Since we finished our study in the book of Acts last Wednesday night and we are nearing the anniversary of Pentecost (probably at the end of this week), I want us to look at the blessings of the New Covenant that came with Pentecost. In doing this, I believe we will be able to better understand the blessed position under which we live in the New Covenant and will get (in part) an overview of what the book of Acts is about as a whole.
In order to understand the blessings of the New Covenant, we need to understand the situation under the Old Covenant. We realize our situation, but we don’t see it as a great blessing because we don’t know what the situation was like in the days of the Old Covenant.
Under the Old Covenant, God dealt with his people as tribes or nations. And over those tribes God had relationships with specially endowed leaders on whom he would pour out his Spirit, speak, guide, and use. These were the designated leaders. So God did not speak to each individual person but to the leader of the tribe. For example, we read of one such instance in Exodus 20:18-22, as it states, “And all the people perceived the thunder and the lightning flashes and the sound of the trumpet and the mountain smoking; and when the people saw it, they trembled and stood at a distance. Then they said to Moses, ‘Speak to us yourself and we will listen; but let not God speak to us, lest we die.’ And Moses said to the people, ‘Do not be afraid; for God has come in order to test you, and in order that the fear of Him may remain with you, so that you may not sin.’ So the people stood at a distance, while Moses approached the thick cloud where God was. Then the LORD said to Moses, ‘Thus you shall say to the sons of Israel, ‘You yourselves have seen that I have spoken to you from heaven.’”
So though God says that he spoke with the people from heaven, it really occurred through the mediator, Moses. Moses was the one who would listen to God, then he would communicate what God wanted to the people.
And, therefore, Moses is set off from the others in that he alone is the one of whom it is said, “Thus the LORD used to speak to Moses face to face, just as a man speaks to his friend” (Exodus 33:11). Moses had a personal relationship with God, knowing God, communicating with God, and fellowshipping with God.
When the leader (such as Moses) sinned, the people were plunged into divine judgment. It is not uncommon under the Old Covenant for one person to sin and the whole tribe of people suffer from the judgment. In real way, one person’s distress could be blamed on another person entirely.
However, when Jeremiah is allowed to see the days of the New Covenant, he writes of a change here. He writes, “‘Behold the days are coming,’ declares the LORD, ‘when I will sow the house of Israel and the house of Judah with the seed of man and the seed of beast. And it will come about that as I have watched over them to pluck up, to break down, to overthrow, to destroy, and to bring disaster, so I will watch over them to build and to plant,’ declares the LORD. ‘In those days they will not say again, the fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the children’s teeth are set on edge.’ But everyone will die for his own iniquity; each man who eats the sour grapes, his teeth will be set on edge. Behold, days are coming,’ declares the LORD, ‘when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah, not like the covenant which I made with their fathers in the day I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt, My covenant which they broke, although I was a husband to them,’ declares the LORD. ‘But this is the covenant which I will make with the house of Israel after those days,’ declares the LORD, ‘I will put My law within them, and on their heart I will write it; and I will be their God, and they shall be My people. And they shall not teach again, each man his neighbor and each man his brother, saying, ‘Know the LORD,’ for they shall all know Me, from the least of them to the greatest of them,’ declares the LORD, ‘for I will forgive their iniquity, and their sin I will remember no more.’”
Jeremiah saw a day when everyone would be able to know God individually even as he and Moses knew God. This is surely the idea and the day that Moses was longing for when he got the news that other men were prophesying and said in Numbers 11:29, “Are you jealous for my sake? Would that all the LORD’s people were prophets, that the LORD would put His Spirit upon them.”
And this day is again written of in Joel 2:28-29 as Joel prophesies on behalf of the Lord, “And it will come about after this that I will pour out My Spirit on all mankind; and your sons and daughters will prophesy, your old men will dream dreams, your young men will see visions. And even on the male and female servants I will pour out My Spirit in those days.” He (like Moses and Jeremiah) is anticipating what life will be like under the New Covenant.
And so when Peter declares in Acts 2, “This is what was spoken of through the prophet Joel,” he is declaring that the blessings of the last days (the days under the New Covenant) have been inaugurated. The blessings of these days are then fleshed out in the rest of the book of Acts. Le me point out a few of them in the hope that we might walk in gratitude and thankfulness, realizing the grace that we have been shown.
Under the New Covenant, we all can know God personally. All of us can fall under the description of Moses and God’s relationship in Exodus 33:11. We don’t just have our sins forgiven; we can know God.
This is incredible in light of the fact that only a select few had this privilege under the Old Covenant. This is surely the pinnacle of the announcement in Joel 2:32 and repeated in Acts 2:21 that “Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved.” We all relate to God personally, being disciplined for our own sins and knowing God ourselves. In fact, even the proclamation that we are God’s people (baptism) proclaimed in Acts 2:38 is able to touch men, women, boys, and girls alike unlike circumcision under the Old Covenant. And this has far-reaching implications, which I will mention as I close.
As I mentioned before, it seems that in the Old Testament, there were a few select individuals on whom God would pour out his Spirit. Moses, Jeremiah, and the other prophets were obviously in another class. But under the New Covenant, every believer has the ministry of the Holy Spirit in his or her life.
The fulfillment of Joel’s prophecy in Acts 2 was that God would “pour forth of [His] Spirit upon all mankind.” Therefore, now, under the New Covenant, all of us have the Holy Spirit indwelling us, convicting us, teaching us, leading us, etc.
Therefore, in the most general sense of the word, we are all prophets because we can hear God speak to us through his Spirit and then speak to others.1 We are all able to communicate with God. Wayne Grudem speaks of this incredible reality more clearly than I, writing, “The prophet is in a regular and unusually vital personal relationship with God and therefore in frequent personal communication with God. It is prophets who stand in the ‘council’ of the Lord (Jer. 23:18, 22, RSV), and the Lord makes known to them what he is going to do before he does it: ‘Surely the Lord GOD does nothing, without revealing his secret to his servants the prophets’ (Amos 3:7). Such statements evoke an amazing picture of personal friendship with God, a claim that is made explicit in the cases of Moses (Ex. 33:11; Deut. 34:10) and Abraham (2 Chron. 20:7; Isa. 41:8; cf. James 2:23). Because a prophet is in such close communication with God, he will often just ‘know’ things about a situation that he could not have seen with his natural eyes alone, but hat had to be revealed by God (1 Kings 14:4-6; 2 Kings 5:25-26; 6:12; 8:12-13; note Elisha’s surprise that there was something the Lord had not told him in 2 Kings 4:27). In light of such a close personal relationship between God and the prophets, it is remarkable that the New Testament epistle of James sees Elijah’s prayer life as a pattern for Christians to imitate (James 5:16-18).”2 James can say this, however, because of the blessings we reap under the New Covenant of being able to relate to, know, and speak with God personally.
We have all had God speak to us in these “special” ways. All we have to do is think of time when you have been tempted and the Spirit has said, “No” to you. We all know that experience. Or he has said, “Say this or that to that person” and you have and it was exactly what they needed. Such is the blessing of the New Covenant.
We all have spiritual gifts with which we can use to minister to one another in the body. This again is a blessing of the New Covenant.
My fear is that we treat these things like our freedom; we’ve grown so accustomed to it that we forget that these are blessings. But on this anniversary of Pentecost, I want to call us back to realizing that we live in the most privileged time in history. Jesus could actually tell his followers that it was to their advantage that he go away so that this period of time could be ushered in with the coming of the Spirit (John 16:7).
Probably one of the greatest privileges that we take for granted (closely connected with the first one I mentioned) is that the gospel can now go to all the nations. Because God relates to individuals who can know him, the gospel can go to all of them. This is the blessing of the events of Pentecost. For Jesus can say in anticipation of that day, “You shall receive power which the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you shall be My witnesses both in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria, and even to the remotest part of the earth” (Acts 1:8).
We know salvation because of the age ushered in by the New Covenant. We no longer wait for anything but the return of our Lord. We have in the Spirit within us if we are believers, we can know God and relate to God personally, and we can take the gospel to everyone who may repent and believe.
This is what is shown throughout the book of Acts as the Spirit speaks to individuals, directs individuals, each person is able to relate to God, and the gospel is taken all over the world. We live in a blessed time that I pray we would never take for granted. Let us walk in an attitude of thankfulness.
Taking note of his grace. Amen.