God’s Timing
The ancient Greek poet Hesiod, who lived around 700 B.C., said, “Observe due measure, for right timing is in all things the most important factor.” Right timing is the most important factor. In other words, “Timing is everything.” You’ve heard it before, everybody has said it…you have said it. One of my favorite comedians Demitri Maritn observed, “Timing is everything. That's a cliche. Now. If I'd said that a long time ago, I'd have been original.” As they say, the secret to comedy is, in fact…timing. That’s what I want us to consider today…timing, in particular God’s timing.
One story from my life about God’s timing happened almost exactly 10 years ago. It was just weeks after our daughter, Skylar, was born and we got a call from Kate’s mom on a Friday that her Dad had had a stroke. It happened the day before and was found to be minor, so much so that he did not even recognize it as such. He just thought he wasn’t feeling well and even had Kate’s mom, Sandra, take him to a Bible study that evening. Thankfully, some of his friends in the Bible study knew something about strokes and urged him to go get checked out. So on Friday, he seemed to recover just fine from that stroke, but then on Saturday he had another one, but much a more significant one. He and Sandra both knew what was happening this time thanks to their experience two days before. They didn’t waste any time in calling 911 and getting Peter ambulanced to the hospital. Once there Peter’s doctors knew they needed to operate. They too heeded the warning of the minor stroke on Thursday and knew that if they didn’t act quickly Peter would not come out of this one his regular self.
Afterward they would tell us that one of the two main arteries that carry blood to the brain was completely blocked and the second was partially. The man was preaching, teaching, writing newspaper articles, traveling, etc. while getting a fraction of the blood he needed to his brain. I joked with him after and said he may become a true genius now with a properly functioning brain. Thankfully, Peter always had a great sense of humor about himself.
The surgeons also told us that if Peter had not gotten to them when he did, if he had been delayed 15-20 min he would have most likely been in a wheel chair for the rest of his life, and if they hadn’t performed the surgery, it was certain that he was headed for a fatal stroke. But God in his amazing mercy orchestrated things so that Peter got the attention he needed exactly when he needed it. Kate and I were struck by God’s amazing mercy in his miraculous timing.
Now it’s not something that I like to think about when I am in the throws of crisis. If someone were to try to encourage me and say, “Don’t worry God has perfect timing I’m sure it will work out” during the crisis, while we were still not sure about Peter’s situation I would probably be tempted to smack them right in the mouth, and I might even call them a name.
She looks so happy slapping her friend.
But in hindsight, once through the intensity of the crisis, considering God’s timing is one of the most amazing and encouraging things.
This was in my mind as I thought about the passages for this week. This Sunday is the day of Pentecost on the church calendar. We remember the events of Acts 2 when the promised Holy Spirit famously came upon Jesus’ disciples after His ascension into heaven. It is a very important event for the church, but what does it have to do with God’s timing? We will get there. We’ll see that God’s timing in sending his Spirit when he does helps us understand more what it means to live in the Holy Spirit.
Let’s consider the text and Pentecost and the Holy Spirit himself. As I said, Pentecost is a very important event for the church, but also a very controversial event. It is important because it marks the new era for God’s people, a shift to a time when they no longer live under law but in the Spirit. It is controversial because the Church has struggled to understand exactly what that means to live in the Spirit. Here once again we see God breaking through the barrier separating the divine and the physical. Like he did with the Incarnation, God enters into our world in His Holy Spirit and makes his home with us.
The truth is any time we humans encounter the divine in such a direct manner as with the events of Pentecost we have a difficult time with it. It is truly awesome and truly overwhelming. We tend to take those experiences and manipulate them and turn them into something that divides instead of unites us. . .we use them as opportunities for sin instead of blessing. We try to control something we cannot control, namely God himself. Remember Tom Cruise as Cole Trickle in Days of Thunder, “I want to control something that’s out of control.” Problem is that’s impossible. Pentecost and subsequently the Holy Spirit have certainly been used in this way. We are not in control of the Spirit. He is the third person of the Trinity, God himself, and therefore Lord over us, not the other way around, but we certainly have tried.
Now you may be new to Christianity or you may not be a Christian at all in which case you may not be familiar with some of these abuses. To that I say Thank God! Some of you however may be familiar with Pentecost and some of you may even have experienced some of the abuses that have occurred in the name of the Holy Spirit, so I want to validate that pain and spend just a moment to give some examples of what I mean by abuses. Many have read Acts 2, the events of Pentecost, and have turned it into some sort of litmus test for spirituality. It is used to see if people are “real Christians.” I had a professor in seminary that said whenever you hear anyone use that phrase “real Christian,” like “Julie is a real Christian because. . .” Fill in the rest of the sentence: because she only listens to Christian music and has a Jesus fish on her car…and it’s a Prius, or because she gets up at 4 am to pray for 4 hours before work…while kneeling on glass, or whatever. Whenever you hear that phrase “so and so is a real Christian” my professor would say reach for your holster. Reach for your gun because you’re not with friendlies. Watch out!
Well, many in the church did that with Pentecost, but instead of saying “real Christian” they said “Spirit-filled.” It went something like this, “Julie is a Christian, but I don’t know if she is Spirit-filled.” Meaning “I am not sure if she has had a supernatural experience of the Holy Spirit like the disciples in Acts 2, which would clearly mark the infilling of the Spirit in her life.” As you can see that was way too long to say so it was cut down to: “I’m not sure she speaks in tongues.” Boom. There it is the new standard for real holiness, for real spirituality. You have to have received the gift of speaking in tongues in order to be a Spirit-filled/real Christian. Reach for your holster!
Other than the fact that it is judgmental sounding and kind of arrogant, why is it wrong to view Pentecost in this way? Is it wrong? Doesn’t Acts 2 show us all of Jesus’ disciples having a second blessing experience with the Spirit?
Let’s try to understand what happened in Jerusalem that day. Pentecost at that time did not mean what it means for us now. We think of it as the giving of the Holy Spirit to the Church, but it meant something totally different for the people then. According to many later rabbis Pentecost prior to this day commemorated the giving of the Law on Mount Sinai. Jews from all over the Mediterranean world came to Jerusalem to worship God and remember how he had delivered them from Egypt, gave the law to Moses and then conquered the Promised Land for them. This is important to understand because it explains God’s timing. He breaks through with His Holy Spirit on Pentecost for a reason. It is not random just like Peter’s minor stroke on that Thursday turned out not to be random. The Holy Spirit comes on Pentecost because God is showing his people that He is going to relate to them in a totally new way. Jesus changed everything. The guardian (which is what Paul calls the law in Galatians evoking the idea of a divine nanny) the guardian or nanny is no longer needed because the parent, God himself-first in Jesus and now in the Holy Spirit, has come.
As Jesus said when he ascended back up to heaven, he did so in part so that He could send his Holy Spirit to be with us in a new way, not limited by a physical body, but omnipresent, wherever his people are he is. So, one of the main purposes here was to show that God would now relate directly to His people through his Spirit and not through the law. This is confirmed in the writings of the New Testament. The writers take great care to describe the Christian life as one in the Spirit and not under the law. Paul does this very explicitly in Romans 7 and 8. He says, “But now we are released from the law, having died to that which held us captive, so that we serve in the new way of the Spirit and not in the old way of the written code” (7:6). Pentecost is the pivotal shift in the life of God’s people.
This is huge, but it is not all that is happening here in Acts 2. God reveals that he will be with his people in a new way through the gift of His Holy Spirit, and he also shows that he is changing and expanding the definition of his people in this passage. The fact that the disciples are given the miraculous ability to speak in other languages, specifically all of the languages of everyone within earshot in the temple courtyard, reveals that God is about to burst the ethnic bounds of his people. God’s Israel will no longer refer to an ethnic group, namely the Jews, but will now be his Church made up of people from every tongue, tribe, and nation. This is the evangelistic purpose of the Spirit and it would not have been seen had it not happened on Pentecost. Because it was one of the four main festivals of the Jewish year it meant that people from all over the Mediterranean world would have been in Jerusalem that week. They were all there to celebrate and worship and as the passage tells us, they spoke many different languages and came from many different places.
Interestingly enough, God could have simply had the disciples speak in Hebrew or Aramaic, which most of the people would have understood. They were the common languages of the region and of the Jews, kind of like English is the international language of business. If you want to do business internationally you better know some English. Well, if you’re going to Jerusalem to worship in the Temple you probably want to know some Hebrew. But God wants to show the very fact that he is going to bring together his Body of believers, his church, from all over the world. It will not have any of those physical or cultural boundaries. His gospel of grace through Jesus Christ transcends culture. It is for everyone. This is precisely why the gift of tongues was so important on that day. It was to proclaim the message, to expand his church, to evangelize the lost. To show that Jesus was not just the Savior of the Jews, but the Savior of the whole world. We see all of this by considering God’s timing in sending his Holy Spirit.
So what does this show us about this new life in the Spirit? As I said earlier, this miraculous event of God breaking into the world through His Holy Spirit is for the purpose of unification not division. The gift of tongues was not intended to be a litmus test for spirituality. As we have seen, it was for bringing in the lost. . .God communicating to his people in their own language, meeting them right where they are. It was about unifying his people under this one message of God’s gracious forgiveness of sins in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ in a language they could understand.
This still doesn’t answer the position that says everyone who is Spirit-filled speaks in tongues. We can consider the wider biblical witness to answer that one. In his first letter to the Corinthians Paul deals with it. In it we see Paul describing the many gifts of the Spirit and speaking in tongues is just one of them. There are a bunch, and no one has them all. He says,
“Now there are varieties of gifts, but the same Spirit; and there are varieties of service, but the same Lord; and there are varieties of activities, but it is the same God who empowers them all in everyone. To each is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good. For to one is given through the Spirit the utterance of wisdom, and to another the utterance of knowledge according to the same Spirit, to another faith by the same Spirit, to another gifts of healing by the one Spirit, to another the working of miracles, to another prophecy, to another the ability to distinguish between spirits, to another various kinds of tongues, to another the interpretation of tongues. All these are empowered by one and the same Spirit, who apportions to each one individually as he wills” (1 Cor. 12:4-11).
So the Holy Spirit is the one who gives the gifts and only he is in control of that. Any one gift cannot be demanded of everyone. As Paul says, all of the gifts are for the common good. They are for serving the body of believers and for reaching out to the lost. If any gift of the Spirit is being presented in any other way remember to reach for your holster.
From this closer look at Acts 2 and God’s perfect timing in choosing Pentecost we can see that life in the Spirit is one where we know and experience God’s presence in a whole new way. As I have said before, we see a God that breaks into our worlds. We see a God that bursts through barriers between him and us in order to be with us. That’s a major difference. We no longer have to go to Jerusalem to the temple to be with God. We do not have to work our way toward him. He comes to us and is with us wherever we are. He removes the obstruction of sin to live with us. The Spirit testifies to the same God that Jesus did because they are indeed one. The Spirit shows us a God of mercy and grace, a loving God that does not count our offenses, but instead showers us with good news of forgiveness and hope. Pentecost shows us that the era of living under the written code, the era of performance, the era of comparison and litmus tests is over. Everything that God required of us He provided in Jesus Christ for us and so life in the Spirit is a life of freedom for us. There is no more hierarchy; there are no more dividing lines. There is no more discrimination because of class, race, gender, or culture. Everyone is invited. The message of God’s radical grace is for everyone.
Because God has given us the Holy Spirit we can rest assured that He is with us and will remain with us through everything. He brings in a new life of freedom to share the good news we have received without reservation. Life in the Spirit is not about what you or we do for God, but it is all about what God has done for us in Jesus Christ.
Recommended Reading
