Peter and the Gospel for all
In Acts 1:8 Jesus gives a template for where the Gospel is heading – Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria and to the ends of the earth. Peter was there, and he heard this. Yet when we get to Acts 10 we see that Peter was still grappling with the implications of how much Jesus had changed.
One day Peter has a vision (10:10) where he’s told by God to eat food that is unclean. You might remember from the Gospels that Peter had had a few tests in the past and hadn’t done so well. But on this one, God’s law was pretty clear (Leviticus 11), so I’m sure he thought he was getting the answer right. But God’s correction to Peter highlights the flaw in Peter’s thinking – a declaration of being clean before God is not given based on adherence to the law, but on acceptance of Jesus.
Now at some level Peter already knew this – it’s what he’d been preaching. In fact, it’s what he heard Jesus saying back in Mark 7:1–23, a Gospel for which Peter was a key source of information. So the problem wasn’t that Peter didn’t know the Gospel, it’s that he was struggling to apply the implications of the Gospel in the rapidly changing environment he was finding himself.
In Peter’s defense, it’s not as if he wasn’t trying. After the vision, and the servants of the Gentile Centurion Cornelius arrives, he goes with them. And though he knows he’ll become unclean by sitting and eating with Cornelius (Acts 10:28; 11:1–3) he goes in anyway because God has told him to. And Peter sees the results of the Gospel. The Gentiles receive the Spirit just as the Jews have (Acts 10:44–46), and Peter goes back to his fellow Jews and defends his actions.
Peter’s reasoning: “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?” (Acts 11:17)
The Gospel with limitations
It all sounds so good and harmonious. But the implementation of what Peter, and his fellow Jews in Jerusalem know and have seen to be true (Acts 11:17–18), isn’t implemented quite as smoothly. We can see two examples of this.
The first is of Peter himself. Peter’s a pillar of the early church. He’s the main guy, the first of the disciples, in the first half of Acts, even to the point of doing things that Jesus himself did (Acts 9:36–42). But even being a pillar of the church, and even having received a direct instruction from God in regards to what makes someone a part of God’s people and what doesn’t (i.e. not food laws), the implementation of these truths are hard fought. We find him in Galatians 2:11–21 being opposed by Paul for precisely the thing God has spoken to him about in Acts 10. Peter is willing to acknowledge that the Gentiles are part of the Kingdom, but he still finds himself drawn back into ways of thinking and patterns of behaviour that are contrary to the freedom found in the Gospel.
The second is of the Jewish believers in Jerusalem and Judea, and their attitude to the Gentiles. We see in Acts 15 that some of the believers were telling the Gentiles they needed to be circumcised (Acts 15:1,5). It’s not as if they didn’t believe that Jesus was the only source of forgiveness or life. It’s that they hadn’t got to the point where they realised that the Gospel didn’t make people Jewish, it made them children of God. And those two things were not the same. It’s into this issue that Peter speaks and declares that “It is through the face of our Lord Jesus that we are saved, just as they are.” (Acts 15:11)
In both of these instances, it’s not that Peter nor the Jewish believers, are weak, theologically un–insightful or even uncaring. It’s that it’s hard. It’s hard to realise your cultural and personal baggage, it’s hard to have it challenged by others, and it’s even harder to call it publicly for what it is.
And to make the situation even more difficult for the Jews, these monumental changes in relating to God for the Jews, are being accompanied by a shift in power from Jerusalem, and from the Jewish nations, to the ends of the earth. Their influence and power is being diluted.
