What Pentecost Means

The passage before us today is obviously an important one not only in the book of Acts but also in the life of Christians to this very day. Luke tells us about a strange event that happened to the early Christians on the day of Pentecost, about seven weeks after Jesus of Nazareth had been crucified. And this strange event that happened to these early Christians was noticed by many people who were there in Jerusalem when it all took place, leading them to ask the question, in verse 12, that I want us to consider together this morning: “What does this mean?”

Christians today are not entirely aligned on how that question is to be answered. Whole Christian denominations have been formed based upon one particular way of interpreting what happened here in Acts 2. And even for those of us who are not formally identified with Pentecostal churches, it is clear from what we are told here that in one sense all true Christians are “Pentecostal Christians.” To put it another way, there would be no Christianity if it weren’t for Pentecost. The event we are reading about here is a fundamental aspect of the Christian faith as is the death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus.

Where is it then in the Apostle’s Creed? It is right there, in that third paragraph, which begins, “I believe in the Holy Spirit.” Pentecost has to do with the sending of the Holy Spirit, and everything else that follows in the Creed is particularly focused on the re-creating work of the Holy Spirit who came at Pentecost. The pouring out of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost signifies that all of God’s promises have been fulfilled and a new day has begun. Pentecost signifies the arrival of a new covenant, a new community, and a new commission.

A Sign of a New Covenant

First, Pentecost signifies the arrival of a new covenant.

The Setting for Joel’s Prophecy

Now again, all Christians believe in Pentecost, even if we end up in different places in some of what we think it means for our lives today. But we don’t get to make up our own meaning for Pentecost. It means what Peter says it means as he begins to speak in verse 14. And he tells us, quite clearly, that Pentecost means the fulfillment of “what was uttered through the prophet Joel” (v. 16). And then, in verses 17-21, he quotes from Joel 2:28-32.

If Pentecost is indeed the fulfillment of this ancient passage, then notice that Pentecost means “the last days” have arrived. What kind of “last days” did Joel have in mind?

The prophet Joel is a somewhat obscure figure, but scholars today generally accept that he was a post-exilic prophet, addressing the Jewish remnant who had survived the exile and were hoping to rebuild Jerusalem and the temple.[1]

A plague of locusts had devastated the agricultural crops, and the people were desperate for relief. Joel saw the plague as a warning from God and a summons to repentance. “Return to the LORD your God, for he is gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love” (Joel 2:13).

Revival One Day

So while Joel as a prophet was certainly a “religious” figure, you can see how religion was not an isolated aspect of Jewish life. The entire hope for civilization depended on some kind of national repentance and reform.

And indeed, the prophet could see a bright future ahead for Israel, and that is what he is talking about in this passage that Peter is citing. The “last days” would constitute a new era in which there would be a fully restored relationship between God and his people. It’s the “last days” because never again would there be a failure in this relationship. It would be fully restored forever. It’s the new covenant about which both Jeremiah (Jer 31:31) and Ezekiel (Ezek 37:26) had predicted, the day in which God’s law would be written on the hearts of his people and their sins that separated them from God (and hence, from his blessing) would be put away forever.

What Joel adds to this is that the restored relationship between God and his people will come about because God will “pour out” his “Spirit” on all his people. They will “come alive” again, a genuine revival. There will be new life, a new creation.

And that is what happened at Pentecost. "When the day of Pentecost arrived, they were all together in one place.” Verse 3 says that “divided tongues as of fire . . . rested on each one of them.” Verse 4 says “they were all filled with the Holy Spirit.”

All of them, not just some of them. Not just the 12 apostles, but evidently, the small group of early Christians mentioned as 120 people in verse 15. The filling of the Holy Spirit on all the believers, not just a restricted group, is the sign that the last days of Joel, the new covenant of Jeremiah and Ezekiel, the kingdom of God that held the hopes and dreams of ancient Israel—that long-awaited day had come.

This is what Pentecost means.

Living in the Last Days

What an exciting moment for a people who had been hoping for such a time to arrive!

You’ll notice here in Joel’s prophecy that the arrival of these last days, the inauguration of God’s new covenant with his people, would be accompanied by “wonders in the heavens above and signs on the earth below.” Joel speaks of “blood, and fire, and vapor of smoke” and the sun going dark, the moon turning to blood. This is apocalyptic language and does not require some sort of literal fulfillment. The Bible uses language like this to refer “to great and shocking events in the world of people, cities and nations.”[2] We do, too, in statements like “the sky is falling.”

It is language that gets our attention, or rather it is language we use to express significant times that have already captivated our attention. In claiming that Pentecost is the fulfillment of Joel’s prophecy, Peter is urging us to get our minds wrapped around what is going on here.

Christians today are of course encouraged to look forward to our Lord’s return, but we must do so without forgetting the exciting moment that has already dawned upon the world nearly 2000 years ago. Pentecost means that God’s everlasting covenant with his people, his eternal and unbreakable kingdom, has already begun. We are Pentecost people, the ones “on whom the end of the ages has come” (1 Cor 10:11).

A Sign of a New Community

And so, in addition to Pentecost signifying the arrival of a new covenant, Pentecost also signifies the beginning of a new community.

The Filling of the Spirit

Luke seems to want to emphasize the completeness of this moment, writing in verse 1 that the day of “Pentecost had fully come.” If there’s one thing that Luke seems most intent on communicating this story, it is the concept of being filled with the Holy Spirit. We see it in verse 1 “fully come,” we see it in verse 2, a sound that “filled the entire house.” and we see it in verse 4, “they were all filled with the Holy Spirit.”

Now what does that mean? It has an Old Testament basis. The Spirit’s filling is about divine enablement, and we see that here in their ability to speak in other tongues as the Spirit gave them utterance. But we must be careful about getting too technical here, because what happens here is what Jesus had called being “baptized” with the Holy Spirit (Acts 1:5). So at this point the terms can be used interchangeably. But elsewhere we will see that one who has already been baptized or filled can be filled again, although such subsequent fillings are never called baptisms.[3]

The need to be precise here is to avoid the confusion that sees the empowerment of the Spirit for a particular task or function here as identical with the presence of the Spirit as the sign of identity.

Let’s state this as clearly as possible. What we see here and will see all throughout Acts is that the presence of the Spirit is “the distinguishing mark of Christianity—it is what makes a person a Christian.”[4] As Paul says, anyone who does not have the Spirit of Christ does not belong to him. In this sense, every person who is genuinely a Christian has experienced their own Pentecost.[5]

God’s Homecoming

But Pentecost is not primarily about a Christian’s own experience. Remember how the resurrected Jesus had told the disciples to stay in Jerusalem and “wait for the promise of the Father” (Acts 1:4)? What did these earlies followers of Jesus have to do to be filled with the Holy Spirit? Nothing. They just waited.

Many Christians today, reading about this event, are tempted to find some key, some technique, something they can do to make their own Pentecost moment happen. We can sometimes fear that, unless we have some kind of similar experience, some kind of supernatural sign, that we have not been baptized with the Holy Spirit.

But the Apostle Paul says, in Galatians 3:2 that the receiving of the Spirit happens “by hearing with faith.” Here’s how you know you have received the Holy Spirit. The fact that you have heard and believed in Jesus is the evidence that the Holy Spirit has been given to you. “Whoever receives the divine call inherits the divine promise.”[6]

But again, Pentecost is not primarily about Christian experience; it is primarily about God’s own experience. That’s why the disciples simply had to wait. Pentecost was coming because God was coming. Pentecost is the homecoming of God.[7]

You see, the emphasis here on “filling” is key to understanding what Pentecost means. “Filling” is temple language. It has to do with the presence of God occupying his house, his temple, taking up residence there.

The best way to understand Pentecost is to understand the Jewish story in which it is meant to fit. We have to go back to Ezekiel 10 where the prophet sees the glory of God departing from Solomon’s temple, the theological explanation for why Babylon was able to defeat ancient Israel, tear down the temple, and send the people into exile. And though 70 years later the Jewish remnant in Babylon were permitted to return home and rebuild the temple, nothing was the same. There was a new temple, but no one ever said that the glory of God had come home to that temple. This would explain why Israel in the first century was still living in expectation for the day in which God would return to his temple and Israel’s kingdom would be fully restored.

This is what Luke is telling us happened at Pentecost. God had finally come home!

The Breath of Life

It was the day they were all waiting for. But it did not happen in the way they were expecting.

Because, you see, the temple that God had come home to, the temple that he was now inhabiting, was not the 2nd Temple that had been rebuilt in Jerusalem. It was all the people who had heard and believed in Jesus. They were the temple in whom God had come to dwell. They were the ones who would now and forever be marked as God’s people, a new community.

Verse 2 describes a sound from heaven “like a mighty rushing wind.” We have already noted that Jesus’s ascension to heaven signifies the reunion of heaven and earth. Now here at Pentecost, we see the reanimation of God’s new community—the breath of heaven rushing forward, breathing life into these believers in Jesus, just as he had done to the man he formed “of dust from the ground” in Genesis 2, turning him into “a living creature” (Gen 2:7). As in Genesis, so here: God’s new creation has begun in earnest with the animation of God’s new community.

A Sign of a New Commission

Consequently, there is work that needs to be done. Pentecost signifies a new commission for this new community of God.

Harvesting the First Fruits

And this commission is full of exiting possibilities, endless potential for delight. The work that God has given his people to do, empowered by his own life-giving Spirit, is not intended to be a drudgery or a burden. It is work we have been made for, or rather re-made for.

Just consider again the significance of Pentecost. Pentecost was a one-day harvest festival celebrating and enjoying the firstfruits of the grain harvest. I find it quite ironic that several of God’s laws are about keeping festivals—if God did not give his people the command to celebrate how miserable would life be! The ruthless taskmaster is not the Lord of heaven and earth but the tired tyrant of money and power who will never let you stop to even take a breath and enjoy the fruits of your labors.

Pentecost did eventually come to be associated with the giving of the Law to Moses on Mt. Sinai, and if that association was already known to Luke, it may well suggest that he intends for us to see the giving of the Spirit as a parallel to—if not even something that supersedes—the giving of the Law.[8]Pentecost, then, is full of expectation for the impact that the Christian message of Jesus’s life, death, resurrection, and ascension can have on society.

As the prophet Joel puts it, “And it shall come to pass that everyone who calls upon the name of the Lord shall be saved” (v. 21).

Speaking in Tongues

Now what about these “divided tongues as of fire” that appeared and “rested on each one of them”? It is a strange image to us, but it is one which is understandable from Old Testament imagery. The “fire” is a sign of God’s presence—just think of the burning bush that Moses encountered—“a visible sign of the purposeful presence of God in awesome, purging, energizing power.”[9]The “divided tongues” are best understood as “many tongue-like objects, each looking life fire, and darting out separately and touching” each person.[10]

Why the shape of a tongue? Think again of the burning bush, where God was commissioning Moses to lead his people out of Egypt and one of Moses’s excuses was that he was not “eloquent.” God’s response?

The Lord said to him, “Who gave human beings their mouths? Who makes them deaf or mute? Who gives them sight or makes them blind? Is it not I, the Lord? Now go; I will help you speak and will teach you what to say.” (Exo 4:11–12, NIV)

The tongues signify God’s effective presence with his people to speak truth to power and thereby to bring the good news of salvation to the world.

Many commentators note the similarities here with the story of the Tower of Babel in Genesis 11. Pentecost looks a bit like the Babel story in reverse.[11] Certainly, the multitude of people who were there in Jerusalem also hints in that direction. The crowd heard them speaking in their own languages, indicating that this miraculous event at Pentecost is about speaking in known human languages—Paul’s discussion about tongues speaking in 1 Corinthians 12-14 seems to be something quite different. The point here is that this new community, being sent out on a new commission, will find that the power of God’s own Holy Spirit will make it possible for that commission to succeed, to overcome all barriers, so that this message will reach even to the ends of the earth.[12]

Speaking the Mighty Works of God

As we will see in the book of Acts, this commission largely involves speaking, as these Spirit-filled believers do here—speaking and proclaiming “the mighty works of God.” I wonder what exactly they were saying? In light of their most recent events, they were no doubt talking about “the mighty works of God” that they had seen in the life, death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus of Nazareth. This is what they were no doubt talking about. This is what they were giving witness to.

And surely this is still the commission of the church to this very day. What we are to be known for, what we are called to bear witness to, is the life-giving message of what God has done in and through Jesus. We are to be witnesses of his resurrection, witnesses of his rule and reign over heaven and earth, calling people to join us as disciples of this Jesus. This is the good news we have to share with the world.

_____

[1] Leslie C. Allen, “Joel,” New Bible Commentary: 21st Century Edition, ed. D. A. Carson, et. al. (Downers Grove, IL: Inter-Varsity Press, 1994), 780.

[2] N. T. Wright, The Challenge of Acts: Rediscovering What the Church Was and Is (Grand Rapids: Zondervan Academic, 2024), 26.

[3] I. Howard Marshall, Acts: An Introduction and Commentary, Tyndale New Testament Commentaries, vol. 5, ed. Leon Morris (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 1980), 74.

[4] Ben Witherington, III, The Acts of the Apostles: A Socio-Rhetorical Commentary (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1998), 140.

[5] Marshall, Acts, 74.

[6] John R. W. Stott, Baptism and Fullness: The Work of the Holy Spirit Today, Second edition (Inter-Varsity Press, 1975), 28.

[7]Wright, Challenge of Acts, 19.

[8] Witherington, The Acts of the Apostles, 131.

[9] J. I. Packer, Keep in Step with the Spirit: Finding Fullness in Our Walk with God, Revised and Enlarged (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2005), 210.

[10] Barclay Moon Newman and Eugene Albert Nida, A Translator's Handbook on the Acts of the Apostles, UBS Handbook Series (New York: United Bible Societies, 1972), 35.

[11] Packer, Keep in Step with the Spirit, 210.

[12]  Witherington, The Acts of the Apostles, 135.