It is in Acts 1 that Jesus commissions His Church in the new covenant age. Most modern day Bible scholars tell us Jesus is commissioning His disciples but this also marks the beginning of the Church age. It is therefore, the commissioning of the Church. The commandment to wait for a baptism with the Holy Spirit is just as valid to each disciple of Christ today as it was to the eleven disciples who stood before Jesus that day. If Jesus is your Savior and Lord, if you are a disciple of Jesus, following His teachings, it is just as incumbent upon you to obey the commandments as it was for the disciples who were present at that time.
Let me say this again for emphasis. In Acts 1, Jesus is commissioning His Church. If you consider yourself a member of Christ’s Church, Jesus is speaking to you. Jesus did not have a private meeting with His disciples, then later have a public meeting with His Church. No, these eleven men were the Church of the Lord Jesus Christ at this time. There was nothing personal or exclusive to the eleven men who stood before Jesus. They were the men He had personally trained to go out training all who would become His disciples. Jesus had trained them in how to make disciples. If they failed to appreciate the call on their lives to carry out the new covenant, we do not have to make the same mistake.
We have the commission of the Church written out for us; we can see the words of Jesus and appreciate the call to wait for a baptism with the Holy Spirit, preach a gospel of waiting, and make sure every convert understands the importance of preaching a message of baptism with the Spirit. We don’t have to fail to make this message clear.
It is debatable whether those eleven men understood the call Jesus placed upon them that day. While it is clear there were eleven men present when Jesus commissioned His Church, it is also clear there were 120 souls present 10 days later. In that same day, 3,000 souls were added to that number and later, another 5,000 were added. Clearly, all of these souls did not get the discipling Jesus commanded.
The three thousand were Jews from all around the Nation of Israel; countries a great distance away. They had come up to Jerusalem to worship for Pentecost and would return home to their own lands. There were not three thousand disciples of Jesus who understood the commission of the Church who could travel back with these men to their own lands to disciple them.
However, let’s consider the simplicity of the new covenant for a moment. Jesus commanded His followers to wait for a baptism with the Holy Spirit, preach a baptism with the Holy Spirit, and teach new converts these two simple truths. How long would it take someone to disciple anyone in this teaching? If the three thousand simply went out preaching what they received of the Lord, they would be preaching the new covenant. Somehow, the message of baptism with the Holy Spirit got mixed with a message of repentance.
Jesus did not commission His church with a message of redemption from sin. That message is naturally conveyed with the message of baptism with the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is not going to indwell and flow out of an impure vessel. Therefore, those baptized with the Holy Spirit were obviously made pure by Jesus earlier. And 1Corinthians 5:17, 18, and 19 tells us Jesus did just that prior to commissioning His Church. Moreover, 1John 2:2 adds an amen to 1Corinthians 5, in that it tells us Jesus propitiated the sins of the entire world. God no longer imputes mankind’s sin to their accounts and has committed to us the message of reconciliation.
The preaching of the baptism with the Holy Spirit is the message of reconciliation. God was in Christ, reconciling the world to Himself, which means, Jesus has already dealt with mankind’s sin and all we have to preach is baptism with the Holy Spirit. The preaching of baptism was set aside however, to focus on a message of repentance from sin, even though God no longer imputes mankind’s sin to its accounts.
The problem is mankind’s conscious. Mankind’s conscious was designed to tell mankind when it was transgressing God’s law, but if God is no longer condemning us for transgressing His law, why should we condemn ourselves? You see, when Jesus fulfilled His Father’s law by living each statute fully, then dying as guilty of transgressing each statute, it fulfilled the old covenant law for all mankind; mankind is no longer held accountable for transgressions because Jesus fulfilled the law that defined transgressions.
This is not the message Christians are called to preach however. If the Holy Spirit is in you and flows out of you daily, isn’t it obvious God is not imputing sins to your account? It should be! Again, the Holy Spirit will not dwell in unholy flesh. If He flows out of your heart daily, you are not sinful flesh, which means, the Father is not imputing any transgressions against His law to your account. The message of baptism with the Holy Spirit is a greater message than a message of redemption from sin. A baptism with the Holy Spirit is an illustration of holiness.
Consider Hebrews 9:14: “How much more shall the blood of Christ, who through the eternal spirit offered Himself without spot to God, purge your conscious from dead works to serve the living God.” What are the dead works your conscious causes you to perform? How does the blood of the one who offered Himself without spot to God purge your conscious from dead works? It is a matter of faith. If you believe Jesus fulfilled the law in your stead, your conscious will not be able to dictate your behavior. The phrase, the living God, refers to the Jesus who died on the altar in heaven. If you believe in this Jesus, the one who commanded His Church to wait for a baptism with the Holy Spirit, there is one work you will strive to perform.
Each Christian who allows the Holy Spirit to flow out of their heart daily is reminded daily their sins are not being imputed to their account. Now remember, the word, baptize, means, to saturate. The baptism occurs as a gift of tongues pours over your lips. Saturation is a relative term. One can be fully saturated, as Stephen was. It is said He was full of the Holy Ghost, that is to say, fully saturated, meaning He had spoken with tongues till He was fully saturated of the Holy Spirit. One can also be mildly saturated or barely saturated. The goal is to maintain some level of saturation.
Jesus said, “If you keep my commandments you will abide in my love.” The word, keep, means to maintain a prescribed condition. The prescribed condition Jesus commanded is that of baptized, or saturated, with the Holy Spirit. It is only in keeping this commandment that mankind can abide in the love of Jesus.
This brings us to Acts 1:7, “It is not for you to know the times and seasons that God, the Father, has placed in His own power.” The disciples commissioned at the beginning of the Church age were not given the information we are given today. They were given the responsibility of preaching the message of the baptism with the Holy Spirit. The problem is: the second generation did not preach this message; it preached a message of reconciliation that depended on repentance. The second generation preached redemption from sin, something that in God’s eyes had been accomplished, a done deal, for God was in Christ, reconciling the world to Himself, not imputing men’s sins against them, 2Corinthians 5:19. Jesus had died some 60 years prior.
Again, the Old Testament reveals “The secret things belong to our God, but those things revealed belong to us and our children for all generations.” There are things that were revealed, such as the fact that God was no longer imputing mankind’s sin to their accounts. This secret was revealed on that first day of Pentecost, when the Holy Spirit flowed out of the belly of 120 souls; then flowed out of another 3,000. This event was supposed to illustrate a glaringly obvious truth.
The gift of the Holy Spirit is not the indwelling presence; the gift of the Holy Spirit is the ability to speak with tongues. The second baptism the three thousand received that day, (see Acts 2:41) was a baptism with the Holy Spirit. That is the apostle’s doctrine; it is the message Jesus commissioned the church with. We all should continue daily in the apostle’s doctrine, to wit, that we wait daily for a full saturation of the Holy Spirit and preach this message.
We live in a different season than those first apostles. Jesus told us there will not be one secret that will not be revealed before the end. We live in the season of the revealing of secrets and one secret is that it is the time of the end. A second secret is that the Father knew Christians would stumble over any commandment Jesus would issue and He knew Jesus would need an army of souls at the end to overcome the armies of the evil one, so the Father gave a gift of the Holy Spirit to all mankind and Jesus commanded His followers to receive it and go out preaching a message of receiving it.
The whole of Christianity stumbled over the commission but this was a secret at the time and Jesus did not reveal it to the disciples. He said, “It is not for you to know the times and seasons, which the Father has put in His own power.” History has revealed it. Today, we can look back and see that Jesus commissioned His Church, which was nonexistent in Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. These books record Jesus’ fulfillment of the old covenant law. Jesus’ Church only came into existence in Acts 1 (Matthew 28), with a commandment to preach a baptism with the Holy Spirit. We can see that the only message Jesus gave the Church is a message to wait for saturation.
We can also see though, that Peter’s first message to new believers included a message to repent of sin, sin already dealt with by Jesus. It is not till later in the New Testament that we learn Jesus carried all mankind’s sin in His own body, redeemed mankind of the old covenant law, where there is no law there can be no transgression of it, Jesus propitiated the sins of the entire world, etc, etc. The message of redemption was never meant to be part of the apostle’s doctrine; the message of redemption was conveyed by the act of the Holy Spirit pouring out of the mouth of believers. It was, and is, proof of a dramatic spectacular remarkable extravagant amazing lavish and incredible unseen redemption.
The commandment is to wait for a baptism with the Holy Spirit; the good news is Jesus has washed mankind of its sin. The good news is not that you can be saved of your sins; the good news is that you are! Now of course, there is a new set of commandments. So, even though all mankind is delivered from the old covenant law, and can no longer sin against it, “whom the Son sets free is free indeed!,” mankind can spoil the white robe of righteousness Jesus gives them.
This is the reason Revelation7:14 states: “These are they which came out of great tribulation, and have washed their robes, and made them white in the blood of the Lamb.” The robes these people wore is the robe of righteousness provided by Jesus’ death on the cross. So why would these robes need to be washed in the blood of the Lamb? We now understand that Jesus died twice. He died to deliver mankind from the curse of the old covenant law, which was on the cross, but then He ascended into heaven to present Himself spotless before the Father, who sacrificed Jesus on the heavenly altar, and raised Him from the dead. It was this Jesus, the Lord of Lords and King of Kings, the Lamb of God, which issued the commandments of Acts 1.
To disobey these commandments is sin but not sin your conscious will convict you of committing. These commandments stand alone. Your heart will not convict you of disobedience; the Holy Spirit will not convict you of wrong doing, or say anything at all. The commandment, issued with all authority in heaven and earth, issued by the one exalted above all principality and power, at whose name every knee shall bow, stands on its own. Mankind either bows its knee to the Lord and obeys, or, soils the white robe Jesus gave.
Obviously, there was a secret here; a secret the disciples did not see until later in life. Peter begins the new covenant age, saying, “Repent and be baptized for your sins,” but by the end of his life, Peter, Paul, and John had all realized Jesus dealt with sin against the law on the cross; it was an accomplished fact, it was only sin against the Lord that mattered. Still, their message was a bit muddied.
Or, perhaps it was the translators who muddied the message and overlapped the message of the Christ, that your sins were washed away through Jesus’ death on the cross, which is untrue, with a commandment to wait for a baptism with the Holy Spirit. It is clear though, this is the reason Jesus commanded this gospel be preached in its simplicity. In commissioning the Church, after fulfilling the law, the only thing Jesus said, was, wait for a baptism with the Holy Spirit, preach this gospel, the gospel of the baptism with the Holy Spirit, and disciple converts in this gospel. This gospel has been hidden for nearly two thousand years. It is only now being revealed.
Consider for a moment the events of Cornelius’ house, found in Acts 10. First, Peter receives a vision of all kinds of animals which were prescribed unclean for the Jews to eat and is told to rise and kill them and eat. Peter, who in his mind is still a Jew and therefore subject to old covenant law, says, I will not, nothing unclean has ever touched these lips. This happens three times. Do you think Jesus is trying to tell Peter something? Peter did not realize Jesus had fulfilled the old covenant law for him and in his stead. Peter did not realize Jesus had redeemed him from the law and provided him with a robe of righteousness that could not be soiled by disobedience of the laws commandments. Peter was preaching a gospel of repentance from sin that no longer existed; was no longer being imputed against man. Where there is no law, there can be no sin against it, according to Romans 4:15. And 1John 3:4 also tells us “sin is the transgression of the law.” Jesus told us He came to fulfill the law, and a fulfilled law no longer has any authority. Hebrews 8:14 tells us, “In that he says a new covenant, he has made the first one old. That which is old decays and waxes old and is ready to vanish away.”
Before Peter could say: “Repent therefore of your sins and receive the gift of the Holy Spirit,” Cornelius’ household, the whole lot of them, was speaking in tongues. This experience was supposed to reaffirm the gospel of Jesus to Peter. Peter was supposed to understand that Jesus had cleansed mankind of its sin against the old covenant law by fulfilling the law and the only message to preach was the message of the baptism with the Holy Spirit.
We see Peter, however, scrambling to baptize these people in water for the forgiveness of sins, after the Holy Spirit has flowed out of their hearts. The Holy Spirit had just illustrated that God was not imputing sins against the law to their account. The Holy Spirit has just illustrated these people are holy in God’s sight. Peter didn’t like this illustration. In Peter’s mind, this illustration set a dangerous precedent. It had to be changed as quickly as possible. Peter took these people out to baptize them in water for the forgiveness of sins.
In actuality, it is Peter’s behavior and thinking that set a dangerous precedent. By the vision Peter had, confirmed three times, and the events that followed, Jesus preached a powerful, commanding, and authoritative message, one that said the only message that should be preached is that of baptism with the Holy Spirit; it is the only pertinent message, the only message that counts. Peter was working against Jesus; he illustrated what it means to be anti Christ.
The new covenant is founded on the dissolution of the old covenant; the righteousness it prescribed is assigned to the whole human race as a free unmerited gift. That truth is so momentous, so incredible, so fantastic, and so extraordinary; it overshadows the message of the new covenant. People feel compelled to preach that message, or some variant of it, and it is such an overwhelming message, it pushes the truth of the new covenant off the stage, out of the picture, and out of the limelight. The truth is, however, that is not the message Jesus calls mankind to preach.
Peter was wrong to baptize Cornelius’ household in water; it set a dangerous precedent for the Church, one the Church still has not seen or understood. There is a secret in the story of Cornelius’ household. It tells us the truth that Jesus has already made all mankind holy in God’s sight. The truth that the Holy Spirit already indwells all mankind and is just waiting to flow out is an unknown truth. The only truth that is in actuality pertinent is that we must keep Jesus’ commandments. That truth remains hidden. It is that secret thing foretold by the prophets and revealed by Jesus that will be revealed again in these last days.
Let me remind you of Deuteronomy 29:29: “The secret things belong to our God,” and Acts 1:7: “it is not for you to know the times and seasons the Father has put in His own power,” and Matthew 8:17: “Every secret will be revealed before the end,” and Revelation 10:7: “In the days of the voice of the seventh angel, when he shall begin to sound, the mystery of God should be finished, as He has declared to His servants the prophets.” There are secrets of God, secrets foretold by the prophets, secrets even the angels of God long to look into, published secrets that have been illustrated over and over again but will not be known until God reveals them. One of these secrets is the new covenant. God holds all Christianity in reserve till that great day when Jesus will call them forth and send them out preaching a gospel unheard of before. All Christianity will look on and wonder. Even the angels of God will wonder, because this truth, though revealed numerous times and in various ways, has been secret.