The Day of the Lord is Here |06.23.24| Actions Speak Louder! pt.2
Acts 2:1-36
Pastor Erik Anderson
We’re continuing our summer series in Acts. Actions speak louder than words. We’re going to be in chapter 2. If you’re in the seat back Bible, the Pew Bible, that’s on page 90. So it’s right toward the end there, page 90 in the New Testament.
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We’re going to be looking at verses 1 through 21. This is the great Pentecost moment. And this is what we read.
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domined
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and visitors from Rome, both Jews and Prostolites, creams and Arabs. In our own languages, we hear them speaking about God’s deeds of power.
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All were amazed and perplexed, saying to one another, “What does this mean?” But others sneered and said, “They are filled with new wine.”
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But Peter, standing with the 11, raised his voice and addressed them, “Men of Judea and all who live in Jerusalem, let this be known to you and listen to what I say. Indeed, these are not drunk as you suppose, for it’s only nine in the morning.” No, this is what was spoken through the prophet Joel. “In the last days it will be,” God declares, “that I will pour out my spirit upon all flesh, and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, your young men shall see visions, and old men shall dream dreams, even upon my slaves.” Both men and women in those days, “I will pour out my spirit and they shall prophesy, and I will show portents into heaven above, and signs on the earth below, blood and fire and smokey mist. The sun shall be turned to darkness and the moon to blood before the coming of the Lord’s great and glorious day. Then everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved.” This is the word of the Lord. Thanks be to God. Well, good morning everyone. My name is Eric, one of the pastors here. A long time ago when I was maybe 12 or 13 years old, I was home by myself. I was kind of a latchkey kid. Both my parents kind of worked in the afternoons and sometimes had a work evening.
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Oftentimes I’d be home by myself, and I was home by myself here. I was fairly young, like I said, 12, 13, maybe 14 years old.(…) There came a knock on the door. This was in the early 2000s, so this was a time where you still kind of answered the door when somebody knocked, right? We had no ring cameras, anything like that. And I answered the door, and there were two gentlemen standing there, and they were evangelists. I can’t remember if they were Jehovah’s Witness or Mormons, but something along those lines. They said hello, and they greeted me, and they introduced themselves, and then they asked me a simple question. You may have heard this question as well. They said, “Hey, if you died today,(…) why would God let you into heaven?” That was a question. Have you ever been asked that question before? Have you ever had anybody knock on your door and ask that question? It’s a little bit like invasive, a little weird, a little strange. I was, you know, a young kid. I had grown up in church, and honestly though, when they asked me that, I had this moment of clarity, and I just said, “You know what? I don’t know.
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I don’t know if God would let me into heaven.”(…) They said, “Well, if you met God at the pearly gates, and he said, “Why shall I let you into heaven? How would you answer?” And I just said again, “I(…) don’t know. I don’t know how I would answer that, and I don’t know if I would go to heaven if I died.”(…) Well, this question, if we were to die today, would we go to heaven? Sometimes it can haunt us, especially if we kind of grew up in or around the church, because this was kind of a question that was asked a lot. Sometimes it can bring us to fear or even anxiety, or sometimes when we read passages like this, where it talks about the blood turning to moon and the sun becoming dark, and we hear about the end of the world, the apocalypse, it can make us a little bit nervous about what’s going to happen. And if Jesus were to come back today, what would he say? What would he say to me? How would I respond if the end of the world happened today?(…) And if you grew up in the church or around the Christian culture, you probably have read or seen the Left Behind movies or the Left Behind books, anybody who’ve read those before, or you just kind of know there was something in the water, especially like in the 90s and early 2000s about the end of the world. This is fairly typical every 20 years or so. This kind of pops back up, and a lot of conversation about what’s going to happen. We hear about wars and rumors of wars, and we hear about famine and locusts, and we worry about the sky raining down fire and these sorts of things, and it can scare us, especially when we go to scripture, and sometimes we read passages like this. The moon will turn to blood. It’ll be dark. We hear about what’s called the day of the Lord. Have you heard that phrase before? The day of the Lord, the end of the world? Well, this can be complicated because sometimes the Bible does use this phrase, the day of the Lord, and sometimes it is associated with scary images, images of war and famine and the end of the world.
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But Peter here actually describes this day of the Lord as great and glorious.
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He describes something happening when he talks about the day of the Lord. This is on the day of Pentecost. It’s 50 days after the Passover. Jesus has ascended into heaven. The believers are all together, and they’re afraid because they’re by themselves. They don’t know what to do. Jesus told them to wait in Jerusalem, and so they’ve been praying together, asking God for clarity, asking God for their next step, and here the Holy Spirit is descended upon them. The sound like a rushing wind, the tongues of fire, the flames over their heads. They bust open the doors, and they begin to speak in all these different languages that they don’t know. They begin preaching the gospel to all the people who are out there on the street. We have a list of 13, 14, however many it is, groups of people that were there, and each one was hearing their own language. These uneducated people who shouldn’t be able to speak these languages are proclaiming the gospel of Jesus Christ. This is what Peter calls the last days,(…) the end of the world before the day of the Lord.
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He quotes a prophet named Joel. This is what Joel says as Peter quotes it. This is spoken through the prophet Joel. “In the last days it will be, God declares, that I will pour out my spirit upon all flesh. Your sons and your daughters shall prophesy. Your young men shall see visions, your old men shall dream dreams, and even upon my slaves. Both men and women in those days I will pour out my spirit, and they shall prophesy. And I will show portents,” this means miracles, “signs in the heaven above, and signs on the earth below blood and fire and smoky mist.(…) The sun shall be turned to darkness and the moon to blood(…) before the coming of the Lord’s great and glorious day.”
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Now some of these things that he talks about is he’s quoting Joel sound pretty great. The Holy Spirit filling all kinds of people, men and women, young and old, slave and free. Everybody gets the Holy Spirit, everyone gets to prophesy. Then we also hear some scary things, blood and smoke and fire and the moon turning to blood and the sun darkened. But this is what Peter calls the great and glorious day of the Lord as he’s quoting from Joel.(…) So for us to really understand what this means, the day of the Lord, the end of the world as we know it, we have to go back and we have to look at the Old Testament. We have to read through the scriptures because this is where this phrase comes up again and again. And in the New Testament when they talk about the day of the Lord or the end of the world, they’re referencing the Old Testament either here directly or in the Revelation, the last book of the Bible, is lots of allusions(…) to the Old Testament prophets. And so if you go back to the Old Testament all the way back to the very first chapter of the Bible, Genesis chapter one, it tells about how God created the world. It’s a well-known story. He creates the world and he fills it with all these creatures and he creates man and woman and he places them in the Garden of Eden and he says be fruitful and multiply. Go and fill the earth, subdue it. He says take dominion over it. He says fill the earth and control it and care for it. Help the world flourish. God gives man and woman a job. He says join me in my work in making the whole world flourish.(…) God created everything out of nothing and then he gives the keys over to the man and the woman and he says now you get to take on the work of helping the world become all that it can be and filling the world with people. And we know that this is true. We know that we can actually help the earth flourish. We can make it better.
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Corn that grows out in the wild is really quite weak. It can’t produce a lot of food. But if you breed corn strains and you put them in rows and you water them well, you put down fertilizer and other nutrients and needs, all of a sudden more corn than we can eat is grown. The earth seems to be able to produce so much when we use our God-given gifts of ingenuity to kind of help the earth produce. That’s what we’re here for.(…) God has given the keys over to humans to help the world flourish. Not just nature flourish but also to help our relationships flourish, to help other humans flourish. This is what God gave Adam and Eve to do way back there in the beginning.(…) And we know just a couple chapters later in Genesis chapter 3, the third chapter of the Bible, Adam and Eve decide that they want to know what’s good and bad for themselves. They circumvent God. They kind of break away from God. They break their relationship. They decide that they want to be God and they want to decide what’s right and wrong. So they fall to the temptation. And what happens in the fall is that God’s good gifts, the nature and our bodies and our relationships are now used to hurt each other. God says that the man and the woman, their their desires are going to be against each other. Adam and Eve have two sons, Cain and Abel, and Cain is jealous of Abel and kills him. In just another chapter or two later we hear about one of Cain’s descendants named Lamech, who was an incredibly violent man, a lover of violence. And he says that if anybody harms him, he’s going to kill him 77 times. Do kill 77 men for one slight.(…) It’s a really dark part of the scripture that we see.(…) And that humans are using God’s gift against each other. This is crescendoed, as we read through Genesis, in what’s called the Tower of Babel, or also the Tower of Babylon. Babel and Babylon are the same word in the Hebrew, in the Old Testament. So we have the Tower of Babylon, which is humans organizing each other, and collectively they use their gifts against each other and against God. They learn how to make strong bricks and they say that they’re going to build a tower to heaven. They’re going to build a huge temple that stretches up to the skies so they can make a name for themselves. They use their God-given gifts of ingenuity and being able to control and manipulate the world and being able to help nature become all it can be. They use it against God.(…) And God confuses their language. He scatters them across the world.(…) And we fast forward to the end of Genesis and into the book of Exodus, where Egypt is this new nation that is kind of Babylon 2.0. They’re like the worst of the worst. And in fact Pharaoh himself is considered a god.(…) It’s Egypt trying to take the place of God and humans trying to take the place of God. And we know that God chose Moses and rose him up and that God rescued the Israelites, the Hebrew people, out of Egypt. That he rescued them from slavery because Egypt was using God’s gifts against God’s people. He was using God’s gift against other people and enslaving them. God rescued the Israelites from Egypt and when they are rescued, Moses and Miriam sing a song about God’s strength, about how God is a warrior, how God fights the battles for the Israelites, and how God defeats the Israelites’ enemies.
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And when the prophets look back on this time where God rescued the Israelites out of Egypt, the prophets call this the day of the Lord.
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They say that was the day of the Lord. When God rescued his people out of Egypt, the prophets also called Babylon, the tower of Babel, with where God confused all the language, he called that the day of the Lord. The prophets looking you back have this one phrase, the day of the Lord, and they use it for multiple things throughout the Old Testament. For the tower of Babel, for the rescuing out of Egypt, and ultimately as we get to the end of the Old Testament, we hear about the Babylon taking over Israel and taking people into slavery once again. It’s called the Babylonian exile and the prophets are telling about a future the day of the Lord, where God is going to rescue his people again. And the prophets tell even of a future, future the day of the Lord, where they’re looking forward to the end of all suffering and the end of all human government, the end of all crooked systems, the end of all evil.(…) The day of the Lord is this phrase that means several days, and specifically it means whenever God intervenes and rescues his people, that’s the day of the Lord. He judges evil and rescues his people that he has promised to be in relationship with. That’s the day of the Lord. It’s both past and it’s future, and then it’s even future, future to the end of all things.
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So the prophets in the Old Testament, they see the day of the Lord as the day that God intervened to rescue his people from evil. They look forward to the future to another greater day of the Lord when God would do this again and rescue his people and bring about flourishing.(…) Flourishing for all people, that the individuals would be flourishing, that they’d be thoroughly transformed, working for the good of humans and working for the good of nature, once again caring for nature as they should, working for the good of their bodies and their minds and the land and the animals. This is the glorious and great day of the Lord.(…) And here Peter is saying, “This is it.”
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When the Holy Spirit descends upon the believers,(…) and the Holy Spirit fills the believers and they are empowered to proclaim the gospel of Jesus Christ, that’s the day of the Lord. That’s the last days.
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That’s how God is preparing for this great rescue.(…) You see, for Peter,
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he saw Jesus
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as this crowned king and messiah, God in flesh.(…) And Peter and the other disciples literally witnessed Jesus having a crown placed on his head, a crown of thorns.
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The king was given a crown and then the king was placed on a throne, the cross.
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Jesus was crowned king and enthroned on the cross.(…) And in that moment, Jesus rescued us.
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And he rescued all people for all time.
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Jesus is God in the flesh, the messiah.(…) That is the day of the Lord.(…) And anybody who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved because of what Jesus has done.
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His blood, his sacrifice was poured out for all.(…) And now we get to access by faith this grace of God.(…) We get to recognize the name of the Lord and we get to say yes and amen to the work of Jesus. And we get to be rescued on this great and glorious day of the Lord.
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Jesus ascends into heaven. He leaves the disciples and then he sends the Holy Spirit.
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Where once we hear the story of Babel, the tower of Babel, where languages are confused here in Acts chapter 2, right before Peter starts referencing Joel, we have people from all over the world understanding each other miraculously. Here at Pentecost, the day of Pentecost, the tower of Babel is reversed. Where all people get to hear the gospel, where languages are unconfused, where people are miraculously given the ability to speak in other languages, languages they don’t know, and they’re able to communicate to each other. Reverses Babylon, reverse the tower of Babel by everyone being able to hear the gospel in their own language. And the Holy Spirit begins a new human community in the church, a new Israel in the church. It’s a community marked by service, by love, by equality and joy,(…) and by the kingship of Jesus. It’s humanity as it should be. It’s creation as it should be. People flourishing in the Holy Spirit, people selling all they have and giving to the poor, those who are oppressed being lifted up, those who are of high status being brought low. It’s exactly how creation should be thoroughly transformed, bearing the fruit of the Spirit responsible for themselves, for their work, for their community, and for each other.
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And in this passage that Peter references,(…) that in these last days when the Holy Spirit is poured out on all flesh, we hear about all the different types of people who get to participate in this new humanity, in this spirit-filled, spirit-empowered work of God. And it’s the young and the old, it’s men and it’s women, and it’s slaves, and it’s free.
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That pretty much accounts for everybody, right? I mean in this room, right?
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Some of you are men,(…) some of you are women, some of you are young, some of you are old, all of you are free. It includes all of us. We all get to participate in the Holy Spirit and in His work. The Holy Spirit gets poured out on all flesh, no matter who you are, no matter where you’re from, no matter your economic status, all flesh gets the Holy Spirit. All flesh gets the opportunity to participate in the work of God on this, the glorious day of the Lord, where all things are made equal and all people are seen as equal in God’s sight.(…) Young and old, rich and poor, male and female, they are all filled with the Holy Spirit.(…) Everybody gets a part to play in participating in the Holy Spirit.
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And ultimately for us, I think that’s what this passage is about.
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That everyone has a part to play in God’s work.
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Every single one of us is invited to be part of the glorious day of the Lord. The day that He rescues humanity, the day that He pours out His Spirit, the day that He brings about human flourishing once again. You have the Holy Spirit. By hearing the words of the Lord, by receiving them in faith, you have the Holy Spirit. You have the opportunity to join Jesus in His work. You are empowered by the Holy Spirit to bring about human flourishing, by rescuing people from sin, by telling them about the good news of Jesus Christ, that our King is crowned with a crown of thorns, that He is enthroned on the cross, and He has died for you. So you don’t have to.
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We get to participate in the rescue of humanity. We get to participate in the rescue and in the flourishing of humanity. We get to have the Holy Spirit where we are filled with His goodness and filled with the fruit of the Spirit. Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, and the rest. And we get to give a little bit of that to everybody that we meet. Everywhere that we go, in our work, in our play, when we’re shopping, when we’re with our family, we get to give peace when people don’t have peace. We get to give patience when people don’t have patience. We get to get the love and joy and kindness and goodness and the rest. We get to help other people flourish and experience the fullness of life with God because He invites us to join Him in His work.(…) You don’t have to be paid full time in ministry to do this. You don’t have to be commissioned and sent to another country to do this. Every single one of us is invited to join the work of Jesus Christ. The Holy Spirit isn’t just promised to those who are paid to do ministry. The Holy Spirit is promised to everyone, all flesh, male and female, rich and poor, young and old.
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We can offer forgiveness to people. We can tell them their sins are forgiven, literally giving forgiveness to people. We can help them trust in God’s love for them.(…) And once we are settled in this reality, that our value does not come from what we do or what we get wrong, but our value comes from God alone, then we get to help people be unleashed into the world, free from shame, free from guilt, unleashed into the world and join Jesus as He transforms us in our interior lives. As we experience the fruit of the Spirit,(…) we can share these things with everyone that we interact with, our friends, our family and our neighbors.
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This is the great and glorious day of the Lord,(…) that God has rescued us from our sin. He has rescued us from evil and He gives us flourishing.
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And so when we hear that knock on the door(…) and we open the door,(…) someone asks you, “If you die today, why would God let you into heaven?”
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And our answer would be simple.(…) We would say, “Well, God, because you are good,
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because you gave me Jesus,
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because you have given me everything that I don’t deserve.”
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That’s the answer.
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The end of the world, the end of our lives hold no sway over us anymore,
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because God is good and He gave Jesus for our sins, and now we get the joy of seeing God unleash flourishing into the hearts of our family, into the hearts of our community.
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We get the joy(…) of being able to be, it’s going to be our words, our friendship, our hands that God uses to bring that flourishing to others. We get to participate in that, every single one of us. Every single one of us gets to participate in the work of God to bring about His great and glorious day.
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Amen.