The Apostles of Jesus Christ
From the Hosts
Join us this week as Greg, Emily, and Rachel discuss the necessity of Christ’s intercession and the installation of the apostles.
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In this episode
Scripture References
Works
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Welcome to Halting Toward Zion, the podcast where we limp like Jacob to the Promised Land and talk about life, the universe, and everything along the way. I’m Emily Maxson here with Greg Uttinger and Rachel Voytek, and we are in the book of Acts.
We’ve been talking about the importance of – I shouldn’t say ‘importance’ because that makes it sound optional. I should say the centrality – but that’s not quite it, either.
The essentialness, the absolute necessity of Christ’s intercession for us at the right hand of the Father, his session there, his being seated at the right hand of the Father, and his ruling from there over earth and history. He rules the world with truth and grace, as the Christmas carol says. That’s what we talked about last time.
I think we’re going to talk a little bit more about that in a bit, but we are still in Acts 1 and there’s quite a bit of important stuff at the end of Acts 1 after the apostles return to Jerusalem. I think we’re even going to get into what that word apostles means, is that right?
Yes. I’d like to wrap up just a little bit from last time and then, as Emily says, later in this episode or more likely in the next one we’ll get into what Acts 2 tells us about Jesus sitting at the right hand of the Father and what it means.
Last time we talked about catechisms and confessions, particularly about the Heidelberg catechism, and this is the question about the session. By the way, ‘session’ is the technical term for him sitting at the right hand of the Father. It’s from the Latin word which means ‘to sit,’ so nothing great there except probably we’ll talk about, “Well, is he sitting all the time?” We’ll get there.
We talk about sittings in English. We read a book in one sitting or do a job in one sitting.
The Heidelberg catechism question 50 asks: Why is it added ‘and he sits at the right hand of God?’ Answer: Because Christ ascended into heaven for this end, that he might there appear as the head of his church by whom the Father governs all things.
It’s talked about his presence as our intercessor. In question 51 it’s going to talk about him giving his Spirit and the gifts of the Spirit. Let me go ahead and read 51:
A: First, that by his Holy Spirit he bestows the heavenly gifts upon us his members. Then, that by his power he defends and preserves us against all enemies.
Emily mentioned the Christmas carol “Joy to the World” and “He rules the world with truth and grace.” You can take that to mean one of two different things. It means that his rule is characterized by truth and grace, which is absolutely true. It could also mean that those are his weapons for the conversion of the nations, which is also completely true. Was it Isaac Watts who wrote Joy to the World?
It was either him or Charles Wesley. I get those two mixed up because my students studied them at the same time in British literature and they got them mixed up.
Okay. It’s his paraphrase of I think Psalm 98 – Old Testament psalms in New Testament language. I don’t know what Isaac Watts exactly meant there. Either of those is valid theology. The question becomes, if we talk about it meaning that these are the tools by which he converts the nations and brings people to himself, it’s easy to stop there and say so the kingdom is a kingdom of men’s hearts, and it operates by the word and Spirit, and that’s the kingdom. It’s a mystery. It’s invisible. It’s spiritual. It’s secret. You can’t tell how the Spirit comes or how the Spirit moves convincing men of sin and all that.
That’s all good as far as it goes, but it may leave out in our conscious thinking, “And he’s the one by whom the Father governs all things.” And it may leave out that by his power he defends and preserves against all enemies. The kingdom is not only one of grace and glory. It’s also a kingdom of power. Jesus is the one through whom the Father rules the physical cosmos and all of history.
We’ll see more of that when we get further into Acts 2, as we stop and look at some of the expressions that too often I think we wave off as, “Oh yeah, we know that. That’s Christianese. That’s religious language. Moving on…” No, the language actually does mean something.
It would have meant a great deal to a world that still had thrones and emperors enthroned and such. It didn’t just mean, “Oh look, cool! He’s got a really neat chair!” There’s a lot more going on than that, so we will return to that with some emphasis when we do get to the middle of Acts 2, which probably won’t be today.
In the meantime, the text takes us back to Jerusalem, which we’re told is a Sabbath’s Day journey from Olivet. We’re told the names of the apostles and that they continue with one accord in prayer and supplication with the women, who we’re now quite familiar with, and Mary the mother of Jesus. I believe this is the last time Mary is mentioned.
And oh look, his brethren are there. They’re believers. Remember Paul tells us that after his resurrection Jesus appeared to James, his half-brother, so he’s become a Christian and maybe is the instrument for the others becoming believers.
As they look around they notice that something is missing. They’ve begun studying the scriptures in the light of what Jesus has been teaching them in the 40 days he’s been on and off with them. They look at the psalms and they see that the psalms did prophecy the betrayal of Jesus, and that the man who did it would be one of their number and that he would, as Peter says, “Go to his own place” (hell), and that therefore the scripture commanded them to let another take his office (as Luke renders it) or his bishopric (by James).
Rachel, why don’t you tell us about apostles and the process of choosing and who was qualified and why that’s become significant, particularly in our day.
Sure. In chapter 1 we are going to begin in verse 21 when they say, “We understand that this was part of the Lord’s plan, that Judas would betray Jesus,” but also that his position should be given to another.
Wherefore of these men which have companied with us all the time that the Lord Jesus went in and out among us, beginning from the baptism of John, unto that same day that he was taken up from us, must one be ordained to be a witness with us of his resurrection.
They are here choosing who will be the new 12th apostle, and they lay out very specific qualifications. It’s someone who has been with Jesus the entire time from the baptism of John through basically the ascension, so that it’s somebody that can testify to all of the things he did and said before his death, they can testify to his death, they can testify specifically to his resurrection.
They have to be a witness of the risen Christ, which means the only men that could be apostles are those of that generation. The apostles are very specific men chosen by Jesus to be with him during his earthly life, but particularly that are witnesses of his resurrection.
That’s significant because we have Paul, who will be added as the 13th apostle. He did not walk with Jesus during his life, but Jesus appears to him as the resurrected Christ so that is his qualification. But it still limits the ability of there to be apostles to that one generation, that they’re going to fulfill that particular task from Jesus to finish the Bible, to finish all the revelation that God has for us, to lay the foundation of the Church, to particularly be there to direct the Church and to correct the Church as it’s first getting started.
Anybody who’s worked with somebody when they’re just starting out in a profession or anything knows that at the beginning they’re very wobbly and they need lots and lots of training and support. Think of children trying to learn any basic skill. They need lots and lots of support, correction, and encouragement, so the apostles are there as you could almost say like the rebar that helps hold the building in place. They’re not the foundation. They’re not Christ, but they are that next layer that is holding up the Church.
It’s really important to emphasize that because the apostles themselves are telling us these things by apostolic authority. There have been many movements through Church history where suddenly, “Oh, we have new apostles. Oh, we are getting more revelation. We have more of this special office.”
It seems like it’s been more prevalent since the Second Great Awakening, particularly in the 20th century with first the Azusa Street revivals in 1907 where we get the beginnings really of what we know as modern Pentecostalism. That’s where we start to get this idea of, “Oh, these special gifts are coming back and we need to start looking for signs and wonders and miracles again.” You get the beginning of talking more about the baptism of the Holy Spirit, a second blessing. Those all start to creep into the Church more and more.
Where we see it today in the last less than 30 years is a new movement that often doesn’t claim to be a movement, which is always interesting. Most of the people associated with it say, “Oh no, we’re not any sort of specific organization,” so it’s extremely hard to pin down because they don’t have their own churches that are labeled this or anything. They’re not a denomination.
What I’m describing is something called the New Apostolic Reformation or the NAR. It’s basically a group that has a lot of its founding in a man named C. Peter Wagner, who was a professor at Fuller Seminary in the ‘80s and ‘90s. He’s the one that declared that the first real apostle returned to the scene in 1998. I think he was that apostle, if I understand that correctly.
It’s very hard to pin it down. I was trying to Google who was the first apostle in this group and it’s like, “Well, they had apostles suddenly appear, and this guy is the one who said that it happened,” so it’s a little unclear, but he is considered one of their apostles.
A side note that’s interesting as we talk about this, another person who is considered one of their apostles is Paula White.
Anyway, this movement as a whole has the idea that the Church failed the Great Commission for 2,000 years because we did not have apostles and prophets to lead the way in spiritual warfare. So what they say is that before God created the world he decided to limit his own knowledge, and when he created Adam and Eve he did not know what they were going to do because he chose to not know somehow. He gave them this authority, this dominion, so when they fell God wasn’t expecting it because he didn’t know, and they lost that dominion to Satan.
So from that point forward to this day, Satan holds the dominion that God originally gave to Adam and Eve, and the purpose of the Church and the purpose of the Great Commission is to take back authority from Satan through spiritual warfare, led by apostles and prophets, and that Jesus came to basically show us how to do spiritual warfare. That was what he came for most. Therefore, in the New Testament Church they were fulfilling this. They were fighting all of the demons.
It’s very heavily a ‘look for demons’ movement. What this ends up becoming in modern times is everywhere that the Church is not in control is controlled by Satan. God is sort of watching, or I think he’s cooperating with us, so there you get that cooperative idea from back with Charles Finney and others, that God basically joins our group and we work together with God to take back everything from Satan.
The way that we do that in the modern time is through receiving ongoing revelation from the apostles that they now have, the prophets, and by the people taking over what they call the “Seven Mountains of Power.” It’s the Seven Mountain Mandate to take over the spheres of religion, education, family, business, government, the arts, and media. When we take over all those seven, Jesus will come back and everything will be done and we’ll win. So we’re bringing a ‘heaven on earth’ again, of course, and it’s a weird mixing of the Kuyperian idea that every realm should be subject to Christ, but with this strange twist on it.
In the last few years they have been heavily associated with Christian Nationalism and lots of pushes to get people in political positions of authority that will help them. They were very pro-Trump because they thought he would help them put their people in power so they could climb those mountains of authority.
If you go to Redding, which is not too far from some of us, where you have the influence of Bethel Church, they claim not to be associated with this but everything they do is this.
I think those who would say that they are in the NAR are big fans of Bethel, if I’m not mistaken.
It’s more Bill Johnson, who is their proclaimed prophet and apostle. He says that he’s not officially NAR, but if you listen to what he says, he’s doing the same thing. They’ve done it in microcosm in Redding, where they’ve basically taken over all the authority positions that they can, and they promote everybody in Bethel being out in every political sphere and other spheres, essentially taking the city for them. It’s an interesting study there.
What this does is create something also called dominionism, which gets conflated with postmillennialism, even though it’s not the same thing of “We need to take over everything for Christ.” What they mean by that is using spiritual warfare to dominate Satan and demons in every realm, not building a kingdom in technology…
And preaching the gospel and the Spirit changing people’s hearts and all that.
Yes. Their idea of evangelism is essentially fighting back the demons so that people can follow Jesus, essentially holding back the bad so people can follow the good.
That’s very much Finney. Basically, Jesus showed us the way to lead people from being demonically possessed and controlled by Satan, to being controlled by the good by following the right things.
This is Finney. I wasn’t familiar with this movement. I’ve been out of the circuit I guess too much lately. But as you’ve described it, every piece you mentioned I have heard some good evangelical Christians say, so it’s easy to say, “These are the whackos.” Excuse me. Your denomination, your pastor, your seminary at some point may well have contributed to this, because the expressions she’s using have been very popular in the last 50 years, during which I’ve been theologically aware.
They haven’t all been put together in one package, but I suppose it was inevitable that somebody would, because once you get the language out there – it’s sort of like Bethel and its music. Once you get the language out there and people using the language or the music, then they’ll start thinking like you. As my wife says, “The way you talk about something is the way you think about something.”
There’s an old Latin phrase, “Lex orandi, lex credendi,” the law of prayer is the law of belief. The words you use then become the way you think.
There’s also a quote from Bill Johnson of Bethel who says, “We’re getting people to sing what they’ll believe in five years.”
If you listen to Christian music frequently, and it’s not hymns or something old like that, or new hymns or psalms, it would be useful if you’re listening to more modern praise choruses to research who wrote them, because the most popular praise choruses right now across Spotify but also in churches are almost all Bethel songs.
A lot of them are very generic and can sound nice and they’re very encouraging, but they basically use those songs and train their worship leaders to purposefully provoke certain responses from people, and to essentially get them all worked up in the Spirit, so to speak, emotionally manipulated.
So it is wise to know whose music you’re listening to, to research the artists just in general. Sometimes I find it very encouraging to see these artists and their backgrounds, but it’s definitely good to be aware and to know what music are you singing in your church.
Can I throw in a little bit more on that just in general? The Christian music, especially praise choruses, are sometimes so poetic as to mean nothing at all. I remember getting some very good advice at one point when considering what music is really edifying and useful. Consider whether it’s written in sentences. Are there complete thoughts or is it a series of unconnected ideas? You’d be surprised. Once you start thinking about it and start paying attention how few have complete thoughts. And then does it mention Jesus? You’d be surprised how many do not. If the answer is yes, if it does mention Jesus, is it in name or is it in concept only?
Those are just three questions that rule out – not that this is some legalistic formula that you can’t listen to music that doesn’t pass these three tests – but so many songs that are so popular on Christian radio, if we applied these three questions we’d go, “Wow. What makes this music Christian? Is it just that it’s positive and uplifting? Is that really what it means?”
It’s almost the exact tagline for a particular Christian radio station. “Positive, encouraging.”
One of the things I did also was, I had heard that they were the most popular, and I don’t think that I’ve heard a lot of their music because I haven’t been in as much modern music recently, but their most popular song is called The Goodness of God, I believe.
When you read it, it’s very generic. I don’t even think it mentions the word God. It just says Father. Maybe it says God, but it’s all in very general terms, “You’ve been so good to me, so so good, you’ve been faithful, you’re so so good, you’re good, you’ve been so good to me, you’re such a good Father.”
In one of the other songs I looked up they had parts of the song that they labeled “spontaneous,” and I’m going, “How do you have spontaneous prepared sections?” but it’s things like, “I feel God in this room.”
That’s one of the other weird things that they talk about that’s more of a Bethel thing. You can take control of a room, where you basically can go into the room and you can control the spiritual forces of the room and make everything in the room serve you or something.
It’s very tricky because when you are a speaker or a musician, you do genuinely interact with your audience in a way that is very peculiar when you’re actually in the room. It’s not the same as broadcasting a performance. We even use the words ‘stage magic’ to kind of put that idea with, but then to take it and say, “This is spiritual warfare. I have spiritual authority because I’m experiencing this,” that’s a misappropriation of scriptural ideas.
I’m not that familiar with all this stuff but taking control of a room – you’re taking it in the traditional sense of a speaker or a musician and how they take control of the audience.
Yes. I was deliberately taking it in the most general way I could figure out how.
The traditional Pentecostal Charismatic slant would be you’re taking control of the physical space, because physical spaces are controlled by demons and you want to take the physical space back, thus my remark about white magic. White magic, of course, is simply black magic painted white.
I think that’s some of how they would consider evangelism. If you’re going to evangelize, you first have to control the room, control the demons in the room, so that you can then speak to the person. Presumably, if you are properly controlling the room, the demons will stay back and the person will believe, because in their mind the demons are what stand between.
Because of spiritual warfare they’re also very big proponents of the return of the so-called gifts of the Spirit, especially healing, so they are ones who promote that age-old phrase, “It’s always God’s will to heal.” They take certain things in the New Testament and read back into the Old Testament and essentially discount or reinterpret things significantly because God must not be in control if somebody is not being healed, because it’s always his will, it’s always his desire, so there must be something in the way like a demonic force or your lack of faith to keep you in that. So anybody that continues to be sick is very beaten down by this, like previous groups that we’ve seen as well.
That’s discouraging so let’s move on to something a little more encouraging.
All that to say that this is why it’s so important to have a good definition.
A good definition of apostles – what’s that good definition, Rachel, from Acts 1?
A good definition of an apostle is someone particularly who witnessed the risen Christ, that is first and foremost, and secondarily someone who was with Jesus from the time of John’s baptism through his resurrection and ascension, so they are eyewitnesses of his life and especially of his resurrection.
When we’re working with small children at school or Sunday School, or even young believers, even sometimes believers who have been around a while, they have trouble keeping apostle and disciple separate because they’re not the same thing. A disciple is someone who is under the discipline of a teacher, that is being taught and corrected. The disciple is trying to be like his master, as Jesus tells us. Jesus had lots of disciples, not just 12. Some were old and some were young, some were women and some were men.
In staff devotions recently we read Matthew 10 where Jesus picks the 12. He’s just said, “The fields are white to harvest. Pray the Lord of the harvest to send laborers into the harvest.” Then he prays all night and then he picks 12 of his disciples to be with him, and the names of the 12 apostles are these.
The word apostle means someone who is sent out as an ambassador with the authority of another. In the New Testament that usually means one of these 12, plus Paul. Occasionally it has a slightly different meaning if you’re sent out by a church, in which case it would be similar to missionary, but the overwhelming use is what Rachel has described. The 12 are the patriarchs of a new Israel.
In Ephesians 2 and in talking about the apostles and prophets and speaking of the church he says,
Now therefore ye are no more strangers and foreigners, but fellow citizens with the saints and of the household of God, and are built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Jesus Christ himself being the chief cornerstone…
Again the word ‘foundation.’ Foundations come at the beginning of a building project. You don’t put a foundation on the 20th floor. That would be kind of problematic.
My former pastor, Jim West, who is now with the Lord, wrote a book that he hoped would be very popular and sadly it wasn’t. It’s easy to find a copy of the book. I think the church still has a bunch. I forget the title of the book but it has the word ‘foundation’ in it.
He talks about how this is the answer to the whole question of spiritual gifts. These were foundational gifts. Being an apostle is listed as the most important of these. God gave some to be apostles, secondarily prophets, thirdly teachers, and then he goes on and lists other gifts. Apostles were first and they were foundational. Prophets are second and they’re foundational. Then we come down to ordinary teachers, who are working from what the apostles and prophets wrote, which is a completed scripture.
We’re going to see more of that as we go on into Acts 2 and why that it so terribly important and why our charismatic and Pentecostal friends have often missed the boat because they’re looking at the experience rather than the content and reality of the promise, but we will again save that until we actually get into the text of Acts 2.
I hope by now that all who are listening have a much clearer idea of what an apostle was. There are some religious groups that still have apostles, aside from those that Emily and Rachel mentioned. The Mormons have apostles.
And of course the church of Rome. The Pope is the successor of Peter and thus an apostle.
That’s actually an interesting link back to NAR because they have this idea that you can pick up the mantle of authority of a dead person.
Yes. The church we read from had a particular famous – I don’t know if it’s Pentecostal or charismatic, but a famous TV speaker whose name you would know if I said it – who came and basically did a series or seminar on exactly that, claiming the mantle of the Christian dead.
It’s a fairly large church, but that day it was packed out. The parking lot was overflowing. People like magic, and dabbling with the dead – I think the Old Testament warns us about necromancy and such.
Yes, and nowhere in the New Testament is it recommended that this idea be pursued.
No. We make things up. But of course if the Old Testament is not God’s final word then apparently we are free to make things up because it’s just God speaking things he forgot to tell us. It’s the Bible part 2 and there’s all kinds of cool stuff in it that the Church missed for 2,000 years.
I appreciated your comment that God has blinded himself. Yes, he set up this program with apostles and prophets in the first century, writing scripture, sent out to evangelize the world, and it didn’t work. So now he’s got to try something new.
The Bible says that God does nothing without revealing it to his prophets, speaking of the prophets of scripture. If that is true, God cannot have these gaps of knowledge. It is impossible. It’s a theoretical impossibility.
Known unto God are all His works from the beginning of the creation – Acts 15.
The average evangelical Christian will absolutely admit, claim, testify, revel in the fact that God is omniscient, but when you start pointing out the consequences of that –
“Which means he knew your parents would get married and have you as their child.”
“And furthermore, He knew that their parents on each side would get married, and that someplace in there would be a spark of faith, a line of faith that could be traced. Or he ordained an evangelist to come from outside of that and lead someone to Christ. And all that before you were born. How far back does this go, kids?”
Yes. That’s what omniscience actually means. He knows the whole story to the last syllable of recorded time.
I think a lot of where they go wrong, and I think where a lot of people can get tripped up is in some of the narrative in the scriptures where the Lord speaks in more anthropomorphic language of himself. The example that the NAR gives for justifying their idea that God doesn’t know things is one of the stories in Exodus where Moses has to go and mediate for the people, and God relents of his anger.
If God already knew what he was going to do, then he can’t actually relent, so if we’re going to make this story authentic we have to take away God’s knowledge. It’s basically holding God hostage by one story and saying, “Well, the rest of scripture must mean that he doesn’t know, because this one thing makes us think he doesn’t know” – defining the whole from just one little part.
I think a lot of it is simply that many Christians don’t know how to explain what’s going on there. Obviously we can’t fully understand and explain, but to the extent that we can be satisfied that God both knew and can speak of relenting…
Yes. We have this phrase that he was using anthropomorphic language. That’s a concept throughout scripture. We don’t have to understand exhaustively, but to say sometimes God speaks of himself in this way, knowing that we are the image of God, so when he uses descriptions that fit an image to describe his ultimate reality, it’s true if not exhaustively detailed and accurate.
It’s true without being exhaustive. We do not know as God knows, but what he tells us is nonetheless true. But since he tells us many things, we must balance everything he tells us with everything else he tells us.
Honestly, one of the problems with evangelicals or good old Reformed Presbyterians is that we don’t read the Bible very much. People are actually surprised to find particular stories or phrases or descriptions because they haven’t read them before. Maybe they heard them mentioned in a sermon or maybe they didn’t, because pastors can’t preach through every single book in any depth during their lifetime. They’re always going to be limited, which is why we do have Bible studies, Christian literature, and other kinds of things like this podcast to help people grow.
But ultimately the individual believer has to start reading the Bible, and reading it thoroughly and in order, whether chronological or the order it was given to us by Providence or some kind of theological covenantal order, so that we can see the development of these ideas and we’re not just stuck on one particular verse.
In a conversation with a gentleman not long ago, where he hung onto one verse in the New Testament, which he was badly misinterpreting, having to do with the will of God, he was rewriting all of theology on the basis of, “Well, God has multiple levels of will – good, acceptable, perfect.” That’s not what that means.
That was another one I heard recently – progressive Christianity holds the whole of scripture to the phrase, “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do.” And any place where it doesn’t align with that, you either throw it out or reinterpret it, because that is their defining paradigm. They look at everything through the one verse.
And that in itself is unbiblical, which you will only know if you read the whole Bible.
We found a Reformation to overthrow the power of the Pope, and yet we reinsert little popes left and right.
Which is what the Catholics warned us about. They said every man would become his own pope, and to some degree that criticism or that warning was justified.
But they did see a potential danger, and it’s a real danger, but it’s one that God’s got covered. It just takes time, and we as Americans are in a hurry. “So this is going to get fixed in the next couple generations?”
“No, I didn’t say that. It may be 1,000 years before God puts everything back together, maybe 10,000.”
I don’t know how long it’s going to take, but God knows what he’s doing and God will heal his Church.
And he gave some, apostles; and some, prophets and some, evangelists and some, pastors and teachers, for the perfecting of the saints, for the work of the ministry, for the edifying of the body of Christ, till we all come in the unity of the faith, and of the knowledge of the Son of God, unto a perfect man, unto the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ. That we henceforth be no more children, tossed to and fro, and carried about with every wind of doctrine, by the sleight of men, and cunning craftiness, whereby they lie in wait to deceive.
In other words, the Church needs to grow up. Christ is our head. We’re a really sickly body right now, and God’s plan is to grow us up to be appropriate to Christ our head, and that involves people teaching truth from scripture and not making stuff up, and not getting in a hurry, and not trying to rush ahead, and not trying to sacrifice doctrine on the altar of “Can’t we all get along?” We have to be ready to knock heads now and then and to let iron sharpen iron and, in some minor cases, agree to disagree for awhile and figure that maybe our children will work this one out.
To take one passage or one section or one idea and enthrone it as The Rule that defines all Christianity is contrary to scripture itself. The only thing that defines all of Christianity, oddly enough, is Christ. The testimony of Jesus is the spirit of prophecy. So if whatever we’re doing isn’t leading us back to Christ as he’s revealed in all of scripture, we’re off-course and we may be taking other people with us, and that – to cause one of these little ones to stumble – you’re better off that a millstone were put about your neck and you were cast into the ocean.
It’s a serious thing to pretend to be a teacher or prophet and then to mislead God’s people in the name of Jesus. Jesus will have words with you, and the rest of us should want to not be around that.
We’re moving now into Acts 2. Due to time I think the best thing is just to set the stage and save most of the sermon for the next episode or two.
The word Pentecost, by being attached to a particular theological movement that began in the early 1900s in America, has gained a certain color and flavor. If you say, “We’re a Pentecostal church,” you’re describing your approach to doctrine. This can be true of any label, honestly, any label we use within Christendom. Calling yourself “the Christian church” – and the rest of us are the not-Christian church? The rest of us are not Pentecostal – we didn’t have our roots in the Day of Pentecost too? We don’t appreciate the Spirit?
Well, maybe we don’t and maybe we need to fix that. God often raises up doctrinal aberrations in one area of the church to stir us up and say, “Oh, maybe we’ve neglected something.” Unfortunately, sometimes our response is to run exactly the opposite direction. “Oh, they’re going to talk about the baptism of the Holy Spirit and sanctification and the gifts of the Spirit? Okay, we’ll make sure we never talk about that except when we’re lobbing hand grenades over the wall to tell people how bad they are.” Maybe if we were saying the positive things, that would help.
John Calvin has been called the theologian of the Holy Spirit, with good reason. He and the Reformed Presbyterian tradition – the formula of unity, the Westminster Standards and such, the Puritans – put a high price on the work of the Spirit, as in scripture. They’re simply saying, “Yeah, the Spirit is sovereign. He changes people’s hearts.”
Can we have an amen from all our Pentecostal/Charismatic friends, honestly? Or do you still feel you have to manipulate people into an emotional state? Are you willing to trust the Holy Spirit to pick up the weapons he’s designed, that he’s inspired – the Bible – and to use broken fragile sinful vessels (yes, that’s what we all are) to declare this truth so that he can take it and change people’s hearts and new lives? Are we willing to do that, or do we think that he needs a little help? Is he sovereign or isn’t he sovereign?
Anyway, all that by way of saying that Pentecost was actually an Old Testament festival. It was one of the required festivals in Israel. There were three: Passover, Pentecost, and Tabernacles (or Booths or Ingathering, it had three names).
Pentecost means 50 days because it came 50 days after the Sunday (first day of the week) after Passover – that is to say, 50 days after offering the first fruit sheath of the harvest to God. So the day on which Jesus rose, as far as the liturgical calendar was concerned, was marked by offering a single sheath to God – resurrection. Then 50 days later, now that that’s happened we can start gathering in the crops, and after 50 days we present them to God. Then at the end of seven months we gather in what’s left – the wheat and grapes – and this is the final harvest. This points to the harvest of the Gentiles, something we see in the Restoration prophets, and it leads to the calling of the Gentiles until the final resurrection. Thus, all the harvest hymns always tie together both evangelism (Bringing in the Sheaves) but also the coming of Christ to harvest His church.
One thing to note, which I didn’t know until I was studying the Jewish observations of this, is that Pentecost also coincides with the giving of the law at Sinai, so they celebrate it by eating honey and milk products, because the milk and honey of the Word.
In my mind there’s something kind of ironic that Pentecostalism has taken this and turned it into so much experientialism, when it’s actually originally a memory of the Lord revealing his character in the law.
Yes. When I was somewhat younger I had heard that it commemorated the giving of the law, so I tried to count it out. Much of the counting of the days is done for us. It was this many days here, and this many days here. But when they actually come to Sinai, Moses stops counting and I had trouble fitting in 50 days. It looked like it was shorter than that.
Then somehow, some way – maybe I read somebody who had suggested this – he would have said something like, “And this day he went up the mountain and came down the mountain. The next day he went up the mountain and came down the mountain,” and suddenly it struck me. I’ve climbed Mt. Lassen. It takes a day. To go up Mt. Lassen and come down Mt. Lassen, that’s a day.
Moses is strong, no doubt, but he’s getting on. Up/down, up/down, up/down, that’s not one day. That’s a day for every climb and descent.
Yes, it’s not a little grassy knoll. It’s a big mountain. When you add that in, yes, it does come to 50 days. It does celebrate the giving of the law and it’s a harvest festival, so when we get to the New Testament here we should expect a couple things. We should expect a harvest, but the beginning of a harvest, which will continue on until the end of the world. This is the first phase, and what we’re going to see is the initial harvest of Israel.
We should also expect an even better giving of the law, because at Sinai God wrote it on tables of stone. Now we should expect the work of the Spirit to come and write the law on our hearts. What is crucial to that is having a completed Bible, the full revelation of God in Christ, which comes with the completion of the New Testament. We’re going to see that that’s a good deal of what’s going on here.
Pentecost took up two days. It took up the Sabbath and then the following Sunday. It’s a two-day festival, so when it says the day of Pentecost was fully come, it means it’s Sunday. We’ve passed through the Sabbath, the 7th day and Day of Pentecost, to the first day.
There’s an old hymn and I don’t remember what it’s called but it speaks of how on the first day of the week, a three-fold light was given: the original light at creation, the resurrection of Christ, and the outpouring of the Spirit. We’re to understand this is the Lord’s Day, and on the Lord’s Day Jesus as already ascended into heaven and has waited. He is self-consciously waiting for the Lord’s Day to come, where he will now demonstrate himself to be indeed the Lord of the Church and the Lord of the world.
At Pentecost at this point, because it’s one of the required feasts, lots and lots of people from all over the empire were here. As we read through the New Testament it seems, although I could not prove this, that although Passover was theoretically the more important because if you didn’t attend Passover you basically excommunicated yourself, Pentecost seems to have been a more popular feast, something that more people attended.
We see Paul not in a big hurry to get back for Passover, but in a big hurry to get back for Pentecost, probably because he knew there would be lots and lots of people there and it would be a chance to preach. So the city is full of people, Jews from all over the empire, all places and corners, and God’s people have been waiting.
Since we’ve been talking about Pentecostalism, this is a good point to go there again. In at least some Pentecostal circles there is the idea of how you receive baptism by the Holy Spirit. Some other theologians have come up with a formula. You have to do these particular things. You have to wait on God. You have to seek him in prayer. And there can be a list of a few things or a number of things.
It’s important to note that the only thing that they were required to do was not go anyplace. Jesus said, “Wait here until the Spirit comes,” not “And if you want him to come, or if you want him to come faster, or you want him to come on time, or you want him to come in real power, here’s a list of things you need to do.”
He didn’t say that. He just says, “He’s coming. It’s the promise of the Father. Wait, and when he comes you’ll be empowered to do the things that he’s told you to do.” That’s the only motivation they needed to stay there. They weren’t helping the Spirit come, and when he came he came not in response to anything they were doing. They were all in one accord and one place, but none of that forced God’s hand or enabled the Spirit to do something he could not otherwise have gone. In other words, again, it’s not magic.
There were those who were outside who prophesied the same – not on this occasion but on other occasions.
And I would like to point out the fact that for them to be together in one accord praying, it means the Spirit was already working in them because they’re already believers, and therefore what’s coming is new, it’s different, but the Spirit is already there.
Yes, and I get this question oftentimes from students and teachers and other people – “Was the Spirit at work in the Old Testament?” Yes. There’s no other way to come to faith in Christ but by the work of the Holy Spirit. “Well, then what’s the big difference? Why is it such a big deal?” We’ll look again more next time, but just a couple hints.
The New Testament language is “poured out,” poured out on all flesh so that whoever calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved. It’s the total sweep, the volume, the earthly omnipresence of the Spirit’s work. It’s not going to be limited to this little desert country in Palestine from here out. It’s going to sweep over the world.
It’s interesting because my husband David has been teaching a course to pastors on pneumatology, on the study of the Spirit, so he’s been obviously sharing things and I can overhear him because he does it via Zoom.
He started with the idea of who is the Spirit and what is his work, but then he did a whole class on the Spirit in the Old Testament before going to the New Testament, because in the country where they are there’s a strong presence of Pentecostalism, so these Reformed brethren are struggling against that frequently.
It’s important for us to often expand our minds on what the work of the Spirit is, because anything that is the grace of God is coming to us by the work of the Spirit, whether it’s common grace or special grace or special revelation, as we call it. He’s working in many different things, but we tend to be very focused only on salvation and conversion. We don’t understand the breadth of his work in all the things that he does. I think that’s maybe why sometimes we miss how everything truly is supposed to be pointing us back to Jesus, because the Spirit is working everywhere to point us to Christ.
One of my favorite overlooked facts in the Old Testament is how Bezaleel, one of the artisans who was tasked with making beautiful things for the tabernacle, was said to be gifted by the Spirit, equipped for that task. The ornamentation of the tabernacle was a gift of the Spirit. That’s wild.
It is, and in some fall-out of that Rachel spoke of common grace. As I’ve told you before, I’m sure, I don’t really like that phrase. My wife told me the other day, “I see why you don’t like it,” because what it suggests is that God favors the universe in two ways: one in Christ and one just because.
Common grace, if we’re going to use that phrase, has to be the overflow of special grace, of redemptive grace. God reaches out into the broader culture and beyond the bounds of the Church and beyond the bounds of where Christendom has even come, for the sake of the Church, for the sake of Jesus.
This is not something like another game that God is running on the side, as it were. This is part of the program and it’s simply him using things that aren’t immediately attached to the covenant people perhaps, or the covenant people outside of worship to forward the kingdom of Christ, but it is still God’s grace in Christ.
Any attempt to say, “But no, doesn’t God just love the world?” Yeah, he subordinated it all to Adam, and Adam screwed it up, and God would have been completely justified in destroying the universe, and he didn’t.
Yes, and Jesus is taking it back, but he’s taking it back not by defying demons who never had any claim on it in the first place, although they are squatters occasionally, but by changing people’s hearts – truth and grace – so that people are not simply doing his will, but consciously doing his will, as the angels do in heaven.
We’ve come full circle to Joy to the World, so that’s a great place to transition to recommendations, and we have a recommendation from a listener. We got some very encouraging fan mail this week from Nathan and Pamela, and Nathan recommends praying for others instead of praying for yourself. He says that you will actually find even more blessing when you do this.
He says, “Our prayers can often be selfish and self-centered. While we ought to pray for all of our daily needs and praise God for his blessings and ask him for even the smallest things that we need, we ought to really and truly pray for others too. I can personally attest to the blessing that comes from being deliberate and setting aside time to pray every day for the specific needs of others.”
Off of that, I would like to take a step in a slightly different direction. Amen to all that you said, Nathan. That’s absolutely true. In the tradition I grew up in, at least within the Christian community I grew up in, if someone said, “I need your prayers,” we’d say, “Oh, I will pray for you,” which meant that if you can remember when it comes time for your evening prayers or maybe the dinner prayer at the table or your private devotions, you hope to remember to pray for them. Of course, the reality is that we often forget. Something I learned from my last headmaster in the Anderson school and my first headmaster here in Sacramento was to pray immediately.
I saw them do this and it was so not what I was used to. I’m by nature rather introverted, whatever impression I give when I’m teaching. Outside of the classroom or a microphone I tend to hang back and let other people take charge of things, so it seemed a little odd to go up to the child who just skinned his knee and is crying and put my hand on him and say, “Lord, please comfort Johnny right now and grant him your peace. And please may there be no serious injury,” or whatever the appropriate prayer is.
So two things – first, why not? Why not pray right then? The need is right there. Why wait? We pray before we eat. Why can’t we just save that prayer until later in the day. “Lord, we retroactively thank you for the dinner.” Because we pray with the occasion. We pray when we start church, not sometime later that night. “Oh Lord, thank you for being present at church. We hope you were there. We forgot to ask you.” Why don’t we pray with the occasion? The fallout of that is, if you do, you may forget to pray again but at least you’ve prayed once. You’ve said you were going to pray and you did.
I think it also teaches us a more active sense of the immediate presence of God. We don’t pray and file requests with God for him to fill out if he gets around to them, if he remembers them eventually. God is right there in that particular instance, and we’re just looking up and saying, “There’s a problem here. Would you please fix this?” which again assures us of his omniscience, his omnipresence, his immanence, his sovereignty in this particular situation. We don’t push it off into religious situations, but we involve him in our daily life because he is.
So my suggestion is to look for opportunities to pray out loud. “Eww, people will hear me.” Yeah, that’s kind of the point. They’ll also hear the name of Jesus so why not?
Recommendation: Look for opportunities to pray out loudMine is – I was going to say it’s less spiritual, but given our entire discussion I’m not sure that’s entirely accurate. I want to recommend a short story by J.R.R. Tolkien. It’s called Leaf by Niggle. It’s a very short book. I think it’s in four chapters, but the audiobook that I listened to was less than an hour. It’s available on Spotify, read by Derek Jacobi.
It’s just a very good little story. It feels very Lewis. If you’re like, “Oh, Tolkien – that’s deep lore and very obscure.” No, this is so accessible and a really very sweet story. I don’t think I’m going to say too much more than that, except that it’s about art and sanctification and grace and love for our neighbor.
In our household, the word ‘niggle’ has become a verb that we fall back on from time to time with reference to that book.
I’m going to make a recommendation that I’m 95% sure I’ve already made, but it’s very relevant today to what we were talking about because it’s to do with the New Apostolic Reformation and where I first learned about more of the movement.
It’s two parts. Alisa Childers did an interview with a man named Brandon Kimber, who I believe is the director of the American Gospel movies. They talk about it because he’s in the process of creating the third American Gospel, which is actually more of a miniseries, about Bethel. They spend quite a bit of time on the podcast talking about what the New Apostolic Reformation is and how it specifically manifests in Bethel in their music, and a lot of crazy quotes from Bill Johnson.
I guess Brandon Kimber grew up in a lot of that culture and knows quite a bit about it, and each of the movies he’s made has been to address issues and doctrinal troubles he’s seen in specific people he knows and cares about. This one is because of the influence he’s seen of Bethel on people that he loves, and just the general New Apostolic Reformation.
You can listen to the podcast, and also I think the first four episodes of his American Gospel 3 called Spirit and Fire are out and you could go watch those.
I think they’re for pay right now because they’re still in the process of trying to produce the rest of the episodes. You can do group viewing, it sounds like, and get everybody together. They seem like they would be very relevant to everything that’s going on, especially for those of us who live in northern California and have lots of influence from this into our churches and our friends.
Speaking of this, do you ladies know that a good friend of ours who I will not name here attended Bethel in his youth, and back then it was actually a fairly decent church because they had a really decent pastor, but he had to leave the ministry, unfortunately, and things took a dive. I met their pastor. He was a good guy and, whatever spiritual manifestations the church claimed it had, he always insisted that they be tested by the word of God before they be made public. Some of the things he was reading were really good books.
So like some of the churches in Revelation, be careful lest you fall, lest Christ come and take away your candlestick. But Christ is still in charge, so we’re back to “We know He knows what He’s doing. He rules the world with truth and grace.”
So this is not a downer of an ending. This is an upper of an ending. The Lord is in charge.
Thank you also to David, my lawfully-wedded husband and the producer and editor of the show. A big thank you to our financial supporters for keeping the show rolling. If you’d like to support the show you can visit patreon.com/haltingtowardzion.
If you’d like to send us a email, that’s free. No financial commitment required there. Just type up your thoughts and send them to [email protected]. We would love to hear from you. Thanks again to Nathan and Pamela for writing to us this week. It was great to hear from you.