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 As this passage has been historically taught, we have come to view it as one of the key moments in which God repealed all the kosher laws, the rules about which animals were either clean or unclean as food for us.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:
ACTS 10:1-6
At Caesarea there was a man named Cornelius, a centurion in what was known as the Italian Regiment. He and all his family were devout and God-fearing; he gave generously to those in need and prayed to God regularly. One day at about three in the afternoon he had a vision. He distinctly saw an angel of God, who came to him and said, “Cornelius!” Cornelius stared at him in fear. “What is it, Lord?” he asked. The angel answered, “Your prayers and gifts to the [Jewish] poor have come up as a memorial offering before God. Now send men to Joppa to bring back a man named Simon who is called Peter. He is staying with Simon the tanner, whose house is by the sea.”
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:
ACTS 10:9-16
About noon the following day as they were on their journey and approaching the city, Peter went up on the roof to pray. He became hungry and wanted something to eat, and while the meal was being prepared, he fell into a trance. He saw heaven opened and something like a large sheet being let down to earth by its four corners. It contained all kinds of four-footed animals, as well as reptiles of the earth and birds of the air. Then a voice told him, “Get up, Peter. Kill and eat.” “Surely not, Lord!” Peter replied. “I have never eaten anything impure or unclean.” The voice spoke to him a second time, “Do not call anything impure that God has made clean.” This happened three times, and immediately the sheet was taken back to heaven.
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:
ACTS 10:22
The men replied, “We have come from Cornelius the centurion. He is a righteous and God-fearing man, who is respected by all the Jewish people. A holy angel told him to have you come to his house so that he could hear what you have to say.”
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:
ACTS 10:27-29A
Talking with him, Peter went inside and found a large gathering of people. He said to them: “You are well aware that it is against our law for a Jew to associate with a Gentile or visit him. But God has shown me that I should not call any man impure or unclean. So when I was sent for, I came without raising any objection.
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.
STERN, JEWISH NT COMMENTARY, PP. 257
Would God, who established his covenant with the Jewish people and gave them an eternal Torah at Mount Sinai, and who is Himself unchangeable, change his Torah to make unclean animals kosher? This is the apparent meaning, and many Christian commentators assert that this is in fact the meaning. But they ignore the plain statement a few verses later which at last resolves Kefa’s (Peter’s) puzzlement, “God has shown me not to call any person unclean or impure. So the vision is about persons and not about food. God has not abrogated the Jewish dietary laws. Yeshua said, “Don’t think that I have come to do away with the Torah.”
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:
ACTS 10:44-46
While Peter was still speaking these words, the Holy Spirit came on all who heard the message. The circumcised believers who had come with Peter were astonished that the gift of the Holy Spirit had been poured out even on the Gentiles. For they heard them speaking in tongues and praising God.
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:
ACTS 11:2-3
So when Peter went up to Jerusalem, the circumcised believers criticized him and said, “You went into the house of uncircumcised men and ate with them.”
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:
ACTS 11:15-18
“As I began to speak, the Holy Spirit came on them as he had come on us at the beginning. Then I remembered what the Lord had said: ‘John baptized with water, but you will be baptized with the Holy Spirit.’ So if God gave them the same gift as he gave us, who believed in the Lord Jesus Christ, who was I to think that I could oppose God?” When they heard this, they had no further objections and praised God, saying, “So then, God has granted even the Gentiles repentance unto life.”
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:
GENESIS 2:15-17
The LORD God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it. And the LORD God commanded the man, “You are free to eat from any tree in the garden; but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat of it you will surely die.”
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:
GALATIANS 2:11-12
When Peter came to Antioch, I opposed him to his face, because he was clearly in the wrong. Before certain men came from James, he used to eat with the Gentiles. But when they arrived, he began to draw back and separate himself from the Gentiles because he was afraid of those who belonged to the circumcision group.
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:
STERN, JEWISH NT COMMENTARY, PP. 528-529
…it is not to be thought that Kefa (Peter) had abandoned Jewish tradition and now ignored keeping kosher, so that he ate with any and all Gentiles whenever he felt like it. His loyalty to kashrut had been such that nothing treif (unclean) had ever touched his lips prior to his seeing Cornelius; for this we have his word, spoken while he was seeing a vision and reported thereafter by him to other believers. There the meaning of Kefa’s vision was not that the laws of kashrut had been abrogated, but that a new circumstance, the inclusion of Gentiles in the Messianic Community, was to have an impact on Torah, so that keeping kosher became a less important mitzvah than preserving fellowship between Jewish and Gentile believers. Accordingly, the laws of kashrut remain; the Messianic Community has not ignored them…
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:
GALATIANS 2:13-16
The other Jews joined him in his hypocrisy, so that by their hypocrisy even Barnabas was led astray. When I saw that they were not acting in line with the truth of the gospel, I said to Peter in front of them all, “You are a Jew, yet you live like a Gentile and not like a Jew. How is it, then, that you force Gentiles to follow Jewish customs? We who are Jews by birth and not ‘Gentile sinners’ know that a man is not justified by observing the law, but by faith in Jesus Christ. So we, too, have put our faith in Christ Jesus that we may be justified by faith in Christ and not by observing the law, because by observing the law no one will be justified.”
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:
STERN, JEWISH NT COMMENTARY, P. 529
Daniel Klutstein has offered an alternative understanding: the problem may not have been whether fellowship between Jewish and Gentile believers is more compelling than kashrut but whether it is more compelling than ritual purity. Today it is hard to appreciate how important ritual purity was in first-century Jewish life, although the fact that one-sixth of the Talmud is devoted to this subject ought to give an indication. True, Orthodox Jews go to the mikveh on various occasions. But in the first century, homes of observant Jews frequently had mikveh built in: to be able to maintain ritual purity at all times it was considered normal to have a private mikveh … consider that Kefa (Peter) went frequently to the Temple; he would not have been able to enter in a ritually impure state, but eating with Gentiles and being in their homes could render him impure and thus subject to criticism by the picky.
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.
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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