Transcription
We've got two terms in the book of Acts which is about people being enabled to speak in other languages because the nations have other languages, not just one. That hooks us back into the division of the nations at Babel. I would suggest to you that Luke wants us to think of the reversing of the nations here. He wants us to think of Babel because now, all of a sudden, the language issue isn't going to matter.
This is so cool. Dr. Michael Heiser explains a dimension of what took place at Pentecost and why in a way that, frankly, I've never heard before. I don't want to steal his thunder here. Let's watch this together, and I'll leave maybe a few comments along the way to make sure that you guys are getting the point of what is being stated here. Let's dive in.
When the day of Pentecost arrived, again, and it's not because we're we're dumb and they were smart. It's because we don't have the world. We we don't have the eyes that they had to to catch certain things. When the day of Pentecost arrived, they were all together in one place. And suddenly there came from heaven a sound like a mighty rushing wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting, and divided tongues as of fire, you know, settled on them.
Now, I want to just, I have the the the column here. I have the word "divided" clicked on in the column. This is the Greek term diamaridzo. Okay. To be divided. Whoopdedoo. Okay. Well, if we search for that term in the Septuagint, the Septuagint was the Bible of the early church and the New Testament writers. Three-quarters of the time they quote the Old Testament. They use the Greek translation of the Old Testament to make their point. Sometimes they quote from the Hebrew and then they do the translation on the fly. But other times they quote from the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Old Testament because, you know, the world speaks Greek. If we search for diamaridzo in the Septuagint, it doesn't show up that many times, 19. But one of them, lo and behold, is Deuteronomy 32, where the nations are divided. That might be a coincidence. Okay, reading.
Now, there were dwelling in Jerusalem Jews, devout men from every nation under heaven. And at this sound, the multitude came together, and they were bewildered because each one was hearing them speak in his own language. If we click on bewildered, we look at the Greek term there. It's soon. If we search for that in the Septuagint, guess where that shows up? Genesis 11, which is the story of the Tower of Babel.
We've got two terms in the book of Acts which is about people being enabled to speak in other languages because the nations have other languages, not just one. That hooks us back into the division of the nations at Babel. I would suggest to you that Luke wants us to think of the reversing of the nations here. He wants us to think of Babel because now, all of a sudden, the language issue isn't going to matter. God is going to supernaturally, you know, have people speak in these other languages.
Why? What is God doing at Pentecost? Well, here here's a map. You can't really see it that well, but if you, you know, you could look later in your in your Bible in the back. This is a map with all of the place names from Acts chapter 2. Again, this is just Acts 2. This is Pentecost. The list, if you read the list in Acts 2, proceeds from east and right-hand side here, east to west. It moves in a westerly direction. It starts with the easternmost geographical points and starts moving toward the sea. And then when you hit the sea, it divides up and covers the northern Mediterranean and the southern Mediterranean all the way through Cyrenaica in Africa, which is almost to Italy, you know, or Rome. But we get Italy in the list as well.
You say, well, is that supposed to mean something? Yeah, it is. A number of those names, a number of those names are plucked out of the table of nations in Genesis 10. Others get a new name because we're going from Semitic language to Greek. Right? The point is that the people in Jerusalem, they're Jews. They're scattered all over the known world. They're scattered among the nations, the 70 nations known to the biblical writers. They're Jews. How'd they get there? Exile. They were scattered to the wind because of their idolatry. They were put into the nations that God disinherited and divorced himself from.
Why would God do that? Because God plays the long game. God knows that at some point the Messiah is going to come. He's going to die. He's going to rise again. The event of Pentecost is going to occur where Jews from all of these nations are going to show up in Jerusalem, and they're going to see something pretty spectacular. They're going to see people of their own kin group speaking in the other languages from the regions they're from. And they're going to be telling them the story of this guy from Nazareth who said he was the Messiah, and he was crucified by the Romans, and he rose on the third day. And they're going to believe. 3,000 of them believe. And you know what they do after they believe? They go home. They're like little cell groups planted among the nations. This is why when Paul and other people get to some of these places, there's already believers.
Wow. It's like a dandelion. You know, God essentially blows the dandelion, and the seed of the kingdom scatters all over the Mediterranean to the nations. The messaging is pretty clear. God is now about the business of reclaiming the nations for himself.
If you read through the rest of the book of Acts, again, it's not a coincidence. Remember Acts chapter 1: "You shall be my witnesses in Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria, and the uttermost parts of the world." Samaria, we we have an episode in Acts chapter 8 about Samaria. Why is Samaria interesting? Samaria was the northern kingdom. It was apostate after the kingdom divided. And when the northern kingdom was conquered, the Assyrians, in this case, came in. They uprooted the populations and deported them to other parts of their empire. And then they took people from other parts of the empire and imported them back into Samaria. And those people would get married and have babies. And you have half-breed Jews, the Samaritans. And the Jews have nothing to do with them because they're not pure. But God is interested in them. The gospel goes to Samaria. And right after the Samaritan episode, this is Philip with the Ethiopian eunuch. Okay. All the way in the south. All the way down to the south, you know, left side of the Dead Sea. There's somebody even from there.
Now, this is a little more interesting because we're not told in the Old Testament why Ethiopia would be significant, but we are told in the Intertestamental period. There is a long tradition and archaeological evidence, abundant evidence and textual evidence as well, that a group of Jews left Judah during the time of Manasseh and possibly earlier to escape the idolatry there, and they moved down the Nile and they built a colony at Elephantine. And there were other Jews that settled a little west again in these African regions. The gospel needs to go to them too.
Do you see a pattern already? The gospel is being taken to the Jew first, and also then to the barbarian. That actually started with the barbarian, the Greek, because of Acts 2. But while that was again theological messaging, the book of Acts proceeds in a more orderly fashion. It wants the Jewish reader to know, well, you know, yeah, this is your Messiah, too. So, let's just do it do it geographically. We hit Samaria, check that off the list. We've got Ethiopia, check that off the list because there's a Jewish presence there.
Philip, after he witnesses to the Ethiopian eunuch, you just read it. The Spirit plucks him out of the chariot and deposits him in Azotus. What's Azotus? Azotus is one of the Philistine cities. It is in a region that was not under the dominion of the Kingdom of Solomon at its height. The Kingdom of Solomon, the kingdom of David, missed that one. But the writer of Acts, Luke, wants you to know that that belongs to God. It's actually covenant territory in the original territorial promises. Every place that matters to the Jewish promises to Abraham gets picked up in either Acts 2 or the rest of the book of Acts.
Damascus, Paul's headed, you know, this is where Paul has his conversion. Why is Damascus mentioned in the book of Acts? Remember back to the story of Abraham when Lot gets kidnapped and Abraham has to proceed, you know, to rescue him. He pursues, and the Rephaim are in this list in Genesis 14. He he pursues this band that that captured Lot with 318 men. He rescues Lot. And where do they find Lot? Where do they catch up to them and rescue Lot? Damascus. You remember God had said, "Every place that your eye can see and the and the place that on your your feet tread on is going to be your land." God didn't forget that. Again, the place names are here for a reason. To the Jewish reader, Luke wants to communicate the gospel was taken to every place that Jews are. And that's important because the the the the the Jewish nation needs to be brought back together. All 12 tribes, not just two. They're still in exile. Even in the New Testament period, only two of them ever came back. But God has to heal this rift. And then he's going to use them. He's going to plant them all over the the known world. They're going to go back home. You know, wherever they're at, they're going to get witnessed to. They're going to believe. They're going to be there because this is now a beachhead for the kingdom of God in the gentile world. The gospel is seeded in all these places. And you go through the book of Acts, it's to the Jew first, also Greek. This is this is Paul's pattern as well. And it's conveyed visually. I mean, we we could go through, you know, the last gentile or the last Jew to be converted is the one in Damascus before you get to Cornelius. Cornelius is again a God-fearing gentile. It's a transition point in the book of Acts. All the Jewish stuff has been taken care of. But now we have to get the gospel because he the Jesus is the Messiah of the nations, not just Israel.
As God is judging the nations for the rebellion against him, as he said, "Be fruitful and multiply." And humanity says, "Thanks, but no thanks. We're going to gather together. We're going to put all of our strength and power together and we're going to build probably what was a ziggurat, uh, which is a temple for a false god in order to basically do idolatry, right? And participate with, you know, with the apostate sons of God, probably, right? Like to essentially worship the devil, if you want to put it that way. And God stops that because he knows it would destroy humanity ultimately. And God loves humanity. So what does he do? He scatters the languages among the nations.
To imagine that at the same time as he's judging humanity in this sense, he's protecting humanity and he is preparing humanity. When suddenly in Acts chapter 2, we see the power that comes along with someone coming back to you like that dandelion blown out, and they come to you, and they're speaking to you in your own tongue, and they're proclaiming to you the message of the kingdom, and they're telling you that Christ is for all nations, including your nation. So God, in his grand design, while protecting humanity at Babel, is also preparing for the proclamation of the gospel so that as the gospel message goes out, it comes to people in their native tongue in a way that would just be so much more powerful and compelling than if everybody spoke the same language and all of a sudden some people are starting to talk about the kingdom and Jesus and this and that. And all of a sudden, someone's giving this to you in your own language. That adds a credibility, a weightiness, and a, I guess you could say, um, just an authority to that original gospel message. 3,000 people, boom, on day one, are are shaken by what happened. So God is in this instance using a rare supernatural redemptive event of allowing people to have, you know, the tongues like fire in order to reconcile and bring in all nations back to himself.
I can't help but also think of the end view in mind here that we know that God has, according to the book of Revelation. And I believe it's in chapter 7, where it says that in the end, there will be some representative of every nation, tongue, and tribe. And the proclamation will be, "Worthy is the Lamb who was slain." And it's just so beautiful. I love what he says here. God is playing the long game. God God is playing four-dimensional chess against humanity for humanity's good. And it's it's a beautiful thing to.