According to the church calendar, Sunday, May 27, 2007 is Pentecost Sunday or Whitsunday. This is observed in different ways in different churches and some do not even recognize it as a special day. Pentecost Sunday is the day we commemorate the outpouring of the Holy Spirit on the early New Testament Church. The actual date and place is said to have been Sunday, May 28, AD 30 in Jerusalem approximately 50 days after the resurrection of Jesus.
After His resurrection Jesus appeared to over 500 believers. The Apostle Paul still referred to them as "brethren" twenty-five years later when he wrote the letter we call 1 Corinthians in our New Testament (
1 Corinthians 15:6). Before His ascension into Heaven, Jesus commissioned His disciples to preach the Gospel but told them to wait in Jerusalem until they were empowered by the Holy Spirit. He compared this empowerment to a baptism similar to the water baptism that they had experienced either under John the Baptist or under His ministry. About 120 of those 500 believers were later filled with or baptized in the Holy Spirit on the Day of Pentecost as recorded in
Acts 2:1-4.
There are some differences of opinion among Christians as to what happened on that original day of Pentecost in Acts chapter 2. Some believe that this was when the 120 disciples of Jesus actually were born again or got saved. Others believe that these disciples who had followed Jesus and ministered His word and healing were already saved and that the HGB, or Holy Ghost Baptism, was a gift or special anointing or empowering or enduement of power sent upon the infant Church to help them fulfill their commission to preach the Gospel throughout the world.
I happen to believe that a person gets saved or born again when he or she asks Jesus Christ to come into their lives and makes a personal commitment of their life to Jesus and that the HGB is a subsequent experience to draw them closer to God and to equip them for service.
At salvation/regeneration/justification, Jesus comes into a person's heart as the Holy Spirit/Spirit of Jesus Christ/Spirit of the Lord/Holy Ghost. He is Christ in you the hope of glory. The baptism in the Spirit is an immersion/overwhelming/saturation/empowerment experience in the Spirit subsequent to salvation
At salvation, the Holy Spirit comes in and takes over and transforms the individual. This is living water within according to
John 4 and drinking from the well of salvation according to
Isaiah 12. The HGB (Holy Ghost Baptism) is rivers of living water flowing out according to
John 7:37-39.
At salvation the Holy Spirit comes in and is like a pilot light (for you who are old enough to remember that term). At HGB the pilot light becomes a flame, energizing, anointing, and releasing gifts in us.
John chapter 20 was a maternity ward. Acts chapter 2 was a baptismal tank.
It has been described this way.
Imagine an empty water glass and a pitcher full of water on a table.
1. Lift the pitcher and fill the glass. Set the pitcher back on the table. The glass is full of water. This represents salvation/regeneration with the Holy Spirit living within.
2. Pick up the glass full of water, and gently lower it into the pitcher of water until it is sitting on its bottom in the pitcher. Now the glass is not only filled with water, it is also submerged/immersed/saturated/baptized in the water. This is the HGB.
On that original Day of Pentecost in Acts chapter 2 Peter preached on the death, burial, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus. He then declared that the Jesus or Yeshua who had been crucified was now seated at the right hand of the Father in Heaven and that Jesus was both Lord (the Jehovah of the Old Testament) and Christ (the Messiah, God’s Son who was prophesied to reign as King of kings and Lord of lords) and that He had poured out His Spirit upon His people as the prophet Joel had foretold about 800 years before.
I read somewhere that during that first century there were between 5 and 6 hundred thousand Jewish people living in that area and that the population of Jerusalem was 50,000 but on some of the feast days there could be as high as 2 million Jews there. I don’t know how many were there for that first century Pentecost or Shavuot feast to hear Peter’s sermon but some of those who heard were “pricked in their hearts” when they realized what they had done to their Messiah who had come. They asked Peter and the rest of the Apostles, “What shall we do?” Peter gave them 2 commands and a promise which are recorded in
Acts 2:38-39. The two commands were:
1. Repent, turn to God, accept Yeshua as your Messiah who had been promised to you in the Scriptures.
2. Follow up that conversion experience with baptism or mikveh washing in the name of Yeshua your Messiah
The promise was that if you do submit to Him, you too can receive this promised baptism of the Spirit that we 120 have already received.
On that day 3,000 people accepted the Gospel message and the church grew from that original 500 disciples to about 3,500. And, the church is still growing today as folks come to Jesus as Savior and Baptizer in the Holy Spirit. It is estimated that there are over 500 million Pentecostal/Charismatic Christians in the world today.
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