Week 43 Acts 2
I don’t get far into Acts before all of a sudden the Holy Spirit came to the believers in a super-charged audio & visual spectacle. The commotion drew a crowd of outsiders and what they saw & heard was sound coming out of the believer’s mouths. But at that point opinion in the crowd divided into two camps.
People in the Reaction #1 Camp were beside themselves with wonder. They were amazed and perplexed. They could hear their own native languages. At least 15 languages are mentioned so even if there was only one representative from each language group then at least 15 individuals were amazed and perplexed. The reason was that a) they heard the disciples talking in foreign languages (foreign to the disciples) and b) the content was understandable & coherent to the crowd (it was about the wonderful things God has done).
People in Reaction #2 Camp just mocked: they’re drunk, that’s all! There’s no telling how many people there were in the second group. But a bunch of unilingual Galileans talking other languages didn’t cut any ice with them. What they were hearing was just incoherent addiction-driven gibberish.
So there it was: One message. Two Reactions. Which was right? Was it extraordinary communication or lunatical absurdity?
One other difference between the groups is that the Reaction #1 Camp wanted to know more: what can this mean? Reaction #2 Camp weren’t too concerned about exploring meaning. They’d solved the puzzle so no further explanation was necessary.
Note: quotes from Acts 2:7 12 13 11 (NLT)