Acts 1:8

Brothers and sisters in Christ,

This evening’s Bible passage is Acts 1:8: “You will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the end of the earth.”

The Old Testament had repeatedly imagined a time when the Gentiles would worship the true and living God. When God called Abraham, he promised not only that he would make of him “a great nation,” but also that in him “all the families of the earth” would be “blessed” (Gen. 12:2-3). The psalms confidently called Gentiles to a joyous faith in the God of Abraham: “Praise the LORD, all nations! Extol him, all peoples! For great is steadfast love towards us” (Ps. 117:1-2). One plural pronoun, “us,” united Jew and Gentile in a vision of shared worship.

The prophets, too, foresaw such a time of universal blessing: “And it shall come to pass afterward, that I will pour out my Spirit on all flesh; your sons and your daughters shall prophesy; your old men shall dream dreams, and your young men shall see visions. Even on the male and female servants in those days I will pour out my Spirit … And it shall come to pass that everyone who calls on the name of the LORD shall be saved.” (Joel 2:28-29, 32). Old, young, male, female, servants, “all flesh,” “everyone”: the promise set no limits.

Peter quoted this passage in his address to the crowd on the day of Pentecost. For Peter, it was no longer only a promise for the future; it was being spectacularly fulfilled in the present.

Peter had good reasons for believing this to be the case. Before his ascension, Jesus had told the disciples to “make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit” (Matt. 28:19). He’d promised them, too, that they would “receive power” to carry out this mission “when the Holy Spirit has come upon you” (Acts 1:8). Ten days later, “when the day of Pentecost arrived, … suddenly there came from heaven a sound like a mighty rushing wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting. And divided tongues as of fire appeared to them and rested on each of them. And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues as the Spirit gave them utterance” (Acts 2:1-4).

The “tongues of fire” recalled, on an individual scale, the glory cloud into which Christ had ascended. The glorified Christ was now with them again, individually and intimately, in the person of his Holy Spirit. He would be with them “always, to the end of the age” (Matt. 28:20), empowering them to be his witnesses “to the end of the earth.”

The “tongues of fire” also pointed directly to the spread of the gospel to “all nations.” The Greek word glōssa means both “tongue” (the physical organ of taste and speech) and “language” (what dictionaries help us to understand). So, in a neat visual pun, the individual glory clouds in the shape of “tongues” pointed to the gift of “languages” that the Holy Spirit gave to the apostles.

A great crowd of Jews from all over the known world had gathered in Jerusalem for the Feast of Weeks. To their astonishment, members of the crowd heard the monolingual Galilean apostles declaring “the mighty works of God” in multiple languages, so that each member of the crowd was able to recognize and understand his or her own native language. I imagine it as a kind of comic reversal of the Tower of Babel, in which the ascended Christ graciously declined to return all nations to the danger of a single language (Gen. 11:6). Instead he granted travelers from many foreign regions the happy experience, for at least one morning, of hearing a stranger speak good news to them in their own language. 

What more practical gift could the exalted Christ have given his disciples? Having commissioned them to take the gospel to all nations, he now gave them the ability to proclaim the gospel in foreign languages they hadn’t known when they got out of bed that morning. For ten days, they must have puzzled a little over Christ’s vague promise that they would “receive power when the Holy Spirit” came upon them. It must, then, have been encouraging to these practical fishermen that the first installment of this empowerment turned out to be a gift of immediate use on that day in those circumstances. If this was the way the Holy Spirit was going to work, maybe they really could serve as Christ’s “witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the end of the earth.”

To be sure, it took the apostles a while to figure out that they hadn’t been called just to the Jewish diaspora but to the Gentiles as well, and that the Gentiles didn’t need to become Jews to be a follower of the risen and ascended Christ. But the fulfillment of God’s promise to Abraham, the realization of the psalmists’ hopes, and the embodiment of the prophets’ visions, truly began on that Pentecost morning.

The Holy Spirit’s expanded role in the history of salvation was thereafter on a scale that God’s people had only dreamed of beforehand. We’ll consider some more aspects of that expanded role tomorrow. Pentecost Sunday, like Ascension Day, is worth more than one day’s meditation.

Your brother in Christ,

Max