Pentecost

Listen or read the following transcript as D. A. Carson speaks on the topic of Holy Spirit from Acts 2.

Some have suggested that the title “The Book of the Acts of the Apostles” might better be “The Book of the Acts of the Holy Spirit through the Apostles,” for certainly, the Holy Spirit is mentioned again and again in this book. There is scarcely a chapter, only four or five, where he does not feature prominently.

Advertise on TGC

Already, in chapter 1, verse 2, the ministry of Jesus is described in terms of the work of the Spirit. “In my former book, Theophilus, I wrote about all that Jesus began to do and to teach until the day he was taken up to heaven after giving instructions through the Holy Spirit to the apostles he had chosen.”

In verse 5, Jesus is the one who baptizes with the Holy Spirit over against John the Baptist who baptized in water. In verses 7 and 8, the disciples are told not to leave Jerusalem but to wait, and they will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on them. As a result, they will be witnesses in Jerusalem, and Judea and Samaria, to the ends of the earth.

All of this implies, of course, that there is a major change in God’s purposes in the great sweep of redemptive history. It may be helpful if we familiarize ourselves with the account of Pentecost that was just read and then focus more closely on the work of the Holy Spirit on that day, and then think through the results that flowed from it.

First then, the flow of the narrative, in verses 1 to 45. In verses 1 to 13, the descent of the Spirit and the initial responses. The phenomena themselves are extraordinary. There is no other passage quite like this in the rest of the Bible. “A sound like mighty, rushing wind,” and then, “Something like,” we’re told, “tongues of fire that divided.”

It’s hard to imagine just what happened. Did they come down on one person and then sort of split like a split screen TV, dividing, and then dancing across to other people and then still more and still more and still more until finally there is something like a tongue of flame? It’s not called a tongue of flame, but something that looks like a tongue of flame on each person who is present in this house.

Then there’s the actual speaking in tongues. Then, it appears, that these Christians boil out of the room, as it were. They spread out. They begin, after they’ve spilled outdoors, to mingle with the multi-lingual crowd that is packing Jerusalem. This is still at the time of the great feasts. Jews and proselytes, we’re told, have come from all over the Empire.

Their first tongues, their mother tongues, would be highly diverse even though most of them would also speak the lingua franca of the day, Greek. In the ancient world, Greek was the lingua franca, as in much of the world English is the lingua franca today. Most of them who would be there would know Greek. Very few of them would know much Hebrew or Aramaic if they’ve come from elsewhere in the Empire.

As the Christians speak, we’re told, all of them hear what they are saying, each one hearing in his or her own language. In other words, this is not a miracle of hearing but of speaking. It’s not as if these people are all speaking in some esoteric tongue and all saying the same thing and sounding the same thing. These people have miracles of hearing so they can hear it in their own language. That’s not what the text says.

These Christians are actually speaking in languages which are understood by this diverse, motley crowd of Jews and proselytes. What they were hearing, verse 11, was “the wonders of God,” and this in a context of praise and worship. “We hear them declaring the wonders of God in our own tongues.”

Undoubtedly, these wonders of God include the things that have happened in the last few years in the ministry and death and resurrection of Jesus. The response of the crowd? We’re told, in verse 7, that they’re utterly amazed and, in verse 12, amazed and perplexed. Some of them, in verse 13, have just gone cynical. “Yes, I don’t know how this is done, but they’re obviously a bit soused.”

There will always be some, even if someone rises from the dead, who will not believe. It was not the tongues phenomena, then, that brought about their conversion. It was Peter’s sermon in verses 14 to 36. In other words, they needed the intelligible Word of the gospel not the word of praise made intelligible in tongues. This is what convicts them in verses 37 and following and makes them cry out, “What shall we do?” And thousands are converted. That’s the first part of this chapter.

Then we should focus for a few moments on Peter’s sermon in verses 14 to 36. The point of this sermon in the book of Acts is not to provide a model sermon despite some homiletics professors who sort of wander through the New Testament finding sermons and saying, “This is how you do it.”

In all fairness, Peter did not spend hours preparing a text and remembering all of his homiletical rules and thinking through how to have three points and an appropriate number of illustrations dropped in so people don’t get too sleepy and making sure they are culturally relevant. He has an international crowd, and this is done on the spur of the moment.

This is not meant to be a model sermon so far as form or style is concerned. Yet, it reflects very careful thought about who Jesus is against Old Testament background. This is largely an exposition of three chunks, two chunks and a bit of Scripture. It is the exposition of Joel 2, Psalm 16, and a bit from Psalm 110.

Reflecting, now, who Jesus is against Jewish background, because, after all, the people whom Peter is addressing are Jews and proselytes. They’re people who are already familiar with the Old Testament. He doesn’t have to explain a whole lot of things to them the way he has to explain some basics to the pagan crowd in Athens in Acts 17 when Paul has the floor.

No, he has the given of the Old Testament. They already are waiting for a messiah to come. What he must prove is that the biblical texts, themselves, anticipate a messiah who looks like Jesus. That’s what he sets out to preach.

The entire sermon is a linking of what had recently happened, the descent of the Spirit, and before that, Jesus’ life and ministry and death and resurrection with certain Scriptures in order to give what had recently happened the right interpretation, the biblical interpretation. The sermon, itself, can be divided into three parts.

The first part of the sermon is the descent of the Spirit and Joel 2, in verses 14 to 21. Peter begins by making reference to the more cynical and amusing comments of the crowd. “These people are all drunk.” “Not too likely,” says Peter. “It’s pretty early in the morning for that many people to get soused.” It’s not a rational explanation. In fact, what this is is nothing other than the fulfillment of Scripture.

He says, “This is what was spoken by the prophet Joel. ‘In the last days,’ God says, ‘I will pour out my spirit on all people. Your sons and daughters will prophesy, your young men will see visions, your old men will dream dreams. Even on my servants, both men and women, I will pour out my spirit in those days, and they will prophesy.

I will show wonders in the heaven above and signs on the earth below, blood and fire and billows of smoke. The sun will be turned to darkness and the moon to blood before the coming of the great and glorious day of the Lord. And everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.’ ”

You see, here is a Peter who had already had his mind stamped by Christ. You recall that Luke 24, written by the same author as the author of this book, records that Jesus, after his resurrection, spent time explaining from the Scriptures how to read the Scriptures, how to understand the way they point forward to Jesus. “He explained from the Scriptures all things concerning himself,” the text says.

Peter was there soaking it all up, taking it all in. Although Peter has some growing to do (that becomes pretty clear in the book a little later on); nevertheless, he’s passing on what he has learned from Jesus about what the Old Testament actually says about Christ and the promises that should be expected.

They were told by the resurrected Christ, before he returned to the glory that he had with the Father before the world began, to wait in Jerusalem for the gift that was promised. Now the Holy Spirit has come. This answers to Old Testament prophecy. “Recall,” he says, “the book of Joel.” Recall, too, that with the coming of the Spirit there is an announcement of salvation to all who call on the name of the Lord.

What some of these celestial signs are, it’s difficult to be certain of. The sun turned to darkness, for example, may actually be a reference to the darkness that fell over the earth when Jesus died on the cross. Maybe there were other celestial phenomena at the same time. Perhaps this is merely picking up the regular Old Testament nature symbolism that crops up pretty often.

When things are going well, then the hills are dancing for joy and the trees are clapping their hands. When things are going disastrously or there’s some fantastic movement taking place, the stars are falling on earth. Yet, there are hints, here and there, of things that did take place, that were supernatural when Jesus died on the cross. Peter wants the crowds to remember them.

Then, in the next part of his sermon he outlines the authorization of Jesus of Nazareth. He has got into the sermon by talking about the phenomena that they have seen, the people speaking with tongues, and dispels any cynicism by referring them to Scripture. Now he comes to Jesus, himself.

“Men of Israel, listen to this: Jesus of Nazareth was a man accredited by God to you by miracles, wonders and signs, which God did among you through him, as you yourselves know.” It was difficult to deny. He had had three years of ministry in the area, and even if some of these visitors had only come in recently, undoubtedly, this was still the talk of the nation. They had picked up on all of these stories. Then, without any desire whatsoever of being too politically correct or tactful, Peter plunges right in.

“This man was handed over to you by God’s set purpose and foreknowledge; and you, with the help of wicked men, put him to death by nailing him to the cross.” One of the things that the first preachers had to do when they were evangelizing Jews was to explain how the promised, anticipated messiah could die such an odious death. Messiahs win. They conquer. Surely a messiah like Jesus couldn’t help but conquer. I mean, how are you going to kill someone who can raise the dead?

Is the army going to starve? He multiplies loaves and fishes. Will it take a miracle to get something done? He can stop a storm and walk on water. How are you going to stop him? Yet, he dies this disgusting death, disgusting in the eyes of the Romans. Death by crucifixion was reserved for the scum of the earth. It was odious in the eyes of the Jews. “Cursed is everyone who hangs on a tree.”

How do you align this person with the various anticipations the Jews entertained about what sort of person the Messiah would be? Instead of entering into a long disquisition about what certain texts mean, like Isaiah 53, who the suffering servant is and so on (all those sorts of things are done elsewhere in the New Testament), Peter makes this very personal, in your face, and up front, right away.

“You all know about this Jesus. He was attested by God. Already among you, you know the kinds of people who have been healed, transformed. Whether you’ve heard the sermons, yourself, or not, you’ve certainly heard about them. I have to tell you, in the crowd’s mad rush, in your mad rush, you, with the help of wicked people, put Jesus on the cross. He died an odious death. You must understand, too, that this was God’s plan.”

That’s a lot of theology and a lot of accusation and a lot of appeal to providence all in two sentences. Don’t you see? That’s exactly what Peter and the other Christians have to do. If they understand Jesus’ death to be a freak accident of mob violence and nothing more, then how is it God’s eternal plan from before the creation of the world?

If, on the other hand, they ascribe the whole thing to God’s sovereign, wise purposes.… “Well, Jesus went to the cross because, of course, it was foreordained. It was bound to happen. It’s nobody’s fault; God just did it. I mean, all those images of a Passover lamb and all those bulls and goats on Yom Kippur, they had to be fulfilled. God had planned his Messiah would die, so don’t feel too badly about it. If you were caught up in the mob enthusiasm, don’t worry about it. This was God’s plan.”

The appeal to God’s sovereignty in Scripture is never at the expense of mitigating human responsibility. If there is no evil in putting Jesus on the cross, there is no evil anywhere. We’re just bouncing molecules. That’s all we are. This theme figures large in the book of Acts. Do you recall the prayer life of the church in Acts 4?

Verses 27 and 28: “Indeed Herod and Pontius Pilate met together with the Gentiles and the people of Israel in this city to conspire against your holy servant Jesus …” It was a disgusting conspiracy. “… whom you anointed. They did what your power and will had decided beforehand should happen.”

You have to hold both of those things. You’re responsible, but you must understand that God was working through your criminal, outrageous, sinful actions to bring about his own good purpose. God has vindicated him. You must not think that his death on the cross left him damned by God, full stop.

Oh, he was condemned, all right. He was bearing judgment, but you have to understand, by the time, this was all over, God had vindicated him by raising him from the dead. That is unpacked throughout the whole New Testament. The reason why he bore this horrible punishment was precisely because he was bearing our sin in his own body on the tree.

Because he paid the penalty of others, God did vindicate him. Yes, he bore the curse on the cross, that was understood to be to everyone who hung on a cross, but it wasn’t his own curse. He was doing this in obedience to his Father’s will. The proof of his vindication before God himself was in the resurrection. God raised him from the dead, freeing him from the agony of death, because it was impossible for death to keep its hold on him.

And now, the appeal to Scripture. Scripture, in this case, is Psalm 16. The appeal that Peter makes belongs to the category that is now called Davidic typology (I’m going to come back to that a little later in the weekend), because David is the prototype of the entire Davidic line, the whole promised dynasty.

The things that happen to David and to other great kings in this line become sorts of models of anticipation which are, themselves, pointing forward to something beyond themselves. For example, David, in Psalm 69, is betrayed by his own best friend. His own familiar friend, the Old English says. So is Jesus betrayed by his own familiar friend.

David is a kind of suffering servant. Jesus becomes the ultimate Suffering Servant. Language that is applicable to David at one level is so often hinted at in the Psalms as being inadequately expounded, fulfilled, or displayed in David, himself. The language transcends David and demands something bigger, something more powerful, until there is a whole expectation in the psalms of a Davidic model, type, or typology. (We’ll come back a little farther on to how that works.)

So also, here, David says, “I saw the Lord always before me. Because he is at my right hand I will not be shaken. Therefore, my heart is glad and my tongue rejoices; my body also will live in hope, because you will not abandon me to the grave nor will you let your Holy One see decay.”

Well, you can read that in a very dumbed down sort of way to be referring to David himself as not being abandoned by God, who will, therefore, not let David die prematurely and not go to the grave prematurely. But if David is part of this long Davidic dynasty and you take the language seriously, it is not exhausted in David himself, because, eventually, David actually does go to the grave and his body does decay.

Oh, doubtless, David was spared more than once from judgment and death. In that sense, he was spared death and decay, but it caught up with him. It catches up with us all. You take this language seriously about a Davidic character and it can’t, finally, refer to David. It has to refer to someone greater than David.

“You will not abandon me to the grave nor will you let your Holy One see decay. You have made known to me the paths of life. You will fill me with joy in your presence.” “Brothers, I can tell you confidently that the patriarch, David, died and was buried.” You can go and visit his tomb, for goodness sake. Try opening that, and you’ll see whether or not he has been abandoned to decay.

He was a prophet and knew that God had promised him on oath that he would place one of his descendants on his throne. There is the long line of the Davidic structure. (As I said, we’ll come back to that one a little later in this series.) Seeing, then, what was ahead, he spoke of the resurrection of the Christ, which is not pretending that he had a full Christian grasp of all that was going to happen.

Rather, the language he used, he understood this could not finally be fulfilled adequately in himself. It looks forward to great David’s greater son, to the Son who would ultimately come and outstrip anything David could ever be, the Anointed One, the Christ. He was not abandoned to the grave, nor did his body see decay. God has raised this Jesus to life, and we are all witnesses of this fact.

Now it’s worth pausing here just for a moment to remember how much of the Christian gospel turns on witness. Because the claim of Christians is that God has manifested himself to us in history. If you go to Thailand and get to know Buddhism pretty well, and then somehow (I don’t know how) prove that Gautama the Buddha never lived, would you destroy Buddhism? No, of course not, because Buddhism’s credibility turns, finally, on the internal coherence of the system, the logical persuasiveness of the entire structure. It does not depend on any putative fact in history in Gautama’s life.

Supposing you go to India and somehow (I have no idea how) you could prove that Krishna never lived, would you destroy Hinduism? No, of course not. In Hinduism there is one deep principle of truth that underlies all of reality, good and bad. You work with your karma to make another cycle and come back and have another go at it to get a little farther up the pecking order.

At the end of the day, there are millions of gods in this system, and if you remove one you haven’t destroyed the system. You can always go down the street to a Shiva temple or some other temple and pay your respects and do your homage and your veneration to some other deity. There is no historical claim that is so intrinsic to Hinduism that if somehow you could overthrow that claim, Hinduism itself would be destroyed.

Even with respect to Islam, although it claims that there is historical revelation in Mohammad, it does not claim that Mohammad is absolutely necessary to the claim. Let me explain. If you visited your friendly local imam and asked this question, how would he reply? “Might Allah, blessed be he, had he chosen to do so, given his final revelation not to Mohammad, but to somebody else?”

Probably your question will initially be misunderstood. The imam will say, “No, no, no, you don’t understand. We believe that God did give his revelation to Abraham and to the prophets and to the prophet Jesus, but his final revelation, he gave to Mohammad.” You reply, “Sir, you know I’m a Christian. I don’t believe that, but that’s not my question. My question is, ‘Had Allah, in his sovereignty, wanted to give his final revelation to someone other than Mohammad, might he have done so?’ ”

“Well, of course. Allah is Allah. He can give his revelation to anyone he pleases. Mohammad is not the revelation. He received the revelation. God could have given the revelation to anybody else had he chosen to do so, but we believe that he gave it to Mohammad.”

Now come to Christianity. Could you ask the question to a Christian, “Might God have given his final revelation to someone other than Jesus?” The question within the structure of Christianity is simply incoherent. It doesn’t make any sense, because Jesus is the revelation, manifested in space and time.

Isn’t that John’s point when he speaks of touching him and handling him and hearing him? That is the revelation. You take away Jesus, and you’ve destroyed Christianity completely and utterly. You destroy Jesus’ resurrection from the dead, and you’ve destroyed Christianity completely, despite some bishops who argue to the contrary.

For the fact of the matter is Paul himself understands this when he writes to the Corinthians. “All right,” he says, “you’re having a hard job swallowing a general resurrection at the end. All right, let’s begin with the resurrection of Jesus.” He says, “Supposing, for argument’s sake, Jesus did not rise from the dead. What would follow from that?”

Well, first, he says, “The first entailment would be that the apostles and the other witnesses are all a bunch of liars.” Do you hear that? Our access to the truth of what God has done in history is through historical witnesses. That’s our access to the truth. It is in that sense that Christianity is a historical religion.

That does not mean that everything that is known about what Christ accomplished on the cross is known through historical phenomena, but there are some non-negotiables to the Christian revelation that are tied to events in history where God manifested himself in history, in the incarnation, in the death of Christ on the cross, in his resurrection from the grave, in history.

There are witnesses to those truths. If you take away those witnesses, if you insist that those things did not happen and make liars of the witnesses, then you’ve destroyed Christianity utterly. It’s a historical claim. That’s why this emphasis is so strong in the book of Acts. “We are witnesses of this fact,” he says, and as the later chapters prove. “We’re ready to die for it, too.”

Then the culminating Old Testament text to authorize to Jesus is Psalm 110, an oracular psalm, that is a psalm that is an out right oracle, where David is looking in the words of the revelation given to him for someone who is greater than he is himself. “The Lord [Yahweh] said to my Lord …”

When David refers to someone as “my Lord,” it just has to be someone spectacular. He’s already, himself, the king! As it transpires in the text, he is the Davidic monarch who is also the Melchizedekian priest. Yahweh, himself, insisted that he will reign until all of his enemies are under his feet. “Therefore, let all Israel be assured,” Peter concludes, “God has made this Jesus, whom you crucified, both Lord and Christ.”

All right? Here’s the flow. What is the role of the Holy Spirit in this flow? Pick up on four expressions regarding the Holy Spirit. First, the initial disciples of Jesus wait for the Spirit. That’s the language of Acts 1:4. “Do not leave Jerusalem, but wait for the gift my Father promised, which you have heard me speak about. For John baptized with water, but in a few days you will be baptized with the Holy Spirit,” and then Pentecost comes.

In the King James Version, the word wait is tarry. Tarry, here, in Jerusalem. Out of this came tarrying meetings in certain segments of Christendom. People would make a profession of faith, and then they were invited to tarry, to wait, until the Spirit fell on them and they spoke in tongues.

What that introduces is a kind of two-stage conversion. First, you believe Jesus and you confess him as Lord, and then you tarry, you wait. However long you tarry, or wait, whether in that meeting or at a series of meetings, eventually, you get the Holy Spirit, and that’s stage two. With all respect, that’s not what is going on here.

After all this sort of tarrying, waiting for the Spirit is not a repeated phenomenon in Acts or the rest of the New Testament. It never occurs, or anything like it, with respect to individual conversions. It stands against so much New Testament teaching. “If anyone does not have the Holy Spirit he is none of Christ’s.” That sort of thing. Then we must ask, “Why is there a tarrying? What’s it for?

Does Jesus just want to test their patience? Why not let them go home? I mean, the Holy Spirit could fall on them in Galilee as well as in Jerusalem, couldn’t he? What’s the point of this tarrying in Jerusalem until the Holy Spirit comes?” Well, there are two pretty strong hints in the text.

First is the explicit reference to Jerusalem. All the way back in verse 4. “Do not leave Jerusalem, but wait for the gift my Father promised about which you have heard me speak,” and so on. The point is that Jerusalem is not only the place where Jesus died and the Holy Spirit flows from Jesus’ death and resurrection in Jerusalem, but Jerusalem, itself, in Old Testament theology, is the city of the great king.

From the time that David moves his capital there, that the ark of the covenant is moved there in 2 Samuel 6, this becomes the center of both the monarchy and all the priestly rites. This is the center to which everybody gathers. Zion, Jerusalem, the city of the great king, is the very focal point of all of God’s saving purposes for Israel until, eventually, that language is bound up with the symbolism of anticipation of a far greater Jerusalem that is coming down the pike.

For example, in Psalm 87, a great missionary psalm, the psalmist says, “In those days my people will have stamped in their passports, ‘Born in Zion. Born in Jerusalem.’ Those who are actually from Philistia, those who are from Egypt.… No, no, they’ll all have stamped in their passports, ‘Born in Zion. Born in Jerusalem.’ ”

You see, God’s salvation comes out of Jerusalem, the city of the great King, the great King’s sacrifice, until, eventually, Paul can say, writing to the Galatians, “Our Jerusalem is above.” The final vision of Revelation 21 anticipates the whole climactic new heaven and new earth as the New Jerusalem coming down out of heaven. The typology of the city looks forward to the coming of the New Jerusalem.

Small wonder, then, Christ wanted his followers to remain in Jerusalem to bring this typology to bear with teeth, so that they would understand the gift of the Spirit flows out of Jerusalem, the city of the great King, the covenant, the temple, the sacrifice of Christ who is the anti-type of the temple and of the sacrifice and of the priesthood. Now, it is the locus, where the Holy Spirit is poured out.

Then, of course, there is the explicit mention of Pentecost in Acts 2:1. “When the day of Pentecost came …” They waited and waited and waited, and eventually the day of Pentecost came. What was an Old Testament feast became a New Testament feast. This harks back to Leviticus 23.

The day after the Passover Sabbath was the day of the wave offering. Then, Moses says, “Count off seven sevens.” That is, seven weeks, a perfection of time, 49 more days, making a total of 50 days to this feast. In other words, this feast is, as it were, parasitic on Passover. Its date is determined by the date of Passover.

It flows out of Passover. Whenever Passover is, determined by the lunar moon, then the date of this feast is determined as well. There is a tight, tight connection in the Old Testament between this feast and the feast of Passover. “Now, Christ, our Passover,” Paul writes, “has been sacrificed for us.”

Out of this comes this feast of Pentecost, dependent upon Passover, the feast of bringing in the sheaves, the feast of blessing, the feast of thanking God for his blessings poured out upon the people. This is the Christian Pentecost, and God in his wisdom has made sure that the gift of the Holy Spirit would, therefore, not be abstracted from what Christ has done on the cross in Jerusalem.

Then there is this language of being filled with the Spirit in chapter 2, verse 4. This is not technical language as if filled with the Spirit always means exactly the same thing. It doesn’t in the New Testament. It’s also called, in chapter 1, being baptized in the Spirit. What you have to do is look at each passage individually and see what’s going on. Similarly, we’ll see speaking in tongues has a wide diversity of phenomena to answer to it. We’ll come to that a little later.

Then there is the mention of the promised Holy Spirit in verse 33. “The Holy Spirit promised by God.” That’s the language that also fulfills Joel 2:28–32. It’s also picked up in Ezekiel 36 and elsewhere. Paul refers to the Holy Spirit as “the down payment of the promised inheritance.”

That is, the ultimate blessing still to come which includes a resurrection body and a new heaven and a new earth, a home of righteousness. We don’t have all of that yet. What we have is the Holy Spirit, the down payment of the promised inheritance. I will come back to these texts. They are very important to our understanding of the role of the Holy Spirit in Acts.

The last thing to say about the Holy Spirit is speaking in other tongues as the Holy Spirit enabled them (chapter 2, verse 4). Inevitably, the biblically informed person cannot help but ponder the relationship between this passage and Babel, Genesis 11. I read Steiner’s, After Babel, a number of years ago, and it got me thinking along certain lines.

How do you understand Babel? On the one hand, the people are unified, aren’t they? Because they’re unified, they rebel. They’re going to build a tower, dethrone God. God breaks them up, as it were, by giving them a wide diversity of languages. Does that mean the unity was good and the languages are bad because it’s punishment? Or, is the unity, itself, bad because they’re trying to build idols, and it’s the diversity that’s good, because now they can’t?

Which is good and which is bad in the account of the tower of Babel? The answer is, it seems to me, right across Scripture, both. We can take unity and make it into a new idol, use unity in order to oppress others, appeal to unity to overturn truth, and use an appeal to unity to overturn God, himself, or we can use diversity and build our fences and have our wars and our resentments and our racism. We can corrupt anything. We can corrupt unity, and we can corrupt diversity.

What strikes me, however, here, is that when you come to this great miracle, it’s not a miracle in which everybody now speaks the same language. That would have been an overturning of Babel, back to pre-Babel. Rather, everybody hears the same message in his or her own language. You’ve got the unity of the message and of the saving power extending to all the earth and the diversity of all the languages.

You find the same thing in the book of Revelation. After all, in the book of Revelation, several times in chapter 4, for example, and again in chapter 7 and elsewhere, you have this powerful description of those who gather around the throne. We read, “You purchased men for God from every tribe and language and people and nation.”

Again, in chapter 7, the people who gather around the throne come together from every nation, tribe, people, and language. When we say they come from every nation, they’re not losing their identities, or from every race … they’re not losing their racial identity. So when they come from every language, why should we think that they’re losing their linguistic identity?

In chapter 11, there is also preaching against those from every nation, tribe, people, and language as well, because people can use their national identities, their racial identities, their linguistic identities as cause for division. In the new heaven and the new earth there will be unity in the midst of God’s blessed diversity.

People sometimes ask the question, “What language will we speak in heaven?” Some say Hebrew. I know the Chinese think it’s Chinese. I think it’s all of them and a whole bunch more we haven’t had yet and others that have died out. After all, if you want to talk to somebody, you have enough time to learn the language, don’t you?

I think someday you’ll be walking down one of those golden streets and somebody is going to yell at you, “Aussie! Aussie! Aussie!” And you’ll reply, “Oi! Oi! Oi!” The Mandarin speakers are going to say, “How on earth am I going to translate that?” God brings about this fantastic diversity in the midst of fantastic unity where people love each other, now stripped of all the sin and destruction. That’s what is going on in a limited, principled way even in Pentecost, itself, in anticipation of the new heaven and new earth.

The final result of the Spirit’s work is given for us in verses 42–47. We do not read that in consequence of the repentance and the baptism the promise that the gift of the Holy Spirit would be given to all who did repent, in verse 38. We did not read that as a result the 3,000 spoke in tongues. There’s no hint of that whatsoever.

What we’re told is that in the wake of all of this, these people devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching, to the fellowship. That’s the correct rendering, the partnership. That’s the way the new Christian movement was seen, to the partnership, to the breaking of bread. Despite the best efforts of some, that does not mean simply to eating a lot. It’s a way of referring to the particular breaking of bread that Jesus, himself, ordained. It is bound up with remembering his own death until he comes. To prayer. Everyone was filled with awe.

The apostles, themselves, did special wonders and miracles. There was sharing. There was no greed. There was a commonness of spirit. They continued to meet and break bread in their homes, because, although they met in the great halls.… That was not where they could have Communion, in the Temple courts. It’s not what was going on. They were already establishing house groups.

These were the beginning of the house groups that multiplied around the Empire, full of praise for God, enjoying the favor of all of the people. “And the Lord added to their number daily those who were being saved.” All of this injects a calculus in preaching that cannot be measured by personality and rhetoric alone. The dead bones live.

Where the gospel has free course, empowered by the Spirit, people change. The result is a hunger for apostolic truth, for the partnership, the fellowship of the gospel, for remembering Jesus’ death, for prayer times, this in a context of massive awe and reverence before almighty God and praise and thanksgiving.

Heaven will be full of this without any of the tarnish of sin. Already, where the Spirit of God comes powerfully upon the people of God, that is what is manifested. It’s a small anticipation of heaven, and it’s borne along by the power of the Spirit of God. We cry, “Do it again! Do it again!”