Ten Minute Bible Talks Devotional Bible Study - Understanding Biblical Doctrine | New Testament | Acts 15

Episode Date: May 19, 2023

What you believe about doctrinal truth has implications for your every day life. In today's episode, Patrick uses Acts 15 to discuss one of those doctrines. Your support makes TMBT possible. Ten Minute Bible Talks is a crowd-funded project. Join the TMBTeam to reach more people with the Bible. Give now. Join the TMBT community in reading the entire New Testament in one year. Get your FREE reading plan here. Like this content? Make sure to leave us a rating and share it with others, so others can find it too. Use #asktmbt to connect with us, ask questions, and suggest topics. We'd love to hear from you! To learn more, visit our website and follow us on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter@TenMinuteBibleTalks. Don't forget to subscribe to the TMBT Newsletter here. Passages: Acts 15

Welcome to 10 minute Bible talks, where we connect the Bible to your life. In the time it takes to get to work. I'm Patrick Miller. If you've been following along with our series, you'll know that we just finished up the Book of Galatians, and now we're going to return to the Book of Acts to the story that happens right after Paul writes that letter to the Galatians. Now, let me get some context here. Paul wrote a letter to the church in Galatia, because there were people there, mostly Jews, who were teaching others that to follow Jesus, you had to be circumcised. Now, that's a problem because there were lots of Gentiles who were being converted and they

were following Jesus, but they were uncircised. And now they're being told, you have to be circumcised if you want to worship together. And so in Paul's letter to the Galatians, he recounts a much older story about how he had to confront the Apostle Peter because he wasn't eating with Gentiles, in part because Jews were giving him a hard time about it. And he says, no, no, no, no. Following Jesus isn't a matter of purity code. it's not a matter of what you eat and don't eat. It's not a matter of whether you're circumcised or uncircised. You see, all of those things, they were signifiers of your ethnic identity,

of whether you were a Jew or you were a Gentile. But Paul says this. Jesus has brought Jews and Gentiles together into one congregation. By laying down his body, he destroyed the wall that separated Jew and Gentile. And so now the sign, the signifier of being a member of Jesus' community isn't circumcision, which was the signifier of being a part of the Jewish community. community, now the sign and signifier being a part of Jesus' community is faith. It's allegiance. It's giving your whole heart, your whole life to Jesus. It doesn't matter whether you're circumcised

or uncircised. And so while Paul was clearly teaching this in Galatia and throughout his church plants, it was still a live debate amongst the early Christians. And that's where we pick up in Acts 15, because as it turns out, the church writ large still had not made a final decision on this issue. how do we worship together with Jews and Gentiles in the same congregation? What does God's word in the Old Testament say about this particular issue? And to solve the problem, a group of apostles and Christian leaders all gathered together in Jerusalem to discuss the matter. Now, if you're not a church historian, you're probably not familiar with the phrase church councils. But if you are, you've had some church history in your past, you know what I'm talking about. A church council is a historic event where people gather together to come to a final conclusion on a major doctrinal issue. And so when we talk about Orthodox Christianity, what we mean when we say that is that there have been councils throughout history where Christians have gotten together to collectively articulate what we see to be the essential core doctrinal truths that define what it means to be a Christian. So now the job of a council is not to create a new doctrine. The job of a council is to affirm an

existing doctrine to say this is what the Old Testament and the New Testament teach. But because there's some debate around the issue, we want to be extra clear about the topic. So, For example, there was a guy named Arias, and Arias taught that Jesus was not eternal, that he was not fully God. Instead, Arias taught that Jesus was the first creation of God, and that's what it means for Jesus to be God's son. And a lot of people followed suit. They said, okay, this kind of makes sense. Jesus hasn't always existed. God kind of had a son at some point in history, and that's who he is.

Now, the problem with this is that if Jesus didn't exist at some point in history, he can't be God. we know that God is eternal. God exists in all times, in all places. God exists outside of time. And so a guy named Athanasius, who was a African monk, he was a black man who was apparently very short and they called him the dwarf. But he came along and he argued with Arias in one of these church councils. And this was a long, drawn out event, but eventually Athanasius won the day. No, Jesus has always existed. Jesus is fully God. Jesus is eternal. Now, he wasn't arguing a new doctrine. He was arguing exactly what the Bible has always taught about Jesus's divine nature. Right? In John 1, it opens up and says that the word was with God and that the word was God.

There is not a time in which Jesus did not exist, in which he was not God, in which he was not with God. Now, I could go through a number of other doctrines and maybe you're starting to feel bored, but this stuff really matters, because what we believe about doctrinal truth has implications for our everyday life. And one great example of this is the very first church council. ever recorded in history. In fact, it's recorded right in the Bible. It's in Acts 15. And the doctrinal issue that this church council gathered to decide upon was the issue of multi-ethnic worship. Can Jews and Gentiles worship with one another? What do Gentiles need to do in order to follow Jesus? These were the live questions that were being asked at the time. And again, as you'll discover, they didn't create a new doctrine.

Instead, they'll draw upon existing doctrine in the Old Testament and they'll say, see, this is how we know what the truth is. So I just want to read this whole passage because I think it's incredibly fascinating. And it also helps you appreciate why when we talk about Orthodox doctrinal truths, these things really matter for our day and day out life. So let's pick up the story here in Acts 15. Verse 4. This is talking about Paul and Barnabas. They're coming to Jerusalem for this council. When they came to Jerusalem, they were welcomed by the church and the apostles and elders, to whom they had reported everything God had done through them. Then, some of the believers who belonging to the party of the Pharisees stood up and said,

The Gentiles must be circumcised and required to keep the law of Moses. So let's just pause here. Amongst the early Jesus followers are converted Pharisees. We met the Pharisees back in the story of the gospel. But in this case, they're saying, hey, if Gentiles want to follow Jesus, that's great. But they need to do what Gentiles have always done to enter into the community of Yahweh. They've always had to be circumcised and nothing has changed. That's what they're communicating in verse 5.

Let's pick up in verse 6. the apostles and elders met to consider the question after much discussion peter got up but remember peter was the guy who paul already had to confront about this exact issues so we'll see what he does let's pick up peter got up and addressed them brothers you know that some time ago god made a choice among you that the gentiles should hear from my lips the message of the gospel and believe so he's talking about when god showed him the vision of the unclean food on the rooftop and it drops down three times before him and God says, hey, don't call things unclean, which are clean. And then this messenger arrives from a Roman centurion named Cornelius. And he says, hey, you need to come meet with Cornelius. And Peter's really confused, but he goes and he meets with them, even though he thinks he's not supposed to be with Gentiles.

And then he sees the Holy Spirit fall upon them. And he realizes, whoa, something crazy is happening. These people aren't Jews, but they're speaking in tongues. They've been blessed by the Spirit. So verse 8, God, who knows the heart, showed that he accepted them, that's Cornelius and his household, by giving the Holy Spirit to them, just as he did to us. He did not discriminate between us and them, for he purified their hearts by faith. Note here, not by circumcision. Let's pick up in verse 10. Now then, why do you try to test God by putting on the necks of Gentiles a yoke that neither we nor our ancestors have been able to bear? And so he's saying here that, look, God gave us his and we broke his law. That's why we were sent into exile. That's why Jesus had to come to not only

rescue us from exile, but to forgive us of our sins. He said, we've never been able to bear the yoke of the law, including circumcision. Verse 11. No, we believe it is through the grace of our Lord Jesus that we are saved, just as they, the Gentiles are. The whole assembly became silent, and they listened to Barnabas and Paul, telling about the signs and wonders God had done among the Gentiles through them. When they finished, James spoke up. So this is James, the brother of Jesus. We've talked about him when we went through the book of James, but James was also probably the most prominent and important leader in the Jerusalem church, which probably meant he was the most important leader in the whole of the church. So anyways, James stands up and this is what he says. Brothers, listen to me. Simon,

he's talking about Peter, has described to us how God first intervened to choose a people for his name from the Gentiles. The words of the prophets are in agreement with this. So pause here. Remember what I said? When church councils get together to decide what is the faithful Orthodox doctrine of the church, they aren't creating new doctrine. They're affirming what has always been believed. And James set that pattern right here in the book of Acts, because he doesn't say, we've come up with a brand spanking new idea. It isn't it great. He says, no, the doctrine that I'm articulating about Jews and Gentiles, it goes back to the Old Testament. And so he's going to read from the book of Amos, as it is written. After this, I will return and rebuild David's fallen tent. It's ruins I will rebuild

and I will restore it that the rest of mankind may seek the Lord, even all the Gentiles who bear my name, says the Lord who does these things, things known from long ago. James continues, it's my judgment. He's saying based on the book of Amos and the doctrine that's found there, it's my judgment, therefore, that we should not make it difficult for the Gentiles who are turning to God. Instead, we should write to them, telling them to abstain from food polluted by idols. So back in that day, it wasn't uncommon to sacrifice food to idols and then sell it in the marketplace. And so James is saying, hey, right now, it's probably not best to eat the food that was sacrificed to idols as a concession to Jews who would have found that highly offensive. He continues to do that.

He says, they should also abstain from sexual immorality and from the meat of strangled animals and from blood. For the law of Moses has been preached in every city from the earliest time. and is read in the synagogues on every Sabbath. Then the apostles and elders with the whole church decided to choose some of their own men and send them to Antioch with Paul and Barnabas. They called Judas, called Barzabas and Silas, men who were leaders among the believers. With them, they sent the following letter. And so they write a letter that basically lays out the findings of this council, that Jews and Gentiles can worship together, and that the Gentiles don't need to be circumcised, but so that they can live a common life together.

They shouldn't eat food sacrifice to idols. And of course, they should obey God's laws around sexual immorality. Now, again, this is a common practice in these church councils, not just to deliberate and say, hey, what does the Bible say about the particular issue that we're debating and discussing? But the second step is to write what you discover down. And so this is where we get many of our early creeds from church councils. After they deliberated on the topic, they sat down and they wrote out a statement articulating what's the orthodox belief on fill in the blank topic. Now again, some of this can start to sound

really boring and disinteresting, and I get it if you're not a doctrine person, but this stuff matters for real life. You see, if the apostles hadn't deliberated on this, if they hadn't made a definitive statement, we would still have churches that thought it was okay to divide based on ethnicity. But wait a second, you hear the problem here, right? Because at least in America, our churches are divided largely by ethnicity. Our churches are largely black or. white or Asian or Latino. And ironically, if we took our doctrine more seriously, maybe we would need to question what we're doing inside of our churches and say that the best way we can witness to the power of King Jesus is through multi-ethnic worship coming together across our ethnic boundaries,

just like the early church did. You see, this is why doctrine matters. This is why church councils matter. Because when we drift away from serious doctrinal matters, there are downstream consequences. When we forget what true doctrine says, there are downstream consequences. See, that's the reason why we have all of these ethnically divided churches, because largely white churches in the 17th and 18th and 19th centuries, they divided churches across ethnic boundaries, forgetting precisely the doctrinal truth that was laid down in the very first church council in Jerusalem. So here's my challenge for you today.

Don't just take the challenge to have multi-ethnic communities seriously. Please do that. Find a way to worship alongside people who, don't look like you. But let's go one step further. Let's take doctrine seriously. Let's thank God for all the church councils throughout history that have helped us to articulate the one true faith in Jesus Christ, our Lord. Before you forget, sign up for the 10-minute Bible Talks newsletter. Hit the link in the show notes and you'll get an email every Wednesday that's going to help you beat that midweek slump and go deeper in your walk with Jesus. Thanks for listening.