Pentecost
W. Carl Ketcherside
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When God drove the heathen out of Canaan he established His "chosen ones in it as an agrarian society. Jerusalem was designated the capital and here the religious worship centered. To promote national unity and solidarity, as well as to preserve intact a proper reverence for Jehovah, it was decreed that the males must go up to Jerusalem thrice annually to appear before the Lord. They were not to go with empty hands. So the three festal occasions were made to coincide with harvest seasons in the land of "corn (grain) and wine." It was providentially arranged that they would also celebrate great events in national history.
The first feast occurred at the outset of the barley harvest. It was called "the Passover." It memorialized both the deliverance from Egypt and entrance into the land of promise. The people fled from Egypt on the night of the Passover and crossed Jordan on the same day that the passover lamb was selected, forty years later. The lamb was killed on the fourteenth of Nisan, the feast of unleavened bread began on the fifteenth day, and on the day following, the sixteenth, the first-fruits of the barley harvest were waved before the Lord in the form of a sheaf gathered from the field of ripening grain. This was the first day of the week.
The day of Pentecost occurred fifty days after the waving of the first sheaf. The Hebrews called it "The Feast of Weeks" because it occurred seven weeks after the Passover. It was determined by counting seven sabbaths from the sixteenth of Nisan, and designating the day following the seventh sabbath, as the holy day. On this day in the month of Sivan, the firstfruits of the wheat harvest were waved before the Lord in the form of two baked loaves containing leaven. This feast celebrated the giving of the law at Sinai, which occurred fifty days after the exodus from Egypt. It also memorialized the birth of the nation which began with the granting of the legal constitution.
The theocracy began on Pentecost at Mount Sinai. The Christocracy began on the same day at Mount Sion, a spiritual mount not subject to human touch. A theocracy is a rule of God. A Christocracy is a rule of God's anointed. At the time of the slaying of the Jewish passover lamb, Christ, our passover, was slain to free us from the bondage of sin. Forty days afterward he returned to heaven to be Christed, that is anointed. There could be no Christian ekklesia and no Christian worship until the Christing of Jesus, in whose name every word and deed must be offered to God.
On Pentecost, announcement of his inauguration was made in Jerusalem by the Holy Spirit. This announcement was accompanied by visible and audible signs--cloven tongues like as of fire, and the speaking in other languages by the envoys of the King. One of the envoys explained the phenomena thus, "This Jesus hath God raised up, whereof we all are witnesses. Therefore being by the right hand of God exalted, and having received of the Father the promise of the Holy Ghost, he hath shed forth this, which ye now see and hear." He concluded his address with the assurance that Jesus had been coronated and anointed, i. e., made both Lord and Christ. Pentecost was the beginning of the Messianic Reign. It was the birthday of the church. And it was on the first day of the week.
From time to time, men who are disturbed by periods of apparent sterility in the history of the church, speak of recapturing the "Pentecostal experience." These seek for a reproduction in their generation of the phenomena which graced the advent of the Spirit in conjunction with the Good News. But there will be no addi-
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Institutions, like the men who compose them, have but one birthday, although each succeeding year marks another anniversary. An anniversary is not a birthday, despite the faulty vernacular which so designates it. It is a celebration in memory of the date of birth, and memory is always related to past happenings and events. Our Lord is not coronated over and over. He was given his position but once and Pentecost provided the occasion for annunciation of it. "Christ offered for all time one sacrifice for sins, and took his seat at the right hand of God, where he waits henceforth until his enemies are made his footstool."
I am reluctant to sit in judgment upon the motivations of any who are sincere and even more reluctant to appear in a role of limiting the Spirit by my interpretation of his own words. I am frank to confess that, while I think I may know how the Spirit will manifest his power in this age, he may do otherwise and exhibit phenomena wholly unexpected to me and beyond my present comprehension. But I am certain of one thing, and that is that in whatever dramatic manner he may choose to appear there will be no repetition of Pentecost. To have it otherwise would make the Holy Spirit inconsistent in his own testimony.
To those who tell me that if I believed the scriptures I would look for a Pentecostal experience, my reply is that it is precisely because I do believe the scriptures that I do not look for such an experience. The church can no more return and experience its birth into the world than I can return to be born from my mother's womb. In each instance there is something to be remembered and not to be experienced anew or afresh.