Acts 15:1-11, 22-29
Now the text we are going through the book of Acts and the text, Acts 15, isn’t usually preached about. I have very seldom preached about it, if ever, on a Sunday, looking through my records I don’t think I have. It usually is not something that people, we spend time on, I’ll tell you one of the reasons why: it’s a long, long theological debate. In fact you notice, we only gave you the first 11 verses and now we cut to verse 22. It’s a long chapter and it’s a very long theological debate. For modern people, a theological debate is boring. “Who cares.” Right? “How many angels can dance on the head of a pin,” that’s our attitude but I want you to see, that this particular theological debate teaches us four incredibly important things about the gospel itself, about the good news, about of the essential message of Christianity, the gospel. And it teaches us about the importance of gospel accuracy, liberty, community, purity.
Gospel Accuracy
First, gospel accuracy. The first thing we see here is that Paul leaves what he is doing to go to this debate. Verse 2, “So Paul and Barnabas were appointed, along with some other believers, to go up to Jerusalem to see the apostles and elders about this question,” we’ll get to the question in a minute. “The church sent them on their way, and as they traveled through Phoenicia and Samaria,” it was a long trip! Why? Now you have to remember how successful Paul is. Paul is now, he’s taken off. He’s in a middle of an incredibly successful career, in fact, it’s ridiculous to realize how successful he was. You know how successful he was? I mean, after Jesus Christ was the main architect of the greatest most influential and largest human movement in the history of the world, and he’s the way of measuring career success for you - if two thousand years from now, millions of people every single week are meeting to study your writings and to even study every word of the writings, two thousand years from now, millions of people studying your writings, I think you can call yourself a success then. That’s what Paul is! He had one of the most successful careers in history and yet, here he is in his career, you know he’s doing his job, why didn’t he say, “I don’t, I’m too busy and important to go to Jerusalem to have a theological debate,” “you know, who wants to get into doctrine and dogma and all that,” “I know what I’m doing, I’m seeing success, things are really going, I’m changing the world.” No, he stops and goes and has a theological discussion, why? Because he knows how important it is for his theology to be right, for his doctrine to be accurate, how important it is to make sure that the truth of the gospel is accurately held and understood and grasped. Now this is hard for us to understand because we live in an individualistic culture and in an individualistic culture, what matters is how I feel about things. And so, when we hear Christianity talk about “love,” we like that - “truth,” we don’t like that. See because truth is something you have to submit to. Love is something very fulfilling, its experiential, we all like that but the point, one of the main points of the bible is, “unless you know the truth, you won’t know how to love, you won’t be able to love, love and truth is interdependent on each other.” C.S. Lewis some years ago wrote a not a very well known article called, “Man or Rabbit,” and in it, he was dealing with this: he says, some people will say, “All I'm interested in is leading a good life. I'm going to choose beliefs not because I think them true but because I find them helpful.” See now that’s typical. What people say is, “I don’t know whether something is true or not, I want to know what works.” So they might come and say, “I’m interested in Christianity but don’t talk to me about doctrine and dogma, I don’t know whether or not they’re true, I just want to know if it works for me, that’s all it matters.” This is 1943 whenever he was writing, quite a while ago and yet he was already dealing with some people who said, “you know, don’t ask me whether Christianity is true or not, I just want to know if it works! If it’s helpful!” And then here’s what he said, “[but] If Christianity should happen to be true, then it is quite impossible that those who know this truth and those who don't should be equally well equipped for leading a good life. Knowledge of the facts must make a difference to one's actions. Suppose you found a man on the point of starvation and wanted to do the right thing. If you had no knowledge of medical science, you would probably give him a large solid meal; and as a result your man would die. That is what comes of working in the dark [without truth].” So think, here’s two people, “one believes that men are going to live forever, that they were created by God and so built that they can find their true and lasting happiness only by being united to God, that they have gone badly off the rails, and that obedient faith in Christ is the only way back. The other believes that men are an accidental result of the blind workings of matter, that they started as mere animals and have more or less steadily improved, that they are going to live for about seventy years, that their happiness is fully attainable by good social services and political organizations.” Okay, so there’s two people, two beings. These are, and then he says, “these are two different sets of beliefs about the universe. They can't both be right. The one who is wrong will act in a way which simply doesn't fit the real universe. Consequently, with the best [of intentions], [the one that’s wrong] will be helping his fellow creatures to their destruction.” Do you see? Truth matters. Don’t say, “all I care about is ‘if it works, not whether it’s true,” but if it’s true it will work and if it’s not true, it wouldn’t work at all! In fact Lewis somewhere else says, “if Christianity is false, it’s of no importance, but if it’s true, it’s of infinite importance. The only thing Christianity could not be is moderately important.” So first of all, this teaches us about the importance of gospel accuracy.
Gospel Liberty
Secondly though, probably the heart of the issue here, this debate was about gospel liberty, freedom. See how it starts. “Certain people,” verse 1, came down from Judea to Antioch and were teaching the believers: “Unless you are circumcised, according to the custom taught by Moses, you cannot be saved.” This brought Paul and Barnabas into sharp debate with them,” because down here in verse 3 it says, “they told how the Gentiles had been converted.” But the point that they eventually come to the debate is actually the conclusion is something that Peter says down in verse 11, “We believe it is through the grace of our Lord Jesus that we are saved [we Jews], just as they are [the Gentiles].” Now here’s what this debate was about: most all of the early Christians were Jews and because they were Jews, they’d been raised following the mosaic, Levitical law. Now the mosaic Levitical law meant that males had to be circumcised but see, when they talked about circumcision, they were talking about the whole thing that, the whole package because along with circumcision came all the clean-laws, and all the ceremonial laws. There was a numerable things, you can read it in the book of Leviticus, and there is other places too in the Old Testament, where there were all sorts of different things that you can eat and you couldn’t eat, you could wear and you couldn’t wear, you could do and you couldn’t do, you could touch and you couldn’t touch. So you could touch that then you’d have to wash with water and not go into worship for seven days and so forth. All kinds of things! And so all the early Christians followed those things because they were Jewish and that’s what all Jews did. But when the Romans and the Greeks and the Gentiles began to come to Christ, they did not adopt the Levitical law or those customs and one of the reasons was because Paul and his colleagues who were preaching to the gentiles didn’t make them and that’s the reason why there was this huge debate. And the debates incredibly important because it actually, what was at stake? Was two kinds of freedom, overlapping, they’re not identical, but they’re overlapping, two kinds of freedom. The first was “spiritual freedom.” Now spiritual freedom is simply this: what makes Christianity unique, what makes the gospel ingenious and unique is that all other religions, all traditional religions are basically “advice,” that is they come and they tell you, “here’s what you must do in order to connect to God or connect to the divine life.” But the gospel is not first of all advice, though there’s lots of advice in the bible about how to live, the gospel is first of all not advice, it’s “news,” it’s not advice about what you must do, it’s first of all “news” about what has been done for you by Jesus Christ so your salvation is not something you achieve but it’s something that you receive and you receive it as a gift. You don’t receive it by, you don’t earn, get it by complying to a bunch of rules like this or by joining a community or by working really hard, no! Or put it in another way: all other religions, even though they might start by inspiring you, in the end they start by putting burdens on you. That’s one of the things that you’re going to see if you read the entire chapter, we didn’t print it all out. The real issue was, “we put these burdens on the gentiles.” There’s a lot of discussion in the New Testament about the idea that the Levitical customs to say, “well you know, you need to be doing all of this,” was a burden! So are we going to put this on the gentiles, no! I’ll tell you why, the gospel always starts by taking all burdens off! All burdens off. The gospel is that you’re saved by grace! See, verse 11: “We believe it is through the grace of our Lord Jesus that [even we Jews],” “because we don’t comply with the law of Moses completely, nobody does.” “We’re saved by grace and they’re saved by grace too,” which means it takes all the burdens off. It takes off the burden, right away, the minute you become a Christian. It takes all the burden of trying to prove yourself anymore. It takes off the burden of the past - you know what that is? Of guilt and regret, and the things you’ve done wrong. It takes off the burden of the future - you know what the future burden is? Fear that you are not going to live up to standards. See, in traditional religion when it says, “now you must do all these things then God will bless you,” that puts on incredible burden, how do I know if I’m going to live up to it? It takes off the burden of proving yourself, the gospel takes off the burden of the past and guilt and regret, the burden of the fear of the future of not living up. If your from a traditional culture, it takes off the crushing burden of parental expectations, some of you know that. It says you're not defined by what your parents think about you, your saved by grace, you're loved by God because of what Jesus has done. Or if you’re from a modern, if you’re from here, if you’re from the western culture, from the time you’re little, you know what they’re doing to you? They’re saying, “you have to decide what you have to be.” That sounds free doesn’t it? It’s not. You have to decide what you want to be! So at the age of 12, you write, “I want to be the first female president, the first woman to walk on the moon, I want to be a fashion model at least for 5 or 6 years, I’d like to win a gold medal,” in another words, you’re twelve years old, because everybody’s been telling you, “Set goals! You can be anything you want to be!” Is that liberating? Oh no. It is crushing. Because as the years go by, you just throw one of those after another after another, “I’ll never do that, I’ll never do that,” all that is taken off of you! That’s what the gospel is, it’s spiritual freedom! Here’s what’s interesting, these are Christians who are saying, “well, yeah, the gospel’s great, Jesus is great, He loves us and He died for us but you also have to do this. You better do this, you better add these things otherwise you can’t be saved.” Whenever you have Jesus plus something else; whenever you have Jesus and you say, “you also have to do this,” whether it’s parental expectations or whether it’s your burdens of your own goals, whether it’s, “well we have to follow all these things as well,” do you know what that does? You lose your freedom. You slip back and the church is constantly slipping back into legalism. This is a church historian talking about Tertullian whose one of the early church fathers who he thought slipped back into legalism, listen this is what the historian says, “when the church loses its way which it often does and teaches believers that they’re justified not by grace alone but by being sanctified,” see, when the church starts slipping back and saying, “you’re not justified by grace alone but you also have to be holy in all these ways otherwise God won’t love you,” he says, then what happens is, “it produces an unconscious need for a list of clean and unclean activities and a rebirth of pharisaism.” Hardline fundamentalists like Tertullian ruled out many intellectual activities…the theater was ruled out because of its origins in pagan worship…dancing was ruled out because it might inflame sexual passions…and cosmetics and perfume were ruled out because as he said, “if God meant for you to smell like a flower, he would’ve given you the crop of them on your head.”” The point is Christians are always losing their spiritual freedom, always slipping out of the idea that we’re saved by grace and they’re saved by grace. But that’s not the only issue here! It’s linked because not only was spiritual freedom the issue here but also cultural freedom. Now think about the Levitical laws. When I say cultural freedom, the gentiles were being told, “if you want to become a real saved person, you need to become culturally Jewish.” Let’s remind you what the Levitical laws were about, all these strange things, if you read through Leviticus and places like that, you’d say, “What’s this all about? Why are all these ceremonial laws, these clean laws, the sacrifices, all sorts of things you couldn’t, couldn’t do with blood?” They were always talking about, “you could do this with the blood, you can’t do that with the blood, you could do this with the blood,” what’s this all about? Now there’s two answers. The first answer is, all of these ceremonial laws were remarkably vivid ways of pointing to the spiritual truths about salvation. The fact that if you just touched something and it was dead, you had to wash and wash and wash and you couldn’t go into the tabernacle, or worship God for a certain period of time. What was that doing? That was getting across the fact that you are spiritually unclean. That everyday no matter what you do, you can’t help but constantly fall into sin and God is Holy and you can’t just walk-in to a Holy God. There’s a barrier between you as a sinful person and a Holy God. That is not something that human beings believe. Even if they believe in God, nobody thinks like that. Levitical laws were incredibly vivid, remarkably intense way of driving into your heart that human beings are spiritually unclean and everything, everyday we continually get ourselves unclean and something has got to atone for our sin. That’s what all the blood stuff is about, that’s what all the sacrifices are about. That’s what the scapegoat is about. That’s what all the various sacrifices that through a substitute, through someone else dying and having bloodshed, your uncleanness can be purified. That’s what it's all about! But of course it is pointing to what? To the fact that we are spiritually unclean and we need a savior, someone to come and die for us. The second reason for the Levitical law was it kept the Jews completely, culturally separate during a period of time in which they alone had the word of God, they alone had the scriptures, they alone had the promises and the revelations of God and the writings of the prophets and it was absolutely crucial that they didn’t mix and assimilate in with the nations around them and intermarry and then syncretistically, you know, the true religion would get mixed in with all the other religions and it would’ve been lost! The whole message of God would’ve been lost. So He created a way that culturally made the Jews so totally different. You realize if you just, if you were a non-Jew and you just want to go out to eat with a Jew, you realize how hard it was? It was unbelievably difficult and that was the point. It was a way of really making sure the Jews stayed intact but now, ah, okay, now what? See Paul’s argument is this: No longer should the Levitical laws be required of believers, why? Number one, the thing that the Levitical laws were pointing to has come. They were shadows, the reality has come! Jesus himself. And secondly, now, believers are not only Jews but all tongues, tribes, people, and nations, Christians are going to be out everywhere, taking the word of God everywhere and what that means is, if you’re a Roman and you don’t have to become culturally Jewish, you don’t have to become culturally anything! If you’re Asian, if you’re African, if you’re Roman, if you’re Greek, whatever you are, you become a Christian where you are. You don’t have to leave and become culturally something else in order to become a Christian! And that’s why the reason why Paul was saying that cultural freedom, you see, is based on spiritual freedom because if you lose the sense of grace, and you fall back into legalism, then what happens? You become more and more someone who starts to pick up all kinds of little cultural things and turn them into ways of being righteous. “See I do that, I do that, and I feel a little more righteous about myself,” if you lose the grip on the gospel of grace, you start to…if you lose your spiritual freedom, you will lose your cultural freedom. And therefore, Paul argued and the elders and the apostles all agreed that the Levitical code was something that Jews wanted to keep it, fine, was now cultural, part of being a culture, but if you are a believer it was no longer required. It was no longer binding on the consequence of a Christian, a believer. Now, that’s the main point of this passage and you say, “why is that of any importance to us?” “Why did you spend all that time telling me this?” I’ll give you two minor and major reasons why it is incredibly important. The minor reason is this: so many people now today, in a way I’ve never heard before in my whole career, so many people today say, “well, Christians don’t follow everything in the bible.” “They pick the things they want to follow and they reject the things…they pick and choose what they want to believe and what they want to just let go.” And they usually point to Leviticus. So they say, “look at all these things the bible says, ‘you’re supposed to not eat this, you’re not supposed to dress like this,’ Christians don’t do that!” “So everybody picks and chooses what they want.” No! No, no, no! We are under the authority of the bible! And what that means is, as a Christian, you have no right to put aside anything in the bible and say that “that doesn’t fit me anymore,” unless the authoritative bible itself tells you it’s not binding, got it? See if the authoritative bible itself, in the New Testament, tells you, “this part of the Old Testament isn’t binding on you,” then you actually aren’t picking and choosing, you’re doing exactly what the bible says. So we are not allowed to put aside anything in the bible unless the bible itself tells us, “you can put it aside.” And therefore that’s exactly what’s happening right here. So there’s no way Christians should ever say, “this part of the bible, we’re going to follow, this part of the bible, we’re not.” But secondly, watch yourself. You say, “oh, weren’t these people, verse 1 and 2, weren’t they, you know, narrow-minded people? Insisting to be a Christian you had to become culturally like this?” Well you know what, we all have a tendency to do that with our culture. Unless you really grasp the gospel of grace, we all have a tendency to not look at our culture as culture but as righteousness. You know that. I remember some years ago I did a wedding. I got to say this real carefully every time I use this illustration. It was between a…it was a wedding between two different races and so I remember right at 2 o’clock, all the white guests from the one side, you know, right there, they’re all sitting there, 2 o’clock, it said, “wedding at 2 o’clock,” all the white people were there at 2 o’clock. None of the non-white people were there, not a single one, including the bride, she wasn’t anywhere around. And somewhat, they started sort of dribbling about 20 minutes later, 30 minutes later, 40 minutes later, you know things sort of started at 3 o’clock. The rest of the day I heard if you listen carefully, white people say, “how incredibly irresponsible! 2 o’clock, you know, this is just wasting, you need to get going soon!” In other words, the white people were not just noticing their cultural differences, they were culturally different, they were actually saying, “we were better people because we were there one 2 o’clock,” meanwhile the non-white people were saying, “White people are uptight, they are so uptight! No, I wasn't there at 2 o’clock! I wasn’t ready, you know! You know, loosen up, lighten up a little bit! I mean this is fun, this is fun, this isn’t work! This is supposed to be enjoyable!” And so what’s going on is, it’s not just “my race is different, my culture is different,” [it’s] “my culture’s better.” “I’m less uptight than you, I’m more responsible than you.” We all do it. And unless you take the gospel and you push it down deep into your heart that you’re saved by grace, you’re going to very slowly do the same sort of thing. Our churches ought to be, Christians ought to be the most culturally flexible people. We should realize, “I’m saved by grace,” I don’t have to look at my cultural distinctives and say, “I’m better than people of other cultural distinctives.” We should be the most open-minded. There’s a great quote in the front of the bulletin from a former teacher and it goes into that. Gospel liberty, three and four, two more things, short points but very helpful.
Gospel Community
This passage also tells us about the importance of community, you know why? Think now. There was a dispute. There was a long debate, in fact, we didn’t even show you most of it. Yeah, from verses 12 to, you know, 22, we didn’t even, there’s a lot of debate back and forth, reading the bible, arguing about the bible, bringing out this bible text. What happens? Get down to verse 22, “Then the apostles and elders, with the whole church,” in other words, they all agreed. And you know what they agreed to do? They agreed that the gentiles certainly had to obey the moral law, they certainly had to obey the ten commandments but they didn’t have to obey all the Levitical law and all the customs and et cetera. So they read a letter, starts in verse 24, “We have heard that some went out from us without our authorization and disturbed you, [we sent these men], and look at verse 27, [and] “Therefore we are sending Judas and Silas to confirm by word of mouth what we are writing. It seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us not to burden,” see gospel takes off burdens, “not to burden you with anything beyond the following,” now I’ll get to that in a second. But look carefully at what it says, it’s fascinating. “It seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us.” That’s almost hilarious. How do they know? How do they know what the Holy Spirit wanted? Did they sit and listen for voice - no. What did they do? They studied the bible together in community. And when they agreed on what the bible taught, they said, that’s what the Holy Spirit is saying. I'll tell you something, Americans, especially, feel like, well you know 80% of Americans say, “you can be a good Christian without being a part of a church,” and of course it all depends on what you mean by being a good christian. Can you be saved without being a part of a church? Sure, all protestants believe that. But I don’t think that’s what people mean. Here’s what they mean: “I can decide what God wants from me. I can decide God’s calling to me. I can decide what’s God’s will to me. I can discern the Holy Spirit all by my little self. I can read the bible, I can sit there and I can wait for a voice,” and yet here’s the point, when you come together and study the bible together, you can have more confidence that you’re reading the bible rightly, why? Because, you know, everybody’s got their prejudices and their biases so they all came together, they studied their bible, they sat under the authority of the bible. They didn’t just come together and talk about their feelings. On the other hand, they didn’t just wait for a voice. They studied the bible in community. They studied the word of God in community and that’s how they knew the Holy Spirit’s direction. How do you discover what God wants for you? You can’t do it well on your own, at least, I’m not saying you couldn’t, I’m just saying you shouldn’t trust yourself. You have blindnesses; you have biases. It’s community that reveals. It’s community that reveals the will of God. You need gospel community. One last thing to say. There’s far more we can talk about here. It was interesting, one more thing about the letter, it would take time to parse it out but one of the things they’re saying is, “you gentile Christians don’t actually have to obey the ceremonial law but please go out of your way to avoid some of these things like eating meat off of idols and things like that because even though there’s no reason why you couldn’t, technically and morally do it, please give up your right to do it for out of love for the sensibilities and the way that might offend your Jewish brothers and sisters.” Isn’t that something? There's a mixture of truth and love. You don’t compromise the truth. There’s nothing in the bible that [aren’t] under the authority of. You do debate to make sure to find out what the truth is and yet, once you have it, you use it in love. You apply it in love. You pair it in love.
Gospel Purity
Here’s one last thing. Yeah, I’m going to do it, don’t have time but I’m going to do it. The main point of the ceremonial law and circumcision was cleanliness; spiritual cleanliness, to purify you. I think the most amazing thing in this entire passage is where Peter, a Jewish man gets up and says, in verse 9, “God did not discriminate between us and them, for he purified their hearts by faith,” in other words, he did not prefer Jews over Gentiles but, he says, “he purified their hearts by faith.” You have to remember that Jews have been taught all their lives that Gentiles were unclean, that they did unclean things, they did all sorts of abominable practices, they worshiped idols, “uhh!” For Peter to say, “the Gentiles are clean!...because they believe in Jesus,” even though they are eating all the things that they’re not supposed to eat, even though they’re not circumcised, they’re clean, why? By faith! It must’ve stuck in his throat to say that they’re purified, how could?...What was it that shattered that man’s paradigm so utterly that a Jewish man can get up and say, “they’re as clean as we are.” “They are as purified in Christ as we are.” I’ll tell you what it is. In Colossians chapter 2, verse 11 and 12, Paul is talking to Colossians, which are Gentiles, and he says this, “in him,” you Colossian Gentiles, “In him you were also circumcised with a circumcision made without hands, by the circumcision of Christ, who took our trespasses and nailed it to the cross.” What is that? Alright, I waited till the very end just to say, you know the whole, the idea of circumcision is really gross. Why in the world did God choose that as a sign of anything? It’s bloody, it’s painful, it’s intensely vulnerable, it’s basically violent, why was that a sign of anything? And the answer is: the circumcision was a sign of a covenant. In the Old Testament days, in the ancient times, you know how you made an agreement with somebody? You acted out the curse of disobedience to the covenant. So if you were having a, if you’re making a covenant with a King, you would say, “I promise to do this, this,” how would you ratify that? How would you sign it as it were? “You would take an animal, cut in half, walk between the pieces and say, “oh dread sovereign, if I don’t do all the words that I’m telling you today that I’m telling you to do, if I don’t fulfill my promises, if I don’t obey the words of the covenant, am I be like this animal. May I be torn to pieces.” You see you’re acting out the curse and what is the curse of disobeying God? It’s to be cut off. The curse of sin has always been to be cut off from people, cut off of community, cut off from God. You know the minute you lie to your friend or your spouse, you immediately feel the curse start working. You feel lonelier. The curse of sin is to be cut off and yet circumcision also represented to be clean, spiritual clean because it meant you were in the covenant. So what in the world is Paul saying, I’ll tell you what, Paul is saying, here’s what’s so radical, here’s what changed Peter’s mind: Paul looked at a group of Gentiles, he was actually not just looking at Gentiles but at women too by the way when he said this, “you, Jew and Gentile, men and women, all circumcised spiritually,” what does that mean, you’re clean, why? “Because you were circumcised in Christ circumcision.” What’s Christ circumcision? If you read it carefully, it’s when he died on the cross, what? Yes. On the cross, Jesus' blood was shed. On the cross, he was intensely vulnerable. On the cross, he was under the knife. On the cross, he was cut off from the land of the living. He said, “my God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” On the cross Jesus Christ experienced the curse of disobedience to which circumcision points and you know what that means? It means that because he was cut off, you can be brought in, you and I. Because he was made utterly, radically unclean, we’re clean. So it doesn’t matter what you’ve done. It doesn’t matter what you’ve done. It doesn’t matter what you may feel guilty about. You’re clean! You remember Lady McBeth? Walking around going out of her mind with guilt. She helped her…she’d go to her husband to kill somebody and once she did it, she couldn’t live with her guilt. So she literally went insane, she went around, she saw blood on her hands, there was no blood on her hands, but she saw blood on her hands, remember? “Out, out, damn spot!” Let us pray.
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