Dennis Tuuri

Acts 2:1-41. And when the day of Pentecost was fully come, they were all with one accord in one place. 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. And they were all filled with the Holy Ghost, and began to speak with other tongues, as the Spirit gave them utterance.

And there were dwelling in 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. And they were all amazed and marveled, saying one to another, “Behold, are not all of these which speak Galileans? And how hear we every man in our own tongue, wherein we were born, Parthians, and Medes, and Elamites, and the dwellers in Mesopotamia, and in Judea, and Cappadocia, in Pontus, and Asia.

Phrygia and Pamphylia in Egypt and in the part of Libya about Cyrene and strangers of Rome, Jews and Proselytes, Cretans and Arabians. We do hear them speak in our tongues the wonderful works of God. They were all amazed and were in doubt, saying one to another, “What meaneth this?” Others mocking, said, “These men are full of new wine.” But Peter standing up with the eleven lifted up his voice and said unto them, “Ye men of Judea and all that ye that dwell in Jerusalem.

Be this known unto you and hearken to my words. For these are not drunkards as you suppose, seeing as 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 my spirit upon all flesh, and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy. 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 show wonders in heaven above, and signs in the earth beneath, blood and fire, and vapor of smoke. The sun shall be turned into darkness, and the moon into blood before that 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.

Ye men of Israel, hear these words. Jesus of Nazareth, a man approved of God among you by miracles and wonders and signs which God did by him in the midst of you as you yourselves also know. Him being delivered by the determinate counsel and foreknowledge of God ye have taken and by wicked hands have crucified and slain whom God hath raised up, having loosed the pains of death because it was not possible that he should be holden of it for David speaketh concerning him.

I foresaw the Lord always before my face for he is on my right hand that I should not be moved. Therefore did my heart rejoice and my tongue was glad. Moreover also my flesh shall rest in hope because thou wilt not leave my soul in hell. Neither wilt thou suffer thine holy one to see corruption. Thou hast made known to me the ways of life. Thou shalt make me full of joy with thy countenance. Men and brethren, let me freely speak unto you of the patriarch David that he is both dead and buried and his sepulcher is with us unto this day.

Therefore, being a prophet and knowing that God had sworn with an oath to him that of the fruit of his loins according to the flesh, he would raise up Christ to sit on his throne. He seeing this before spake of the resurrection of Christ that his soul was not left in hell, neither his flesh did see corruption. This Jesus hath God raised up, whereof we are all witnesses. Therefore, being by the right hand of God exalted, and having received of the Father the promise of the Holy Ghost, he hath shed this forth, which ye now see and hear.

For David hath not ascended into the heavens, but he saith himself, the Lord said unto my Lord, sit thou at my right hand until I make thy foes thy footstool. Therefore, let all the house of Israel know assuredly that God hath made that same Jesus whom ye have crucified both Lord and Christ. Now when they heard this, they were pricked in their heart and said unto Peter and unto the rest of the apostles, “Men and brethren, what shall we do?” Then Peter said unto them, “Repent and be baptized, every one of you, in the name of Jesus Christ, for the remission of sins, and ye shall receive the gift of the Holy Ghost.

For the promise is unto you and to your children, and to all that are afar off, even as many as the Lord our God shall call. And with many other words did he testify and exhort, saying, “Save yourselves from this untoward generation.” Then they that gladly received his word were baptized. In the same day, there were added unto them about three thousand souls. We thank God for his word, and we pray now through this song that we’re going to sing that he would illuminate to our understanding that our lives may be changed.

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Alright, I had to get an outline. I didn’t have a copy of the outline with me. This is basically part two of last week’s sermon. We’re going to conclude hopefully today. And I only got through most of point one going through this particular passage in Acts chapter 2. It’s a very important passage as I said last week and I won’t belabor the point now. Let’s just move right into the text and we’ll do a little bit of review as we go along.

Reviewing our outline we went through last week and then proceeding on. And I’ve added more details to it this week for your benefit as well. Okay. First, you’ll see the outline there. It says basically we have a story here, an account of a historical event from God that is placed into the scriptures. And it’s a very important story. It’s a very important historical event. It’s the beginning of the church, the reorganization of the church is the way Alexander puts it in his commentary from the old covenant organization to the new covenant organization.

And so that’s very significant for us. We had the first sermon preached by the Christian church, so to speak, by a Christian minister, an apostle recorded for us. And so it’s very important, a very important event. So we have this historical event. It has a message for us in it. It has an exhortation to us. The central message is what I believe is the salvation of the world being prefigured. It has an exhortation to us to apply this in our own lives.

And then it has comfort in it as well. That’s very important to have a proper context and balance for what the scriptures teach us. The scriptures are always a command to us, an exhortation of faithfulness, but there also always hope, comfort, good news in Jesus Christ our savior. Now, the particular story takes place in the day of Pentecost. For those of you who may have a background in a church or may have been exposed to churches that have a liturgical year, Whit Sunday is the liturgical calendar date in the Anglican church that essentially correlates to Pentecost.

It happens seven weeks after Easter. So the New Testament church and some of its manifestations and organizations has taken over the calendar of the old covenant and tried to incorporate it into a New Testament liturgical calendar. That’s useful. It can be a very useful device. And Whit Sunday correlates to in case you’ve ever heard that word in the Anglican church or Lutheran church, it correlates to this event, the day of Pentecost.

We said that just to remind us now the importance of the day of Pentecost. Pentecost is one of the three main feasts of the Old Testament. These three feasts are the three required times for the males to go up and appear before God in Jerusalem in the old covenant. These three occurrences were Passover, Pentecost, and then Tabernacles. And we talked on tabernacles and we talked about family camp.

And you know, J. Alexander in a very nice learning device we can give to our children talks about how each of these three things have an agricultural event that they remember, a historical event in the old covenant and then a prefigurement of something in the new covenant times. And so Passover for instance is related to the agricultural cycle according to the Old Testament in the first fruits the early harvest of the grains.

And so its agricultural significance is the early portion of the harvest in the spring. In the experience of the Old Testament church, it of course reminded them of their deliverance from Egypt when the angel of death passed over the people who are protected by the blood of the lamb applied to the doorposts. And then the prefigurement of course then was the coming advent and sacrifice of Messiah to come in the future.

The Lord Jesus Christ the Paschal Lamb that we sing of at our communion feast. Now Tabernacles—its historical significance is the ingathering or harvest of fruit late in the season, Octoberish, September, October in there. The historical significance was the reminding of the people that God gave them tents to dwell in as they went through the wilderness experience. And so the prefigurement of the New Testament times is the remaining rest that comes for the people of God.

Only partially fulfilled in the New Testament, ultimately, the rest, the Sabbath rest remains for us yet future with the Lord’s final advent. Well, Pentecost had an agricultural significance. It was harvest. It was the main harvest, the cereal or grain harvest. That’s what it commemorates agriculturally. Historically, I believe it correlates back to the giving of the law on Mount Sinai, which happened fifty days after the deliverance from Egypt.

And it then looks forward to as Alexander said the reorganization of the Christian church, which reorganization we are now reading of in Acts chapter 2. I would add to that a further definition though. It’s the reorganization of the church for the purpose of the salvation of the world because I think that’s the central message of this particular text. So the setting for this is the day of Pentecost. The manifestation of the Holy Spirit.

The Spirit comes upon the day of Pentecost. Mighty rushing wind. There’s sounds associated with it. There is the sight of flames distributed, apportioned upon the heads of the different people, the one hundred twenty or more disciples of the Lord Jesus Christ. And this coming upon the people also manifested itself in the speaking of foreign languages. That’s what I believe it clearly is meant in Acts chapter 2. Maybe not all the references to tongues in the scriptures, but here I’m sure from my study of the word here, and most commentators are that what this is talking about is that these different disciples of Christ were filled with the spirit to the end and given the manifestation of the spirit to the end that they could speak in a particular foreign language.

And so, these and by the way when it said that they began to speak in other tongues as the spirit gave them utterance—other languages—the verb form there is a particular verb form that has the significance of saying this was an event that started and then continued on. So I believe that these men then knew these languages and they could over the rest of the course of their ministry use these particular languages for the purposes of God’s evangelism of the world and I talked about that more last week so we have that event happening the manifestation of the coming of the spirit.

And then we have the reaction of the divided world. People are gathered from all nations under the in the world. The scriptures say by way of uh well in any event, all nations are represented there. And remember I talked last week about how the particular regions that are specified in the text—there’s a long list there of a number of regions—they form almost a sundial approach where you start in the northeast corner, it proceeds on and covers the whole known area making almost a full circle.

And so the whole world comes and you have two kinds of reaction from the people to the manifestation of the power of God. Some people are amazed and they say, “What does this mean?” They’re asking the question. Other people mock and they say, “These guys are drunk.” And that’s the reaction to the preaching of the gospel in all ages of men. Some people want to know more. We see God’s grace beginning to work in their hearts, asking for more information from the scriptures to define what they see in the world around them.

And other people mock those people who testify to the Lord Jesus Christ. Peter then gives his sermon and I’ve given you a little outline this week. I know it probably got a little confused last week because I was trying to go through all the different verses and I just want to go through it briefly in outline form with you right now just to remind us what he talks about. I think it’s very significant for the purpose of this whole message.

Peter begins his sermon by saying it’s not this. He says these guys are not drunk but what is happening to the disciples of Jesus Christ here is what has been prophesied by Joel. So on your outline where it says not this—drunkenness—but it is this: the coming of the spirit prophesied by the prophet Joel. This prophecy of Joel brings with it a strong threat to the hearers. Peter uses the prophecy from Joel to remind the people who are seeing this manifestation of what Joel had prophesied of, that what was coming was the consummated day of the Lord.

And I think specifically there’s a strong reference in this text—maybe not exclusively but a strong reference—to the judgment of God upon the generation that had said, “We will take upon ourselves the blood of Messiah.” And that’s what the Jewish nation did. And that’s what they got in AD 70. Blood flowed through the temple up to I don’t know the ankles or calves or something like that during one particular portion of the massacre that went on.

Josephus says that there was a comet that hung in the sky for a year over the city of Jerusalem and there was a dagger pointing down to the city of Jerusalem as a cosmic manifestation. As Joel refers to God’s judgment upon Jerusalem in AD 70, Peter’s sermon, make no doubt about it, in its beginning explains the drunkenness charge, but then he gives them a prophecy from Joel that should strike fear in their hearts because he tells them, “You crucified Messiah, and the last days are what we’re in now leading up to the consummation of God’s wrath against men who have rejected him.”

So Peter’s message of the gospel, which is the preeminent beginning kernel of what Christian sermons are all about, includes threat. And when you preach the gospel, you must preach the threat of hell. And that’s why so much of the Christian church today has no ability, no calling left to preach the gospel because they’ve even abandoned the doctrine of hell. Peter brings a strong threat to the people. He warns them of the coming of God’s judgment. He says, “You crucified him.”

Now, it’s interesting. He does certainly talk about the sovereignty of God in this matter as well. That it’s all according to the determined counsel and foreknowledge of God. These, you know, some people say you leave the things of Calvinism to more mature Christians. Not so. Peter in his open gospel message affirms the sovereignty of God even in the crucifixion of Messiah. Goes that far. Doesn’t negate responsibility. He proclaims responsibility for their actions. But he talks about the sovereignty of God.

Now he has threat. But he also ends the Joel passage on the note of promise. He says, “Whosoever shall call on the name of the Lord shall be saved.” The gospel is not just threat and condemnation. It is a message of salvation to the elect. And so that’s what Peter gives them. He gives them besides threat, he gives them promise. And then he fleshes that promise out. And now we’re moving from his explanation of the prophecy of Joel.

And then after the prophecy of Joel ends, and whosoever shall call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved, he then begins to explain how that works. How do you call upon the name of the Lord? What does that mean? And he makes reference to the Lord Jesus Christ. He fleshes out the promise by two Psalms citations. And the first one emphasizes that Jesus Christ who was crucified is now resurrected. At the core of the gospel message is the death and resurrection and ascension and glorification of the savior.

That is the keystone. The resurrection preeminently is the keystone of the Christian message. And so it’s the keystone of Peter’s sermon here. And he quotes from the Psalms. He says, you know, David rotted, but his psalm said one would come whose body would not rot. So he wasn’t talking about himself. He was talking about Messiah. He was talking about Jesus Christ whom you guys crucified. So he gives them the promise.

He fleshes that out talking about the death and resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ for their sins. And then he quotes another psalm citation to relate the death and resurrection of Christ to then Christ pouring out the spirit manifestation. So he brings the sermon full cycle, returns back to the subject of the manifestation of the Holy Spirit. And he says this is poured out because Jesus died, was resurrected and ascended to the throne of the father.

And his citation from the Psalms now also has strong threat to it, doesn’t it? Because now he moves to the psalm where it says that the Lord said to my Lord, “Sit at my right hand until I make your foes your footstool.” And he is telling them, “This Jesus Christ whom you crucified is not only resurrected, he’s ascended and glorified at the right hand of the father.”

And now what history will see is condemnation to those who crucify the Lord Jesus Christ either historically in the past or present with the omission of giving glory and honor to him and praising his name. He reminds them of the glorification of Jesus Christ, the pouring out of the spirit. And that spirit comes to bring death, damnation, destruction, and threat to those who are outside of the Lord Jesus Christ, but exaltation to those who are in the Lord Jesus Christ.

And so, Peter’s sermon is powerful, powerful, and it calls for it calls for commitment. It calls for decision at the end. He ends his sermon not with promise. He ends his sermon with threat. He warns them of what’s going to happen. And they then cry out and asked for more saying what can we do? What must a man do to be saved?

J. Alexander summarized the sermon of Peter in this way. He said he referred to the very effusion of the spirit promised by the prophet Joel as a part and token of a great reformatory change which would be ruinous to all who did not trust in the appointed savior. And that’s a good synopsis of what Peter told this crowd and what we’re to tell people when we preach the gospel.

Okay. So, Peter’s sermon is that and Peter’s sermon ends with a threat to the people that unless they repent, they are certainly damned by God and this day of the Lord coming will find them in darkness.

Okay. This threat then calls as I said a response of asking more information. What must we do to be saved? Is the response of the men from every nation and we see recorded then in verses 37-41, the conversion of men from every nation. And we talked about this some last week, but I do want to bring out a couple of points that I didn’t have time really to reference, but I just want to reference them quickly.

First of all, in this recitation of a historical event, we see biblical repentance at work.

Okay. Let me read a quote here from one of the commentators. He says that the word repent originally meant an afterthought, a second thought. Often a second thought shows that the first thought was wrong. And so the word came to mean a change of mind. But if a man is an honest man, a change of mind demands a change of action. Repentance must involve both change of mind and change of action.

I’ve tried to use this device with my children, but I’ve used my hands. I say, “What is that?” That’s repentance. That’s you’re facing this way. Repentance isn’t just being sorry about that. Repentance is a change of not just of mind, but of actions that demonstrate a change of your very being. It’s a movement from this to something else. And that’s what these men do.

What must we do to be saved? Not must we feel? What must we do to be saved? And he says, “Believe in the Lord Jesus Christ.” And he immediately calls for action. Baptism. A concrete action. I cannot believe it. But I have had talks in the last few months even with men who call themselves more reformed than we are. Who told me that they think all repentance really is. And when you say forgive somebody, all they got to do is say they’re sorry for their actions.

And I said to this man, “Are you mean to tell me when your children come to you and they’ve hit somebody or done something or they’ve sinned and they say they’re sorry, you immediately believe them and forgive them?” “Oh yeah, that’s what I do.” He says, “I don’t know. But the scriptures don’t give us that model. The scriptures give us a model not just of emotions or even of mind. But repentance is a change of action.

And until you see a change of action, you should not believe your children are repentant. Okay? And you should not take any solace in your own heart because you feel bad about something you did that you’re repentant. No. The scriptures say you’ve got to change your actions. Okay.

Secondly, I want to point out from this text, I want to talk a little bit about baptism. What are the actions he calls for them? Believe in the Lord Jesus Christ. Be baptized for the remission of your sins. Baptism. Couple of points here.

He goes on to say, be baptized. He goes on to say, verse 38. Repent. Be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ, remission of sins. You shall receive the gift of the Holy Ghost. For the promise is unto you and to your children and to all that are far off. Why does he say the promise is unto you and to your children?

I mean, if if all he’s calling for here is the baptism of those people that make profession of faith and not children, why does he include this quotation in the Old Testament about the extension of covenant blessings to our children? Well, I think it’s clearly because baptism is by most of household those children under the parents authority are baptized as well.

He says the promise the gift of the Holy Spirit that indicated by this covenant sign of baptism is unto your children. Matthew Henry comments on this. Let’s see. Well, first of all, there’s a commentator, Mr. Wood, who does a commentary on Acts that I’ve been reading lately. It’s an excellent commentary. He says simply this. He says the audience heard in this response of Peter that the promises unto you and your children.

What they would hear is the covenant. That’s what the baptism is here. The covenant baptism into the covenant. It’s the covenant sign. The covenant my household. That’s what they would hear Peter saying here. And that’s that’s what’s going on in the context here is that he is calling them in terms of baptism of their children as well. The extension of the covenant sign to children I think is here being alluded to.

Matthew Henry says basically they would be asking at this point being raised with the idea of the covenant applied to all of the household in the Old Testament. They would be naturally saying what must be done with my children? Must they be thrown out or taken in with me? Taken in saith Peter by all means for the promise the response the great promise of God being to you a God is as much to you and your children now as it ever was.

Peter is reaffirming continuity in a basic covenantal unit of the family here. That’s what’s going on. I had a discussion a few months ago about a fellow who wanted to know several fellas who wanted to know, well, I can see where you’ve got single judges ruling in the Old Testament, but where do you have any examples in the New Testament of that? And I said, well, you know, you can’t really use an argument from silence to say something that isn’t legitimate.

If there’s going to be a shift from Old Covenant administration of justice, for instance, in the new covenant, we would want God to point that out to us. Otherwise, we’re to assume things are the same. And that’s much of the argumentation for why baptism is extended to the whole covenant household. If this would have changed, Peter would not have been so confusing to them as to tell them that yes, in terms of the administration of the covenant sign that God will be to you a God to extend it out to their children as well by throwing in this confusing phrase that promises unto you and to your children.

Okay. So, we have here the baptism of children, I think, indicated and I we could spend more time, but I want to move on.

Secondly, The descent of the spirit comes upon the people and it is the picture I think of the proper mode of baptism as well. Now we’re not hung up on this. If people want to immerse their kids and don’t believe in that’s think that’s the most important mode. We’ll talk to them about it but we will sprinkle.

But see the descent of the spirit comes upon the people from above. And when you sprinkle people when you pour people water comes upon them from above. Heavenly clean water not earthly dirty water. Okay. The water is a picture of the coming of the spirit. And so when we baptize kids, we try to give that picture and that picture really comes right from these opening chapters of the New Testament church in Acts chapter 2.

There’s so this is like the book of Genesis. It forms much of what happens, our understanding of what happens in the rest of the New Testament. And here it should inform us about the recipients of baptism and the best mode being water from above coming upon the people. The fact that three thousand were baptized in one day also should tell us something about mode. Hard to imagine three thousand people being immersed by the twelve apostles, but any did that very easy to imagine the sprinkling of water the way the blood was sprinkled upon the people as they retook covenant in the Old Testament in the at the end of the wilderness at the beginning of the wilderness wanderings okay I just wanted to mention that briefly.

Third, there’s no second blessing attached to the gift of the Holy Spirit here. He says repent be baptized what you get is remission of sins gift of the Holy Spirit. You see and those things are coterminous events. The gift of the Holy Spirit the baptism of the Holy Spirit, the once-for-all filling of the Holy Spirit as opposed to the filling of the spirit for particular action, the once-for-all reception of the Holy Spirit is coterminous with repentance and and baptism, the covenant sign being administered.

In other words, it’s when you’re brought into the family of God that the spirit is given to you. It’s not on the basis of some second blessing work that you put yourself into. This is important. The charismatic movement has had a tendency within it to move away from the doctrine of justification by faith because and this is why there’s been so much linkage in years past the charismatic movement and the Roman Catholic Church.

The Catholic Church is all messed up on justification by faith. They think it’s internal righteousness that we get as opposed to the imputed righteousness declared by God to our account. That’s important in terms of baptism of the spirit because if you think somehow the spirit is given on the basis of something that you do later on, you start to really water down this understanding that no, it’s not your deeds.

It’s the work of the Lord Jesus Christ. The spirit is given on the basis of Christ’s work. And when Christ’s work is imputed to your account and you are covenantally in the Lord Jesus Christ, you then are given the gift of the Holy Spirit. Okay? No second blessing involved. Okay?

And we talked on this passage last week somewhat. The conversion of men from every nation, very important. We’ve got people gathered from every nation of the world. That’s hyperbole. It’s an overstatement, but it’s symbolic. It’s true to the sense that God wants us to understand that the world is represented, so to speak, by these groups of people that are associated together on the day of Pentecost and the conversion of men from every nation is what happens here. Three thousand people are baptized and added to the church.

And that’s the fourth point I want to make here is a call for church membership. Again, there’s so much critical in these opening chapters. Church membership. What does it say? It says they gladly received his word. Wonderful. That gladly received his word. Not grudgingly like we can do so often. Gladly received his word. Were baptized. And the same day they were added unto them about three thousand souls. They were added to a particular identifiable group, three thousand people. They were put on a list. They were added into a group.

Now, again, this is not the main purpose of my talk. And you know, I know I’m throwing a lot of things in here, but see, it’s important as we go through this to see so much pictured for us in these opening verses.

I want to just read some quotes here that I got from Greg Skipper in a paper he wrote on the church covenant. And these first quotes are from a platform of church discipline written in 1649 and found in the great works of Christ in America by Cotton Mather. Remember I mentioned that last week that in the Latin that’s Magnalia Christi Americana and in the Latin vulgate version of what these men were hearing in their own tongues were the great works of God. And so Cotton Mather saw that in the formation and the foundation of America we have the great and mighty works of God at place and Jesus Christ at place in this land.

Well in any event, I’m going to read this from a platform for church discipline. I think it’s so true. And on your outline, you have listed a bunch of scripture references, a whole bundle there under point E of point one, the conversion of men from every nations. Those scripture references are primarily to do with this particular point of membership. This is what the platform of church discipline said:

“Saints by calling must have a visible political union amongst themselves or else they are not yet a particular church. This form is the visible covenant agreement or consent whereby they give themselves unto the Lord to the observing of all ordinances of Christ together in the same society which is usually called the church covenant. All believers ought as God gives them opportunity there unto to endeavor to join themselves unto a particular church.”

And he quotes from Acts 2:47 and other places in the book of Acts that talk about this. And we’ll see that as we go through this that there’s a particular identifiable group and it’s right here in its origins in this three thousand being added to an identifiable group of Christians.

Now William Ames in his The Marrow of Theology written in 1629 and this is going to be a strong statement but if you believe this text and the others we’ll go through as we go through the book of acts about the identification of people not just with God somehow one-to-one with him but with the body of Christ in a particular visible political union, political in the sense of organizational union.

Then you’ll understand if you come to understand what those scriptures teach about that, you’ll agree with Ames’s quote here. Ames said this:

“Those who have opportunity to join the church and neglect it, most grievously sin against God because of his ordinance and also against their own souls because of the blessing joined to it. And if they obsely persist in their carelessness, whatever they otherwise profess, they can scarcely be counted believers truly seeking the kingdom of God.”

See, if this is true, that there’s an identifiable group of people under a legal jurisdiction of the rulers that God places into a church, if that’s the way God has called us to operate, then for us not to do that and to hold back from joining a church covenant for this or that reason and to hold back for a long period of time. Folks, it’s not a good thing.

Now, there are good men who disagree with me on this. I know that even in this church, this is not a majority position and it’s not the position of RCC. It’s my personal position though I would like to see people become members of churches the same day as these men did the same day they were baptized no membership classes and it’s important to teach people about the faith and what a particular church believes it’s more important now because there’s different manifestations of the church but my point is that you should be identified with the body of Jesus Christ and Christ says that body refers to his visible church as well you should be willing to come into submission to King Jesus as he administers organizational structure in the context of a particular local manifestation of his body.

And so I think that you know going along with that people should recognize they can leave churches in an orderly fashion as well. They can move. If you go start through the study of the doctrine of a particular church and you find you don’t agree with it, you should come under the instruction of that church. See what the scriptures say if you’re right or wrong. Maybe you’re right, maybe you’re wrong. But if you come to a sincerely held difference of opinion with that church based on your knowledge of the scriptures, then I’m sure that any good church of Christ, including this one, would help you find a church that would meet what you understand the scriptures to meet, unless it’s something really wacky, of course.

But if it’s a difference about, you know, basic issues of the faith, baptism, even where other good men disagree, communion, the way we practice it, whatever, we would help you to study through the scriptures, but then we’d say, “Well, here you can find another church. We’ll help you to find it. But in the meantime, you should be under the authority of local churches. You should be in the context of a covenant, a group of people that you’re trying to assist to cause grow in their knowledge and obedience to the Lord Jesus Christ.

And I think that is given for us here as this conversion of men from every nation occurs and they’re added to this list. Okay. Made it through point one.

Got some time. Okay. And and so that’s the story and some incidental doctrinal points along the way here, but they’re so important as you can tell.

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And then secondly, what is the basic message? Okay. You know what baptism, repentance, membership roles, et cetera sure, but what’s the basic, we don’t want to lose the forest for the trees. I think that the forest of what happens in the day of Pentecost is the whole world gets saved symbolically, representationally, covenantally, and as a result of that, that tells us something so important about what history is.

It tells us that as the Holy Spirit is given as an earnest or down payment toward us, that’s what the scriptures tell us. We have here an earnest or down payment from the world as well. The whole world represented conversion of men from every nation. And what does the book of Revelation end with? It tells us that men, he saves men from every kindred and tongue and people and nation. And throughout the scriptures, we have this model that the part stands for the whole.

And right at the beginning of the New Testament historical accounts and as a result, it’s how we interpret then the New Testament epistles is on the basis of what’s happened. We’re given this dramatic illustration of the conversion of the whole world represented by these men would come together. Isaiah 2, other places of scripture say the nations will come up to the mountain of the Lord. And that’s what they were doing. They were coming up, proselytes were coming up from various countries and nations to Jerusalem to worship God. And they found the pinnacle of worship in the presentation of the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ.

And that’s what history is all about. And I’ve got several historical things. You can throw your own in here as well.

Pentecost. The idea there is that Pentecost is indeed the picture of harvest. Harvest of the whole world. And so Pentecost is a picture of the coming Pentecost, the great harvest to come. Our savior said the fields are white to harvest. Pray the government send workers forth into his field. And immediately on the day of Pentecost, we have workers sent forth and a great harvest reaped. And that’s what history is all about. That’s what’s going to continue until the great and consummative day of the Lord finishes off all recorded history with the coming return, the final advent of the Lord Jesus Christ in the new heavens and the new earth.

So the scriptures tell us something very important here about Pentecost, the ingathering, the harvesting of the entire world.

Jericho, remember the destruction of Jericho. We’ve talked about the core similarities in terms of the book of Joshua and the book of Acts. In the book of Joshua begins with a demonstration of God’s power, the Jordan parting and they go through and God demonstrates his power in the way he had already demonstrated his deliverance. He now demonstrates his power in the beginning of the pursuit and advancement of the kingdom, the conquering of the nation of Canaan.

And so that power is displayed and they go to Jericho and spy it out and what do we see? We see Rahab saved. Why? Because she’s heard of the mighty works of God. Somehow she heard it in her tongue. I don’t know if it was different or how different it was, but she heard about the mighty works of God, the deliverance of God’s people from Egypt. And we don’t know if she’d heard about the Jordan parting or not, but it was a demonstration of power from God.

Then people are saved. Jericho has one family saved out of Jericho representing the whole. How everybody else who isn’t saved is destroyed. And then before all of the land of Canaan is conquered. Gibeon happens. What’s the next group that gets saved? The Gibeonites, not just one family now, a whole city, a major city. They become converted.

I believe that’s what this text tells us. Yes, it was a bad covenant. Yes, there was sin involved. But the foreknowledge and determinate council of God was that the Gibeonites would be servants of his in his temple and represent salvation. They said to Joshua, what the people say to Jesus working through his apostles in Acts 2, remember they said, “Whatever seems right to you, Joshua, do to us. There’s no salvation. There’s no life for us. We’ve got to save ourselves from this wicked generation.” As Peter told the people in Acts, Rahab said, “I got to get saved.

I know these guys are bad. You got the real God.” The Gibeonites said, “We know you’re going to destroy everybody. We want to be saved. And if you’re going to kill us now, okay, do to us whatever seems right.” And what did the people say to Peter? What must we do to be saved? You tell us. You tell us what we’ve got to do. And Gibeonites were brought into covenant. The people in Acts are brought into covenant.

And the Gibeonites again represented all of the nation, all the conquering, not just of Jericho, but the entire nation of Canaan. And so all of Canaan is conquered by God’s people by the lesser Joshua in the Old Testament. And we see Jesus now riding forth, conquering and to conquer in the personal work of the apostles as they preach forth, not using physical swords, preaching forth his word, that two-edged sword.

And we see the conversion of men from every nation. And it’s model to us that the whole world will be converted the same way that all of Canaan became cleansed of the wicked people and converted and the only people that dwell in that land at the end of the time are God’s people who will honor and praise him.

Jericho is a model of this. Egypt was a model. Joseph begins in slavery he becomes at the right hand of the pharaoh the pharaoh seems to be converted all Egypt apparently there’s good evidence that shows us that all of Egypt becomes converted through the work of the man who had been a prisoner first through the acquisition of his entrance into the royal household and then all the people.

So all the world comes up to Joseph to receive bread for the entire world during the famine because of his wisdom and his understanding of God. And it’s a picture again of the coming conversion of all the world where all the world will stream up to receive not the bread that perishes but the bread that doesn’t perish. The man that come down from heaven, the Lord Jesus Christ mediated to us through the Holy Spirit.

Egypt is a model of this as well.

Babel, the great picture here is the reversal of Babel. Babel was the confusion of tongues. In the Old Testament, tongues, that same word means confession. There’s a confusion of confessions. And we see it in our day-to-day. We see liberal Democrat, conservative Democrat fighting with each other. We see the non-Christian Republicans getting in there and fighting with other non-Christian Republicans, moderates and conservatives.

There’s a babel in our day and age because God confuses, does not allow the people to form up one confession against the God of heaven. He confuses them. Confuses their tongues. He confuses their confessions. What do we have? Here we don’t have one tongue. We sort of do and later on we’ll see manifestations of the gift of tongues that seem to indicate there’s one tongue. But essentially we have one confession now as Babel was divided through the dividing of tongues.

Now through an apportioning of tongues, cloven tongues apportioned on every one of the believers. Through the apportioning of tongues, God brings unity back to the people through a common confession that Jesus Christ is Lord and that people must believe in him to be saved. So we have this great reversal. As we said last week, this is true multiculturalism because these nations don’t lose their nationness, but they become one together in the person and work of Jesus Christ.

Tremendous picture for us here in Babel in the reversal of Babel in Acts chapter 2.

Psalm 1 beginnings mean something. Psalm 1 tells us what every psalm tells us, there’s two paths. There’s the path of blessing. There’s the path of obedience to God’s law, meditation on it, and there’s the counsel of the ungodly. Two paths in life. And what are the end of those paths? Well, the path of those who meditate in God’s word, whatever he does, he prospers in it.

He grows like the tree beside the water. What happens in this path, the wicked are not so like the chaff driven by the wind. And what happens on Acts 2 is Peter tells him the same thing. If you’re going to prosper, you’ve got to be covenantally responsive to the Lord Jesus Christ and in him. Psalm 1 tells us that the picture of history is the destruction of the wicked as we’re going to see in AD 70 in at the end of the generation that Peter was speaking to in the book of Acts.

But the exaltation, the tree growing by the river of living water that the proper path tells us will mean will be essentially will come to inhabit the whole world. Genesis tells us the same thing, you know, that the serpent will indeed have his heel bruised so to speak, but his head will be crushed by the seed of the woman. And so we have a model throughout scripture. We see this over and over and over again.

And here at the beginning of the New Testament church, we see written in huge letters in the sky that all the world will be converted through the conversion of not one necessary language there’s still diversity of nations but through one common confession of the Lord Jesus Christ we see pictured for us here the reason why we’re eschatologically optimistic in this church.

You know it we live in a day and age when nothing could be more foolish to hear preached than that the church will conquer the world we sit as little bands of people trying to hold on to a full-fledged application of the word of God in everything that we do and we find we find opposition on every corner that we turn including in the church.

What could be more foolish than to assert postmillennialism? But what could be clearer from the text from this text and from all the others I’ve cited and from a multitude as well? And if God’s word says it, that settles it and we ought to believe it. And if we don’t, then we’re then we’re foolish men believing the newspapers as Bahnsen wrote about newspaper eisegesis instead of what the word of God tells us.

It tells us how to interpret these events.

So the message here is the salvation of the world, but there’s also an exhortation. There’s an exhortation to us here. And this is really the most important thing I want to talk about. I’ve only got ten or fifteen minutes left, but let’s let’s at least try to do it. And I touched on this last week.

Remember what Jesus had said. Wait for the spirit and then you’re going to be my witnesses in Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria, and to the uttermost parts of the world. And I think that we have in this account from the day of Pentecost, if we unravel it and apply it to our lives, we have four exhortations.

The first exhortation is to have a relevant word to rebuke the idolatry in our day and age of statism. Peter rebuked the idolatry of the people who crucified Messiah because they didn’t want him to claim ownership of the vineyard. They killed the owner’s sons and he rebuked their idolatry.

He told them, “You are headed for damnation because of your crucifixion of the savior and desire to be autonomous from the king. The reformers saw in the perversions and idolatries of the Roman Catholic Church the present day manifest demonstration of idolatry in their day and age and they rebuked it. They said that is sin. If you maintain that position the Roman Catholic Church takes selling of indulgences, many other things that is sin.

You are the road to destruction. God will judge you historically. You will be found wanting. And they called for the rebuking of the particular idolatry that people had come into. And what do we have today? We don’t have the Roman Catholic Church as the great antichrist. And I don’t believe that at all. I believe the great antichrist today is the civil state. People think the state is God walking on earth. The voice of the people is the voice of God.

And the people are wrapped up in these political entities. Civil states, states, nations. The United Nations issues an arrest warrant for a man. I don’t know. Guy’s probably a terrible person. By what jurisdiction? Have you ever thought about what jurisdiction does the United Nations exercise over a country and what jail will they put him in? I don’t know. These are very interesting times we live in. They’re times in which people have ceded over to the state the authority of God.

And I think that one of the things we must do to be relevant and obedient to the exhortation of Acts 2 is to rebuke the idolatry of statism as the predom religion in people’s lives and there are specific things that we should be doing. We have done it. We’ve done it uh quite a bit actually. It’s interesting. I was I read the looked at the Sunday paper before I came to church just before I came. The front page article Sunday paper Oregon is on the Christian right in Oregon.

And you go through the article and it’s it’s kind of an interesting article. It lists all the players. Doesn’t list parents education association interestingly enough. It lists these various organizations, some of which I’ve never even heard of before. A bunch of most of them are for other interesting groups in the state. And it’s interesting because early on in the article, it talks about how one of the main achievements that the people are talking about in terms of the success of the Christian right are two things.

One is homeschool liberties, private school liberties, and the second is the advancement of a bill through the legislature now, an abstinence bill. You know, we did those things. Our name is on that second bill and we did the first thing. You know, we’re not in the article. That’s interesting. We’ll talk a little bit more about that in a couple of minutes. But the point is we have challenged lished with the parents education association over the last ten years this idolatry.

But I think we must do it in a much more concentrated fashion. It is specifically geared to the protection of our children, the PEA. And I want to see this church, Lord willing, and other Christians from across the Northwest as well take a common voice together to speak forth a dynamically Christian message, not just in protection, but an invasion of these other areas where people essentially attempt to keep Jesus Christ out of civil politics.

What I’m talking about is a formation of something. Not a party, but a group of people committed to