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The Crisis of Pentecost
by
T. Austin-Sparks
Christianity is built upon two great facts, the facts
that God raised Jesus from the dead and the fact that the
Holy Spirit makes this a reality in the life of the
believer. Jesus risen; the Spirit given: these are the
two foundations of our faith. There is no real knowing or
living until the Holy Spirit comes, and comes in.
It is He who throws light upon Jesus, from His birth to
His cross, explaining the significance of His earthly
life. You will never come into the good and value of the
life of the Lord Jesus until the Holy Spirit interprets,
explains and applies it. You will only have an earthly
story, snatches of history and biography, unless the
Spirit takes up the incarnation, the walking, the
teaching, the working and the dying of the Lord Jesus and
imparts their true significance to you. Why did Christ
come to earth at all? What was He here for? The one
inclusive answer to this question is that He came to
bring back man into a living, conscious union with God.
But if this was the case then all that He was and did was
in vain until the Holy Spirit came from above to impart
the value of His life and work to believers. He would
have come in vain, taught in vain, worked in vain and
died in vain if the Holy Spirit had not taken up the
matter and made it real and living. It was the Lord Jesus
Himself who placed this tremendous importance upon the
Holy Spirit: "It is expedient for you that I go
away, for if I do not go away the Comforter will not
come..." (John 16:7). The meaning of the life of
Christ can never be effectively realised apart from the
gift and indwelling of the Holy Spirit. The very first
thing which the Spirit does is to make instantly real in
us that which Christ came to do. "The Spirit beareth
witness with our spirits that we are children of
God." Quite clearly this means living, conscious
relationship with God. When the Spirit comes He begins at
once to take up the purpose of Christ's coming to earth
and imparts it in the life of the believer. In fact there
is no spiritual experience which we can have which is not
directly attributable to the Holy Spirit.
Now the Bible is a book of crises. There are four major
crises described in the Word of God. and of course many
minor ones in between. The first of these major crises
was the crisis of creation. That was a major crisis for
it was nothing less than the intervention of God in
relation to purpose. God reacted to vanity, to what was
void and without purpose or meaning, serving no real end
- "Now the earth was without form and void".
God was not prepared to tolerate this, so He acted in a
crisis of intervention. The second great crisis was that
of redemption. Through the coming to earth of the Son and
through His death on the cross, God intervened to recover
what had been lost through sin. It was the great crisis
of recovery. The third crisis was that of Pentecost, the
intervention of spiritual fullness as against mere
figures, representations and fragments, to bring in the
real and the full. By Pentecost heaven intervened to
bring into human affairs and experience the full
expression of divine life. Then the fourth great crisis
will be that of the coming again of Christ. This will
represent the intervention of God for universal
restoration and restitution. It has many aspects and is
still future, but it is just as certain as the other
three.
Now we note that in every one of these major crises the
Holy Spirit is very much in evidence. At the beginning,
we are told that "the Spirit of God brooded over the
face of the deep". He was the agent and energy of
the first creation. Then in the crisis of redemption He
was in charge from first to last. The Redeemer was born
of the Spirit; He was anointed by the Spirit and did His
mighty works by His agency; and finally He offered
Himself without spot to God through the eternal Spirit.
All the way through the work of redemption, the Holy
Spirit was the energy and power, the agent, the
custodian. Then of course it goes without saying that the
third great crisis of Pentecost was in the hands of the
Holy Spirit. That was where He took charge of everything,
even as the Lord Jesus had so strongly stipulated that no
attempt was to be made to preach and nothing was to be
done until the Spirit had come. It was the commandment of
the Lord that His disciples were to tarry until they had
been endued by the Spirit, so insisting that no movement
was to be attempted until the whole divine programme had
been taken over by the Holy Spirit. Finally we may be
sure that the matter of the coming again of the Lord
Jesus will involve the activities of the Holy Spirit. It
will represent the consummation of the Spirit's work. He
will have brought to birth sons for manifestation with
the Son. He will have effected the spiritual growth and
perfection of God's people; like Abraham's servant, He
will bring the bride and present her to the Bridegroom.
So it is that the end of the book of the Revelation
brings the call: "The Spirit and the bride say,
Come".
But when we have considered these four main crises and
the many minor ones in between, we still have to ask what
occupies the foreground of God's eternal purpose. The
answer is that right in the centre of the stage is a
being called MAN, a unique creation, the crown of
all creation. The Bible is the story of heaven's interest
in man. He is the one upon whom all attention is
focussed. God's great concern is with man, and moreover
the activities of all the heavenly beings are centred
upon him. "Not unto angels hath he subjected the
inhabited earth to come, but one in a certain place has
said, What is man that thou art mindful of him?"
(Hebrews 2:5-6). All heaven is occupied with the destiny
of man. And all hell equally focusses its attention on
the human race. The kingdom of evil is occupied in its
hostility to mankind. Being divided as a kingdom - as
Jesus says it is - it works in seemingly contradictory
ways. On one hand it does its utmost to degrade man, to
dishonour him, to make him lower than he really is, to
persuade him to make human life cheap, a mere cipher to
be liquidated at will, fodder for the state or for the
cannon. On the other hand it tries to make man without
God to be something more than he really is, to ensnare
him into arrogance and self-sufficiency, to pretend that
a human being has independence and authority of his own
and something to be proud of. But in both cases the
objective is the corruption of man and his spiritual
destruction. The kingdom of evil concentrates its
attention on the purposes of God for man in a
never-ceasing campaign to spoil this masterpiece of God's
creation.
This may seem irrelevant to the subject of the Holy
Spirit, but far from being so, it forces us to recognise
that only by the coming in of the Spirit can these evil
purposes be averted and the grand design of God
fulfilled. The purpose of creation was that man should
become a son of God. As Paul explains:
"...foreordained unto the adoption as sons, to be
conformed to the image of his Son...". So Pentecost
really takes us back to the original thought and purpose
of God in the creation of man. The Holy Spirit brings
that purpose up to date, so that when a believing man
receives the Holy Spirit as his inner life, all God's
eternal desires and intentions enter into a phase of
realisation.
If this is so, then it follows that there must be a
tremendous change in the person of the one who is in the
good of Pentecost. We know very well that before
Pentecost the men and women who were closely associated
with the Lord Jesus in His walk and work by no means
answered to God's original thought for mankind. When the
Holy Spirit came, however, they became quite different
people, so very different that we might almost say that
they were another 'order' of people. They had passed from
one kingdom into another. By the Spirit of sonship the
Son Himself had entered into their lives, to make them
veritable sons of God.
It seems to me that there can be no true understanding of
the meaning of the crisis of Pentecost until we associate
it with God's original purpose in creating man.
Immediately we understand this, though, we have the key
to the coming of the Spirit. I understand that there are
some eighty-eight direct references to the Holy Spirit in
the Old Testament, but they are partial, symbolic or
preparatory, all pointing on to the supreme objective of
God which is to enjoy intimate fellowship with human
sons. This explains the words in the letter to the
Galatians, where Paul speaks of the promise of Abraham
coming to Gentiles as well as Jews. This promise consists
of the life of sonship to God through Jesus Christ. Now
we note that the apostle goes on to say that this is made
effective by the promised gift of the Holy Spirit who is
"the Spirit of His Son" (Galatians 4:6).
The Spirit is busy making possible God's eternal desire
to have His creation peopled by loving and obedient sons.
We are told that the creation itself groans and travails
that this holy purpose should be realised - and soon!
What is more, the Holy Spirit also longs over God's
people with groanings which cannot be uttered, for His
supreme purpose in intervening in human history is
related to the goal of sonship. He regenerates us to make
us children of God. He guides us because we are the sons
of God. He trains and disciplines us according to the
fact that "God dealeth with you as with sons".
It is impossible to exaggerate the importance of the
presence and working of the Holy Spirit. All the
fulfilment of divine purposes in man is committed to Him.
But it is possible for us to fail to realise the great
objective of the crisis of Pentecost, which was to
provide God with men and women who can eternally satisfy
His heart and administer His will. This is not mere
doctrine, it is the most wonderful prospect which has
ever been revealed in God's universe. God the All-Wise
and the All-Gracious has set His heart on bringing many
sons to glory, and has committed to His gracious Spirit
the task of transforming sinners like us so that He may
have the family of sons, conformed to the image of His
Son, which He planned before time was. There are many
other aspects of the Spirit's working in and through us.
All of these are important. Most of them, however, are
related to the one all-inclusive objective which involves
the transformation of our inner lives into that spiritual
reality of likeness to Christ which was always God's
purpose for man. "Behold, what manner of love the
Father has bestowed upon us, that we should be called
children of God, and such we are. It is not yet
manifested what we shall be, but we know that when He is
manifested we shall be like him." That is really
what Pentecost was all about.
From
"Toward The Mark" Nov-Dec 1974, Vol. 3-6.
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