And They Shall Prophesy | Acts

Scripture reading this morning will be coming from the book of Acts, chapter 2.

Acts 2 · chapter mention

Acts, chapter 2. Listen carefully and take heed to this, because this is the word of the Lord.

Acts 2 · chapter mention

When the day of Pentecost arrived, they were all together in one place,

and suddenly there came from heaven a sound like a mighty rushing wind,

and it filled the entire house where they were sitting.

And divided tongues as of fire appeared to them and rested on each one of them.

And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues

as the Spirit gave them utterance Now there were dwelling in Jerusalem Jews,

devout men from every nation under heaven And at this sound the multitude came

together And they were bewildered because each one was hearing them speak in

his own language And they were amazed and astonished, saying,

Are not all of these who are speaking Galileans?

How is it then that we hear each of us in his own native language?

Parthians, Medes, Elamites, and residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontius and Asia,

Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt, and the parts of Libya belonging to Cyrene,

and visitors from Rome, both Jews and proselytes, Cretans and Arabians.

We hear them telling in our own tongues the mighty works of God,

and all were amazed and perplexed, saying to one another, What does this mean?

But others, mocking, said, They were filled with new wine.

But Peter, standing with the eleven, lifted up his voice and addressed them,

Men of Judea and all who dwell in Jerusalem, Let this be known to you, and give ear to my words.

For these people are not drunk, as you suppose, since it is only the third hour of the day.

But this is what was uttered to the prophet Joel.

And in the last days it shall be, God declares, that I will pour out my Spirit

on all flesh, and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy.

And your young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams,

even on my male servants and female servants.

In those days I will pour out my Spirit, and they shall prophesy.

And I will show wonders in the heavens above and signs on the earth below,

blood and fire and vapor of smoke.

The sun shall be turned to darkness and the moon to blood before the day of

the Lord comes, the great and magnificent day.

And it shall come to pass that everyone who calls upon the name of the Lord

shall be saved. This is the word of the Lord. You can be seated.

Let's pray together. Father, you are the one who guides and directs us by your spirit.

And so we ask now for your Holy Spirit to continue to speak to us afresh and

anew the word of the Lord, particularly from this passage, Lord,

may we be once again called to Jesus Christ in whose name we pray. Amen.

This morning, the text is focusing our attention on prophets and prophecies

that are coming here at this extraordinary event.

And I don't know if any one of you have ever met a prophet.

I did. I met one once in Africa, said he was a prophet.

I don't know what you think of when you think of a prophet. Maybe you think

of an old guy with a long gray beard or something along those lines,

a hippie type person, or maybe someone sitting deep into a cave with a long

line of people outside of it.

But usually when we think of prophets and prophecies, we think of predictions of the future.

The ancient Oracle of Delphi, the great prophets that would be there at the

Oracle of Delphi, was a great temple to the god Apollo.

And according to Greek history, people would come from all over the known world to hear the Pythia.

These were the priestesses of the oracles of Delphi.

And people would wait, and they would come to hear them speak,

and they would speak to them prophecies. And usually the prophecies were strange.

Poetic, enigmatic, difficult to figure out kinds of things.

And so they would go there to this temple.

People would go there primarily before they wanted to go to war or start a new

colony or whatever they wanted to do.

Usually it was leaders or something about decisions for the future.

We also sometimes do that today in our lives. Who should I marry?

What kind of job should I take? We would really like it if we could go to a

prophet and have them tell us the future.

And that's usually what we connect prophecies to. The great Nostradamus,

I don't know if you've heard of him.

He was a French thinker and teacher who predicted a lot of things.

Again, they were cryptic. They're strange.

You have to, a lot of times when you confront these prophecies,

you have to kind of turn your head sideways, squint real hard,

and then squeeze the facts of what happened in the future into that prophecy somehow.

Now, just so you know, I thought this was interesting, Nostradamus predicted for 2025.

Great global events, an asteroid impact is imminent, according to Nostradamus and his followers,

a resolution to the Ukraine and Russia conflict, Trump would be happy to hear

that, a global economic collapse, sorry, that was also in there.

So according to Nostradamus, and many people, many of his followers have looked

and they believed he predicted the great fire in England in 1666,

and all these events that Nostradamus predicted supposedly have been coming true.

But I want today, this morning, to look at the book of Acts and think about

prophets and prophecy and what it meant when Peter said, they shall prophesy,

when he's quoting from the prophet Joel.

The idea is that prophets would predict the future cryptically and strangely.

The Bible will even say, we'll get to a verse where it says,

God doesn't speak through such dark sayings, through such strange,

cryptic, and symbolic devices.

In fact, biblical prophets were not actually known for predicting the future.

That was not the purpose of the biblical prophets. I want you to keep that in

mind because when we look at people today who can say the church continues to

have prophets, we went to, we were traveling once

and we were behind a big, large series of taxis and on the back of it,

it said, come see the prophet of the almighty God.

It was an amazing thing. It wasn't just a big revival. It said the big mega revival.

I guess if you're gonna have a mega revival, it's gonna be a really big one.

And so these people were following the prophet of the Almighty God.

So there are people today who continue to believe that there are prophets who prophesy in our time.

What I'm going to try to argue is that even from the nature of biblical prophecy,

it doesn't look that way.

Again, although biblical prophets would make future pronouncements,

Jeremiah, the Assyrians are going to come, the Babylonians will do this and so forth.

The focus of the role of the biblical prophets was not to foretell the future,

but to forth tell the word of God.

Oftentimes when a prophet would make a prediction about a future disaster,

what he was doing was warning the people about the judgment of God that was coming on them.

And the purpose of predicting the future, if you will, was not about the future

prediction, but the prophet's desire to call God's people to God.

That was the goal of the prophet, to go to the people and says,

thus says the Lord God, you have tortured people, you have not kept the widows

and the orphans. You've been following other gods.

You're chasing after idols. You have been adulterous.

And thus, therefore, the Lord says you will be judged.

At the heart of that prophecy is not so much a prediction of the future,

but that God was going to his people saying, I love you.

I'm calling you back to myself, even if it takes judgment.

Even if the judgment is the means by which. And oftentimes, as we see in the

Bible, many times when people would say, forgive us, Lord, then the prediction,

so supposed prediction, the warning of judgment, God withheld it.

We see this in the life of the prophet Jonah. He goes around the city and says,

yet in 40 days, the Lord will destroy Nineveh.

And they repented and they turned to the Lord. It was such a dramatic revival

that they were even making their animals fast.

This was a widespread revival. And the Lord said, I won't judge Nineveh.

By the way, Jonah wasn't just going around saying, God's going to judge you, end of the world.

You know, those guys that hold up signs, the end of the world is near,

those kinds of prophets.

What Jonah was doing was going about the city, describing to them his own story,

that he was on the ship and that he'd been thrown into the sea and swallowed by a large fish.

In three days, he was resurrected and put on dry land and so forth.

And the Ninevites, the Assyrians heard that and they repented.

And the Lord blessed them.

Ironically, Jonah was upset. The reason Jonah was upset is because he knew that

at that particular time, when prophets and prophecies went to the Gentile world

and they repented, it meant judgment for Israel.

It meant judgment for Israel. So here to our text, Peter says that in these

last days, God will pour out his spirit on all flesh.

That's the phrase he uses. That's the first phrase, on all flesh.

And then he goes about to stipulate who that is.

It's old men and old women and young men and young women and servants and slaves

and masters, all flesh, all kinds of people.

The spirit of prophecy had been to this point fairly restricted.

Sometimes when we read the Bible, we look back at the Old Testament and we think,

man, there was fire on Sinai, there were burning bushes, there were all these

amazing things that were happening. Actually, those things didn't happen every single day.

Every single day, the Lord wasn't sending prophets all the time.

Prophets came at certain periods when the Lord sent them to bring his people back to himself.

You could probably actually name most of the prophets. I know if you know your

Bible, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, all those, those are prophets.

But when you look back at biblical history, you see hundreds of years or time

periods when there were no prophets and there were no prophecies or miracles or signs.

So what I'm getting at is in the Old Testament, God would send a prophet, but they were numbered.

And they almost always came from Israel.

In this particular case, we see that when the Holy Spirit comes at Pentecost,

there's an explosion of the work of prophets and prophecies.

The Spirit of the Lord comes down, and the Old Testament barriers that were

once existing for the prophets, namely that they were almost all Jewish and almost always a man.

Now we see that the Gentiles all over the world, men and women,

and Old Testament barriers were being smashed and broken down in our story, as we would expect.

Hebrews chapter eight says, and in that he says, a new covenant,

he has made the first obsolete.

What we're seeing in our story in Acts is that the end of the old covenant is

there before us and is becoming obsolete.

And you see that in the nature of national status, Jews, and gender.

Now, women and foreigners were not, previous to this, allowed into the presence

of the Lord at the temple.

But here we see the barriers are taken down in the new covenant.

Women and foreigners and children were allowed into the presence of the Lord

and were given direct special revelation from God.

It doesn't change the role of women in the church.

Those are still clearly defined roles, both in the home and in the church.

But it certainly changes the nature of covenantal worship.

In the Old Testament, every woman, every child that was not of a certain age

and a male would not be allowed into the presence of the Lord,

into the holy place of the temple.

But now we see those barriers are being destroyed and men and women and children

and old people and Gentiles, non-Jewish people are now called in to the presence of the Lord.

Galatians, Paul says this, chapter three, verse 26, for you are all sons of

God through faith in Christ Jesus.

For as many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ.

There is neither therefore, this is amazing. And I want you to listen.

Most of us are Gentiles. That is, most of us don't have any lineage that could

say, well, my great, great grandpappy, you know, came from Jerusalem in this

particular, most of us are Gentiles, at least in terms of our tribe.

And so most of us, and for generation after generation have grown up in the

church with a Gentile church.

So when someone says, guess what? A Jew can come into our church.

You're like, well, so what? Of course he can.

Or a Gentile and a Jew can worship together, at least in terms of their tribal

ethnic heritage. And most of us shrug our shoulders and say, so what?

But in these days, this was a dramatic event.

Gentiles were not allowed into

the presence of the Lord. They weren't allowed to come into the temple.

And so now we see that this national status and this gender is all changing.

So Paul says, there is now neither Jew nor Greek.

There is now neither slave nor free, male or female. You are all one in Christ Jesus.

It's amazing, especially amazing when Paul is saying it in the New Testament time.

And so what we see here is that this is, in Acts chapter two,

this is a revelation of the end of the old age and the beginning of the new age.

Signs of the times, in other words, that the last days were being fulfilled

according to the prophet Joel.

So what's going on? Well, God is now giving direct revelation to all kinds of

people, men, women, children, they're having visions, they're having dreams,

and they're speaking forth the word of the Lord.

They are prophets in that sense. But we need to remember that a prophet has

its origin or prophets in prophecy have their origin in the Old Testament.

Are we together? So that when you think about a prophet, don't think about the

oracles of Delphi or don't think about Nostradamus or don't think about predicting the future.

They think about a prophet given the word of the Lord, and he's supposed to

tell the word of the Lord to the people of God.

So a New Testament prophet is the same as an Old Testament prophet.

These are people given direct new revelation from God to speak forth to the

people of God in order to call God's people back to them or back to God.

The word prophet actually is first used for Abraham.

Abraham is the first time we see that in the Old Testament where Abimelech was

rebuked for threatening Abraham, who was protected by God, and Abraham is referred

to as a nabhi in Hebrew, a prophet.

And a prophet was someone who received the word of the Lord and spoke to the people.

In Exodus, we say, Then the Lord said to Moses, see, I have made you like a

god to Pharaoh, and your brother Aaron will be your prophet.

You are to say everything I command you, and your brother Aaron is to tell Pharaoh.

The word of the Lord comes directly to them, and they speak forth the word of the Lord.

Prophets, then, are mouthpieces of God.

God's prophets speak God's word, and that's what he's supposed to do.

And the people are supposed to listen to the words of the prophets.

Deuteronomy 18, we read where a prophet is never to presume to speak his own

word, only the words which I have commanded him.

Numbers 12, 6-7 says, Then hear now my words, if there is a prophet among you,

I, the Lord, make myself known to him in a vision, I speak to him in a dream.

This is what's happening in our passage this morning.

These people are receiving direct revelation from God, and they are speaking forth that revelation.

You'll notice, by the way, that that direct revelation is not for the personal

subjective experience of the prophet.

I'm connecting, of course, to the modern-day Pentecostal charismatic movement

where the prophets are receiving revelation from God, and they're supposed to

want to receive it for their personal experience.

It wasn't about a personal experience. The prophet was to receive the word of

the Lord and give it to the people of God.

Like tongues, these signs are going to pass away at the end of the age,

the end of the old age. How do I know that?

Again, I go back to that 1 Corinthians 13 passage.

You may get tired of me saying it, but here it says, love never ends.

As for prophecies, they will pass away. Okay.

As for prophecies, they will pass away.

And we know that those prophecies will pass away because the end of the age

will come and the complete one, Jesus Christ, will begin speaking to us directly

through his word and through what we might call New Testament prophets or prophecies.

Not direct revelation as I'll show you, but New Testament prophets who now speak

forth the word of God to his people.

In bringing this multiplicity of prophets to the people of Israel,

Israel was reminded that their times of rebellion were finished.

One of the lessons you certainly see, at least I need to remind you of in the

book of Acts, is that God will not tolerate endless rebellion.

The nation of Israel had had many prophets.

Many times the word of the Lord came to them. Jeremiah is a classic example.

I'm so happy to be at Wilmington Reformed Church and not speaking to Israel

in the days of Jeremiah, because God said, go speak to the people.

You can hear it, see it through the story, but they won't listen to me.

In fact, the Lord says, they'll hate you. Thanks.

It's fun to be a prophet. So the prophets were going to Israel and they were

speaking, please turn back to the Lord.

Please humble your hearts. And the Lord judged them and then brought them back

in his judgment through mercy and another prophet would come and the people

would not listen and the lord judged them and the judgment was a mercy and here

finally in the new testament god is saying to israel your days of rebellion

and judgment are finished forever.

I will not tolerate endless rebellion. By the way, in your own life,

as you look at your life, think about this.

If God would not withhold his judgment from his beloved Israel,

what makes you think he will withhold it from you?

God does not tolerate endless rebellion. But this is also another point that

God is judging the nation of Israel, but in his judgment, just like in the days

of the prophet, the invasion of the Assyrians was a judgment, but it was also a mercy.

In the days when the Babylonians invaded and Nebuchadnezzar took the people of God to Babylon.

It was a judgment, but it was also a mercy, a great mercy for the people of God.

So now in these days, God is judging the nation of Israel, but in so doing,

he is bursting open the floodgates of grace to all the world, to all the nation.

Christ is the goal of this revelation. Christ is the end point of this revelation.

And all the prophets and prophecies and the young children and the maidens and

everyone's dreams were all focusing on foretelling Jesus Christ as the final word.

Direct special revelation, Paul said, was going to pass away, and it has. It has.

Are we together? None of you should be expecting to hear a direct revelation from God that's new.

But I wanna qualify it a bit, and I wanna encourage us to look to Acts and to

our church as a church that wants to hear revelation from God by the power of the Holy Spirit.

I remember a question once was asked at a young man at Presbytery meeting.

You know, all of us are anxious to make sure we have the right answer.

And all of us are all certainly anxious not to be shown as like a Pentecostal

or Roman Catholic or something bad.

So the young man was asked, does God continue to reveal himself to his people today?

Young man said, no, absolutely not. Tongues, prophecies, they have ceased.

And then he got away with that. But then later during the question and answer

time, he was asked again, does God continue to reveal himself to his people today?

He said, he could tell it was, you start to sweat when you're up there and you're

answering questions like, maybe not.

So he says, no. But then the pastor kept saying, when you preach on Sunday,

do not the people of God hear direct revelation from God?

And the young man said, yeah, I guess in that sense, God continues.

My point in saying that is that just because we no longer believe that each

one of you, men, women, children, are receiving direct revelation from God, new revelation,

fresh revelation, a word or a vision or a dream from God, it doesn't mean that

we do not, as the people of God, through the power of His Spirit,

continue to hear His voice.

In fact, I would call you this morning to hear that voice today through the preaching of the Word.

It's an amazing thing that the Puritans, there was a famous Puritan named William

Perkins who wrote a book called Prophesying, The Art of Prophesying, 1592.

And he equated preaching with prophecy. And he did so brilliantly because he

was going back to the idea that an Old Testament prophet and a New Testament

prophet were those who were not just predicting the future, but forth telling the word of God.

Preaching the word is prophesying, says Perkins, in the name of and on behalf of Jesus Christ.

He cites 1 Corinthians 14 and Romans 1. On the other hand, the one who prophesies

speaks to people for their upbuilding and encouragement and consolation.

The one who speaks in tongues builds himself up, but the one who prophesies builds up the church.

Beloved, I want to remind you, yes, that as these bursts of miracles and signs

and wonders were given to usher in the new age and they ended when the old age

ended and the new covenant age began,

It doesn't mean that we no longer long to hear the voice of Jesus.

And it doesn't mean that we no longer want to hear revelation from God. We should.

Every single Sunday, you should. Every single Sunday, you should come here looking

forward and praying for the Holy Spirit to help you hear direct revelation from God from his word.

Perkins says, the word of God is to be preached in its perfection,

in its inner consistency.

Scripture is the exclusive subject of preaching and the only field in which

the preacher is to labor.

I shouldn't be standing up here predicting the future.

I shouldn't be standing up here bringing my own words.

I need to be, as a prophet in the New Testament sense, in the preacher sense

that Perkins was after, speaking to you the word of God.

Our own director for public worship says that in the sermon,

God addresses the congregation by the mouth of his servant and through his spirit

opens the ears of his people.

We are not living in the days when new direct revelation comes,

but I don't want you to be dead in the sense that you're not looking forward

to direct revelation and the power of the Holy Spirit to stir you up to love Jesus.

That's what the prophets would do. They would speak the word of God and tell

the people of God, come back to God.

Come to the Lord in some way. And we now have the completed canon of scripture, the whole Bible.

And that is sufficient to continue prophesying in this biblical sense.

Don't say that we need more revelation. I won't, when we have the meeting for

chairs later, I'm not going to say, you know what, God told us that we should buy these chairs.

So stacking the deck a bit. Have you ever had anybody tell you that?

I've had pastors tell us, the Lord told me that we need to ABC.

How are you going to argue about that?

I mean, if we said to you, well, that God spoke to the session about chairs,

what are you going to say? Yeah, but how much do they cost?

You probably want to still know that. We don't need direct dreams and visions

and revelations from God.

We have the Word of God completed, and we are in a beautiful time of not laying

a foundation with all the new direct revelation that came at this time.

We are now in a building stage, which is even better.

We're in a time beyond the last days where we preach the Word of God,

the ministers, and the people hear the voice of Jesus Christ in the sermon.

That's what you should be longing for. John chapter 10 says,

John 10 · chapter mention

my sheep hear my voice and they follow me.

That's the purpose of preaching and prophesying in this biblical sense.

And we have the Bible now. We have the whole of the Bible, the canon completed.

Perkins again says that its perfection consists in its sufficiency or its purity.

Its sufficiency is such that as the word of God, it is so complete that nothing

may be added to it or taken from it, which belongs to its proper purpose.

The law of the Lord is perfect.

Whatever I command you, you are to observe it. You shall not add to it or take

away from it, Deuteronomy 12.

And of course, at the closing of the book of Revelation, John warns us that you shall not add to.

If anyone adds to these things, God will add to him the plagues that are written in the book.

And if anyone takes away from the words of the book of this prophecy,

God shall take away his part from the book of life, from the holy city,

and from the things which were which written.

John is simply repeating the Deuteronomic warning.

When you hear the Word of God, when you see the Word of God,

do not add to it and do not take away from it.

Perkins is not arguing for new revelation, but certainly fresh revelation.

The Word of God, as it's opened up and read and preached to the people of God,

is prophecy from God in that sense.

And the preacher is to sort of try to apply it somehow, not just give a doctrine

in general, but apply it so that the people of God are fed by the word of God.

If there's no power, says Martin Lloyd-Jones, it's not preaching.

True preaching, he says, after all, is God's acting.

It's not just a man uttering words. It's God using him.

He is being used of God. He is under the influence of the Holy Spirit and what

Paul calls in 1 Corinthians, preaching and the demonstration of the spirit of power.

I want you to love the preaching of the word of God. I want you to love the word of God.

This passage tells us, yes, that multiple different new revelations and new

prophecies came at this time period.

But these new revelations were indicating the end of such, the end of the old

age, and the time when Christ alone would be the focus of our attention.

And the Word of God, as it's finally complete, would be now the prophesying

from which the church would get.

English theologian Oliver O'Donovan says it was a Christian insight that the

capacity to give instruction was actually a kind of authority,

parallel to, though different from, the capacity to give effective commands.

Jesus' teaching ministry, then,

is taken by the evangelist to be something more than just instruction.

It's a disclosure of the reign of God through which the authority of God asserts itself.

Jesus' authority consists in his capacity to bring us directly into contact

with God's authority through the Word of God.

And I'm asking you the question, is this the way you see it?

Is this the way you feel about it when you come to church? Are you actually

longing to hear revelation from God, an opening up, an unveiling of God himself,

pointing us to Jesus Christ, revealing your own sins,

revealing your own insufficiency, and through the revelation and through the

prophesying and the preaching to be called back to Jesus Christ because that's what you should do.

We should long for it. Do you pray for it?

When you come here, before you come here, do you pray for the Holy Spirit?

Just because I keep saying, it sounds like I'm saying, well,

we're having no fun because we're not Pentecostals.

We don't speak in tongues. We don't have signs. We don't have miracles.

And now the dude's saying no prophecies or I'm not saying that.

What I'm saying is no direct revelation from God beyond the scriptures which

points us to Christ. we still need to pray for the Holy Spirit to awaken our

souls, to aliven us, to call us back to Jesus Christ.

I don't know where any one of you is, but I can be sure that as sinners,

all of us every single Sunday need to be called back by the prophecy in the

scripture to come to Jesus. Come to Jesus.

I had a friend that used to say that that's what his children needed when they

were under threat of discipline. It's time to have a come to Jesus meeting.

Every Sunday should be a come to Jesus in that sense. Let go of your sins,

let go of the problems, and come to Jesus Christ.

The exceptional character of the influence of the scripture,

says Perkins, lies in two things.

Its power to penetrate into the spirit of man and its ability to bind our conscience

and to constrain that conscience before God, either to excuse or accuse of sin.

This is what we long for as a church, to have the word of God preached,

the revelation of God prophesied to you from his word.

And then for you as God's people to long for that word to work in your hearts.

Hebrews 4, 12 is such a powerful verse in regard to this.

The word of God, it says, is living and powerful, sharper than any two-edged

sword, piercing even to the division of soul and spirit and joints and marrows.

It is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart. What about you?

Is that how you approach worship? Is that how you approach listening to sermons?

We must earnestly ask God to open our blind eyes to the meaning of scripture

and to the meaning of what we're doing and why we're doing it.

And every time we hear it, to come back afresh and repent of those sins and

turn to Jesus Christ, who is the only hope, the only hope that we have. Do you pray like this?

Do you earnestly, even before you come to this worship, pray that the Lord would

open your eyes and open your hearts? If you do, then the Lord will.

And he does through the preaching of his word through Jesus Christ.

Amen. Let's pray together.

Lord God, as we as a church, see the visions and the prophets and prophecies

that came in a flurry in that moment.

Help us to be so thrilled and so amazed that we're in a better place today.

We're in a better place because you, through Jesus Christ and the power of your

spirit, are continuing to speak to your church.

You continue to give us afresh the word of God and call us to Jesus Christ.

And Lord, as we prepare for the Lord's Supper, we pray that you would even encourage

and strengthen us in that commitment.

For those of us who have been weak, for those of us who have been frail,

for those of us who have been stubborn, for those of us who have insistently

lived in sins, we pray, O Lord, we beg you, God, that you would help us this

morning to turn away from those and turn to Jesus Christ.

For us, for the old, for the young, for the children, for all of us here,

we pray, O Lord, that your spirit would be at work in us through the preaching

of Jesus Christ, in whose name we pray, amen.