Seeing through the Lens of Scripture

In Peter’s Pentecost sermon, we hear a man whose mind has been renewed: he now sees all things through the lens of Scripture. Today, Sinclair Ferguson considers how this change in Peter calls for a change in our own thinking.

Welcome to Ligonier’s weekday podcast, Things Unseen. If your short-term memory is still functioning okay, you’ll remember that yesterday I was saying that when we think about Pentecost, we need to think about what Jesus was doing.

I know if we were to ask most Christians what Pentecost is about, they’d tend to say it’s about the Holy Spirit, and of course they’re not totally wrong, but that’s not the whole story—at least Simon Peter didn’t think so, judging by the sermon he preached. It was preached in order to answer the question people were asking: What is all this about these strange sounds, this preaching of the gospel in different language?

When Peter answers that question in his sermon, of course, first of all, he demolishes the cynics in the crowd who say they’re drunk, and he points out that it’s only the third hour of the day; that is, by Roman Empire reckoning, nine o’clock in the morning. “No,” says Peter, “these men are not filled with intoxicating liquor; what you are seeing is the fulfillment of the prophecy of Joel 2.”

“Remember,” he says, “what God promised through Joel? How in the future the last days would come, and they would be marked by the spirit of God being poured out on all flesh, on sons and daughters prophesying and having visions and seeing dreams?”

“Well,” says Peter, “what this means is that future is now; it’s happening today.” We could almost use the words of Jesus in the Nazareth synagogue here, when He says, “This Scripture is being fulfilled in your presence today.”

Pentecost is much more than just an amazing personal experience these people are having. Notice how Peter’s mind is working here. I think it’s worth pausing on this incidentally, because first of all, he thinks biblically about what’s happened. If you think about it, that’s a huge change in Simon Peter. Typically, in the Gospels, he doesn’t think very biblically. He just thinks the way he thinks himself, and he thinks he’s right.

We would find it faintly amusing, I think, if Peter had explained what was happening on the day of Pentecost by saying, “Well, the way I like to think about what’s happening is this,” and maybe then said, “John, Andrew, do you have anything to you’d like to share with the people here about how you think about it?” I know I’m painting a caricature, but some Christians do speak that way.

Simon Peter doesn’t say, “Well, here’s how I think about it.” No, he’s seeing these events through eyeglasses that have been crafted to a biblical prescription, and the optometrist who has helped him is the Lord Jesus. Those seminars between the resurrection and the ascension have radically transformed the way he thinks, and it’s a tremendously important general lesson for us to learn. Peter now thinks about everything through the eyeglasses that are prescribed by the teaching of Scripture.

Forgive me if I stress something with which you’re very familiar. I hinted the other week at the fact that when Eve was tempted, one of her cardinal mistakes was to see things through her own eyes and not through the ears that listened to God’s Word. That mistake happens again and again and again. Eve forgot one of the most basic spiritual principles of all: the saints of God seek to see and understand things through the eyeglasses of God’s Word.

Now, I know that what I’ve just said may seem far removed from talking about what happened on the day of Pentecost, but I think it’s important for us to begin to develop this new instinct that Peter now had, the instinct that he revealed on the day of Pentecost, an instinct he had been taught by Jesus Himself.

As I say, the tendency of the old Peter was to see everything through his own eyes, but now this was receding into the background and he was learning to live like Jesus Himself—on every word that came from the mouth of God. His new instinct was to ask, “What does Scripture have to say about this situation?”

That’s a great lesson for all of us to learn, but we can only learn that if we soak our hearts and our minds in God’s Word. And if the statistics about Christians that the posters produce are right, then those of us who profess ourselves to be evangelicals may well be the most Scripture-ignorant generation of evangelical Christians since the time of the Reformation.

So, what Peter learned is enormously important for us, desperately important for us. We need to get back to our Bibles because we can’t today have a multi-week seminar with the Lord Jesus in any other way. And we’ll think more about Pentecost tomorrow.