Godbey's Commentary - Acts - Romans - Enter His Rest

on the floor. But they are done praying. They have prayed up to the highlands, where heavenly
visions, in seraphic splendor, roll in floods of unearthly glory, inundating that memorable missionroom
with an electrical panorama of the long-anticipated descending Comforter. Hark! the roar of
a cyclone fills the firmament. Behold! forked-tongues of flaming fire sit on every brow and flood the
room with an unearthly illumination. That mission-room can no longer hold the fire-baptized one
hundred and twenty. What a stampede down stairs! all mouths wide open, stentorian voices roaring
like lions, arouse the city, and one hundred thousand people rush from all directions to see what is
the matter. I visited a great convocation of scholarly clergymen and high-steeple officials with long
plug hats, sleek coats, tooth-pick shoes and golden-headed canes, with long faces and lugubrious
countenances and deep sighs, consulting either with other, “How to reach the masses.” Here the
problem is solved once for all. Get the baptism of the Holy Ghost and fire and they will reach you.
You need no advertisement but the stentorian shout of new-born souls and Spirit-filled pilgrims.
Peter’s seniority is recognized in his leadership, complimented with the first gospel sermon on that
wonderful occasion. O, that sermon! of which Luke gives us but a brief epitome. It was a clap of
thunder from beginning to end, sheet-lightning flooded with dynamite. Modesty and cowardice have
been burnt up with the fire of the Holy Ghost. So the illiterate fisherman faces kings and potentates,
the combined authorities of church and state, panoplied by all the persecutionary power of earth and
hell, and without a flicker looks them squarely in the face and arraigns them at the judgment bar of
God Almighty, charged with the murder of His Son, the Savior of the world. The countless multitude
stands appalled, as if the archangel of doom had come down and was blowing his mighty trumpet,
waking the dead and gathering the world to the judgment-bar. Amid the forked lightnings of this first
gospel sermon, preached without preparation, grammar or logic, thousands fall prostrate, as if a
battery of a hundred cannons had been simultaneously turned on them. They make Jerusalem roar
and reverberate, “What must we do?” Now that the lightning of conviction has sent panic to listening
myriads, immediately the hundred and twenty-five baptized men and women disperse in all
directions, preaching with the Holy Ghost sent down from heaven. Do you see Mary Magdalene
mounted on David’s tomb preaching to the thunder-riven multitude falling round her and crying for
mercy? Look at Thomas the doubter, his doubts all burned up with Holy Ghost fire, standing on the
wall of Jerusalem, with a voice like a lion, preaching to the appalled multitude! O, that wonderful
day! never to be forgotten, memorialized by the incarnation of the Holy Ghost. The world had never
seen such a day since from Sinai’s melting summit, amid lightning bolts, deafening thunder and
heaving earthquakes, Jehovah God came down and launched the Mosaic dispensation. Again He is
come in the culminating miracles of fiery Pentecost to inaugurate the last dispensation, destined to
prepare the world for the glorious theocracy, never to go into eclipse.
TONGUES OF FIRE.
3. The tongue symbolizes the gospel whose dispensation is here and now inaugurated. God has
never given but one definition of His minister, — “a flame of fire” (Hebrews 1:7). Satan is the great
counterfeiter. He counterfeits everything that God does, in that way fooling the people till he can
dump them into hell. The world is to-day chock full of the devil’s religion, in which he deceives
people by millions, Pagans, Moslems, Papists and Protestants, making them believe he is God.
Despite all the chicanery of hell, honest Bible readers, illuminated by the Holy Ghost, have no
trouble to detect the devil’s counterfeit. The way to heaven is so plain “that wayfaring men, though
fools, shall not err therein” (Isaiah 35). God’s gospel is all fire. We need two tongues to preach it,