The Christian's Interest in the Day of Pentecost
I. At the day of Pentecost a new era did manifestly break upon the world; not an era during which human reason was to be more vast than it had been, but one during which there was to be a supernatural ascendancy, such as had not been vouchsafed under the former dispensation. The Spirit of God descended in greater measure, and in a new office, and the Gospel seemed irradiated, and mind sprang into comparative energy. Let the Spirit be withdrawn from the Church, and we thoroughly believe that men might become like the Jews, idolaters, with the truths of the Old Testament in their hands, and, like the Apostles, ignorant of redemption, and the facts of the New. While long before this visible descent the Holy Ghost had renewed our depraved nature in the elect people of God, yet at Pentecost He came in such measure, such fulness of purpose, such largeness of justice, and with such developments to unfold the mystery of the Gospel, as to put into the shade every previous communication, when, according to the description in our text, with the sound as of a rushing mighty wind, He became the instructor of the Church.
II. Note the connection of the gift of the Spirit with the exaltation of our Lord Jesus Christ. The great event which Whitsuntide commemorates was but the act of a victor celebrating His triumphs and distributing His gifts among the people. He gives, not gold and not silver, but something incalculably more precious; He sends His own Spirit to renew the sons of the earth, and to transform the heirs of death into the heirs of immortality. Nay, He scatters pardon, peace, acceptance and happiness whatever He had taken flesh to procure for mankind, seeing that the result of His mediation cannot be appropriated to us except through the Spirit; so that to send the Spirit was to make available the merits of His obedience unto death. For the men of every clime, in every age of the world, did the Spirit of the living God enter with the sound of the storm, and the flame of fire; and we ought to rejoice at this witness of Christ's resurrection, and give thanks that we have not been left to the uncertainties of oral tradition; but that we are as thoroughly informed of the doctrine of our Lord, as though with our own eyes we had seen, and with our own ears we had heard the author.
H. Melvill, Penny Pulpit,No. 1520 (see also Voices of the Year,vol. i., p. 514).
References: Acts 2:2-4. Spurgeon, Sermons,vol. xxvii., No. 1619. Acts 2:3; Acts 2:4. W. B. Pope, Sermons,p. 270.