie all of this together. Empowered by the Holy Spirit, he speaks to them the good news of Jesus, how everything that they have been raised with, how everything that they have understood in their Jewish scriptures is centered upon him. Pentecost is about the Holy Spirit. Coming to God’s people to launch the ministry of Jesus into the world. It’s not about a new and improved me.
It’s not about my personal and private experience. No, Pentecost is the launching of the church. It’s about the public proclamation of Jesus, the Son of God. It’s about moving from death into life. In Exodus 32, it’s the giving of the law.
Moses goes up on Mount Sinai for 40 days. 40 days he’s in the very presence of God, and everyone’s around. They can hear and see the presence of the Lord. And what do they do? They get bored and restless before the very presence of God, and they had Aaron make them a golden calf.
So that they could worship it. And in the chaos that ensued, in the judgment that followed, it tells us that some 3,000 people were put to death. And here at Pentecost, which the Jewish people celebrating the very giving of the law, we read in verse 41 at its conclusion, so those who received his word, Peter’s word about the gospel, were baptized, and there were added that day about 3,000 souls. See, no detail is left out by the Lord, bringing all these threads together in the person of Jesus. The Holy Spirit is sent to empower the proclamation of his Son.
He reunites, he recreates, he spiritually heals those who are blind and cannot see. And when Jesus ascends to the Father, the Spirit descends to the earth. The disciples were in this unique position, uh, in this in-between spot between the— this bridge between the old and the new. So the coming of the Spirit was actually delayed for them. But for all the rest, after Christ’s ascension, to have Jesus is to have the Spirit.
There’s no delay. There are not Spirit-baptized believers and non-Spirit-baptized believers. That’s not a thing. If you have The Spirit, you have Christ. If you have Christ, you have the Spirit.
Because the Holy Spirit, as Paul tells us repeatedly, he is the deposit, he is the guarantee given to us of the future salvation and glory that awaits us. We are united to Christ because his Spirit dwells in us. This too is the beginning of the end. And what awaits us at the end is now given to us in part. Until we get there.
The Old Testament Pentecost was the celebration of the first fruits, and the Apostle Paul tells us in Romans 8 that, that we have the first fruits of the Holy Spirit. And what is to come in fullness is now pledged to us in part by the Lord, but it’s truly there. Again, we see the bookends of Pentecost and the Lord’s return, and we’re living out the middle. Our time in Revelation is showing us the that all through this history of what we do in the middle, the church age, is what we are currently living out, the time between the times. And we still live in a world that’s in conflict with its creator, but the Spirit enables us to, to bow the knee to our Sovereign, and you and I live under his rule and reign.
And so in doing, we we proclaim the Spirit has come. And as you endure persecution for his name, you proclaim that the Spirit has come. And as you tell the wonders of Jesus, you proclaim that the Spirit has come, that it’s reality, it’s presence. And it’s in the moments of hardship and difficulties that God’s people have always thought that the end is right here, right now. Especially when you’re suffering.
And that’s been the case throughout 2,000 years of history. In those moments, it’s a, “These are the very last days.” No, this is it. This is finally it. Maybe. Hope so.
But we’re to be busy until the end.
And so often when people get caught up into focusing so much on, “Is this is it? Is this the end?” They do so and they lose their peace and their joy. It’s almost always spoken of with a shadow of fear and trepidation.
That’s not the good news of Jesus. Jesus saves us from sin and death. Jesus restores our relationship to the Father. Pentecost launches a church empowered into the world, and that’s worth celebrating. That’s worth joyfully proclaiming.
It’s a one-time event that reverberates through all of history. And in this, we also know that Babel is always very near to our hearts.
And the Lord in his mercy is moving us along. And what I mean by that, it’s very easy for us to develop a fortress mentality. It’s us versus them. That’s what Babel is all about. It’s us who understand against those who don’t.
We get it. They don’t. In whatever way that that’s said, part of the task of Pentecost is building and strengthening the unity that it creates. We see so much fracturing in our society right now of a godless and a spiritless response is to pull into even smaller and more narrow divisions. And we see that everywhere.
Us versus them, and the us is getting really, really small, and the them is getting really, really big. And we see that in the church, how some of our differences divide us, how we pull in and they’re no longer a part of us. But as spirit followers of Jesus, we have to wrestle with the hard work of unity. Because he has made us one. One pastor said, stop treating the great sin of disunity as if you’re only driving 60 in a 55, like, oh, no big deal.
No, it’s a big deal. It matters— truth and unity. Why? Because Jesus has died and resurrected and ascended to the Father and sent his Spirit for the unity of his people. And we are to live that out.
And we’ve seen that, and we’ve gone through Revelation. In Revelation 7, John is looking in his vision. He said, after this I looked, and behold, a great multitude that no one could number, from every nation, from every tribe and people and language, standing before the throne, before the Lamb, clothed in white robes, crying out with a loud voice, salvation belongs to our God who sits on the throne and to the Lamb. A multitude of the peoples of the world.
And, and we work then for that unity. We work hard for it because this is what God has made us for, to live in eternally before him. And we start now with that. It is hard work because the world wants to divide us. It wants to separate us.
And so let the Spirit blow you into the streets to tell people the good news of the gospel of Jesus. Jesus tells us in Matthew 24, “And this gospel of the kingdom will be preached in the whole world as a testimony to all nations, and then the end will come.” Everything has its appointed time by the Father, which he alone knows. And you and I get to be a part of the proclamation of that good news that will usher in the end at some point. And so we share the good news, but it must be good news in order to share it.
Because in sharing good news, it makes it even sweeter. And so the question comes back to each of us: What is so sweet to you about Jesus? Sweetness that’s worth sharing? What is the sweetness of Jesus for you that you want to tell other people about? That’s worth proclaiming, that’s worth the sacrifice, that we hardly count the cost because we get to go and speak of the wonders of our Savior, to speak of the life that we now have, the aroma and the fragrance of the vitality that the Spirit brings to us.
That’s ours to be able to share. And we are a part and participate in this great work of redemption. That’s the joy of belonging to the church, to the body of Christ. And we share that one with another. And we share that as a common goal, a common task.
That God has sent us his very presence of Christ into the world. The sweetness of Jesus upon our lips.
That people would be able to see the love that we have for one another, the love that we share for them, and wonder and question, “What is this? I am truly bewildered by the words that you are speaking to me.” Even as we pray, come Holy Spirit, that times of refreshing might come from the presence of the Lord. Pray with me. Father Almighty, as we come before you, we just say thank you. We are here because of your kindness, your forbearance and patience.
Lord, you have blessed us with the hearing of the gospel, the proclamation of these words of truth. Your Spirit, he has descended into our hearts. And Father, we pray and ask that you would continue to reveal to us the magnitude of what that means. Father, that you would fill us with boldness to proclaim, and Father, that you would empower us to live as you have called your people to live, that you would unite us one to another, the world would see this unity and give glory to you for sending your Son. For we pray and ask these things all in his mighty name.
Amen.
Discaimer: This sermon text was generated by an automated transcription service.