The Words of the Prophets
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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’re in the book of Acts.
We left off last time with Acts 2:1, I believe. “And when the day of Pentecost was fully come, they were all with one accord in one place.” I think this is the biblical justification for buying Hondas, if I’m not mistaken.
We talked about the significance of the Feast of Pentecost. It was a 2-day feast, so we passed from the Sabbath day to the next day, which is becoming the Lord’s Day, what we think of as Sunday. And although they were with one accord in one place, it speaks to the grace of God in them. It does not list a qualification for obtaining the blessing of the Spirit. It’s just telling how things were and showing us the Spirit was already at work even before his formal descent.
This is a long chapter and we probably won’t get through all of it. Again, we remind you this is a history podcast. I know that sometimes that may be difficult to believe because we spend an awful lot of time talking about theology, but to that there are two responses. First, what’s happening here is a historical event of tremendous importance, not just for particular parts of the church or even for the whole church, but for the world and for its future. Secondly, being such, we need to see what the Bible itself says about this history-transforming event. So although the goal here is not complete exegesis of the passage, we’re going to be here a while.
One of the reasons I think that Christian history suffers so much is that when we hit God’s great acts in the new covenant we just kind of skip over them because we want to get to the history. This is history. One point of this podcast now is to keep reminding God’s people this really happened. This is history, and some of the most important history you’ll ever read. If God thought other history were more important he would have kept writing the Bible, but this is what he chose to record for us.
Let’s note also that history is supposed to make sense. Often I think history becomes a jumble of things that happen. People look at even the biblical histories and think, “They’re recording facts; therefore, parallels that you might notice, the biblical theology, we don’t want to bring that in because we’re talking about historical facts.” Let’s remember that parallelism and other literary structures have meaning in literature because they’re something that God has done in history.
I’ve run into the objection of pointing out biblical parallels and someone will say, “Well, they recorded it that way because that’s the way they happened.”
That’s kind of the point. God is the author of history. These are not random accidental events that just happened for some strange reason we don’t understand to look alike. If they look alike it’s because God the Creator, the Ruler of the universe, made them look alike and there is some point here, especially when it falls within the interpretative scope of scripture itself.
Yes, we don’t want to be drawing wild parallels making up meanings for things, but scripture interprets scripture. Scripture tells us what the meaning of the history is.
And suddenly there came a sound from heaven as of a rushing mighty wind, and it filled all the house where they were sitting.
For years I’ve asked students the question, “So what filled the house?” and the answer I usually get is, “There was a great and mighty wind.”
You might say, “Well, that’s being a little picky here.” No, if God had wanted to say the wind filled the house, he would have said the wind filled the house and we could infer that there might be sound connected. It says that there came a sound from heaven, as of a rushing mighty wind. The simple fact is it wasn’t a wind, it was the Holy Spirit.
The word ‘spirit’ in Greek as in Hebrew is the same word for wind and breath, so there’s a play on ideas and a play on words here, but the One who was coming was himself God. He’s coming from heaven. He’s descending to earth. And what does that mean?
First of all, the answer is I don’t know and I don’t think anybody else knows exactly. What we can do is use and quote the words that God uses to describe it. He’s coming to baptize his Church into unity. He’s coming to fill his Church. He’s coming to empower his Church.
He’s always been here. He’s omnipresent. He’s God. And yet in some sense or senses he is “coming” in a sense he has not come before, or senses in which he has not come before, and we’ll be talking about some of what that means as we go along.
I think it’s significant when we do emphasize the word ‘sound’ because one of the primary things he’s coming to do is to bring the full completion of revelation to his people in the rest of the New Testament, and he’s going to be calling to mind for the apostles the things that Jesus said so that they can record those.
We see one of his primary roles within the Trinity is to communicate, to be the breath on which the words go to the people, so the fact that he comes with the sound of wind, but he’s a sound. He’s a noise. He’s bringing words to God’s people.
And that, as we’re going to see, is the result. The Spirit comes upon them and they start speaking, but let’s go on and see what the text says next.
And suddenly there came a sound from heaven as of a rushing mighty wind, and it filled all the house where they were sitting. And there appeared unto them cloven tongues like as of fire, and it sat upon each of them.
Again, it wasn’t fire but it was something that did a good job of imitating it. They each are now human candles, lampstands. The churches in the book of Revelation are portrayed as lampstands. Here individual believers. Why light? The same reason as sound, because light reveals. It shows things up. It communicates things by dispelling darkness and making things open to the eye. “You are the light of the world,” our Savior said. We’re getting visual effects to reemphasize this.
Which are also the shape of bishops in chess, which I didn’t realize until an embarrassingly short time ago.
That’s funny. I was just about to go there and say, “Oh, and that means then…” I think I had been told that but I had forgotten. You’re right, of course.
Again we have to understand the Bible uses such language as we can understand and process. We use the word anthropomorphic. The Spirit is not a liquid that you can pour into a container, nor are we containers into which something can be poured, but it’s the best language God has and it does effectively communicate the idea that God is telling us.
When something is filled, there’s not room for other things, and the things that fills it controls it, determines the nature of what it is. With a cup of coffee we don’t say, “Oh, look…” Actually, at my house you do say, “Look at the pretty cup,” but generally you’re more interested in the coffee than you are about the cup, especially if you got it from Starbucks and something paper.
These are Spirit-filled people, controlled by the Spirit, yielded to the Spirit, given to the Spirit, people whom the Spirit will use. This is not incarnation. Dr. Rushdoony had a tape, which unfortunately I don’t have. It may be in one of his books, an article called “Incarnation vs Indwelling.” I don’t even remember what he said, but the title itself is sort of a stop sign of, “Wait a second.” When you’re filled with the Spirit, when you’re indwelt by the Spirit, that does not mean the same thing it meant when God became man in the person of Jesus Christ. Incarnation and indwelling are not the same thing.
When we look at ourselves, when we look into the depths of our souls, we don’t see God. We see his work. We see his Word. But he does not identify with us, and we need to continue to make that clear because there are many kinds of mysticism that following Neoplatonism or Gnosticism or now eastern pantheism and new-age mysticism that basically borrow Christian language and say, “Be filled with the Spirit, by which we mean you get to be God now.” No, you don’t.
Before we move on, I also have noted in those four verses that every single verse has some form of ‘all’ or ‘every,’ in that sense that they’re all in one place, all the house was filled, all were filled, and also it sat upon each of them.
I think that’s another example that’s important for history, that when the Spirit comes in this way there’s a totality that was not there before, particularly when we think of the Old Testament and the number of times people are said to be filled with the Spirit or moved by the Spirit. It’s very limited.
The prophets are the stories that we know, but if you start to count the years, as we would in history, you realize how infrequent it is comparatively. Now with this there’s an overflowing abundant rush of the Spirit.
Yes, I think that’s an excellent observation. I have to think about that some more.
That means languages, and that’s going to become clear in a second. So this is not just a filling, but it’s a filling with a point – many points, but at least one is they are speaking by divine inspiration. They are becoming prophets or exercising the prophetic gift, because it’s the Spirit who gives them utterance.
In modern words, the Spirit gave them what to say. They’re not making up the words, and it’s not that they’re put in such a state that now anything they imagine is magical and divine. No, God is providing them words to say through the agency of his Holy Spirit. And as they’re doing this…
And there were dwelling at Jerusalem Jews, devout men, out of every nation under heaven. Now when this was noised abroad, the multitude came together and were confounded, because that every man heard them speak in his own language.
This does not mean it was a hearing miracle, but we’ve already been told they were speaking in other languages. But of course if you speak in another language, people who know the language will hear it and recognize it.
And they were all amazed and marvelled, saying one to another, Behold, are not all these which speak Galilaeans?
We’re not told how they knew, but there are two obvious things: 1) the way they dressed, and 2) they spoke with an accent.
When my wife first learned Greek, she learned it from a southern gentleman and she was later told by other Greek teachers, “Did you know you speak Greek with a southern accent?” I remember meeting a young lady on my first trip to Germany, who was mastering German. She was very good. She’d had eight years or more of German training, but she was from Australia, and when she spoke German she sounded like an Australian speaking German. The accent does not necessarily go away.
So they were able to tell, “These aren’t resident Jews,” that is Judeans from Jerusalem. “They’re Galileans,” which did not add to their prestige particularly. They’re just identifying them. If you lived in Galilee you probably spoke Aramaic and you probably spoke Koine Greek, but that was probably the extent of it. You weren’t known to be polylingual or any such thing, and yet here they are. There are 120 and they’re all speaking in different languages.
And how hear we every man in our own tongue, wherein we were born? Parthians, and Medes, and Elamites [towards the east], and the dwellers in Mesopotamia [going into the Fertile Crescent], and in Judaea, and Cappadocia [Asia minor], in Pontus, and Asia, Phrygia, and Pamphylia, in Egypt [now we’re down below], and in the parts of Libya about Cyrene [a Greek colony in north Africa], and strangers of Rome, Jews and proselytes, Cretes and Arabians [the deserts to the south and east], we do hear them speak in our tongues the wonderful works of God.
That’s a list and it’s not necessarily all-encompassing because we’re told “from every nation under heaven,” at least within the Roman Empire and maybe beyond, because the Jews did not necessarily stop moving outward as they reached the borders of Rome. They went where the profit was, or where freedom was, as the case may be.
“We do hear them speak in our tongues the wonderful works of God.” We’re not told what exactly they were saying, presumably something about Jesus’ death, resurrection and ascension, but we’re left to wonder. It may simply have been songs of praise and thanksgiving to God for his greatness and power.
And they were all amazed, and were in doubt, saying one to another, What meaneth this?
“What’s going on here? What’s this all about?” They looked for meaning in historical events, and in religious events at that. They expected this to mean something.
“They’ve been up early drinking. This is just babble. These aren’t real languages and there’s no content here. Move along, nothing to see.”
But I think what we see in this passage is the significance that when they speak by the Spirit, the point is for them to communicate clear truth to people. It’s not in just any language, not even any known language, but specifically the languages of the people right there, because the goal is for them to be able to properly communicate with other people. The goal of this is not for them to enrich themselves or feel themselves more spiritual. The goal is for them to serve others by communicating the truth to them in their original language, their mother tongue.
If you have learned multiple languages you know that there’s a difference in your understanding as you move across the languages away from your mother tongue. So even if you speak a trade language pretty well, it’s not the same as hearing the clear truth in your own language.
Because trade tongues are trade tongues. They don’t have the full power and beauty of what you were born with.
Yes. And it’s not that they’re just saying anything. They’re specifically communicating the wonderful works of God. We should think even of Isaiah where it speaks of how one of the names of Jesus is Wonderful; therefore, they are speaking of Jesus to all these Jews, so they’re those who would know to some degree – they’re Jews or proselytes – they would know the Old Testament, so in some ways they’re drawing upon those to help them understand what has just come to pass.
You would think if people were there for Pentecost they were also there for Passover, but they’re in a sense acting as interpreters of what has happened, to call people to faith and repentance.
Just a note to that. The distance between Passover and Pentecost is such that by now people who are far enough away – unless they have a business vacation, they can’t stay that long. Even in the Old Testament there’s enough time that you didn’t go to Jerusalem and stay there for 50 days, so they found themselves more and more having to choose. And it seems, just from passing references, that Pentecost may have become more of a favorite. Paul is very anxious to get to Jerusalem by Pentecost at one point, although he passes over Passover.
So these people were, as you say, probably not here for Jesus’ death so they missed that one. And probably a lot of people haven’t been talking about it because the Sanhedrin’s kind of down on any kind of conversation about that right now, so this is the first time that many of these people have heard anything about this.
Peter feels he needs to answer those who say, “This is religious babble or just plain worldly drunken babble” by explaining what’s really going on, and to do so he quotes the Old Testament. He quotes scripture, because at this point the only scripture there is is what we call the Old Testament.
But Peter, standing up with the eleven, lifted up his voice and said unto them, Ye men of Judaea and all ye that dwell at Jerusalem, be this known unto you and hearken to my words: For these are not drunken, as ye suppose, seeing it is but the third hour of the day.
It’s 9 in the morning, three hours after sun-up. Good Jews don’t get drunk that early. It’s not something you see. Even bad Jews don’t. They get drunk at other times.
Yeah, it’s not something they do. Peter felt that the argument had enough force to actually use it, and no doubt the people around about were saying, “Well, yeah but look at this…” so Peter is going to be left to explain what this means.
Two things that come to mind before we plunge into the sermon itself. First, tagging off what Rachel said earlier, the point is that God is now speaking the language of Gentiles. Two sub-points under that: 1) This is after a fashion undoing the miracle at Babel, but not exactly. He doesn’t restore everyone to a single language – he allows his Word to be spoken in many languages.
Exactly, transformation. And as we look at the various pictures of heaven in the book of Daniel and the book of Revelation, we’re told that before the throne of God there are nations and tongues and kindreds and peoples – tongues. It doesn’t say, “And all those people who now miraculously know how to speak Hebrew” or Koine Greek, as the case may be, or good old American or the Queen’s English. Even in heaven the languages remain, so like a prism or a beautiful crystal or diamond, the light of the gospel comes and is reflected and refracted into all of these beautiful ways of saying things.
I think anybody who’s experienced enough of languages knows that some languages are better for some things than others. I’ve seen this in my classroom. Many of our students speak Russian and we tend to discourage that because it’s an English-speaking school and we don’t want them saying things they shouldn’t be saying where we can’t understand what’s going on, but there are times when it’s very practical.
I had two of my math students trying to explain a concept to each other, and one said, “I don’t know how to say this in English.” I said, “Can you say it in Russian?” “Well, yeah.” “Then say it in Russian.” “Oh okay,” and suddenly light dawned. Their familiarity with Russian was such that they could explain algebraic concepts much faster and clearer. I don’t know if that was holy language, but it certainly was their language. It did make a difference.
On the other hand, languages like French and Italian are great for poetry. English is lousy for poetry, because French and Italian have a lot of short significant words that end in vowels. In English you’ve got the same 20-30 words that you have to fit into every single poem you write, because we don’t have that many. Try it with German, that’s something else again.
There’s an argument that English humor could only have come from English-speaking people, and also that the way numbers work and are counted in the Chinese language contributes to the stereotype of Chinese kids being really good at math.
Yes, they have a different way of processing mathematics. I don’t know if it’s a better way but it works for them, and they insist that their children master it. As Malcolm Gladwell points out, anybody who works in a rice paddy 10 hours a day can’t help but have rich children. Work ethic is important as well as emphasizing basics and drilling them in soundly, and arithmetic is a language, something we often don’t appreciate.
The other thing is that these are foreign languages. This is not Hebrew, it’s not even Aramaic, and it’s not just one other language. It’s all kinds of other languages. They could all be speaking Koine Greek because that’s the language the New Testament is going to be written in, and that would have some significance and it’s understandable, but God speaks in all of these languages.
What does that mean for Israel? Well, it depends upon how Israel receives it. If Israel says, “Wow, God is reaching out to all nations!” then this is a blessing. If Israel says, “What does God think he’s doing? These are our blessings. He needs to stay away from those Gentiles,” then the sounds of foreign language being spoken in Israel’s ears is a deadly warning.
Yes. In the law in Deuteronomy and then again in Isaiah, God threatens to speak to his people in a strange language which they will not understand, and in the context it’s the language of conquering armies.
In I Corinthians 14:21, which is about spiritual gifts among other things, Paul alludes to that.
In the law it is written, With men of other tongues and other lips will I speak unto this people; and yet for all that will they not hear me, saith the Lord. Wherefore tongues are for a sign, not to them that believe, but to them that believe not: but prophesying serveth not for them that believe not, but for them which believe.
You can read the context. It’s about spiritual effects and the importance in public worship of communicating in language that’s clear and that everyone present can understand. What Paul is saying there is tongues are wonderful, but they are at least from his perspective at the time primarily a warning. To the Gentiles it’s a blessing. God is turning to the Gentiles.
To Israel it’s, “That doesn’t speak well of your future, does it? God has been betrothed to you for 2000 years if you go back to Abraham, and now he’s not speaking your language, he’s speaking the language of all these other nations. And the fact that this is even coming into your Christian assemblies in divine power and inspiration, that should frighten you. On the one hand you should be excited and delighted that God is reaching out to the Gentiles, but you should also be afraid for Israel because it means that God is not limiting himself to one people anymore.”
That is basic to what Peter is going to say here. The verse that gets quoted is, “Whoever shall call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved,” and “I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh.” It’s the non-exclusivity of the gospel. It’s no longer going to be bound to Israel, to one cultural group, to one language group. It’s going to go to the ends of the earth.
Yes, not stay here and let people come to you and witness as you have opportunity. It’s that you’re going to carry this to the ends of the earth, and people are going to hear and believe, and the Church is no longer going to have a geographic center. It’s going to be wherever the Church meets, wherever two or three are gathered in his name.
With that as a background, we’ll get our foot wet probably just in the preface.
For these are not drunken, as ye suppose, seeing it is but the third hour of the day. But this is that which was spoken by the prophet Joel; And it shall come to pass in the last days, saith God, I will pour out of my Spirit upon all flesh, and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, and your young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams. And on my servants and on my handmaidens I will pour out in those days of my Spirit; and they shall prophesy.
And I will shew wonders in heaven above, and signs in the earth beneath; blood, and fire, and vapour of smoke. The sun shall be turned into darkness, and the moon into blood, before the great and notable day of the Lord come. And it shall come to pass, that whosoever shall call on the name of the Lord shall be saved.
That’s his text. This is perhaps the closest we come to a real case of expository preaching in the New Testament. He has a text, and although he seems to veer from it, he really doesn’t. The two phrases “on all flesh” and “whosoever shall call” are in the back of his mind all the way to the end and he comes back to them and brings us there as the conclusion.
Joel’s prophecy follows a series of prophecies about an approaching plague of locusts that’s going to absolutely destroy Judah. It looks really bad, and there’s encouragement to repent and turn to the Lord, but it looks really bad. But afterward this happens.
Peter has added a couple words for us. He says, “It shall come to pass in the last days.” That’s not in Joel. That’s Peter’s interpretation, which means we need to stop and talk about that for a second.
Generally the American church has thought the last days are the days just before Jesus returns – that is the weeks, the days, the seven years, something like that – before the second coming. The New Testament really doesn’t use it that way. Whether it’s the last days of history compared to the first days of history – that is we had the first part of the book, called the Old Testament, and now we have the rest of the book called the new covenant age and the victory of Christ’s gospel – or it might mean the last days of the old covenant as we transition – the time from the coming of Christ into the world to the time of the fall of Jerusalem and the completion of the New Testament canon.
In any case, take your concordances if you’re not sure what I’m talking about, and look up last days, latter days, end of the ages, the last time, and you will find that this is uniform. “God in these last days has spoken to us by his Son,” “These things are written for us on whom the ends of the ages have come,” “Little children, it is the last time,” literally it’s the last hour.
So as the apostles look at history, they were at the end of something. Whether it’s the beginning of the end, or the end of the beginning, this is it. He doesn’t say, “This is kind of like what Joel meant,” or “Joel prophesied something and this is a foretaste, but the reality is way off in the future.”
Our Pentecostal brethren will often speak of the early reigns and the latter reigns. This was the early reign, but using the harvest metaphor later on there will be another outpouring of the Spirit. None of that is there. This is that. This is what God was talking about all along.
To make sense of this I want to read a passage from Numbers. We’re in Numbers so we’re in the wilderness and Moses is having a hard day, and for once he doesn’t jump up to the challenge of acting as intercessor and praying for God’s people. He more or less has the attitude of, “Kill them. Kill them all. I’m tired. Don’t even ask me to do this.”
God says, “Okay. Hmm, I think you need some help there.” So they assemble 70 elders, a senate, if you will, the origins of the Sanhedrin, from the existing tribal elders, men who fear God. He calls them together and they’re going to be his helpers, his court, his advisors, his arms and legs, as it were. They’re to come together and God is going to take some of the Spirit that’s upon Moses and put it on them.
Picture this not as pouring tea from a pot into numerous cups, whereby the pot is eventually exhausted. Think of this as lighting a lot of little candles from a big candle. The original fire is not diminished but it is the source of all the little lights. So they have the 70 guys there and the Spirit descends and they begin to prophesy.
And the Lord came down in a cloud and spake unto him, and took of the spirit that was upon him and gave it unto the seventy elders. And it came to pass that when the spirit rested upon them, they prophesied and did not cease. But there remained two of the men in the camp, the name of the one was Eldad, and the name of the other Medad, and the spirit rested upon them; and they were of them that were written, but went not out unto the tabernacle and they prophesied in the camp.
These were two who had met the qualifications. They had been appointed. Their names were on the list. But for one reason or another, we’re not told, they didn’t make it to the ordination ceremony, and yet the Spirit reaches out to them where they are. It’s not the holy setting. It’s not the place that’s set apart. It’s just in ordinary camp life, and the Spirit comes upon them and they start prophesying.
Eldad and Medad do prophesy in the camp. And Joshua the son of Nun, the servant of Moses, one of his young men, answered and said, My lord Moses, forbid them.
Enviest thou for my sake? Would God that all the Lord's people were prophets, and that the Lord would put his Spirit upon them!
That’s the root, and notice the parallelism. If they have the Spirit of God, then they are prophets. If they are prophets, then they have the Spirit of God.
Now, weren’t there false prophets? Yes, there are, and yes, there are those who have the gift of prophecy for a short time who are in fact unbelievers. We can think of Saul and Judas, the false prophet Balaam, but in general to have the Holy Spirit and to be indwelt by the Holy Spirit is to be in intimate fellowship with God, and it results in you speaking God’s words.
Now, the problem at this point – well, the good thing was that suddenly there were a lot of words to speak because Moses is in the process of publishing Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, and is busy writing Numbers as they’re speaking. So there’s more of God’s Word that they’re going to have, and they’re going to be able to speak it, and God is giving them the ability to go apparently even above what’s already been written and prophesy other things. So when we come to the book of Joel, that’s a section of the Numbers thing, something that God’s people would know about.
And it shall come to pass afterward [after all of God’s judgements against you], that I will pour out my spirit upon all flesh, and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, your old men shall dream dreams, your young men shall see visions. And also upon the servants and upon the handmaids in those days will I pour out my spirit…
And it shall come to pass, that whosoever shall call on the name of the Lord shall be delivered, for in Mount Zion and in Jerusalem shall be deliverance, as the Lord hath said, and in the remnant whom the Lord shall call.
Now, here’s where we need to sit down with our Charismatic and Pentecostal brethren, and even some of our Reformed brethren, and have a little conversation. Of course we would never argue, but when you discuss with a Christian brother who has a different viewpoint, sometimes we miss where the point of difference actually is and we find ourselves standing on their ground and arguing their point from their ground. When we’re done we may walk away saying, “Ha! Won that one!” and yet there’s a big uneasiness that maybe we missed something.
One gentleman who I highly respect, who wrote a little book on speaking in tongues, wrote that the gift of the Holy Spirit that people received in the book of Acts was the ability to speak in tongues. This man was a Reformed Presbyterian and a good theologian and sound, no doubt, but he kind of got caught up in, “Well, what’s happening here is these people are being given the prophetic gift, that is the gift to speak by inspiration,” and this gentleman would certainly have said, “And not everybody gets that now.” In fact, he would say nobody gets that now.
He kind of assumes that that’s what’s happening. In other words, that what Joel prophesied was more of the Old Testament gift, and that’s a problem because we’ve just shifted covenants. We’re no longer in the old covenant.
When the prophets say “every place in the earth will be consecrated for offering incense,” we don’t expect to go out in our backyards and offer incense to God, let alone our churches. When we say, “Jerusalem will be exalted above the hills and mountains and all nations shall flow unto it,” we don’t start a campaign to rebuild Jerusalem – well, some people do, but we don’t start a campaign to rebuild Jerusalem or its temple, because we understand it’s talking about something gospel-oriented. It’s talking about the Church.
We also don’t start building a temple on Mt Everest, because that’s the highest place.
Yes. What we need to understand is that the prophets spoke in Old Testament language because they didn’t have any other language. They didn’t know exactly what God was going to do, and God actually was not telling them very clearly. He was using the language and the images they were familiar with, that is the ones that he himself had given and established in the law, to give them a kind of hint.
You know when you’re driving down I-5 and you look and see this big gigantic burger and it says McDonald’s 3 miles ahead, and you come to McDonald’s and you say, “Wait, this burger is like the size of my hand. I expected something much more giant,” you’re not that stupid. You know the picture and the reality are two different things. They could hand you a billboard-sized picture of a Big Mac and you’re not going to be happy because you want something to eat.
Here if everyone present got the Old Testament gift of prophesying, that’s not what they need. That’s not what they want. What they need and want is to have God’s Spirit in them, and that’s what’s happening.
We often think of the Old Testament very much like the New. There were all these saints, but there were some unbelievers. Actually, you go back and read – there were all these unbelievers, and then there were a few saints. When Jesus talks about believers in the Old Testament he says Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and the prophets. He skips entire generations and multiple generations as if they did not believe, and when we go back and look it’s kind of hard to find generations where all of God’s people by and large were believers.
They had the outward forms. What they lacked was the regenerative power of the Holy Spirit. They weren’t born again. They were apostate in their hearts, even when they weren’t apostate in their outward culture. What the covenant people have always needed is the reality, the power of God’s Spirit in their hearts and lives, and that’s waited upon the coming of Messiah, which is the point that Peter is going to make here. We’ve waited for this, but until Messiah came it wasn’t a possibility.
Joel doesn’t actually mention Messiah, but when Peter says ‘last days’ everyone says, “Oh, you mean the time of Messiah. Oh wait, you mean Messiah is here? He’s come? What did we miss? We haven’t been to Jerusalem for several months. What’s going on here? What’s happening?”
There of course is more to the prophecy. First of all, this transformation crosses gender lines. God is not simply going to work with and give his Spirit to males. It crosses age lines, not only parents but sons and daughters. It crosses socio-economic lines, not only the masters but the servants. Old men are included, young men, those who have visions and those who dream dreams. The Spirit is going to come upon all kinds of people, and in fact upon all flesh.
He doesn’t say all Jewish flesh. Not everybody read that closely. Sometimes we forget to look at what God didn’t say, little things like Melchizedek not having a father and mother. Sometimes the things he doesn’t say are profound.
“And when you say whoever calls on the name of the Lord, that’s Israel, right?”
Peter is going to stand up and say at the end, “Whoever calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved,” and yet he’s the one who gets sent to the Gentile Cornelius and has to be told three different ways it’s okay, because he too didn’t quite get that all flesh means all flesh, and whosoever means whosoever.
We cast it in the modes of thought we’re comfortable with, rather than letting the text carry us to where we’re going. We’re in a new age and God is giving his Spirit to his covenant people in such abundance that it’s as if everyone were a prophet – that is, they have the Spirit in them and they have God’s Word on their lips. Oh wait, how’s that going to happen?
Messiah has come. God has revealed himself thoroughly. Jesus is the image of the invisible God. He is the Logos, the very word of God’s heart. God in various manners and times past spake unto the fathers by the prophets. Now he’s spoken to us in these last days by his Son, who he’s appointed heir of all things, by whom also he made the worlds.
The fact that God is now revealing himself so clearly that every believer is in fact a believer, has been born again and has the Word of God in his heart and in his mouth means Messiah has come and the end game is here. God is about to declare checkmate. He’s got it. It’s all come together. The devil screwed up. He lost it. The game is over because Messiah is come, and that’s the force of Peter’s prophecy.
Now, there are a couple other things to go along the way, a couple dark notes.
And I will shew wonders in heaven above, and signs in the earth beneath; blood, and fire, and vapour of smoke…
You know, there’s only one way to get blood and that’s to cut somebody open. Smoke you get by burning things. Oh, there’s the fire.
What he’s describing is the results of battle of war, and the place is going to be Jerusalem. God’s going to torch the old economy. It’s going up in smoke, and it will be as if a new day has dawned. The old heavens and earth, or the old covenant, are going to pass away.
The sun shall be turned into darkness, and the moon into blood, before the great and notable day of the Lord comes.
All of the lights of the Old Testament – the tabernacle, the priesthood, all the rituals and the feast days – all that’s going to go. The temple is going to be destroyed so that God can honor his promise to bless all nations, which of course has been the promise and the gospel from the beginning. So Joel says, “It shall come to pass that whosoever shall call on the name of the Lord shall be saved,” a passage that Paul also quotes in Romans 10.
With that as a background, Peter now asks the question, “What have you missed? Well, let me tell you what you’ve missed over these last couple years, and particularly these last few months. Here we go.”
In all of that it’s a good idea to, in a sense, boil down the definition of a prophet a little bit more simply. Again, we tend to be taken in by the language of our Pentecostal and other brethren, but even in the Old Testament a prophet is not simply someone who foretells the future. They’re someone who brings the Word of God, and they do that through the Spirit in the Old Testament, even as they do in the New Testament.
So we as believers after the coming of Christ are not prophets when we foretell the future or when we now receive a new revelation, but rather we are prophets as we speak the Word of God that has already been given by the Spirit, who then uses that word to affect us and those who hear.
There’s a shift in the New Testament, but often we misunderstand how we are prophets in the New Testament because we don’t understand the prophets of the Old Testament. Many prophets came saying, “This is what you’ve done and God is going to judge you.” That’s one of the most common prophetic things we hear in the Old Testament.
There’s a sense in which that’s not novel at all, because Moses told us, “You disobeyed and cursed the covenant.”
“Here are the stipulations. You’ve broken them. This is what the law said would happen. It’s coming.”
And I think when we talk about the fact that the old covenant system is passing away, we see the office of prophet pass away as it was in the Old Testament, but now all believers are prophets. We see the priesthood pass away, but now all believers are priests. We even see the kingship pass away, and yet we all rule as kings under Christ, as we do in all three of those offices. So there’s a universality when the Spirit comes of all aspects of the image of God in man being more greatly fulfilled in his people.
One last tag note to that, and probably where I should have started. The first mention of prophets is not Moses, but when the pagan kings take Sarai and God plagues them and they turn and say, “Oh, we didn’t know! Forgive us!” God says, “Go to my servant. He’s a prophet. He will pray for you.” We tend to think, “He’s a priest. He’ll pray for you.” Well, they were priests after a fashion, but it’s the prophetic office.
You can think here of Abraham wrestling with God, debating with God, “If there be but 40 people in the city…” Prophets were people who could go into the presence of God and counsel him. God wasn’t bound to take their counsel, but he often did. Prophets had access to the councils of the trinity. We can think of Isaiah. “Here am I, send me,” because God is saying, “Who shall I send?” “Oh, I volunteer.”
As we read through the law, prophets are not just receivers. They are active participants in what God is planning and doing, so not just the speaking of God’s Word, which they do most certainly, but also speaking to God and offering suggestions either of grace or not so much of grace. Think of Elijah. “Your people are sinning. Your law says you’re not going to give them any rain. About time, Lord. Get with it.”
This is what God’s people do. We don’t have the gift in fragmented pieces where we get a little peek of this or a little poke of that or manage to slip in a word to God between the cracks. We are Jesus’ friends. We can talk to him all the time and make suggestions, offer prayers, make requests, ask him to bring down dictators, to open up closed lands to the gospel, to revive churches, to save souls, and he promises to listen to us.
Then we turn around with his Word in our heart and our tongue and in our hands and say, “Thus sayeth the Lord.” And we do it with greater clarity and assurance than the Old Testament prophets ever did, because they didn’t always get what in the world God was talking about. God was still talking in shadows and in hints, but now God having spoken to us by his Son, and is about to record it all in scripture and we’re going to have the mind of God. We’re going to have a complete transcript of “everything my Father wants you to know,” Jesus said, to which there is no need to add anything. We’ve got it. The thing the Spirit needed to do, all that he wants to do, we’ve got it now. We’re ready to move. He’s ready to move us.
Alright, we’ll stop there and continue with Acts 2:22 next time. For now, do we have some recommendations?
I have what I guess you could say is a strange recommendation, but I often seem to. I live in a place surrounded by lots of agriculture and fields, which means I have lots of bugs. We have been particularly plagued it seems these last six months with bugs, and I would say not that I’ve been enjoying but have appreciated finding some alternative solutions to those bugs in things that already exist in my house.
My most recent favorite is the fact that if you have fruit flies, they are very attracted to apple cider vinegar. If you put a little in a cup, and you put some plastic wrap over it and poke some holes, they’ll go down in the holes and get stuck and then die in the vinegar. Yay!
This also works for compost piles. When you get too many fruit flies you sprinkle apple cider vinegar on them.
Yes. The other thing is if you have a lot of them, as we seem to in our house and we’re not quite sure how we suddenly have so many in every room of the house, if you think you know where they’re coming in from or they’ve laid eggs, you can take just regular vinegar diluted in water and spray those areas and it kills all the eggs and everything too, and can reduce them coming in.
Vinegar seems to be the winner in so many different things, and baking soda also is the other thing. That’s the other thing I still need to do is clean my drains, because apparently they like drains, too.
So those are my recommendations if you have bug problems like I do. Look up some vinegar and baking soda remedies.
I’m going to recommend playing chess, even if you are not very good. For reasons that do not concern you, for reasons related to other creative projects that I’m doing, I needed to get good at chess. The way that I set myself to do this was to lose 50 games of chess by Christmas, and of course the bigger goal is not just to lose the games – I’m not going to throw them on purpose – but to get better at chess by playing people who are better than me.
Then I discovered a yet ulterior motive, which was that it’s super fun to share games of chess with your friends, so I’ve been enjoying that. If it’s not chess, maybe it’s poker, who knows, but finding a game to play in real life is a good thing.
It is. I have something a little more theological, mostly because I can’t think of anything else right now. In light of our discussion of what prophets are, not terribly long ago, I couldn’t tell you how long ago, in our adult Sunday School class I did a lesson on Christ’s office as prophet, king, and priest. Notice, one office, a triune office – not three offices, one office. And I believe I touched on how it’s that office we share.
At the end of this month our regular teacher is going to be gone and he’s asked me to fill in, and I’m going to take the next step and come back to Christ as our prophet, and probably again touch a little bit on what that means for us as prophets. It will be some overlap of what we’ve talked about.
It should be available on Sermon Audio. Probably you can find it under my name when the time comes. So if you’re interested in such things and you want to hear it again, and maybe hear it in slightly different words, you might try that.
Very cool. Thank you both so much for this conversation. It’s been a delight, as always.
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