The Coming of the Fire

Pentecost is an interestingly misunderstood event in the Bible.

Fire is a symbol in the Bible.  The word light is a word with more meanings than just a single meaning.  Darrow and Bryan struggle with it in “Inherit the Wind.”  When they created the tabernacle, God came down in a pillar of fire.  When Solomon built God’s temple, God entered it in  a column of fire, but when Herod build his stunning temple, one which even the pagans came to look at with awe, no light appeared.  No sign from heaven to earth.

Then, Christ came, lived, learned, and died.  The disciples waited and were prepared.  Christ ascended and then, when they visited the Temple, known to the Jews as the house, on the day when God descended on the Mountain and three thousand died for their sins, the disciples gathered and the fire came down.  But it didn’t come down on the temple, the spirit of God poured down and over his new dwelling, the minds and hearts of his children.  We are the tabernacle, the temple, the Holy of Holies.  Three thousand were saved, not lost, and we became the dwelling place of God.  A historic, but not necessarily understood change.  Do you think that most folks who celebrate Pentecost realize what it means to them.

Repentance is more than just a confession and an “ I’m sorry.”  True repentance involves changing your life, your daily life, the way you think.  Repentance is a painful and visible change.

Faith is a belief so deep that it changes who and what you are.  It is not a simple belief that Christ is the son of God.  The Bible mentions that Satan believes that God is God and exists.

The study of the Bible is a difficult and yet simple task.  The problem is that we have dismembered it into verses and chapters and even two books.  It makes it hard to follow.  We read it in pieces and even the pieces are not in the correct order, kind of like reading a novel by picking pages at random.  We mutter about how confusing it is and often they are bewildered why someone behaves in a certain way, when it is clear what is going on if you know the whole story in order.   People who find Revelation opaque often ignore the fact that it ties up the loose ends in the Old Testament.