Pentecost 2020
By George C. “Chip” Hammond
This Sunday, May 31, is Pentecost Sunday. Lord willing, it will be the last Sunday of livestream-only services before we implement safety measures and open back up for in-person worship on the first Sunday in June (June 7).
Did you know that this Sunday was Pentecost Sunday? Most American Christians are aware of Christmas because it’s culturally observed. Most are also aware of Easter because there is a residual cultural memory of it. Many are even aware of Good Friday. But few Christians in the U.S. are even vaguely aware of Pentecost Sunday. That is a poverty and reflects our lack of knowledge of the importance of the coming of the Holy Spirit for the life and witness of the church in the wake of the death, resurrection and ascension of Christ.
There are a variety of reasons for our lack of awareness of the Holy Spirit. One is that of the Persons of the Trinity (one God existing eternally in three Persons), God’s revelation of his Spirit is the most mysterious. We have an easily understood analogy of the Father in earthly fathers, and an easily understood analogy of the Son in earthly sonship. But even the contemplation of the human spirit is filled with mystery for us (compare 2 Corinthians 2:11 and Ecclesiastes 3:21).
Although the Holy Spirit was the agent of both the incarnation (Matthew 1:18 and Luke 1:35) and the resurrection (compare Romans 1:4 and 8:11), the Spirit does not draw attention to himself, but rather to Christ: “When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth, for he will not speak on his own authority, but whatever he hears he will speak, and he will declare to you the things that are to come. He will glorify me, for he will take what is mine and declare it to you” (John 16:13-14 ESV).
While the Holy Spirit was with God’s people before the coming of Christ, his presence, like their redemption (see Hebrews 10:40), was based upon Christ’s death and resurrection and would not be manifest in fullness until his work and glorification was accomplished. (1 Peter 3:18 compare 1 Corinthians 15:45; and John 7:39 translated very literally: “Now this he said about the Spirit, whom those who believed in him were to receive, for the Spirit was not yet because Jesus was not yet glorified”).
Because the Spirit does not draw attention to himself, we would have a “natural ignorance” of the Spirit were it not for the Word of God. God has bound himself to his Word, and while God may act in ways that surprise us, he does not act in ways that are contradictory to his Word, or apart from it.
The American church, however, has not done a good job of teaching about the vitality that comes from (and the vital truth of) the Holy Spirit, and the error has come from two directions. The first has been through the Pentecostal movement, which in its origins dissociated the work of the Spirit from the Word. Detached from the history of theology and biblical exegesis in its early days, it saw Pentecost as a “second blessing” subsequent in the life of he believer’s coming to Christ, and found evidence for the idea in the “Pentecostal experiences” recorded in Acts 2, 8 and 10. They concluded on the basis of these passages that each believer should seek to experience his or her “own Pentecost.”
In reaction to this, the more historically rooted branch of the church in the U.S. rejected the Pentecostal experiential approach, but sadly did so by ignoring Pentecost altogether. This is, I believe, why so many “orthodox” churches in the U.S. seem dead. They operate “in the flesh” as the apostle Paul called it – that is, operate relying on their own strength, ability, intelligence, even while giving all glory to God with their lips (cf. Is 29:13). This is so even among some churches in the Reformed and Calvinistic tradition, which is historically strange because Calvin himself was preeminently (as B.B. Warfield called him) “the theologian of the Holy Spirit.” In fact, Warfield indicated that in God’s use of human agency to elucidate his Word, we must give due credit to Augustine for explaining grace, Anselm for explaining the atonement of Christ, Luther for explaining justification by faith, and to Calvin for explaining the ministry of the Holy Spirit as absolutely indispensable to the life of the church and Christian life for anything that could truly be called life or godliness.
God’s sovereignty does not preclude human actions, effects, and responsibility. Those who use the doctrine in such a way show themselves to be either devoid of the Holy Spirit (and thus not Christians) or among those Christians who are for a time “walking in the flesh” (1 Corinthians 3), an intolerable condition for those who really are in Christ. A true Christian cannot remain “in the flesh” forever any more than a living man can sit in scalding water forever.
Because God has bound himself to his Word, the cure for both Pentecostal misunderstanding and “fleshly” “orthodoxy” is to be found in the Word of God. Just as we could not know of the incarnation, the meaning of the death of Christ, and the resurrection of Christ in all of its glorious significance, nor appropriate it for ourselves apart from the preaching of the Word (Romans 10), we could never know of the coming of the Holy Spirit and what it means for us and for how we are to live apart from the preaching of the Word. And this is where the American church has so badly failed. It has either ignored the Holy Spirit in its preaching or mishandled it badly.
This is what makes Pentecost Sunday such an opportunity for the Church. It gives us a regular, planned for time to consider what it means that Christ has come. While it is possible for a church to regularly do so without such a deliberate plan, I know of none that do.
In his book Perspectives on Pentecost my old (and very beloved) teacher, Richard Gaffin points out that Pentecost does not stand on its own. It is a complex – a single epochal event if you will – consisting of the incarnation-death-resurrection-ascension-Holy Spirit. The coming of the Holy Spirit is as necessary as all of these, and none of them have any meaning or value apart from the others. Christ’s incarnation would do us no good had he not died for our sins; his death does us no good apart from his resurrection (1 Corinthians 15:17); and the death and resurrection of the incarnate Christ have no application to us except that they are applied to the Church by the Holy Spirit in a once-for-all-event a Pentecost. The epoch of Pentecost is as unrepeatable as the death and resurrection of Christ. The Holy Spirit no more comes to each believer in his own and separate Pentecost than does Christ die for each believer on his own and separate Calvary.
As Christ died over a period of three hours according to the Gospel accounts, the Holy Spirit’s coming is epochal over three manifestations corresponding with Jesus’ statement that the Church would be his witnesses in Judea (among the Jews; Acts 1:8 and Acts 2), Samaria (among the quasi-Jews; Acts 1:8 and Acts 8), and the ends of the earth (among the gentiles’ Acts 1:8 and Acts 10). The Holy Spirit is not a “second blessing.” To not have the Holy Spirit is to not belong to Christ (Romans 8:9). Nor do we each have our “own Pentecost.” Pentecost is a whole cloth, a historically unrepeatable event woven seamlessly to the incarnation, death and resurrection of Christ.
It is possible, though, for believers to quench the Spirit as evidenced in such things as failure to admonish one another (“that wouldn’t be polite; we’ll leave that to the pastor”), to encourage the faint-hearted, to help the weak, to be patient with everyone; to repay evil with evil, to neglect prayer, to be sour rather than rejoicing, to be thankless, to despise preaching (1 Thessalonians 5:11-23), and to walk “after the flesh” rather than “in the Spirit” as evidenced in such things as sexual immorality, enmity, strife, jealousy, fits of anger, rivalries, and divisions in the church. If these actions are continued in without repentance they are evidence of having no real union with Christ and will result in not entering the Kingdom of God (Galatians 5:15-26). If the Spirit did not come at Pentecost, we could not “walk by the Spirit and so not gratify the desires of ‘the flesh’ (life in the abstract of which we ourselves are source and measure; Galatians 5:16) any more than we could believe in a Christ who had never come.
This will now be the third Pentecost Sunday that Bethel Church has marked. The life of the Spirit comes to us, not “spookily” but through the preaching of the Word and biblical teaching about the Spirit, for God has bound himself (even the mysterious operations of the Spirit) to his Word. As I said before, it would be possible for a church to regularly do so without setting a regular time to mark the coming of the Spirit at Pentecost, but I’ve never known a church to do so.
It would not be wrong for a church to ignore Christmas, Good Friday, Easter, and Pentecost Sunday (Romans 14:5), although there is something strange about setting one’s self aloof from the common practices of the church (see 1 Cor. 11:16). But given that the incarnation, death, resurrection, and the coming of the Spirit are one complex, it would be strange to mark some of these events and not others. It would especially be strange of observe Easter but not Pentecost Sunday.
This Sunday is Pentecost Sunday, and although we will be gathered via livestream, let us pray together in the words of the hymn “Come Holy Comforter, Thy sacred witness bear in this glad hour; Thou who almighty art now rule in every heart and ne’er from us depart, Spirit of Power,” for the Good News and the power of it in our lives is given by God’s design and plan through “those who preached the good news to you by the Holy Spirit sent from heaven” (1 Peter 1:12).
