by
T. Austin-Sparks
Chapter 2 - The Holy Spirit's Day of Liberty
The book of the Acts, chapter 2: "And when the day of Pentecost was
now come..." the margin says, "was being fulfilled": "And when the
day of Pentecost was being fulfilled". In this very great matter of
the presence and work of the Holy Spirit we can only take one more
small fragment this morning, and it arises out of this fulfilment
that took place on that particular day.
It ought to impress us that it was on that particular day that God
decided to send the Holy Spirit. There is nothing in the Old
Testament that speaks of the advent of the Holy Spirit at any given
time; no word there that at a certain time the dispensation would
change by the coming from heaven of the Holy Spirit to abide for the
age. No word that it would be so, but there's very much in the Old
Testament that is gathered into that day and that advent.
God chose that day because of the deep and rich relationship of
things to that particular time.
And when you think of it, dear friends, it is an impressive
thing how God chooses His times for things. You know when the Lord
Jesus was about to be crucified, the Jewish rulers said, "Not on the
Passover". Not on the Passover, but heaven and God said, "Yes, on
the Passover". The Jewish Passover was being fulfilled, but being
fulfilled in a way, in a fulness, that they neither thought of nor
intended. But God said, "This is the time for the great Passover
transcending all others; the fulfilment of all others up to this
time." He chose this time. He chose the time for this great
dispensational change and movement: the coming of the Holy Spirit.
It was by His decision that it took place at that
particular time.
When all these people gathered in Jerusalem at their feast
of Pentecost, they never imagined what would happen. It had never
occurred to them as they had left their far-off cities and countries
mentioned in this chapter - how many of them - they never, as they
set out on their journey to Jerusalem, had in mind this thing
that was going to happen. For them it was the keeping of an old
Jewish festival, with much rich meaning for them in history. But the
Lord said: "Now's the time for something much more, much greater."
He chose the time. Of course we shall see why in a moment, but it
was like that. And we are given to understand that the Lord is
choosing the time, or is going to choose the time for the coming
again of the Lord Jesus. And that is not a general statement, but it
is said precisely that when the spirit of Antichrist has reached
that point of expression where, more than ever before in history,
there will be a bid for world dominion, "Then He whose right it is"
will come, to take it.
Antichrist will make the great bid for worldwide dominion, gathered
up into one system, whether in one head - it may be, and is there
not today a bigger movement in that direction than ever before.
There have been many who have made that bid, but it's been more or
less on a limited scale, but there are only two camps in this world
today really, and the battle is to break down the one, to make way
for Antichrist - that is, the summing up of the dominion of this
world under one head. And the Lord will say, when it reaches that
point, "Now is the time for the right One to have it." "He has
appointed the day in which He will judge the world in righteousness
by the One whom He has appointed". God chooses His time, His
day, and it is always very strategic, opportune, and full of
significance. And so it says here, "Now, when the day of Pentecost
was being fulfilled", He chose that day for the coming of the Holy
Spirit in Person, to govern this dispensation until the coming of
the Lord Jesus.
You know that Pentecost means "fiftieth"; literally it is, "Now when
the fiftieth day was in fulfilment," was in the course of
fulfilment... and that at once opens to us God's meaning in choosing
this particular day. For all who know the Bible, even in a very
simple way, know that that fiftieth day in the old economy was:
The Day of Jubilee.
And the day of Jubilee was the day when all who had been in slavery
were released. All men and women who had been sold into bondage, got
their liberty on that day. All lands and properties which had been
brought into bondage for debts and so on, had to be released on
that day. If you had lived on a fiftieth year day, you would have
(if it was necessary) been awakened very early in the morning by a
certain sound; for early on that morning, as the sun broke through
out of the night, the priests sounded the Jubilee trumpets - the
trumpets of Jubilee. And they were the gospel trumpets, if "gospel"
means "good news", it was the sound of release for all captives, all
prisoners, all in bondage; people and land set free. And the
trumpets proclaimed release: "Good tidings to the captives, the
setting at liberty of them that were bound!" It was a day,
therefore, of great joy for the prisoners, for those who had known
no liberty.
God chose that day, or the meaning that was bound up with that day,
for the day of the coming of the Holy Spirit. Significant, isn't it?
Indeed, that day in Jerusalem was, for many captives, a day of
rejoicing, a day of liberation; the going forth over the whole
world of the representatives (through representatives). Look at it,
"Parthians, and Medes, and Elemites, and dwellers in Mesopotamia, in
Judea, and Cappadocia, Pontus, and Asia, Phrygia, Pamphylia, Egypt,
Libya, Cyrene, sojourners from Rome..." the whole world is here. The
gospel trumpet proclaimed in Jerusalem to the whole world as
represented, on
that day, the good news of
release
for the world from its bondage. How strategic God was, how apt.
Fulfilment of the old conception, but how much
greater the
fulfilment than had ever been imagined. I say again, when they came
from far-off Rome, and Cyrene, and Libya and all these places, they
never expected to hear
that message which God had prepared. Now of course, quite
simple is the message for us: Pentecost, the Holy Spirit having
come, and being here as He is, represents that, just that: glorious
liberty for men, glorious gospel of emancipation from bondage!
When the little remnant came back from the captivity in Babylon,
Chaldea, having known seventy years of bondage, the word of the Lord
through His messenger was: "According to the covenant which I made
with you in the land of Egypt, My Spirit remaineth among you...
according to the covenant in Egypt, My Spirit remaineth among you".
And here they are, because of the faithfulness of God to His
covenant, and because of the abiding Spirit of God, they're out of
captivity. It's one little sidelight upon the great truth.
Dear friends, I am not sure that we appreciate our liberty
in Christ sufficiently. We need to read again that letter to the
Galatians in the light of Pentecost, in the light of Jubilee, "our
liberty
in Christ" - one of our most priceless possessions - translated
not out of an earthly Egypt, but out of the authority of darkness
into the kingdom of the Son of His love. Being fulfilled then, is
the gospel of emancipation for all slaves, for all prisoners.
The Lord Jesus is undoubtedly in the fulness of His ministry on the
day of Pentecost. What I like about this is He'd already said it,
but here it is in fulfilment: He is here by the Holy Spirit, in the
fulness of His ministry. He said... of which He said:
"The Spirit of the Lord is upon Me, for He has anointed Me to preach
the good tidings to the poor, to bind up the broken hearted, to set
at liberty them that are bound, to open the prison to the prisoner,
to proclaim..." oh, what an unfortunate translation we have of the
words: "the acceptable year of the Lord". No! The year of Jubilee of
our God -
the Year of Jubilee of our God, the Year of
Grace... the Year of Grace, the breaking of the Law which binds the
prisoners and has imposed bondage upon so many - the Year of Grace
being fulfilled.
And another thing was here very present in the minds of all these
who had gathered in Jerusalem. What was it that they were there to
celebrate? Well, for them, the Feast of Pentecost was linked with
the giving of the Law at Sinai. They were remembering Moses going
into the Mount, God meeting him, and giving him the covenant by the
Law to govern their lives henceforth. And for them the Feast of
Pentecost was always closely linked with that great epoch in their
history:
The Covenant and the Law.
The sad and tragic history of broken law, but the Lord knew what He
meant... He meant something more than tables of stone written and
engraved with pen and inks. He had a deeper meaning. And the day
came when the prophet Jeremiah was caused to say, as you will read
in the thirty-first chapter of his prophecies, the thirty-first
verse. It's always easy to remember the great change: Jeremiah
31:31, it's an epoch. "The day is come, says the Lord, when I will
make a new covenant with the house of Israel, not according to the
covenant which I made with them when I took them by the hand and led
them, but this is the covenant that I will make in those days, saith
the Lord,
I will write my laws upon their hearts, and upon their
minds will I write them". Now, we'll not say a lot about that,
because it is so clear, simply clear, that that is
exactly
what the Holy Spirit came to do; that
is the fulfilment of
Pentecost. You and I know it. Do we?
Do we?
Let me challenge every heart. Let me challenge old and young with
this. Do you really know in experience, in life, Jeremiah 31:31? If
you really have received the Holy Spirit (which as a child of God
you ought to have done) do you know that? Are you able to say, "I
know what the Lord meant when He said that through Jeremiah. I know
in my own experience that part of Pentecost anyway." Because one of
those very first things in the Christian life, when we are born of
the Holy Spirit, is we know in ourselves without anybody having to
tell us, what we ought to do, and what we ought not to do, in a new
way. It's remarkable! It's very remarkable. Things that we did
without any question: the way we behaved, the way we used to speak,
perhaps dress, oh, in a thousand ways about which we never had a
second thought before, we are beginning to get some sensations, some
feelings about that now, some question arises about that; what we
do, where we go or where we do not go. We say we have a conscience
about it, but it's another conscience that we never had before. We
did have a conscience before, but it's a new one – an altogether
new
set of laws which never governed us until this time. Isn't it true?
I know it begins in a simple way.
All of us remember the first time that we had a question about
something that had never been a question before, we remember it
quite well. We remember that first time when within us the Spirit of
God put His finger upon something, and raised an issue. We felt
uncomfortable, perhaps miserable... something we could not
altogether explain and define; something which we did not feel was
right. We learned afterward that it was a very vital matter. We came
to realise that the progress of our spiritual life was bound up with
our giving heed to that. We stayed where we were until that found an
answer in our heart. All that is very true, isn't it? "Upon their
hearts
will I write them, and in their minds". The inwardness of the new
covenant that began on the Day of Pentecost, that is in Pentecost;
it's the Day of the New Covenant. That's what it means to have the
Holy Spirit.
And may I say this, it is a grand thing, a
grand thing, to
see lives (especially, if I may say so, young men and young women) who
are in that way walking with the Lord, and not having to have the
law laid down to them by parents, or preachers, or other people;
just not having to be told: coming alive to these issues and being
able to say: "The Lord has spoken to me about that!" If ever anybody
mentions it, then they'll say: "Alright, alright, the Lord has
already touched me on that matter." Isn't that grand? That is a
sure
sign, a
sure sign of the Holy Spirit within. Oh for more of
it! Oh for more of it, this mighty work of the Holy Spirit on the
basis of the New Covenant! If necessary the Holy Spirit saying "Thou
shalt not" it is alright if He says "Thou shalt not," or if He says,
"Thou shalt". That is, the Spirit is the Arbitrator, the One who
comes between the right and the wrong, and gives His verdict
in
the heart - in the heart. Pentecost is the Day of New
Covenant, and it's not right back there so many centuries ago, it's
now! It's now, it's for the age, as the Lord says.
And, to close with for the present, Pentecost, as you know, as we
have recently said, was the Feast of the Firstfruits - the time when
in the old economy the husbandman went out and saw the first ripe
grain, gathered it into a sheaf, took it home, made it into two
loaves. Two loaves, and took them, and laid them at the feet of the
high priest. The first-fruits of the harvest in token of God's
faithfulness, of God's grace, of God's disposition to be favourable,
of God's intention to give all that that represented and signified -
the token of a full inheritance taken by faith in the two loaves.
Two
loaves. You know, in Biblical symbolism, two is always the number of
sufficient testimony. When you've got two you've got enough: "In the
mouth of two witnesses", that's enough. If you can get two, you've
got sufficient for God: "Where two or three are gathered together in
My Name there am I", sufficient basis for the Lord. "If two of you
shall agree as touching anything that they shall ask it shall be
done of My Father" it's sufficient.
Two loaves - a sufficient
testimony. Why? Well, the Lord Jesus in death and resurrection: two
sides of His glorious redemptive activity, has
now gone up
into the Presence of God, presented Himself and been accepted. As He
said to Mary, as she sought to embrace Him on that resurrection
morning, "Touch Me not; embrace Me not; lay not hold of Me, I have
not yet ascended unto My Father. Go to My disciples and say unto
them, I ascend unto My Father and your Father; unto My God and your
God". Something happened. He presented the double testimony of death
and resurrection to the Father God, and was accepted,
but in
token of all those who
in Him, were represented and
included as His full harvest. No wonder the Lord chose "those out of
every nation under heaven", it says, to be represented in Jerusalem
on
that day, and One representing the fruit of all the
nations attested by the Holy Spirit. All wonderful, very blessed.
Here, in a little gathering like this, a very little one,
nevertheless enough nations represented, enough nations to be a
token, but Christ the first-fruits - out of every nation, every
tribe, every tongue - accepted in token of a great harvest. That's a
word of encouragement in a day of frustration in the nations, a day
when it seems like limitation and curtailment, but because
He is
there as the first-fruits of all that believe, the vision will
be fulfilled. "A great multitude which
no man can number out
of every tribe and kindred and tongue... ten thousand times ten
thousand and thousands of thousands" that is beggaring language! The
inexpressible fruit of Pentecost, Pentecost: the work of the Holy
Spirit.
May we all be the fruit of the Spirit, really be the fruit of the
Spirit: something presented to God. So, the Lord says, "Present your
bodies, a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God, which is your
spiritual service... Be not conformed to this world. Be
transformed
by the renewing, the making anew, of your mind." That is the Holy
Spirit's work and business. May He have a clear way in every one of
us.