In Acts 2:17 we see the fulfilment of God’s promise to ‘pour out of My Spirit on all flesh’. This really struck me recently when I was reading it in my quiet time. I always hear this quoted as ‘I will pour out my Spirit on all flesh’, and that is what He did. Still, when I read that He will pour out OF His Spirit’ it gave me a clearer picture of what happened at Pentecost.
God promised in Joel 2:28 that there was going to come a day where He would pour out the Spirit of God on all flesh. This was fulfilled in Acts 2, and when Peter is quoting Joel in Acts 2, he is trying to help the people understand what they were witnessing that day in Jerusalem.
They were seeing God pour Himself out into the world and into humanity. He indeed poured out His Spirit, but to add even more clarity, He poured out of His Spirit, in other words, He poured Himself out into humanity.
This is the actual meaning of a torn temple curtain. The day of Pentecost is the fulfilment of what it meant to no longer have a barrier between the areas that people could go regularly and the place that God dwelled.
A torn curtain doesn’t mean more people could access God, it means all of God could now access all of us. God was longing to dwell with us and be in our presence. He wants to be with us in every moment of our lives, and He desires for us to abide with Him in the same way that Jesus does. The intimacy that exists between the Father and the Son is what we have been invited into through the gift of Holy Spirit; the poured out Spirit of God.
In John 17:22 Jesus prays ‘the glory which You gave Me I have given them, that they may be one just as We are one.’ This prayer was answered at Pentecost. God was no longer isolated to the Temple, He was able to invade and saturate the life of every believer with His Glory.
That's why I say that the overflow of God into humanity is the goal, not merely more people visiting God. His desire is having all of Him in all of us, not just more people seeing Him from time to time.
Likewise, this is not meant to stay isolated to the Church, but it is to overflow from the Church into the world, into all humanity and expanding into the heavens. In other words, God’s grand plan is for Heaven to invade the earth and one of the primary vehicles He uses for that is the Church.
On the day of Pentecost, God poured out OF His Spirit into all flesh, and I want more of the pour.
