Pentacost
Notes
Transcript
Acts 2:1-12
Acts 2:1-12
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 there 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? Then how is it that each of us hears them in our native language? Parthians, Medes and Elamites; residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya near Cyrene; visitors from Rome (both Jews and converts to Judaism); Cretans and Arabs—we hear them declaring the wonders of God in our own tongues!” Amazed and perplexed, they asked one another, “What does this mean?”
Over the past few weeks, we have danced around this story reading what happens before this, and right after this. We also usually talk about Pentecost every year, so this tends to be a familiar story for a lot of people. We celebrate this story as the birth of Christianity, this new chapter of God and his people. It is a wonderful story with lots of rich details, but I must confess that even though I grew up within the church, my understanding and appreciation for Pentecost was fairly limited. In fact, it wasn’t until well into my adulthood, that I realized that the celebration of Pentecost wasn’t a new holiday or Holy day that was being created. This wasn’t a NEW celebration but an old one.
Maybe most of you already know this, but for a long time, I certainly didn’t, so just for the sake of covering our bases, lets go back to the Old Testament and unpack a few important details that I think really shape and enhance my appreciation for what happens here in the text of Acts 2 at THIS Pentecost celebration.
Lets go all the way back to the book of Exodus! The second book in the Old Testament. This book is rich and full of wonderful stories and part of what is addressed in the book of Exodus is God establishing his relationship with the new Nation of Israel. In Exodus Chapter 34 God is giving Moses a list of instructions and one of those famous instructions is Exodus 34:18 Which says
“Celebrate the Festival of Unleavened Bread. For seven days eat bread made without yeast, as I commanded you. Do this at the appointed time in the month of Aviv, for in that month you came out of Egypt.
We don’t typically use the phrase Festival of unleavened bread, we typically just call it Passover. But this is the same celebration. The instructions are to do this every year in celebration of God leading the Israelites out of Egypt. Most of us are familiar with that story and familiar with the Passover celebration.
However just a few verses later, in this same set of instructions God is giving to Moses, he also sets up 2 more important festivals that they are supposed to celebrate every year. Exodus 34:22
“Celebrate the Festival of Weeks with the firstfruits of the wheat harvest, and the Festival of Ingathering at the turn of the year.
Together these three festivals the festival of unleavened bread, the festival of weeks and the festival of ingathering, were the 3 pilgrim festivals instituted by God. This will be really important as we move along, But lets zoom in on the festival of weeks for a moment. We learn from other passages of the Bible some additional information about this festival. For example Leviticus 23:15-16 says
“ ‘From the day after the Sabbath, the day you brought the sheaf of the wave offering, count off seven full weeks. Count off fifty days up to the day after the seventh Sabbath, and then present an offering of new grain to the Lord.
In other words count off a weeks worth of weeks 7 x 7 and then add one more Sabbath and you get to 50 days. So the greek term Pentecost, comes from the idea that this is 50 days after the passover celebration. The Hebrew short hand for this festival of weeks is commonly called shavuot, which just means weeks. So this celebration, this festival, which we call Pentecost was established by God way back in the book of Exodus. It started with the primary function of being a celebration of the Grain and Barley harvest. Basically you had 50 days to finish all of your harvesting and then you were to bring the first fruits from your harvest to the priests as an offering to God. Once the temple was built in Jerusalem, this is where you were to bring your offering. Now this celebration also absorbed another significant celebration which was the celebration of receiving the 10 commandments. So the people of Israel would both bring in their grain offerings and dedicate their harvest to the Lord, but they would also renew their covenant and commitment to living as Gods people and following the 10 commandments.
This was both a big party celebration, to celebrate the end of the harvest season and to give thanks for the blessings of a good harvest, but also, to spend serious time in the temple recommitting yourself to God and reconnecting in your faith.
So this is the undercurrent, the backdrop for what is ALREADY taking place in Jerusalem on Pentecost, PRIOR to what we so often think of as Pentecost. This was a celebration of the Goodness of God, for his blessing, and favor in providing a good harvest for the people and a reminder about how God wants us to live as his people and that God has given us clear instructions on what he wants from us in our lives through the giving of the 10 commandments.
You might say, Isaac, how can this festival of weeks, this Pentecost celebration be both a huge party, joyous event, but also deeply spiritual and Holy. To that I say think about our celebrations of Christmas and Easter. These are both Fun, Festive, Joyful celebrations full of family and good food and reunions and laughter, but there is also a deep spiritual element to these celebrations as we are reminded of the Love of God, his sacrifice and gifts to us, and they serve as catalysts for us to recommit our lives to living as God wants us to live, in light of his great gifts to us.
This is what the atmosphere was already like in Jerusalem, which will play an important role in influencing what we read in Acts 2 about what we think about from the story of Pentecost.
The other big thing from the Old Testament we need to keep in mind when reading our text this morning is much less positive. We need to remember, that in the Old Testament, the people of Israel were not always faithful to living the way God had called his people to live. And so, despite sending prophets to warn the Israelites to change their ways, the Lord sends in other nations to defeat and conquer the Israelites for their unfaithfulness. First the northern Kingdom of Israel was conquered in 720 BCE by the assyrians and the southern Kingdom of Judah was conquered a little over 100 years later in 587 BCE by the Babylonians. This is important to keep in mind, because part of the strategy of both the assyrians and the Babylonians, was not only did they conquer a region, they also then scattered the people all across their empire and they moved new people into the land they just conquered. This had the brilliant result of still maintaining enough people to work the land and generate revenue for the empire, but left each conquered people fractured and in unfamiliar territory so they could not work together to mount a revolt! This is what lead to having Jewish people scattered around the entire Mediterranean region. After time the Israelites are allowed to come home and reestablish themselves but not everyone returns in fact, lots of Jewish people stay where they were placed and so we see jewish groups all over what becomes the roman empire.
So, now we have Jewish people scattered all around the region, having lived there for generations. They would have learned the languages and the customs of their new homelands, but they still also stayed faithful to their religious heritage. Part of that heritage was to travel to Jerusalem at least once in their adult life to Jerusalem for these sacred Festivals. The more wealthy might travel, more often, but it was expected that everyone made this journey at least once. It was also common practice that for those who made the long journey from surrounding regions into Jerusalem, they would often come for Passover, or the festival of unleavened Bread, and then stay nearby all the way through the festival of weeks, or Pentecost since they were just 50 days apart.
So in Jerusalem, on the day of Pentecost, you would have all of these people who were present during the festival of the unleavened bread, or passover, who would have witnessed both Palm Sunday and the death of Jesus Christ, and now 50 days later, you have the same people who are in town for the festival of weeks, who get to experience the arrival of the Holy Spirit in a new and tangible way. A significant number of whom were people who traveled here from far away and who were staying in the area and could witness all that took place between the death of Jesus and now!
This helps explain Acts 2:5-11
Now there 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? Then how is it that each of us hears them in our native language? Parthians, Medes and Elamites; residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya near Cyrene; visitors from Rome (both Jews and converts to Judaism); Cretans and Arabs—we hear them declaring the wonders of God in our own tongues!”
These were the people who had traveled here to Jerusalem, not because they knew the Holy Spirit was going to poured out, but because they were celebrating this already existing festival that God has established long ago. I love this detail. Think about the timing of how all of this worked out! God sets up these 2 super important festivals, celebrations all the way back in the book of Exodus, Literally HUNDREDS of years before this moment. Yet he times it PERFECTLY, so that there would already be this huge crowd from all over the known region in Jerusalem for these two monumental moments of the death and resurrection of Jesus aligning with Passover and the giving of the Holy Spirit during the festival of Weeks. Remember the other big element of this celebration is focused on the receiving of the 10 commandments and the invitation from God to live as his people by obeying these commandments.
Now God is giving a new amazing gift, the Holy Spirit, who is our new guide for how to live as Gods people. The holy Spirit now lives within us and guides us and convicts us just as the 10 commandments we received so long ago were intended to do. Jeremiah 31:33 foreshadowed this when he wrote.
“This is the covenant I will make with the people of Israel
after that time,” declares the Lord.
“I will put my law in their minds
and write it on their hearts.
I will be their God,
and they will be my people.
This is more than a new gift, more than a new celebration. Just as Jesus took the regular celebration of Passover and gave it a new meaning through his death and resurrection by becoming the lamb that was slain so that we could be freed from captivity to sin.
God is renewing and breathing new life and new meaning into the celebration of Pentecost, by giving us this the Holy Spirit to guide us, a guide written not on stone tablets but on our hearts and deep inside of each of us.
There is this deep beauty and symmetry that takes places in these two ancient celebrations now renewed through the work of Jesus and the gift of the Holy Spirit. This is something that is so easily missed if we don’t know the stories of the Old Testament and don’t pay attention to the bigger picture, the grand scale to which God works!
Think of the Disciples. Jesus, dies on the cross, three days later he raises again, and for forty days he makes appearances to various people before ascending into heaven. Then they get this instruction to WAIT! For 10 days they waited, not knowing what exactly they were waiting for, unsure of what happens next, or what to do. I am sure those 10 days of waiting were hard, but God was waiting for the PERFECT time to send the gift of the Holy Spirit to come and live among us humans. Waiting can sometimes be really hard, especially when we feel like we are waiting on God to do something, but often we don’t see the full picture that God sees. He knew the beauty and the power and the symmetry of waiting until this moment, the celebration of Pentecost to send his Holy Spirit down to the disciples, to unleash them to go and speak boldly to the crowd in all of their native languages and to take advantage of the spirit of spiritual renewal and commitment to God to invite them into accepting Jesus Christ as the Messiah. It is in part, the waiting, and the trusting in Gods timing which allowed their message to be so successful. The Bible says that 3000 people were added to the faith that day and we know that in the ensuing days even more accepted that Jesus is the Messiah and became believers so that soon that number became 5000.
There is so much going on here in the text and in the background when it comes to Pentecost that is so easy to miss! The elaborate timing, the renewing of two sacred festivals established hundreds of years ago, the presence of Jewish people from all around the known world who get exposed to the Gospel message, who then take this message back home and become anchors for the global spread of Christianity, the power of the Holy Spirit to embolden Peter who just weeks before was ashamed to be known as a disciple of Jesus who now boldly proclaims that Jesus is the Messiah, to the Holy Spirit being our new Guide to shepherd Gods people just as the 10 commandments served as the Guide for Gods people. Pentecost is this beautiful, rich, complex, significant moment in time and so much of it is easily missed! So next time someone mentions Pentecost, we will not just think of this story in Acts 2 which many of us are familiar with, but we will be reminded of the broader story and grand design of God, whose timing, and intentionality are amazing to watch and let it be a reminder that God is in control, he has a grand plan for all of humanity that he put in place LONG ago and he chooses to use us to help him accomplish his plans! It is just another reason that we can put our full faith and trust in God and Know that he is at work in this world, even if we don’t always see the full picture or understand his timing. He deserves our faith and trust, and he will lead and guide us if we let him.
Amen!
