Let me go ahead and pray then, and we'll look at this topic of Pentecost. Father, these are things that can appear distant to us. They can appear foreign, and in many ways, perhaps not even relevant to us, or if they are relevant, only in a sensational way, as we consider things like speaking in tongues, or the gifts of the Spirit, or whatever. And it's easy for us to overlook the momentous hinge point that Pentecost represented. The way in which the life and the work, the resurrection of the Messiah had come to its climactic high point, the day of the coming of the Spirit, As you had promised through the centuries of Israel's life, as you had promised through your prophets, one day you would send the Spirit, the restoring, recreating, healing Spirit who would make all things new. And so I pray, Father, as we consider these things today, as we set aside this time to turn our minds and our hearts to think on these things that you will help us not just to hear and think and understand, but to be changed by the things that we hear, to recognize the infinite privilege that is ours to be Pentecost people, people who are sharers in this good gift of your spirit, the comforter, the instructor, the one who enables and empowers, the one who is Christ in us, the hope of glory. So minister to us, and we pray, Father, that you, Son and Spirit, together are equally exalted, glorified in our hearts, that we would be worshipers sincerely in truth. Meet us in this time. We devote it to you in Christ's name, amen. Well, the last time we considered the resurrection and the importance of viewing the resurrection in the light of the entire Christ event, thinking about the resurrection of Jesus, not just in terms of satisfaction for the debt of sin, but understanding resurrection as really the beginning of this new creation. And I've got a couple of introductory comments here that just pull us back to that time last week. And one of the points that I made was that in the resurrection, we don't just see the fact that this one who is the king of the kingdom has come, this new creational kingdom, but we see in Jesus even the beginning and the source of that. that new creation. He is the firstfruits. We talked about firstfruits as an offering to God that takes into account, that presupposes the fullness of the harvest to come. The firstfruits is the beginning of a harvest. And if Jesus is the firstfruits of new creation, He is the beginning of a renewal that obviously extends beyond Him. And so first fruits implies a harvest beyond itself. If Jesus is the first fruit, then there was more to come. We talked about Jesus' life and the way that he did this atoning, reconciling work just in the life that he lived with his father. culminating with the cross, but ultimately the issue wasn't just that Jesus would be a true son, but that through him he would become the beginning of a whole family of children who would be sons and daughters as he is son of God. So Jesus' resurrection then as consummate image son, man as God intended him to be, established him as God's new Adam. The resurrected son is the last Adam, as Paul calls him. Well, what is the point of Adam? Adam was the beginning of the human race. A new Adam is the beginning of a new race of people who share in his life and likeness, who bear the likeness of that particular Adam. In Paul's language, that Jesus would be the firstborn among many brethren. So the resurrection is the beginning of God's new creation, particularly in the human sense, but as first fruits, as the beginning of a harvest that is going to extend to the ends of the earth. So we talked about last time in conclusion, what does this mean? It means we as Christians are resurrection people. We are already resurrection people, as Paul says, already raised up in the Messiah, inhabiting the heavenly places in him. We are raised up in Him. We are the living manifest evidence of this new creation, this new creational kingdom, and its King. We are Christ in the world. We talked a little bit about this imagery of salt and light, and how salt and light function by intimate interaction with their environment. Light doesn't happen off to the side. Light shines in the darkness. Light dispels the darkness. Salt works by being worked into the meat or the particular food material that it's a preservative for. And this is how Jesus speaks in the Sermon on the Mount as he's instructing his Israelite fellow citizens in what it's going to mean to be sons of the kingdom. You are salt and light. that if salt loses its saltiness, how is it made salty again? It's good for nothing. It's good only to be thrown on the ground, trodden underfoot. And in the same way, you are the light of the world. But he says when men don't light a lamp and hide it under a bushel, they light it and put it up on the table where it illumines the whole room and everything in the room. And he says, in the same way, you as the light of the world, let your light shine before men that they would see your good works, the kingdom works, the works of this new way of being human, and they would glorify your father who is in heaven. So to be salt and light, to be resurrection people, is to be actively engaged in the world. This is where we ended with those Torrance quotes last week. actively engaged but in a way that conforms to and advances the truth of the new world, the new creation, this pattern of new creation that's been inaugurated in Jesus himself. But at the very center of that is the person and the work of the Holy Spirit and that's what brings us now to this episode of Pentecost. Pentecost as the time where the Spirit is outpoured into the world. And, you know, it's often been a quandary with people because they've said, well, wasn't the Spirit around in the Old Testament? Wasn't the Spirit around in the life of Israel? Yes, but not in the way that we see manifested at Pentecost. The Spirit led the people of Israel. The Spirit was, in a sense, God's presence and power amongst the sons of Israel. He preserved them. He went with them. but this would be a whole new pattern of the Spirit's presence and involvement in the world, very much tied to Jesus' own life and work. Remember in the upper room, as Jesus begins talking about the Spirit, he's talking about the meaning, what's gonna happen the next day, the meaning of his death, the meaning of his crucifixion, and how this is the way in which the Spirit will come. He says, unless I go, the Spirit will not come. He is the one in whom I will return to you. He is the one in whom I will take you to the place that I am, that you would be one with me as I am one with the Father. The Spirit is the one in whom this new intimacy, this new union would be accomplished. This is at the heart then of what Pentecost is all about. And as I say here, his presence and work even in relation to Jesus was very much tied to Jesus' humanity. We don't think of the Spirit's relation to Jesus in terms of, okay, this was the way in which we see his deity. No, this was the way in which he was actually living as true man. conceived by the Spirit, led by the Spirit, empowered by the Spirit, communing with His Father through the Spirit, doing the works that He did through the Spirit, enduring the cross through the Spirit, being raised by the Spirit. ultimately exalted through the Spirit. You see the Spirit at the center of all of that. So from beginning to end, Jesus' life fulfilled Isaiah's promise of a unique servant, Israel, anointed by Yahweh's Spirit for his task. We saw how Jesus, after his baptism, where he's anointed with the Spirit, he goes into the synagogue at Nazareth and he reads from Isaiah 61, the Spirit of the Lord is upon me, he's anointed me. to proclaim the good news to the poor, right? This day of the Lord's Jubilee. So Jesus was man of the spirit, but for the sake of mankind and the wider creation. We see in his relation to the spirit what it is to be truly human, but he didn't just do that for the sake of himself, but ultimately he was the pattern of this new human race. He's man of the Spirit, but as last Adam. The point being that what will come from him through the ministration of the Spirit is a whole new race of human beings who will be related to the Spirit in the same way that he was related to the Spirit, and so related to their Father in the same way. That's why the Spirit's coming at Pentecost followed from and depended on Jesus' own triumph and glorification as true man. I use the expression here, pneumatikos man, man of the spirit. This is the way Paul refers to Jesus. But he was man of the spirit. Adam was psychikos man, natural man. This last Adam is pneumatikos man, man of the spirit. But in order that what would come from him is a whole community of pneumatikoi. spiritual men, not spiritual in the way that we think about it, oh yes, I'm a spiritual person, I believe in God, or I'm religious, or I'm a Hindu, or I'm a shaman, not spiritual in that sense, but meaning being enabled, empowered, animated by, led by the Spirit, the Holy Spirit of God. That's what it is to be pneumaticoi, and this is what Jesus was promising in the upper room. I am going but I'm coming back to you. I will come in the Spirit. The Spirit will lead you into all truth. He will take what is mine and He will communicate it to you. And then you will be able to be witnesses of me in truth. You will testify of me not just by your words but by who you are. And at the beginning of the book of Acts, Luke records the things that Jesus began to do and teach are now to be carried on through his disciples. But in what way? In the sense that they are him in the world by being taught, led, animated by his spirit. So Jesus says to them, tarry in Jerusalem till you are clothed with power from on high. When the Spirit comes, then you will be witnesses of me in Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria, to the ends of the earth." So that's what Pentecost is about, and it has the Spirit at the very center of it. So as we think about Pentecost, the place to begin is by recognizing that it's really the capstone of the Christ event. And even when you think about this event, what we call Pentecost was actually at the time of the Feast of Pentecost. Pentecost being taken from the fact that this came 50 days after the Passover, right? The Feast of Unleavened Bread. Passover began the Feast of Unleavened Bread. But that Feast of Unleavened Bread, 50 days later, culminated with the Feast of Weeks, is the way the Bible usually refers to it. Each one had its own first fruits offering. After the Passover, the first day after the Sabbath of the Passover, came the waving of the sheaf offering as a first fruit. Pentecost has the presenting to the Lord of another offering, two loaves baked with the produce of that harvest, baked with leaven. So they're bookends. These two offerings are bookends that joined together the Feast of Unleavened Bread and the Feast of Weeks. And that's why you have all of these people in Jerusalem at that time, as we read in Acts 2, because these were two of the three feasts where all males in Israel were to present themselves in Jerusalem. And because they were only 50 days apart, and particularly people who came a long way, they weren't going to go all the way back to wherever they came from. And we saw from Acts 2, they were coming from all over the Roman empire. Jews from all over the empire were coming as required by Torah to be in Jerusalem for those two feasts. And if you're coming for Passover, you're not gonna leave and come back 50 days later. So they tarried. and stayed there dwelling in Jerusalem through that interval. And that's why you find them all there on the day of Pentecost. So these two feasts are very tightly woven together. If Jesus offered himself and found the meaning of his self-offering in Passover, and even the firstfruits offering associated with that, that has its own capstone in the Feast of Weeks or Pentecost. So this isn't arbitrary. This is all a part of God structuring these things to show how all of Israel's life and calendar and festal issues, everything in Israel's life was ultimately building the case for the Messiah and the messianic work. That's this first point that Pentecost has to be viewed as the capstone of the Christ event. You see that even in the feasts themselves. But also an important aspect of Pentecost that we tend to miss as Western American Christians certainly is that it represents the fulfillment of the promise of God to renew Israel. We kept seeing as we went through the Old Testament God's promise that desolation, judgment, exile are coming, but that wouldn't be the last word. One day Yahweh would arise, he would return, he would take up the power of deliverance in himself, he would put on the helmet of salvation, he'd put on the breastplate of righteousness, he would come, he would deliver the exiles, he would cleanse, he would restore, he would heal, he would gather them back, he would once again take up his place in their midst and he would set over them as king this messianic son of David who was to come. This is the great theme of the Old Testament. And so we see that truth of renewal in essence in Jesus. He is the true Israel, the true son of Abraham in whom the Abrahamic people are to be renewed. But we see the beginning of that restored Israel taking place at Pentecost. So Pentecost provided the answer to the question of the relationship between Jesus' status as man of the spirit and his status as last Adam. Because it was in that Pentecost event that God manifested his intent that this glorified image son, the resurrected, exalted, enthroned son of David should be the firstborn among many brethren. brethren who like him are resurrected, exalted, imaged children living in the power of his spirit. How did this begin? It began with the 12 disciples, right? In the upper room at the center of this assembly of Jewish disciples are the 12. And we've talked about the fact that the 12 apostles was a critical number because they were to be the foundation of a restored Israel corresponding to the 12 tribes of Israel. So if we would have read in chapter 1, we didn't. We started with chapter 2 at Pentecost. But after Jesus is ascended, part of the process of preparing for Pentecost, waiting for it, is that they have to pick a new replacement for Judas. It's going to be 12 apostles on Pentecost who go down into the street and begin proclaiming the mighty works of God. And these aren't just arbitrary, God is great, he made the world, he made the sea, he made the fish. It's not that. The mighty works of God, this is, in the biblical vernacular, this is God's mighty saving works. God taking up the power to be warrior, to be, it's the language of Joel. God arising and doing this mighty work of vanquishing his enemies, becoming king. That's what they're proclaiming, the gospel, the good news of this triumph of God in the streets. But at the center of this outpouring of the Spirit are the 12 apostles. The Spirit descends on them and appears as tongues of fire above them, right? So this renewal of Israel is to show that it is actually the people of Abraham that are the starting point. It begins with the 12 and these Jewish disciples that are up in the upper room. It spills down into the streets, and amongst this small group of Jewish disciples is a large crowd of Jews, both native Judeans, but also diaspora Jews, Jews that have come from all over the empire to be there at that time, as well as, Luke records, proselytes, Gentiles who were converts to Judaism. So in a certain sense, you have all Torah believers there. You have all Jews and proselytes to Judaism that are gathered there and become the constituent members, these 3,000 that are gathered to the Lord that day. We've talked about this before. The initial church, the initial restored people of God, is a Jewish people. The church was a Jewish sect. And even though there were Gentiles there in Jerusalem at Pentecost, they were in effect Jews in that they were converts to Judaism. So you see in this, God is now fulfilling his promise to raise up the exiled house of Israel. He's reconstituting Israel in and around the Messiah who is the preeminent Israelite, the servant of Yahweh, in whom Israel would be restored, Isaiah chapter 49. These are all things that the Old Testament was building the case for. So Jesus' death and resurrection completed His atoning and reconciling work on behalf of all mankind and the cursed creation. And now, together with His Father, just as He had promised His disciples From his place at the right hand of power, they're sending the Spirit to fulfill the goal of atonement, atonement as reconciling the alienation between God and his estranged creation with people at the center of that. Now, Father and Son together are sending the Spirit to fulfill the goal of that reconciliation, which is renewal and in gathering. that reconciliation has to bear its fruit in actual gathering back to God of actual human beings. But as we've seen, the very structure that God put in place because of his covenant with Abraham, this renewal had to begin with the Abrahamic household. Jesus came to the lost sheep of the house of Israel, to the Jew first, then to the Greek. not because they're better, not because they're more important, but because God had bound up this restorative work in Abraham and the Abrahamic people. And so Jesus, the Israelite, was going to reconstitute a Jewish Israel around him that now this Israel, this true Israel, could be about its election, fulfilling its election on behalf of the world. That was the basis for the apostolic mission carried out in the power of the Spirit. John 20, as Jesus is resurrected, he appears to his disciples and he says, As the Father has sent me, so I am sending you. And he breathed on them and said, Receive the Holy Spirit. The Spirit was going to come upon the apostles and this initial Jewish little fledgling group of Jesus followers. The Spirit was going to come on them in order that now they could fulfill Israel's vocation on behalf of the world. They would go out into the world, as Jesus said, and bear witness of me. You will testify of me as the Spirit testifies of me. That's John 16 where you see Jesus saying the Spirit will convict the world of sin and righteousness and judgment. How does he do that? Through the people through whom the Spirit manifests this truth that convicts the world. The people of the Messiah will go out in the power of the Spirit and they will do this work of gathering in the nations. So Pentecost testified to the universal goal in the Spirit's coming, but ultimately you see that also in another aspect of the significance of Pentecost, which again isn't unusual. It's not like nobody's ever thought of it before. But the first thing about this, and this has to do with this new creational kingdom, the universal significance of this. This isn't just about saving Jews or whatever we happen to think. This is about the fleshing out in reality. If the messianic work and Jesus' resurrection is the reconciling of everything in the heavens and the earth to God, Now there has to be the actualizing of that reconciliation in a new relationship between God and his creation, ultimately between God and the human race, most narrowly. And we see that in the way that Peter interpreted the significance of what was happening. We read from Joel 2. This is what Joel was talking about. In the last days, the Spirit will be poured out on all mankind. as many as will call on the name of the Lord will be saved." That's what you're seeing happening here. What's happening with these 12 immediate followers of Jesus and then another assembly around them, those that were gathered up in this room waiting for this fulfillment that Jesus had promised, the coming of the Spirit. What you see in this little group is the beginning of what God has promised, the outpouring of the Spirit on all flesh, on all mankind. This is to be a universal work. And I commented, at least briefly, on how you see that even in the idea of the Feast of Weeks. Passover had its first fruit offering, which was the waving of a sheaf, not processed grain, but a sheaf of barley being waved to the Lord. associated with a feast of unleavening. Now at the capstone of that, you have actual bread being made with that product, harvested, processed, two loaves, each of them leavened. which is alluding to the idea of Jew and Gentile. This offering of the Messiah to the Father, the first fruits, yields a second first fruits, but this one is a leavened first fruit, but one that is made fit for the Lord. The Messiah, the unleavened one, but you see this imagery plays out in that sort of a way. So Israel is being restored as first fruit offering to Yahweh, but as the promise of an abundant harvest to come. Both the sheaf and the loaves were regarded as first fruits, pointing to a further harvest to come. So the spirits coming at Pentecost brought the Christ event to its climactic outcome. And it signaled that Yahweh had indeed redeemed Zion as he promised through the servant. He was now restoring Zion such that she should become the mother of a multitude of children drawn from all mankind. This is Isaiah 54 and 55 coming out of the four servant songs. All stuff we've considered as we've gone through the Old Testament. But Zion's renewal and the renewal of her children look to the creation's renewal. I've talked about this before. God's intent is not just to renew human beings, but to renew human beings that they can fulfill the reason for which he created them, which is to be the stewards, the caregivers, the lords, the administrators of his relationship with his creation. So the restoration of a human race looks to the restoration of the whole creation. We talked about that last week in terms of resurrection. The resurrection of our bodies is the precursor to the renewing of the physical creation. All creation participates in this redemption and renewal and restoration. Man is imaged son for the sake of God's relationship with his creation. So there can't really be a renewed humanity without a renewed creation. As I say here, truth implicates function as well as form. To simply renew human beings without them executing their function for which they were created is really not to renew them. And their function implicates the creation itself. This is why it's so wrong and so misleading for Christians to present this goal of God in the saving work of Jesus in disembodied souls going off to heaven. It misses this whole point of creational renewal. So this is the third piece of this. If Pentecost speaks to the closing, the climax, the completion of the whole Passover festal season that had Jesus at the front end of it, this is now the book and the completing of that. It also speaks to God's promise to renew Israel that it can now become the light of the nations and begin this work of global and gathering. So also Pentecost establishes If the new creational kingdom was inaugurated in Jesus, Pentecost establishes that by now producing subjects of that kingdom under King Jesus, but a new creational kingdom. The last thing that I want to consider in that regard is the connection between what happened at Pentecost and the Babel episode. And this isn't explicitly mentioned in the book of Acts. It's not explicitly tied to Pentecost, the Babel episode, but you see the correspondence there. And if you're familiar with the Babel episode, you have in Genesis chapter 10, after the Flood and the beginning of a, you know, a new human race that are all related to Noah, right? There were the eight people that came out of the Flood. You have now in chapter 10, all of a sudden, the discussing of nations and languages and families and geographical locations. related to Shem, Ham, and Japheth. Well, it begs the question, where did all these nations and languages and, you know, scattered throughout the earth come from? Chapter 11, the first nine verses or so of chapter 11, the Babel episode, explain how that came about. So the compiler of Genesis is throwing this thing of nations, languages, distinct people groups scattered around the earth at you and to pique your interest, and then saying, here's how that came about. Coming out of the flood, when the world is again now repopulated by a new Adam, by Noah and his family, coming out of the flood, the human race, Genesis tells us, remain relatively unified. They had a common language, common culture, common social order. As a human community, they were as homogeneous as a community could be. Well, what happens then is this human community in solidarity decides that they're going to build a city for themselves, hearkening back to Cain building a city that he names after himself, right? Or he names it for his son. But they're going to build a city to make a name for themselves. And at the center of this city, it's called a tower in most versions, but it's the idea of a ziggurat. And a ziggurat, if you look in the ancient world, it's like a stepped, almost kind of like a ladder. It's a long ascent. that goes up to a high point, usually where sacrifices, it was a place where the gods or the deities were encountered. But more than the priest going up to meet the god, what the ziggurats did was they provided a means for the deity to come down and to meet with the worshipers, with the implication that this deity would come to meet us and bless us, to prosper us. Our worship is appeasing the gods and we give him away now to come and to meet with us and to be with us to bless us. So this is human hubris. This is in a sense whether conscious or not an attempt to undo the alienation that had come because of the fall. Building a city that we will It will be a tribute, a monument to us, to human solidarity, to human power, to human accomplishment. See what we can do if we'll just put our heads together. If we can just come together and be of one heart and mind, look at what we can accomplish. And we build this ziggurat to have the God of heaven, the creator God, come and meet with us here. That's what Babel was all about. And you see when you read that account that God does come down to meet with them. He comes down to see what it is that they're doing is the way that the text puts it. And what does he do? He finds fault with what they're doing. He acknowledges at a certain level that yes, the human race in solidarity is capable of accomplishing amazing things. But it's just like when Haggai is sent to the priest to ask for a ruling, if you take a piece of clean meat and you put it in a defiled garment, what will happen to it? Does the clean make the unclean clean? And the priest's ruling is no, it works the other way. If you bring together something that's clean and something that's unclean, the clean will be defiled every time. And God says, so it is with my people and so it is with the works of their hands. Israel's whole history was a record, a time and time again unfolding of what would happen when the people reach some kinds of solidarity in their national covenant life, and it never went well. So in a sense, the solidarity of the people is a denial of the fundamental at Babel. The solidarity of the people is a fundamental denial of the essential alienation that was introduced into the creation at the Fall. We've talked about that many times. Not only human beings alienated from God, but alienated from one another. You see that in the relationship between Adam and Eve. the awareness of nakedness, and, oh, the woman did this, and this is her. You know, you see this fundamental I versus you dynamic that now characterizes the world. And even the alienation of people with themselves, people conflicted and opposing themselves and at odds with their own best interests, their own sound judgment, people at war with themselves. What marks the created order after the fall is alienation at every level. But here you have the human race together in one place saying, we're of one heart, we're of one mind, we're of one purpose, look what we can accomplish. And so God does say, I can't let this continue because they will be able to accomplish great things, amazing things, but not things that I can tolerate. because what they will accomplish will ultimately work against my good creation. Their solidarity won't work for good, it will work ultimately for evil. Even what was happening at that time was human solidarity manifesting corporate hubris and idolatry, trying to make God the captive of their own agenda, right? God said, I can't tolerate this, I won't allow this to happen. Yes, they can accomplish a lot, I've used the example before, if you look at coming out of World War II, the United Nations, two world wars, and people are like, the only answer is to bring the human race together. We can't endure this kind of global warfare. Well, has the United Nations solved anything? No. All it's done is just increase and intensify the human corruption, but now at the institutional level. So one culture, one language, one social identity had enabled the solidarity that was manifested at Babel. But the truth was that the Calamity of Eden had estranged human beings from one another, even as they were estranged from their Creator. There was no true human unity, and what could be achieved at the human level of unity would only work against mankind. God recognized all of this and he would not tolerate it. This kind of unity in the context of a fundamental alienation hostility would work against his good creation and his purposes for it. So how did God respond? He shattered that solidarity by scattering the human race geographically, separating and isolating the various people groups through different languages and cultures. This is the way the Bible explains what we see manifest in the world, which is people who are all the same species, as it were, but estranged, alienated, divided, separated from each other by language, culture, practices. When I was in England, even though we were speaking the same language, I wasn't often sure we were speaking the same language, because I didn't often understand what they were getting at. The humor's different. The expressions are different. You read their greeting cards, and you're like, I don't get it. It doesn't make any sense to me. The food they ate, cultural practices, the way their homes were ordered, everything's very different. And that's as close to American and kind of American experience as you can get. So people are very divided throughout the world. They don't see things the same. They have different perspectives. It's the reason that we can't just go into the Middle East and impose American democracy and think it's going to work. They don't think the same way. They don't have the same sort of perspective on things. So God was not only addressing the hubris and idolatry of Babel. He was exposing the delusion of human unity and underscoring the fundamental alienation that divides all people. But God wasn't condemning human unity as such. In the Messiah, we know that God's design is a unified human race, a family of people who are one as Father and Son are one, correct? But the issue was that God and not human beings would bring that unity about And importantly, this would be a unity that is unimaginable to human beings, let alone incapable of being accomplished. The unity that God would bring was unimaginable, and it would come in a most astonishing way. Not through any natural points of commonality. When we think of unity, it's always around things that we understand as human beings to be points of commonality. You know, these are my homies. We speak the same language. We know the same lingo, right? We have the same culture, values, or whatever. This was going to be a unity that wouldn't be based on any commonality under the sun. No human commonality. but a true unity that's comprehensive and permanent that is common union with the last Adam sharing in his life through his spirit. A community of one people but of every tribe and tongue and nation and people. We've talked before and we'll be talking more about it. This was the great struggle of the church in the first century, is how do we have a unity that has nothing to do with language, culture, dress, food, communities that we're a part of, even most significantly, Jew-Gentile distinctions. How do we become one in the context of those differences? And the natural human way is to say, okay, you become like us. We become like you. The way we find commonality is to set aside the differences and find something that we can rally around. And in the early church, And particularly in the Jew-Gentile level, as we're going to see, the answer was not Gentiles become Jews, but recognizing that as Jews and as Gentiles, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave, free, male, female, you are all one in the Messiah. an otherworldly unity that not only has nothing to do with things under the sun, it actually sets aside everything under the sun that would be a point of unity. It doesn't require it. It doesn't even look for it. Unity is not uniformity. And that becomes important, we'll see, even as we how we understand what the church really is, what unity is really all about. So Pentecost completed the Christ event, initiated the new creational kingdom of God. We saw that in even the relation between the bookends of the two feasts, the Feast of Unleavened Bread and the Feast of Weeks. And so we see in the Spirit's work beginning that day, this work of ingathering, it would Breathe the promise of a fully restored covenant household comprised of Jew and Gentile, as Paul calls it, the Israel of God. Circumcision means nothing. Uncircumcision means nothing. What matters is a new creation. To as many as walk according to that rule, mercy and peace be upon them, even upon the Israel of God. So I wanted to conclude again with a couple of Torrance statements, again, because I think that these kind of get at, in a summary way, what I've tried to speak to today. He says, first, we must remember the fact of Pentecost and that the outpouring of the Spirit is one of the mighty acts of redemption and recreation. In other words, the pouring out of the Spirit belongs to atonement. It is atonement actualizing itself really and subjectively, meaning in terms of individual people, within the personal lives of men and women, within their decisions, living actions, upholding them creatively in their real relation with God. This is not a new event. Pentecost is not a new event or some additional event in atonement. It is but the one atoning event inserting itself into human lives and actualizing itself within them, just as the Feast of Weeks was the completion of what began with Passover and the Feast of Unleavened Bread. or to put it the other way around, and this is the salient point, if we think of the incarnation and death of Christ as his great work of incorporating himself into our alienated humanity and existence, and taking our whole cause, our need, our plight, our circumstance before God, taking our whole cause upon himself so that he acts fully and completely for us on our behalf, then we must think of the baptism of the Spirit, what began at Pentecost, as affecting our incorporation into Christ. That is, our incorporation into Christ, who incorporated himself into us in order to act in our place as substitute. That's what Pentecost initiated, is if Christ bore us, we have to now bear him. and we bear him through the Spirit. Christ in you, the hope of glory." What is that, the Spirit? Well, what does this mean then for this thing called the Church, all of the members of Christ in that way? He says, the oneness of the Church derives from the one Spirit of God through whom it is united to Christ. The Spirit is the principle of multiplicity as well as unity. Unity does not mean uniformity. but he is the principle of unity in the heart and wealth of all multiplicity, making one in the context of differences. Therefore, when he came upon the assembly at Pentecost, binding the people of God together in one, it was the antithesis of Babel, the dividing and confounding of the people gathered to glorify their own name. For at Pentecost, the ancient promises and prophecies of the healing and restoration and reunion of God's people are fulfilled as they call upon the name of God and are saved, as they are given one heart and one mind and one voice in their praise and thanksgiving to God for Jesus, the Messiah, his son. Because he, meaning the Spirit, sheds abroad the love of God in the hearts of the people of God, he heals their dissensions. He restores them to fellowship and unity with one another in God. Think again of Jesus' high priestly prayer in John 17, part of his interpretation of the meaning of his cross and what's going to come from it. Because He, the Spirit, sheds abroad the love of God in the hearts of the people of God, He heals their dissensions and restores them to fellowship and unity with one another in God. Therefore, the continuance of division in the Church cannot but grieve and quench the Spirit in its midst, cripple and weaken the Church, and destroy the roots of its communion with the life and love of God. Pentecost establishes this pattern of new creation centered in a new community of people defined by this new creation, a whole new way of being human. And that's what's to be on display in the world. That's what the church was grappling to understand and flesh out in its own understanding and experience. And that's what we're going to be seeing as we move forward now. into the New Testament and seeing these epistles and how they're addressing the challenges that the church had. And at the center of it is this, how do we become an entirely different community of people who are not unified by anything that unifies people? but unified by something that is otherworldly, something that is transcendent. The only thing that ties us together, but ties us together exhaustively, comprehensively, permanently, is being taken up in the life of God in Christ by the Spirit. not our language, not our culture, not our dress, not our food, not our denomination, not our traditions, not our confession, meaning our written confessions, whatever they happen to be. And the church for 2,000 years has struggled to find and hold onto its true unity, to know what really binds us together and to fight for that. and not constantly be grappling for things that are irrelevant, seeking unity in things that don't count, that don't matter. That's where we'll be going. But that's what Pentecost does is establish this paradigm of new creation in a new human community that will ultimately take everything up in the Messiah. So let me pray then and we'll be done for today. Father, I pray that this will lay a good foundation for us, that it will be something that will mull around in our minds, something that we will be thinking about. This is truly at the heart of the battle that each of us continually has to fight throughout our lives as Christians. How do we recognize and how do we relate to our brothers and sisters in Christ? What is the church? What is it to be a part of the church? What is it to be the church in the world? What is it to bear the good news of the triumphant Christ that only the living, existing, manifest church can testify to? Father, when we think of these things, we see how far the Christian community throughout the world has gone astray throughout the ages, throughout the centuries, and certainly even in this country at this time. We struggle to know what it is to even be Christians, and so the church struggles to be the church. And there were all sorts of things that we are constantly preoccupied with and give our attention and our efforts to, even in our desire to be faithful Christians, to be zealous for this thing called the church, things that really are irrelevant and in many ways, perhaps even undermine and argue against the truth of the church and its witness in the world. And so Father, I pray that we will be good stewards even in our pondering and meditating, thinking about these things that we've considered today and that they will provide a foundation for our consideration going forward as we see the way Paul and the other apostolic leaders and witnesses labored and were so burdened for the church to be true to its identity and its calling. This is always the struggle that the church faces. It's at the center of this need to tear down strongholds and every seemingly lofty thought and conception and notion and idea that is actually raised up against the knowledge of Christ. What it means for us to truly take every thought, every understanding captive to the truth as it is in Christ himself. This is the challenge. This is the work to which you've called us. And if we are to be faithful witnesses in the world, we've got to get this right. So I pray not just for this group assembled today, but I pray for your church throughout this land and throughout the world. Father, that if there is to be a revival, if there is to be the outpouring, a new work of your spirit in the world, that it would be this work. This is what your church needs. It needs a fresh, leading and instructing and purging and restoring by your Spirit, that your church would bear truthful witness in these days where its testimony is so desperately needed. So we pray for your grace, not only for us individually, but but in your church at large. And we do so with the confidence that you have not taken your hands off your church. Jesus himself said, the gates of Hades, death itself, all of these things that would come against your purposes, they will not prevail. You are jealous for your church and you are building it. But Father, we have a responsibility to be faithful stewards of what you've entrusted to us. You don't work in a vacuum. So help us to be faithful in all these things we ask in Jesus' name. Amen.