SERMON: The Curse is Reversed

Thank you for subscribing to the Shepherds Church podcast. This is our Lord's Day Sermon, and we pray that as we declare the

Word of God that you would be encouraged, strengthened in your faith, and you would catch a greater vision of who

Christ is. And may you be blessed in the hearing of God's Word, and may the Lord be with you.

I want to begin by just a statement. The modern church has shrunk the day called

Pentecost. Now, I'm sure it was not intentional. We had the best of intentions, probably.

But no matter how we slice it, it's been shrunk. We have this folded, this towering, cosmic, earth -shaking day down to either a justification for ecstatic giftings, or the less important aftershock after the resurrection.

But as we've said before, without the ascension, the resurrected Christ would not be ruling, and without Pentecost, you and I would still be dead in our sins.

Because we would not have the Spirit of God, or justification by faith. We would not have union with Christ, and the way that He applies that monergistically to us through regeneration.

To focus almost exclusively on crucifixion and resurrection is in a way to downplay or to ignore entirely the days of ascension and Pentecost, which leaves us with an incomplete gospel that does not save.

And what we will see is that on this day called Pentecost, that happened 50 days after Jesus rose from the grave, comes from Pent, 50, something happened that had never happened before in the long groaning ages of the world since the

Garden of Eden. We, of course, know the story. In Adam, we all fell, and we inherited a sin nature.

And the curse of our covenant breaking came upon the entire world. But what we rarely consider is that the implications of this, for thousands of years, the plague called sin, the curse that was affixed to us, that marred

God's good creation, only ever ran in one direction. And what I mean by that is that once mankind and creation came under the curse, there was no going back to God.

It was only one direction away from Him. In fact, the entire story of the Old Testament is not one of the curse being progressively lifted, but one of the noose getting tighter and tighter, the face turning bluer and bluer.

The Old Testament is the story of the direction man took away from God, out of the garden, into the thorns, into the desert, into the graves, into exile, into the midst of silence.

Every page in the Old Testament is like a man falling farther from God, like a free solo climber falling to his death.

Once it begins, it only goes in one direction. That is until the moment of Pentecost.

Before Pentecost, Jesus proved that one man could have victory over death. He proved that one man could rise from the dead and live in a new creation body, that one man could be the example that could be right with God, so that in Jesus we have one example of how the curse can be overturned.

But on Pentecost, for the first time in history, the history of the fallen world at least, the curse for all with whom the

Spirit came was thwarted, was overturned, was reversed. The pathway away from God turned that day.

The curse, if it were a clock, began running backwards. The river, the ebb and flow of space and time, actually reversed its current.

It'd be like the Nile switched and started going downhill instead of uphill like it does.

The river that had only ever flowed away from Eden was now a current that was taking

God's people home. And this is what I'd like for us to examine this morning, and I want us to do it through eight examples of why

Pentecost is such good news. And if you're thinking, if you know me, eight examples might not be good news for you.

It will be, trust me. We're gonna see today how Pentecost, through the application of the

Holy Spirit, is God reversing the curse that was on man, healing everything that was broken in the old creation.

And Jesus can do that because the Apostle Paul tells us that Christ redeemed us from the curse by becoming a curse for us.

Before Pentecost, that curse was applied to one man. After Pentecost, it was applied to all men who were in union with him.

So if you will, I'm gonna read some passages from Acts chapter 2. We're gonna pray, and then we're gonna examine how

Pentecost is such a great and wonderful part of the good news of Jesus Christ.

Amen. Acts 2, 1 through 4 will be the first passage I read. Now, when they heard this, they were cut to the heart and said to Peter and the rest of the

Apostles, Brothers, what shall we do? So those who received his words were baptized, and they were added that day about 3 ,000 souls.

Let us pray. Lord, there's so much in this passage, so much overturning of the curse, so much reversing of the curse that is occurring.

Lord, help us as we see it today to expand our view of gratitude for this day called

Pentecost. Help us to understand the depth and the beauty for which it is. Help us to celebrate what you've done by sending your

Holy Spirit. Lord, it's in Jesus' name we pray. Amen. Alright, so the first thing we need to understand about Pentecost is the breath of God.

If you're gonna truly understand Pentecost and what was connected, how Pentecost was about the work of reversing the curse, then we need to go back to where everything begins, which is in the dust of the garden, outside of the garden.

Genesis chapter 2, which is the most intimate picture of God creating man in the entire Bible. God does not speak at him into being like he hurled the cosmos into existence from afar.

God actually comes in the flesh, he kneels down in the mud, and he forms this man with his own fingers like a potter bent over the wheel.

And then the text tells us something breathtaking, or maybe a better way to say it would be breath giving.

It says, the Lord God breathed into his nostrils the breath of life and the man became a living creature.

Now in that tiny moment, this little mud man, this little figurine that God had made out of the dirt, now had synapses that were firing, had mitochondrial

DNA replicating, and a fully functioning skeletal system, endocrine system, cardiac system.

Am I getting that right, Scott? Good. With a thinking brain, a beating heart, and breathing lungs, the little figure was given life.

And it came into the man by the breath of God. So as soon as the breath of God entered into this statue made of clay, it became a living man, opening its own eyes to behold his creator.

So from the very first second, man was a breathed creature. He didn't have life in himself.

He wasn't a, he was a contingent being. He was animated by borrowed breath, a walking exhale of God.

But as we know as the story goes, not long after this miraculous inspiration, and by that I mean to inspirate, came the horrible rebellion of expiration.

God had already warned that in the day that you eat of it, you shall surely die, which quite literally meant that you would expire, which comes from the

Latin, expirate, which means the breath will leave you. And so the curse was fallen upon man.

The breath that was freely given in a moment now was forfeited. Spiritually, that breath was forfeited all at once.

And what I mean is that the Spirit of God, the breath of God that animated the soul of man, left instantly so that he became spiritually asphyxiated.

But also he would expire physically, meaning over time, not only would he have a choking soul, but he would have a body that enters into the final stages of the curse, choking for air in its final moments as he returns from the dust to which he came.

So as a result of Adam's rebellion, every rebellious -born son of Adam was likewise born spiritually blue -faced, gasping, spiritually asphyxiated, a physical body that's still breathing, yet over time the breath is leaving.

So now you understand what happened in the fall. In the curse, the breath of God left us so that now in our sin, we're choking.

Now I want you to see how Jesus, both before Pentecost and after Pentecost, reverses the horrible curse of choking.

The Apostle John records it this way. He breathed on them and said to them, receive the Holy Spirit.

I want you to see something here. You can only see it if you read the Greek Old Testament, which is why I'm here. That's why you pay me big bucks to tell you this stuff.

When the 70 elders translated Genesis 2 -7 into Greek, they reached for a very rare Greek word to describe

God breathing into Adam. The word was emphasao, which same word we get emphazema from, which is quite literally the breath going out of you.

So the disease where the breath of life comes out of you is emphasao, but yet in this passage, it's referring to the breath of God coming into you.

And it was that word that appears nowhere else in the Hebrew Bible, only there. And this is the exact verb

John uses when he describes Jesus breathing in. The same verb of God breathing into Adam is the same verb of Jesus breathing into his disciples.

To make them living beings, the same word.

Do you see what John is telling us? He's telling us that while the first Adam's sin left us choking and breathless, devoid of the life of God and the soul of man, the last

Adam came to do exactly what the first Adam undid or to undo what

Adam undid. Jesus bent down over the breathless disciples just like he did in the garden, and he breathes life back into them.

And this has just been a foretaste of what he does 50 days later at Pentecost. Luke describes it this way. The sound of a mighty rushing wind came into the room.

That word wind, panuma, also means breath. It's the same word.

So here you have this word of breath coming into the upper room, the same breath that hovered over the waters of creation and that filled the nostrils of Adam with life is now coming into the disciples.

The hundred and twenty of them that were in the supper room, which is a very large room. The same breath that brought the dry that the

Valley of Dead Bones back to life is the same breath that now is infusing the church.

And this tells us that when Jesus sent his spirit at Pentecost to reverse the curse, he did it to bring us out of our state of sin and suffocation and to bring us into a place where we could breathe again and live again by the breath of God.

Jesus is reversing the curse and giving his breath. That's the first thing. The next thing we need to understand is fire and the flaming sword.

If we want to understand Pentecost, because breath was not the only thing we lost in the garden.

We also lost the garden itself. When Adam sinned, he wasn't merely sentenced to die.

He was sentenced to get out and he was driven out. Genesis three, 24 says that he drove the man out.

And at the east of the Garden of Eden, he placed the cherubim and a flaming sword that turned every way to guard the way to the tree of life.

I want you to picture this for a second. A cherubim angel, two of them actually wielding swords that are set ablaze by a never ending fire, spinning and flashing and turning in every direction so that there's not a single angle of approach.

No way that you can like the laser thing and Mission Impossible get past it. There's no way.

So you walk away from the presence of God. You walk east of Eden from his holy presence.

The message of the sword, actually, in this way was simple, but brutal. You can't come back. God's holiness is not a friend to you anymore.

It's a weapon armed against you. The fire that was meant to warm the people of God will now consume you if you step closer.

And from that day forward, actually, fire becomes this great symbol of unapproachable holiness, fire on the mountain of Sinai.

And the people are begging stop fire in the temple where no man can enter except once per year and with great trepidation.

The fire that came down and consumed Nadab and Abihu for bringing counterfeit fire. The fire that fell on Sodom and Gomorrah, the fire that was summoned by Elijah to destroy his enemies.

The fire that came down and consumed the burnt offerings at the dedication of the temple for the entire

Old Testament. The fire of God coming forth is actually not good news.

It's that you will be consumed. Now we come to Pentecost and watch what the fire does.

Luke describes it this way. Divided tongues of fire appeared to them and rested on each one of them.

I don't want you to miss how significant that actually is. The fire of God that was a weapon throughout Genesis to Malachi is now descending upon them and they're not being turned to smoke and ash.

It descended upon them not to drive them away from the presence of God, but to hover over them and bring them into the presence of God.

In that moment, they were a walking, talking Mount Sinai. The very flame that stood over the

Garden of Eden to keep sinners out and now settled over them like a crown upon their head welcomed in.

And you ask yourself, how can this be? This raging, all consuming fire, how could it so gently and lovingly welcome guilty sinners and not reduce them to a pile of ash?

Surely their sins deserve that, of course. But the only answer is the fact that God's anger and wrath fell somewhere else for them.

For those who are in Christ, the flaming sword of fury was turned upon the only righteous man so that Jesus was ran through with the sword of God's wrath, the sword that was aimed straight at you.

He stepped in front of you. This is why the prophet Zechariah says, Awake, O sword, against my shepherd, against the man who stands next to me.

The flaming sword that banned us from the tree of life was the one that was unleashed upon the king and author of life so that he could bring us into his life.

The fire is no longer a danger to you. It is now a blessing to you. That's what

Pentecost has done. Pentecost is reverse the curse of the flame. To make now that flame a gift.

The third thing you need to understand is tongues. And I'm not talking about the kind that most people are talking about.

I'm talking about in Genesis 11. The men of Babel gather on this plain called

Shinar to make this great declaration about themselves. They say,

Come, let us build ourselves a city and a tower with its top in the heavens.

Let us make a name for ourselves. This is the oldest sin in the

Bible. Let us make a name for ourselves. Let us climb up to the heavens. Let us build our own staircase.

Let us be our own God. Let us be our own savior and Lord. Let us live for our glory instead of the glory of God. And then

God came down. I love this passage so much. You probably heard me say it 10 times. I love it. It is so funny.

They're down there making this little anthill to their own glory. And it says God came down to look at it because it was so insignificant that he like, what?

He had to come down to see it. Of course, God in his omnipresence didn't need to come down to see it. He's mocking them.

God says, Come, let us go down and they're confused. Their language is confused. Their tongues. That is the third curse that fell upon man.

The first was spiritual suffocation. The second was you're an enemy to God. Now, the third is that you've been confused by God.

The Hebrew term here is a bit cheeky. It constitutes kind of a little bit of a word play.

It's related to the Hebrew word balal, which means to confuse, muddle or jumble together.

So babble actually is the place of confusion, the place of muddling and the place of jumbled up garbledy gook.

If you want to use proper exegetical terms. One moment, there are people who have one tongue and one lip in the next moment, two brothers standing side by side, one spreading the mortar and one grabbing the brick says to the other, hand me another brick.

And he's now uttering utter gibberish. Their syllables were scrambled. The crew dissolved in chaos.

The project collapsed and humanity once again and proud rebellion is scattered to the four winds of the earth.

They're shattered and divided into rival nations, divided by the very tongues that were resting in their mouths.

Now, notice what happens in the street of Jerusalem on the day of Pentecost. God descends upon the men just as he did in Babel.

He comes down to look at them. But instead of throwing them into confusion and mixing up their languages,

God unloosens their tongues and they all speak the same language again. He's undoing the curse of Babel at Pentecost.

Every one of them hearing them speak in his own language. Acts two six, which means that the

Parthians were hearing the word in Parthian. The Egyptians were hearing it in Egyptian. The Romans were hearing it in Latin.

The curse of Babel was being overturned in the giving of the spirit of God.

It's being reversed. God at Babel came down to scatter at Pentecost.

God came down to gather at Babel. Men tried to ascend on their own at Pentecost. God descends and makes man whole and he heals the tongue of man through his spirit and undoes what was lost.

That's the third thing. The fourth thing that we need to understand is 3000. Pentecost was not a brand new feast for the

Israelites. For centuries, the Jews had been keeping this festival. Actually, from the moment that they met

God at the mountain of Sinai, they were keeping this festival 50 days after the

Passover. And they kept it as a feast to be remembered on the day that God descended upon Mount Sinai, the day that he gave them the burning mountain and the law of God.

So when Sinai fell at Pentecost or someone, so when the spirit came at Pentecost, he fell on the anniversary of the coming at Sinai, which actually is quite profound.

And we'll learn more why in a minute. As we said before, the mountain was wrapped in smoke and fire and flames and lightning bolts and and tremblings.

God had come down to thunder his law upon the summit. The people of God were begging God for mercy. They were saying they were saying, you take

Moses, which actually is really unloving if you think about it. They're begging God to pull back his presence because they're in agony.

And they're like, Moses, you go. Moses, you go get crushed. We're going to stay behind.

Moses goes up to the mountain and he receives the two tablets that were written by the finger of Almighty God.

And down at the base of the mountain, the people are doing something that they should not be doing. They're growing restless.

They're waiting on Moses that that squirrely fellow who went up the mountain to come back down, if he will.

We doubt that he will. So a few people started to get an itch and then a few others decided to scratch it.

And soon you have everyone demanding that they take their gold and they turn it into a calf named Yahweh. They even named it

Yahweh because they thought they were being faithful so they could bow down and worship it, because we don't know what's happened to this

Moses fella. It's probably dead. We're not going to get him. So this whole melting down of the gold happened at the very same time that God was and his fire was smoldering on the top of Mount Sinai.

They were happening simultaneously. The people using fire for judgment, God bringing fire and holiness and purity.

And then the people who were doing this were flung into a kind of frenzy, doing all sorts of despicable things such that God told

Moses to go down and see it. Similar phrase there to the Tower of Babel. And what

Moses saw horrified him, sending him into a kind of God inspired holy rage.

And if you remember the passage, God commands the Levites to take up the sword and to go throughout the camp of Israel, killing even their own brothers.

This is what Moses tells us, the final death toll. This was on the Chiron of the

Wilderness News Channel. And there fell upon the people that day or fell of the people that day, about three thousand men.

Three thousand corpses were left dead in the wilderness. And if it were not for the grace of God, three million of them would have been there.

That's why Paul later says that the letter kills, but the spirit gives life because they had violated the word, they violated the law.

And the only punishment for that is death. About three thousand dead Israelites, a number that Moses purposely recorded.

In the ancient world, it was really expensive to make books. I think I've said this before, but it would have been in modern day terms.

The Book of Romans, which is much smaller than the Book of Exodus, would have cost about ten thousand dollars to make.

If you take time and wages, hourly rate, and you take materials, about ten thousand dollars to produce a book like Romans.

Think about the Book of Exodus at a much more meager time in the wilderness. It would have been every single letter would have had to have been intentional and important.

You wouldn't want to waste a single space on the vellum. Moses tells us deliberately, he chooses to tell us that three thousand men fell under the curse of God.

How does this connect to Pentecost? Look at what Luke says. And there were added that day about three thousand souls,

Acts 2 41. Do you see what Luke is doing? He hands us the exact same number, three thousand.

And he even says about three thousand. And he uses the exact same phrase as in the Book of Exodus, which makes this almost a perfect quotation from Exodus, except one thing, one critical point.

In the Book of Exodus, three thousand men were slain. In the Book of Acts, three thousand men come to life. Luke is holding up Pentecost as a deliberate reversal of the curse that came to the

Israelites when they made the golden calf. At Sinai, the law came down, the

God of the law came down and three thousand died. At Pentecost, the spirit came and three thousand lived. Do we think that that's coincidental?

At Sinai, the word was carved on cold, dead stone. At Pentecost, the word was carved into newly warmed and living hearts.

It's very same God, very same number on the very same day that they anciently celebrated it.

The same God who killed three thousand now raises three thousand. This is certainly not a coincidence.

Jesus is reversing the curse. The next thing we need to understand, this is number five, is this idea of exile or the far country.

If we want to understand Pentecost, we have to understand exile. When God gave Israel his covenant, he laid before them in Deuteronomy 28 and Leviticus 26, blessings and curses.

And the most terrible of all the curses was the curse of the exile. Being forcefully ripped out of your land, out of your own home, chained and marched for hundreds of miles to a new land and a new place.

Your land desecrated, your land obliterated. In the book of Deuteronomy, it says this, the

Lord will scatter you among all peoples from one end of the earth to the other. Same curse as at Babel.

To be cursed was to be sent far off, far from the land and confusion, far from the temple, far from the presence of God.

And in that way, the exile was the great horror of the Old Testament. The great blessing of the Old Testament is that God would make his face shine upon you.

The horror is that he would make you exiled. A people dragged away in chains, weeping beside foreign rivers and foreign streams.

Distance was the curse in the old covenant, to be far off, to be lost. So look at what

Peter says in his sermon at Pentecost. It's something I hadn't seen before till this week. He says, this promise is for you and your children, for all who are far off.

Far off. What do you think Peter means there? You think he's talking about the curse of exile, the distance between us and God?

Peter reaches for the exact same language that's used in the exile, and he turns it completely upside down. He's saying that the far off ones now can come near because of Christ and because of his spirit.

This is why Paul takes the same word and presses it down in Ephesians 2 .13 to show us.

He says, but now in Christ, you who were once far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ.

You who were once exiled have now been returned. You who were cast like Adam out of the garden have now been brought home.

There it is. The Pentecost, this giving of the spirit is reversing the exile so that man can be brought near.

Every prodigal in every far country, every person who wakes up in their sin and realizes that they're in a pot of pigs is being called home by the spirit of God.

Those who are far off are being brought near. Because of he who knew no sin became sin for us.

That's the fifth thing. The sixth thing, if you want to understand Pentecost is dry ground.

After the exile, the people return to a land not overflowing with milk and honey anymore. It's more described like a wilderness, like a wasteland, like a desert even.

And as such, the prophets begin to paint the curse, to talk about the curse in very dust like language, with dryness language.

And that's not altogether surprising because a part of the original curse was that man would be returned to the dust.

So it makes sense that dust is evocative of curse. Because of the exile and because of the uprooting of the

Israelites from the good land, because of the cutting down of trees, because of the way that the

Babylonians treated the promised land, it was now rendered a valley of dust. But Ezekiel picks this up and he talks about it in this more surprising way.

He says that the cursed nation also spiritually has become a valley filled with full, bleached, dried and cracking bones.

Ezekiel, who was carried off by the Holy Spirit, sat down in the middle of the valley, saw as far as I could see, nothing but dried up bones.

Not fresh graves with dampened flesh, bones. One that had been there a long time.

It says in Ezekiel 37 too, and behold, there was very many on the surface of the valley and behold, they were very dry, very dry.

We miss sometimes the emphasis on Hebrew. Hebrew, when it says very dry, it means it was unbelievably dry.

And that's a picture of the curse right there in a single sentence. A whole nation reduced to a boneyard.

No flesh, no breath, no life, just the brittle leftovers of a people who were once filled with his breath, now reduced to dust.

But over that dusty valley of cursing, God makes an incredible promise, a future blessing.

And what is that promise? Ezekiel 37, 9, come from the four winds, oh breath, breath of God, and breathe on these slain that they may live.

Ezekiel, commanded by God to utter this promise of Yahweh, is saying that the breath of God is going to come back over the dust.

Isaiah, who says the same promise in Isaiah 44, 3, I will pour water on the thirsty land and streams on the dry ground, and I will pour out my spirit, using words of the spirit being poured out like water, poured out like breath.

Prophet Joel says it even more plainly, I will pour out my spirit on all flesh.

So at Pentecost, God is pouring out onto things that are dry, things that will make them alive again.

Vibrant again. The outpouring of the Holy Spirit is like a desert rain, like a flooding that comes over the valley of dry bones, breaking the curse and delivering the people unto the fount of living waters.

This is why Peter on the day of Pentecost says, this is what was uttered through the prophet Joel, that in the last days,

I will pour out my spirit. So Peter is saying, not only that the prophecy of Joel was fulfilled, not only that we have already entered into the last days, but that the drought is over.

The curse of dust is lifted. The rain has finally come. The same spirit that the prophets promised is bringing life to the world.

Jesus' life to the world. And unlike the great flood that drowned all men in their sin, now this great flood of grace is subduing and emerging, or submerging people in God's grace.

The boneyard of Ezekiel is now standing up on its feet. The desert is now blooming. The valley of the very, very dry bones was now a forest of the living.

The curse reversal is happening through Pentecost. Jesus even alluded to this in John chapter 7.

He said, if anyone thirsts, let him come to me and drink, and out of his heart will flow rivers of living water.

Such an astounding passage. Us who've been reduced to the dust in our sin will flow rivers, not one river, rivers of living water.

Us who've been cracked and broken and bleached and dried will be wet again, will have life again, only through the spirit of God.

Jesus is saying, even before Pentecost at the Feast of Tabernacles, this is coming. And through my spirit, you will become little gardens of Eden with four rivers flowing out, which means your life will multiply, and his life will multiply through you.

The seventh thing you need to understand is the heart of stone. If you want to understand Pentecost. And this one's the deepest curse of them all.

Deeper than the confused tongues, deeper than the long exile, and deeper than the dry bones.

Because underneath every external curse was always an internal curse.

Because the deepest problem was never that the nations were divided. The deepest problem was not just that the land lay barren.

The deepest problem was not just that they were far from home. The deepest problem of all was the human heart was made of stone.

Ezekiel says that the human heart had become cold and dead and hard as marble. A heart that you could strike with a hammer and it would not even flinch.

A heart that you could plead with over a lifetime and it would never beat. A heart that cannot possibly love

God because it's cold and dead in the same way that you can't walk up to a corpse and say, stand up and expect it to move.

But against that stony reality, God lays the most beautiful promise in all of the prophets. He says this to Ezekiel.

I will give you a new heart and a new spirit I will put within you.

And I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh.

There's a surgery that's going to happen in the coming of the spirit. Which happened at Pentecost. He's saying that God is going to perform a heart transplant.

He's going to take out this dead heart of stone and it's going to give us living, beating hearts again through regeneration. That's why

Peter could say now when they heard this, they were cut to the heart. Do you hear that? We take that for granted, don't we?

If you have hearts of stone, you're not cut. Try cutting a heart. Try cutting a block of marble with a butter knife.

Doesn't work. These people don't have hearts of stone anymore. The spirit came on and now they have hearts of flesh and now their heart is cut.

Because they're guilty. And that cut heart leads them to repentance.

Leads them to ask, what must we do to be saved? The only reason they ask that is because they already were. You can't pierce a rock with the sharpest knife.

You cannot wound a slab of granite and watch it bleed. But when 3 ,000 hearts were made alive again, turned from stone to a nice succulent piece of brisket that we'll enjoy later, that you can cut, that can be cut by the spirit, that can be afflicted with sorrow over sin that would cause them to run back to their

Savior. It's evidence that the promise of Ezekiel had come true. It's evidence that Pentecost was reversing the greatest curse of man, the heart of stone.

Seven curses so far, all of them being reversed exactly on Pentecost day.

Not before and that moment. The final one, we need to understand the new man.

If we want to understand Pentecost, we have to understand what it means to be new. Right after the nations were scattered from Babel, God called a single man out of the shipwreck of humanity and his name was

Abram. And he gave that man a promise. And that promise was an answer to the tower of Babel.

It was an answer to the exile. It was an answer to the deadness, the catalog of curses that we went through.

It was the answer to all of it in Genesis 12, 3. In you, Abram, all of the families of earth shall be blessed.

The nations that fractured at Babel would one day come back together again in the seed of one man, in the son of one man,

Abram. And we know in the new Testament that one man was not Isaac. That one man was not

Jacob. That one man was not Judah. And that one man was not David. That one man was

Christ. Luke gives us a list just so that we understand what Jesus has done.

The son of Abram. Abram was promised the nations. So what does Luke tell us? In chapter two, on the day of Pentecost, Peter says this,

Parthians and Medes and Elamites and the residents of Mesopotamia, Judah and Cappadocia and Pontus and Asia, Phyra and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya, belonging to Cyrene and visitors from Rome, both

Jews and proselytites, Cretans and Arabians. Why is Luke saying this to us?

Right in the middle of the good part. Right in the middle of like this riveting account of the spirit of God coming and then this list of nations.

Because in the curse at Babel, the nations were cast far from God. And now in Pentecost, the nations are coming home.

He wanted you to see that the table of nations in Genesis 11 was being fulfilled by the son of Genesis 12.

The fracture that began at Babel was being healed at Pentecost. And Paul tells us exactly what

God is building out of this scattered motley crew people that he's assembling together. He says,

Christ has made Jew and Gentile one new man in place of the two. So making peace.

Not a flattened, faceless man, a new kind of man, a man with a thousand different faces and different tongues and different varieties and cultures coming back together into one man with his head being

Christ. One Lord, one faith and one baptism. And this is the great hope of the entire

Bible, that the nations of the world will no longer be heading towards hell in a handbasket, but they will be coming back to the son of Abraham.

The nations will come back to the one who was blessed. And that is being fulfilled now.

Starting at Pentecost, it's being fulfilled in time now, right before our very eyes.

And what is unbelievable is how much pessimism so many people in the modern church have.

Do you see what's going on in the world? You see what is happening? The church is shrinking. We're just getting ready to leave and be rapture rocketed out of here,

Tony Stark style, all the way to heaven. But yet the spirit fell upon these 120 men in the upper room, and then 3 ,000 were swept up into it from the table of nations.

And this little flood began steadily rising in Judea and then Samaria and then to the uttermost parts of the

Roman world so that Theodosius could even say that Christianity was the official religion of Rome.

So that now the gospel has made it in every longitude and latitude on earth. So now there's a church in every time zone on earth.

So that over the last hundred years, the church has quadrupled in size. Do you know that?

It's actually outgrown the population's growth in the world. This flood that's been rising for the last 2 ,000 years, why would we ever believe that it would stop?

Why do we believe that we're going to see the sunset of humanity in our lifetime instead of the dawning of Jesus' ongoing kingdom?

The kingdom that will fill the earth with the knowledge of the glory of God as the water covers the sea. This is why

Pentecost is essential, brothers and sisters, because eight curses had eight reversals.

Eight ancient wounds opened in Eden, bleeding down through the ages of the

Old Testament. Every single one of them was stitched shut on Pentecost.

On Pentecost, these things came true on Pentecost. Not on the day

Jesus was crucified. Not on the day that he was raised. Not on the day that he was ascended. These things came true for you and I on the day that the spirit fell.

And that's what I wanted you to see today. That all of the riches of Christ, all of the faithfulness that he accomplished is no good to you if it stands far away from you.

I want you to think about this. You're 2 ,000 years removed from Jesus and two continents away.

Christ could have been born of a virgin in Bethlehem and it could have remained a fact of history that had no impact on you.

Christ could have lived a perfect and unblemished life and it could have remained his righteousness and not yours.

Christ could have died on a Roman cross and he did, under the wrath of God and he did. And that blood could have dripped on the ground of Golgotha and it did.

And it never touched you. Christ could have walked out of an empty tomb on the third day, the most astonishing event in the history of the world and still you would be dead in your trespasses.

Christ could have even ascended on high to rule over the cosmos and you'd still be choking blue -faced in your sin.

The problem if you have a low view of Pentecost is you have a low view of the gospel. Because every single one of the kindnesses of God, every single one of the curse -reversing blessings of God is outside of you without Pentecost.

It's on the other side of the world without Pentecost. It's in heaven stored away without Pentecost in a place where even your great -great -great -great -grandfather couldn't see.

Between the cross and the cold stone heart bleeding in our chest, there is a chasm that cannot be breached unless the spirit of God comes down and takes those things outside of you and puts them inside of you.

And that's the hope of Pentecost. It's that all the glories and riches and treasures of God that were external to you became internal to you through the spirit, written on you, revived in you, inspired in you because the breath of God came back into you.

If we have a low view of Pentecost, we have a low view of the gospel. My heart for us this morning is that we would see all that Christ has done on this day and we would thank him with lips now no longer bound in confusion, but unleashed to give him praises forevermore.

Amen. Let's pray. Lord, we thank you so much that all of these things are true.

And they're true not because we earned them, not because we were religious, not because we did a certain thing, lit a certain candle, performed a certain act.

These things were external to us with no way to get inside of us apart from the regenerating work of the

Holy Spirit of God, who came in and gave us brand new hearts so that the spirit of God may come in and cut our hearts when we sin and fill our hearts with joy as we worship.

To heal the curse, to bring the breath of God back in.

Lord, thank you. Thank you that you wrote these things on our hearts at Pentecost, that you deposited these things inside of us at Pentecost.

Lord, I pray that as reformed people, that we would not look at Pentecost like our crazy

Uncle Jerry, that holiday that the charismatics love and that we don't understand.

Lord, I pray that we would look at it with delight. I pray, Lord, that we would look at it with reverence and joy.

I pray that we would look at it and praise you that the curse has been reversed. All the goodness and truth and beauty of the gospel came into us that day.

Lord, let every word that comes out of our mouth be rooted in gratitude for that day.