What Did They Miss On That First New Testament Pentecost?

We are approaching the anniversary of Pentecost on June 4, 2006. Pentecost is fifty days following Easter each year.

What do you think happened on that fiftieth day after Christ’s death? I guess it all depends on what you have been taught, or haven’t been. Most fall in the last category, “haven’t been”. After fifty years of being a Christian, I had never heard anyone or any church explain to me what really happened on that day of Pentecost. It had always been explained to mean the start of the Church, power, wind, tongues of fire, and speaking in tongues.

What did they miss? IT WAS THE UNDERSTANDING OF A CHRISTIAN’S NEW BIRTH INTO A NEW NATURE - THE NATURE OF GOD! They missed the knowledge that Jesus was to take up His abode in them and become their very life.

The Passover had taken place fifty days earlier and Jesus had commanded them to wait for the promise which was the fulfillment of the feast of Pentecost. The Church started off at Pentecost with the twelve apostles, about most of whom little is said. These apostles went about doing signs and wonders, which is what you might expect from them.
Since they knew Jesus after the flesh, and He was their teacher, they were out trying to duplicate what they had seen Jesus do. This was not bad, but in so doing they missed the purpose of the Holy Spirit as a teacher. It is the job of the Holy Spirit to teach us about the resurrected Christ. He is no longer Jesus of Nazareth, but the risen Christ. Many who knew Him in the flesh did not know Who He was after His resurrection.

Some years later Paul, the apostle, came upon the scene. Now the Church takes a turn for the better. Paul never met Jesus in the flesh; this is what makes his experience so different from the others. His meeting was with Christ in resurrection power. This must be the reason Jesus called Paul on the road to Damascus. Since Paul never knew Him in the flesh, he was not carried away with miracles. Therefore, his ministry took him in a different direction. He was completely engrossed with Who Jesus IS!
Paul had great credentials; he was highly educated, was very proficient with the law of Moses, and was tuned for knowledge. He was the perfect choice, a mind thirsty for the knowledge of God. The Lord gave him the revelation. And together with his accumulated knowledge, the message of Christ living in you exploded in his mind. The truth of the mystery, hidden from the foundation of the world, burst forth on him and out from him (Galatians 2:20) (Colossians 1:27).

But this start of the Church on Pentecost must have been a very complex time for the apostles and believers, since they did not at once understand the mystery. This Jesus they had known in the flesh now lives within. His own brother, James, had to learn that Christ was within him. Can you imagine the mother of Jesus? She had a miracle birth as a virgin, now she has another birthing miracle, the resurrected Christ alive in her as her only life.

JESUS OF NAZARETH NO LONGER EXISTS

Although the day of Pentecost was powerful and resulted in many conversions to faith in Jesus, the day did not really produce the desired results. They were all caught up in miracles, trying to be like Jesus of Nazareth, but this day changed the status of Jesus of Nazareth forever. He will no longer be Jesus of Nazareth, but Jesus Christ IN US, our hope of glory. The ministry is not the same, the message is not the same, and His relationship to us is different. Things are not as they were, THANK GOD! The cross worked and IT IS ALL DIFFERENT NOW! It is so hard to accept such a radical change so we just tend to perpetuate things as they are a little longer.

The scripture says it all: we are not to know Jesus in the flesh!! (2 Cor. 5:16) It is a more powerful truth when you learn that Paul never referred to any of the works of Jesus of Nazareth. Paul did not go about making a special point of healing as Jesus did. Paul refers to Him only as the resurrected Christ. How very different from the Jesus of Nazareth that we try to preach today. Radical, isn’t it? Most of today’s preaching is about what Jesus did. Paul preached about Who He is now, not the historical Jesus of Nazareth. Paul spoke of Christ living in us today, actually enabling us to allow Him to live out through us to those around us.

Pentecost was like getting out of jail. The heavy yoke of law was suddenly lifted (Galatians 2:16). Pentecost was a mind-boggling event. Freedom from law is difficult to accept, so they did what many others have done in our age. Responding to what they saw with their eyes and felt with their emotions, they continued mixing law with grace. Never once did they recall the words of Jesus spoken to them and recorded in John 14:20: “At that day (Pentecost] you shall know that I am IN my Father, and you IN me, and I IN you.”

Peter was the spokesman on the day of Pentecost, and what does he say? He responds with a prophecy from the Book of Joel that was given several hundred years prior, and this was to be the only Biblical explanation given. It was a true one, but it was weak and an incomplete explanation of what was really happening. Peter, in days to come, would have many things to learn and unlearn.

Many of those who were at Pentecost and, in fact, reborn with God’s nature through Christ in them, were still dragging around the old chains of the law. Freedom is a very hard thing to accept. We must rid ourselves of the shackles in our mind and recognize thousands of years of man’s inability to keep the law. No one but Jesus was ever able to keep the law, AND THE SAME IS TRUE NOW! Only we Christians who have a living union with Christ can draw on Christ’s power to fulfill the ways of God. If man could have kept the law himself, he would have pleased the Father fully, and Jesus could have stayed in heaven. It is just not possible to keep a holy law with a devil nature.

THE WORK OF THE HOLY SPIRIT

The work of the Holy Spirit underwent a radical change on the day of Pentecost. He no longer moves on our exterior as He did throughout the Old Testament. But He is within, working in the soul area, our mind. Unlike Jesus Who was born with a sinless body, we need all the help we can get to clean our minds of pollution, or as someone has put it, “stinking thinking”. The day of Pentecost has much to do with our mind. This is the main battleground, because there is no transformation in our minds when we are reborn at conversion. Only our nature is changed, and this is within our human spirit. Our soul (mind) is transformed by the Holy Spirit throughout the rest of our human life. He is our Teacher, working within our mind to bring us into all truth and understanding of who we are in Christ and His righteousness. See Romans 12:2, Ephesians 4:23, Philippians 2:5.

One of the jobs of the Holy Spirit is to convince us that we cannot save ourselves by anything that we do or don’t do. We are saved by Christ in us - salvation IS Christ! The Holy Spirit guides us into this belief and understanding, and we need guidance because we are so polluted that our minds cannot grasp the things of God. That is why you hear so many concepts about who God is, about His attitude toward humans and what He expects from them. We simply have too much left over garbage in our minds and are just too polluted to be able to understand God on our own. And the job of the Holy Spirit is indeed a big one. But He never leaves us, He never gives up. We slip and fall, but He picks us up and sets our mind again on our union with Christ and our eternal God-nature.

THE SOUL NEEDS THE RIGHT MASTER

Suppose you never smoked, drank, or took drugs, you were never around anyone who did, and no one ever told you there were such things. Your body would not have a desire for them. Then you were introduced to and experimented with one or all of them and continued to do so. One day you realized that you were hooked and couldn’t do without them. You gave your mind over to your body and are now controlled by it. It tells you when it is time for a cigarette, a drink, or drugs. This is what Paul means by the “works of the flesh”. It is when mind and body are operating independently of the spirit.

The Holy Spirit operates to make and keep the connection with our spirit part where Christ dwells. This is where the mind of Christ is. We must give Him our mind in much the same manner as we gave it to the body. A spiritual appetite in our mind created by the Holy Spirit Teacher, will pull on the mind of Christ in us and Christ’s guidance and wisdom will start to flow in our mind, then be expressed by our body.

Jesus of Nazareth set us a great example of how to live. But Jesus of Nazareth died on the cross, and as Christians, WE DIED WITH HIM!
What Peter and the gang had to start learning from the first Pentecost forward was:
THE MYSTERY OF CHRIST IN YOU!

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