Pentecost!

The word Pentecost means fifty and refers to fifty days. The word comes from the Old Testament feast of weeks or feast of Pentecost or feast of harvest. It was the feast that was celebrated fifty days after passover.

Pentecost was one of the three great feasts to which every male Israelite was required to come. It was a feast in which the Israelites enjoyed the beginning, or even the principle, of their harvests that they had gathered as the fruits of the passover lamb. Pentecost was the beginning of the harvest that would be fulfilled in the feast of tabernacles and the enjoyment of perfection.

In the feast of Pentecost, the Israelites looked forward to the coming of the Spirit in all his fullness as the Spirit of the risen and exalted Jesus Christ. Fifty days after Christ arose from the dead, he returned in the Pentecost Spirit. Pentecost came and was fulfilled on that day in the upper room.

Yet Pentecost is not a mere day. Pentecost is a description of the entire New Testament dispensation. We can say that we live in the dispensation of the Spirit poured out. That is really the dispensation of the whole fulfillment of the promise of God. He promised, and now he gives the Spirit in rich and full measure.

We do not remember Pentecost as a mere event in the past, but we remember that event as an ongoing reality and as that event calls us to live Pentecost every day. Pentecost is the reality of our salvation every day and especially every Lord’s day. The living and exalted Lord Jesus Christ, who poured out his Spirit, also constantly and continuously pours out his Spirit and sheds abroad in our hearts his Spirit, so that we live and enjoy life in the Spirit every day. We live in the new covenant of the Spirit of the exalted Lord.

The day of the Lord!

You cannot explain Pentecost apart from an understanding of the reality of the day of the Lord. Pentecost says that the day of the Lord is at hand. Pentecost declares that the end has come, that the Lord is at hand, that the judgment of all men is near, that it is the last hour, that the night is far spent, that the day is at hand, and that the restoration of all things is around the corner. The day of the Lord will be a great and terrible day full of signs and wonders. Think of the biggest storm you have ever witnessed. The day of the Lord will be that on a grand and universal scale when all things shall pass away with a great noise, and the elements shall melt with a fervent heat.

At Pentecost Peter preached the day of the Lord. When the multitudes were gathered together, the people were all amazed. Pentecost was an amazing event because they all heard the one hundred and twenty believers speaking in foreign languages the wonderful things of God.

Magnalia Dei!

The miracle was in the speaking. Men who did not know a language spoke that language instantly and with intelligence. And the content was the divine and heavenly things of the Spirit uttered so that the people understood those words. And being amazed, they were in doubt and wondered what that meant. That was their confused, perplexed, and even disturbed reaction to Pentecost.

The wonderful works of God always throw man into confusion. The works of God are heavenly, spiritual, miraculous deeds of God, the breaking of the perfect and the eternal into this sin-cursed and groaning creation. The wonderworks of God startle and amaze as much as if a bright light would suddenly penetrate a cave of those who had sat in darkness for thousands of years. So all men are darkness. And the light shines in darkness, but the darkness comprehends it not. At Pentecost also the bright light of the heavenly and eternal, the perfection of God’s covenant in the new heaven and the new earth, the coming of the kingdom of God, burst into the darkness, and the darkness comprehended it not.

The darkness was ready with a convenient explanation in order to allow for an easy dismissal of the light. In the face of yet another of the wonderful works of God, the people sneered and said that those men were drunk and full of new wine. That was a very convenient, self-serving, and safe explanation of Pentecost. That was unbelieving man’s explanation of Pentecost. Then he could stay untouched by the word of God in his life and in his sin.

If those men were drunk and full of new wine, it meant that nothing had changed for the Jews of that day. It meant that the disturbance was only the meanderings of some distraught and overwrought disciples, who had drowned their sorrows in the new wine of the Pentecost harvest. Those things could not only be gawked at and ridiculed but also dismissed without any danger. It meant that the temple stayed. It meant that the veil—which God had torn and which the Jews had no doubt repaired—stayed. It meant that the altar and the table of showbread stayed. The altar of incense and the laver likewise stayed. The priesthood and the lambs, goats, oxen, and their blood stayed. Then Annas and Caiaphas and their whole regime stayed as high priests who represented God. It meant that their wicked condemnation of Jesus of Nazareth by majority vote stayed as well. Then according to the church of that day, Christ was in fact a wicked sinner who had perished justly for his sins. And it meant that all the reports of Christ’s resurrection that the Jews had heard were mere fables and that Christ was still safely embalmed in some unknown and nondescript tomb as a dead Christ. Then the law was the way of salvation, just as the Jews had always taught. Salvation too remained the work of man, as the Pharisees taught; or according to the Sadducees’ teachings, salvation was a vain illusion. And the axe that God had laid against the tree of Israel was withdrawn, and all was well with the people’s souls. Then their lives and their houses, the houses of scorners and mockers and unbelievers, were safe from destruction. Then the calls to repent, to be baptized, and to believe were all nothing.

Those men were full of new wine. Nothing had changed! Such is the reaction of man always to God’s wonders. That is how the Jews reacted to John when in the preaching of the gospel John came uncomfortably close to them, spoke uncomfortable things to them, and demanded of them that they repent and believe on the Lamb of God. John did not drink wine, as they well knew, so they said that John had a devil. But the effect was the same. The Jews dismissed John as no prophet, his word as man’s word, his baptism as not of God. Thus John was neither of God nor spoke for God. The Jews were safe from destruction.

They did the same to our Lord during his earthly ministry. He came eating and drinking because he was not afraid of the world. Jesus would overcome the world, and so he ate and drank. When the bridegroom came, the Jews said that he was a gluttonous man and a winebibber, a friend of publicans and sinners. He was from Nazareth, where nothing good happened and from which nothing good came. Very wickedly—blaspheming the Spirit—they said that Jesus cast out devils by the prince of devils, Beelzebub. They said that Jesus was a Sabbath-breaker, a temple-destroyer, and a blasphemer who made himself the Son of God. Away with the man! Crucify him! And when confronted with the irrefutable testimony of the terrified guards, the Jews secured with their money the lie that the disciples had stolen the body of Jesus while the keepers slept.

Like children in the marketplace, the Jews always had an excuse for why they would not hear God’s word and do it.

And man still does so to this day.

Man has a word about Pentecost because Pentecost is not a mere event that happened that one time, but when Pentecost comes, the last days have come. Pentecost ushered in the New Testament. Pentecost is the ongoing reality of the New Testament. We live and eat and enjoy Pentecost because wherever the wonderful things of God are heard, wherever Christ crucified is preached, wherever the truth comes, wherever the Spirit is operating and bestowing Christ and his salvation, there is Pentecost, and there too man has a word about it. When the wonderful things of God are spoken, then man says that there is something wrong with them. Men say that today just like they said it then so that they can go on unchanged and unrepentant in their lives. Drunken babble! There is something wrong with the preacher. Let us pass on. We need not be exhorted. Do not call us to faith and to repentance. Do not speak the word to us. We are safe as we are. Our houses—the houses of mockers and drunkards—are safe from destruction.

How convenient. How easy to dismiss the wonders of God. Nothing has changed!

But this—this wonder of Pentecost—cannot be explained away by unbelieving man!
That speaking at Pentecost was not the babble of drunkards. As John did not have a devil and as Jesus was not a glutton, so the speaking at Pentecost was not the babble of drunkards.
That is what the prophet Joel spoke about: the sign, the wonder, the great work that God would work before the day of the Lord comes. Pentecost was a sign that the day of the Lord is at hand.

What is the day of the Lord?

The day of the Lord is a terrible storm that will break on the world, burn the world with fire, shake the world to its foundations, and blast the world with a terrible wind. In that day sinners will tremble and quake. It will be a great and terrible day. It will be a day of destruction and annihilation.

The day came once before in the world when the inhabitants were all eating and drinking and marrying and giving in marriage, a world and church world smug in their unrighteousness, comfortable in their wickedness, and sure in their persecution and mockery of the church. In a moment the day of the Lord came as a flood on them and destroyed the world that then was.

Later the day of the Lord came upon a hardened Egypt when the Lord, who is God alone, swept through Egypt as an avenging angel. He strode through Egypt’s towns and marched through its villages. Where there was no blood on the doorposts and lintels, the angel entered those homes and barns and killed all the firstborn of Egypt, both man and beast. And so a great cry went up throughout all Egypt.

The day of the Lord as it appears in the Old Testament is the day of Jehovah. Jehovah is the i am that i am, the unchanging, sovereign, and omnipotent God. The day of the Lord, then, is the day when God, who is God alone, will declare himself before the whole world to be God alone, to show forth his righteousness and the righteousness of all his mighty acts. In that day Jehovah God alone will be exalted.

The day will come as destruction from the Almighty. That day will be a scene of carnage, a day of vengeance and fierce wrath, a day when God will cut off eating and drinking and joy and gladness—the day when God will arise and by his might put all his enemies to flight in shame and consternation. It will be a day of the revelation of Jehovah for judgment, when the heaven and earth shall pass away, the very elements shall melt with a fervent heat, the earth and all its works shall be burned up, and all men shall be brought into judgment. It will be a day when Jehovah shall utter the words, “Depart from me, ye wicked evildoers.”

When, oh, when is that day?

That day will come on the world at the end of this age. That day comes on every man at the moment of death, when God tears down a man’s whole earthly existence. God cuts down the tree, and the tree lies where it falls. That day comes especially when God comes to visit his people in the gospel. Every sermon is in a sense the day of the Lord. Then every man is placed before the Lord in his heart and conscience.

And who shall abide the coming of the day of the Lord? All who call on the name of the Lord shall be saved. Such is the promise of the gospel in light of that day and in light of God and the judgment of God in that day. All who call on the name of the Lord shall be saved. Only those who call on the name of the Lord shall be saved. Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved. All those who despise the Lord and who do not call on him shall not be saved but will be damned in that day.
Before that day God will show wonders in heaven and signs in the earth. It will be a day of destruction; a day of blood, fire, and vapor of smoke, when the sun shall be turned to darkness and the moon into blood before that great and notable day of the Lord come.

Such was Pentecost also. It was the declaration that the day of the Lord is nigh.

Who is that Lord upon whom you must call for salvation?Jesus. That is what Peter preached. He preached Jesus as the Lord. Let all the house of Israel know assuredly that God has made this Jesus, whom you crucified, Lord and Christ.

This Jesus!
This Jesus, who was born of Mary. This Jesus, who was laid in a manger. This Jesus, who walked among the Jews, and whom they heard and saw and their hands handled. This Jesus, whom they heard speak, whose voice made the lame walk, whose voice raised the dead, whose voice stilled the waves of the sea, and whose voice they refused. This Jesus, upon whom they laid wicked hands and whom with those wicked hands they crucified.

This Jesus, God raised up. A living Lord! A living Lord according to the work of God. A living Lord by the resurrection of God. A resurrected Lord of whom they all were witnesses. Oh, they did not witness the resurrection. That was hid in the tomb. They witnessed the resurrected Lord. They saw that he had been changed; that he possessed the glorious body of the resurrection; that he was alive but not with the life of this earth, but he possessed immortality and life and all authority in heaven and on earth; and that he enlightened their dim hearts and minds, so that they suddenly understood what he had said and remembered the words that he had spoken to them when he was yet with them. And a resurrection, therefore, that declares about him and his cross that he is the righteousness of God, whose righteousness when it becomes ours is more than sufficient to acquit us of all our sins. A resurrection in which the long-promised kingdom of God had come.

This Jesus, therefore, who was exalted by the right hand of the Father and received the promise of the Spirit has shed this forth. Therefore! Therefore, he shed this forth! What that means is that Pentecost was the conclusion, the goal, the therefore, of all that went before it: the incarnation, the cross, the resurrection, the ascension in which Jesus was exalted to the right hand of God and in which Jesus received the promise of the Spirit. It was all for Pentecost that Jesus might come and that his people might have the Spirit.

In Pentecost Jesus declared himself to be the Lord upon whom you must call to be saved in the day of the Lord. He declared himself to be the Lord who was set down on the right hand of the majesty on high and who was about to reveal himself in the day of the Lord.

Jesus declared himself to be Lord in the absolute sense. He declared himself to be the God of our salvation. And he declared himself to be Lord in the sense of the man to whom God gave all authority in heaven and on earth and who rules over all things until he will make all his enemies his footstool. Jesus declared himself to be the one who would bring that day of the Lord and who would be revealed in that day as the Lord to the glory of God. In Pentecost Jesus declared himself to be the Christ who alone saves in that day. He alone has salvation because he alone has the Spirit of grace and reconciliation, the Spirit of promise. When Jesus Christ was by the right hand of God exalted, Jesus received the promise of the Spirit. He received the Spirit from God triune to be the Spirit of Jesus, the man whom God had exalted. The Spirit became Jesus’ Spirit, the Spirit of the risen and exalted Lord. And by the Spirit, Jesus Christ himself comes to us to save.

Jesus, this Jesus, God raised up, exalted, and gave the promise of the Spirit.

At Pentecost the Lord Jesus Christ shed forth his Spirit. That is what the people saw and heard. They saw and heard the Spirit of the risen and exalted Lord.

Understand what Peter preached to the people. He said that Jesus shed forth the Spirit, which the people saw and heard. So the text says that they saw and heard the Spirit. Imagine, for example, a tornado has come through your neighborhood, and someone points to downed trees and demolished houses and reminds you of the terrible noise of the mighty rushing wind and says to you, “God sent a tornado, which you saw and heard.” So Peter said that they saw and heard the Spirit. They did not hear and see some strange phenomenon that Peter then linked to the Spirit and then to Christ. But Peter preached to them that they saw and heard the Spirit. He became visible and audible to them.

Peter was referring to those signs and wonders that God worked before their eyes. Peter was speaking of the sound as of the mighty rushing wind, which must have been heard not only in the room but also more widely. And Peter was speaking of those cloven tongues of fire, which must have remained on the one hundred and twenty believers as they came into the temple. And Peter was especially referring to the preaching of the one hundred and twenty believers in different languages, in which every one heard the wonderful things of God spoken in his native tongue. And Peter said that they heard not merely a wind or saw fire or witnessed the preaching of the gospel of Jesus Christ, but they saw and heard the Spirit. The Spirit made himself known; and in making himself known, he directed the people’s attention to Jesus Christ the Lord. The Spirit made himself known and became visible and audible in those signs. Those signs were visible seals of the promise of the Spirit of Jesus Christ.

They saw and heard and thus were witnesses of the pouring out of the Holy Ghost. The event of Pentecost was not a mere collection of signs; Pentecost was not a mere event to which signs and wonders were attached, but Pentecost was the Spirit, and the Spirit was Pentecost. He created it and made it happen. And the Spirit was made visible and audible in that event. The one whom the people saw and heard was the Holy Ghost.

The Holy Ghost is God. The Holy Ghost is the third person of the holy Trinity. He is not a mere power of God or an effulgence of God, but the Spirit is God himself—truly God, of the same essence as the Father and the Son, who together with the Father and the Son is worshiped and glorified.

Yet the Spirit poured out is the Spirit as Jesus, the man, received the Spirit of the triune God, his Father. At the ascension of Jesus Christ, the man, God triune gave to Jesus, the man, the Holy Spirit. This is a great miracle and a great mystery. The Holy Ghost became the Spirit of Christ, so that Christ controls the Spirit and sends him out. The Holy Ghost became very really and permanently Christ’s Spirit.

The Spirit testifies of Christ. The Spirit points not at himself but at Christ. The Spirit declares Christ, the Lord. The Spirit works on behalf of Christ. So whenever and wherever the Lord Jesus Christ pours out his Spirit, the Spirit, and thus Christ, Christ will be both audible and visible. Then men and women will see what cannot be seen and hear what cannot be heard and will perceive what never entered into the heart of man to conceive.

And what becomes audible and visible? What does Jesus Christ work when he sends his Spirit? The promise, I say. For that is the name of the Pentecost Spirit. The Spirit of promise. This means the Spirit, who is the promise. Where the Spirit is and where the Spirit works, there is the promise, for the Spirit is the promise—the holy oath of God to save his people from their sins and to bring them to heavenly glory. Or, to put it another way, the promise of God is to save his people in the day of the Lord!

In one sense the promise is one. The promise is the same from the beginning of time to the end of time. The promise is the one word of the Lord concerning salvation by grace alone as God’s work alone. And yet the promise is so rich. It is the promise that we will be made partakers of Christ and of all his riches and his gifts, the promise that God will wash us from our sins, save us from those sins, and bring us to glory. It is the promise of righteousness, holiness, and eternal life. It is the promise that God will ever be our gracious God and Father. It is the promise that God has fully accomplished our salvation in Jesus Christ and the promise that God will surely make us partakers of that salvation.

The promise is the oath of God to be a God unto us. The promise brings the covenant of God, which is God’s friendship and fellowship and life everlasting. So the promise of God is that he will never leave or forsake his people; he will wash them from their sins, forgiving them and cleansing them from the pollution and dominion of sin, and he will at last present them without spot or wrinkle in the assembly of the elect in life eternal.

The Spirit is that promise. To receive him and to have him is to have all that God promises, for the Spirit brings Christ and all Christ’s riches and gifts, and the Spirit works salvation in accordance with the promise of God.

And the Spirit is seen and heard yet today. Oh, he becomes as really visible and audible as he did at Pentecost. Wherever Christ is preached in truth and wherever that preaching of Christ transforms men and women, there the risen, exalted, and anointed Christ pours out his Spirit. This is the Spirit whom you see and hear. Jesus brings salvation in the gift of the Spirit. Salvation in the coming of the day of the Lord.

And Christ Jesus has this Spirit. And Christ Jesus went up in order to shed forth this Spirit.

Shed him forth!

Not a trickle or a drop but an abundance of the Spirit. An abundance of the Spirit to comfort us with Christ. An abundance of the Spirit to cover our guilt with Christ’s righteousness, to overcome sin’s terrible dominion, and to cleanse us from sin’s terrible pollutions. An abundance of the Spirit to bless us with the fullness of joy, to warm us and to fill us with Christ crucified, and to comfort us with the perfection of our salvation in Christ. It is the fullness of the new covenant come, a fullness that the Spirit pours out in his church, a fullness that the Spirit gives to all who call on him. To all who repent and to all who are baptized in his name and believe his promise. They shall receive the gift of the Spirit; of his fullness they will receive grace for grace.

To whom is the promise? To you and to your children and to all who are afar off, even as many as the Lord our God shall call. Never is the promise in the power of man. The Spirit is not in the power of man. But the Spirit sovereignly accomplishes according to his own sovereign and eternal choice that those whom God has appointed to eternal life he also calls. He calls them first, they call on him, and he saves them!
Understand, then, that Jesus Christ alone is the Lord upon whom you must call. In him are all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge. In him alone are righteousness, sanctification, and redemption. Pentecost declares that the day of the Lord is at hand, the day that will burn hot as an oven and in which sinners will be consumed. Jesus Christ is the only one who has salvation. And he alone saves in the day of the Lord.

Repent! Believe! Call on him! All who do will be saved. All who do not will without a doubt perish everlastingly.