CHAPTER 21
M. R. Thomas
M. R. Thomas is from India. His insights have emerged from decades of discipling Hindu people.
The greatest crisis the New Testament church ever faced was actually a culture clash, although some believed the issues were doctrinal. They could not imagine life without Moses and the Law. Over the centuries, the laws of Moses had become more than religion. They had become deeply ingrained traditions that gave the Jews their identity as a people. Yet God showed Paul that the gentiles could not live with the Jewish traditions. Paul came to understand that the gentiles should not be forced to accept a gospel that was mired in confusion over what was grace and what was simply Jewish tradition.
When new believers are required to take on a new set of customs to be part of “God’s family,” they quickly confuse grace, which is received by faith, with works. And if they adopt a new human culture, they become outsiders to their own people. This, in turn, results in a gospel that is immobilized. To require people to embrace anything beyond what is found in Scripture puts a yoke on them that they should not bear. Anything more than Scripture is too much. This may seem obvious, but it is something we often ignore. It is a confusion that has created recurring tension throughout the history of missions. And it creates tension still today when we can’t resist including a few amendments to the gospel of grace.
Jesus’s Earthly Ministry
When the Lord Jesus commissioned His followers to make disciples of all nations, they were to be His witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth. During His time with His disciples, Jesus revealed Himself as the Son of God and trained them for the task ahead. “As the Father has sent Me, I am sending you,” He told them (John 20:21). And He promised the Holy Spirit to empower and to guide them. There was a spectacular beginning to the work of missions on the day of Pentecost. The Holy Spirit came as promised and the gospel was preached to an audience of “God-fearing Jews from every nation under the sun” (Acts 2:5). A tremendous response followed and thousands believed. Acts 1–12 describes the growth of the gospel from Jerusalem to Antioch, over a period of about fourteen years.
Gospel to the Jews
This was a unique time; the movement of the gospel was almost entirely within the Jewish community. God had prepared the Jewish community over a period of two thousand years for its Messiah. They had His word in the writings of Moses and the Prophets and in the Psalms. They knew the stories and had embraced the promises of a Messiah to come. The early disciples understood the gospel as the actual fulfillment of the messianic prophecies. They believed that Jesus was the promised Messiah.
This truth about Jesus and their experiences as “witnesses” to Christ’s death and resurrection compelled the Jewish believers to take the gospel to the whole Jewish world. And the gospel fit well into their existing Jewish religious practices. As always, their activities centered around the temple. They continued to observe the Jewish traditions, customs, and feasts. They held to all that was familiar, except that in Jesus, they now had their Messiah. In their minds, Judaism had been validated; the ancient Scriptures had been fulfilled. Most Jewish Christians were not aware that they were, in fact, a part of a new global work by God Himself.
This truth about Jesus and their experiences as “witnesses” to Christ’s death and resurrection compelled the Jewish believers to take the gospel to the whole Jewish world.
Gospel to the Gentiles
A few had more insight into the changes Christianity would bring. Stephen must have understood that it was impossible for the gospel message to remain within the boundaries of Judaism. He must have recognized that the temple, with its rituals and institutions, was a thing of the past. His defense, when he was arrested, reveals his understanding of God’s purposes. He was brought before the Sanhedrin under the charge that he spoke “against this holy place and against the law,” that he had said, “Jesus of Nazareth will destroy this place and change the customs of Moses handed down to us” (Acts 6:13–14 NIV). When Stephen answered by referring to Isaiah 66:1–2, he reflected the same radical change Jesus communicated to the Samaritan woman at the well—that the time “has now come when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and in truth” (John 4:23 NIV).
Stephen was stoned to death. With the outbreak of persecution, many Jewish Christians were forced to flee Jerusalem. For these people, the temple now ceased to be the focal point of their worship; the gospel was extended geographically. “Now those who had been scattered by the persecution in connection with Stephen traveled as far as Phoenicia, Cyprus, and Antioch, telling the message only to the Jews” (Acts 11:19 NIV). These Christians still believed that Jesus was exclusive Jewish property. From their perspective, they were the “heirs” of the gospel. But some of them “began to speak to the Greeks also” (Acts 11:20 NIV). This was of greatest significance.
This indeed was a turning point! God blessed their efforts and “the Lord’s hand was with them and a great number of people believed” (Acts 11:21 NIV). This fact triggered the movement of the gospel into the gentile world as the apostolic teams of Paul, Barnabas, and others set out from Antioch. Acts 13–28 records the spread of the gospel into the gentile world. It was not without tension and conflict, but through them, God’s eternal purposes were clarified and understood.
Insight into the chasm between the world of the Jewish believers, and that of the gentiles, helps us understand and learn from the tensions the early disciples worked through. There was one exceptional case, before Antioch and Paul’s mission to the gentiles, in which the gospel spilled over from its Jewish mold into a gentile’s home. This was the apostle Peter’s visit to the home of Cornelius, a Roman military officer who was “devout and God-fearing and prayed to God regularly” (Acts 10:2 NIV). Peter visited Cornelius under coercion by the Holy Spirit. He even told his gentile host, “You are well aware that it is against our law for a Jew to associate with a Gentile or visit him” (Acts 10:28 NIV). But God had put Peter through a special preparation which helped him add, “But God has shown me that I should not call any man impure or unclean.” Peter overcame a major mental block and when he heard Cornelius’s story, he received fresh insight that caused him to exclaim, “I now realize how true it is that God accepts men from every nation who fear him” (Acts 10:34–35 NIV).
With this realization Peter began to explain the gospel to all who had gathered at Cornelius’s house. Even before he finished, God ratified his message by sending the Holy Spirit! The Jewish believers “were astonished that the gift of the Holy Spirit had been poured out even on the Gentiles” (Acts 10:45 NIV). But Peter found himself in trouble when he returned to Jerusalem. The Jewish believers there “criticized him and said, ‘You went into the house of uncircumcised men and ate with them’” (Acts 11:2–3 NIV). Peter explained all that had happened. With this, his critics concluded, “So then, God has even granted the Gentiles repentance unto life” (Acts 11:18 BSB).
This early episode gives us a glimpse of the struggles that the early disciples experienced in understanding what God was doing and the implications of the gospel. But the real tensions were yet to come. God had chosen Paul to take the gospel to the gentiles. It probably took several years for Paul to grasp God’s purposes for the Jews and all peoples. He came to understand that the gospel of Christ was distinct from the Jewish law and tradition, that salvation was by faith in Jesus Christ apart from the law. He grew to realize that the gospel of grace was for all peoples and that there was no difference between Jew and gentile. This understanding was not his own invention; it was revealed to him. It was the message he preached on his first missionary journey with Barnabas when God “opened the door of faith to the Gentiles” (Acts 14:27 NIV). Many gentiles turned to Christ at this time, and the gospel was sown into the gentile soil.
Some Jewish Christians, probably from Jerusalem and Judea, did not agree with Paul’s message. They said, “Unless you are circumcised, according to the custom taught by Moses, you cannot be saved” (Acts 15:1 NIV). These people went about “correcting” the gospel Paul preached believing he had left out the need for circumcision. He had not told the gentiles to observe Jewish customs to become part of God’s people. When Paul heard about this, he was furious.
At the Jerusalem Council, some Jewish Christians maintained vehemently that “The Gentiles must be circumcised and required to keep the law of Moses” (Acts 15:5 NIV). It is important to notice the process and the basis on which conclusions were drawn as the apostles and elders considered the issue. After much discussion and debate, Peter recalled the Cornelius episode and the lessons that came from the experience. He said, “God . . . showed that he accepted them by giving the Holy Spirit to them, just as he did to us. . . . He purified their hearts by faith” (Acts 15:8–9 NIV). Then Peter put his finger on the core issue by saying, “Why do you try to test God by putting on the necks of the Gentiles a yoke that neither we nor our ancestors have been able to bear?” (Acts 15:10 NIV). Paul and Barnabas spoke next, and “the whole assembly became silent as they listened” to what “God had done among the Gentiles” (Acts 15:12 NIV). Finally, James spoke up, quoting from Amos. Echoing Peter’s observation, he said, “We should not make it difficult for the Gentiles who are turning to God” (Acts 15:19 NIV).
We, too, must be ready to celebrate the ways that Christ is obeyed fully, but differently, amidst the diverse cultures of the nations.
The Gospel Today
The purity and mobility of the gospel were at stake on that day. The essence of the gospel was distinguished from its Judaic cultural background. How far would the good news have gone if Paul had lost this debate? The entire movement of Christ-followers called “The Way” would have ended up like one of the hundreds of splinter sects of Judaism which are now defunct. Instead God orchestrated a dramatic change: to follow Christ, gentiles would no longer have to become Jewish in cultural ways. God had opened the door of faith to the nations.
The first-century disciples had to sort out the universal glory of Jesus from the cultural patterns of Judaism before they could obey the Great Commission and take the gospel to all nations. This is our challenge today as well. We, too, must sort out Jesus from our religious traditions, from “our” Christianity. We, too, must free the gospel from the amendments we’ve made to the grace of Jesus Christ. We, too, must be ready to celebrate the ways that Christ is obeyed fully, but differently, amidst the diverse cultures of the nations. Only then will the gospel continue to go forward “unhindered” (Acts 28:31). 