Pentecost represents two celebrations without delay. For Christians, the celebration is primarily concerning the arrival of the Holy Spirit, the miraculous present of the Lord, full with fiery tongues and evangelistic outflows. However that is all the time layered atop its first objective: as a pageant of the Jews celebrating the descent of the Lord upon Mt. Sinai and Moses’ reception of the Regulation from God. Each scenes–the primary from Acts 2 and the second from Exodus 19–are scenes crammed with fireplace and glory and the presence of the Lord, although their tenor is kind of completely different. In Acts 2, the believers rejoice joyously the arrival of God’s energy of their midst, whereas in Exodus 19, we learn that “all of the individuals who have been within the camp trembled.”
Lest we attempt to make too quick a dichotomy right here, nonetheless, it’s price recalling that simply as holiness within the Previous Testomony may very well be so {powerful} that an individual may die simply by unworthily touching the holy factor (cf. Ex. 19:12, II Sa. 6:7), we now have the same sample within the New Testomony, with the sudden deaths of Ananias and Sapphira (Acts 5ff) and elsewhere the place misleading figures like Elymas are struck blind (Acts 13ff). The trick right here is to not pit Mt. Sinai in opposition to the Higher Room and say that the parallel is about legislation versus grace. As a substitute, we must be asking: How is the Pentecost present foregrounded by the legislation’s majesty?
And right here once more we discover ourselves reflecting on the priestly name of the folks of God. The presence of God is ineffable, omnipotent, and untouchable—so sacred that even the mountain upon which God descends is simply too holy to the touch. But right here, simply as God is getting ready to supply Israel with the Regulation that may form their interactions with God to any extent further, we see a imaginative and prescient of God’s targets: “You shall be for me a priestly kingdom and a holy nation.” Even in Exodus, the imaginative and prescient isn’t for a everlasting mediation between God and the nation by a specific priesthood. The imaginative and prescient is larger than that–it’s for a holy nation that mediates God to themselves by their very own collective priesthood. Although the folks initially recoil from this proposition–the very sights and sounds of God’s presence overwhelms them–right here in Exodus we see the primary foundations for a common priesthood of all believers, a foretaste of the approaching Holy Spirit.
Ian Edward Caveny serves as pastor at First Presbyterian Church of Alton in south-central Illinois and as an occasional lecturer for the John Martinson Honors Program at Southern Illinois College Edwardsville.
The Diocese of Mukono – The Church of the Province of Uganda
St. Martin’s by the Lake Episcopal Church, Minnetonka Seashore, Minnesota
