Acts #43 - Restored

Acts 15:12-21 (NIV)
Read by: Hugo Castro

If God is gracious and loving, then what are the boundaries of behaviour for those of us who begin to follow Jesus?

This is a part of the questions that the followers of Jesus are trying to work out in today’s passage? Now that the Holy Spirit is moving in and including the Gentiles in the family of God, what does it look like to walk together and be set apart as God’s holy people? Some say that they need to be circumcised and follow Torah.

Now, this passage is full of contention and debate around how we should interpret it, but here are some helpful thoughts. Basically James says that we shouldn’t make it hard for Gentiles to turn to God, instead let’s tell them to abstain from food sacrificed to idols, sexual immorality, and from the meat of strangled animals and from blood. Some take this as a basic set of guidelines to keep from offending the Jewish Christians. Others think it’s a narrowed set of basics that are being prescribed. And still others probably think that it’s a problem with scripture and don’t like that it’s there.

However some context will help. First, these abstaintions were not new, they were actually given to the Israelites in the wilderness with provisions for the gentiles living among them in the wilderness. So we can hear James just reaching back to that tradition. Some Jewish scholars point back to Noah, and the laws given to him. And others the James is pointing to the need for Gentiles to no longer participate in the Pagan temple practices which included all these things.

All of this is probably at play, but at the end of the day, Gentiles didn’t need to adopt the Law of Moses because they probably already would have if they wanted to. But they also couldn’t go on living life as usual, and if they can get along with their Jewish neighbors without causing them to stumble even better.

----------REFLECT----------

1. What challenged you in this passage?

2. The verse about David's Fallen tent is a ref. To the temple and God’s desire to restore it, and he does so by placing his presence not in a new temple but in humans where there are new creatures. How do these abstensions make sense when you think about humans as temples?

3. Sexual immorality is actually the most clear abstention. But what about the other two? Food sacrificed to idols was about not participating in idol worship, and the rules about strangled animals and blood was about respect for life. In what ways might the Spirit want to restore you, his temple, in respect to our modern idols, you sexuality, and your view of the value of life?

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