According to John in 1 John 2:14, it’s possible for “young men” to “overcome the evil one.” He tells them, and us, how it’s possible too: it’s because “the word of God is living in you” (same verse).
But how did that happen in them, and not in Adam and Eve and the Israelites? Simply put: it was “the effect of the Holy Spirit.” When Jesus ascended to his Father to ask him to send the Holy Spirit, the Spirit would open up a completely different relationship with God, where we humans, even as “young men,” could “obey Jesus’ teaching” out of love for him, John 14:21 – just as Jesus obeyed his Father out of love for him (31).
But there was more too, because when the Holy Spirit was then sent as Jesus promised in Acts 2, Peter “stood up with the Eleven, raised his voice,” verse 14, “and addressed the crowd” with “what was spoken by the prophet Joel” (back in Joel 2:28-32).
“In the last days,” Peter begins in Acts 2:17, quoting Joel, “God says I will pour out my Spirit on all people.” To a Jew hearing “the last days” it meant the new age of the Kingdom of God, the one great dream they’d all had for centuries when God would “restore the kingdom to Israel” (1:6), and then through Israel bless the whole world as God had promised to Abraham back in Genesis 12:3 (and Isaiah 49:6).
Was Peter saying, then, that this time had finally come? Well, they’d know if it had, because, as Peter continues in Acts 2:17, “Your sons and daughters will prophesy, your young men will see visions, your old men will dream dreams.”
Visions and dreams about what, though? About the Kingdom of God being set up on this planet, now that the time had come for it to happen. And who is it going to show up in the most? According to God in the book of Joel, it’s going to be the “young men” and the “old men.”
Which John tells us later is exactly what he’d seen happen. The old men, or the “fathers” as he calls them in 1 John 2:13, “have known him who is from the beginning.” They’ve been rooted solidly in the teachings of Jesus for years, because their “dream” (Acts 2:17) is to see the whole world at last living by those teachings, as promised. But what about the effect on the young? According to Joel, ““Your young men will see visions”….(next blog)
Buck To Basics 