Baptism of the Holy Spirit
Published by Stanley Pouw in 2022 · 19 June 2022
How wonderful if everyone understood how important this portion of Scripture is. It is important on God’s side for what He does as described here. It is important on our side for us to understand that we are a part of being the church of Jesus Christ. Acts 2:1-4, When the Day of Pentecost had fully come, they were all with one accord in one place. 2 And suddenly there came a sound from heaven,
as of a rushing mighty wind, and it filled the whole house where they were sitting. 3 Then there appeared to them divided tongues, as of fire, and one sat upon each of them. 4 And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak with other tongues, as the Spirit gave them utterance.” On Pentecost, there came from heaven a noise like a violent rushing wind. And there appeared to them tongues as of fire resting on each of them.
That is the phenomena that God designed to inaugurate the birth of the church. We are the church. This is our history. Remember, in Acts 1, we saw the preparation for the birth of the church. Now in Acts 2, we will experience the actual beginning of the church. In Acts 1, the disciples were waiting for the coming of the Holy Spirit. In Acts 2, He arrives with power.
In Acts 1, the disciples were equipped. In Acts 2, they are empowered for their ministry. In Acts 1, the believers are held back. In Acts 2, they are sent out full of resources to declare the gospel message to the ends of the earth. This is Acts 1:8, “But you shall receive power when the Holy Spirit comes upon you, and you shall be witnesses to Me in Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria, and to the end of the earth.”
First, came the Old Testament revelation. God speaking in many ways to the fathers by the prophets, establishing truth, understanding of Him and his redemptive purpose. Then after the Old Testament was the arrival of God incarnate, the Lord Jesus Christ, who came and became flesh and dwelled among us. And 30 years later, His death ratified the new Covenant by the sacrifice of Himself.
Next was His resurrection from the dead by which God affirmed that He was satisfied with the sacrifice of Christ. Forty days after that, was the ascension of our Lord Jesus Christ as He went back into heaven to be seated at the Father’s right hand. The next great event is in Acts 2, the sending of the Holy Spirit to bring the believers together and establish the church.
In Acts 2, Jesus has ascended. Now He sends the Holy Spirit which is the beginning of a new age. Something new has come that has never been known before. Something never seen in the Old Testament. Something promised in the New Testament, and even described by the Lord Himself who spoke of the church in Matthew 16. But up to this point it was something hidden.
This is the inauguration of the church, and what the church is and how the church lives then grows through the rest of the writings of the New Testament, even to the consummation of redemption and the place the church will play in final redemption and the establishment of the kingdom of Christ in the Book of Revelation. So here, we meet the bride of Christ, the church.
Here we meet the branches connected to Christ who is divine. Here we meet those who are part of the kingdom of salvation, ruled by the Son of God. The church is called a household, a family of children by adoption. It is called a spiritual temple with Jesus and the apostles as the foundation. It is also called the body of Christ. This is the unique identification of the church in the New Testament.
Not one nation ethnically, but Jews and gentiles all one in Christ. The wall has come down. Everyone is placed into the body of Christ by Christ through the power of the Holy Spirit. This is what our Lord promised in Acts 1:5, “For John baptized with water, but you will be baptized with the Holy Spirit not many days from now.” Jesus says, “This is the baptism with the Holy Spirit.”
Jesus ascended 40 days after His resurrection. We’re now ten days later when we read in Acts 2:1, “When the day of Pentecost had come, they were all together in one place.” That was the pattern from the time of our Lord’s resurrection when He appeared to the disciples on the road to Emmaus and again appeared the same night to them from the period of that first appearance all the way to His ascension.
We see in Acts 1:13, that when they went back to Jerusalem, they went up to the upper room where they were staying, so they just sort of rented the upper room. It was the same upper room where they had the Passover meal the night Jesus was betrayed. There were 120 of them, so it must have been a roomy place. Wherever it was, Luke describes history at the discretion of God.
Verse 2, “And suddenly there came a sound from heaven, as of a rushing mighty wind, and it filled the whole house where they were staying.” The baptism with the Holy Spirit is a sovereign act of God based on God’s timing, not based on anything they did. It was on the day of Pentecost, meaning the 50th day after the resurrection. To the Jews, it was just the name of a feast 50 days after Passover.
Which commemorates the first fruits of the wheat harvest. But it also took on some other characteristics. After the exile, it became the traditional celebration to remember the giving of the Mosaic Law, the birth day of the Torah. Because it was about 50 days after the Exodus from Egypt that God gave Moses the law, and so the Jews just added another 50th kind of celebration.
So here on this day, where they celebrate the first fruits of the harvest to come, they also celebrated and remembered the giving of the Mosaic law. The Spirit’s timing then on Pentecost is very important. The Spirit comes because God deems that this is the very day the Spirit is to come to fulfill prophecies from the Old Testament that are very important. It is God’s sovereign timetable.
In Leviticus 23, we learn of the feasts of the Lord given to Israel to celebrate. These key feasts really are pictures of the work of Christ. The first was Passover in the spring on the 14th of Nisan, and was a picture of the death of Christ. Jesus was the ultimate Passover lamb, the one true sacrifice for sin. And God bringing the fulfillment of the Passover had His son die on the Passover.
That is why 1 Corinthians 5:7 says, “Christ, our Passover.” The second feast in Leviticus 23 was the next day after Passover. And it was first fruits. This was the celebration symbolizing the full harvest to come. This is a picture of Christ’s resurrection, which came immediately after his death, and 1 Corinthians 15:20 says, “Christ is the first fruits of those who sleep.”
Because He lives, we shall live also. Fifty days later came the third feast discussed in Leviticus 23:15-16. It’s the Feast of Harvest, which is Pentecost. The crop is not yet fully in, but this anticipates a full harvest. What does that have to do with Christ? It is on the day of Pentecost that the Lord sends the Holy Spirit who is the guarantee of our future complete inheritance.
The Holy Spirit comes as the first fruits. He comes as the down payment of the final complete inheritance. The earnest of the full harvest that is typified in another feast, the Feast of Trumpets. Now the Feast of Pentecost is tied to the birth of the church as well. In the first fruits festival the day after Passover, which pictured the resurrection, they brought bread with no leaven.
What did leaven represent? Sin. That celebrated the resurrection of Christ, and so there was no leaven because in Christ, there’s no sin. However, when they brought their loaf at Pentecost, it had leaven. Why? Because while there’s no sin in Christ, there is sin in the church. That’s the specific message of these images in Scripture. All of Leviticus 23 looks at this significant event.
Suddenly, unexpectedly, the church is born. Suddenly, the Holy Spirit arrives as an instantaneous, unexpected, miraculous, divine gift, from heaven.” Let’s look at the phenomena. There came from heaven a noise like a violent rushing wind. This is not wind but a metaphor to describe the kind of sound they heard. There’s only a sound like a hurricane. The word here is ‘pneuma’, which means a blast.
So the church is born. This is a non-experiential reality, like salvation. You don’t feel salvation. Some people talk about feeling the presence of God. They don’t know what they’re talking about. You can’t feel the presence of God. You can’t feel with your physical being something which is a spiritual reality. There was also visual phenomena in the fire or the tongues that were like fire.
First Corinthians 12:13, gives us an important explanation, “For by one Spirit, we were all baptized into one body, whether Jews or Greeks, whether slaves or free, and we’re all made to drink of one Spirit.” Literally we’re saturated with the Spirit, immersed with the Spirit, and we as believers all take in the Holy Spirit. This is a transformation from heaven. This is a divine miracle.
This is true for every believer. So He takes up residence at the point of salvation in every believer from here on, and we are all baptized into the body of Christ by the same Holy Spirit. So this is not an experience you seek. There is regeneration giving you a new life, and then there is this uniting of every believer with all other believers in the body of Christ by sharing the indwelling Holy Spirit.
The Spirit comes from God as a gift from God. You’re not your own. You’re bought with a price. He paid the price. You belong to Him. He placed His Spirit in you. Now in John 17 when Jesus was praying for all believers, it was very important to Him to pray for the unity of his own. So in verse 11, He’s praying, “Keep them in your name that they may be one, even as we are.”
Four times in one prayer Jesus says, “I want them to be one.” The unity that Christ prayed for was fulfilled on the day of Pentecost in Acts 2. The prayer is answered. We are one. We might not all act like it, but we are one. We are one because we have all been immersed in the Holy Spirit and are completely indwelled in the Holy Spirit so we share a common life as one body.
Verse 3, “Then there appeared to them divided tongues, as of fire, and one sat upon each of them.” It wasn’t real wind, and it wasn’t real fire. It was the appearance of fire. This is supernatural occurrence. These little tongues appeared over each one of them to make it clear that with no exception, that each person had received the Holy Spirit. Their spiritual baptism had occurred.
This is not the baptism of fire of Matthew 3:11, which is judgment. This is the visible manifestation of the descent of the Holy Spirit. Because it is impossible then for them to know what has happened if there isn’t some means by which they can know that God has come down and done this, the individual tongue over everyone would show that it happened to all of them.”
Remember when the Holy Spirit came at the baptism of Jesus to empower Jesus for His ministry that the Holy Spirit came down on Him in some form of a dove? Here, the Holy Spirit comes down, and it looks like small tongues, and something like flames resting on the head of the disciples, symbolizing the descent of the Holy Spirit and the baptism that Jesus had promised.
Because there’s a power in you controlling you from heaven. It’s why you love other believers. It’s why you want to serve them. It’s why you want to care for them. You’ve been bought with a price. You belong to the Lord. This is what He has given you. Verse 4 says, “And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit.” They were all placed in union with the Holy Spirit.
You’ll never lose the Holy Spirit because the Holy Spirit himself is the down payment on the future inheritance. So He’s God’s guarantee, God’s down payment, God’s first installment, God’s first fruits. You cannot lose the Holy Spirit. That’s permanent. But the Bible says in Ephesians 5:18, “Be filled with the Spirit of God.” It means let the presence of the Holy Spirit dominate you.
They were totally controlled by the Holy Spirit, filled not in the sense that you would fill a glass with water, static, but filled in the sense that wind would fill sails and move it along like, in the words of Peter, holy men of God were moved along. At the point of salvation, every believer is both baptized and filled. But the challenge for us as believers is to maintain that filling of the Holy Spirit.
This means to continually yield to the Spirit’s power and control so that He moves us. You don’t experience the baptism of the Holy Spirit. But the filling of the spirit you do. Because if you’re filled, you possess the fruit of the Spirit: Love, joy, peace, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness and self-control. When all of those are your attitudes, you’re being filled with the Holy Spirit.
In other words, you don’t move in your own energy, you don’t move in your own flesh, you don’t move with your own ideas, you don’t generate your own will, you are blown along under the wind of the Spirit of God. You are carried along the path that He wants you to go. It’s in a very real sense almost like those who wrote the Scripture who were moved along by the Spirit of God.
The filling of the Holy Spirit is the ongoing experience that we want to sustain. Baptism is positional. Filling is practical. Baptism grants the Holy Spirit. Filling yields to Him. If you’re filled with the Holy Spirit, all those relationships fall in line to the honor of God.” To be filled with the Spirit is to be under His total control, and that means to be obedient to his will as revealed in his Word. Let us pray.