What Was Pentecost All About?

We might naturally think the day of Pentecost is all about the Holy Spirit. Yet Peter’s sermon in Acts 2 focuses ultimately on Jesus. Today, Sinclair Ferguson takes principles from this passage to help us read all of Scripture.

Welcome to this week’s Things Unseen. Today is actually Pentecost Monday. You’ll know what I mean if the day of Pentecost was celebrated in your church yesterday or marked in some way. Perhaps I should begin by saying that all true churches are Pentecostal churches, even if they never say so, because Pentecost belongs to all true churches, or it actually belongs to none, because without it, there wouldn’t be a worldwide church. If we lack the Holy Spirit our Lord sent at Pentecost, then essentially, we also lack the gospel.

Anyway, yesterday was Pentecost, and it’s another day in the year like Christmas Day, and Good Friday, and Easter Sunday, and perhaps Ascension Day, when Christians remember and celebrate the mighty works of God in His Son Jesus Christ.

That’s probably the first thing we need to remember. Pentecost is a day we remember and celebrate something that happened in the past. Like the cross and the resurrection, it’s not an event that keeps on being repeated. There is ever only one day of Pentecost.

Before His ascension, Jesus told the disciples to stay in Jerusalem until He baptized them with the Holy Spirit, when they would receive power to be witnesses to Him to the ends of the earth. And that was what happened. There was the sound of a mighty rushing wind. Something like tongues of fire came on the disciples. They began speaking in languages other than their own local Aramaic. And you’ll remember how Peter then explained to the astonished crowds what it all meant, in a very remarkable sermon in Acts 2, and several thousand people were baptized.

I said that Pentecost, like Christmas and Easter, was an event that happened. And I also want to emphasize again, that like Christmas and Easter, it happened only once. We shouldn’t think of it as happening again and again, any more than we believe the death of Christ happens again and again.

That leads me to make a very general point about the way we read the narrative sections of the Bible. I think we need to avoid what I sometimes call the “find Waldo” approach to reading narratives. I wonder if you’ve seen those marvelous books, I think from the 1980s. They contained pictures of large numbers of people, and somewhere in the crowd is this little fellow, Waldo, or Wally, as I think he was originally called by the English creator. He’s wearing a red and white striped sweater and a hat. And the whole point of the books, the only point of the books, is to try to find Waldo in the crowd, in the city, or on the beach, or wherever he happens to be.

And I suspect many Christians read narratives like the Gospels, and perhaps the Acts of the Apostles, as though they’re looking for Waldo, when Waldo is themselves. They’re looking for themselves in the narrative. And the most important question for them, and perhaps almost the only question they ask is: “Where am I in this passage? Am I there in Nicodemus, or in Bartimaeus, or in Simon Peter, or in whoever?”

Now of course, these passages of Scripture do apply to us, but they’re not first and foremost about us. Actually, in the Gospels, and really in the Acts of the Apostles, our first focus shouldn’t really be on “find me,” but on “find Jesus.” Who is He? What is He like? What is He doing? We first of all ask, “Who is Jesus here, and what is He doing?” And only then do we ask, “Well, how then does that apply to me?”

Now, I say that because many Christians today seem to focus so much on their own experience in this way that they have a tendency to miss something that turns out to be fairly obvious. So, if they’re asked what Peter’s sermon on the day of Pentecost is all about, they’ll say, “Well, obviously it’s about how you can get the baptism with the Holy Spirit.”

But if you read the passage carefully and thoughtfully, I think you’ll give another answer to that question. What’s Peter’s Pentecost sermon about? Actually, Peter is telling us what these strange phenomena mean. And his answer is, they’re telling us something about the Lord Jesus Christ: “If you’re going to understand the meaning of this event, I need to tell you what has happened to Jesus.” And his whole sermon turns out to be what people today would call an evangelistic sermon about Jesus Christ. It’s Jesus he preaches, not the Spirit.

And of course, that’s just as the Spirit likes it to be. When the Spirit came, the people were pointed to Jesus, and we need to remember that. And we’ll think more about it tomorrow.