Acts 2:4

4. Filled with the Holy Ghost This was the great fact of the Pentecost, the great fact of the New Testament dispensation the ADVENT OF THE SPIRIT.

Of this pentecostal sanctification we may remark: 1. It was a higher and purer endowment than the working of supernaturalisms, inasmuch as the latter does not necessarily imply even a regenerate character, and was mainly a transient and special provision for the establishment of the Church; while the former presumes a proximate conformity to the heavenly image, and is the normal privilege of the truly faithful for all ages. Even in the divine nature, though every attribute be perfect, yet holiness is pre-eminent over mere physical omnipotence. 2. Though the apostles before the Pentecost were holy after the less perfect dispensation of Moses, and so heirs of heaven, it was by this outpouring that they were wrought to the higher, and doubtless highest, sanctity of the new dispensation of the Spirit. 3. This sanctification was not merely sovereign or arbitrary from God, but consequent upon the entire self-consecration intimated in our note on Acts 2:14. The freedom of man and of God co-operated in the same blessed work. Man’s self-consecration is the condition, God’s sanctifying gift is the consummation. This sanctification is a source of spiritual power higher, because holier, than even miraculous power. (See our notes on Matthew 5:8; Matthew 5:48.) A fuller discussion would belong to note on 1 Thessalonians 5:23.

Speak with other tongues In other languages than their native.

Spirit gave them utterance The miraculous Spirit shaped their articulations.

In regard to the nature of this miraculous gift, we dismiss at once the rationalistic solutions that deny the miracle. Such are the hypotheses that it was simply a more fluent and ecstatic style of utterance; or, with Baumgarten, that it merely implied that their tongues, formerly instruments of the flesh, were now organs of the Holy Ghost. Still worse is the assumption of others, that the Christians who spoke were really Persian and other foreign Jews, and that a storm just then happening brought strangers to the place, who took the speakers to be mere Galileans miraculously speaking in foreign languages! On the other hand, we may dismiss the ultra-miraculous view that the apostles were at this time endowed with the permanent power of speaking in a variety of languages to enable them to preach the Gospel to the different nations of the earth. Of such a permanent gift there is no valid proof either in the New Testament or in early Church history. And for most of the nations of the Roman world the Latin, the Greek, and the Hebraic were a sufficient supply of dialects.

The ordinary supernaturalistic interpretation among commentators is, that each one of the disciples in turn spoke a single foreign language; so that the various foreigners were successively addressed, each in his own language. Our readers may still prefer that view, as it is maintained with great unanimity by all modern scholars; but to our own mind, we are obliged to confess, it is beset with difficulty. By most audiences such a miracle would be considered very equivocal, if not complete counterfeit. How could foreigners and strangers be absolutely sure that the speakers were genuine Galileans? How be convinced that each man had not learned his part and so was a deceiver? We can scarce consent that this great primordial event should receive so inadequate an explanation.

Now it is remarkable that a form of expression is thrice used which emphasises the marvel upon the hearing rather than the speaking. Acts 2:3. They “were confounded because every man heard them speak in his own language.” As if the hearing by every man in his own language was simultaneous, and produced by the same speaking and speaker. Acts 2:8. “How hear we every man in our own tongue ?’ The we and the every man simultaneously hear their native language uttered. Acts 2:11. “ We do hear them speak in our tongues.” The marvel plainly is that each Galilean speaker is simultaneously heard by each auditor in his own native-born dialect. The speaker’s organs furnished the vocality, which the Spirit shaped, and, as it were, translated into each hearer’s native tongue.

And this conception was by no means unknown to the Jewish Church. Tradition held that by such a polyglottal miracle the self-same vocality at Sinai was so divided and articulated as to be audible and intelligible to every man of all the seventy dialects of the world. (See our note, vol. ii, p. 105 . ) So Wetstein quotes Rabbi Jochanan as saying, “Whatever word goes forth from the mouth of God is divided into seventy languages.” And Mechilta, commenting on the word “voices” in Exodus 20:18, says, “How many were the voices? They heard each according to his own capacity.” Jochanan also says, “There went forth an utterance, and it was divided into seventy words in seventy languages; since all the nations heard, each hearing the word in the language of his own nation;” words singularly identical with Luke’s! Rabbi Tanchuma says upon Deuteronomy 5:23, “Said Moses, Thou hast heard how the utterance went forth to all Israel, to each one according to his own ability, old men, youths, boys, sucklings, women.”

That this polyglottal miracle actually took place at Sinai we have no Scripture proof; nor, perhaps, as a literal historical fact, did the Jewish doctors affirm it. They simply clothed in physical form the sublime conception that God’s law speaks, irrespective of national or racial boundary lines, to every human intelligence. Yet, as Christian baptism recognises and perpetuates in the new dispensation a later institute of the Jewish Church, being a physical form of the conception of sanctification, so the Pentecostal miracle was an appropriation of one of the divine thoughts of that same Jewish Church. The Divine Spirit here, as in many other cases, appropriates existing conceptions to valid and permanent uses.

This, it may be said, not wisely, would be, not a miracle of tongues, but a miracle of ears. But the miracle, as we understand it, and as the Jewish Church conceived and described it, interposed at the initial point, namely, at the tongue; it truly articulated the vocality, and its result only reached the ear with its marvellous effect. Just as the fiery tongue, a unit at the root, is divided off into a variety of terminal points, so does the vocality, which is one and simple at the start, divide off into a variety of articulations. It is as if the Spirit tongue impregnated the fleshly tongue, like a soul, and flung off the various dialects from its flaring points. And that surely was not a miracle of ears, but a miracle of tongues.

The miracle did not certainly consist in putting into the brain of each speaker a complete miraculous knowledge of a new language, so that he could select from its entire vocabulary the term fitted to the thought. That, Alford says, not much too strongly, would be an inconceivable and monstrous violation of man’s cerebral and mental nature. When God made the dumb brute reprove the prophet Balaam, he did not bestow upon the animal the soul of a man to understand human language. He simply shaped the words in the mouth of the brute, so that, phenomenally, “the dumb ass spake.” And this the divine power could as easily do as shape the name of “Samuel” in the air for the hearing of the boy prophet. Nor in either case does it follow that the miracle was solely upon the ears, but a miracle in the utterance, reaching the ears in its realization. Nor in either case was there a “mistake.” (as Lechler in Dr. Schaff’s Lange says,) nor a “mere thinking that they heard,” but a reality, and a true hearing of a true utterance.

By this view of the case, 1. We have no equivocal miracle which a combination of impostors might simulate. 2. We have a miracle pregnant with a divine idea, symbolizing the power with which God’s voice finds an auditory in every human conscience. 3. We have confirmed the parallelism of the inauguration of the Pentecostal Gospel and the Sinaitic Law. 4. We have a clear symbol of the universal diffusion of the one true religion. 5. We have a type not only of the reparation of the confusion of Babel by the bringing the intelligence of all nations into the reception of one utterance, but a type of Edenic unity in the bringing all back to the one primitive God-formed language of created Adam, in whom all the race was embodied.

What is here said refers, of course, to the Pentecostal miracle alone. The power of that primordial miracle was never fully repeated. Secondary Pentecosts occurred at Samaria, (Acts 8:14-17,) at Cesarea, (Acts 10:44-48,) and at Ephesus, (Acts 19:2-7;) but the first power grew fainter and fainter, and the gift of tongues became less and less marked, as at Corinth, by its original attributes.

Since our writing of the above the following paragraph has appeared in the (London) Quarterly Review, commencing an article on Islam, by Immanuel Deutsch:

“The Sinaitic Manifestation, as recorded in the Pentateuch, has become the theme of a thousand reflections in the Talmud, and the Haggadah generally. Yet, however varied their nature, one supreme thought runs through them all, the catholicity of Monotheism in its mission to all mankind. Addressed, apparently, to a small horde of runaway slaves, the ‘Law’ was intended, the Doctors say, for all the children of men. ‘Why,’ they ask, ‘was it given in the desert and not in any king’s land?’ To show, it is answered, that even as the desert, God’s own highway, is free, wide open to all, so are his words a free gift to all. The ‘Law’ was not given in the stillness and darkness of night, but in plain day, amid thunders and lightnings. Indeed, the Law itself had been offered to all nations of the world before it came to [Israel] the ‘chosen’ one. But the other nations, one and all, had turned to some one special national bent, or mission, with which one or the other of these commandments would have interfered, and so they declined them all. As for trembling Israel, had they not accepted the ‘Law’ that self-same mountain would have covered them up, and that desert would have become their grave. But, the legend continues, when this Law came to be revealed to them in the fulness of time, it was not revealed in their tongue alone, but in seventy: as many as there were nations counted on earth, even as many fiery tongues leap forth from the iron upon the anvil. And as the voice of the ‘Law’ went and came, echoing from Orient to Occident, from heaven to earth, ‘all men heard and saw.’ They heard the voice, and to each it bore a different sound: to the men and the women, the young and the old, the strong and the weak. In that self-same hour God’s majesty revealed itself in its manifold words and aspects: as Mercy and as Severity, as Justice and as Forgiveness, as Grace and Peace and Redemption. And through the midst of all these ever-varying sounds and visions there rolled forth the Divine word, ‘I am the everlasting Jehovah, thy God, one God!’”