Wind, Fire, And Word

Introduction — The Music of Words

Language. That simple word carries a universe inside it. Gustave Flaubert once wrote that language is “a cracked pot on which we beat out a tune for bears to dance, while we long to make music that will melt the stars.”

What a contradiction—clumsy and celestial at the same time. He called it cracked, yet he made it magnificent.

We live, move, think, and even dream inside words. They shape our prayers, our humor, our memories, and our worship. Culture itself is woven from language—our stories, our recipes, our songs, our faith. More than our clothes or customs, it is our speech that identifies who we are. Strip a people of their language and you strip them of their soul.

Every human being is born wired for it. Before we know arithmetic or geography, before we learn to walk, we learn to speak. The first cry in a newborn’s lungs is the beginning of a lifetime dialogue with heaven and earth.

God made us this way because He Himself is a communicator. “And God said, Let there be light.” The universe began not with thunder but with a Word. So it should not surprise us that when God wanted to form a people, He gave them a vocabulary of covenant—law and promise, prayer and praise. When He wanted to redeem the world, He sent the Word made flesh.

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Pentecost — When Heaven Spoke Every Language

Acts 2 records one of the most startling moments in human history. Jerusalem was filled with pilgrims celebrating the Feast of Weeks. The city hummed with prayer and conversation in a dozen dialects. Suddenly, Luke says, “there came a sound from heaven as of a rushing mighty wind, and it filled all the house.” Fire appeared—flames dividing and resting upon each believer—and then came something even more astonishing: speech.

Those ordinary Galileans began to speak in languages they had never studied, and every listener heard “the wonderful works of God” in his or her own tongue. Parthians and Medes, Egyptians and Romans, Asians and Arabs—all heard heaven addressing them personally. The crowd gasped: “What meaneth this?”

It meant that God’s grace had just broken the sound barrier. It meant that divine love would no longer be translated through a single culture or confined to one sacred tongue. Hebrew had carried the story so far, but the Spirit now burst the seams. The same God who once scattered languages at Babel now used language to gather hearts at Pentecost.

Wind, fire, and word—three symbols of one reality: the living Spirit of God filling His people. And the miracle was not that people spoke; it was that everyone understood. Pentecost was not the birth of noise; it was the birth of meaning.

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The Promise Fulfilled

When the crowd accused the disciples of drunken babble, Peter stood up—steady, clear-eyed, and full of Scripture. He said, “This is that which was spoken by the prophet Joel.” Then he quoted the ancient words:

> “And it shall come to pass in the last days, saith God,

I will pour out of My Spirit upon all flesh:

and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy,

and your young men shall see visions,

and your old men shall dream dreams…

and it shall come to pass, that whosoever shall call on the name of the Lord shall be saved.”

The key phrase is all flesh. Not only Israel, not only men, not only the educated or the pure, but all flesh—sons and daughters, servants and strangers, every tribe and tongue. Joel’s prophecy was a crack of lightning across the narrow sky of nationalism, and now the storm had broken.

Peter’s sermon that day was the first to proclaim a gospel big enough for the world. And when he reached his conclusion—“Repent, and be baptized every one of you”—three thousand souls stepped forward into the flood of grace.

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Beyond Monopolies of Grace

What happens whenever the Spirit moves is that people who think they have a monopoly on God are gently—or sometimes not so gently—disabused of that illusion. Pentecost was God’s way of saying, “You don’t own Me.”

God will not be confined to the walls of a denomination or the lines of a creed. Lutherans do not own Him. Methodists do not own Him. Pentecostals do not own Him. Adventists, for all our Sabbath light and prophetic insight, do not own Him. He moves where He wills. The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh or whither it goeth.

That is both humbling and liberating. It means that the Spirit can work in a Buddhist heart seeking truth, in a Catholic nun serving the poor, in a Baptist choir lifting praise, in a Muslim scholar wrestling with the name of God, and yes—in an Adventist classroom where a child first hears Jesus loves me. We do not have to defend the boundaries of grace; we are invited to live inside its vastness.