Friday
Friday
The Pentecost Event
Exalted to the right hand of God, he [Jesus] has received from the Father the promised Holy Spirit and has poured out what you now see and hear.
Acts 2:33
The day of Pentecost was a multifaceted event. Firstly, it was the final act of the saving ministry of Jesus before the Parousia, and in that respect it was as unrepeatable as Christmas Day, Good Friday, Easter Day, and Ascension Day. Next, it was the inauguration of the new era of the Spirit. Thirdly, it equipped the apostles for their unique teaching role. And fourthly, it can be understood as the first revival, in which God visited his people in mighty power.
Luke’s narrative begins with a brief and matter-of-fact account of what happened. The Spirit of God came upon the waiting disciples, and his coming was accompanied by three supernatural signs—a sound like violent wind, what looked like tongues of fire, and speech in other languages. But what was the glossolalia that they spoke? Firstly, it was not the result of intoxication, as a small minority jested. Secondly, it was not (as some have suggested) a miracle of hearing. True, “each one heard them speaking in his own language” (v. 6), but it was a phenomenon of hearing only because it had first been a phenomenon of speaking. Thirdly, it was not a case of incoherent speech that Luke mistook to be language. Fourthly, and positively, according to Luke, it was a supernatural ability to speak a recognizable language (that they had never learned) in which to proclaim the wonders of God.
Luke is at pains to emphasize the cosmopolitan nature of the crowd that gathered. Although they were all Jews from the dispersion, staying in Jerusalem, they came “from every nation under heaven” (v. 5), that is, from the Greco-Roman world situated round the Mediterranean basin. All the nations were, of course, not present literally, but they were representatively, for Luke deliberately includes in his list descendants of Shem, Ham, and Japheth, and has given us in Acts 2 a “table of nations” comparable to the one in Genesis 10. Ever since the early church fathers, commentators have seen the blessing of Pentecost as a deliberate and dramatic reversal of the curse of Babel. At Babel human languages were confused, and the nations were scattered; in Jerusalem the language barrier was supernaturally overcome as a sign that the nations would now be gathered together in Christ.
For further reading: Acts 2:1–13