#88 What If Pentecost Happened Today? TikTok, AI, and the Tower of Babel + Dr. Greg Forster

My question today is, if Pentecost happened today,.

What would it look like?

Would we see it on TikTok? Would it be translated on podcasts? Would we have AI at foot? And so today I have an expert, Dr. Greg Forrester.

Pentecost is really the central action in the Bible that marks that transition from God's people having their own country to God's people being a people around the world.

So it seems like that Pentecost was the pinnacle of this change.

For this moment in Pentecost, the walls between cultures dissolve.

If Pentecost happened today, where would you kind of expect to see it?

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My name is Cassian Blino and I am your host. Quick question about Pentecost. I'm sure that all of us remember kind of that vision of chaos, those visions of many languages being spoken. My question today is if Pentecost happened today,.

What would it look like?

Would we see it on TikTok? Would it be translated on podcasts? Would we have AI at foot? Would we be blaming AI? Would we be thinking it's AI? How would we even recognize it? So in Acts 2, the Holy Spirit, for those that don't remember, the Holy Spirit comes and people don't leave their cultures behind.

Everybody starts speaking the languages of the world despite there being many cultures present and before not being able to speak all these conversations. It's like if Times Square, suddenly you could hear all of the languages of your culture being spoken in places they do not speak your language.

And so today I have an expert, Dr. Greg Forrester. You are the president of Karim Fellowship and the affiliate professor of biblical and systemic theology at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. You're also the author of 10 books,.

The editor of six,.

And your most recent book is Nationalism and Heresy in Augustine. And today we're gonna be mentioning a few things about that book because it just released. I can't wait to get into that. But your major scholarly focus is gonna be on the structures of culture and civilization, family, work, education, business, politics.

And due to your work, you've done major research on Pentecost. Welcome to the show. Why did you decide on Pentecost?

Well, I didn't set out wanting to study Pentecost. I've set out wanting to understand how the church fits into culture. We live our lives in cultures around the world. And one of the biggest challenges Christians face is how can I be faithful and at the same time live as part of the community around me?

It would be really easy to be faithful if we could just withdraw and not have anything to do with the world around us. And it would be really easy to live in the world if we didn't care whether or not we were faithful.

But to be faithful and to be living out in the world, that's a tough challenge. And I began looking into it. And what I discovered is that historically, for most of the history of Christianity, Pentecost was understood as the baseline for thinking about this problem.

You have a big transition from God's people in the Old Testament time. They have their own separate country. They have their own special culture. And so if you want to follow God, the best thing to do is travel to that country and make yourself part of that culture.

But in the New Testament era, and continuing to today, that's no longer the case. Why do God's people no longer have their own single special country where everyone is supposed to move there and have a special Christian culture that is separate from all the others?

Pentecost is really the central action in the Bible that marks that transition from God's people having their own country to God's people being a people around the world.

I've never even thought of it that way, that his nation of people were physically a nation in a particular... I feel like today we would call that a cult. Those people out in the field that believe that one thing, that was the norm for the early Israelites, for the early church.

Well, for God's people in the Old Testament time, God gave them a special covenant under Moses that said, I'm giving you this land. This is a special land. It's not like all the other places, and you're gonna be a special nation, not like all the other nations.

Now, that didn't mean they were supposed to hate all the other people. Their job was to love all the other nations of the world and bless them, but to do it from their own home base, right? They did have their own physical territory, and they had a set of laws, right?

God gave them a set of criminal laws. It's all this specific stuff about how the economy is supposed to work and how family law works and all that stuff. He wrote all their laws for them and said, here are the laws you're going to live under.

He established a kingship for them. First, God was their king, and when they demanded a human king, he gave them a human king. So he gave them their own system, and he said, be my special country, my special people group in their own land under their own laws, and from that home base, you are to bless the world.

But that all gets inverted when Jesus comes. After Jesus comes and accomplishes his saving work, he says, now you go out. You don't have a home base anymore. Now you go out to the world because you bring them my message and my love and my holiness.

I'm sending you, right? So there's an inversion from a come in movement in the Old Testament to a sent out movement in the New Testament.

So it seems like the Pentecost was the pinnacle of this change. This was the tipping point of these people over here where they were kind of separate, very set apart and to a more integrated within the larger cultures of non-Christian beliefs, but Pentecost is that moment that they mix.

Yes, and the significance of that is it's because Jesus has done his saving work and now God's people are going to be different because the saving work has been accomplished. Jesus says, it's to your advantage that I go away because if I go away, I'll send the helper, right?

That's the Holy Spirit. So Jesus accomplished our salvation, but now it needs to be applied. John Calvin famously said, Jesus dying and rising again for us would be of no value at all unless we get connected to it.

It has to somehow become ours, right? Jesus dies and rises again, but until it becomes applied to me, it's of no value to me. And that's what the Holy Spirit does. The Holy Spirit is poured out in a whole new way.

Of course, the Holy Spirit has been present and active before, but in a much more limited way. At Pentecost, the Holy Spirit hits the church like a freight train and their lives are transformed, their hearts are transformed.

And because Jesus now has accomplished his saving work, we can be the people who live in that resurrection power that Jesus has accomplished.

Okay, wow.

I wanna get into a little bit of exegetical understanding. So what I wanna do before we understand the larger concepts and applications on how it brings people in, I'm gonna read Acts 2, verses one through 11, where this is all taking place, because maybe there's somebody listening that's like, what is Pentecost?

And maybe it was just a sermon that was too long ago, but this is what happens at Pentecost, which like put it in modern terms, how this would look like in your head if it happened today. Okay, so starting with chapter two.

When the feast of Pentecost came, they were all together in one place. Without warning, there was a sound like a strong wind gale force. I'm sorry, this is the message version, if anybody is confused.

So okay, there was a strong wind gale force. No one can tell where it came from. It filled the whole building. Then like a wildfire, the Holy Spirit spread throughout their ranks and they started speaking in a number of different languages as the Spirit prompted them.

There were many Jews staying in Jerusalem just then, devout pilgrims from all over the world. When they heard the sound, they came on the run. Then when they heard one after another, their own mother tongues being spoken, they were blown away.

They couldn't for the life of them figure out what was going on and kept saying, aren't these all Galileans? How come we're hearing them talk in our various mother tongues? And then it lists all of the countries.

So they're speaking our languages, describing God's mighty works.

So that's insane.

What is going on in the world when this is happening? Why was this, you know, I think we always, like in my head, I'm like, oh, back then crazy things were happening all the time. This seems pretty crazy, but was it also crazy to them?

It is a very freaky experience and it would have been for them as well because we have to remember that miracles are very unusual in history. God does these amazing works that stand out and really point to the fact that God is doing a special thing.

You know, when somebody walks on water or when the dead rise, that's a marker that God is doing something really extraordinary. But it has to be extraordinary or it wouldn't be a miracle, right? If people walked on water every single day, you wouldn't call it a miracle, you would call it natural.

Yeah.

That would be science, right? If you could walk on water anytime you wanted, walking on water would not be a miracle, it would be science, right? And our physicists would study it and understand it and explain it, right?

Because it would be normal, just like gravity, right? Things fall when you drop them. Physicists explain that because it's normal. Miracles are not normal, that's part of what makes them a sign of God doing something unusual.

And there's a connection between the sign, the miracle, and what God is doing, right? Jesus walks on water to demonstrate his mastery over nature, right? Jesus made water and he can do whatever he wants with it, right?

Jesus feeds 5 ,000 people miraculously from just a handful of loaves and fishes to show that he nourishes people and takes care of them, right? That he cares for their needs, right? Again and again, the miracles are not just arbitrary.

It's not like, you know, magicians waving their wands and pulling a rabbit out of their hat. It's not just random and unconnected. The miracles always show you something about God, right? That walking on water shows mastery of nature and so on.

So at Pentecost, you have these dramatic visions and sounds, right? You have this loud sound of wind and you have tongues of fire. Well, they would have known that those are symbols of the Spirit of God in the Old Testament because they had their Hebrew Scriptures and both wind and fire are key symbols of the Holy Spirit in the Old Testament.

So this is announcing the presence of the Holy Spirit. But then something that they couldn't possibly have anticipated happens. They hear one another speaking in their own languages. And this reverses the story of Babel.

We'll get into that later, I know. But since the Tower of Babel, the human race has been divided and unable to understand each other because they speak different languages. There's no precedent for God making cultures able to understand one another past that language barrier.

So if you spoke a certain language, you wouldn't be able to.

This would have been shocking.

Oh, like you wouldn't have multilingual people.

Well, people could learn other languages, but that's one person doing the work of learning someone else's language. Then that one person can operate over here in this language group and operate over there in that language group.

But the groups are still separate. I as an individual could know both Hebrew and Greek. And I could go to Jerusalem and speak Hebrew or Aramaic. I could go to Jerusalem and speak Aramaic and I can go to Rome and speak Latin.

But Jerusalem and Rome don't therefore understand each other. That's why these very few people, because until the modern world, very few people spoke more than one language. These people who could move from one world to another were unusual and they had a very unique standing.

Like this person could actually go to Rome and understand what they're saying. That's really crazy. But nobody could actually bring the cultures themselves together. You're always either operating in one culture or operating in the other culture.

For this moment in Pentecost, the walls between cultures dissolve. And I speak and one person hears me speaking in Aramaic and another person hears me speaking in Greek and another person hears me speaking in Arabic.

The dividing walls have all been broken down.

You mentioned Tower of Babel. How is that connected?

This is, I think, the key to understanding Pentecost and the people involved at the time, they knew their Hebrew scriptures so they would recognize this connection. When God made the world, we all spoke one language.

And as a result of that, you can think of the whole human race as one culture. Because language is, it's called, the saying is language is the storehouse of culture, right? If we speak the same language, then we're operating within the same cultural environment.

So the whole human race is essentially one nation or one culture because they all speak one language. But then humanity in its sinful rebellion begins using all the power God put in us to do things against God, to defy God's commands and to set ourselves up, is secure and safe without God's protection.

The actual beginning of the Babel story is a technological innovation. We invented a better brick. And that was as revolutionary for them as the invention of the internet or AI are for us. They have a better brick.

And so they say, ah, with our superior brick technology, we can make a city that will be bigger than anything anyone's ever imagined. The tower at Babel is actually a city that is built on floors going up and up.

If you look at all the classic depictions of Babel, you'll see it's a ziggurat. It's a pyramid-shaped structure. And every time you add something new to it, the pyramid gets bigger and bigger and bigger.

So it's not a tower like we think of a cylinder going up. It's a big city going up and up. And what they said is, with our better bricks, we can be secure and safe here in this one place. God told us to fill the world, but we're not gonna do that.

We're all gonna gather in one place and we're gonna be secure in ourselves in defiance of God. And God looks at that and says, wow, I made these human beings to do really amazing things, but they are using their power for evil.

So I have to limit their power. I have to limit their ability to get things done. So he confuses their language, and suddenly they all speak different languages. And it's a funny thing. Human ability to do things depends on cooperation.

Your ability to do things and my ability to do things is very, very limited if we can't work together with other people. But when we can work together with other people, we can get much more done, right?

Two people working together don't get twice as much done. They get four times as much done because they can specialize and exchange and all kinds of other things. So by limiting our ability to cooperate, God limited our power.

He had given us all this power to do things and he placed a limit on it because we were sinful and rebellious. And then when the saving work is accomplished and the Holy Spirit is being poured out so that a people is being reclaimed for God, he takes the limits off.

He's taking those training wheels back off the tricycle, right, the bicycle. He's saying, okay, now that you are a saved people following a resurrected Messiah, you can handle this power. So I'm giving you the car keys back by making you able to understand.

Yes, we can now understand and cooperate with people who are culturally different because the Holy Spirit makes us able to care more about the other person than we do about ourselves, to care more about what's right than about what my culture wants, right?

I care more about doing what's right than I care about being a good member of my group. And that allows us to cooperate with people in other groups.

It seems like we have a lot of responsibility now today given the fact that we have things that can live translate in our ear and we have the ability to connect with anybody across the world and with Google Translate and just through the internet itself.

So it's almost like, what does that say about unity today? It seems like there's a grander responsibility.

Right, in fact, brother Martin over here, Martin Luther King used to point to increasing technologies that connected the world more and more. We can pick up a phone and talk to someone on the other side of the world.

We can get on a plane and fly there. And this was totally new. And he said, we're going to need goodwill and understanding more in a world where we are better connected because if we don't have goodwill and understanding when we're better connected, then the connections are going to drive us against each other, right?

The more connected I am to people I hate, the worse off we both are. If I'm going to be more connected to people it's all the more important that I love them better. So the demand for goodwill and understanding is going to be much greater in a better connected world.

And if we don't have it, the disaster will be really serious.

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Now, back to the show.

That makes sense. Okay, so we've talked about what was happening before Pentecost, that there was this like post-Babel separation. There was this, that culture over there that lives by its own rules, its own laws.

They follow this Hebrew God. And then Pentecost is like the enmeshment of, now people have the opportunity. They get the car keys back and now they can love each other and work together and be cooperative and proactive.

So what happens after Pentecost? What happens right after?

The church gets sent out into the world. And part of the reason that happens is there's severe persecution in Jerusalem and Christians spread out because they're avoiding that persecution in Jerusalem.

But also God empowers the church with a desire to spread the word. And, you know, Paul goes on his missionary journeys and others go on missionary journeys to spread the good news about what God has done.

And if you read the book of Acts, wherever they arrive, they arrive in places and they have to introduce people to the idea that God is now coming to them with a message of salvation. At one point, Paul says, during the times of ignorance, God overlooked your rebellion against him, but now he's come here with a message of salvation.

And he has appointed a day where he's going to judge the world. So he commands all people to repent. So this message comes to the nations as a new thing, right? God's not reached out to these nations before with a message of redemption and reconciliation.

And so both for bad reasons and for good reasons, right? There's persecution going on in Jerusalem, but there's also a desire to bring the news to the nations. Christians spread out and you see churches getting planted throughout the Mediterranean world and gradually further than that.

And Christians now have to live in places like Greece and Rome and Africa and eventually, you know, even further afield, Spain. And they get to Asia. Like lots of people are not aware that there are Christians in Japan in the early Middle Ages.

Gospel got there much faster than most people think. So the message goes out and Christians have to ask, well, what does it mean to live as a follower of Jesus, you know, in Northern Germany in the third century, right?

Or in Spain or in Africa? And that's tough, right? It's tough to be a Jesus follower in these cultures that are dedicated to pagan gods and don't really like the Christian message very much. It can be very disruptive.

Yeah, and it's just, the thing that you said at the beginning of all that that really blew my mind is that, you know, I think as a Sunday school Christian, you think, okay, yeah, Jesus had an amazing ministry and then he died and his death was so impactful that everyone ran out of their house to start spreading the gospel.

But I think I've underestimated what Acts really did, what Pentecost did, because, and like, correct me if I'm wrong, if Pentecost didn't happen, then there would have maybe been that remaining seclusion.

It would have stayed an isolated cult in a designated area. But because of Pentecost, because those keys were given back to them.

To drive that car away,.

That is how we got that massive global gospel spreading of, you know, in these countries.

Yes, that's right. And this was always part of the promise of salvation. When God makes the promise of salvation to Abraham, he says, Abraham, all the nations of the world are going to get a blessing from the promise I'm making to you.

And God reaffirms that when the patrimony is passed from Abraham to Isaac, he says to Isaac, all the nations of the world. And when it's passed to Jacob, he says to Jacob, all the nations of the world.

And then later, the prophets in Israel begin filling in more details about this. They talk about the message going out and people around the world turning to the true God, right? People in these pagan empires.

Isaiah has these mind-blowing images of these pagan empires that are enemies of God all turning to the true God and worshiping the true God. And I'm sure when people, you know, when Isaiah shared this, people must've been saying, you're nuts, Isaiah, right?

These pagan empires are never going to turn to the true God. So it was always part of the promise. When the Messiah comes, he's going to do the saving work. Then he's going to send you out to the nations of the world to reclaim the nations for God.

Yeah.

It always happens in the least expected way. You know, like God is so predictably unpredictable. And so even when you hear that, that all the nations of the world, it's like, okay. So, you know, it makes me think about the promises of revelation of like, okay, so like we're going to see it on an iPhone.

We're going to see him come down from a cloud. It's like, I don't know, you know, it's going to happen in a way that we can't even fathom right now, the same way no one could have fathomed Pentecost.

Well, that's right. God's promises are always fulfilled in unexpected ways, but they do authentically fulfill the promise. One of the promises in Revelation is that the nations will be redeemed, not just individual people.

If you read Revelation 21 and 22, this theme is actually hit really hard. It says the nations will come to Jerusalem and the kings of the nation, the new Jerusalem, not the old Jerusalem, the new Jerusalem that comes down from heaven, the nations will come and the kings of the nations will bring the glories of the nations into the new Jerusalem and lay them at Jesus's feet.

And there'll be a tree of life and the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations. It's just like nations, nations, nations, nations, almost like God thinks this is really important. Or Pentecost itself is a surprising fulfillment.

So if you knew that the nations of the world were separated at Babel by being given different languages, if I told you God's gonna reunite the nations, you would probably say, oh, he's gonna make them all speak the same language again.

Yeah. Right?

Because we all spoke the same language and when it was time to divide us because we were sinful, God made us speak different languages. If I tell you he's gonna reunite the nations, you probably say, oh, he's gonna make us all speak one language again.

But guess what? He has a card up his sleeve you're not expecting. He's gonna glorify himself by the diversity of the nations and Revelations hits this too, every tribe, tongue and nation, right? So all the Chinese Christians and the Ugandan Christians and the Brazilian Christians and the American Christians are gonna glorify God in different ways and he's gonna use that to show millions and millions of different facets of himself.

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Now back to the show.

Whoa, that's such a good tangent.

Okay, so now we kind of fast forward into like the present day. This is kind of, you know, post-Pentecost but also happening today is you have Christianity existing within pagan societies. You have Chinese Christians, you know, that, you know, operate within, you know, Tao beliefs, I believe, you know, or just like paganistic beliefs or whatever it might be.

How, like you were mentioning before we jumped on that there needs to be a permeable membrane because at the end of the day, what is the downfall of an isolated Christian community that does not go into those paganistic Tao, you know, atheist communities?

This is really important for understanding how we live faithfully as Christians. I want to note first though, you don't have to go as far as China to find Christians living in a pagan culture, but I won't press that too hard, but I will say this, every culture has both believing and unbelieving like elements.

So Christians are present everywhere. So there is a Christian influence in every culture in the world. So, and including in China, right? Let's not think of China as a culture that has no Christian influence.

There are millions of Christians in China and they have an impact on their world. At the same time, every culture also has a lot of paganism in it, right? There's no culture in the world that's clean of that.

So we're all in this paradoxical space where Christian influence and anti-Christian influence are struggling for control of the culture. This is just, and nobody can fully control a culture. Cultures can't be controlled in any kind of serious long-term way.

So it's a permanent struggle. And so Christians have got to learn to live in a world where we need to be faithful. So it can't just be anything goes. We can't just go with the flow. We can't just say, well, whatever my culture wants, we should just do that so that we'll be thought of as nice people, right?

That's a perennial temptation. We want our neighbors to think of us as nice people so that they'll like Christians and they'll like Christianity. But it can't be anything goes because we have to be faithful.

We have to be holy. We have to put God first. And that means we need a Christian community that is distinct. We can't just say, well, I'm a Christian out there in the world when I'm on the job, when I'm voting, when I'm in school.

We have to have a distinct place where we say this is the Christian community, where we think together about how to be Christian, where we encourage and build one another up in being Christian, where we love each other, where we care for each other when we need it.

We form that Christian identity and character. And we have that Christian mission that gets sent out from those communities. At the same time, while there's a temptation to knock all the walls down and just have anything goes, there's also a temptation to build a big wall around the Christian community, right?

A big, high, thick wall and say, well, the world is evil. The world is pagan. The world is unholy. What we want is to protect our Christian space so we can have purity and holiness inside this Christian space.

And the problem with that is, A, you're just abandoning the mission to bring the love of God to the world, right? The reason they went out from Jerusalem and went to all those pagan countries in the first place is because the mission of God is out in the world.

The mission of God is not inside the church building. It's outside. We form ourselves inside the church building for the Christian mission that's outside the church building. But the other problem is when you build that wall, that wall starts to form you, right?

You start by saying, I want this space to be protected so it can be formative, so it can help me develop Christian character. I'm gonna build a wall around the space to protect my formation, but the wall also becomes formative.

You become a wall builder. You become a person whose job is to shut the world out and it becomes a spirit of hostility. You're constantly having to build the wall higher to make the wall thicker. The wall gets knocked down, so you have to rebuild it, right?

So we get into this mode of hostility and opposition, which is really not God's love for the world.

Right, right.

And it sounds like that almost leads to a fragile faith because although you might have a big strong wall, you don't really have a strong defense.

Yes, that's right. In fact, it's caused by a fragile faith. The reason people go into this isolationist mode is because they know that their faith is fragile. At some deep level, they know that they don't have a strong enough trusting God to handle, you know, the dynamic and chaotic world outside the walls, right?

That protective movement where we withdraw and build a wall around ourselves is because we lack confidence that the Holy Spirit will empower us for a mission to the world, right? The more we trust that the Holy Spirit is in us and is working in us, the more we'll be able to get out of those walls and be confident in, you know, a chaotic and really dark world.