Today is Pentecost Sunday! It is a good time to remember the promised outpouring of the Holy Spirit on Yeshua’s followers. It is a blessed time to celebrate the ongoing work of the Holy Spirit in the lives of all believers. It is a great time to embrace the wonderful gifts that the Holy Spirit operates in our daily lives. But have you ever stopped to think about the origin of Pentecost? It was a holiday that was celebrated long before the disciples’ Upper Room experience. In the Bible it is called the Feast of Weeks that occurred fifty days after Passover. And it commemorated the time that God Himself came down on Mount Sinai to meet with His people and to give them a special gift—His covenant of promise to the people He was calling unto Himself as a special possession.
We are all familiar with that first covenant that God made with the Israelites at Mount Sinai. It was there that they received the Ten Commandments and the Law. But did you know that God made a second covenant with His people before they entered the Promised Land? It is found in Deuteronomy 29. Verse one begins,
“These are the words of the covenant which the LORD commanded Moses to make with the children of Israel in the land of Moab, besides the covenant which He made with them in Horeb (Sinai)…” This covenant was for the children of those who stood before God at Sinai, but not only for them! Verse 10 says, “All of you stand today before the LORD your God: your leaders and your tribes and your elders and your officers, all the men of Israel, your little ones and your wives–also the stranger who is in your camp…that you may enter into covenant with the LORD your God, and into His oath, which the LORD your God makes with you today.”
But He didn’t stop there; God went on to say,
“I make this covenant and this oath, not with you alone, but with him who stands here with us today…as well as with him who is not here with us today…”
God included even the future generations who would rise up and foreigners who would come from a far land (verse 22) as part of this covenant! That includes YOU!
And what did this covenant entail? What was God agreeing with them to do? One promise on God’s part in verse 13 was, “that He may establish you today as a people for Himself, and that He may be God to you…” And the obligation of the people in verse 18 was, so that there may not be among you man or woman or family or tribe whose heart turns away today from the LORD our God, to go and serve god’s of these nations, and that there may not be among you a root bearing bitterness or wormwood (like jealousy or resentment that eats you up from the inside out).
That’s it (but that’s plenty!). It is simple. God wants us all to be His own people. He doesn’t want us to become distracted by the idols that this world entices us with so that we gradually turn our back on Him. And he doesn’t want us to have a root of bitterness or wormwood toward our fellow men. In other words, God wants us to love Him and love each other. Yeshua said that all the law hangs on these two commands (Matthew 22:40).
So, I leave you today with a final word of encouragement from 1 John 4:10-11,
“In this is love, not that we loved God, but that He loved us and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins. Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another.”
May you feel God’s deep and abiding love wash over you today and spill out on all those around you! And may your souls be refreshed and revived by the renewed infilling of His Holy Spirit in your heart as you accept God’s second precious gift of Pentecost. Happy Pentecost Sunday!