Pentecost Sunday is when we celebrate the pouring out of the Spirit and the inauguration of the New Covenant.*
Think prayerfully and deeply about Pentecost. It is an epochal Sunday!
In his book, The Holy Spirit (Contours of Christian Theology)
, Sinclair Ferguson convincingly demonstrates the gracious correspondence between Pentecost and the judgment of Babel:
On the morning of Pentecost, the disciples began to speak in other tongues so that visitors to Jerusalem heard the message of the gospel in their own language (Acts 2:4
). Luke’s statement here is accompanied by a ‘table of the nations’ (Acts 2:8-12), just as the Genesis record of the confusing of human language is accompanied by a ‘table of nations’(Gn 10:1-32). Part of the answer to the question ‘What does this mean?’ (Acts 2:12), therefore, seems to be that here we have the reversal of Babel, the founding of the community of the reconciled. I.H. Marshal has pointed out that the number 120 (Acts 1:15) was the minimum number of men required ‘to establish a community with its own council’, so that these early Christians were able to ‘form a new community’. On the Day of Pentecost that new community became the sphere in which the eschatological reversal of the effects of sin began to appear in a reconciled people consisting of both Jew and Gentile, possessing one Lord, one faith and one baptism (Eph. 4:1ff.), united by the Spirit.
The effects of Babel were thus arrested. Now the word of reconciliation will be preached in many languages, since the disciples have received the promised power of the Spirit to enable them to be witnesses to Christ all over the world (Lk. 24:28; Acts 1:4).
*This post repeated from Pentecost 2009.
Pentecost Sunday is when we celebrate the pouring out of the Spirit and the inauguration of the New Covenant.*
That’s a really cool parallel. I never considered that. So can the following parallel be made? When the people of Babel refused to disperse and fill the earth, preferring their own glory, God split them into groups by creating a language barriar. Then, once they had filled the earth, and become diverse nations, he drew them into a unified church (a tower to his name) by getting rid of the language barrier.
The Bible emphasizes unity so much, in regard to the church. Do you think God created our deeply embedded loyalty to our own ethnicity (and distrust of others) as a backdrop for the impossible (but glorious!) scene of every tongue and tribe gathered around the throne in perfect unity?