An Exhortation on the Day of Pentecost

When the apostle Peter, girded with power from on high, spoke to the assembled crowd, he said at the end of his sermon, “Save yourselves from this untoward generation.”

It is an incomprehensible miracle that it was precisely Peter who was given to utter this grave warning on the Day of Pentecost, the day of the outpouring of the Holy Spirit. He who was so afraid that he would deny knowing the Lord; he now was as brave as a young lion and could, driven by God’s Spirit, give a testimony that has been food for thought for lost souls throughout the ages and has been preaching matters for God’s servants until the present time.

Between the lines we may note that we need not speak of God’s servant in pride and disdain. After all, everyone who has been truly set straight by the Lord will not speak contemptuously about Peter’s denial of his Lord and Saviour but will have to ask himself with shame: how many times have I denied the Lord—denied the Lord in my family; denied the Lord in the midst of my friends; denied the Lord at my work; and denied the Lord in my official work? The most advanced of the Lord’s children will, by heavenly light, be most ashamed of themselves. How many times has one spoken where he should have kept silence, and how many times has one been silent where he should have spoken.

One thing is certain: Peter did not make it right with the Lord, but the Lord made it right with Peter, both personally and officially. Now on the Day of Pentecost, as the spokesman for all the others, he spoke boldly concerning Him whom he had denied so terribly, but for which he had become deeply guilty. God Himself restored him into his office, and now girded with power from on high, he summarized his speech in the above appeal, “Save yourselves from this untoward generation.”

Reader, may we come to know, by the discovering operation of the Holy Spirit, that we, too, belong to that untoward generation. May we:

• Become untoward in our deep covenant-breaking in Adam and having slid back from our Creator and Maker with a perpetual backsliding.

• Become untoward with body and soul and refusing to bow under God. No need from ourselves to fall before the High God.

• Become untoward in our ways. Does not the Lord say to us, “Their deeds were evil”?

• Become untoward with our mouth, untoward in all things temporal and eternal.

Thus, with us, no turning back anymore!

On the contrary, with man there is a hardening against better knowledge, and he goes on and on in the paths of destruction without taking into account that eternity is at hand, but now the apostle said, “Save yourselves from this untoward generation.” Does that mean separate yourselves from it and become a better generation?

No, that is not what this zealous servant of the Lord said because he knew that he himself also had belonged to that untoward generation. It was grace alone that he was translated from the state of death to the state of life. When he said here, “Save yourselves,” then you must read this in the context of the entire sermon that Peter was given to preach there and on that day. He set before them their great sins, which were especially manifested in their wicked operations against the Saviour of lost sinners. Oh no, they were not lost in their own eyes. They were blind to the miserable state in which they were, just as today man is blind in the ways of heaven.

Look now, Peter could also point out that there was still a possibility from God’s side for evil persons to be saved. However grievously they had sinned, however much they had forfeited it, the Lord still let Peter announce that there was a way of escape. Hence, he concluded with this earnest exhortation. He exhorted them says the Word of the Lord. Oh, what a precious and loving exhortation that was. The love of Christ constrained him to show them through whose labour alone they could be delivered from the wrath to come. However. then it also had to manifest itself in them by their turning away from the path of sin, confessing and bewailing their great guilt before the Lord with heartfelt sorrow. The fruits have, therefore, become richly manifest. In those days thousands were saved from the untoward generation to which they belonged by and of themselves.

Now, look at our lives. We live in a time when untowardness is abundantly revealed. My dear reader, is there still a plea to heaven to save ourselves from the untoward generation and to end up as a poor beggar at the Lord’s feet? Or do we feel quite at home in the untoward generation? Can we go farther and farther along the path of sin? Do we also seek more and more the things below? Then know that all this will perish, and so will we if we do not come to true repentance and there does not come a breaking with the world and sin.

Do you know what is needed for that? That God’s dear Spirit begins to work in the heart. Not because we are so willing because that is not how it is but because the Lord, even in the end of time, will still add to the Church such that shall be saved. Are you going through life as a miserable one, as one having no hope? Do you feel that you are so tied to the untoward generation? Then know that there is One in heaven who can still help you and free you from the clutches of Satan, the world, sin, and your own flesh.

If you have had a little exercise in your life, then you will experience more and more that it will be an incomprehensible miracle from above if you save yourself from this untoward generation. Then, once at the end of the race, you will give Him glory—not to yourself, because it was a miracle of God that drew you out of the state of death and transplanted you into the kingdom of His eternal love. Oh, that a little more of it might be experienced here on earth, “But he that glorieth, let him glory in the Lord.” What a blessed Pentecostal fruit that would be for you and me on our journey to the great and never-ending eternity.

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