Part 1 | Part 2

Peter has argued that God is Lord in multiple arenas. He’s Lord over the course of history, including over those who consider themselves his enemies. More than that he takes the evil acts of his enemies and incorporates them into his purpose and plan; the assassination of the Christ was, after all, the most evil act in history, and not only does it not frustrate God’s plan, but it is at the very center of it; God’s redemption of his fallen image in humans cannot proceed without it. He’s also Lord over death, our greatest enemy; Jesus dies—in fulfillment of God’s plan—but is almost immediately, over a weekend, brought back to life, never to die again. And along the way God has demonstrated that he’s Lord over all the cosmos in that he is not bound by the natural laws that he himself created. He can do miracles, and he can even delegate miraculous powers to others. His Son does miracles at will, and he—the Son—delegates those miraculous powers even further, to twelve ordinary men.

This is lordship writ large.

But Peter’s sermon is nowhere near done.

Raising his Son from the dead, it turns out, is only just the beginning of the Lord’s elevating his Son. He gives the Son all authority on earth—Jesus claims that in Matthew 28.18—and extends that delegated authority to the heavens as well—same verse—and then makes that delegation visible by taking the resurrected Son in the clouds, before a group of reliable witnesses, all the way to heaven itself, to the right hand—the authoritative hand—of the Father, where he sits down in his presence (Ac 2.33-34). The images of authority are just piled one upon another.

The Father has more to demonstrate. He gives to his Son another promise, the Holy Spirit—himself a member of the Godhead—and authorizes the Son to pour him out on his followers, with visible evidences that are themselves miraculous: hovering flames over each head, and the ability to speak clearly and fluently obscure tribal languages that they have never spoken or learned (Ac 2.33).

And the Father makes the Son another promise. “I will make your enemies,” he says, “your footstool” (Ac 2.35). He has already demonstrated their defeat by frustrating their purposes in killing the Son, and in raising him from the dead. But frustration is not utter defeat, and the Father is not going to stop halfway. He will prostrate Christ’s enemies visibly and physically before him, under his feet. And while Peter doesn’t include the end of that story, we know from his fellow apostle John that those enemies will be finally and irrevocably judged and sent forever to the lake of fire (Re 20.14-15).

Peter sums up the Father’s delegation of lordship to the Son with a direct statement: “God has made him both Lord and Christ” (Ac 2.36). Only a Lord can make someone else one.

It’s interesting that Peter uses the word “Lord” 5 times earlier in this sermon (Ac 2.20, 21, 25, 34 [2x]), and in 4 of the 5 times he’s quoting or alluding to an Old Testament passage that refers to Yahweh, the personal name of God. So when he says immediately later (Ac 2.36) that the Father has made the Son “Lord,” does he have that specific meaning in mind?

Maybe, maybe not. But calling Jesus “Yahweh” would be consistent with numerous passages throughout the New Testament.

Peter closes his sermon by answering the question of his hearers: “What shall we do?” (Ac 2.37). His answer is simple:

• Repent. Turn in discontent from your old life. Reject it.
• Believe. Trust in Christ, the Lord: the effectiveness of his payment for your sins, and the goodness of his will for you.
• Be baptized. Publicly profess what has happened in your thinking, believing, and doing.

What a privilege it is to serve such a Lord! What confidence and joy such service brings!

I have lived—imperfectly—under his care and direction for more than 60 years. By his grace, I will live with that confidence and joy for the rest of my days. That is my testimony.

Photo by Greg Rakozy on Unsplash

Part 1

The crowd thinks that these babeling (yeah, I meant to spell it that way) Christians are drunk. Peter, the leader of the group, and apparently still impetuous, even after being baptized in the Spirit, can’t let that slander stand. He speaks up.

He denies that they’re drunk. It’s only 9 am. How could all these people be drunk this early in the day?

And then he begins what one commentator has called “the first Christian sermon ever preached.” I suppose. If you don’t count the ones by Christ. Or the centurion at the cross.

He takes as his text a passage from Joel 2.28-32 (Ac 2.16-21). God, the prophet said, would pour out his Spirit on all flesh.

This is a new thing.

In the Hebrew Scripture, what we call the Old Testament, the Spirit “came upon” relatively few people—warriors facing battle, sometimes, and some of the prophets. Joel foresees a day when “all flesh” would receive this gift: men and women, young and old, even servants. This would be a decisive shift in the timeline of history, what Joel calls “the last days.” That’s what’s going on at Pentecost, at Jerusalem, in the days after Jesus’ resurrection.

Peter continues his quotation of Joel beyond that. He describes astonishing things, apocalyptic things: “blood and fire and vapor and smoke” as well as changes in the heavenly bodies (Ac 2.19-20).

Hmm. Don’t see any of that happening there in Jerusalem.

Interpreters have taken different views of what’s happening here. Some say Joel’s prophecy wasn’t fulfilled at all, because none of it will happen until the end of the world. All Peter was doing was using it as an illustration. I find it difficult to square that assessment with Peter’s direct words: “this is that which was spoken by the prophet Joel” (Ac 2.16).

Others say that Joel’s prophecy was completely fulfilled at Pentecost—that references to the sun and moon are symbolic, meaning that the earthly powers will be humbled before the reigning Christ. I find that one unsatisfying as well, because there’s nothing in Joel’s prophecy to indicate to the reader that he’s moving from literal prophecy (the pouring out of God’s Spirit) to symbolic prophecy (the earthly authorities being described as the sun and the moon).

Which leaves us with a third possibility: Joel’s prophecy is partially, but not completely, fulfilled here. The pouring out of God’s Spirit on all flesh initiates a new age, which will eventuate in the apocalyptic events he describes. His prophecy plays out over a long period of time—so far, more than two millennia. Pentecost is the beginning of the “last days,” when God’s plan for history and eternity will come to maturity and fruition.

Why now? Why is the pivot point of all time here?

Peter proceeds to explain. He brings up, for the first time to this audience, the name of Jesus of Nazareth (Ac 2.22).

• This man was endorsed by God, who empowered him to work miracles, mighty acts that some of those in the audience themselves had witnessed (Ac 2.22).
• He was executed as part of the very plan of this God, who directs all things according to his will and for the goal of his glory (Ac 2.23).
• And he was resurrected because God is Lord over death as well as life (Ac 2.24).

Why did God do these things? Because he had promised that he would not leave this one in the grave (Ac 2.25-28). Peter here cites another prophecy, this one by King David, in Psalm 16.8-11. But wasn’t David talking about himself? Didn’t he say, “You will not leave my soul in the grave”? Peter sees this objection coming, and he answers it conclusively.

David, he says, is still dead, a thousand years later. But David was a prophet—here his hearers would agree with him—and he knew that God would fulfill his promise to him, to have a king eternally on his throne (2S 7.12-16), even after he was dead.

This God is Lord over all. He empowers his people—ordinary people—to speak in the tribal languages of all present in this thronging crowd. He endorses an itinerant Galilean preacher, and that simple endorsement changes everything about how we view the man. He directs in the hearts of kings to arrest and execute this preacher, thereby perfectly fulfilling his plan. And then he raises him from the dead, demonstrating his lordship over unearthly as well as earthly powers.

Lord.

And there’s more to come.

Photo by Greg Rakozy on Unsplash

It’s been said that biblical Christianity is not a religion, but a relationship. I’ve said before that the Bible uses metaphors of multiple relationships to describe our relationship with God. It’s as though no single human relationship can embrace all the complexities included in our relationship with God. Over the years I’ve thought of nearly 20 such metaphors.

In recent posts I’ve meditated on God’s standing as Father and as Husband, two of the most common metaphors in the Scripture. Here I’d like to do something similar for a third, his standing as Lord.

I could do that, I suppose, by surveying all the Bible verses that reference this concept. That would guarantee me something to write about for the rest of my life, and it would be a worthwhile study for both of my readers. But I think I’ll approach the topic in the same way I did the topic of God as Husband: I’ll choose a single passage that discusses the topic robustly and then see what’s to be found there. The passage is Acts 2, and as you know from the reference, the event is Pentecost.

For Israel God arranged a calendar designed to keep his people in constant fellowship with him. In addition to the weekly Sabbath, there were annual holidays, involving either fasting or feasting. Three of those holidays—Passover, Pentecost, and Booths—were designated as “pilgrimage feasts,” when the Law required all Jewish males to appear before God, first at the Tabernacle and later at the Temple. By New Testament times, of course, this meant coming to Jerusalem, to Herod’s Temple, the grandest Temple yet.

Pentecost occurred 50 days (thus the name) after Passover, which would be in our late spring (late May this year). Because weather was typically good, this festival was usually very well attended, with Jews returning to their homeland from all across the empire. It was a time of reunions, good food, and great rejoicing.

Luke tells us that the day “was fulfilled” (Ac 2.1). Some commentators see that wording as prophetically significant—that Luke was saying more than that a date on the calendar had come. John Polhill writes, “The ‘fulfillment’ language bears more weight than mere chronology as the fulfillment of the time of the divine promise for the gift of the Spirit (1:4f.). The time of waiting was over” (Acts, The New American Commentary Series, 96). He notes another passage (Lk 9.51) where the same author, Luke, uses the expression to mark another key turning point in the history of salvation, the crucifixion.

In the midst of all this hubbub, Jesus’ disciples gathered, perhaps in the Upper Room, but certainly inside a building (Ac 2.2), when to their surprise, the Spirit of God arrived and manifested himself in a most unusual way—a way not described anywhere else in biblical history. There was a sound of rushing wind (Ac 2.2), and tongues of fire appeared over their heads (Ac 2.3). And then they all began to speak in foreign languages—not because they knew those languages, but because “the Spirit gave them utterance” (Ac 2.4).

I think it’s safe to assume that at this point the small group of disciples erupted from the “house” and began speaking in those foreign languages to the massive crowd out in the street (Ac 2.5-6). This crowd was astonished. Those from the far reaches of the Empire were hearing the good news spoken, not in Greek, not in Aramaic or Hebrew, but in their local tribal languages—Elamite, from way east in Persia (Iran), and Cyrenian, from way west in North Africa. (That’s a 1500-mile spread, which covers pretty much the whole known world at the time—Marco Polo having not yet informed the “known world” of an entire well-developed civilization yet farther to the east.)

The crowds were perplexed. How did these people know all these languages?

Someone suggested that the disciples were drunk.

Now, I’ve talked to a lot of drunk people in my time, and never once has being drunk helped anyone speak any language more clearly.

There has to be a more sensible explanation.

Do you hear echoes of Babel?

The God over all nations, who once scattered its people around the globe by confusing their languages (Ge 11.1-9), now gathers its people from across the globe and brings them grace instead of judgment, using those very languages, or at least their linguistic descendants.

God is great, and he is good.

More next time.

Photo by Greg Rakozy on Unsplash