daily java

Daily Java:

The next day Paul went with us to meet with James, and all the elders of the Jerusalem church were present. After greeting them, Paul gave a detailed account of the things God had accomplished among the Gentiles through his ministry. After hearing this, they praised God. And then they said, “You know, dear brother, how many thousands of Jews have also believed, and they all follow the law of Moses very seriously. But the Jewish believers here in Jerusalem have been told that you are teaching all the Jews who live among the Gentiles to turn their backs on the laws of Moses. They’ve heard that you teach them not to circumcise their children or follow other Jewish customs. What should we do? They will certainly hear that you have come. (Acts 21:18-22)

There is always someone who is willing and ready to minimize what you have done.

There had been a massive paradigm shift in the kingdom of God. No longer was one group of people important and the others second class. Now all were equal in Christ Jesus. No longer would the Jews be the sole people of God. He had turned from them. In fact, he hadn’t even spoken to them for over 400 years.

Now, in order to be his people, they had to come to him and accept his grace on an equal footing with the Gentiles.

They could not stand this. Of course, you can understand why. The entire Old Testament revelation was either given to them or given to others with them in a primary position. They had been big.

When Paul came up and told them what good was being done, they agreed. Yeah, yeah, that’s great. But, you know, there are lots of Jews being converted and one thing is for sure. They do not want to change. They will accept Jesus, but they do not want to change their lifestyles.

What is more, they are afraid Paul was teaching other Jews that they didn’t have to keep the law of Moses, something they loved and felt was their right and due.

And he was. His message was that the old order was gone. There was now a new order: a law of love and grace, not of laws and commandments.

By the end of this chapter, they were trying to beat him to death and he had to be carried by a bunch of soldiers on their shoulders to keep him from being killed.

In their defense, the church in Jerusalem was treading a fine line. The Jews were as rabid about keeping their laws and customs as the Muslims are today. The only real difference between the two was that they did not insist on converting the rest of the world at the point of a sword.

They would, however, kill you if you told them that their way of doing things was not valid anymore. And the church was both afraid for their own survival in a hostile situation and themselves basically unwilling to change their lifestyles. They had always been Jews and could not imagine worshiping God any other way.

So they reminded Paul of the letter they had sent with him telling everybody what they had to do. Paul, of course, had disregarded this letter as another attempt of the old guard to force their wishes on the new guard. The things it contained, They should abstain from eating food offered to idols, from consuming blood or the meat of strangled animals, and from sexual immorality (Acts 21:25), were for the most part true.

Their real problem was that God had shown Peter a vision saying what he had created not to consider unclean. In other words, eat everything and shut up about it. So everything in the letter except for immorality was not valid any longer, and Jesus had already talked about immorality anyway. There was no reason for an official letter.

When it came down to it, no one in the church has the right to tell anybody else what they can or cannot do. Our relationship in this new order is based on our relationship with God, not with somebody “in authority.”

The customs you follow in life do not matter. What matters is when you begin to mandate them. Then they become wrong.

And there are those who will not care what good you are doing. They will only care about how you can make them feel better.

That is a shame, but it is true.

But we continue anyway. And may God be praised and we be placed in second place.