Pentecost: The God Who Comes Again (1)
We have just celebrated Jesus’ ascension to the Father to take up his royal rule on the heavenly throne. Before we can catch our breath from that, though, he’s coming back again! Pentecost is really Jesus’ second coming in the biblical narrative. He’s not the incarnate Son in this coming, to be sure. But it is the “Spirit of Jesus” (Acts 16:7). The form of his continuing presence in the world as he pursues God’s ultimate purpose. God never intended to leave his creation alone. From the first moments when he walked with our fore-parents in the Garden of Eden (Gen.3:8) God purposed to be near and dear to his human creatures. And that’s the story line of the Bible punctuated a key points with events hastening and deepening that divine nearness. Pentecost is another of those moments tracked by the church’s calendar. Luke story of Pentecost in Acts 2 is a rich telling of this key events. In my several posts on it we’ll explore a few aspects of it. In this first post I want to focus...