NOTES for Act 19:5-6

The Kingdom's entrance into the world begins on the day of Pentecost with the descent of the Holy Spirit. God's breath permeates the Kingdom, forming its nature (or, more precisely, what replaces nature in the Kingdom). And afterward the spread of the Kingdom through the world continues in the same way: it becomes a continuous Pentecost, repeated again and again.

Not some other, new Pentecost, but the very same one, appearing now here, now there, everywhere there are people seeking the Kingdom and desiring to enter it. God's breath, the breath of the Kingdom, enters the world, but always through people. It cannot be otherwise: the Kingdom consists of people who have firm, stable, and completely real relationships with God and with Christ. These relationships form the structure of the Kingdom, insofar as they can be called a structure at all. Yet despite its apparent dependence on a person and his choice, the power of the Kingdom is fully real. It is so real that, once it has entered the world, everyone senses the effect of this power.

Of course, they sense it in different ways: although the power of the Kingdom can be felt anywhere and at any time, its breath, full of God's love, can be felt only by opening the heart to it and entering it. It is no accident that the Book of Acts so often mentions magicians who sensed the power of the Kingdom and left their former way behind. They felt the power of the Kingdom very well, but they could not feel the breath of God's love that stood behind it until they themselves became its inhabitants, and therefore Christians.

There is no other way: one cannot simply make use of the Kingdom. Some wanted to, like the "exorcists" who tried to use the name of Jesus to achieve their own goals. They had apparently heard the words about the name of Jesus by which one can be saved, and they decided that it possessed power in roughly the same sense as the names they used in their magical practice possessed power. The result was disastrous, and the newly minted exorcists barely escaped with their lives.

The power of the name of Jesus shows itself only when a person becomes an inhabitant of the Kingdom, and only to the extent that he has become one. It cannot be otherwise: God's power always changes a person from within, and God never merely wants to make a person His instrument by giving him certain special abilities. He wants to renew him, turning him into an inhabitant of His Kingdom. That is what matters most. Everything else is only forms and means, which in themselves give a person nothing.