Pentecost 1.0

Feasts of Israel Series: Part 12

Passover marked the beginning of months for the children of Israel and commemorated their deliverance from Egypt. In the third month of their newly established calendar (May or June on our modern one), they arrived at Mount Sinai. There, Moses walked into the cloud of God’s presence and received the Ten Commandments. Because God would later establish this month for observing the Feast of Pentecost, it was celebrated as commemorating the giving of the Law.

Jesus’ disciples would experience a remarkably similar close encounter of the God kind—but their Pentecost happened in an upper room instead of a hilltop. To understand the importance of the feast in the book of Acts, we need to take a close look at what happened during Israel’s premier “mountaintop experience.”

Pentecost on Mount Sinai

When Israel arrived at the base of Mount Sinai, they spent three days consecrating themselves in preparation for God’s appearance. When He arrived, it was with “thunderings and lightnings, and a thick cloud . . . and the sound of the trumpet” (Exodus 19:16).

The sound of God’s voice so terrified the people, they begged Moses to do the listening for them and pass His messages along. “You speak with us, and we will hear; but let not God speak with us, lest we die” (Exodus 20:19).

The arrangement seemed to be working well, until Moses took longer than expected to come back down the mountain. A week passed. Then two. A month came and went with no sign of their leader. Israel found themselves idling at the base of the hill for forty days. And they were getting itchy. What if Moses never came back? What if the fire of God’s presence had simply consumed him?

Four hundred years of constant, body-numbing labor and months of marching did not prepare them for this sudden pause in activity. Leisure gave them the time slavery had denied them to indulge in every carnal and spiritual desire. And indulge they did.

Casting off all restraint, however, has a strange effect on humans. It soon makes them yearn for boundaries. In Exodus 32, they begged Aaron to give them structure and purpose by giving them a god they could see and touch.

It wasn’t like Aaron was trying to disobey God, you see. According to his account, he just tossed the people’s gold into the fire and, what do you know, “this calf came out” (Exodus 32:24). Before ever seeing the Ten Commandments, Israel had already disobeyed the one rule He’d asked of them so far—to stay in covenant with Him (Exodus 19:5). As a result, by the end of Exodus 32, three thousand people lay in the grave.

Why another Pentecost would be needed

Which brings us to the funny thing about God’s Law. Though it clearly defines sin for us, it doesn’t give us the power to stand justified before God. “Therefore by the deeds of the law no flesh will be justified in His sight, for by the law is the knowledge of sin” (Romans 3:20).

Not only does the law help us identify where we fall short, it seems to simultaneously make it more difficult for us to separate from it. As Paul said, “The strength of sin is the law” (1 Corinthians 15:56).

The first Pentecost brought a gift meant to set boundaries that would corral us into a safe place beneath God’s protective arms. The Law is good and holy. It’s tested and true. But by itself it ministers death to us as it did to Israel. Fortunately, Pentecost 2.0 was on its way. In the second chapter of Acts, God would show up again with a display of noise and fire, bringing the missing element that would enable us to live in freedom under His Law—grace.