The Holy Spirit Comes to the Harvest Festival for You
Grace and peace to you from God the Father and
our Lord Jesus Christ!
Our text,
Acts 2:1-21, is the start of something big, and it happens on the Day of
Pentecost. Pentecost is the Greek name for the Old Testament Feast of Weeks
that God required the Israelites to celebrate each year seven weeks after the
Passover—thus it was called the Feast of Weeks because it took place a “week of
weeks” after the Paschal Feast. That means the feast was celebrated on the
fiftieth day—that’s the “Pente” in Pentecost.
The feast
of Pentecost was a day of rest when all the men of Israel were to appear before
the Lord
and offer appropriate sacrifices. Each farmer was to come into the temple
courts, bringing a basket with his first sheaf of the year’s wheat harvest. At
his turn, the farmer would step forward and say the liturgy of recitation: “I
declare today to the Lord
your God that I have come into the land that the Lord swore to our fathers
to give us.” The priest would take hold of the basket, and the two of them would
sway it back and forth as a “wave offering.”
Then the
farmer would recite in Hebrew, “A wandering Aramean was my father. And he went
down into Egypt and sojourned there, few in number, and there he became a
nation, great, mighty, and populous. And the Egyptians treated us harshly and
humiliated us and laid on us hard labor. Then we cried to the Lord, the God of
our fathers, and the Lord
heard our voice and saw our affliction, our toil, and our oppression. And the Lord brought us out of Egypt with a
mighty hand and an outstretched arm, with great deeds of terror, with signs and
wonders. And He brought us into this place and gave us this land, a land
flowing with milk and honey. And behold, now I bring the first of the fruit of
the ground, which you, O Lord,
have given me” (Deuteronomy 26:5–10). He would leave the basket, bow before the
Lord,
and make way for the next farmer.
Over
time, in addition to being a spring harvest festival, Pentecost also came to be
celebrated as the anniversary of the giving of the Law, the establishment of
the covenant at Mt. Sinai. This is attested in Jewish writings such as Jubilees
and the Babylonian Talmud, but there are also hints of this in the Old
Testament. In Exodus 19:1, Moses writes that the Israelites arrived in the
wilderness of Sinai “in the third month” after they had left Egypt. Since they
left on the day after Passover, the fiftieth day after Passover would have
fallen within this third month. Also, in 2 Chronicles 15:10-15, the author
describes a gathering in Jerusalem during the third month where the covenant
was celebrated and renewed. A later Aramaic paraphrase of Chronicles, called a
Targum, says expressly that the Israelites gathered in Jerusalem during the
festival of Weeks. And so Pentecost came to be a day that celebrated the
covenant the Lord
made with His people, the promise of a productive land and a prosperous
nation. For the Jewish people, Pentecost was kind of like Independence Day and
Thanksgiving rolled into one.
For
nearly 15 centuries, every generation of Israelites had gathered for the second
major feast of the year. As we see in Acts 2, even those scattered in the
Diaspora came to Jerusalem if at all possible. Present that Pentecost were
“devout men from every nation under heaven… Parthians and Medes and Elamites and residents of Mesopotamia, Judea
and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of
Libya belonging to Cyrene, and visitors from Rome, both Jews and proselytes,
Cretans and Arabians” (Acts 2:5, 9-10).
These pilgrims
didn’t realize this year would be different. “When the day of Pentecost arrived, [Jesus’ disciples] were all together
in one place. And 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 one of them. And they
were all filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues as the
Spirit gave them utterance” (Act 2:1-4).
The crowds were understandably “amazed and
astonished” to hear the apostles “telling in our own tongues the mighty works
of God” (Acts 2:10). Some asked, “What does this mean?” Others accused the
preachers of a little “day drinking.” Peter preached a powerful sermon. Drawing
upon the prophecy of Joel (2:18-32) and a psalm of David (16:8-11), he declared
that Jesus of Nazareth is the Messiah, who, having been crucified and
resurrected, had now poured out the Holy Spirit, as He had promised (Acts
2:14-40). The result was extraordinary, for on that day “three thousand souls” received
his word and were baptized “in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of
[their] sins” (Acts 2:38, 41). It was quite a day!
The question is this: Of the 364 other days of the
year upon which Christ could have poured out His Holy Spirit, why did He do so
on exactly the fiftieth day after Easter? It was, indeed, already a holy day,
the Old Testament Feast of Weeks. But why choose this feast day? What makes
Pentecost so fitting a time for Jesus to give His Holy Spirit to the Church?
But perhaps an even more important question is the one the crowds asked that
day: What does this mean? What does all of this mean to you and me and our
salvation?
There is, first of all, a common theme between the
two, namely, that this fifty-day period is one of waiting or anticipation. For
the believers under the old covenant, the days between Passover and Pentecost
were symbolic of the years of waiting between their departure from Egypt and
their entrance into the Promised Land. Only then could they finally offer to
God the firstfruits that sprang from the sacred soil of Canaan. For although
Passover could be, and was, celebrated in the wilderness (Numbers 9:5), Pentecost
could not be, for to be able to sow, reap, and offer the firstfruits of wheat
to the Lord,
the Israelites had to be settled in their own land. Thus, until their wandering
was wrapped up, Canaan conquered, and seed sown into that sacred soil, they
waited. Pentecost was anticipated but not yet realized.
Similarly, the days between the Passover of Jesus
(that is, His crucifixion and resurrection) and His sending of the Holy Spirit
at Pentecost were days of waiting. As Luke tells us in Acts, Jesus appeared to His
disciples prior to His ascension offering many proofs of His resurrection and
speaking about the kingdom of God. He ordered them not to depart from
Jerusalem, but to wait for the promise of the Father, which, He said, ‘you
heard from Me; for John baptized with water, but you will be baptized with the
Holy Spirit not many days from now’” (1:1–5). Similarly, at the end of his Gospel,
Luke records Jesus instructing His disciples, “And behold, I am sending the promise of My Father upon you. But stay in
the city until you are clothed with power from on high” (Luke 24:49).
Everything
was to take place in its proper time. Following the crucifixion, resurrection,
and ascension of Christ, Jesus would send forth the promise of His Father, the
Holy Spirit, on Pentecost. That day would bring to fulfillment the saving plan
of the Lord,
in a way similar to how the entry into the Promised Land brought to fulfillment
God’s saving plan for the Israelites. Until the promised Spirit came on that
promised day, however, the disciples had to wait in the city. Then, and only
then, would they receive “the firstfruits of the Spirit” (Romans 8:23).
Speaking
of firstfruits, this brings us to a second link between the Old and New
Testament Pentecosts. As the Israelites celebrated Pentecost, they offered to
God the firstfruits of the wheat harvest, but at the new Pentecost, God offered
to His Church the firstfruits of the Spirit (Romans 8:23; Ephesians 1:13–14). By
offering to the Lord
the firstfruits of grain, the believer bore witness that the whole field and
crop belonged to God, whose continued blessing was demanded through the
sacrifice itself. Similarly, Christ places the Spirit within the believer as a
pledge that the whole person—body and soul—belongs to Him. He will continue to
care for that person in whom the firstfruits of the Spirit are present until
the “full harvest,” that is, the day of the resurrection of the flesh.
As I
already mentioned, by the time of the outpouring of the Holy Spirit, at least
some (if not most) of the Jews had begun to commemorate Pentecost as the
institution of the Sinai covenant and the giving of the Law. If so, what
happened in Acts 2 should be viewed in relation to the appearance of God at
Sinai.
When the Lord
descended upon Sinai, His presence was visibly and audibly revealed in fire. In
Deuteronomy, Moses says that “the mountain was burning with fire unto the heart
of the heavens: darkness, cloud, and thick darkness” (4:11). Then the Lord
spoke to the Israelites “from the midst of the fire” (4:12, 15, 33). At Jerusalem,
there was the “divided tongues, as of fire, which rested upon each one of them”
(Acts 2:3); and the proclamation of the Gospel in unlearned languages. In both
cases, there was divine speech connected with divine fire, but the message
could not have been more different.
At Sinai,
the Lord
identified Himself as the one who had led them out of the land of Egypt, then
laid upon them the Decalogue, the “ten words” of the covenant. The rest of Old
Testament history, however, is Israel’s “rap sheet,” divine documentation of
how the people repeatedly and often flagrantly broke this covenant. Indeed,
even before they departed from Sinai, they rebelled against the First
Commandment by attempting to worship the Lord under a golden calf.
The
Father, in His grace, did not reject Israel but promised to establish a new
covenant with them, “not like the
covenant that [He] made with their fathers on the day when [He] took them by
the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt, [the] covenant that they broke”
(Jeremiah 31:32). This new covenant Jesus established with His Church as He
gave His body and blood to eat and drink (Luke 22:20). It is the covenant built
upon His life, death, and resurrection.
The
apostles announced this new covenant in their preaching at Pentecost. Once
more, Christ spoke to Israel from the midst of the fire, namely, the fiery
tongues resting upon the heads of His apostles. But He laid upon the listeners
not the “ten words” for them to fulfill; rather, He proclaimed the fulfillment
of the law in Himself (cf. Luke 24:44). The Lord had commanded
Passover and Pentecost so that His people might remember His deliverance and
provision. But more than that, He commanded these feasts to point to Jesus.
It is no
coincidence that Jesus was crucified at the Passover, because He is the Lamb of
God who takes away the sin of the world. And it’s no coincidence that the Holy
Spirit comes at Pentecost: it is time for the apostles to sow the seed of His
Word. It is time to ready for the harvest.
Pastor
Bill Cwirla writes: “Fifty days after the Passover, on the day the people
celebrated the firstfruits of their wheat harvest, the crucified, risen and
reigning Lord Jesus swings His sickle over the fields ripe for harvest and
gathers into His barn the firstfruits of His resurrection. Three thousand
people who heard the Gospel that day were baptized into the death of Jesus.
They were the firstfruits of a harvest that’s been going on for two thousand
years, that reached us in our baptism, and will continue to the end.”
Pentecost
is a miracle of both speaking and hearing that continues even today. The Holy
Spirit works both through the mouth of the preacher and through the ear of the
hearer to convey the Word of God. That’s why two people can get two different
things from the same sermon, or react in two different ways. That’s something
that I’ve learned over the years. No two people hear the same sermon the same
way. And sometimes what I plan to say and what is said are two different things
as well. Nevertheless, God’s Word does not return to Him empty, but yields His
intended harvest. I believe, on the basis of Pentecost, that this is precisely
how the Holy Spirit works. He always works subtly, hidden in the background, through
humble, rather ordinary, means—in this case, words. Even the fumbling, mumbling
words of this mediocre preacher.
The Holy
Spirit is at work here among us. Not in wind and fire, but in the Word. Sowing
the seed and reaping a harvest of righteousness. Calling, gathering,
enlightening, and sanctifying you and the whole Christian Church on earth, and
keeping it and you with Jesus Christ in the one true faith. In this Christian
Church He daily and richly forgives your sins and the sins of all believers. On
the Last Day He will raise you and all the dead, and give eternal life to you
and all believers in Christ. This is most certainly true. For Jesus’ sake, you
are forgiven for all of your sins. In the name of the Father and of the Son and
of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
Unless
otherwise indicated, all Scripture quotations are from the Holy Bible, English
Standard Version, copyright © 2001 by Crossway Bibles, a publishing ministry of
Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
Much of the
information on the relation of the Old and New Testament Pentecost comes from
an article by Chad L. Bird on his blog: https://chadbird.squarespace.com/blog/2016/5/11/ot-and-nt-pentecost-why-did-jesus-pour-out-his-spirit-on-this-particular-day
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