I wasn’t sure how this message would be received when I wrote it, but the response was very encouraging; at least a half-dozen people came forward for prayer during the worship set that followed. Nice to see God move in people’s lives. Enjoy the sermon below. Or listen to it!
Shabbat Shalom.
Today, I’d like to talk about something that is hard to talk about. It’s hard because, whenever to teach about something, you had better be sure you’re living up to what you teach. And this is a hard one to live up to for any of us: repentance. The word repentance comes to us from the Hebrew word:
STRONG’S H8666 תְּשׁוּבַת TESHUBAH
1. Answer, be expired, return.
2. From shuwb; a recurrence (of time or place); a reply (as returned) — answer, be expired, return.
So repentance is an answer to something, and a return to something. It is also an expiration of something. What is repentance a return to? What is repentance an answer to? And what is repentance the expiration of? We’ll get to the answers before we’re done today. Yet before we get there, I believe it’s valuable to take a look at what repentance has come to mean to believers today.
The reason I want to explore our modern context for repentance first, rather than explore this concept’s original context, is because repentance today is primarily considered a “church word.” What is a “church word?” Well, it’s a word that’s largely used in church and not often used outside of it. Therefore, I think it’s useful to look at how this word is understood today, so we can examine if our understanding of repentance matches up with the Biblical understanding of it.
Lately, I’ve come across some rather … unique views on repentance held by various believers. These views concern me.
I recently had a conversation with a person who attends a mainstream Christian church and this is what she told me: She said, “You know, my understanding is that Jesus lives inside us and He does all our repenting for us. He does it better than we ever could, so we don’t have to worry about it.”
Here’s another take someone recently shared with me: He said, “Repentance is valuable when it comes to accepting Yeshua (Jesus) as LORD. But once you’re saved, you don’t need to keep repenting because then it becomes YOUR work, not God’s, and you make repentance something that replaces God’s grace. Jesus forgave us once, for everything, so we only have to repent once when we first come to him.”
Do either of these mindsets sound familiar? Unfortunately, they’re not as uncommon as one might hope. Each of these statements, it seems to me, sprout from the same core mentality. This mentality grows from an extreme emphasis on the concept of grace; one that lacks a balanced view of God. And of course, here at Sar Shalom, we know exactly where to look when we want a balanced view of God. We go to where He defined himself for Moses in:
EXODUS 34:6-7
And he passed in front of Moses, proclaiming, “The LORD, the LORD, the compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness, maintaining love to thousands, and forgiving wickedness, rebellion and sin. Yet he does not leave the guilty unpunished; he punishes the children and their children for the sin of the fathers to the third and fourth generation.”
So, as we read here, God is not all grace, nor is He all judgment and holiness. He is both, at the same time. God, by his very nature, is both completely forgiving and completely holy. And so this should guide us as we look at different views of God; any teaching that does not maintain this definition God gave of Himself is very likely a misleading teaching.
With these outlooks on repentance I’ve heard from various believers lately, the most basic question that comes to my mind is: where is the Scriptural basis for these ideas?
If indeed Yeshua living inside us does all our repenting for us, there ought to be at least a couple verses that describe Him as doing this, shouldn’t there? There ought to be some indication in the teachings of Yeshua, or the letters of the apostles, that we no longer need to repent because Yeshua will do it for us once he lives in us.
Yet there is no such verse to be found. Paul makes reference to Messiah living in us, but he never suggests that Yeshua does our repenting for us so we don’t have to. Can you see how this false teaching is built? It begins with a grain of truth: as believers, Yeshua now lives in us. But then someone comes along and adds human logic, human-invented ideas, to that truth, until it veers off to the right or to the left of exactly what Scripture tells us.
It’s the same with the second mindset on repentance that I described. Yes, it’s true; Yeshua died once for all our sins! But does that, by extension, mean we don’t have to repent from sins we commit after coming to salvation? Does it mean we’re forgiven even before we sin? Does it, therefore, mean that we now have a license to sin because, as Paul seems to indicate when you take him out of context, “wherever sin abounded, grace abounded much more?”
Paul had a response to this very mindset. We find it in:
ROMANS 6:1-2
What shall we say then? Shall we continue in sin that grace may abound? Certainly not! How shall we who died to sin live any longer in it?
Yet the objection could be made: Craig, how can you be sure? How can you know that our understanding is more accurate than someone else’s? Well, let’s be like the Bereans today. Let’s take a closer look at what the whole of the Bible teaches us about repentance and its importance and role in the life of a believer. Let’s see for ourselves what Scripture supports and what it does not, and then let’s believe that.
Now that we know some of the mistaken impressions that are circulating among some believers today about the nature of repentance, let’s begin to see what the Bible itself teaches us about it, and cast aside anything that doesn’t fit with that Biblical understanding. One of the earliest occurrences of the concept of repentance comes to us from:
I KINGS 8:46-50
“When they sin against you—for there is no one who does not sin—and you become angry with them and give them over to the enemy, who takes them captive to his own land, far away or near; and if they have a change of heart in the land where they are held captive, and repent and plead with you in the land of their conquerors and say, ‘We have sinned, we have done wrong, we have acted wickedly’; and if they turn back to you with all their heart and soul in the land of their enemies who took them captive, and pray to you toward the land you gave their fathers, toward the city you have chosen and the temple I have built for your Name; then from heaven, your dwelling place, hear their prayer and their plea, and uphold their cause. And forgive your people, who have sinned against you; forgive all the offenses they have committed against you,
Now, how does that measure up to how we see repentance practiced by believers today? Not very well, right? Too often, our impression of repentance is limited to simply telling God, “Ooops. We messed up. Sorry about that. Thanks for forgiving me through Yeshua!”
But that’s not what we see here, is it? No, this sort of repentance is no simple, “Ooops.” It involves what? First of all, a change of heart. Also, pleading with God from a position of brokenness for His mercy and forgiveness. And importantly, as I think will become clearer by the time we’re done, it involves agreeing with God in detail that He is right, and we are wrong.
Now, this is no attempt to simplify the steps given in I Kings into some formula that we can satisfy in a quick, ninety-second prayer and then move on in our lives like nothing ever happened. Remember, we are called to be in relationship with God, and when we sin, that relationship is broken.
Think about it. How many of us accept half-hearted apologies that only go skin deep, that make it obvious that the same offense is likely to occur again … perhaps the same day… even the same hour? Yes, we’re called to forgive until we lose count, but even if we do accept a shallow apology, do we trust that person has undergone a change of heart? Not likely. If we can know this, limited as we are with our imperfect, human understanding, then how much more must the Creator of the universe not be fooled by shallow apologies?
So repentance is more than a simple, “I’m sorry,” right? But we have more to learn about it. I particularly like this insight found in the book of Job, where it is written in:
JOB 34:31-33
“Suppose a man says to God, ‘I am guilty but will offend no more. Teach me what I cannot see; if I have done wrong, I will not do so again.’ Should God then reward you on your terms, when you refuse to repent?
The reason I like this passage is that this is how many of us would prefer to relate to God. We want the blessings the LORD has to offer, but we want it on OUR terms, not His. We don’t want to have to repent, or even to be told we need to repent. We want simple, uplifting, inspirational messages that can be summed up in bumper-sticker phrases like, “I’m OK – You’re OK,” or “Don’t worry, be happy!”
Does God reward us on our own terms? Does God reward us when we refuse to repent?
To answer this, we have to know exactly how important the concept of repentance was to Yeshua Himself, don’t we? We get a clue to how Yeshua valued repentance in:
MATTHEW 4:17
From that time on Jesus began to preach, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is near.”
Now this passage comes from early in Yeshua’s public ministry. He began to preach “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is near,” we are told. And is this a one-time message? Not at all, because the passage tells us he did this, “from that time on.” This indicates repentance is a theme that became a hallmark of Yeshua’s ministry, a message he’d return to over and over again. We also learn this from:
MARK 6:12-13
They [the disciples] went out and preached that people should repent. They drove out many demons and anointed many sick people with oil and healed them.
So repentance wasn’t just a theme of Yeshua’s ministry, but it was the central theme he taught those who followed him to teach as well.
So, was Yeshua unique in his emphasis on repentance? Not really. Jewish tradition tells us that Maimonides the Rambam taught that, “All the prophets preach repentance.” This saying came to be known as Maimonides’ dictum.
Furthermore, Yochanan the Immerser – better known as John the Baptist – also preached repentance as a central theme, and he taught it fearlessly, as we read in:
MATTHEW 3:7-9
But when he saw many of the Pharisees and Sadducees coming to where he was baptizing, he said to them: “You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the coming wrath? Produce fruit in keeping with repentance. And do not think you can say to yourselves, ‘We have Abraham as our father.’ I tell you that out of these stones God can raise up children for Abraham.
Now, this passage is rich with significance. We see here that, unlike our current Western mentality, repentance is not merely agreeing with God for a moment in prayer that He is right and we are wrong. It goes deeper than that, because he tells these Pharisees, “Produce fruit in keeping with repentance.” So repentance can’t be just a one-time action; it is something that will continue to manifest itself throughout your life, if you continue to walk in it. This passage also indicates to us that our identity – be it as a child of Abraham, or by extension, as a follower of Yeshua – does not make us immune to the need for repentance.
Now, up to this point, what I’ve shared is something most believers would agree with. Most people get this. But the objection that begins to be raised at this point is, “Craig, what you’re saying is fine. But as far as I can see, repentance only applies to sinners, not those of us who are believers, who are already in Messiah.”
John’s words start to break down that concept. Let’s see what else we can find. Here’s what we read in:
ROMANS 2:3-5
So when you, a mere man, pass judgment on them and yet do the same things, do you think you will escape God’s judgment? Or do you show contempt for the riches of his kindness, tolerance and patience, not realizing that God’s kindness leads you toward repentance? But because of your stubbornness and your unrepentant heart, you are storing up wrath against yourself for the day of God’s wrath, when his righteous judgment will be revealed.
Is Paul’s letter to the Romans addressed to believers, here, or those who are still lost, still outside of life in Messiah? Traditionally, it is believed that Paul was writing Romans to the first-century Messianic community he’d help establish in Rome, and addressing issues that had popped up in his absence. But if that’s not clear enough, let’s take a look at perhaps the clearest example of repentance being a topic addressed to believers. The author of Hebrews writes this in:
HEBREWS 6:4-6
It is impossible for those who have once been enlightened, who have tasted the heavenly gift, who have shared in the Holy Spirit, who have tasted the goodness of the word of God and the powers of the coming age, if they fall away, to be brought back to repentance, because to their loss they are crucifying the Son of God all over again and subjecting him to public disgrace.
After reading this passage, can there be any doubt that repentance is a topic that does apply to all of us as believers and not merely those who are still lost in their sin? You see, when someone falls away from Yeshua, or slips back into sin, what’s the first thing most believers say?
“Oh, well, they must never have been saved! They didn’t really know Yeshua anyway, because no one who REALLY knows him could act like that.”
Let me be clear that this idea that believers can never fall away is simply not supported in Scripture. Can you name anyone of whom it can be said that they have been enlightened, tasted the heavenly gift, shared in the Ruach haKodesh, tasted the goodness of the word of God and the powers of the coming age – and yet still be considered an unbeliever who “was never really saved anyway?”
If so, then was Moses “never really saved” when he struck the rock, rather than speaking to it as commanded? Moses is called God’s friend … was he never really saved? Let me answer that one: No! He was in a relationship with the creator of the universe, and Moses – the friend of God – was still susceptible to sin! So what makes the difference for Moses?
Repentance.
Moses was continually willing to acknowledge when he was wrong and God was right. He never fought with God over it for any length of time. He didn’t let pride get in the way of admitting his sins. And if any man has ever had a reason to let pride get in the way of his humility before the LORD, it was Moses!
I mean, Moses was the person God used to lead the children of Israel out of bondage in Egypt! He had a following of over a million people who followed him into a desert for forty years – not even the most popular mega-church leaders today have that kind of following. And yet Moses was willing to repent when he fell into error.
How can any of us, who have accomplished so much less, be any less willing to humble ourselves, set aside our foolish pride, and begin to admit at the core of our being that God is right and we are wrong? It’s essential. It’s so essential that if we’re not willing to do so, we could even miss out on Messiah. We read this in:
ISAIAH 59:20
“The Redeemer will come to Zion, to those in Jacob who repent of their sins,” declares the LORD.
You see, what is true is that God’s spirit, his Ruach, his spirit of truth, is in us; but He is the spirit of truth, so he cannot and will not continue to abide in us if we continue to abide in rebellion and deception, if we continue to embrace pride over truth. He comes for those who repent, not those who justify themselves!
There’s a Jewish tradition I really appreciate that paints a solid picture of this struggle we can go through when it comes to humbling ourselves to the point of real repentance. It comes to us in:
TA’AN 16A
“He that confesses his sin and still clings to it is likened to a man that holds in his hand a defiling object; though he bathes in all the waters of the world he is not cleansed; but the moment he casts the defiling object from him a single bath will cleanse him, as it is said (Prov. 28:13): He who conceals his sins does not prosper, but whoever confesses and renounces them finds mercy.”
You see, to truly be walking in repentance, we can’t hold on to the sins making us unclean. We can’t claim holiness, but continue to walk in rebellion. We have to cast the source of our sinful behaviors from us, in order to truly experience the forgiveness, mercy and grace of God. We have to let go.
You see, God doesn’t play games when it comes to repentance. He’s not fooled by them. This is a concept even the rabbis understood, as we find in another Jewish tradition from:
MISHNAH, YOMA 85B:
If one says: I shall sin and repent, sin and repent, no opportunity will be given to him to repent. [If one says]: I shall sin and the Day of Atonement will procure atonement for me, the Day of Atonement procures for him no atonement.
You know, a lack of repentance can be the cause behind a lot of things that hold us back from truly experiencing and knowing God face-to-face, from truly knowing his joy and seeing that joy manifest itself in our lives.
How many believers do you know, who claim to know and love God, but as you see them interact more and more, it becomes apparent that they are people who are bitter, angry, scared, easily offended, short-tempered, untrusting … the list goes on. Does that sound like the gifts of the Ruach haKodesh to you? Of course not.
So, what’s holding these people back? Well, it can vary from believer to believer. But there are some very common themes.
Sometimes, it can be a wounded spirit from what we perceive to be unanswered prayer.
For example, how many of us have gone through this: There’s something really, sincerely important to us, so we pray God will respond in a certain way. But what we’re praying for isn’t what comes about. Maybe what we prayed about was asking God for something outside of his nature, like bringing a person to salvation who has no interest in God, or making someone love us who doesn’t, or making someone who is leaving us stay, or allowing someone to survive and be healed, but that doesn’t happen.
We tend to treat God like a genie in a bottle sometimes, thinking that anything we pray for, He’ll grant us. But that’s not how Yeshua modeled prayer for us, is it? No, He showed us to pray for His perfect will over our own. But when God’s will doesn’t match ours, do we accept that He knows more than us, or do we begin to blame him? Down that path lies bitterness, anger, rebellion, sin and death.
Here’s another thing that can get in the way, one I know well from my own walk with God: the victim mentality. How often do we refuse to repent of our own actions because we feel we have been wronged and our actions are only in response to that?
How often do we justify what we know deep down to be sin because, “Hey, this other person did it to me first,” or “I’m only doing to them what they did to me.” This attitude builds walls between God and us, because it is literally arguing with God about whether we’ve sinned or not! Does God reward us on our terms when refuse to repent? I wouldn’t count on it.
Sometimes, the barrier can even be justifying current actions because of past actions. This week, as I was preparing this message, I got a call from someone looking for advice. He told me, “I’m Messianic and I want to get a tattoo with the name of God – Y H W H. That’s not going to endanger my salvation, is it?”
I told him, “No, it’s not a salvation issue, but it is an obedience issue.”
He responded, “Leviticus, right? OK, so here’s my other option. I could get a tattoo with my son’s name. Would that be OK?”
I said, “I think maybe you misunderstood me. It’s not the name of God or the name of your son that’s an issue. The Torah forbids getting a tattoo.”
He said, “What if I got the name of God put on me in Hebrew? Yod-hey-vav-hey?”
By this point, the conversation reminded me of Balaam’s experience with Balak… “Well, OK, maybe we’ll get a different response if we go over here and try it from this angle.”
So I told him, “Look, Leviticus 19:28 says, ‘Do not cut your bodies for the dead or put tattoo marks on yourselves. I am the LORD.’ You can either obey, or disobey. The choice is yours.”
So finally he told me, “Well, it’s too late for that. I already have a ton of tattoos. And in fact, I’ve used them to start conversations and seen people come to the LORD through them.”
I told him it was never too late to start obeying by not adding more tattoos to the ones he already had, but the conversation was soon over after that.
None of us are all that different when it comes right down to it, are we? We know what God commands, what He asks us to obey … and rather than bring our obedience in line to His word, we would rather justify our rebellion, claiming that what we do now doesn’t matter because we’ve made the same bad choices in the past, or we’ve used our mistakes to share the Gospel with people so they’re not really mistakes and it’s OK to continue making the same mistakes. It’s all deception.
No matter what our roadblocks are, though, we – even and maybe especially we believers – are called to repent. When I began this message we looked at the definition for the Hebrew word repentance comes from – teshubah – and learned that, Biblically, it indicates an answer to something, a return to something, and an expiration of something. In light of our study, I think we can now fill in the blanks here.
Repentance – real, Biblical repentance – is the expiration of what? Of our fighting with God over whether something is sin or not; it is the expiration of our rebellion against God’s righteous rulings.
Repentance – real, Biblical repentance – is our answer to what? To the conviction that comes from the Holy Spirit – the Ruach haKodesh – the Spirit of Truth letting us know we’ve fallen short of God’s standard.
Repentance – real, Biblical repentance – is a return to what? To being in unity with God, placing Him back to His rightful position as the ruler of our lives.
Only when we cast aside that which defiles us can we be made clean once again in God’s sight. If we’re capable and culpable of sin, repentance is required. Only then can it be said of us that we have not treated the grace Yeshua won for us through His death and resurrection like a cheap, dime-store ring made of cubic zirconia and fool’s gold, but have treated it like a ring of great value, made from the finest, purest gold, and the rarest, best-cut diamonds.
Repentance is our reasonable response to the spirit of God when we stray from the truth. Only a fool would refuse that reasonable response. I’ll close with this:
HEBREWS 6:9-12
Even though we speak like this, dear friends, we are confident of better things in your case—things that accompany salvation. God is not unjust; he will not forget your work and the love you have shown him as you have helped his people and continue to help them. We want each of you to show this same diligence to the very end, in order to make your hope sure. We do not want you to become lazy, but to imitate those who through faith and patience inherit what has been promised.
That is our prayer for everyone here today, for everyone who hears or reads this message.
Shabbat Shalom.
Sermon: Peter’s vision
Friday, July 1st, 2011
Here is the text of my most recent sermon, delivered in late May at Kehilat Sar Shalom. It’s a message I’d prepared last fall and had in reserve for a while. Enjoy!
Shabbat Shalom.
You know, there are certain passages in the New Covenant writings that present challenges to us as Messianic believers. If we are not careful in our study, they can cause us to question whether what we believe is actually correct. Yet with the prompting of the Holy Spirit, careful study, and some effort to read these writings through first-century Messianic Jewish eyes, there is always an answer to be found.
One such case is the case of Peter’s vision, detailed initially in Acts chapter 10. As this passage has been historically taught, we have come to view it as one of the key moments in which God repealed all the kosher laws, the rules about which animals were either clean or unclean as food for us. It is why so many congregations hold bacon-and-egg breakfasts, pig roasts, and serve Easter ham at gatherings even today.
And whenever any of us finds the Messianic movement and begins to consider observing God’s regulations for what is clean and permissible as food, and what is unclean and ought not be eaten as food, this is one of the first passages we are pointed to by our well-intentioned friends who don’t want to see us “going back under the law.”
But is that what Peter’s vision in Acts 10 is all about? Let’s take a closer look, and see if the traditional arguments of the last sixteen hundred years or so actually hold water.
In Acts 10, there is an important preface that many who study this issue overlook; yet it is critical for understanding the events in this chapter properly. So let’s read what precedes Peter’s vision in:
Now, for our purposes here today, I don’t want to spend too much time on Cornelius and God’s selection of him, other than to point out that Cornelius was not a practicing and faithful traditional Jew. He was not a proselyte convert to Judaism, although it is believed he had studied and had, like Ruth, embraced the Jewish people as his people and the Jewish God as his God. This is demonstrated by his compassion and charitable acts on behalf of the Jewish poor, as mentioned in the passage.
But the point is, he had not undergone circumcision, or full conversion to Judaism, at the time this angel appears to him and promises to bring Peter to him. This all happens without Peter’s knowledge, and then what follows next is Peter’s vision. Let’s read on:
Now, certainly it is understandable how this passage might be taken out of context and thought to be a vision concerning the dietary kosher laws. All sorts of animals, both clean and unclean, are part of Peter’s vision, and a voice does instruct Peter to kill and eat three times. It’s certainly a forgivable misunderstanding.
But we must not make the mistake of taking any part of the Bible out of context; whenever we do, bad theology is the result. Wrong thinking about God is where we end up. So let’s challenge ourselves to go against centuries of teaching to the contrary; let’s forget what we may have heard taught elsewhere and examine what the Scriptures really say here. This is not the end of the story.
Now, if anyone other than God was ever going to know the meaning of this vision given to Peter, it would have to be Peter, right? After all, he’s the one God was communicating with.
Initially, Peter is indeed puzzled over the meaning of this vision. Surely the same thoughts we have today must have been going through his head. Could God really be undoing centuries of Torah tradition on what is good for food and what isn’t? Remember, each of the three times this vision was given to Peter, he replied that he had never let any unclean meat touch his lips. This means Peter was indeed devout; he was a Torah-keeper even as a disciple and emissary of Yeshua Himself!
As Peter is puzzling over the meaning of his vision, though, let’s notice that immediately there’s a knock at the door; messengers from Cornelius arrive and ask Peter to come with them, explaining in:
So after inviting the men to stay for the night, they set out in the morning for Cornelius’ house and Peter goes in to meet with him. Let’s read this next bit carefully, as we skip down to:
This will be the crux of how we should properly interpret Peter’s vision. Right here, in verse twenty-eight, Peter himself explains the interpretation of his vision. He says, “But God has shown me that I should not call any man impure or unclean.”
Where did God show Peter this great message? Just a few verses earlier! Peter is telling us that this is what that vision about clean and unclean animals was all about! You see, if God had not tapped Peter on the shoulder like this, he very likely would have refused to come to the house of Cornelius.
Why? Peter himself tells us why right here. “It is against our law for a Jew to associate with a Gentile or visit him.”
You see, by the very act of visiting Cornelius, Peter was, by the standard Jewish custom of his day, making himself ritually unclean – unfit to visit the Jerusalem Temple and in need of a cleansing – a mikveh – to regain his ritual purity.
Even though Cornelius was a God-fearer whose actions spoke of his love for the Jewish people and their God, he was not yet a convert; he was not yet circumcised; and therefore, he was a source of uncleanness, in the first-century Jewish mindset.
I’d like to read you a passage I found in Stern’s Jewish New Testament Commentary that addresses this issue.
So we have Peter’s own testimony that his vision was not about food at all, but about the inclusion of Gentiles into the first-century congregations of Yeshua. If this is the proper way of understanding Peter’s vision, then there must be some divine confirmation, right?
And are we given any? Certainly. Because as chapter ten continues, Peter begins sharing the good news about Yeshua the Messiah with Cornelius and all of his household, and an amazing, unheard-of thing happens. We read this in:
Does God pour out his Ru’ach haKodesh – his Holy Spirit – on people He does not bless or accept? Of course not! So a person must believe one of two things here. Either Cornelius and his household faked the gifts of the Ru’ach so ingeniously that they fooled Peter and the other emissaries of Yeshua, or God was indeed speaking to Peter about Gentile inclusion into the communities of Yeshua, and the vision was indeed not at all about food.
Peter’s actions with the household of Cornelius is soon brought under criticism, as we read in:
Now carefully notice the objection here. No one is saying that Peter ate pork. No one is suggesting he had a ham sandwich and lobster bisque. The criticism is focused not on what Peter ate, but who he ate it with! He ate with uncircumcised men! The accusation was about his ritual purity because of who he ate with, not what he ate! If what he had eaten had been at issue, it would have been mentioned. The fact that it’s not further underlines the point that this whole episode was not about food, but Gentile inclusion.
Peter goes on to recount everything that happened in detail, and at the end of this, he concludes this way in:
Now, this is great news! When understood properly, it all fits together much more coherently. If Peter’s vision had been about making pulled-pork barbecue sandwiches OK to eat, it would seem out of place in the text of Acts. Properly understood as being a symbolic vision about Gentile inclusion in the first-century communities of Yeshua, the thematic unity of the text is restored.
Now this is where some of us, before we became Messianic, would have begun to get uncomfortable. And it is where, even now, those who know us but do not yet embrace a Messianic understanding, begin to raise questions.
Recently, I had a friend object to our interpretation of this text; he was adamant that it was about doing away with the concept of unclean food because, he reasoned, God would never be so petty as to worry about what we eat and what we don’t eat. It’s all cultural. It’s all about personal tastes.
God doesn’t care about what we eat or don’t eat? Really?
Let me share with you an insight I received while studying through Acts 10 for this very message: Sin entered the world because of a dietary command of God.
Let me say that again: Sin entered the world because of a dietary command of God. Let’s take a look at:
This one, simple command is all Adam was given in the Garden. One simple command, and it was a dietary command. Eat from any tree in the Garden except this one tree. Eat from any tree except from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Don’t eat from that tree.
It was just one command. That’s all Adam had; one dietary command: don’t eat from this one, particular tree. And because Adam and Chaveh couldn’t keep even that one, simple command, sin entered the world. Rebellion against God’s instructions entered the world because we decided that the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil was “good for food and desirable for gaining knowledge.”
Sin entered the world because we refused to let God tell us what to eat and what not to eat.
Now, is that to suggest that disobeying the clean and unclean dietary laws are more important than the other commands of God? Not necessarily.
If I get absent-minded at a gathering and eat a slice of pizza that looks like a cheese pizza, but turns out to have some sausage in it, does it mean I’m in danger of the fires of hell? No. But it does make me unclean. The solution is not the death penalty; the solution is that I immerse myself and I’m unclean until the start of a new day, at sunset.
So, let’s not go overboard here. Dietary laws are not as critical as His command not to murder. We know this because the penalty is different. But dietary laws are an excellent temperature-taking set of commands when it comes to determining our willingness to accept God’s sovereignty in our lives.
It is easy for anyone to say they want to make God the Lord of their life. Anyone can say that. Yet we all know our actions prove our words, don’t we? And we are all familiar with the first-century Jewish argument style known as kol v’chomer, arguing from the lesser to the greater, correct?
So let’s imagine a scene. You are in your prayer closet and while praying, you say, “LORD, I want you to make my life a testimony to you! I want you to use me in powerful ways! Make me a missionary and anywhere you send me, I will go. Africa, Siberia, anywhere.”
So the LORD replies to your prayer and he says, “Give up your pepperoni pizzas.”
Indignant, you reply, “LORD, I love pepperoni pizza! Let’s not focus on such a trivial thing! You’re missing the point! I’m willing to be your missionary to anywhere in the world you wish to send me.”
And then the LORD replies, “If you cannot obey me in this small, simple command to give up pepperoni pizza, how can you obey me to go into the mission field wherever I wish to send you?”
Are you beginning to get the picture? Dietary laws may not be the most critical laws in terms of the penalty for violating them, but that also makes them the simplest to obey! And if we’re not willing to obey the LORD in the small, easy matters, how can we claim we are willing and able to obey Him in anything bigger and more important?
But let’s focus back on Peter. What we have seen in our look at Acts 10 and 11 is that Peter’s vision was not about food, but about Gentile inclusion.
Another objection to this understanding I was recently challenged with, by a friend, is this. “OK, so even if Peter’s vision isn’t about food, that’s certainly what was going on when Peter was confronted by Paul, as related in the book of Galatians! Peter was eating pork with the Gentiles, and that’s a known, indisputable fact!”
Is it?
Since this ties in directly to Peter’s vision, let’s take a look at this related incident in the book of Galatians. We read this in:
Now notice the careful wording here. Paul does not write that Peter ate, “like the Gentiles.” He says that Peter ate “with the Gentiles.”
And why? Because God had shown Peter that it was OK to eat with uncircumcised Gentiles.
There is absolutely no verbiage in this passage that suggests that Peter and the Gentile believers were having ham sandwiches. That would have been the furthest thing from his mind! As a first-century Messianic Jew, the idea of eating anything unclean wouldn’t even cross his mind – it was not something he even considered food.
And when the members of the circumcision group show up, does it say Peter started reaching for the roast beef instead of ham? No, what does it say? It says, “he began to draw back and separate himself from the Gentiles.”
Peter, always rash and eager for acceptance, knew the truth God had shown him in that vision – that it was OK to eat with uncircumcised Gentiles, but he didn’t always live up to that truth. He sometimes would slip up and allow the opinion of others to matter more than God’s opinion of him.
Stern agrees with this interpretation in his commentary, as we read:
So why did Paul “oppose him to his face?” What made Peter “clearly in the wrong?” Was it all over the food on his plate? Not at all. It was the sudden shunning of the uncircumcised Gentiles he had previously been treating as friends and brothers. And his hypocrisy spread quickly to others, as we read in:
So what laws is Paul referring to here? Traditional teaching has been that it is the dietary laws, but that is not the case. After all, the people who show up and cause Peter to start shunning the Messianic Gentiles was known as the circumcision group, not the Clean Meats Only group, right?
We get further verification of this in Stern’s commentary, where he quotes an early Messianic Jewish Rabbi. We read:
What we see here, then, is that the source of many of these episodes of controversy is, if not the same individuals, at least members of the same group. The Messianic Jewish Pharisees who insisted that Gentile believers must be circumcised to be genuinely saved first spring to life in reaction to this new work of Gentile inclusion into the Messianic communities of the first century.
After this, they showed up and began “teaching the brothers at Antioch” without authorization, and disturbing the congregation there since their teaching contradicted that of Paul and Barnabas, who were assigned to Antioch at that time. This lead to the Jerusalem Council decision of Acts 15; there, the legalistic interpretations of the Circumcision group was defeated by James and Peter.
Yet the circumcision group did not go away quietly, we can see, because some time after the Jerusalem Council, the circumcision group shows up again, which leads Peter to forget himself and start shunning the Gentile believers, contrary to the truth of his vision.
In these incidents, the real issue at hand has been that uncircumcised Gentiles are no longer considered to be a source of uncleanness. Yet our twenty-first century cultural blinders mislead us so that we miss that truth and assume it’s about whether it’s okay to eat bacon. Can you see now why it’s important to understand these passages properly and in their first century context?
In the first century, the main problem was cultural pressure on Gentiles to conform to Jewish customs and traditions. How unfortunate it is that the far more common problem today is just the opposite: that we as Christians too often put pressure on Jewish believers in Messiah Yeshua to abandon their Judaism and conform to our customs and traditions.
So my prayer today is that God, through Messiah Yeshua and the ministry of his Ruach haKodesh, would bring all of us together to worship the Father in Spirit and in truth. After all, that’s what our Messianic community, Kehilat Sar Shalom, was founded on.
Shabbat Shalom.
Tags: Peter's vision
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