Speaker 1
This tape contains the third of a series of teachings on the Book of Acts by the Reverend John W. Howe of Truel Episcopal Church in Fairfax, Virginia. The teaching is entitled The Day of Pentecost and covers the second chapter of Acts, verses 1 through 13.

Speaker 2
Chapter 2. Let me read you the first 13 verses. When the day of Pentecost had come, they were all together in one place, and suddenly a sound came from heaven like the rush of a mighty wind, and it filled all the house where they were sitting.

And there appeared to them tongues as of fire, distributed and resting on each one of them, and they were all 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 this sound the multitude came together, and they were bewildered, because each one heard them speaking in his own language, and they were amazed and wondered, saying, Are not all these who are speaking Galileans?

And how is it that we hear each of us in his own native language, Parthians and Medes and Elamites and residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt, and the parts of Libya belonging to Cyrene, and visitors from Rome, both Jews and proselytes, Cretans and Arabians, we hear them telling in our own tongues the mighty works of God. And all were amazed and perplexed, saying to one another, What does this mean? But others mocking said, they are filled with new wine.

Let's just recap where we are in the very early part of this book called the Acts of the Apostles. 120 people, apostles and others, were in Jerusalem waiting. Waiting by command of the Lord Jesus himself.

Exactly for what? I'm sure they were confused. It was very unclear to them.

what they were waiting for until it finally happened. Jesus referred to what they were to wait for as the promise of the Father. Elsewhere in the end of Luke's Gospel it's called being clothed with power, and those phrases are used interchangeably with the third phrase, the baptism with the Holy Spirit.

They're told to wait until this happens, the promise of the Father, a clothing with power, the baptism of the Holy Spirit. it. They're waiting.

Luke, in the very last sentence of his gospel, chapter 24 and verse 53, tells us they were continually in the temple, blessing God, bringing praises to God during this time of waiting. They considered themselves good Jews. They were considered by others to be Jews, Jews who had some funny beliefs, but Jews.

The place of worship is the temple. That's where they went continually, every day, into the temple to be part of the ceremony and part of the worship and take their place as good Jews. It must have been an extraordinary juxtaposition of feelings and beliefs for them to go there.

You can try, but I don't think you're going to be able to imagine your way back into it. to go day by day into Jewish temple worship where everything in the worship is pointing forward to a Messiah and they know he's already come. I don't know if any of you have worshipped in your own lives or at least visited Jewish worship meetings.

And even today you may feel something of that on occasion. Some of the songs, the hymns, some of the scripture readings, some of the prayers have a longing for a Messiah who we understand has long since come, and yet they're still looking forward to him. What must it have been like for the apostles and the others in this particular never-never land between the old covenant and the full setting free of the new?

Be very clear in your understanding that news of the resurrection is already being voiced abroad. Okay? Jesus said, I don't want you to go out preaching but it's already being voiced abroad.

The Roman guards have already perjured themselves at Pilate's insistence to say, we were asleep, the disciples came and robbed the tomb. The fact that the tomb is empty is a very clearly known and understood fact. There are rumors about it.

We observed last time that something in the neighborhood of 380 people, at least, had had an encounter with the risen Christ and yet they didn't hang around Jerusalem. They're already making their way back to their own homes, wherever they might be, and obviously they're bubbling over with the fact that they've seen a man come back from the dead. I would suggest to you that the 120 are a pretty clearly defined group.

As they come day by day to the temple, you can imagine that some of the other Jews might give them a fairly wide berth. Those guys, you know. They were Jews, and yet there was something different about them.

The pressure was off. The political pressure, which rose up against Jesus himself and threatened his disciples into silence and betrayal so that Peter doesn't even acknowledge knowing him, the pressure is off for the moment. They're moving about the city of Jerusalem with some degree of freedom.

but I suggest to you they're a pretty clearly defined group and that they stuck pretty close to each other during this period. They're living, as we saw in the first lecture, in an upper room, presumably that of the mother of John Mark, presumably the same room where they had the Last Supper, although we don't know that. That's where they're living.

That's where they're staying to spend the night. but they're not spending all day every day there. It sounds as if they're spending the majority of their time in the temple.

They're in the temple praising God. They're waiting. They're not quite sure for what.

Now Jesus ascended over near Bethany on the other side of the Mount of Olives ten days ago. Okay? During the last week or so people have been arriving in the city of Jerusalem in droves.

Tremendous multitudes of Jews from all over the known world are descending upon the city of Jerusalem for the celebration of one of the very high holy days, the day of Pentecost. It may be that the 120 had a growing suspicion that the day of Pentecost was going to be a very special day, but we're not told that. As far as we know, it was going to be another day, a high holy day for the Jews, but we don't know if it's this day or six months down the road. We don't know when it is that the promise of the Father, the clothing with power, the baptism of the Holy Spirit is going to take place.

What we do know is that Jews from all over the world are arriving in the city of Jerusalem for one of the high, high holy days of the Jews. Now I need to recap just a little bit about the significance of the day of Pentecost. For some of you, I'm on very familiar territory, and for others this may be brand new.

I'll try to do it as quickly as I can. It had primarily a two-fold significance, a two-fold significance for the Jews. First and foremost, it was an agricultural festival.

It was called the Harvest of First Fruits Festival, or the Spring Harvest. festival. It was one of the three great festivals that are outlined very, very early on in the history of Israel.

You can go back all the way to Exodus 23 and you begin to hear about the three festivals. All of you know the first. It's what?

Passover. That's the first and for us probably we look back as the most important. And Passover clearly is fulfilled in the cross.

Jesus identified himself in a very deliberate, very explicit way with the Passover celebration. You remember originally Passover was deliverance from Egyptian bondage. The angel of death came to visit the Egyptians, but the Israelis who lived as slaves in Egypt escaped from destruction by virtue of taking the blood of an innocent lamb, splashing it on either side of their door and above the door, and the angel of death would see the blood and pass over, from which we get the name.

And Jesus came along and said, this blood, this cup, rather, of the Passover meal, this cup is my blood of the new covenant. So he identified himself with the Passover celebration. The second great festival was the festival of Pentecost.

And it came 50 days after Passover. And in fact, that's where we get the word Pentecost, 50 days. 50 days after the conclusion of Passover.

And it was a celebration of the early harvest. In that part of the world, you don't do much growing during the summer months. It's very hot, very dry, very arid, very little waterfall.

There are two growing seasons, a spring growing season and an autumn growing season. And Pentecost is a celebration of the spring growing season, a harvest of those first fruits. If it's a big harvest, you hope that the fall, the autumn, will be an even bigger one.

It's likely to be a good year. Okay? That's what they were coming to Jerusalem to celebrate, is this Pentecost harvest, the first fruits.

It was celebrated, and you can read about it, as I say, in Exodus 23, Exodus 34, and also especially in Leviticus 23, if you want to go back and read about it. It was celebrated by taking the wheat or the barley and grinding it into a very, very fine, pure flour, And then mixing that flour with oil, always associated symbolically with the Holy Spirit, and also, strangely, horror of horrors with yeast. And I say that because that is very exceptional.

The Jews, for the most part, did not mix yeast with their ceremonial bread because yeast, in biblical thinking, was almost always, not quite always, but almost always associated with corruption. That's why the other name for Passover, even though in our minds it might be more associated with the blood of the lamb and with the eating of lamb, the other name for it is the feast of unleavened bread. it was not to be mixed with the yeast or the leaven of corruption.

It was to be made in haste, a symbol of exodus. Okay, unleavened bread is typical of the Jews right down to the present time. Unleavened bread, leaven is a symbol of corruption.

And yet in Leviticus 23, when they talk about the Pentecost celebration, in this one instance it was specifically commanded that they add to the very fine flour and to the oil, yeast. And it was to rise up then into two loaves. And they were to be offered in celebration for that early harvest, that first fruits harvest.

That's the first significance. And the second of it is that traditionally Pentecost was also associated in the mind of the Jews with the giving of the law to Moses on Sinai. Now just sort of log all that away in the back of your mind.

We'll come back to it in a moment. The third great celebration we're not going to talk about, but just to complete the picture, it's the feast of ingathering or booths or tabernacles at the end of the autumn growing season. So you have Passover, Pentecost, ingathering as the three great original festivals in Jewish worship.

There have been others added since then. Now having outlined that very quickly, I want to mention one other intriguing, strange, puzzling little factor. And that's that Passover and Pentecost are connected to each other.

Deliberately and explicitly. The very last thing to be done as part of the celebration of Passover was to go out and gather the very first young green shoots that are coming up on your barley plants and bind them together into a sheaf and wave them before the Lord. Okay, those of you who have been here on a Palm Sunday can sort of picture that taking the palm branches and waving them before the Lord.

It was something like that. Gathering together these shoots, these little tiny green shoots, waving them before the Lord. And then begins the counting.

It's from that that you begin counting your 50 days. Now what's being said? It's being said that in the celebration of Passover, you also have the hint, the expectation, of the Pentecost celebration to come 50 days later.

Do you see what I'm saying? They're tied together. If you like, you might consider that sheaf of barley shoots to be the first fruits of the first fruits.

All right? It's anticipatory. Or, I'll put it this way, and if you're taking notes, write it down.

This is important. You could say that Pentecost is contained in embryo in Passover. Okay?

It's contained in Passover. A strange little feature at the end of the Passover celebration. now I said people are coming from all over the world and we read here some of the places that they're coming from both Jews and proselytes in other words pagans or Greeks or Gentiles who have converted into Judaism coming from all over the known world to be part of this great celebration on the day of Pentecost this is not an optional festival this is commanded by the Lord Exodus 23 it says every male shall be there

Speaker 3
alright

Speaker 2
now obviously that was not possible because since 721 B.C. when the Assyrians came through and decimated the northern kingdom and a century and a half later 586 B.C. when the Babylonians came through and destroyed the southern kingdom the majority, the great majority of Jews who lived through it have been scattered all over the world.

They're not resident in Israel anymore. They're all over the world. And they're called the dispersion.

Okay? It's very clear that no more than you could get everybody in one place today who are Christians. Okay?

You're not going to get all of those Jews together for the day of Pentecost or for any other day. As they found themselves scattered all over the known world, what began to happen was they would gather together into little assemblies, begin to form communities of worship. And in fact, that's where we get the word synagogue.

It literally means an assembly. Wherever the Jews were, if they tried to maintain their Judaism, They could no longer go and worship in the temple, could they? God had very clearly said, there's one temple and it's in Jerusalem.

You don't build another temple and start having sacrifices somewhere else. You don't do that. But they would gather together in what they called assemblies or synagogues, usually down by a waterside somewhere, a riverbank or what have you.

And eventually they would build houses of worship. And the houses were always pointed toward Jerusalem, wherever you were, north, south, east, west. They would be pointed in the direction of Jerusalem.

And here's where the Jews would worship. And they began to use a little phrase, next year in Jerusalem. But when a high holy day came and it was commanded that they go to the temple, what they would do would be a very obvious thing.

They say, we can't all go. There's no way. But let's see if we can't send a representative or send a small committee.

We'll take up a collection to help defray the expenses and we'll send two or three or half a dozen of our best to go and represent us and be part of the celebration. Okay, and that would happen several times during a year, especially on the day of Pentecost. That was the great celebration.

Obviously, to be sent by your community would be a tremendous honor, wouldn't it? You would have to be a number of things. You would have to be very, very committed, very religious person.

You would have to be a person who knows a number of languages, not only your own tongue, whatever that might be. Because of great distance in some cases, you would have to know at least Greek or Latin, if not both, the languages of the empire. If you're going to Jerusalem and Israel, or Palestine, you would need to know Aramaic, which was the street language, and you'd have to know Hebrew, which was the language of the temple.

So these are very greatly honored people coming to represent their community and pretty well educated who speak a number of different languages. You've got the picture of what's going on. Here's the 120 every day in the temple, praising God, blessing God, trying to fit in, still Jews and yet something different.

During the last week or so, people gathering from all over the world, coming as representatives for this great high festival celebration. The ancient records tell us that the temple observances began just about daybreak, which would be somewhere around 6 a.m., sort of like some of us might have a sunrise service on Easter. They would come crowding in to the temple area, 6 a.m., and then stay there for most of the day.

If you've ever been to Jerusalem or if you've seen pictures of it, you need to know that Temple Mount is huge. It is unbelievably large. It could hold masses of people, tremendous numbers of people.

It's not like a little tiny building somewhere. It was a whole complex of buildings as well as the central place where sacrifices were offered. Now let me ask you a question.

If this is so important, the high holy day of the Jewish year, commanded by God, it is not an optional extra. People coming from all over the world, a privilege to be there. And if the apostles, the 120 now, are in the temple every day anyway, where do you suppose they're likely to be on the day of Pentecost?

I think the case is fairly strong that they were right there in the temple. A number of commentators have suggested that, even though that probably conflicts with the conception you've had up to this point. You've probably pictured them gathered in the upper room, sitting around or kneeling around, praying, waiting for the Spirit to descend.

It says they were in a house. Okay? And I think most of us have identified that with the house of Mary, the mother of John Mark.

But it doesn't say that. It says a house. The word house, of course, could mean a residence, but it's used in a wide variety of ways in the New Testament.

Jesus himself said, I'm sent to the lost sheep of the house of Israel. So it could mean a family grouping. One of the commonest phrases in the New Testament is that the temple itself is the house of God.

Some commentators have suggested that it might very well mean a particular area in the temple complex, such as, for instance, Solomon's porch, which was a huge portico on the eastern end of the temple area, where we find the disciples gathering from time to time in the book of Acts. I want to just offer that as a possibility. I'm not tied to that, but as a possibility.

Given the dynamics of what's happening, I'm suggesting that it could very well be that these earth-shaking events that took place on Pentecost took place literally in the temple itself. Just entertain that as a possibility. The other alternative, of course, is that for some reason, they weren't there.

In spite of the fact that they probably should have been, they were in some other house. And what transpired was so absolutely overwhelming that it totally eclipsed what was going on in the temple. Okay?

Millions of people, literally, coming to be part of the temple celebration and God says, forget it guys, here's what's really happening over here. Or right in the middle of the temple celebration itself. I like to think about that.

Can you imagine all of these people gathered for this high holy day and God says, I've got a different service sheet to follow. Completely different. Suddenly, suddenly unexpectedly unable to anticipate suddenly a sound from heaven like that of a mighty rushing wind people did not come to wherever the disciples were because they were speaking in tongues that happened afterward they came because of this incredible sound from heaven have you ever been too close to an express train as it came rushing along i remember being in the middle of a tunnel one time walking through and suddenly hearing this train you'd never ran so fast in my life a mighty rushing wind okay or a hurricane or maybe some of you have been too close to a tornado.

Or maybe it was something like Mount St. Helens erupting. I want you to hear this. This incredible thunderclap of noise.

This was not a... This was a... Okay? Whoever was presiding over the service was interrupted. I want you to know that.

Okay? Accompanied by This dazzling sheet of blinding flame interrupted everything. Do you suppose that if you had been in the city of Jerusalem that day, it might have gotten your attention?

I want you to see this. I want you to see very clearly what is happening. God coming in sound and in fury with blinding light, coming perhaps to the temple itself, or else passing right over it to another place, coming and focusing in, descending upon this little group of people, out of all the millions gathered to celebrate, this group is the one that he's singling out, coming, hovering upon it, hovering above it, the flame now blazing, blinding to the eye, separating into individual tongues and lighting upon their heads, and then suddenly it's over.

what's happened god has come in a visible audible way and has invaded their physical being and if you'd been there that would be absolutely clear you would have seen this thing perhaps like a like a tornado funnel coming and landing upon matt and then a moment later it's gone it's clearly pinpointed Matt and come inside of him and then it's gone and 119 others and then suddenly out of their lips begins to come a diversity of languages what's happening? God himself has come inside them and now they're speaking out of something that is not of their own personality anymore you could not have missed the significance of it bear in mind that the people again whether in the temple or outside of it the people see this they hear it they're drawn to it they're overwhelmed by it they say what in the world is that they rush to the 120 and these for the most part are these very well well educated multilingual Jews and it's no longer Hebrew that they're hearing it's no longer Aramaic that they're hearing it's no longer Greek or Latin they're hearing them speaking in a multitude of dispersion languages they're saying hey that's my own language what they were saying was not a matter of preaching the gospel that comes in the next verse we'll get to that next week what they're hearing in their own languages their own dialects, they're hearing these 120 singing, speaking forth the mighty works of God. I would gather it would be something like what we hear in the Psalms, just praising God in a multitude of tongues.

I have a friend who was part of the Scandinavian airlift who went over to Norway one year to be part of a tremendous preaching and teaching mission that was conducted by the full gospel businessmen, And he went over on a charter jumbo jet, and they had a tremendous week in a very godless nation. Tremendous undeniable healings took place repeatedly in front of the television cameras. The press didn't know what in the world was happening.

And on the last day of the meetings, my friend felt incumbent upon him a moving from God to get up and offer a word of prophecy. And he felt very strange about doing so, Because up to this point, he had been completely silent. He had to do all of his ministry through an interpreter because he didn't speak a word of Norwegian.

And he got up out of obedience to the Lord, and he gave this word of prophecy, and he waited for the translator to step up to the microphone, and suddenly he realized everybody was buzzing. And what had come out of his mouth was pure Norwegian. I think it was something like that.

What they were hearing was not the gospel per se, although it certainly touched on it. They were hearing the mighty works of God, not through an interpreter or through some standard language. They were hearing them in their own various tongues and dialects.

All of the external commotion, the wind, the fire, disappears, and God reverses the curse of Babel. do you remember Babel men in their pride and arrogance thought that they could somehow climb up to God in their own strength their own efforts we can get to God that's occult alright that's the world's religion we can get to God and God said for this I'm going to bring confusion and he confused the languages so they couldn't understand each other on the day of Pentecost Whatever else happened, God reversed the confusion. He gave to them a gift of understanding, a gift of speech.

They spoke in different languages, not for the purpose of confusion, but for the purpose of understanding. At Babel, men tried to reach heaven in the natural. At Pentecost, heaven stooped down and touched the earth with glory.

Well, do you remember that on Easter evening, John records a very strange fact that Jesus met with his disciples and he breathed on them and he said, receive the Holy Spirit. And 50 days later, this is what happens. And we've had any number of scholars come along and say, well, it couldn't have been both.

Obviously, somebody made a mistake. Could I suggest a parallel to you that you may never have thought of before? Do you remember the last event of the Passover celebration was taking those little green shoots and waving them before the Lord in anticipation of what was going to happen 50 days later?

Do you see a connection? Jesus goes, Ah! That's the little green shoot.

Fifty days later, comes the first fruits, the first harvest. The first harvest. Bear in mind, there's another one.

A bigger one. Tabernacles. Booths.

The autumn rains, which are much more abundant. Do you remember that Pentecost was celebrated by taking that barley, that wheat, and grinding it into absolutely beautiful, pure, fine flour, which speaks to us perhaps of the beauty and the purity of the life of Jesus. Mixing it with oil, which perhaps reminds you of the anointing of the Holy Spirit, and then strangely, on this particular occasion, adding to it leaven.

the corruption of our humanity mixed with the purity of Christ anointed by the Holy Spirit. Well, verse 12 says they were all amazed and perplexed. And they said to one another, what does this mean?

Tune in next week. Same time, same station.