Hey, this is John at the Bible Project. Right now we're working our way through the Book of Acts, the story of the early church.

The Book of Acts is telling me that if I've given my allegiance to Jesus, I'm a part of a Messianic Jewish sect that started as a persecuted religious minority movement in ancient Jerusalem.

Like that's a living heritage. Christianity as humble beginnings, but it had been expected by Jewish prophets who were hoping expecting a new work of God's spirit to come and recreate Israel.

So in this episode, Tim and I discuss the singular event that gave Christianity its early spark, its momentum, Pentecost.

A time where God's spirit showed up in an expected but unexpected way.

So in the same way, there was an expectation about the spirit. We looked at one from Isaiah, Ezekiel, Joel, Zechariah, all have really explicit hopes for a new work of the presence and spirit of God in this new age.

But what happens doesn't quite correspond to what anybody would have expected.

All the believers were in one room and there was a loud, violent wind. And then tongues of fire came flying over people's heads, which sounds pretty scary and pretty confusing.

But fire is an important image in the Bible about God's presence. God appeared in a burning bush, Tim Moses, in flames over Mount Sinai, and in a pillar of fire over the Tabernacle.

And so the flames at Pentecost?

This is the marking out of Temple's face. Places where heaven and earth meet become where God's appearance manifests itself. So that's the claim being made here.

The Gs's people are where heaven and earth meet.

So today on the show, Pentecost, the new Israel and our bodies as the Temple of God. Thanks for joining us. Here we go.

All right. So the Book of Acts, we just talked through the first chapter.

Or just the opening scene. Opening scene of the first chapter.

Yeah.

And how it gives us a template for how the Book of Acts is going to, how it's going to work.

How a marginal, small, messianic Jewish sect became an international multi-ethnic movement that will become the most ethnically diverse religious movement in human history.

Spoilers.

That's remarkable.

First of all, second of all, we would expect then to find in this foundation story, what are the core values?

What's the core? What kind of story could generate that kind of movement in human history and hold it together?

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