Fire on Every Head
Cross to Throne Part V
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“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.” — Acts 2:1-4
The Mystery Hidden from the Ages
Before Pentecost there was a secret.Paul names it in Ephesians 3 with the kind of precision that suggests he has turned the thought over for years, the mystery hidden in God from the ages, not merely kept quiet but actively concealed, hidden from the principalities and the powers who govern the spiritual architecture of the present age. The plan of redemption was sealed between the Father and the Son before creation began, before the first human breath, before Eden, before the fall that made the plan necessary. And the principalities were not told. The beings who had watched the creation of the world, who had seen the covenants with Abraham and Moses and David, who had studied every movement of God in human history, did not know what the cross was going to accomplish. They had not been given the information. The mystery was hidden in God, and God had kept it.
This means that everything Satan did from the garden of Eden to the garden of Gethsemane, he did in ignorance of the outcome. Every accusation leveled at human beings before the throne of God, every temptation pressed against the sons and daughters of Adam, every stirring of jealousy in the hearts of the religious leaders who would eventually cry crucify, was a move made inside a plan he could not see and had not been permitted to understand. He was not a knowing participant in the drama of redemption. He was its unwitting instrument. The cross looked to him like a victory. The sealed tomb looked like the end of the threat. Three days later he knew better, but it was already too late.
Paul says the mystery was designed to be made known to the principalities and powers through the Church. Not explained to them. Made known through the Church. The existence of the new creation people, alive and indwelt and walking in the authority of the Name, was itself the revelation. Pentecost was not the announcement of the mystery. It was the mystery, made visible, in a room in Jerusalem, in one hundred and twenty people who were no longer what they had been.
What the Fire Meant
The sound comes first. A rushing mighty wind filling the entire house, the Greek word is pnoe, breath, from the same root as pneuma, Spirit. The room fills with breath before it fills with fire, because what is happening is a creation event. In the beginning the Spirit of God hovered over the face of the waters. In the garden the Lord breathed into the dust of the ground and the man became a living being. Now the breath is filling a room in Jerusalem, and what is being created is neither a world nor a single man but a new order of human being, a family, a body, the first members of a species that had not existed before the three days and the blood in the heavenly sanctuary made it possible.
Then the fire. Divided tongues of flame, settling on each head, not on the building, not on an altar, not hovering above an ark between golden cherubim. On people. The same fire that had led Israel through the wilderness as a pillar, the same fire that had consumed Elijah’s altar on Carmel in front of the prophets of Baal, the same consuming presence that Moses had encountered in the burning bush and been told to remove his sandals before, that fire was now resting on human foreheads in an upper room and nobody was being consumed. The temple had moved. God had left the Holy of Holies in Jerusalem when the curtain tore on Good Friday. He had not been homeless since. He had been waiting for the sanctuary that the blood in the heavenly Holy of Holies was preparing, and on the morning of Pentecost that sanctuary was ready. One hundred and twenty human beings, recreated in their spirits, became the dwelling place of the living God.
They spoke in tongues they had not learned. The crowd outside, gathered from every nation, heard the works of God declared in their own languages. The reversal of Babel was beginning. What the pride of man had scattered, the love of God was gathering. A new language was being spoken in the new creation family, and it was a language that crossed every boundary the old order had erected, because it came from a different source than the old order had ever known.
A New Species
Satan had been in this fight for a long time. He had seen revivals. He had watched nations turn toward God and then drift back. He had seen prophets rise and kings repent and movements of the Spirit that stirred the people and then subsided. He knew how to wait. He knew how to outlast what looked like momentum. He had developed, over millennia, a working understanding of what human beings were capable of and what they were not. But what he saw in that upper room did not fit his categories.
These were not the same disciples who had scattered at Gethsemane. He knew those men. He had watched them argue about greatness at the Last Supper. He had watched Peter deny Jesus three times in the firelight of the high priest’s courtyard. He had watched all of them run. Fear was a language he spoke fluently, and he had spoken it to these men with considerable success not six weeks earlier. But the people standing in that upper room were not simply those people recovered. They were those people replaced. The nature of God had entered their spirits. Eternal life, the same life that had been generated in Jesus in the darkness of Hades, the life that had dismantled Satan’s authority from the inside, was now resident in them. The Spirit who had raised Jesus from the dead was not visiting. He had moved in permanently, making their bodies His temple, His ongoing address in the world.
Paul will name what they have become in 2 Corinthians 5:17 with a phrase that deserves more weight than it typically receives. Kaine ktisis or new creation. The word kaine does not mean new in the sense of recent, a fresh version of something familiar. It means new in kind, belonging to a different order of existence entirely. The first Adam had been formed from the dust. The last Adam had been raised from the dead. The people in that upper room had been born from the last Adam, and what they were now had no precise precedent in the history of the world. Not reformed. Not renewed. Recreated, at the level of the spirit, with the nature of God as their inheritance and the authority of the risen Christ as their operating ground.
Satan had moved against Jesus to annihilate the threat. Instead, the death and resurrection of Jesus had produced a family. And that family was multiplying. Every time he moved against one of them, the testimony of their endurance produced more. He had miscalculated at the cross, and in the upper room he was beginning to understand the full scope of what he had done to himself.
Jesus Men and Women
This is where this story has always been going. Not to a set of doctrines to be held correctly, not to a historical narrative to be admired from a distance, but to this: a declaration of what you are. Because the Logos became flesh and pitched His tent among us, and poured Himself out in Gethsemane’s consent and Calvary’s darkness, and descended into the place where no one could follow and came out holding the keys, and carried His own blood into the heavenly sanctuary and presented it before the throne of the universe, and breathed on one hundred and twenty people in a room in Jerusalem and set fire to every head in the room, the person united to Christ is not who they used to be. They are not a sinner managing their condition. They are not a forgiven person still fundamentally defined by what they were forgiven of. They are a new creation. They are, as Kenyon names it with the plain directness that two thousand years of theological complexity has made harder to say, Jesus men and women.
The Spirit who raised Jesus from the dead is resident in you. Not assisting you from a distance. Not available to you under certain conditions. It is resident. Making your body His temple, His dwelling place, the ongoing address of the living God in the world. The same eternal life that was generated in the darkness of Hades when the Father spoke over the firstborn from the dead is the life you carry. The same authority that Satan discovered in the upper room, when he saw his former slaves standing free and indwelt and multiplying faster than he could move against them, that authority was not given to the one hundred and twenty and then distributed in diminishing portions across the centuries. It belongs to everyone who has been born from above, including you, including now.
The arc that began in Bethlehem, in the dark, with the Logos pitching His tent in the form of a child that almost no one recognized, closes here: with the fire of Pentecost resting on the heads of the people who are now His body in the world. The tent has become a temple. The temple is you. What the Father dreamed of before creation, a family that carries His nature, a people who walk in the same authority the Son exercised in His earth walk, that dream is not deferred. It is not waiting for a future dispensation or a more spiritually advanced generation. It came into being in that upper room and it has been in being ever since, in every person who has received what the cross purchased and the resurrection ratified and Pentecost delivered.
You are not waiting to become something. You have already been made something. The fire has already fallen. The Spirit has already moved in. The mystery that was hidden from the ages has been made known through the Church, and you are the Church, and what Satan saw on the day of Pentecost when he looked into that upper room and realized what he had done to himself, he sees when he looks at you.
Live accordingly.
We pray:
Father, we have reached the end of an arc that began before creation and landed in an upper room in Jerusalem, and we are undone by the logic of it. That the Logos would take flesh and walk incognito through the world He made. That He would consent in a garden and be made sin on a cross and descend into the place where no one could follow. That He would carry His own blood into the heavenly sanctuary and seal an eternal redemption before Your throne. That He would breathe on a room full of frightened people and set fire to every head and make them into something that had never existed before.
We confess that we have not always lived from what that makes us. We have carried guilt that the blood has already answered. We have approached Your throne as though the curtain were still intact. We have lived as though the fire had not fallen, as though the Spirit were a distant resource rather than a resident Presence, as though we were still defined by what we were before You made us new.
Forgive us. And more than forgive us, open our eyes. Let us see what Satan saw in that upper room: a new species, indwelt and authorized and impossible to permanently defeat, because the life they carry has already been through death and come out the other side. Let us see that this is what we are.
The fire has fallen. The Spirit has moved in. The mystery hidden from the ages has been made known, and we are the making known of it. Let us live as though we believe this. Let us pray as though we believe this. Let us love the people in front of us as though we believe this, because the love that is being asked of us is not our own. It is the nature of the One who is resident in us, poured out through us, the same love that moved the Logos to take flesh, that held Him on the cross when He could have called ten thousand angels, that would not stay in the tomb. That love is in us now. Let it out. In the name of the Father who dreamed this, the Son who purchased it, and the Spirit who is making it real, in us, today.
Amen.