THE DAY OF PENTECOST
WE may never know precisely what happened on the Day of Pentecost, but we do know that it was one of the supremely great days of the Christian Church – for, on that day, the Holy Spirit came to the Christian Church in a very special way.
Acts has been called the Gospel of the Holy Spirit; so, before we turn to detailed consideration of its second chapter, let us take a general view of what Acts has to say about the Holy Spirit.
The Coming of the Spirit
It is perhaps unfortunate that we so often speak of the events at Pentecost as the coming of the Holy Spirit. The danger is that we may think that the Holy Spirit came into existence at that time. That is not so; God is eternally Father, Son and Holy Spirit. In fact, Acts makes that quite clear. The Holy Spirit was speaking in David (Acts 1:16); the Spirit spoke through Isaiah (Acts 28:25); Stephen accuses the Jews of having opposed the Spirit all through their history (Acts 7:51). In that sense, the Spirit is God in every age revealing his truth. At the same time, something special happened at Pentecost.
The Work of the Spirit in Acts
From that moment, the Holy Spirit became the dominant reality in the life of the early Church.
For one thing, the Holy Spirit was the source of all guidance. The Spirit moves Philip to make contact with the Ethiopian eunuch (Acts 8:29), prepares Peter for the coming of the messengers from Cornelius (Acts 10:19), orders Peter to go without hesitation with these messengers (Acts 11:12), enables Agabus to foretell the coming famine (Acts 11:28), orders the setting apart of Paul and Barnabas for the momentous step of taking the gospel to the Gentiles (Acts 13:2, 13:4), guides the decisions of the Council of Jerusalem (Acts 15:28), guides Paul past Asia, Mysia and Bithynia, down into Troas and from there to Europe (Acts 16:6), and tells Paul what awaits him in Jerusalem (Acts 20:23). The early Church was a Spirit-guided community.
For another thing, all the leaders of the Church were men of the Spirit. The Seven are men of the Spirit (Acts 6:3); Stephen and Barnabas are full of the Spirit (Acts 7:55, 11:24). Paul tells the elders at Ephesus that it was the Spirit who made them overseers over the Church of God (Acts 20:28).
And further, the Spirit was the source of day-to-day courage and power. The disciples are to receive power when the Spirit comes (Acts 1:8); Peter’s courage and eloquence before the Sanhedrin are the result of the activity of the Spirit (Acts 4:31); Paul’s conquest of Elymas is the work of the Spirit (Acts 13:9). The Christian courage to meet the dangerous situation, the Christian power to cope with life more than adequately, the Christian eloquence when eloquence is needed, and the Christian joy which is independent of circumstances are all attributed to the work of the Spirit.
Finally, Acts 5:32 speaks of the Spirit ‘whom God has given to those who obey him’. This has in it the great truth that the degree to which we can possess the Spirit is conditioned by the kind of people we are. It means that anyone who is honestly trying to do the will of God will experience more and more of the wonder of the Spirit.
In the first thirteen chapters of Acts, there are more than forty references to the Holy Spirit; the early Church was a Spirit-filled Church, and that was the source of its power.
THE BREATH OF GOD
Acts 2:1–13
So when the day of Pentecost came round, they were all together in one place; and all of a sudden there came from heaven a sound like that of a violent, rushing wind, and it filled the whole house where they were sitting. And tongues, like tongues of fire, appeared to them, which distributed themselves among them and settled on each one of them. And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit, and they began to speak in other tongues as the Spirit gave them the power of utterance.
There were, staying in Jerusalem, Jews, devout men from all the races under heaven. When the news of this got abroad, the crowd assembled and came pouring together; for each one of them heard them speaking in his own language. They were all astonished and kept saying in amazement: ‘Look now! Are all these men who are speaking not Galilaeans? And how is it that each one of us hears them speaking in our own language in which we were born? Parthians and Medes, Elamites, those who live in Mesopotamia, in Judaea and Cappadocia, in Pontus, in Asia, in Phrygia and Pamphylia, in Egypt and the parts of Libya round about Cyrene, Romans, who are staying here, Jews and proselytes, people from Crete and Arabia – we hear these men telling the wonders of God in our own tongues.’ They were all astonished and did not know what to make of it, and they kept on saying to each other: ‘What can this mean?’ But others kept on saying in mockery: ‘They are filled with new wine.’
THERE were three great Jewish festivals to which every male Jew living within twenty miles of Jerusalem was legally bound to come – the Passover, Pentecost and the Feast of Tabernacles. Pentecost means ‘the Fiftieth’, and another name for Pentecost was ‘the Feast of Weeks’. It was so called because it fell on the fiftieth day, a week of weeks, after the Passover. The Passover was celebrated in the middle of April; therefore Pentecost fell at the beginning of June. By that time, travelling conditions were at their best. At least as many came to the Feast of Pentecost as came to the Passover. That explains the list of countries mentioned in this chapter; never was there a more international crowd in Jerusalem than at the time of Pentecost.
The feast itself was significant in two ways. (1) It had a historical significance. It commemorated the giving of the law to Moses on Mount Sinai. (2) It had an agricultural significance. At the Passover, part of the first crop of barley was offered to God; and at Pentecost two loaves were offered in gratitude for the safe gathering in of the harvest. It had one other unique characteristic. The law laid it down that on that day people should not do their everyday work (Leviticus 23:21; Numbers 28:26). So it was a holiday for everyone, and the crowds on the streets would be greater than ever.
What happened at Pentecost we really do not know, except that the disciples had an experience of the power of the Spirit flooding their beings such as they had never had before. We must remember that, for this part of Acts, Luke was not an eyewitness. He tells the story as if the disciples had suddenly acquired the gift of speaking in foreign languages. For two reasons, that is not likely.
(1) There was in the early Church a phenomenon which has never completely disappeared. It was called speaking with tongues (cf. Acts 10:46, 19:6). The main passage which describes it is 1 Corinthians 14. What happened was that someone, in an ecstasy, began to pour out a flood of unintelligible sounds in no known language. That was supposed to be directly inspired by the Spirit of God and was a gift greatly coveted. Paul did not approve of it, because he preferred that a message should be given in a language that could be understood. In fact, he said that a stranger coming in might well think that the members of the congregation were mad (1 Corinthians 14:23). That precisely fits Acts 2:13. People speaking in tongues might well appear to be drunk to someone who had never witnessed the phenomenon.
(2) To speak in foreign languages was unnecessary. The crowd was made up of Jews (verse 5) and converts (verse 10) – Gentiles who had accepted the Jewish religion and the Jewish way of life. For a crowd like that, at most two languages were necessary. Almost all Jews spoke Aramaic; and, even if they were Jews of the dispersion from a foreign land, they would speak the language which almost everyone in the world spoke at that time – Greek.
It seems most likely that Luke, a Gentile, had confused speaking with tongues with speaking in foreign languages. What happened was that, for the first time in their lives, this mixed crowd was hearing the word of God in a way that struck straight home to their hearts and that they could understand. The power of the Spirit was such that it had given the disciples a message that could reach every heart.
THE FIRST CHRISTIAN PREACHING
ACTS 2:14–42 is one of the most interesting passages in the New Testament, because