Rabbi Schneider - Pentecost: Looking in the Wrong Place
Virtually, all of us are familiar with the term Pentecost, the Hebrew holiday that we see brought to the surface in the Brit Chadashah in Acts 2, where the disciples are gathered together because the day of Pentecost had come. We’re all familiar with the holiday called Pentecost. But how many of us are familiar with the title of that holy day from the Hebrew Bible, which is Shavuot? Today we’re going to look deep inside the Word of God to try to understand both the roots of Pentecost as well as its present-day application for our lives. So let’s go back to the Hebrew Bible. We’re going to the book of Exodus now. I’m looking at chapter 34. In verse 22, the Lord tells Israel to celebrate a holy day known here as the Feast of In its original historical context, it was the celebration of the wheat harvest.
And so Israel every year, as a practice, would take the first of their harvest in the spring and in the fall, and then they would present the first fruit of that harvest to the Lord. And in doing so, they were acknowledging that it was God that was blessing them. When the early disciples were gathered together in the upper room in Acts 2, they were actually celebrating the Feast of Weeks that we read about in the Torah. And they weren’t necessarily expecting that anything out of the ordinary was going to happen. They had been doing the same thing every year for 1,500 years already. Since the time the Torah was given, they had been celebrating the Feast of Weeks (which the church calls Pentecost, again, it’s the same exact day) — they had been already celebrating by the time we get to Acts 2, for 1,500 years. Now, what were they doing as they celebrated? They were doing two things.
Number one, they were thanking God in celebration, once again, of the agricultural harvest. But there’s another layer now of what they were celebrating. Because over the years, according to oral tradition, it was on this holy day of Shavuot or Pentecost that the God of Israel, that the God of our forefathers, Yahweh, revealed Himself on top of Mount Sinai and spoke as thunder so that approximately 3 million Jews who were alive at the time heard his voice and saw his glory. So as we look today now at the celebration of Shavuot or Pentecost, I want you to understand two things.
Number one, your faith in Jesus goes back 3,500 years to where this holiday began at. Secondly, I want you to understand that it was fulfilled in Acts 2, when the Lord didn’t speak to His people as He did on Mount Sinai from a faraway place where they heard his voice from the heavens. The Israelites at the base of the mountain, they heard His voice from the heavens and they were put into terror. But in Acts 2, the Lord went beyond speaking from the heavens to come inside and inhabit the human soul. And if you love Jesus, He lives in you. This is the mystery of the gospel. Christ in you, the hope of glory. So when I think about the celebration of Pentecost, what I am predominantly celebrating is the nearness of God. Even beyond near God is here.
And when I say He’s here, I’m not saying that He’s just a few feet away. I’m saying that He’s so here that He lives inside me and He lives inside you. He’s closer to you than your next heartbeat. He’s closer to you than your own breath. And that, beloved one, is the challenge in front of us. Mark my words. The challenge for you and the challenge for me is to stop looking for God out there and to recognize that He is in here. Both the Torah and the Brit Chadashah tell us the same thing. God is not so far away that we have to go up to the heavens to find Him. Neither is He so far away that we’ve got to find him in the bottom of the ocean. But Paul said, He’s near, He’s here, He’s in your heart.
And so, because we were born into this world in the flesh, because we were born into this world in the sense realm… what do I mean by the sense realm? We relate to everything by the senses. We relate to the world outside of us by what we see, what we hear, what we smell. We relate to the world through our senses. So we’re used to relating to reality in a way that is outside ourselves. What we need to do now that we are born into a new reality is to come out of relating to something that’s outside of ourselves. We need to stop looking outside, and we need to, again, turn our focus inside where Christ is seated in our soul.
We need, beloved one, to learn how to live our life from the inside out. We need to live from within. And if we’re going to be able to get in touch with this mystery that the Bible speaks of, if we’re going to get in touch with the reality that God’s Spirit literally is inside us, what we’re going to have to do is pull ourselves back from looking on the outside and turn our focus again to the inside where Christ is. To do this requires discipline. It means we have to take time in our life each day to turn off the cell phone, turn off the internet, turn off the television, turn off the radio, to just spend time, beloved one, sitting before the Lord.
I also do it listening to sanctified worship music, where beautiful songs are being sung to God. Not strong, you know, high voltage beats, but soft, soothing worship music singing songs to God out of the Scriptures. And as I sit in that environment, just sitting still before the Lord, allowing the Holy Spirit to slowly sanctify my soul, to settle me, to bring me within myself where He is, what I have found over all these years of doing that is that the Lord has gotten a root in my soul so that I’m better able to live by his power and to be led by the Spirit’s leading in my life. We need to practice the presence of God. We can celebrate Pentecost historically, we can look for the spectacular, look for signs and wonders.
And I love seeing the spectacular myself. But Beloved, God’s not in the earthquake predominantly. He’s in the still small voice of His Spirit that lives within us. And so Pentecost is an inward journey. And it takes dying to ourself. And it takes a dying of being connected to the world, so much so that we can’t discern the reality of the indwelling ruach HaKodesh, which is the Hebrew word to say «the breath of God» or «the Holy Spirit». Many of us are looking to experience God, we want to live in His power, we want to be led by His Spirit, but we don’t know how.
The mystery, beloved, is that Jesus lives inside your inner man. But it’s going to take some discipline on your part to begin to get in touch with Him. I want to encourage you, as I close this special broadcast on Pentecost, to spend time every morning, even if it’s only 15 minutes. I’m not suggesting it should only be 15 minutes, but even if you start out with just 15 minutes, spend your day beginning that day with God. Sit before Him. Be still. Don’t even talk to your spouse first. Don’t talk to your kids first. Give the Lord the first 15 minutes of your morning and just say, «Lord, help me to get in touch with the living reality of your Spirit in me».