A Sound Like The Wind

Suddenly, there was a sound from heaven like the roaring of a mighty windstorm, and it filled the house where they were sitting.   Acts 2:2

In many ancient languages, there is one word that can mean “wind” or “breath” or “spirit.” In Hebrew that word is ruach. It is one of those words that sounds like what it means. If you pronounce ruach correctly, it sounds like the rushing of the wind.

If you think about it, the sound of wind is pretty much the same as the sound of breath, only it’s much louder and it lasts longer. In the ancient world, people thought the wind was like breath on a larger scale, so they used the same word for both.

If we ask, “Where have we come across this before?” there are two answers. The first is at the very beginning of the Bible story, where we read about God breathing life into Adam. God shaped a lifeless corpse from the dust of the ground. It just lay there until God breathed into it. God gave Adam the kiss of life, and the first man became a living being.

The second is after the Resurrection. Jesus “breathed on [the disciples] and said, ‘Receive the Holy Spirit’” (John 20:22). Jesus was explaining what would happen on the Day of Pentecost. Then he took a deep breath and blew it out toward them. It sounded like the rushing of the wind.

When the disciples heard a sound like the rushing wind a few weeks later, they would have immediately associated it with the sound of Jesus breathing on them and recognized that this was the fulfillment of what Jesus had promised.

Think about an Olympic sprinter taking in great gulps of air that pulsate through his chest as oxygen fills his lungs and energizes his body. That’s what happened at Pentecost. God breathed new life into the disciples, and they were never the same.

Jesus had sent the disciples out to do ministry before, and they would not have been able to do what they did without the power of the Spirit. But this was something entirely new—the Spirit of God was not only with them, but in them.

For further reading, see Acts 2