What day of the week did the Holy Spirit come down upon the disciples ?

Question:

What is the proof that it was Sunday when the Holy Spirit came upon the disciples? You try to show that Sunday is related with the day of Pentecost… Soon we will celebrate the day of Pentecost. If you don’t know sufficiently about the origin of this feast and what to celebrate, you can’t profit the true joy of it. In childhood I knew about the day of Pentecost only by being sent to gather lavender which would be spread in all house. And outside, we and all neighborhood would hang branches of linden tree, and those who didn’t have time to bring linden would hang branches of nut tree. For other feasts, there is a special greeting which at least communicates about the celebration. During Easter, for example, we all say “Christ is risen!”. Forty days after Easter, the greeting tells about what happened then: “Christ ascended!”. At the day of Pentecost we don’t have such a greeting which could show us at least what happened. In this message, I would like to see presented what the Bible says about the feast of Pentecost. In the Bible it is named the day of Pentecost…. THE DAY OF PENTECOST described in Acts chapter 2 doesn’t have any connection with Sunday! It was a day of Sabbath; examine, and you will see….

It is true that when a person celebrates something without knowing the essence of the holiday, it profits him nothing. Apostle Paul uses this expression frequently in his epistles: “I do not want you to be unaware of…”.  Moreover,  we know that a condition to enter in the  kingdom of heaven is the faith, but faith implies knowledge, recognition and full entrusting in the message of the Gospel. The kind of faith that somewhere out there exists a God whom I don’t know, it profits me nothing. God, who loves us, gave us the sacred Scriptures and sent us His Holy Spirit to “guide us into all the truth and to disclose to us what is to come” (John 16:13).

In this case, the question is why we celebrate the coming down of the Holy Spirit on a Sunday if, in the opinion of the person asking the question, the events from Acts 2 occurred on a Sabbath day. I do not know what the arguments are supporting that the coming of the Holy Spirit happened on a day of Sabbath, but one thing is well known that the feast of Pentecost was a feast related to the first day of the week (namely Sunday, considering the Jewish calendar, where Sabbath was the last day of the week). Here is the commandment given by God to Moses regarding the feast of Pentecost or the feast of Weeks, which was celebrated seven weeks after the feast of “the first fruits of the harvest”.

Then the Lord spoke to Moses, saying, “Speak to the sons of Israel and say to them, ‘When you enter the land which I am going to give to you and reap its harvest, then you shall bring in the sheaf of the first fruits of your harvest to the priest. He shall wave the sheaf before the Lord for you to be accepted; on the day after the sabbath the priest shall wave it. Now on the day when you wave the sheaf, you shall offer a male lamb one year old without defect for a burnt offering to the Lord. Its grain offering shall then be two-tenths of an ephah of fine flour mixed with oil, an offering by fire to the Lord for a soothing aroma, with its drink offering, a fourth of a hin of wine. Until this same day, until you have brought in the offering of your God, you shall eat neither bread nor roasted grain nor new growth. It is to be a perpetual statute throughout your generations in all your dwelling places. ‘You shall also count for yourselves from the day after the sabbath, from the day when you brought in the sheaf of the wave offering; there shall be seven complete sabbaths. You shall count fifty days to the day after the seventh sabbath; then you shall present a new grain offering to the Lord. You shall bring in from your dwelling places two loaves of bread for a wave offering, made of two-tenths of an ephah; they shall be of a fine flour, baked with leaven as first fruits to the Lord. Along with the bread you shall present seven one year old male lambs without defect, and a bull of the herd and two rams; they are to be a burnt offering to the Lord, with their grain offering and their drink offerings, an offering by fire of a soothing aroma to the Lord. You shall also offer one male goat for a sin offering and two male lambs one year old for a sacrifice of peace offerings. The priest shall then wave them with the bread of the first fruits for a wave offering with two lambs before the Lord; they are to be holy to the Lord for the priest. On this same day you shall make a proclamation as well; you are to have a holy convocation. You shall do no laborious work. It is to be a perpetual statute in all your dwelling places throughout your generations (Leviticus 23:9-21).

God didn’t arrange the feasts in Israel unintentionally: each feast beared an image of the work that God would do through the Lord Jesus in the New Covenant, the Covenant of Grace:

1. The Lord Jesus was sacrificed (arrested and tortured) at night when Israel sacrificed for Passover, which was a remembrance of the act that the angel of the Lord smote all Egyptian families and passed over the families of Israel, who celebrated the Passover as God directed them to (Exodus 12).

2. The Lord Jesus resurrected on the day when Israel was celebrating the Feast of the First Fruit (the First Harvest). In 1 Corinthians chapter 15, apostle Paul speaks about the fact that everyone will rise in Christ, each in his own order. Paul mentions that the Lord Jesus is “the first fruits of those who are asleep” (1 Corinthians 15:20), i.e. the first who rose from the dead in a new body over which the second death no longer would master over.

3. The coming of the Holy Spirit that marks the birth of the Church formed of Jews and Gentiles coincided with the feast of Pentecost while celebrating the spring harvest.

Translated by Marcela Tasca

Romanian