Acts 2:5 - Meaning and Application

We have here the public notice people took of this remarkable gift that the disciples suddenly received. First, there was a great crowd in Jerusalem, more than usual for the feast of Pentecost. Among them were devout Jews, people with a real fear of God before their eyes, and some were proselytes, Gentiles who had joined the Jewish faith.

Some of these proselytes were full members of the Jewish church, having been circumcised. Others were proselytes of the gate, people who turned from idolatry and worshiped the true God, but did not take on the ceremonial law. They had come from many lands, from nearly every part of the known world, so Jerusalem was filled with visitors from far and wide.

We are told where some of them came from, including Parthia, Media, Elam, and Mesopotamia, the eastern lands. Then came Judea, though the people there spoke with a different local accent before. After that were Cappadocia, Pontus, and the province called Asia, along with Phrygia and Pamphylia, regions farther west.

There were also visitors from Egypt, from the parts of Libya near Cyrene, from Crete, and from Arabia. Some were Jews by birth, scattered among those nations. Others were native people of those lands who had become converts to the Jewish religion. As one writer notes, Jews lived spread through the whole earth, and there was hardly a nation where some of them could not be found.

What brought so many of them to Jerusalem at that time was not just a short visit for the feast. The verse says they were dwelling there. A general expectation had spread that the Messiah was about to appear, because Daniel’s weeks had just ended, the rule had passed from Judah, and many thought God’s kingdom would soon break out (Luke 19:11).

This brought the most earnest and devout people to Jerusalem, so they might be there early for the Messiah’s kingdom and its blessings. Then came the amazement these strangers felt when they heard the disciples speaking in their own languages. The report seems to have spread before they all came together, and that report drew the crowd, especially people from different countries.

They noticed that the speakers were all Galileans, people thought of as ordinary and uneducated, from whom no polished speech was expected. God often chooses weak and foolish things to put wise and powerful people to shame. Christ himself was thought to be a Galilean, and his disciples were indeed Galileans, unlearned men.

Yet these men spoke clearly and fluently in the hearers’ native languages. Each person heard the apostles speaking in the language he had been born with (Acts 2:8). The Parthians heard their language, the Medes heard theirs, and so on for the rest. They said, “We hear them speaking in our own tongues the wonderful works of God” (Acts 2:11).

These were the great things of God, the great acts of his grace and power. The apostles were likely speaking about Christ, redemption through him, and the blessings of the gospel. They were praising God for these great things and teaching the people about them in the listeners’ own languages. That made the message easier to understand and showed special kindness to these visitors.

It also pointed ahead to the wider spread of God’s truth among the nations. The sacred records of God’s wonderful works were not meant to stay in one tongue alone. Scripture should be read, and public worship should be carried out, in the common languages of the nations. This was a sign for unbelievers, as tongues are meant to be (1 Corinthians 14:22).

The people were amazed, and the wording shows they were deeply stirred and confused. They did not know what to make of it, and they asked one another what it could mean. They wondered whether this might be the beginning of the Messiah’s kingdom. It was such a striking sight that, like Moses at the burning bush, they wanted to turn aside and see what this great thing meant.

Some who were native to Judea and Jerusalem mocked what happened, likely the scribes, Pharisees, and chief priests, who often resisted the Holy Spirit. They said, “These men are full of new wine,” meaning they thought the apostles had drunk too much at the festival time (Acts 2:13). They were not so foolish as to think wine could give a person the power to speak languages he had never learned.

Rather, these native Jews did not understand, as the others did, that the apostles were speaking real languages from other nations. So they treated the speech as noise and nonsense, the kind of talk drunk people, those fools in Israel, sometimes make. When they had already decided not to believe the Spirit’s work in Christ’s miracles, they explained it away by saying, “He casts out demons by a pact with the prince of demons.” In the same way, when they refused to believe the Spirit’s voice in the apostles’ preaching, they brushed it off by saying, “These men are full of new wine.” If they called the Master of the house a wine-drinker, it is no surprise that they would say the same about those in his household.