The Last Days, the Spirit and “Being Saved”

Acts 2:16-21

But this is what was uttered through the prophet Joel: “And in the last days it shall be, God declares, that I will pour out my Spirit on all flesh, and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, and your young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams; even on my male servants and female servants in those days I will pour out my Spirit, and they shall prophesy. And I will show wonders in the heavens above and signs on the earth below, blood, and fire, and vapor of smoke; the sun shall be turned to darkness and the moon to blood, before the day of the Lord comes, the great and magnificent day. And it shall come to pass that everyone who calls upon the name of the Lord shall be saved.”

N. T. Wright, Acts for Everyone (Part One)

Up to this moment, God has acted by his spirit among his people, but it’s always been by inspiring one person here, one or two there—kings and prophets and priests and righteous men and women. Now, in a sudden burst of fresh divine energy released through the death and resurrection of Jesus, God’s spirit has been poured out upon a lot of people all at once. There is no discrimination between slaves and free, male and female, young and old. They are all marked out, side by side, as the nucleus of God’s true people.

This work of God is wonderfully inclusive, because there is no category of people which is left out: both genders, all ages, all social classes. But it is wonderfully focused, because it happens to all “who call on the name of the Lord” (verse 21). . . . All who call on the name of the Lord will be saved.

“Being saved” doesn’t just mean, as it does for many today, “going to heaven when they die.” It means “knowing God’s rescuing power revealed in Jesus, which anticipates, in the present, God’s final great act of deliverance” (33-4).