What Are You Reading? – God of Restoration

well hello ladies and happy Monday morning and welcome to our what are you reading and if you've been in any of these or listen to any of these videos recently you know that I have been hooked on the book of Acts mainly because I am working through a study that I'll be teaching this fall called gospel on the ground and so that's doing some preparation ahead of time and I might be giving away a few spoilers, but super excited to just share a few insights. There's so much depth in this study, but I want to share a few things that I learned today that I thought was really awesome. If you know me, you know that I absolutely love looking at the New Testament and the Old Testament. And I remember growing up and, you know, you kind of viewed them completely separate, but when you start to read them, you realize that one goes on top of the other and how neat our God is. And so I just learned something neat today, and I wanted to share it with you. So there were some things that I knew, and then there was one particular point, which is sort of the end of this video, that was something I'd never noticed before. So I'm in Acts chapter 2, and in Acts chapter 2, we meet up with the disciples, and they are celebrating Pentecost. And Pentecost is one of the feasts, and this one can also be called the Feast of Weeks or Shavuot if you're using the Hebrew word and or Shavuot I may be saying it wrong um and this is one of the they call them the foot festivals because it's one of the times that you were to make a pilgrimage if you were able to there were three times a year you have Passover you have the Feast of Weeks and then you have the Festival of Tabernacles which the Festival of Tabernacles is in the fall but these other two are in the spring and so um within this so the, the Pentecost is 50 days as Penta is 50 days. So 50 days after Passover, we meet the disciples and, um, they are there in the temple and there's a violent wind. So Christy McLellan, who wrote this study, she, she makes the case for, it says that they were in the whole house. And she believes that that means that they were in the temple because it was so many people and you wouldn't go and celebrate this festival. Um, just at somebody's house, you would go to the temple and there's she also points there's some particular times right um that is said because peter later addresses if you're familiar with this story what happens is the spirit of god descends this is when the holy spirit comes upon them and the tongues of fire and i'm going to read that scripture here in a moment but then later down because people start to say they must be drunk because they're speaking in tongues and all these different languages and peter says it's only nine in the morning well nine in the morning is very important and you maybe know about that so There are two sacrifices that were made in the Old Testament and were continued on forever. Two sacrifices, there were two lamb sacrifices that were made every single day. One at 9 a.m. and one at 3 p.m. And what I want to point out today, the main theme, is that God is a God of restoration. And his picture, his big picture and overarching picture of restoration is bigger than we can think. I don't know what you're walking through right now, but God has a purpose and a plan for it. And that restoration is at the end of it, no matter what, that there is the God is a God of restoration. That's what he does. He's in the business of it. And so we see that with Jesus being on the cross. He was put on the cross at 9 a.m. He died at 3 p.m. Both times the lambs were to be sacrificed. But then we also see it in this other area. And so I want to read just a little bit of this portion of scripture and then I'm going to kind of describe what I learned today that was really, really neat. So it says, when the day of Pentecost came, this is in Acts 2 verse 1, they were all together in one place. Suddenly a sound like a blowing of a violent wind came from heaven and filled the whole house where they were sitting. They saw what seemed to be tongues of fire that separated and came to rest on each of them. All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues as the Spirit enabled them. And so here we go back to this New Testament and Old Testament coming together. What is happening at this time, the Jewish people are people that remember. And so the portions of scripture, I did not know this, that they would have been reading at this point in time is Exodus 19 and 20. And that is when the Torah is given to the Israelites. And think about the wind, the fire, God descending on Mount Sinai and his spirit descending on the mountain. And here we have the spirit and tongues of fire coming down and spreading among the disciples, right? But there is something else that's interesting here that she pointed out. We also have, a little bit further down, they start to speak in different languages, right? They all start to speak in the native tongues of all these people that have gathered. And she said, if you look back even further to the Tower of Babel, God took the pride of man and separated them. He dispersed them so that they all spoke different languages and they couldn't understand one another. And then here we have God of restoration restoring people. He brought them all together. So he brought them back from the ends of the earth together and gave them different languages to say, but one unified message of Jesus being the sacrificial lamb of Jesus is the gospel, right? And so that's a neat God of restoration. But now I'm going to share with you something that I just was blown away by. So if they are reading Exodus 19 and 20, so just imagine you're in the temple, you're hearing Exodus 19 and 20 being read, remembering God descending on Mount Sinai, and then the aftermath of what happens. Because what's happening while Moses is on the mountain, the golden calf, right? And so after the golden calf, what happens when Moses comes down? 3,000 people die who had sinned, all of that. Well, how is that God of restoration? Well, if we read in Acts, and this is what just made me so excited, and I wanted to share it with you. If you read in Acts, we go a little bit further. This is the Holy Spirit has descended. Peter gets up and addresses the crowd. He says it's 9 a.m. in the morning. Again, that 9 a.m., so very important, right? And he presents the gospel. He tells them all about Jesus. He says who Jesus is. He makes the case, talking about David, saying, the Lord said to my Lord. And then I want us to hone in on verse 40. So this is Acts 2, verse 40 and 41. With many other words, he, that's Peter, warned them, and he pleaded with them, Save yourselves from this corrupt generation. Those who accepted his message, the message of Jesus, were baptized, and about 3,000 were added to their number that day. God of restoration. So I was just blown away by that. In Exodus, we have these people in Acts reading the story of Exodus and what happened in the fallout of that sin, and 3,000 people being killed in their sin. And then we have the God of restoration in Acts. Not only did he bring all the people together under one unified message with different languages. He was able to use his spirit to speak different languages so that they could hear the gospel in their own language. So restoring the Tower of Babel, not the actual tower, but the problem of people dispersing because they couldn't understand one another. So now he's restored the language. And not only has he restored that with one unified message, he also, there were 3,000 were added to the church that day. So 3,000 lives saved. And I just thought that was the coolest thing, and I just had to share it with you. And so I hope that something you can go and do today is, one, maybe set an alarm for 9 a.m. and 3 p.m. and just remember Jesus' sacrifice and that God is God of restoration at 9 a.m., 3 p.m. He is all the time. But at those two times, you could also go and read Acts 2 on your own and just really put yourself in their place. And then you could also go back and read Exodus just to see how they correlate with one another. So I hope that that was kind of a neat little insight for you and just to remember that God is a God of restoration. So I hope you guys have a wonderful Monday and I will hopefully see you next week.

Originally published at warren.church.