What would you have thought if you had come all the way from Libya to Jerusalem for a Jewish harvest celebration and heard a new message in your own language from people who didn’t know that language? And you weren’t alone. The person from what’s now Turkey heard the message in his own language. And visitors from Rome heard it in theirs.
That’s what happened a scant fifty days after Christ Jesus’ resurrection and less than two weeks after his ascension. What took place was extraordinary. On what Christians know as the Day of Pentecost, a mighty sound of wind was followed by “tongues like as of fire” resting on the Christian apostles, “and they were all filled with the Holy Ghost” when they spoke to the surrounding crowd (see Acts, chap. 2). They spoke in different languages, and the listeners received a message of hope and salvation—each in his own language.
What those listeners heard that day, many for the first time, was that Christ Jesus overcame death and then ascended. In the days and years that followed, as the Christian teaching spread far and wide, many would go on to discover that Jesus’ message of Christ, or Truth, which he so fully lived, really was available for everyone, everywhere, to understand and practice, reforming and healing lives.
