At the end of that final conversation, Jesus commanded His followers to remain in the city where He had been killed until you receive the Holy Spirit. Just remain in Jerusalem until the Holy Spirit comes. However long you need to wait, just wait. And as soon as He gave this command, He was carried away before their eyes into Heaven. Now, if you were a disciple, what would you be thinking? How would you be feeling? What would you do?
We know what the disciples did. The disciples went back to Jerusalem, where they were praying for the arrival of the Holy Spirit. They prayed the first day after Jesus went back to Heaven. They prayed the second day. They prayed the third day. They prayed the fourth day. Now imagine yourself as an early follower of Jesus. Jesus never gave you a timeline, just not many days from now. But what does that mean? After the fourth day, what would you be thinking? What about after the fifth day? I don’t know about you, but a natural question that would arise in my mind is “How long? How long do I have to remain here doing nothing? Shouldn’t we be doing something?” Then comes the sixth day; then the seventh; then the eighth; then the ninth. Nine days and nothing, except silence.
Now every Jewish person was required to travel to Jerusalem on three occasions in order to worship God. Regardless of where you lived, every Jewish person would travel to Jerusalem to gather together as a nation and to celebrate four feasts. Two of those feasts, which occurred during a week in the spring, were called the Feast of Passover and the Feast of Unleavened bread. And it was during the Passover Feast that Jesus had been arrested and killed by crucifixion. Fifty days after the Passover was the Feast of Weeks, which marked the end of the wheat harvest where the Jewish people offered the first fruits of the wheat harvest as an act of worship to God as their provider. Now those who were Jewish ethnically, but lived outside of Israel and spoke Greek referred to this feast as Pentecost. And Pentecost fell on the tenth day after Jesus had gone back to Heaven.
So, as the disciples began their tenth day praying and waiting for Jesus to fulfill His promise to send the Holy Spirit, Jerusalem would have been filled with visitors from all over the known world who had come to celebrate Pentecost. And the expectation would be that, as a good Jewish person, you would participate in the celebration of Pentecost, which would mean traveling to the temple and possibly encountering the very people who killed your leader. So what would you do? What would you be feeling as you began your day, just as you had the previous nine days, gathered together in an upper room praying in community for God to be present and provide His Spirit? Because, it is in this context that we enter back into this story, beginning in Acts 2:1. Let’s look at it together:
When the day of Pentecost had come, they were all together in one place. And suddenly there came from heaven a noise like a violent rushing wind, and it filled the whole house where they were sitting. And there appeared to them tongues as of fire distributing themselves, and they rested on each one of them. And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak with other tongues, as the Spirit was giving them utterance.
As these early followers of Jesus gathered together, from out of nowhere the whole house was shaken with a noise that drowned out their prayers and their conversations. A noise that could only be described as a violent wind and that was accompanied with flames of fire that appeared over the heads of these early followers of Jesus. Now in the Bible, God’s presence amongst His people was often displayed in the form of fire. It was from the midst of a burning bush that God spoke to Moses. It was a pillar of fire that guided the Jewish people out of captivity in Egypt and to the Promised Land. In addition, Jesus, in a story that is recorded for us in the gospel of John, had explained that the Spirit of God was like the wind that blew wherever it willed. And Jesus early followers would have been very familiar with these stories. God’s Holy Spirit was present in their midst. God’s presence was present in a powerfully visible and powerfully audible way.
But it was not that God’s presence was in their midst; it was that God’s presence was now going to indwell them through the Holy Spirit. God was doing something new. God was not just going to dwell with His people; God was going to dwell in His people by giving His people the Holy Spirit. And as a result of the Holy Spirit’s indwelling presence, these Jewish followers did something new; they began to speak in different tongues by the power of the Holy Spirit. These tongues were other human languages that were unknown to the speaker, but known to those who heard.
You see, it was on this day in history that God began to do something new in the world. Just as God did something entirely new by sending His Son Jesus into the world in order to reveal Himself and to provide the opportunity to rescue the world from selfishness and rebellion, God was once again doing something new, something extraordinary. God was now sending His Spirit in order that followers of Jesus would be united together by His Spirit as a part of a new community called the church. And this new community called the church would be the vehicle that He would use to reveal Himself and His message of rescue through the gospel to the world.
And as these early followers of Jesus experienced God’s indwelling presence in a new way that had never been experienced before, they responded by pouring out into the streets of Jerusalem and toward the temple, praising God in a language that was totally unfamiliar to them.
Tomorrow, we will look at how those in Jerusalem responded to what God was doing in the lives of these early followers of Jesus...
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