What are the boundaries of God's people? What changes and what doesn't?
In this second part of Acts the Gospel moves out from Jerusalem to Judea and touches the nations.
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Transcript
Dan:
Hi, and welcome to episode 25 of training for life redeemed. I’m your host, Dan and I am here with my father, David Jackson. We are continuing through part two of Acts this week. We’re looking at chapters nine through to 12. So then we’re going to kind of, at the end of chapter nine, here looked at the Roman Centurion and how he’s brought into the kingdom of God. Now, this is a big challenge for Jews, particularly because we’re now looking at accepting Gentiles into the family and not just any Gentile . This is a Roman Centurion, which means they probably has been involved in some kind of fights against the Jews and arresting Jews and all that kind of stuff as well. Tell us a bit about this.
David:
Okay. So Israel, Judea is under occupation by the Roman army. they were taken over in 63 BC. There’s been all kinds of fights and nonsense and riots and false christs have popped up. And Roman troops have gone out and slaughtered people. They’re not welcome. Okay. This is armies of occupation and never welcome . So for a Jew, particularly, so you take somebody like Peter, Peter is he’s a fisherman . He’s a , is your average sort of Jewish fellow that Jesus has trained up as a disciple. And he’s tried to obey Torah . He’s tried to be a godly God-fearing Jewish fellow who worships Jesus as Lord and savior. Now we’re going to ask him to go and stay a few days with a Roman Centurion.
Dan:
It’s a bit of prep work beforehand, though. It does get a solid vision around food. And the fact that you know , anything that God declares to be clean should be clean . I think he puts put in a bit of background work here. I think he used to mention putting the learning under Jesus for quite a while .
David:
I mean, Mark 7, Jesus declared all foods clean. So all those boundaries that the old covenant set up to keep Israel from mingling with Gentiles, there , all those fences are coming down. Now the only fence that separates God’s people from the rest of the world is their commitment to Christ. So our boundary is faith, but not national borders, not ethnicity, not, you know , food laws and purity laws. So, but man, that’s challenging. If you look at, I mean, I look at our coffee culture and you’ve got, I would never be a barista in a tell me how many different ways can you make coffee too many. I’m not a barista, but yeah . You know, half lattes , I dunno . But then you get the next group of people and who have 47 different things. They don’t eat. And 47 things they do eat and you’re going to cater for 12 people at a party. And each one of them has a different diet. Uh , it gets to be a problem. Food separates. So in this case you were going to ask , uh, do who’s never broken the food laws to be eating stuff that Romans eat. And that really is hard. And part of the hardness of it is not only does it break God’s Torah, but some of that food’s disgusting. I think let’s be honest. We’re being able to , I’m not a great fan of fish. I know people who can’t stand oysters, that’s nothing compared to what these Romans are going to serve up, go look it up on the web. So it’s a big challenge for Peter cross-cultural ministry means that things like food and dress habits and all this stuff, we’ve just got to let go of all that. And we’re going to sit at a table and enjoy being God’s family. Peter’s going to learn that lesson.
Dan:
All right . And then maybe moving to Greeks, getting converted out in Antioch. So now we’re moving, not just to, you know, sort of Gentile and Judea who is kind of devout like the centurion. And he seems to love God and want to follow God without moving out. Even further, adding up to Antioch, the spread of the church here, continuing to move out from Jerusalem. We’ve moved into Judea Antioch’s a little bit further.
David:
Yeah . You got to take your hat off to the Greeks. I say that with my daughter-in-law being Greek, but you’ve got to take your hat off to him . When these guys got converted , uh, the Greek church spread east and it, it went all the way down to Arabia, went down into Africa. It went across to Persia. It really travelled. But when you look at this particular section of acts , you go, okay, I can cope with a Samaritan. You know , I I’ve I’ve I’ve, I’ve had a case of, you know , a black fellow who’s been castrated. That’s that’s pretty challenging for the old covenant fellow we’ll even welcome a Roman Centurion, but fall final challenge is. Greeks, we’re going to go to a foreign city. So these aren’t just, people are getting converted within the boundaries of Judea . We’re now seeing people converted outside the boundary of Judea. We’re in Greek territory in Antioch, and they’re going to flood into the church. So, okay. We’re in a Jewish synagogue, that’s become Christian. And there’s a couple of odd people in here. There’s a Samaritan there and some fellow from somewhere else over there. But now you’re asking me to go on my travels to Antioch. And instead of sitting in a Jewish synagogue, you’re asking me to go to a synagogue full of Greeks, where there’s a couple of Jews. But the thing that binds us together is believing in Jesus. We’ve just pushed the culture shock to the next level. And it’s saying that the church is going to be dominated by people from every nation, tribe and language. It will no longer be dominated by Jewish people and that’s going to cause all kinds of problems.
Dan:
Yeah . We’re going to get to the main problem that that’s going to bring in yet because that’s in our next episode, come and join us next week. And the next day was . That’d be Friday, possibly for our next episode where we will talk about that issue of circumcision. But before we get there, Acts, Luke , as he’s writing this , it’s going to give us this section on Herod where Herod essentially just accepts praise from people which probably wasn’t too uncommon for Kings or emperors or anything at the time yet he really gets destroyed.
David:
He Does. And he does it in style. So remember Luke is writing this book as a report to Theophilus. Theophilus is a Roman nobleman and night of the equestrian order. He ranks with provincial governors. We think maybe he’s writing this report for Theophilus as background for when Paul has to stand before Caesar on trial. So he Luke’s putting in stuff here that would be relevant to arguing that Christianity, the Christian faith is not a threat to Rome. So what is a threat to Rome? Well , the people who are persecuting Christians, they are the t hreat to Roman order and peace. The gospel brings peace and Shalom and blessing and healing. We’ve seen people healed in the temple, the people who o pposed the gospel, are, creating riots and, illegal murders and all sorts of terrible things. Well, let’s go and have a, have a look at the people who the Romans ha ve p ut in charge and He rod i s not a reputable king. He, the lifestyle, the , the corruption, the Herods were famous for, and by this stage, the Romans were ready to pull them out of power and break down their power base. So here’s Herod and he’s , uh , he’s having trouble with the Tyrians and the Sidonians. And they’ve come to make peace. We’re looking at a great famine in the Roman empire. Uh, so you want to make sure your trading relations are good and he gets there and his palace and Caesar air Maritima. And we’re told that he’s dressed in his silver robe and all these measures . He’s trying to impress everybody. And the people who look at him are going , uh , we want to suck up to the, the Roman authority here. So we’ll tell him what he wants to hear. You’re a great guy . You’re a God. And he accepts the praise of being a God. Well, Caesar claims to be a God. There’s a whole cult of worshiping Caesar as a God. And Herod is making the same claims that that’s maybe gonna offend Nero anyway, but what’s , what’s powerful Here is what God does back in the old Testament, Isaiah and Ezekiel mock , the Kings of Tyre and Babylon who wanted to proclaim that they were gods. And one of the comments they make to these fellows is , you think you’re a guard you aspire to being up there in the heavens well God’s going to bring it down. he’s got a bed of maggots waiting for you. He’s got worms waiting for you. And here is Herod. You are a God. And the next thing, you know, he’s screaming with abdominal pain as the worms block his bowel, and he dropped any dead and he dies in agony. And the message is pretty clear. Yahweh is God. If you make yourself a God will show you just where you fit in terms of God’s creation back down there with the dirt. it’s and the message is really clear. you don’t compete with God.
Dan:
That’d bring us to the end of this episode, which was episode 25. If you would like the study notes for episode 25, please come over to trainingforliferedeemed.com/ 25. And you can grab the study notes for this episode. If you’re enjoying the podcast, please leave us a review. And we hope that you subscribe as well so that you come back next week for episode 26 or in two days that I keep remembering that make sure you come back for episode 26, where we look at Acts 13 to 15, and we finish off part two of Acts.
