The Church Age - Distinctives:
Spiritual Life
Before we get started this evening let's have a few moments of prayer
so we can make sure that they are in fellowship and ready to study the Word and
focus upon God's grace and God's provision in a greater understanding of His
plan and purpose for us, especially as church age believers. So we'll have a
few moments of silent prayer before we began and then I will open in prayer.
Let's pray.
Father, we are thankful for this opportunity to come together this
evening to study Your Word. We just pray that You will open our eyes to the
truth of Your Word that we will come to understand the tremendous blessings and
benefits that we have as believers in this Church Age. Father, we also pray for
the folks in this congregation that are going through personal challenges.
There are folks who are going through challenges that are related to their
health; folks who are going through challenges related to finances. There are
folks who are facing difficulties and diseases that are ultimately fatal; and
we pray that they might have strength and endurance; that they might be
faithful witnesses to those who care for them; that they might be faithful
witnesses to their friends and to their family; and that they might have a
tremendous testimony to Your grace. Now Father, we pray that as we study this
evening that you would help us and strengthen us in our understanding of Your
Word that we might be more adapted, more prepared and more faithful in the way
in which we handle and utilize Your Word in our day to day lives. And we pray
this in Christ's Name, Amen.
We have been going through our study on God's Plan for the ages and now
we are starting in the Church Age. So I want you to open your Bibles to Acts 2.
We are starting a study on the distinctives of the Church Age or the
Dispensation of Grace. Just as a kind of interesting note before we get
started. The last two lessons that we covered have been rather intense and
rather detailed, especially as we have gone through some new material related
to how the Old Testament (OT) is used in the New Testament (NT). I have taught
that there are four basic ways that are evident in Jewish interpretation from
the first century and how the OT or how the Scripture was quoted and
interpreted. I taught that many times. I taught it several times as we were
going through the Book of Acts. I taught it in Matthew and other studies that
we have gone through. But I took on the second example, which is a historical
event that is used as a type and I added a new layer to that this last time,
going beck and looking at a comparison in the second and third Balaam oracles.
The purpose for that was to show that the Bible really uses this. It sets up
Israel as a type; the nation is a type of The King, which was a new layer of
information and a new layer of study complexity on that particular element of
interpretation.
Now I originally learned these four areas of interpretation from Arnold
Fruchtenbaum back in the 70s. Charlie Clough would have Arnold Fruchtenbaum
come and talk to his church up at Lubbock Bible Church. And that is where I
first learned about Arnold Fruchtenbaum. That was the first time I learned that
and as I studied that I saw this was a tremendous way to come to an
understanding of these particular passages. Well as you all know, Arnold is a
tremendous scholar, especially in helping all of us understand the Jewish and
the Hebrew background to understanding the NT. One of Arnold's protégés is
Michael Rydelnik, who I mentioned earlier. Michael Rydelnik went to Dallas
Seminary. He started in 79 and finished in 83. He worked for Ariel Ministries
for Arnold for a number of years before he went on to his teaching career at
Moody Bible Institute; his current position as the chairman of the Jewish
Studies Department.
A few years ago Michael wrote a book. I think it was three years ago it
came out, and the title is Is the Hebrew
Bible Messianic?, dealing with this whole problem that has infiltrated a
lot of evangelical scholarship that basically there is no Messianic prophesy in
the OT. Michael has done a tremendous job working with that. In one of his
chapters he deals with those four ways in which the OT passages are quoted by
the NT and he did a much better job of developing that and presenting it in a
much more scholarly academic way then Arnold had, which is needed to give that
documentation support for all the different things that you are alleging as you
argue for that position.
Arnold has been given a copy of the book and wrote an endorsement for
the book when it first came out, but he just sort of skimmed through the book.
I was talking with Michael yesterday; asking him some questions relative to what
we've recently studied. And Michael told me that he got a letter from Arnold
about a year ago. Some of you know Arnold and you've heard him speak, and
Arnold is not one to be real infusive with his complements. And he wrote an
infusive complementary letter of praise to Rydelnik about how wonderful the
book was; because Arnold finally got around to reading the whole book. And what
is interesting for us is that Arnold told Michael, he said, I have never put
together and understood the significance of those two Balaam oracles. That is
what everybody here sort of tripped over. He said, from now on I'm teaching it.
He said that was the best explanation of that principle that I have ever heard
and it will forever change the way in which I teach this particular topic. So I
just thought you would like to know that additional information. All of us,
many of us, Mike Rydelnik, Arnold, Tommy Ice, Randy Price, have know each other
for many, many years along with another of others. No one man can maximize or
become an expert in every area. It has really been exciting over the years to
see how we have all sort of fed off of each other and stimulated each other and
helped each other in different areas working through our understanding of the
Scripture. That is the body of Christ at a pastoral level working together. So
that just gives you a little insight into that.
Okay, we are moving past the OT. We are coming into the NT and we are
specifically looking at the beginning of the church age. And the church age
begins in Acts 2. And so I just want to run through, in a categorical outline
manner, the basic characteristics of the church age:
XV. Dispensation of the Church
Slide 3: The Church Age or the Dispensation of Grace
A. Scripture: Acts 2:1-Revelation 3
The Scripture that covers the Church Age in the NT begins in Acts
2:1-Revelation 3. Remember Revelation 2 and 3 contain the Seven Letters to the
Seven Churches. At the end of Revelation 3 there is no longer a mention of the
Church until you get to the end after the Tribulation. So there is no mention
of the Church because the Church is absent from the earth during the period of
the Tribulation. So this section, Acts is the historical narrative on the
foundation and expansion of the Church through the power of God the Holy
Spirit. We just studied the entire Book of Acts on Tuesday night before we
began this series on Dispensations.
The Epistles that are written, all of the Epistles in the NT are
written to explain the dynamics of the Church Age. The information that is
given in those Epistles from Romans to Jude is information, much of it is
different, but built on that of the OT because the spiritual life of the Church
Age is different. In the OT they anticipated the coming of a Messiah. They
anticipated the coming of the Savior. In the Church Age we look back to the
completion of the payment for sin and all that has been done for us. In the OT
they did not know of the personal ministry of God the Holy Spirit in the life
of every single believer. But in the Church Age we have various ministries of
God the Holy Spirit that are true for every single believer in the Lord Jesus
Christ and that is the foundation for our spiritual life. So the spiritual life
of the Church Age doesn't look back to the age of Israel. It doesn't look back
to the Mosaic Law at all for the precedent, for the framework for understanding
the spiritual life. And that is so critical and in many denominations and many
theological frameworks; basically all theological frameworks other than
dispensationalism. They look to the OT as the precedent for the Christian life,
which means they look to the Law as if it has some sort of direct impact on
Christianity and it doesn't. There is a clean break; something new happens on
the Day of Pentecost that had never happened before; that was not even
predicted in the OT at all; that was completely unknown and that was based not
on the precedent of the age of Israel and the Mosaic Law and the spiritual life
under Israel, but is based upon the foundation of the ministry and life of the
Lord Jesus Christ. He not only fulfilled the Law, which studied in Matthew
5:17. He not only fulfilled the Law, but He also, by virtue of His relationship
with God the Holy Spirit in His humanity laid the foundation for the spiritual
life of the Church Age.
One of the things we studied in Hebrews many years ago when we went
through our study of Hebrews was to understand that the Lord Jesus Christ did
not live His humanity on the basis of any of His divine powers. There was as it
were, a firewall between His deity and His humanity. There is no intermingling
of the divine attributes and the human attributes. Now there were times that
Jesus did things that demonstrated that He was fully God from His omnipotence,
He was able to change the water into wine; from His omnipotence He was able to
still the storms on the Sea of Galilee; from His omnipotence He was able to
walk on the water, but these were not things that He did to solve personal
problems and spiritual problems in His humanity. They were things that He was
doing to demonstrate that He was Who He claimed to be; that He was also the
Eternal God made flesh incarnate, Who had come to the earth to fulfill the
promises related to the Messiah. But in His spiritual life as a human being He
faced the challenges that we all face, temptations.
For example, at the beginning of His ministry when He demonstrates His
qualifications for His ministry He was led by the Holy Spirit into the
wilderness where He is tempted or tested by Satan three times. That testing or
temptation, when he passes it that shows His qualifications to be the Messiah.
But He doesn't pass those temptations by relying upon His divine attributes. He
relies upon them as a human being by utilizing the same resources that you and
I have, the Word of God and the Spirit of God.
So we can't ever fall into the trap of thinking, well Jesus could
handle it because He was God. No, Jesus never handled any challenge or problem
or difficulty in His life because He was God or on the basis of His divine
attributes. He handled all of those problems as a human being setting the
precedent for us in the Church Age by depending upon the Word of God and the
Spirit of God. So the Epistles outline this new, this distinct spiritual life
that is based upon the indwelling and filling of the Holy Spirit, walking by
the Spirit not by the flesh. So the Epistles are specifically written to inform
us as Church Age believers on How we are to live the Christian life and to tell
us what God has provided for us so we can access these incredible spiritual
resources that God has given us. In this dispensation as in each dispensation
there is a key person.
B. Key Person:
Now the Church is treated as a corporate entity and the Church as a
whole is called the body of Christ. It is the body of Christ that is the
steward of the Church Age. But Paul, as it were, is the key person as the key
apostle to the Gentiles, he is the one that articulates mostly what is called,
and we will see, understand this in a minute, the mystery doctrine of the
Church Age. That is the information that was revealed related to Church Age
believers that was completely unknown in the OT. So the apostle Paul refers in
the Scriptures, as we'll see, to the dispensation of grace, the administration
of God's grace in this unique way in the Church Age, as having been uniquely
and distinctly given to him.
C. Name:
The Church ate is called the Church Age because the dominate entity is
the Church, the body of Christ, but it is also sometimes called the
dispensation of grace and this comes from John 1:17, which says, that "the
Law was given through Moses; but grace and truth through the Lord Jesus Christ."
Now that verse doesn't mean that there was no grace or truth in the OT.
Grace and truth are linked together by that conjunction "and." Was
there truth in the OT? Sure three was truth in the OT. Everything that God
revealed in the OT was absolute truth. So Jesus Christ came along as the
ultimate expression of truth, but He is not the first to bring truth. And so
you can apply that same line of reasoning to grace. Jesus Christ is not the
first to bring grace into God's relationship with the human race. Salvation in
the OT wasn't based on Law.
There were some early dispensationalists who misstated that, but the
Law was never a basis for salvation in the OT. Salvation in the OT was based on
faith alone in Christ alone. They didn't understand the specifics of Jesus of
Nazareth, but they understood Christ, the Greek word is Christos, meaning
"The Anointed One." The Hebrew is Mashiach.
They understood that the promise of the Mashiach,
Who would be "The Anointed One" Who would bring deliverance to God's
people from sin; and so they are looking forward to a Redeemer, the Seed of the
women, Genesis 3:15, Who would fulfill those promises and bring redemption from
sin to the human race.
So grace was known in the OT. Truth was known in the OT. But there is
an ultimate expression of grace and truth in the incarnation of the Lord Jesus
Christ in the First Advent. So because of this, this age is known for grace
because in a distinct way grace is being showcased in the Church age because of
God's extension of His favor to all the world, to all the nations in a way that
was never know; not that God wasn't saving Gentiles in the OT, but in a way
that was never known in the OT because God was primarily working through
Israel. Now there were many Gentiles that were saved. We know of Jonah going to
Nineveh. The remains of Nineveh are on the outskirts of the modern Iraqi city
of Mosel. And if you have been following the news you know that there are ancient
Jewish communities that have lived in Mosel going back to 500 years to 600
years before Christ.
There are Christian communities that trace their heritage back to
almost the first century in this area of the world and yet these horrible
barbaric Moslems that are marching across Iraq right now are destroying
everything of cultural value. They have taken and stolen the homes and
businesses from all the Christians and Jews who live in these areas and they
are expelling them from the country. They are giving them just a few days to
leave and they can't take anything with them. Their truly losing everything
that they've ever had and they will never recover it. They are reduced to zero
possessions and being expelled by the peace loving Moslems.
You know the fact that they are a religion of peace doesn't mean that
it is a religion of peace. If you know anything about Islam you know that the
peace is only for those who are in the House of Peace, The House of Islam, and
if you are in the House of Peace there is peace from Allah for you. But if you
are not Moslem, if you are not under the authority of Allah, then you are in
the House of War. Everybody in the world is either in one or the other; you are
in the House of Peace or the House of War. And if you are in the House of War
then you are to be destroyed. Jihad is declared against you and if you are a
Koran-believing Moslem then the orders in the Koran are to destroy every Jew
and Christian on the planet; and that is what Islam is. Anything else, when
people talk about moderate Islam, they are not talking about Moslems who
actually believe the Koran. But if they believe the Koran, eventually they'll
be pushed to Jihad. But that is what is happening now.
So you had in Assyria in the ancient world in Nineveh you have the
whole city repented when Jonah came. They responded to his message and all
those Gentiles turned to the Jewish God and the Jewish Savior in their
expectation of eternal life. There are people like Neman the Assyrian, who also
was a Gentile who came to salvation; and there were many, many others in the
OT. So there was grace that was extended to the Gentiles, but not in the way it
is in the NT. The NT church has primarily a Gentile make up even though
initially in the first one hundred years it was primarily Jewish.
D. Responsibilities:
Every dispensation has a specific responsibility or in some cases one
or two responsibilities that are to be carried out and fulfilled by the
steward. Remember, I pointed out at the beginning that the Greek word from
which we get our English word "dispensation", the Greek word is OIKONOMIA, meaning economy
or administration, or you also have a variant of the word referring to a
steward or the person who is responsible for the administration. Each
dispensation has a responsible party or corporate entity in the age of Israel
and under the Law; the responsible entity was Israel. In the church age the
responsibility is to the church. This is distinction that we have between
Israel and the church is one of the primary distinctives of dispensationalism.
So there are responsibilities given to the church and to church age
believers. In summary this is that we are to utilize the power of God the Holy
Spirit in our individual spiritual life and to be witnesses to Christ
throughout the world, Acts 1:8. You could also say Matthew 28:19-20, the Great
Commission. And there is a responsibility we have to the New covenant to
proclaim the benefits even though it is not in effect today and won't come into
effect until the millennial kingdom. That is what we are working toward. That
is our end game. We know the old saying, "You have to begin with the end
in mind."
The end for us as church age believers is the judgment seat of Christ.
There we will be given rewards, rewards and responsibilities that will
determine our role in the millennial kingdom. And so some will have no rewards,
some will have a few rewards, and some will have many rewards depending upon
our faithfulness and our spiritual growth. But the responsibility of the church
age is to grow to spiritual maturity, to be a witness for Christ, to be an
ambassador for Christ; 2 Corinthians 5 emphasizes that. We are as such
ministers of the New covenant, which is what comes into effect in the
millennial kingdom when we, as the bride of Christ, will be ruling and reigning
with Him in the millennial kingdom.
So these are the first four aspects of the church age:
1. The Scripture that covers the church age, Act 2:1-Revelation 3
2. The key person that reveals this doctrine is Paul, but Peter, James,
Luke, Matthew, Mark, all reveal significant things related to the church age.
3. The name, as the dispensation of grace comes from John 1:17.
4. The responsibility is to grow in the grace and the knowledge of the
Lord Jesus Christ by means of God the Holy Spirit and to be a witness
throughout the ends of the earth.
E. Basic Test:
Now the basic test is always in each dispensation the test is related
to responsibility that God gives us. The Basic Test for us is will we walk by
the Spirit? And in each dispensation the test is really in relation to
obedience to God as it is articulated within the covenant in the OT. Since
there is not a specific covenant for the church age what we have are the
commands and the mandates of Jesus Christ. So the issue is, will man walk in
the Spirit and be a witness for Jesus Christ? This is seen in Acts 1:8 and we
will look at these passages in just a little bit.
F. The Failure:
The failure is that many Christians will become apostate by the end of
the age and will fall into false doctrine, embrace false teachers, and like
every other dispensation, the steward fails to utilize the resources that God
gives them. So the church age ends; the church will never dominate.
You have the view of post-millennialism that says that the church grows
and grows and grows and through God the Holy Spirit eventually all mankind will
become saved and will bring in a utopic period of the kingdom and after that
Jesus comes back. That is called postmillennialism because Jesus comes back
after the Millennium in their view. And because they are so optimistic that
everything will eventually get better and better; it may get worse before it
gets better. They refer to themselves as optimillennialists; they are
optimists; they are optimillennialists, and they sneer at premillennialists and
they call us pessimillennialists because we are looking forward to doom and
gloom so we are a bunch of pessimists.
Historically the opposite is really true. It is premillennialists who
have had great hope in the future because we know that even though between now
and then there may be dark days, Jesus is coming back to establish His kingdom
and this has stimulated the church to great evangelistic activity. In fact in
the 19th century and 20th century it is primarily through
premillennial pastors and missionaries and evangelists that there has been a
great explosion of the gospel around the world. That is not to say that others
have not been a part of the expansion of Christianity in the last two
centuries, but much evangelism has been speared by premillennialists. In fact
one of the founders of the Chosen People Ministries wrote his PhD dissertation
at Fuller Theological Seminary on Jewish Evangelism in the early 20th
century in Europe. Some of his statistics are remarkable. I cannot recall all
of them off the top of my head, but in some areas of Eastern Europe as many as
15% of the Jewish population in the 1920s and 1930s converted to Christianity
as they came to understand the gospel. In fact there were more Jewish
believers, Messianic Jews, in Budapest in 1930 than there are Jews living in
Houston, Texas.
And I believe, because I am an optimist, that many of those Messianic
Jews who understood the gospel went to the gas chambers at Auschwitz and at
Treblinka and at many of the other death camps in Poland, but they went with
the gospel of Jesus Christ on their lips and through their witness I believe
there were many, many other Jews that were saved during that time. This is an
extremely unusual and extremely rare area of study and Mitch Glazer is the head
of Chosen People Ministries. This was his doctrinal dissertation. But he has
done remarkable, groundbreaking research on that area. But he said that all
this Jewish evangelism was driven by premillennialists and premillennial
dispensationalists. So we are not the pessimillennialists that the
postmillennialists claim that we are. We have genuine biblical hope and genuine
biblical optimism based on our understanding of the gospel of Jesus Christ and
fulfilling the mission, which is to be a witness to all the nations in the
world of the gospel. So we emphasize grace. We emphasize grace, which means
undeserved favor, unmerited kindness, unmerited blessing; that God deals with
us not on the basis of who we are or what we have done, but on the basis of who
Jesus Christ is and what He did on the cross.
G. Grace:
Now if you can get your mental fingers around what I just said, that
alone ought to change your whole perspective on Christianity. That God deals
with us not on the basis of our failures, not on the basis of our sins, not on
the basis of our good deeds or our works, but on the basis of Christ's
righteousness, on who Jesus Christ is and the fact that we are saved not
because of anything positive we have done, but because we possess the perfect
righteousness of Jesus Christ.
And that means that you don't have to do anything to be saved. So this
is the focal point of the gospel. This is grace and God's grace is specifically
demonstrated to the church in that before the Tribulation begins, so that
doesn't mean there won't be persecution. There has been much persecution of
Christians in pass centuries. There is a tremendous amount of persecution
toward Christians today, especially in Moslem countries; a tremendous
hostility. they have been driven out of Egypt; they are now being driven out of
Iraq; they are being driven out of Syria. They are being persecuted; they are
being killed; they are being martyred by these horrible Islamists; but that is
nothing compared to what is going to happen in the Tribulation period to
believers. Now they are not church age believers. God in His grace is going to
remove the church from the earth before any part of the Tribulation begins and
He will keep us out of that terrible judgment.
There are some Christians who teach a partial-rapture view. In other
words, if you have been a good Christian and if you have been a maturing
Christian then you get raptured, but if you are a backslidden Christian or an
apostate Christian then you have to go through the Tribulation. And if you get
right with the Lord then maybe you get raptured. So there are some that have
these partial raptures all through the Tribulation. There is also a view called
the mid-Tribulation view. Again it is the same kind of thing. And at the core
these folks usually have a problem understanding grace and the fact that Christ
paid the penalty for all of our sins at the cross. And there is no sin too
great for the grace of God, there is no sin that the omniscience of God forgot
about and Christ didn't pay for; every sin was paid for at the cross so that
sin isn't the issue. The issue is what do you think about Jesus Christ? And
that is grace.
So all that are in Christ, all who are members of the body of Christ by
faith alone in Christ alone are going to be raptured when Jesus Christ returns
in the air for the church and in an instant, in less than a blink of an eye, we
are all going to disappear. We will be bodily resurrected. We will instantly,
in a nanosecond; you can't even measure how it takes place, but in a nanosecond
we will receive our resurrection bodies and we will all be joined together in
the clouds in the air with the Lord Jesus Christ and from there we go to heaven
where we receive our rewards at the judgment seat of Christ in preparation for
the next stage, which is when we rule and reign with Christ. That is our end
game. That is what we are preparing for; you can think of the judgment seat of
Christ as a graduation ceremony. Some people are going to have a high honor,
some people are going to graduate with honors, some people are going to
graduate, and some people are going to graduate just by the hair of their chinny
chin chin. They are going to graduate. It says in 1 Corinthians 3 that at the
judgment seat of Christ they will enter heaven yet as through fire. You can
almost smell the smoke as they walk by. They are just escaping the hellfire,
but they are saved, but that is it. They've got no rewards because they were
failures in their Christian life, but they don't lose their salvation. They
just lose out on the maximum blessing they could experience in the judgment seat
of Christ.
One writer put it this way, "everybody's cup is going to be
full." You are going to come out of the judgment seat of Christ and
everyone will have a full cup. Some people are going to have really large cups
and some people are going to have mini-mini-demitasse cups. Yet everybody's cup
will be full. If you have the small cup you are going to be exceptionally happy
because your cup is full. And if you have a really, really large cup you are
going to be exceptionally happy because your cup is full. It is just going to
have different capacities. So that is what happens as a result of the judgment
seat of Christ. All of which we will go into over the next several lessons.
When does the church age begin and when does the church age end? Now
this is really important because this relates to understanding Scripture. There
are many folks that think that, usually covenant theology, but also other
theological systems, Lutheranism, Roman Catholic theology, all believe that
Israel, spiritual Israel in the OT was the church of the OT. They confuse the Cchurch
with Israel. So they see the church in the OT and Israel in the OT is the
church in the OT and the church in the NT is spiritual Israel. So they confuse
those two and they don't understand the distinctions between the believer in
the OT under the Law, who did not have the Holy Spirit, and church age
believers and all that God has provided for us in grace through the ministry of
God the Holy Spirit. So it is important to understand these distinctives and they
relate to understanding the beginning and the end of the church age.
1. The Church began on the Day of Pentecost, AD 33, Acts 2.
It didn't begin with Adam. You don't have this spiritual church as far
back as Adam. You will run across that if you read very much. You will hear
people say that, but the church did not begin with Adam. It didn't begin in
Abraham's tent. It didn't begin in Abraham's home in Ur of the Chaldees or in
his tent in the Promised Land. It didn't begin with Moses on Mt. Sinai; the church
began on the day of Pentecost with the arrival of God the Holy Spirit. This is
the scene in Acts 2.
Now I have asked you to turn to Acts 2, but as background for that I
want to read to you from Matthew 3:11. In Matthew 3:11 John the Baptist is
talking. John the Baptist is down by the Jordan River where he is preaching a
message, "Repent for the kingdom of heaven is at hand." And he is
calling upon those who have repented to indicate this change by water baptism.
And then he says to them, "I indeed baptize you with water unto
repentance, but He who is coming after me (which is a reference to the Messiah)
is mightier than I, Whose sandals I am not worthy to carry. He will baptize you
with the Holy Spirit. Now when he says "He will baptize you" he
uses a future tense verb. A future tense verb means that something is going to
have to happen in the future, but it is not happening now. It is something that
is a future event. So in Matthew 3:11 John the Baptist says, "This baptism
by the Holy Spirit is future."
Then we turn to the Acts 1. This gets into the second point.
2. The Baptism of the Holy Spirit is what forms the Church, the body of
Christ.
This is seen in Acts 1:5. In Acts 1:5 Jesus is speaking, Jesus said,
"For John truly baptized with water." That is what we just looked at
in Matthew 3. You see the whole Bible is interconnected. You can't just read
part of it. You have to understand the entirety of the Bible because it is
interconnected and interdependent. If you just go in and grab verses out of
context then you are going to misunderstand because these verses are
interdependent. So Matthew 3:11 is the background for what happens in Acts 1:5.
Matthew 3:11 happens just before the beginning of Jesus' ministry. In Acts 1:5
Jesus has been crucified. He has been buried. He has been resurrected. He is
about to ascend to heaven. It is going to happen at the end of this discussion
by the time we get down to about Acts 1:9-10 Jesus is going to ascend to
Heaven. But here He is repeating what happened at the beginning of His
ministry:
Acts 1:5, "for John truly baptized with water, but you"
who is He talking to? He is talking to the eleven disciples. He says, "but
you will be baptized with the Holy Spirit not many days from now."
So from the time of John the Baptist until Christ's ascension how many
people were baptized with the Holy Spirit? Zero; not one. Not one person prior
to Acts 2 is baptized by the Holy Spirit. It's future tense in Matthew 3:11;
its future time in Acts 1:5.
Now we will skip over Acts 2 just for the moment and we look at Acts
11. We've gone through Acts in the past and we know that what happened in Acts
1:8 is that Jesus gave them a commissioning. One of the many times He
commissioned them in terms of expansion of the church. "And He said,
"but you shall receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you and
you shall be witnesses to Me in Jerusalem and then in Judea and Samaria and
then to the ends of the earth."
Now this is the expansion of the church. So as we went through Acts we
say that initially the proclamation of the gospel and the repetition of the offer
of the kingdom occurred to the Jews in Acts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6. Then
persecution broke out and the church was forced to leave Jerusalem because of
hostility from the Jewish leaders in Jerusalem. So they had to spread out. They
went to Judea and to Samaria. They just stayed together and huddled together in
Jerusalem and God said okay, if you are not going to fulfill what I told you to
do then I am going to have to squash you and hit you hard with some discipline
and that will scatter you. You will finally do what I told you to do after you
get a little discipline. So they scattered. They went to Judea and Samaria. And
there was tremendous impact. Peter is now at this time living in Joppa, which
is really a suburb of the modern city of Tel Aviv. Joppa was the old poet. It
was the port from which Jonah left fleeing from God so he wouldn't have to take
the gospel to those nasty filthy Gentiles. And he went on a ship and then he
got a return trip home via a special fish. So he left from Joppa. So Joppa is always
associated with God's grace to the Gentiles.
When I take groups to Israel I give them a tour guide and most tour
guides will list all the biblical passages that relate to a particular place.
All the things, I mean all the things that happen at
that place biblically, historically, etc. I don't go through everything because
it overwhelms everybody, but I try to point out the key events that take place
in certain locations so that you can connect a key doctrinal point to a key
location because God did not operate in human history apart from space-time
events. He is not out in the ozone somewhere in some kind of special spiritual
dimension. He is always functioning in space-time concrete human events.
So Joppa is tied to God's grace to the Gentiles. God's grace to the
Gentiles is exhibited in the OT by Jonah who was to take the gospel to the
Ninevites. In the NT we see the same thing happen there. Peter is staying at
Joppa at the home of Simon the tanner, Acts 9-10. It shows God's grace because
a tanner was somebody who dealt with dead things. And therefore he was
perpetually ceremonially unclean because he was dealing with carcasses. So
Peter is staying with him and he had a vision that there are some Gentiles who
are going to come and invite you to Caesarea by the Sea. Caesarea is one of the
first places we usually go on the tour. He (the Gentile) is going to invite you
to Caesarea to the home of Cornelius the centurion. You need to be welcomed by
them; don't be a separatist, because the Jews would never go into the home of a
Gentile. And you are going to go and they are God-fearers and you are going to
give them the gospel and explain the way of salvation to them and then they are
going to be saved because the gospel is going not only to the Jew but also to
the Gentile.
Well that happens in Acts 10. In Acts 11 Peter goes back to Jerusalem
and he is telling the other apostles and the Christians in Jerusalem what God
is now doing among the Gentiles. And he describes this in Acts 11:15-17. He
says, Acts 11:16 "And as I [Peter]
began to speak, the Holy Spirit fell upon them, as upon us at the
beginning."
"Us at the beginning." When was that? Who is the
"us"? That is "us." He is primarily giving this report to
the other apostles. So he is talking to them. When did the Holy Spirit fall
upon them? Acts 2, when God the Holy Spirit came upon them. That is the
"beginning." The "beginning" of what? The
"beginning" of the church. It is not back in the OT with Adam or
Abraham or Moses. It happened on the day of Pentecost. And then Peter said,
Acts 11:15, "Then I remembered the word of the Lord, how He said,
'John indeed baptized with water, but you shall be baptized with the Holy
Spirit.' "
Future tense, that was in Acts 1:6. So he is quoting in Acts 11; he is
quoting from what Jesus said in Acts 1. And then he said,
Acts 11:17a, "If therefore God gave them the same gift", them
being the Gentiles, "as He gave us when we believed…"
When did that gift come? "when we believed." He is talking
about the "beginning" because many of them became believers. He has
got a large audience here. Not just the apostles, but he had others who had
believed on the day of Pentecost.
Acts 11:17b, He "[God] gave them the same gift as He gave us when we believed on the Lord
Jesus Christ, who was I that I could withstand God?"
So he [Peter] makes it very clear that the giving of the Holy Spirit
occurs and the "beginning" of this new age was when
that occurred on the day of Pentecost.
Now several years later, a decade or more later, the apostle Paul wrote
in his Epistle to the Corinthians the statement "For by one Spirit we were all baptized. Now it is past
tense. See Jesus said in Acts 1:5, you will be in the future baptized by the
Holy Spirit. That occurred in AD 33. This is around AD 50-51. Paul says we were
all baptized by the Holy Spirit. So sometime between AD 33 and AD 52 everybody
who is a believer in Christ gets baptized by the Holy Spirit. Acts 11 tells us
it was "at the
beginning" at the day of Pentecost. So it is very clear that the church
began on the day of Pentecost in AD 33 and that this occurred when God the Holy
Spirit came on the day of Pentecost in Acts 2. I had you open to Acts 2; lets just
look at that as we sort of wrap things up here in a few minutes.
Act 2:1, "When the day of Pentecost had fully come, they were all
with one accord in one place."
Now when we have studied this in the past I have pointed out that the
pronoun "they" that third person plural pronoun has as its antecedent
the closest previous plural noun is the eleven apostles at the end of Acts
1:26. Many people make an understandable error by thinking that the 120 that
were gathered together to chose or select an apostle to replace Judas were
still hanging out at the same place. But this is several days later. They all
wouldn't have room to stay in these small upper rooms, so it was just the eleven
that come together on the day of Pentecost. Just the apostles, because they are
the foundation of the church. So they are all together in one place.
Acts 2:2, and there came a sound from heaven, a sound like a tornado,
it filled the whole house and then there was a visual effect, there appeared a
fire over each one of them and they were all filled by the Holy Spirit and
began to speak with other languages. This would be languages that they had not
learned, but were legitimate forms of language: Aramaic, Roman, Latin, various
Mesopotamian dialects, various other dialects, Parthian, perhaps some languages
form the Medes and the Persians, but they all miraculously were able to
communicate in these other languages and they were describing the gospel, which
is stated to be the great things of God.
There is an automatic reaction to this. The people are astounded. They
are hearing the gospel presentation from the disciples in all their different
languages. These different nationalities or ethnic groups are listed between
Acts 2:9-11. Now there have been linguistic scholars who have looked at this
list and have said that it basically represents eleven different languages.
Well there were eleven different apostles. And so each apostle was given an
ability to communicate the gospel in a language related to one of these
linguistic groups that were present in Jerusalem.
But the people who are hearing them are astounded and they are saying
what does this mean? And others are mocking them saying, well they are drunk.
Peter said look it is only nine o'clock in the morning. They haven't had enough
time to get drunk yet. The stores aren't open. So Peter then explains it in
terms of the OT. Acts 2:16 he says, this is what was spoken by the prophet
Joel.
Now we just spent two lessons talking about how the NT cites the OT. We
tend to think of a passage like this, well he is saying that this prophetic
fulfillment in the same way that Matthew 5:2 says the Messiah would be born in
Bethlehem. And Matthew 2 says Jesus was born in Bethlehem. It is a prophetic
announcement with a prophetic fulfillment. But what we learned in those last
two lessons was that that is not always true. There are different ways or
different meanings that they assign to this word fulfill. So there is a
typological fulfillment where you have a historical event; Israel as a type of
The Messiah came out of Egypt and so that was a typical prefigure of Jesus the
Messianic King coming out of Egypt.
And then you have the application of a historical even when the mothers
of Israel were weeping over the young men who were being taken as captives to
Babylon in Jeremiah. "Rachel was weeping for her children" and this
is applied to the weeping of the mothers in Bethlehem pointed out that there
was only one thing those two events had in common and that was weeping mothers.
That in the historical event in Jeremiah the sons, the children were not dead.
They were being taken off into captivity. The mothers would never see them
again. It happened in Ramah, which is where Rachel is buried, north of
Jerusalem. Whereas, Bethlehem was south of Jerusalem.
In Matthew 2 the mother are weeping because their infant sons are dead.
So there are no parallels, no similarities except one thing and that is what
you see in that third usage, which was the OT applied to a NT event and you
have a series of circumstances that only one of which is identical. What the
writer is saying is I am going to demonstrate a point from a similar situation
in the OT. And so Joel talks about these incredible things that God the Holy Spirit
can do. And he predicts that there will be a time in the future when God will
pour out His Spirit on all flesh, sons and daughters will prophesy, that
daughters will dream dreams, and sons will see visions, and all these things
are mentioned in Joel 2. But one thing that is not mentioned in Joel 2 is
speaking in languages. And of all the things that are mentioned in Joel 2 none
of them take place in Acts 2. The only point of similarity is the pouring out
of God the Holy Spirit.
So what Peter is basically saying in this extended quotation from Joel
is that this coming of God the Holy Spirit is in keeping with how God has
promised work in the future. And so there is a connection there. God the Holy
Spirit from what we learn in the OT can do this kind of thing. So he uses that
to go on and talk about the fact and apply this to the message and ministry of
Jesus of Nazareth in Acts 2:22. So of all the things he (Joel) quotes, all the
things that he cites, prophecy, the signs in the heavens, the wonders in the
heavens, the moon turning into blood, and the coming of the great and awesome day
of the Lord, Joel 2:28-31, none of those things happened in Acts 2. That is
going to happen at the end of the Tribulation. That is when that prophesy is
actually fulfilled is at the end of the Tribulation. But Peter isn't saying
this is that event. He is saying this is like that and we can learn something
from it in terms of the gospel. So he is explaining this. This is when the church
begins in Acts 2.
Now the third point we will save until next time. This is when we go
into what is known as the mystery doctrine of the NT. This is an important
concept to understand because what it tells us is that Israel in the OT had no
foreshadowing, no predisposition to realizing that God was going to set them
aside at the time. They thought The Messiah would come and then they would go
into the kingdom. There was no idea that there would be an intervening period
of time, a parenthesis as some call it, between the first coming of Christ and
the second coming of Christ. It was not revealed at all in the OT. It was a MYSTERY, unrevealed truth, and everything related to your
life and my life as a Christian is based on this mystery doctrine. It is some of the most important material in all
of Scripture and we will start looking at that next time.
Father, thank You for this opportunity to study these things this
evening and to reflect upon the beginning of the church, the uniqueness of the
church, and the distinctives of the church. And we pray that God the Holy
Spirit would use it to challenge us that we might maximize the assets, the
privileges, the blessings that You have given us in this church age, so that we
might grow and advance in our spiritual life and glorify You. We pray this in Christ's Name, Amen.