EPISODE 60 Chapter 15 "The Big Decision"

In today's chapter, we read about an important meeting convened by early Christianity's most important leaders. They had to take up a huge question that threatened to divide the movement if it wasn't resolved, a question that would not only decide what Christianity would ultimately become, but even determine what the true gospel message should consist of. Let's take a listen. Acts chapter 15: The Big Decision. A history professor I had in college was fond of saying, and I can still see Dr. Panosian stride up to his big podium in the big lecture hall, and he began this way on the very first lecture my freshman year: The one thing we learn from history is that we don't learn from history.

I don't think he made that up, because I've had other people tell me their history teacher often said the same thing. We laugh at that because it's funny, but it's also ridiculously and tragically true. We humans forget some of the most important lessons from the past and repeat the same mistakes over and over. We're going to run into a maddening example of that today related to a time when the leaders of the early church faced a big decision. As we open this chapter, chapter 15, the church at Antioch, Syria, where Paul and Barnabas had been ministering and which sent them out on their first missionary journey, was now about 15 years old, approximately, and it was going strong. And I would love to have been a member in that church during that era.

It seems to me to be a model for what God has in mind for a local church. But of course, obstacles and issues always arise. Luke tells us that during this time, the peace of this church was disrupted by some men from Jerusalem who arrived in Antioch. They felt it was their job to convince the Gentile believers there that they needed to be circumcised in order to be right with God. That might sound completely crazy to you, and I'm sure it did to many of the early Gentiles in Antioch's church. But it wasn't a totally random idea.

Circumcision was the physical mark of the covenant God made with the Jews that extended clear back to the time of Abraham in the book of Genesis. It was one of the cultural practices that God told Abraham his descendants should follow to set themselves apart from other nations. So, Jews had practiced this for centuries and actually took pride in it as a distinguishing feature, as a mark of their being God's chosen people. This might not be the only Jewish practice these people from Jerusalem were attempting to impress on the Gentiles in Antioch, but Luke mentions it because it was no doubt the most problematic. Think of it this way. These men who came from Jerusalem were telling early Gentile Christians in Antioch that if they really wanted to be right with God, they needed to essentially become Jewish proselytes and practice Jewish customs.

And let's get you started with this awkward, painful one right here. These men obviously were still thinking of Christianity as a sect of Judaism and, on a human level, I think, were concerned that Christianity was growing too fast and beyond the control of the leaders in Jerusalem. They felt they were losing their grip. Can you imagine the disruption and the questions this had to produce in the church at Antioch, where Jews and Gentiles had now been worshiping together in peace as equal for years? Luke says that Paul and Barnabas took great exception to what these men from Jerusalem were teaching, and they sharply debated with them. To try and solve the debate, a decision was reached by the leaders in Antioch, where Saul and Barnabas, to lead a delegation to Jerusalem for a meeting with the apostles and elders, where this problem could be aired.

They wanted, once and for all, for early Christianity's leaders together to affirm exactly what was necessary for a person to be not only right in God's eyes, but also to be recognized as fully a part of the Christian church movement. What happens next in Acts chapter 15 is usually referred to as the Jerusalem Council, and the question taken up there could not have been any more crucial. Paul and Barnabas went as representatives of the church at Antioch, as representatives of the view that Gentiles who put their faith in Jesus were the equals, in God's eyes, of any Jews, even those who had been with Jesus from day one. They took along a few Gentile believers as examples of this, one of whom we later learn was Titus.

At this meeting were leaders of the church at Jerusalem, including some of Christ's original apostles, Paul and Barnabas and their delegation from Antioch, and representatives of the faction who wanted Christianity to remain very Jewish in its practices. Luke describes this group in verse 5 as believers who belonged to the party of the Pharisees. I'm sure if you've been listening for a while to Share the Word, you know who the Pharisees were. This was a sect of Judaism, very concerned with retaining Israel's customs from the past and who lived strictly by the Old Testament law. But notice Luke calls them here believers. So these men were schooled in Phariseeism as Paul himself had been, but they had since that time become believers in Jesus as Messiah.

So they were believers who believed in keeping the Old Testament law on top of believing in Jesus. When Paul and Barnabas and their delegation reached Jerusalem, they rehearsed what God had been doing this time in Antioch, probably as well as in Galatia where they had recently returned. This is how Paul expressed his side's point of view. Brothers, you all know that God chose me from among you some time ago to preach to the Gentiles so they could hear the good news and believe. God knows people's hearts, and he confirmed that he accepts Gentiles by giving them the Holy Spirit just as he did to us. He's made no distinction between us and them.

He has cleansed their hearts through faith as well. So why are you now challenging God by burdening these Gentile believers with a yoke that neither we nor our ancestors were able to bear? We believe that we are all saved the same way, by the undeserved grace of our Lord Jesus Christ. But the spokesman for the Jewish faction, we often refer to these people as the Judaizers, pressed their view that these new Gentile believers must be circumcised and required to live under the law of Moses. Their position, again, was that new converts from among the Gentiles should be taught that in order to become fully Christians, they must essentially become Jewish proselytes first and live according to Jewish laws and customs. They wanted growing Christianity to remain in practice kind of a new and improved form of Judaism.

After those two points of view were expressed before the council, the elders, the apostles, the leading Christians in Jerusalem. They all took some time to discuss this, Luke says. The term Luke uses here indicates this important question was thoroughly aired. Questions were asked back and forth. Considerable debate occurred. I'm sure we're getting only a brief synopsis of all this that happened at this important meeting.

It was wise, even if the apostles knew the answer to the critical question, it was wise for it to be aired publicly and at some length. When the council reconvened, it was the apostle Peter who spoke first, and here's what he said. Brothers, you know that some time ago God made a choice among you that the Gentiles might hear the gospel from my lips and believe. God, who knows the hearts of men, showed that he accepted those Gentiles by giving them the Holy Spirit, just as he had us. He didn't discriminate between us and them. He purified their hearts by faith.

Now then, why do you try to test God by putting on the necks of these Gentiles a yoke that neither we nor our ancestors were able to bear? No, no. We believe it is through the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ that we are saved, just as they are. Well, that was pretty strong, wasn't it? In a nutshell, Peter said, this question actually has already been decided, and not by us or another church council, but by God. He was referring to how years before God had directed him to the Roman centurion Cornelius's home, and how when Cornelius and the other Gentiles gathered there listened, they believed the gospel message, and they were given the Holy Spirit just as the apostles had been at the beginning.

So, Peter said, we're not going backwards now and requiring non-Jews to try and keep rules and regulations we were never able to keep and which could never save us. We believe it's only through the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ that we are saved, and so will they be. That's a very clear statement from Peter. His point was that even trying their hardest, no one ever keeps God's laws perfectly, so no one could ever be saved by trying to keep them. If we could, Jesus' sacrifice would have never been necessary. The way anyone, whether they are a Jew or a Gentile, then or now, can be made right with God, saved is often the biblical term, is by grace through faith in Jesus.

Peter said this. He affirmed this. Grace means as a matter of God's favor and is the opposite of human merit. Becoming a Christian and so fully a part of the Church of Jesus Christ, no matter who you are, is on the basis of grace, Peter insisted, and happens when you put your faith in Jesus. I'm sure Paul and Barnabas were very relieved to hear that speech from Peter, how he came down so clearly on their side. They again spoke up, confirming what Peter had said by telling how God's favor was clearly on them as they preached his message of salvation by grace through faith in Jesus among the Gentiles in the Gentile cities they had visited.

Finally, the apostle James, and this was Jesus' half-brother James, who apparently was recognized as the president of this council, spoke in conclusion. And he too agreed that God had already answered this crucial question when years before he had used Simon Peter to unlock the door and welcome believing Gentiles into the Christian family. James shared from the Old Testament prophet Joel his understanding that Gentiles receiving the gospel and joining with believing Jews as God's people was in no way inconsistent with the Old Testament, that it had always been God's plan to include them. And James said in conclusion, so it is my judgment, therefore, that we should not make it difficult for the Gentiles who are turning to God. So, no, Gentiles do not need to become Jewish proselytes, and thankfully, they don't have to be circumcised. Peter and James agreed with Paul and Barnabas.

The Council of Jerusalem's decision in favor of accepting Gentiles as equals based on their faith in Jesus was affirmed. This is a big takeaway from this historic meeting. I'm sure Paul and Barnabas were relieved and greatly encouraged after listening to the words of the leaders of this conference, who were apostles before them. James and Peter agreed wholeheartedly that God had already said and God had already shown that he intended to include Gentiles as equals, people from all nations, in his eternal family. And furthermore, that nothing anyone can do can add to what Christ has already done. Salvation is by grace, that is, it's a free gift from God because Jesus has already fully paid for it.

Faith in Jesus as Savior is what purifies men's hearts, as Peter said. It's not Jesus plus our obedience to some religious code. It's not Jesus plus this or that denomination's set of sacraments and laws. It's just Jesus plus nothing. That's the good news. Jesus said, Receive me, believe into me, because I am the way.

And that's the gospel message that Paul and Barnabas had been preaching, and which the apostles in Jerusalem now affirmed. Because Jesus made a once-for-all-time atonement for sin, God can offer us salvation as a free gift, and anybody who places their faith in him and trusts in him will be saved. I hope everybody listening to this has taken God up on that amazing offer. If you haven't, you can make that big personal decision today by asking God to forgive your sins and to accept Jesus as your Savior. Then turn your life toward learning from and following Him from this day forward. And by the way, if you make that choice to become a follower of Jesus, we'd like to know about that.

Please drop us an email and let us know about that. You can get up with us at info at sharetheword.org. When this council in Jerusalem concluded, James asked the delegation from Antioch to take back with them a letter from Jerusalem to the Gentile churches. He also sent along with them two witnesses, Silas and a man named Judas Barsabbas, to vouch for the fact that this letter was authentic and had come from Jerusalem's leaders. The letter said that those who had earlier come from Jerusalem teaching the confusing ideas that Gentiles who had believed into Jesus needed more, needed to get circumcised, needed to start obeying Jewish laws and customs, hmm, all of that was baloney and had no authorization from the apostles. They were acting on their own.

No one needed to listen to them. The letter also encouraged the Gentile believers to avoid certain practices associated with pagan religions and things that were offensive to serious Jewish believers. That, I think, was a nod the council made to these Judaizers, as we call them, that faction, to be conciliatory toward them. In other words, tell the Gentiles, don't do things on purpose that create problems with Jews who have strong convictions about Jewish customs and practices. Just as Paul and Barnabas earlier had brought that monetary gift to Jerusalem during the famine to try and knit the new Gentile churches to Jerusalem, this was another attempt from the other end to keep growing Christianity together, to keep it unified.

James and the others in Jerusalem were urging the new Gentile believers, who were coming to Christ out of paganism and out of mystery religions, to make a clean break from some of those practices in their cultures, as well as be sensitive to the Jewish Christians in their churches who would find such things very repulsive. I wish I could tell you that this council's decision to put an end to the Judaizers' attempts to add law-keeping onto the gospel, this was the final end of it, but it wasn't. As we go further into the New Testament, we're going to find the apostle Paul confronting this problem again, trying to change Christianity into a typical religion, trying to add things we must do onto the gospel message of grace and faith in Christ, who has already done it for us, keeps raising its ugly head over and over again.

When that delegation returned to Antioch and the council's letter was read to the churches in Syria, with Judas and Barsabbas and Silas confirming its authenticity, the Gentile Christians were greatly encouraged, I'm sure also relieved. I can see a guy like Titus looking at his wife with a look that said, Hey, I'm not going to have to get circumcised. Woo! Riding the wave of this newfound encouragement and the endorsement they had gotten from the Jerusalem leaders, Paul was itching to get back to sharing the good news in new places. He was anxious to get back on the road to new cities, as well as to see how the churches they had already planted in Galatia were doing. Barnabas was ready to join him again on the second missionary expedition, but he very much wanted to take along young John Mark.

Remember him? Mark was that young relative of Barnabas who had apparently gotten scared or homesick and left the team early on their first missionary trip. Paul was completely opposed to taking Mark along the second time. In his view, what they were about was far too serious to take along someone young and unprepared again, especially someone who had already let them down once. This led to such a sharp disagreement that these two friends, good ministry partners Paul and Barnabas, decided to part ways. Barnabas decided to take Mark with him and to head back to Cyprus, which he felt they had left too soon last time, while Paul invited Silas to join him on a second missionary trip through Galatia and further west.

You know, Luke could have easily skipped over that episode, couldn't he? I mean, the episode about them having such a difficult disagreement that they broke up. This is one remarkable thing to me about the Bible that underscores its authenticity. There's never really an attempt to gloss over or minimize the weaknesses and failures of its heroes. It presents people honestly. At Lystra, those superstitious people wanted to worship Paul and Barnabas as gods, but they weren't gods.

One important lesson we can learn from this incident is that although it is our tendency to idealize certain people we look up to, to idealize leaders, to almost idolize them, we need to remember they are still humans like the rest of us. Paul and Barnabas were great men, but they were only men. Luke observed them up close and felt no need to hide their foibles. Some people get disillusioned when they get up close to a Christian leader and find out, hey, this person is no different than me. We shouldn't, though. On the contrary, when we see these things, we should marvel at the fact that God uses regular people.

We see Paul's humanity here in Barnabas, and we should think, hey, if God could use those guys, maybe stubborn, hard-headed guys, he can use me. In case you are wondering, these important Christian leaders did make up later down the road. They were brothers in Christ who had a disagreement, and Paul even came, believe it or not, to appreciate in time Mark after he had proven himself. So now we have two teams of missionaries heading out from the church at Antioch, and Christianity is about to expand even further, as we'll soon see. Remember that line about the only thing we learn from history is that we don't learn from history? The big idea in our lesson today is not about circumcision or about Paul and Barnabas's rift.

What I want you to carry away from Acts chapter 15 is that from the very beginning, the gospel the apostles believed and taught was that anyone who believes into Jesus will be saved. Anyone. Anyone who is ready to return to God is welcome to receive God's gracious gift and offer of salvation and reconciliation through Christ. Salvation is on the basis of grace. It's a free gift. It's offered to all of us who will put our faith in the Savior that God provided.

Underscore that in your mind and heart. Imprint it in bold and put a couple bright red asterisks around it. Why am I so emphatic about that? It's tragic to look back on what's happened over the centuries to that simple but powerful gospel message of the apostles. Little different from the Judaizers who we saw in this chapter that wanted to add the requirement of obeying Jewish laws to the simple gospel, there always have been. And there still are false teachers and movements throughout church history to this very day that have wrongly added their own religious rules or additional requirements, religious hoops that people must try and jump through to earn God's favor.

And these false teachers, often in clerical garb with crosses around their necks, tragically are still confusing people and obfuscating the simple gospel. Don't miss this. The apostle Peter summarized what the early Christian leaders believed and preached succinctly when he spoke at that council in 49 A.D. He said, God purifies our hearts by faith. It is by the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ that we are saved. By grace through faith.

I'm just bold enough to tell you that if anyone tries to add to that simple but powerful formula, they are false teachers. They have altered the gospel of Christ, turning it into a religion of man's doing, a religion of works and human effort. Turn away from them. I don't remember a lot of sermons or messages I've heard over the years. I've heard thousands. But I heard once on this very point a sermon that stuck in my memory.

The crucial point that I'm trying to make today from Acts 15 became crystal clear in my mind when I heard this preacher speak that day. I can still see the earnestness in his face and hear the urgency in his voice when at the end of his sermon he called out, The religions of the world all tell you, try, try, try. But the gospel message is trust. Trust Jesus. Trust his cross. Trust what happened there.

Trust the Savior that God provided. There's nothing any of us sinners can possibly do to add what he's provided. What our gracious God is looking for from us is simple. It's to sincerely trust in the perfect atonement of the Savior, Jesus Christ. Thanks, Paul. And to all of you, thanks for joining us for this episode of Share the Word podcast.

We pray that God's Word brought insight in your walk through the Bible. Share the Word is a Great Commission project whose focus is to systematically go through the New Testament one chapter at a time. Keep in mind that everything we produce for Share the Word is free for you to use and to share with others. If you'd like to support us, you can make a contribution of any amount simply by going to sharetheword.org and click on Give. From all of us at Share the Word, our blessings and prayers go out to all of you.