August 31st

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Welcome to On the Way with Tony Crisp. Each weekday, Dr. Crisp will be discussing biblical passages, people, places, and prophecies. Tune in daily to start your day right and deepen your understanding of how to better walk the way and enjoy the journey. Here's your host, Dr. Tony Crisp.

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Welcome to On the Way. This is Tony Crisp, and this is the 365 Bible Reading Plan. Today is August 31st, and our chapter for today is the Book of Acts, chapter two. When the Day of Pentecost had fully come. Now let me just stop at that one line and describe for you the context of Acts two. When the day of Pentecost had fully come. Pentecost was what the Greek name was for the ancient biblical Levitical feast called Shavuot. Shavuot is the feast of weeks. It is one of the seven Levitical feasts. There were other feasts, but not Levitical feast. By Levitical Feast I mean those that were prescribed by God. They're summarized in Leviticus chapter twenty three. The beginning of all feast was in the spring of the year in the month of Nisan. Remember, Nisan was the name of the month after the exile, not before. Before it was the month Abib, A B I B in our English Bibles, but it is A V I B in modern Hebrew, and it means spring, Aviv, springtime. And so it was the first of all the months of the year, and it began every year in the spring. And the first thing that they celebrated every year and remembered was Pasak, the Passover, when God brought them out of Egyptian bondage after four hundred years of being slaves and being tortured, tormented, worked against their own will. And remember it started well with Joseph, but there arose a Pharaoh who knew not Joseph. And so God said, I want you to remember this day from time immemorial. So every year the feast of the Passover is observed. In ancient times there were seasons when they did not observe that, and God was not pleased, and many times he judged them for not keeping these feasts. And the reason that these feasts are important because they set out God's timetable and God's calendar for how he deals with his people. And they are prophetic. They are like a countdown to the great messianic age. And so you can go back in the podcast and look at Leviticus 23. You can go back and search and find those podcasts that are dealing with the feast. But Pentecost was the fourth of the feast every year, and it was in early summer. You had Passover, that was the first. Then you uh the next day began to celebrate what was called unleavened bread in our Bibles. Then you would celebrate the feast of firstfruits, which was always the first day of the week after the Sabbath of Passover. This is when Jesus rose from the dead. He was crucified on Passover. He was raised from the dead on firstfruits. And then the next great feast was Shavuot. From the day of first fruits you counted seven Shabbats, which is forty-nine days. And then the fiftieth day you had a great day of festival and celebration of the wheat harvest. There were special offerings that were given. And so people came from all over the earth, remember. Many times they would come and stay through tabernacles, which was in the fall of the year, because they came from all over the earth, and they didn't fly in on airlines and come in on rail. They came in in caravans, they came in with their life savings, they would come and stay at the beginning of the year in the springtime, and they would uh celebrate Passover, uh unleavened bread, they would celebrate first fruits, and then Shavuot, which is called Pentecost in the Greek text, and then they would stay the summer and go through Yom Terua, the blowing of the trumpets, what's called Rosh Hashanah. Then there would be ten days of awe, and then Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, and then just a few days after that, they would celebrate tabernacles, sukkot, or the feast of booze, when they remembered that they wandered in the wilderness for forty years and they lived in lean tos and tents and booths and shelters. And so it is the feast of shelters or tabernacles or booths. And so this is what had happened in Acts chapter 2. It was time on God's calendar for this to happen. Now remember, Jesus was crucified on Passover. He rose from the dead on the first day of the week after that, which is called first fruits. Now it's fifty days later, and Pentecost has come. Jesus had ascended to heaven ten days earlier because he spent forty days after his resurrection, according to Acts chapter one, teaching them about the messianic age that is to come, teaching about the kingdom of God that will literally be on the earth, and Jesus will rule and reign in person. And we who are followers of Jesus will reign with him all over the earth. And so the day of Pentecost was on the calendar. The day of Pentecost or Shavuot is the time when the Jews believe that it was the fiftieth day after they had left Egypt. They came to Mount Sinai, and God gave them the law, the Torah, gave them the instructions about how to please him and who he is and how a man walks with God. And so all of that was given on the day called Shavuot. And so it was a great day of celebration because that's when Torah, the instruction, was given. Now, that was fourteen hundred years before the birth of Christ. And so now fourteen hundred years plus, the coming of the Holy Spirit to live in the life of every believer and follower of Jesus had now come to pass. And when the day of Pentecost had fully come, they were all with one accord. The word is homo thumodon. Homo means same. Thumadon comes from the word heat or passion, thumas. They were all the same heat, they were all the same temperature. They had a holy passion for God. They were in one place. And verse two begins the supernatural manifestations, the miraculous manifestations of God's presence. In verse two is the miraculous manifestation of sound. In verse three is the miraculous manifestation of sight. In verse four is the miraculous manifestation of speech. Now where we get hung up on Acts chapter two is when we emphasize the miraculous manifestations that took place that surrounded the great miracle of Pentecost. And so we talk about the great sound from heaven as of a rushing mighty wind, and it filled all the house where they were sitting. And you hear whole messages on the wind and the sound of the wind. It wasn't wind, it was the sound of wind. And it came upon them suddenly. Why? Because the day had come that God had sovereignly set aside when the Holy Spirit would come and indwell his followers from that day forward. Verse three, then there appeared unto them divided tongues as of fire, and one set upon each of them. The term set upon each of them means that a person was distributed, the Holy Spirit, according to all of his capacity. In other words, that day on Pentecost and from every day since the moment you are saved, you are filled with the Spirit of God at that moment, because there is total surrender to God, and you are filled with capacity. Now every person has a different capacity, just like we all have a different walk, we have a different talk, we have a different brain, we have a different mindset, but every person got all of God they were ever going to get the moment that they received the Holy Spirit. That's just like with us. The moment we're saved, the moment we truly repent of our sins and place our trust in Jesus, and He becomes our Lord, our Savior, our God, our sovereign, that day a man gets all of God he's ever going to get. From that day forward, it's not a question of if we're going to get more of God. It's a question of if God is going to get more of us. Because you see, the Christian life is not that we need more of God. We have all of God that we need inside of us with the Holy Spirit. But God needs for us to surrender to Him. And so that's what happened on the day of Pentecost. And they were each filled, and so you have the supernatural manifestation of sound. In verse 2, verse 3, the miraculous manifestation of sight, of fire, the purifying, refining fire of God. And then in verse 4, you have the most controversial of all, and they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak with other glosa. G-L-O-S-S-A. Glossa. Glosa is not gibberish. It is not an unknown tongue. And this text points this out. Now you see, you and I don't get a vote on what this means. The text says what it means and means what it says. Now often people will say, Well, I just feel like doesn't matter what you feel. Well, I just think doesn't matter what you think. The text says what it says. And so let me break this down for you. The Bible says they began to speak with other glosa. Now, glosa is a known language. It's like in our day, French, Italian, Hebrew, Arabic, English, Mandarin. All of these are glosa. They are languages, known languages. On that day, these men who were all Galileans, they began to speak in known languages because people were there from everywhere under heaven, and it goes on to name some of the places they were from, which all spoke certain languages, and they spoke certain expressions of that language. But a glosa is a known language, a spoken language, but these men were all speaking a language that they had never studied. They had not previously known this language, but on this day, God gave a supernatural manifestation of his power and of his spirit to validate this was a supernatural God work that they were able to speak languages they had never previously studied. But it goes on to say, and there were dwelling in Jerusalem Jews, devout men from every nation under heaven. People from all over the earth were there. Why? Because the Jews were scattered, they were dispersed, they were called the diaspora. They were scattered throughout the face of the earth, and wherever they went, they took root, and they learned the languages, they learned the particular kinds of languages, the particular dialects. And so there were people there from every nation under heaven. They had come to celebrate this great festival and trio and quad of springtime and early summer festivals ending with Pentecost. And so when this sound occurred, the multitude came together. Now, where did this sound occur? It happened on the steps of the temple, the southern steps where the common people entered. There were many gates that entered into the temple complex, but the southern gates, called the triple gates and the holda gates, there were steps, a series of steps, and many of you have been with me in Israel when I have taught you there. And these steps are unusual because they will be one elongated and then one normal step, one elongated, and then one normal step. Now we see this sometimes in Western countries, and it's primarily for crowd control because the people have to slow down and look so they can't run up the stairs. But that's only one aspect of it. This was a tradition where on the elongated steps, which would be two to three times the width of a normal step, they would stop and many times would say particular scriptures or psalms that would cause them to prepare their hearts to enter into worship. This is why the Bible says, Enter into his courts with praise, and enter into his gates with thanksgiving. And so they would do that by literally giving thanks and praise by quoting the psalms or portions of Scripture as they walked into the place of worship. It's called heart preparation. They didn't come into the temple on two wheels in a chariot. They walked in and they walked in deliberately, intentionally, preparing their heart to meet the God who created everything. And so people were there from every place under heaven. And it says when this sound occurred, the multitude came together and were confused. There was chaos. Because why? Because everyone heard them speaking in his own language. Now this is a different word. This is the word dialectas. If I say that with a long I, it would be dialectas. If I took off the OS ending, which is an inflected ending that tells us whether it's a nominative case or whether it is a genitive case or an accusative case or dative case, it's the case system. When you take off the OS of dialectas and use our pronunciation, it is the word dialect. Now what is a dialect? A dialect is a particular brand of a language. For instance, in the southern United States, the English sounds different than the English of Great Britain. As a matter of fact, it sounds different than any other place in the country. I have been in Israel this week, and as I've been in Israel, today I was on uh top of Mount Arbel, and there was a gentleman there that was uh listening to me explaining where we were to the wonderful men who were with me, and the man said, Are you from the South in the United States? I said, Yes. He said, Your accent, your dialectos, your dialect is very distinct and soothing to my ears. He told me that three times before I left that my dialectos, my dialect was soothing. Now I let him know that this is pure Southern Appalachia, because Southern is a dialect, Appalachian is another dialect that is a subset of Southern. And all of it is English. All of it is glosa English, but there are different dialects. And so these people were confused because these, it goes on to say, were speaking their dialect. Then they were all amazed and marveled, saying to one another, Look, are not all of these who speak Galileans? They were all from Galilee, and Galileans had their own dialectos. And how is it that we hear each one in our own dialectos, in our own dialect? Now the Galileans had a particular way of speaking Aramaic. That's what they spoke. That's what Jesus would have spoken, not Hebrew, that was in the temple and the synagogues, but the everyday language was Aramaic, which was the language of the exile, and they spoke it, Jesus spoke it, John the Baptist spoke it. All of the people spoke in their everyday language Aramaic. That was the language of the New Testament, the spoken language of the Jews who lived in Israel during this time in Judea, Samaria, and the Galilee. And so they spoke this. But the Aramaic of the Galilee was different than Jerusalem. You say, well, how do you know that? Well, it was very distinct. If you'll recall, we have an instance of this where the Galilean dialectos exposed one of Jesus' disciples. When Peter denied the Lord three times, he was in the courtyard of Caiaphas. And the last denial had to do with a young maiden who said to Peter, I know that you're one of his disciples. I know you're from the Galilee because your speech tells on you. Now the King James uses Elizabethan English when it says, Your speech betrays you or berys you. And so what was this young lady saying? You sound like a Galilean. You're from the Galilee because I can tell by the way you talk. You see, our speech tells on us as to where we are from, the kind of atmosphere and context that we grew up in. Why am I telling you this? Because this was a supernatural act of God. And this was to validate that the change that came into these people's lives, these disciples who had been hiding away and uh working with Jesus for 40 days, and then they had been together in the upper room for 10 days. They had been electing someone to take Judah's place who had betrayed the Lord, and they were praying, waiting for the promise of the Spirit to come. And on the day of Pentecost, it was no accident that on that day God sovereignly did something supernatural just like He had done when they celebrated that first Shavuot, when the Torah, the instruction of God, was given at Mount Sinai. Now, I wish I could continue through the rest of the chapter, but the fact is I've already been going twenty minutes, and so I'm going to have to stop. But I want you to understand that the great miracle of Pentecost, as great as the miraculous manifestations of sound, of sight, and speech were, they were only the accompanying miracles. The great miracle of Pentecost, hear me, don't miss this, is that God Almighty, his spirit, who would come upon the saints in the Old Testament and leave them, come upon them and leave them, come upon Saul and leave him, come upon Samson and leave him. David even prayed, please do not take your Holy Spirit from me in Psalm 51. No child of God on this side of the cross, since the substitutionary, death, burial, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus and the coming of the Holy Spirit to live in the life of the weakest believer, never has to pray, God, please don't take your Holy Spirit from me, because God will never do that. God comes to take up residence, permanent residence, in the life of every child of God to enable them to live a life that's pleasing to Him. That is the great miracle of Pentecost. For On the Way, this is Tony Crisp.

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Thanks for listening to On the Way with Tony Crisp. Tune in every weekday for information on biblical passages, people, places, and prophecies. Fridays are for your questions. Email your questions to questions at TonyCrisp.org. Then just listen for your question to be answered on Friday's podcast. That's questions at TonyC R I S P dot org. Thanks for listening and have a blessed day on the way.