Acts 4:23-31

SECOND PENTECOST

23-31. During the imprisonment and trial of Peter and John the one hundred and eighteen, with quite a host of the Pentecostal converts, are pushing the battle for God and souls on the great temple campus on Mt. Moriah in the east end of the city, the judgment hall, where Peter and John and Jesus were tried, being on Mt. Zion, in the west end. When constrained by popular sentiment to release Peter and John they reluctantly discharged them through fear of an insurrection. Then the apostles go immediately to the great meetings on the temple campus and report the persecutions of the preachers and official board and the intervention of the Almighty through the people for their acquittal. Now they quote the prophecy in Psalms 2, which had actually been fulfilled in the crucifixion of Jesus, and is still being verified in the rage of the clergy and official board against the apostles. They allude to the union of Pilate and Herod in the crucifixion of Christ, despite their former and long-standing animosities either to other. How signally is the same prophecy fulfilled to-day in the reconciliation and co-operation of the hitherto warring sects, forgetting all their bitter hatred either to other, and uniting against the holiness movement! Amid the implacable animosities of church and state combined against the poor Nazarenes and determined to exterminate them and even obliterate the very memory of their leader from the memory of the world, there is much fear on the unsanctified young converts. Hence they need another Pentecost to bring down the baptism of the Holy Ghost and fire, consuming all their cowardice and filling them with the perfect love, casting out fear. Therefore they all fall on their knees, unite their hearts and cry to God for the sanctifying power. Behold! the place is shaken and another Pentecost comes down from heaven, gloriously filling and flooding them, sanctifying all the fear out of the young converts and weak believers, so that “they were all filled with the Holy Ghost and continued to speak the word of God with boldness.” This glorious second Pentecost gave a wonderful new impetus to the revival Niagara already shaking the metropolis with a spiritual earthquake. This second Pentecost gloriously sanctifies the converts of the first, raising up hundreds of new preachers to herald the living Word, thus broadening the revival into paradoxical dimensions, till it rolls its mighty inundating wave out from Jerusalem into all of the surrounding country, not only inundating all Palestine, but sweeping over Samaria like an avalanche and rolling out its irresistible tide into heathen Syria.