Acts 15:1-5

    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." This brought Paul and Barnabas into sharp dispute and debate with them. So Paul and Barnabas were appointed, along with some other believers, to go up to Jerusalem to see the apostles and elders about this question. The church sent them on their way, and as they traveled through Phoenicia and Samaria, they told how the Gentiles had been converted. This news made all the brothers very glad. When they came to Jerusalem, they were welcomed by the church and the apostles and elders, to whom they reported everything God had done through them.

 

    Then some of the believers who belonged to the party of the Pharisees stood up and said, "The Gentiles must be circumcised and required to obey the law of Moses."

 

We non-Jews sometimes don’t realize how much of a struggle it was for the Jews when we began to follow Jesus Christ. It was first a struggle for them to realize that Jesus was inviting us to know God through Him, just like the Jews. But then it became a struggle for other more “practical” reasons.

 

We Gentiles acted like illegal immigrants. We entered the community of God’s promise in Jesus Christ, but we didn’t follow the rules that had been in place for 1500 years as we entered. The main issue was that we didn’t get circumcised.

 

This was no small issue. When God first gave circumcision to Abraham as a sign of the covenant between them, God said, Any uncircumcised male, who has not been circumcised in the flesh, will be cut off from his people; he has broken my covenant. And until now, any non-Jew who wanted to follow the Jews’ God had to submit to circumcision and to all of Moses’ law (yes, circumcision was given before Moses, but it was Moses who recorded the story of circumcision in Genesis). To the Jews, a fundamental question was at stake: How will we know they are truly following God if they have not received the sign of circumcision? How will we know they have God’s approval and welcome?

 

Some of the Jewish believers concluded that circumcision was as important a mark of citizenship in God’s kingdom as pledging allegiance to the flag is for American citizenship. They probably had good intentions. They were probably worried for their new Gentile brothers, not wanting them to falsely believe that they were safe from Christ’s judgment and therefore warning them not to stop short of full citizenship.

 

But Paul and Barnabas disagreed. And the debate was so intense that they had to go to Jerusalem to settle the matter with the apostles and elders there. As they went, they told about how the Gentiles were following Jesus, and believers all along the way were filled with joy.

 

But despite all the joy, the initial response in Jerusalem was that the Gentiles should be required to keep the law of Moses and be circumcised. “If they are going to follow the God of the Jews, they are going to have to look like Jews, because the Jews’ customs have been given to them by God.” – that was the thought.

 

Father, help us to see the struggle in these passages. We are accustomed to our freedoms, and we will soon see why we have them. But help us to sympathize with our Jewish brothers – those who know Jesus and yet follow Jewish customs precisely because they love You so much. Help us to understand that their concern is not to enslave others, but to teach us all to love You fully, and to be sensitive to that. Help us not to be flagrant about our freedoms, flaunting them and saying, “God says I can, so there!” Help us love our brothers enough to avoid offending their consciences as much as possible. And not just our Jewish brothers. Help us look at each believing brother with enough love and sensitivity to live as much as possible to avoid offending each other. And most of all, when we see how much of a struggle it was for Jewish believers to accept uncircumcised people as brothers, help us to praise Jesus Christ all the more for overcoming every obstacle that used to keep non-Jews from knowing God. Jesus is everything!