So the fact that Jesus’ life was centered on the land and
the holy city of the elect people of the Creator God led indirectly to the Jew
and Gentile struggles of the early church. The church, by and large,
rightly saw itself as a continuation of Israel (and its mission in and for the
world). The church also knew that their commission had been to take the
message of the kingdom of their God, that had been announced by Jesus, which
had somehow sprung into existence at His Resurrection and which was empowered
in some strange way with the coming of the Holy Spirit on the Day of Pentecost,
into the whole world. Where Caesar was being proclaimed as lord and
savior and son of god, the message of Jesus as the Lord and Savior and Son of
God, who had conquered the means by which Caesar maintained his power (the
cross), was to be announced.
The kingdom of God was to extend well beyond the borders of
Israel. It was to be a worldwide kingdom. The world was not to
stream to Israel, to Jerusalem, and to its Temple as the locus of power and
worship in this world. Rather (and consolidating), the new Temple was to
stream out into the world, as the Creator God would now take up residence among
mankind in the lives of His people and through the actions His people, with the
mark of this fact being their worship of Him through Jesus and their adherence
to Jesus as Lord of all (which would manifest itself in their interaction with
people and the whole of creation).
This spawned issues of
tremendous importance, one of which, and perhaps the most important, was how
Gentiles were included in the covenant that the Creator God had made with
Israel. Did the Gentiles need to adopt the Jewish practices of
circumcision, Sabbath-keeping, and dietary laws (the works of the law) that
served to identify a person as being a member of God’s covenant people
(justified)?
Though the inclusion of Gentiles is viewed as natural and
sensible, thinking things like “well of course the message of Jesus and His
Gospel was for everybody,” this was not exactly a foregone conclusion. In
fact, the free acceptance of Gentiles, along with a seamless integration of the
same, as one church and one people for one kingdom was to be developed out of
two classes of people that had been kept quite distinct, would require a radical
revolution in worldview In the book of Acts, which details the growth of
the church in its earliest days as it moved from Jerusalem, to Judea, to
Samaria, and to the ends of the earth, the “Gentile issue” receives a fair
amount of attention. Had it not been an issue of momentous consequence,
it would not feature so prominently.
In demonstration of the
importance of that issue, in Acts’ eleventh chapter, after Peter has visited a
Gentile named Cornelius, having joined him in his house and eating there, he
was sternly questioned. “When Peter went up to Jerusalem, the circumcised
believers took issue with him, saying, ‘You went to uncircumcised men and
shared a meal with them.’” (11:2-3) As a bit of a side note, this should
remind an observer of the centrality of the meal table for the earliest of
Christians. After Peter explains all that happened, “they ceased their
objections and praised God, saying, ‘So then, God has granted the repentance
that leads to life even to the Gentiles.’” (11:18b)
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