I'm not quite ready to leave Acts 15 just yet.
AD,
Mostly unpacked so I'm back!! With hopefully some new thoughts....
How can two groups from diff cultures live together in one church without on the one hand compromising the grace of Christ in legalism or on the other offending the sense of decency of some good Christian brothers and sisters? That is exactly the issue that this early church is struggling with in Acts 15. This would be no different than if I were to worship say in Bulgaria today. There would most likely be an immediate cultural clash because of customs very strange to me.
We've already established the cultural issue here was whether circumcision was necessary for salvation (15:1). Peter voiced the solution
..."we believe it is through the grace of our Lord Jesus that we are saved, just as they are." (v 11).
James agreed referring to
"all the Gentiles who bear my name" (v17). In other words, the Gentiles might remain Gentiles and still be saved. Circumcision was not necessary.
We must be clear what this council
did not do. It
did not require circumcision or the keeping of the sabbath or tithing or the kosher regulations. These rules marked out a Jew from a Gentile and in the end were not enforced upon Gentile Christians.
Paul would have been satisfied with the ruling for his concern with "works" and "law" in Romans and Galatians is not with moral rules, but with those practices that marked out Jew from Gentile. That they were not necessary for salvation is a point of agreement between Paul and the council.
We also need to be clear about the nature of worship in the early church. Christians met in homes. A city church would have many cells each with perhaps a maximum of 60 people depending on the size of the house. At each service the central feature was a meal with a loaf of bread broken in the beginning and shared with a cup of wine at the end. In between would be a potluck meal. So Jew and Gentile believers would be eating together.
Therefore Pauline discussion of food in 1 Cor 8-10 and Romans 14 was to assist a church in living together. It had nothing to do with regulating private behavior.
So what does this all mean in the context of Acts? All of them have to do with the Mosaic law drawn from Leviticus 17-18. The first issue in those chapters in Lev is the sacrificing of an animal to anything other than Yahweh or even sacrificing it to him outside the appointed place. Thus a Jew would find it impossible to eat meath that came from a sacrifice to a god other than Yahweh. Most meat found in pagan markets was in some way associated with idols. Paul does not believe that this contaminates the meat (1 Cor 8-10) although he rules out going to a meal in an idol temple. He stated clearly that love would make one refuse to offend a weaker brother (a Jew) on this issue.
The other issue in Lev is that of blood. There were two ways in which blood might e eaten. In many cultures blood was eaten directly as in blood sausage and pudding. In some cultures the manner of slaughter might lead to retention of blood in the meat maybe even deliberatly to keep it tenderer. But neither of these ways were acceptable to the Jews. It must be poured out.
The third issue in Lev 17-18 is that of inappropriate sexual relations. It would be highly disturbing to a Jew to have table fellowship at the Lord's table with a person who had an inappropriate relationship. Paul opposes just such a relation in 1 Cor 5.
What we are talking about then is Paul's rule of love in Romans 14 summed up
...."The kingdom of God is not a matter of eating and drinking, but of righteeousness, peace and joy in the Holy Spirit (Rom 14:17). If the Gentile Christians would keep the minimal food standards not so much in what they did privately at home but in what they brought to church or served Jewish believers, and if they would observe minimal rules of sexual decency, then Jews and Gentiles could live and function together in the church. As long as the principles were based on love and unity Paul had no problem. Only when the legal rituals became a means of salvation then he put his foot down.
Go to Rev 2:14,20 and you'll see a similar rule put here. There are examples of Christians in the early church who felt bound by the rules. But at the same time there is often an observing of the rules and an ignoring of the reasons for them. Even now in different cultures these things still can come up with strange culture clashes. In some cultures it might be the way a woman dresses that might offend. If we adopted their cultural patterns we might feel a rigid legalism upon us that would stifle our growth.
Paul should be our guide. He clearly prohibits sexual immorality for ALL Christians everywhere, leaving the dietary rules to our own conscience before God and our love for our fellow Christians.
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