Solving A Crisis

In our ongoing series of studies in the book of Acts, we come this morning to Acts 15.
Acts 15 introduces us to the second major internal crisis in the history of the early church.
Wonder this morning, who of us here knows what was the first major internal crisis of the early church?
Anybody want to wager a guess?
Had to do with deacons, had to do back in Acts chapter 6. You may remember the Greek widows and their proponents were resentful because they felt that they were being overlooked in the daily distribution of food.
They thought the Hebrew widows were being favored, it became a geschmossal, and they solved that problem the apostles did by appointing deacons.
That's where the office of deacon in the church came from.
Because of the apostles said, and we read in Acts chapter 6 verse 2, it would not be right for us to neglect the ministry of the Word of God in order to wait on tables.
And so that crisis was a verdict. While time goes on, in Acts chapter 15, we come to the second major crisis, one that threatens to blow up the early church or that threatens to seriously compromise its mission to reaching the world.
And again, the conflict is between you and Gentile. You'll recall, I have said repeatedly, the gap between you and Gentile in the New Testament is greater than you and I can begin to imagine.
It is like you and I living next to a pedophile. That is how they viewed each other. And so when God was constantly at work bringing Gentiles into the church, that created huge stresses.
And so what happens here is that there are those among the Jewish new believers who have raised the issue that Gentile believers need to be observing the law of Moses.
Not good enough, just to come to faith in Jesus, they must observe the law of Moses, particularly they must observe the discipline of circumcision.
So notice how this chapter begins with verse one. Some men came down from Judea to Antioch and were teaching the brothers, unless you are circumcised according to the custom taught by Moses, you cannot be saved.
Two things there that are rather interesting. First of all, the phrase came down from Judea to Antioch can throw you off a little bit because if you look at the map, Antioch is way to the north of Jerusalem.
But the reason it is always going down from Jerusalem is because Jerusalem is at a higher elevation. And so you are actually going down whether it is to Jericho, to the east, or whether it is going to Antioch in the north.
It is a little bit like when I was a student in school, it took me a long time to get my head around lower and upper Canada. I used to think lower Canada was Quebec and upper Canada was Ontario, if you will remember your Canadian history, you did study that, I am sure.
And I always used to say to myself doesn't make sense because it is to the north and rather to the south, well it is the same reason, upper Canada, the rivers flow downhill.
And so upper Canada is at a higher elevation, lower Canada is at a lower elevation.
But far more important than that little distinction in this passage, of course, is the phrase, unless you are circumcised according to the custom taught by Moses, you cannot be saved.
This is no minor matter, this addresses the very heart of the gospel, because it challenges the basis for salvation. You cannot be saved, it is not enough to believe in Jesus, you must also keep the law of Moses.
So at the risk of making this a little bit complicated bear with me because I want to give you the backstory to this. The backstory to this is incredibly important if you want to understand the writings of the New Testament, particularly as they relate to the subject of law and grace.
Books like the book of Hebrews, the book of Galatians, the book of Romans even, all ties into this picture. When God entered into covenant with Israel at Mount Sinai, many hundreds of years earlier, he gave them instructions as to how he wanted them to behave as his lawfully wedded wife.
Because that's really what the covenant was. God said, I will be your God and you will be my people. And here's how we're going to get along with each other because I'm holy and you're not holy, he gave them the law. We call it the law of Moses.
Now the law of Moses, it's really important to understand, is has two components to it in the Old Testament. It has a moral law and it has a ceremonial law.
The moral law are God's instructions on how to do life in a way that honors him. The moral law can be said to go back all the way to the very beginning of creation.
You're to love God above all, you're to love your neighbor as you love yourself, you're not to have idols think of the Ten Commandments, you're not to, you're not to steal, you're not to murder, you're to treat each other in a good and godly fashion.
The ceremonial law instituted Edmonds Sinai had a whole series of rituals that Israel also had to keep it centered on tabernacle worship.
They had to bring offerings, they had to eat certain foods, they had to abstain from certain other foods. And all of these had a purpose that we'll talk about in just a moment.
So there was the moral law, there was the ceremonial law all rolled together into the customs of Moses to make it even more complicated, there was the act of circumcision.
And the act of circumcision in this particular passage is attributed to the customs of Moses, but actually far preceded Mount Sinai goes back all the way to Abraham, because when God entered into covenant with Abraham as the father of all believers, this is what God says to him in Genesis 17, verse 11.
You're to undergo circumcision and it will be the sign of the covenant between me and you. And without making that too complicated, think of a wedding ring being the symbol of marriage.
Covenant or circumcision was the sign that you belonged to God and God belonged to you. It had a lot more implications than that, but let's just leave it at that for the moment.
Now, again, very helpful for us to understand that the purpose of the law, given it Mount Sinai, for our purposes this morning, was threefold. Let me run the pasture really quickly, but it's very important to understand this.
First of all, it's showed, as I said a moment ago, that they belonged to God. It was a symbol of their marriage to the covenant, God of Israel.
So when they observed the ceremonial law, when they observed the moral law, when they observed the institution of circumcision, they were demonstrating to each other and to the nations, to the principalities and the powers that they belonged to God.
It was a promise of the hotterites or particular people, groups around the world who identify themselves uniquely either by their dress or by their behavior. Israel was marked as God's people.
Secondly, the purpose of the law was to keep evil in check by showing them how to live and by punishing them if they wandered away from it.
The law was God's instruction. This is how I want you to live. This is how I do not want you to live. And this is what's going to happen to you if you break the law.
It was given, as we'll see a bit later, to restrain evil. And the reason it was given to restrain evil was, and that's the third reason for the law, is that it was instituted to set the stage for the coming of the Lord Jesus.
Paul in Galatians puts it this way, so the law was our custodian or our guardian. A lot of translations have our tutor until Christ came that we might be justified by faith.
Now, that's a really important issue in the New Testament, particularly in the book of Galatians. The issue here is this. It was never God's intention for the law to make people righteous before God. Why not?
Because the law is imposed on you from the outside. And what happens when somebody from the outside tells you what to do? What happens when you try to tell your kids what to do?
What happens when your boss tries to tell you what to do? What happens when the policeman pulls you over and tells you what you haven't done right?
The human heart, unregenerate, always resists the law. In fact, Paul makes a big case in the New Testament for the fact that the law brings out our rebellion.
Most of us don't know how rebellious we are until somebody tells us something to do that we don't want to do, isn't that true?
Paul says it didn't know what sin was until the law came along and told me what sin was. The law can change you. Force from the outside can change you because it can't reach inside you and change you from the inside out.
And so the purpose of the law, so says Paul, was to show us just how rebellious, how difficult, how obstinate we are, how far from God's glory we fall, and how much we need Jesus to be our Redeemer and our Savior.
Because he's the only one who can change us from the inside out. And so therefore the law is the tutor, it is your guardian, it keeps you in place, it keeps you from getting too far off track, but it underscores the need for salvation.
So by the time Jesus comes, you're ready to acknowledge that you cannot save yourself, you need help from the outside. And so as Jesus comes into the world, everything changes.
Everything changes in two ways in particular. First of all, when Jesus comes, he fulfills the moral law. What was the moral law? Do this. Don't do that.
Leave this way before the face of God. Love God above all. Love your neighbor as yourself. Jesus fulfilled that to a T. Here's how he puts it. Matthew 517, this is in view of the criticism of the Pharisees that he was not serious about keeping the law.
And he says, do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets. I have not come to abolish them, but to fulfill them.
And so Jesus is born into the world, conceived by the Holy Spirit, doesn't share Adam's sin, doesn't share your amine's sin nature, though he is fully human.
And for all the years that he lives in the face of the earth, and I've often talked about this and it continues to blow me out of the water, the only man who ever lived, who kept the commandments of God without fail.
Do you ever think that through? Love God all the time. Loved his neighbor perfectly all the time. And so when he died on the cross, didn't die for his own sins, died for our sins.
So that when by faith we are joined to him, our sins can be forgiven. His life can come to dwell within us, and we can be born again from the inside out with the resurrection life of Jesus in our hearts, helping us to put to death the old and bringing to life that which is new.
Diagrammatically, as you know, I like to picture it this way. We are, give even in here, by nature, we're separated from God.
Well, under his wrath and judgment, a lot of people don't understand that. We are actually bonded to Satan, we are selfish, we are in conflict, and the end of all of that is death.
The big issue in the human race is how do I move from here to here, and that is where there is a huge difference between law as the Jews understood it at Mount Sinai and Grace, because the law says it's up to you to get yourself over here.
The law says, if you keep the commandments, if you will try harder, if you live up to the standard that you know you're supposed to live up to, then God will accept you, and he will like you, and he will love you.
The law leads to pride, it leads to arrogance, it always leads to selective righteousness, because I emphasize the things that I'm good at, but I conveniently ignore the things that I'm not so good at.
That's why Jesus says to the Pharisees, you swallow, you strain out the net, but you swallow the camel. You overlook the really big issues, but you concentrate on the minor issues.
If we can have that back up again, Grace on the other hand says it has been done in Jesus. Grace says nobody can go from here to here, because the gap is simply too big, the righteousness that God requires of us, we cannot deliver.
There's only one whoever delivered it, his name was Jesus, and so I am saved, not by doing it right, but by faith in Christ Jesus our Lord.
And so the summary is this, under the law, I obey, and therefore I am accepted, my obedience is determined by my behavior, my acceptance is determined by my behavior, but under Grace I am accepted, therefore I obey.
Subsequently, the difference is that between a slave and a son, both belong to the same household, both have certain expectations placed upon them.
The slave's value in the household is determined by his performance, and when he gets old and decrepit and he's no longer any use to his master, or if his master decides to sell him,
take him to the auction block like we do, an old horse or an old cow, and there you go, I don't need you anymore. So under the law, you always live in fear.
You always live in the fear, am I good enough? Is this the sin that's going to make God turn his back on me? Is this the piece of stubbornness that I have found in my heart?
He finally looks at it and he says, you're beyond hope, you're beyond redemption, I don't want you anymore, off you go to the auction block. That's what the law does.
The law makes you hide your true self because your true self, you know, simply doesn't measure up to what God has for you.
The son is part of the household and his place is not determined by whether he does it right or whether he doesn't do it right.
It's determined by does he belong? Is he a son and has he been born into the father's family? That's huge because whether he's good or whether he's bad, they're stuck together.
I mean, how many of us wouldn't have gotten rid of a kid here there or everywhere? If it was simply a matter of behavior and not being embarrassed by them and if we could put them off on the auction block and say, well, that kid's not mine.
Like, it's not that simple. Any parent here can testify that some of the greatest joy is a success of your children but some of the greatest pain is when your kids embarrass you and do all kinds of things that are wrong and your name gets dragged to the mud because they're your kids.
Isn't that true? Are you getting? I'm belaboring this because the New Testament belabers this and I'm belaboring this because it just about blew the early church out of the water and it continues in many ways to keep many of God's people today as we'll see later on from living in the joy and in the freedom of God.
So Jesus fulfills the moral law but he does more than that. He abolishes the ceremonial law. Remember the ceremonial law is this business of all these sacrifices, the foods you can't or cannot eat, you can't eat pork, you can't wear clothes that are made of two different materials, you can't do all kinds of things.
All of which are intended to be a teacher that will lead you to the Christ who is the fulfillment of all of these things.
So Jesus comes along, he fulfills the moral law but he abolishes the ceremonial law. Ephesians 2.15 Christ abolished in his flesh the law with its commandments and regulations.
He said they all point to the coming of the Christ whenever they were forbidden to eat unclean food God was trying to teach them that they were God's holy people, they were not to mix with the Gentiles.
Where God told them to bring sacrifices they were constantly being reminded. We are sinners, God hates sin, blood has to be shed for the punishment of sin, that blood is going to be shed one day in the cross by the Lord Jesus, the Lord Jesus shed his blood on the cross.
Therefore the law has been fulfilled because the law was a shadow of the reality that was to come but Jesus is the fulfillment of that which is why you and I today don't make sacrifices of animals.
We don't have to worry about wearing blended clothing, we don't have to worry about whether or not we eat pork or any number of Old Testament ceremonial laws, all of which were fulfilled in the person of Jesus Christ.
And the evidence of this reality is found among other things in two events that happen particularly in the New Testament. The first is that remember when Jesus died in the cross who remembers what happened in the temple?
The veil separating the holy of Holies from the holy place got torn into from top to bottom. Remember that, sorry. That was God saying to the people of Israel this Old Testament structure of worship which is a model of heavenly reality is now fulfilled in the death and the event.
The death and the eventual resurrection of Jesus who was entered into the holy place according to the book of Hebrews with his own blood which can truly transform us as opposed to the blood of bulls and goats and sheep and whatever else.
And keep on making those sacrifices because it didn't really change you one ayoda. All that can change you is union with Christ the power of the Holy Spirit on the inside that changes you from the inside out.
The other example of this of course in the New Testament is earlier on in the book of Acts chapter 10. Peter is in Japa you will recall and staying at the house of Simon the Tanner interestingly enough and has this vision clean and unclean animals coming down in a sheet and his voice from heaven that says eat.
And Peter's response is no because for all these years I have kept the law by not eating unclean animals and God says don't call unclean what I call clean and thereby God was declaring the dividing wall between you and Gentile had come down.
And Gentiles were now going to be brought into the kingdom of God has demonstrated by the fact that God gave the Holy Spirit to Cornelius who was a God fearing pagan.
So the ceremonial law was undone in Christ and the book of Hebrews is full of that as there are other New Testament passages but the moral law in Christ was fulfilled which is why to this day you and I are not to commit adultery were not to commit adultery were not to kill.
That remains unchanged what is changed is that it is no longer up to us to try to live up to that it is Christ in us who will transform us by his spirit from one degree of glory to another you still with me that's a lot of stuff I'm throwing at you but it's foundational to understanding the gospel of grace because what happens here in Acts chapter 15.
The Jerusalem church consisted primarily of Jewish believers who had come to faith in Christ and they had been added to by Gentile God fears and that is a word for Gentile
and it's a word for Gentile who had become Jewish and who had adopted a Jewish way of life.
The Antioch Church was a church largely composed of Gentiles and so the Jerusalem church had a strong contingent in it that could
be themselves from their past or from the law of Moses they had come to faith in Christ they truly had but in coming to faith in Christ they did not yet understand how Christ had come to fulfill the law and to abolish it in a biblical sense of the word that we've just been talking about it and so they were convinced that it wasn't good enough just to believe in Jesus
no you had to practice what Moses taught you the customs according to Moses particularly the element of circumcision and remember that was especially complicated
because though they thought that was part of Moses is doing it wasn't it goes back all the way to Abraham so it predates the law at Mount Sinai
so they were convinced about that not only for themselves but they also wanted to apply this to the New Gentile believers and so we have them coming down from Jerusalem to the Antioch Church with this message unless you were circumcised according to the custom taught by Moses you cannot
be saved it's not it would be better it might be nice you really want to consider no no you cannot be saved it's not enough to believe in Jesus you also have to observe the customs taught by Moses particularly the custom of circumcision
so what do you think happens when they get to Antioch will read on with me in this story a big fight breaks out first two this brought Paul and Barnumus into a sharp dispute and debate with them
they went add each other I suspect in the way that that only Middle East people can fight I remember years back when Michelle and I were on a trip to Israel
we ran into two Arab peddlers who were fighting over a particular location and the one had stepped into what the other person thought was his territory and I thought the Dutch knew how to fight
nothing compared to these two going at it in full public view of all the tourists arguing about this particular location so they have this controversy and they have this controversy for two reasons
number one at stake is the integrity of the gospel Lord willing we'll talk more about that next week but the integrity of the gospel is at stake because the question now is are we saved by works of the law or are we saved by grace
are we made right with God because of Jesus' righteousness or are we made right before God because we're bringing something to him that he happens to like and he's going to pat us on the back
that is huge in the New Testament because it gets at the very heart of what salvation by grace is about and whether or not the power of the gospel can be released to actually transform and change people from the inside out as they said Lord willing
to talk more about that in detail next week but there's a second reason and that's a very obvious reason of course it creates an additional obstacle for Gentiles to come to faith
if it's no longer just about believing in Jesus but now it's believing in Jesus and becoming a Jew practicing not only the moral law
which we know in Christ has been fulfilled but also practicing the ceremony or law you have just up the ante for anybody out of the Gentile world becoming a Christian
in Lentra I mean think of it this way think of yourself as having been raised in a very primitive proper religious tradition where you say that really to worship God properly in church and Sunday morning
you've got to wear a suit and tie
and you're trying to bring somebody to church and bring somebody to faith who doesn't even own a suit or a tie and he must now first go out and buy himself a suit and a tie before he can belong here
what do you think are the chances of his accepting your invitation to come with you to church or to come with you to Jesus
see what I'm getting at? I think you just lowered your chances by like I mean judging the number of you
at least I'm eyeball
that's in jest you see what I'm trying to say so from Paul's and Barnabas's perspective and the perspective of the Antioch Church
and all the mission churches which they had just planted this was outrageous because you cannot do mission work under those conditions
that's why this chapter is so critical because of this issue does not get settled in favor of grace
either the early church is going to split into two factions the legalist faction and the Gentile faction the Jewish faction and the Gentile faction or it's going to remain essentially a very narrowly centered Jewish sect that will not succeed in making disciples of all nations
let me say it again if people have to become like the Jews culturally and in every other way in order to belong you've just raised the barrier and the chances of world evangelization are next to Zilch
so they're at a crossroads this is huge this isn't just a couple of people having differences of opinion no this is the integrity of gospel this is the future of the church that is at stake and it's the future of missions that is at stake so what do you do?
well you go to Jerusalem because Jerusalem is where the problem came from Jerusalem is where the apostles are and so we read in verse 2 goes on to say so Paul and Barnabas were appointed along with some other believers to go up to Jerusalem to see the apostles and the elders about this question
and I think that's where we'll stop this morning because now what happens is they hold what is known as the council of Jerusalem this is the first time the church leaders gather together to decide policy for the world wide church
and Lord willing as we pick this up next time we'll start looking at at what happened in this meeting and how they settled this very difficult issue how they solved the crisis and then we'll talk Lord willing as time goes on about the implications for this for you and for me
so here's a request in a suggestion that I have for each of us if I may be supposed to make that would you please take that insert home or read Acts chapter 15 on your own in the course of the week or with your family around the devotion table
and then try to follow the argument that develops that reaches that that enables this church assembly to reach a particular decision
because in the end they they solve this issue to everybody's satisfaction and then they you know write it in a letter to the church and to York and everybody is happy
but here's the thing I want you to think about number one what are the implications of this for believers today
what how does this relate to my life because believe you me it does and number two when you get to the end conclusion and I hope to get a little further today than we can
but when you when you get to the end conclusion read what they decide and then ask yourself the question why did they decide what they decided
because it is decidedly odd but read that over study it and then Lord willing will come back to it because at the end of the day it is all about Jesus Christ and His grace alone
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