An Eschatology Of Pentecost

ESCHATOLOGICAL BLUE DIAMONDS

All diamonds are beautiful and rare. They are formed as a collection of carbon atoms, subjected to unimaginable heat and pressure over the space of time, melding into one of nature’s greatest crystalline masterpieces that has ever captivated the eyes of man. Some diamonds, such as the standard white diamond, are easier to find, occurring nearer to the surface of the earth in the alluvial deposits and within volcanic pipes, which makes them more abundant and affordable in the market. Other diamonds, however, such as the elusive blue diamond, are buried much deeper within the earth’s strata, making them not only harder to extract but also rarer and more costly. 

In the same way, every truth learned from Scripture is precious and essential. Some truths hang right on the surface of the text and do not take much digging to lodge them loose. Other truths, however, take a bit of digging. Yet, the reward for peeling back the layers of Scriptural strata is most definitely worth the reward for all who will venture into its depths. 

This is a good way of thinking about our passage today. Many of you will be familiar with some truths on the surface. These truths are precious and glorious, and I do not want to minimize them. But, if you will grab your shovel and pickaxe, I’d like to take you down just a bit further, below the surface and into the eschatological crust of the text, as we hunt for the Biblical equivalent of blue diamonds. 

THE TEXT: ACTS 2:1-12

1 When the day of Pentecost had come, they were all together in one place.2 And suddenly there came from heaven a noise like a violent rushing wind, and it filled the whole house where they were sitting. 3 And there appeared to them tongues as of fire distributing themselves, and they rested on each one of them. 4 And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak with other tongues, as the Spirit was giving them utterance.5 Now there were Jews living in Jerusalem, devout men from every nation under heaven. 6 And when this sound occurred, the crowd came together, and were bewildered because each one of them was hearing them speak in his own language. 7 They were amazed and astonished, saying, “Why, are not all these who are speaking Galileans? 8 And how is it that we each hear them in our own language to which we were born? 9 Parthians and Medes and Elamites, and residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, 10 Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the districts of Libya around Cyrene, and visitors from Rome, both Jews and proselytes, 11 Cretans and Arabs—we hear them in our own tongues speaking of the mighty deeds of God.” 12 And they all continued in amazement and great perplexity, saying to one another, “What does this mean?” 

To understand this text, let us first consider what eschatology is and how this text is eschatological. 

EXPANDING OUR DEFINITION 

First, eschatology is not merely about the final climactic moments of human history. That is a futurist’s perversion. Instead, eschatology is about what life will look like during the final age of man. Eschatology is about how the history of planet earth will be brought under the rule and dominion of Jesus Christ in these last days we are living in. That end-time age began when Jesus Christ rose from the dead and poured out His Spirit upon all flesh, which we will see in greater detail next week. 

But for now, it is crucial to understand that everything within the old covenant, all of the promises of God, all of the types and shadows, will either pass away under the rule of Christ or will soar to its climax in the rule of Christ. In this way, eschatology has just as much to do with fulfilling the past as it does with the future. Thus, eschatology is trying to understand how all of the old forms and norms will find their ultimate realization and transformation in the new covenant that Christ has ushered in. To say that in shorthand: eschatology is how Christ ushers in His end-time Kingdom, now in part, one day in full.

To that end, let us explore a few examples, beginning with Pentecost. 

PENTECOST AND THE FESTAL CALENDAR

Pentecost comes from the Greek word πεντηκοστή, which means “the fiftieth” or “the fiftieth day,” referring to the fact that the miraculous outpouring of the Holy Spirit happened fifty days after the resurrection of Christ on Easter Sunday. Yet, the origins of Pentecost and the other key events during Holy Week run much deeper than the first century AD. 

For instance, underneath the events of Good Friday, Easter, and Pentecost are buried Old Covenant feasts that directly and chronologically correlate with what Christ is doing. Take, for example, the festival called Passover. This feast was the first among the final three feasts in the Jewish year. During that feast, a lamb was slaughtered for the people’s sins, and its blood was painted on the doorpost of every home so that the angel of death would pass over them. As Christians, we look to Christ as the final and perfect Lamb, whose blood was painted over the mantle of our own hearts, causing the angel of death to pass us over so that we may inherit eternal life in the Son. 

Likewise, underneath the events of Easter and Christ’s resurrection was a Jewish festival immediately following Passover called “First Fruits.” In that feast, the people would praise and worship God for the first sign of the harvest, that once more He had caused the seeds that went down into the earth dead to sprout and break through the ground again, symbolizing new life and resurrection from the dead. When Jesus rose from the dead, during the celebration of this festival, He was not only claiming to be God; He was fulfilling an Old Covenant rite with precision and beauty. 

In the same way, underneath the events of Pentecost was an Old Covenant norm that must be explored if we are going to understand what God is doing in Acts 2. After the Passover and the festival of First Fruits, the Israelites hightail it out of Egypt and travel ferociously towards the Red Sea. After God’s final and glorious showdown with Pharoah, the Israelites continue to Sinai, where God leaves His throne in heaven and descends upon the mountain to dwell with His people. The journey from celebrating the First Fruits in Egypt to seeing Yahweh descend upon the mountain and deliver His law to Moses took exactly fifty days (Just like Pentecost). 

To commemorate that arduous fifty-day journey, God established a feast called the Festival of Weeks (Shavuot in Hebrew), which would become one of the three mandatory pilgrimage festivals that all Jewish males were required to attend once a year in Jerusalem. Furthermore, within the ordinary annual calendar of the Jews, this feast was the last and final celebration of the year, spiritually symbolizing how God’s ultimate and final purpose in redemption was to condescend and draw His sojourning people into His presence forever. 

This is why the timing of Pentecost in Acts chapter 2 is so rich and eschatologically significant. All of the events that happen during holy week and Pentecost track perfectly along with the Old Testament Festal calendar. This is not by accident or mere coincidence. God is purposefully taking His Son through each of the final feasts of Israel to show His people how His Son is the end and point that each of these feasts was pointing to. 

In the same way, God rescued His people from the Pharaoh and their taskmasters in Egypt, Heaven’s spotless Lamb came and offered Himself during the final Passover, freeing the people of God from a far worse tyrant than Pharoah. In Christ, we have been set free from the wicked rule of Satan, the slavery of our own sinful flesh, and the bonds of death that once accosted us. He is the hope the Passover was always pointing to. 

Immediately after Christ fulfilled the Passover, He fulfilled the feast of First Fruits, being the first fruit of a new creation, being the first to rise from the ground, breaking out of the earth like the first barley harvest the people were worshiping God for. In this, Christ (the bread of life) became the first one to rise in the new covenant Kingdom. And through His power, He is bringing all His people back to life and out of the grave until the entire harvest has come in. He is the hope the feast of Firstfruits was always pointing to. 

Then, fifty days later, in the same way God descended from heaven to dwell with His people in Sinai, God Himself descended again to dwell with the people of God at Pentecost. But unlike the Old Testament version, where the people needed to remain far off from God because of the finished work of Christ, the Holy Spirit of God would not remain distant but would live even within the heart of every believer. This was the chief end that the Festival of Weeks always pointed to: God living with His people forever. 

These events are not eschatological because they speak about the final moments of history. They are not eschatological because they concern modern-day Apache helicopters, Antichrists, or marks of the beast. These events are eschatological because old covenant trappings were fulfilled through Christ’s faithful work, and the final end-time Kingdom was inaugurated. Passover, Firstfruits, and the Festival of Weeks reached their glorious crescendo in the person and work of Jesus Christ. He is our forever Lamb! He is our resurrection and first fruit! And in His Spirit, He is the one who ensured God’s people would dwell in God’s presence forever! In Christ, we are not waiting for these realities to come, but because of Him, they are already fully here. 

Before concluding, there are a couple of other examples of Christ doing this same thing in this passage. Let us dig a bit deeper.  

ESCHATOLOGICAL WIND

While the disciples were waiting for the Holy Spirit to come, just as the Lord Jesus promised, they were huddled together and hiding in an upper room somewhere in Jerusalem. This made sense for a variety of reasons:

1. Jesus told them to wait, and they would have needed to stay somewhere.
2. This room was apparently spacious enough to hold 120 of them and private enough to where they would not provoke any undue suspicion.
3. This was so critical because waiting out in the open, in the town that just killed your master for insurrection and who was likely on the lookout for you, would not have been the best way to stay alive.

Yet, while they were in the safety and seclusion of the upper room, God brought the full fury of His hurricane-like breath, which is essential for a host of reasons.

The main reason is theophanic. When God physically reveals Himself to the people of Old Testament Scripture, He usually does so through a phenomenon called theophany. If you are not familiar with the term, it simply means God using material means to reveal Himself to people in a physical form. Notable examples include God appearing as a burning bush to Moses, a smoking pot to Abraham, a cloud to Israel, and a sparring partner to Jacob. 

In addition to those common theophanies, God often appeared physically as a wind or cloud in various places. First, since the Hebrew word for Spirit (Ruach) also translates as wind, the Holy Spirit hovering over the chaotic primordial waters of pre-creation in the first two verses of the Bible would count as the earliest example of a wind theophany in Scripture (Genesis 1:1-2). More salient to our discussion would be how the Lord appeared during the Red Sea episode, hovering over a different set of waters, blowing back the waves into walls with theophanic fury. In that scene, God delivered His people by His own breath, which indeed connects to Pentecost and the coming of the Spirit. 

Yet, another wind theophany blows closer to the point of Pentecost. If you remember a few paragraphs before, I said the Old Testament equivalent of Pentecost was the Festival of Weeks in Exodus. This festival occurred after Passover and Firstfruits, and it commemorated how the people traveled for fifty days and settled at the base of God’s mountain waiting for Him to descend. When He did descend upon the mountain, the text tells us that He came as a furious storm that shook the mountain so fiercely that the people and the mountain trembled! In the middle of that storm cloud that lowered itself down upon the mountain’s apex, the wind was so intense that it was described as God blowing trumpets with the magnitude of His breath. Is this not precisely what is occurring at Pentecost?

The twelve disciples, like the twelve tribes of Israel, are in an elevated place waiting on their covenant God to come down and make His dwelling place among them. And in much the same way that God descended upon Mt. Sinai with a breathy storm, God filled the upper room with His glorious divine breath, with one notable exception. Instead of the people being barricaded from going into the eye of God’s theophanic hurricane, Christ the better Moses ascended the mountain and made atonement for our sins. Because of that atonement, God would descend and live with us forever. In that way, the wind rushing into the upper room was the definitive sign that God was making His dwelling place, without restrictions or distance, with His people forever. No longer relocated to the tops of mountains or the back room of a Jerusalem temple, but dwelling within His people’s hearts, filling them with His life-giving windy breath. 

ESCHATOLOGICAL FIRE

You will also notice that when the Spirit comes upon God’s people at Pentecost, He came as a tongue of fire that sat aloft on each of the disciples’ heads and did not consume them. This should remind us of how God first revealed Himself to Moses, coming as a fire that did not consume the dusty wilderness bush at Mt. Sinai. In addition, when Moses led God’s people out of Egypt, wasn’t it God who appeared both as a cloud to lead the people by day (wind theophany) and as a tongue of fire to lead them by night (fire theophany)? And, wasn’t it also God, who when His divine cloud descended upon Mount Sinai (wind theophany), that He also appeared through bursts of intense, white-hot lightning at the apex of Sinai (fire theophany)? 

Without belaboring the point, when God drew His people out of Egypt and settled upon the mountain to be their God and them be His people, He used fire and wind as the physical phenomena signifying His genuine spiritual presence. This is, again, precisely what happened in the upper room. The same God who blew His wind and cracked His fiery lightning on Sinai was now inhabiting the Upper Room with wind and flame. And this time, there was no safe distance between the people and their God. He was descending with wind and flame directly onto them – and praise be the Lord Jesus Christ – for this is what our Lord accomplished. 

There is one final Old Testament reality going on in the text that Christ’s Kingdom will not only intersect with but also undo.  

ESCHATOLOGICAL BABEL AND THE TABLE OF NATIONS

The first command in Scripture is for the people of God to be fruitful, to multiply, and to spread out into the uninhabited world (Genesis 1:28). Yet, under the perniciousness of prevailing sin, the people staunchly refused the commands of God and chose rebellion instead. Rather than spreading out and carrying faithful God-glorifying living to the remotest deserts and deepest bogs, sinful man multiplied their iniquities. Then they huddled together in a single plain where they sat stubbornly in disobedience. 

Echoing their creator God, who said: “Let us make man in our image,” this gaggle of future babblers declared: “Let us make a city,” Let us make a tower,” and “Let us make a name for ourselves.” In this threefold repetition of the “let us,” this group quoted God. Yet, their hearts couldn’t be farther from His. Instead of making a name for God, the entire point of our creation, they were consumed (like Lucifer) with making a name for themselves. Instead of spreading out in obedience, they built a tower that so dominated the ancient skyline that no one could get separated from them (Genesis 11:4). They erected a mud-brick skyscraper to ensure no one accidentally obeyed God and ended up scattering.

Ironically, the tower was so slight and unimpressive from God’s vantage point that He described Himself having to come down in order to see it (Genesis 11:5). Picture God squinting and mocking their effort. Then, once God comes down and scrambles their alphabets, they all become so mired in linguistic confusion that everyone ends up scattering anyway, which is another rather humorous aspect of this narrative. Ultimately, the peoples of the earth are subdivided into seventy nations separated by many languages. 

Now, think about what is going on at Pentecost. Instead of God coming down to confuse the people’s languages, God unloosened the various tongues so the people would no longer Babel (pun intended). Instead of one people being divided into all nations on earth (as was the case on the Shinar plain), in Jerusalem that day, people from “all the nations under heaven” came back together as one people under the one true King. In both scenes, the people are confused and bewildered. Yet, in Christ, everything that afflicted the people of God before is now melting away. 

HOW SIGNS WORK

Before drawing this to a close, one additional element to this passage needs to be dug into. If you are tracking, we have dug down under the surface into the layers of Old Testament feasts to see the eschatological truths buried within. We went further down into an understanding of wind and fire theophany to find the gems embedded into the text at that level. Then, we dug further down into the typological level, seeing how Jesus was undoing one of the most profound elements of the curse at Babel by reunifying the nations at Pentecost. Now, we are ready to find blue diamonds. 

When God gives a sign to His people, He gives it to encourage us because He loves us. He uses temporary physical means like water applied in baptism, fire mounted on the apostle’s head, wind rushing into a room at Pentecost, bread and wine at the Lord’s Table to point to eternal spiritual realities that never end. While the physical manifestation of fire on the apostle’s head and wind in their chamber was a singular and non-repeatable event, the spiritual reality that each signified remains. Every time a man or woman believes the Gospel, the fire and breath of God descends upon them, igniting and fueling new life in the Spirit, which makes every believer on earth a walking, talking Mount Sinai. We do not need the physical phenomena to continue. That was only a sign that the spiritual realities had come. 

In the same way, the gift of a unifying tongue that brings the disparate nations back together in Jerusalem is a one-time physical sign from God that need not be repeated in the modern world. In this passage, God was not encouraging an ongoing physical Pentecostal-style tongue babbling because this passage says Christ has cured and will continue to cure the problem present at Babel. Instead, this passage is a physical sign from God that communicates a powerful spiritual truth. At Pentecost, God unloosed their tongues to bring the fractured world back together in His Son. And while the physical manifestation of the miraculous language speaking does not continue to this day, the spiritual consequence of God unifying the Babel-broken world in His Son does continue. In Christ, the scattered, fractured world will be reintegrated. There will one day, and I hope soon, one people, washed with the same baptism, feasting at the same table, joyfully serving their one King. Pentecost was a one-time event that showcases that God is doing that work, and He will not stop until it is finished. 

CONCLUSION

Eschatology is a much larger topic than what concerns the last and final moments of human history. Rightly understood, eschatology speaks about the entirety of Jesus’ end-time Kingdom. It includes things that happened in the very beginning of His reign, such as His Passover completing death, His Firstfruits accomplishing resurrection, His Daniel 7 fulfilling Ascension, His Festival of Weeks closing Pentecost, and His undoing of the curse of Babel. Eschatology includes events in the apostles’ lifetime, such as the Gospel going out and advancing into the Roman world, the downfall and destruction of Jerusalem, the end of the temple era, the sacrificial system, and the priesthood. Eschatology concerns what happened after the canon was closed, how Jesus’ Kingdom eventually overtook the Roman Empire, experienced a Reformation in Europe, and how that Kingdom is alive and well today. 

Eschatology concerns future events, but those events are the minority. More accurately, it is the theological discipline that examines how all the promises of God, from salvation and redemption to His worldwide Kingdom, will come to fruition under the rule and reign of His Son. And when you understand that, you will not only see that you are living in the end times but also that the final era of human history is upon us. This means that we are living under the end-time rule of Christ, and there are end-time things Christ has commanded us to be doing. The apostles were only commanded to sit and wait for a season. Once the Spirit came upon them, they sat and waited no longer.

In the same way, far too many people treat eschatology as something long into the future that is either irrelevant to where we stand or something we have to wait to arrive. Dear ones, our end-time King has come. His end-time kingdom is here. And His Spirit has come upon you, christening you for the end-time service He has commissioned you to. 

With that, do not be the kind of Christian who sits down and does not get involved. Do what the apostles did and turn your city upside down for Christ. Start Bible studies. Host prayer groups. Do some street preaching. Be present and active in your local congregations. Get married to a godly spouse. Have children and disciple them. Use your life to see His end-time Kingdom advance. 

And one last thing: remember what Jesus did at Pentecost. For a moment, He made all the peoples from all the nations in Jerusalem that day speak in one voice. Let that be an encouragement that our work is not in vain. One day, Christ will complete that work. He will make of all the nations on earth one people under God, indivisible, with perfect liberty and perfect justice for all. We labor to see that true and better nation come in full, even as our nation withers around us.

God bless you! 

Postmillenialism