Acts 15:22-35

22 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 chose Judas (called Barsabbas) and Silas, men who were leaders among the believers. 23 With them they sent the following letter:
The apostles and elders, your brothers,

To the Gentile believers in Antioch, Syria and Cilicia:

Greetings.

24 We have heard that some went out from us without our authorization and disturbed you, troubling your minds by what they said. 25 So we all agreed to choose some men and send them to you with our dear friends Barnabas and Paul— 26 men who have risked their lives for the name of our Lord Jesus Christ. 27 Therefore we are sending Judas and Silas to confirm by word of mouth what we are writing. 28 It seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us not to burden you with anything beyond the following requirements: 29 You are to abstain from food sacrificed to idols, from blood, from the meat of strangled animals and from sexual immorality. You will do well to avoid these things.

Farewell.

30 So the men were sent off and went down to Antioch, where they gathered the church together and delivered the letter. 31 The people read it and were glad for its encouraging message. 32 Judas and Silas, who themselves were prophets, said much to encourage and strengthen the believers. 33 After spending some time there, they were sent off by the believers with the blessing of peace to return to those who had sent them. [34] [d] 35 But Paul and Barnabas remained in Antioch, where they and many others taught and preached the word of the Lord.


Dig Deeper
Teachers and schools are notorious for giving their students long lists of rules that they have to follow. Some classrooms and schools have long lists of rules that each student must remember and follow each day while at school. I suppose that rules serve a purpose at times and can be quite helpful but there is also a downside to rules. Students who learn only to follow rules rarely learn how to actually think and discern through situations themselves. They will be quite prone to looking for loopholes in the rules and when they find themselves in situations outside of the prescribed rules they are generally at quite a loss. Rules tend to serve the purpose of conforming behavior and controlling people in the immediate moment. Rules are good controllers and conformers, but they are bad trainers and transformers. People who just learn to follow rules, you see, don’t usually mature and progress past those rules. They learn to follow those rules and that’s it. But they don’t learn how to think and live rightly regardless of the situation.

That’s why when I was a teacher I always had but one rule: You must show respect at all times for everyone else in this room. When you think about it that’s not much of a rule. That’s certainly not a rule that you can follow mindlessly. It is actually a guideline more than a rule. Guidelines are far more demanding than rules because they offer some general principles and then demand the one following them to really stop and think and learn from each situation. When different scenarios come up you must care enough about following the guideline and hold it as an important conviction to do the work of thinking through what it means to follow this guideline in this situation. As one does that more and more they grow and learn and mature. Rules teach you how to follow. Guidelines teach you how to think Surely if you give someone a rule you teach them how to act for a day but if you teach them to think through guidelines you teach them how to live for a lifetime.

This is exactly the kind of people that God has always promised that he would have: a thinking people. This is precisely what the prophet Jeremiah spoke of when he declared that “’The days are coming’, declares the LORD, ‘when I will make a new covenant with the people of Israel and with the people of Judah. It will not be like the covenant I made with their ancestors when I took them by the hand to lead them out of Egypt, because they broke my covenant, though I was a husband to them’, declares the LORD. ‘This is the covenant I will make with the people of Israel after that time’, declares the LORD. ‘I will put my law in their minds and write it on their hearts. I will be their God, and they will be my people. No longer will they teach their neighbor, or say to one another, ‘Know the LORD,’ because they will all know me, from the least of them to the greatest’, declares the LORD. ‘For I will forgive their wickedness and will remember their sins no more’” (Jer. 31:31-34). The point was that in the new covenant God would have a people that wouldn’t be just a bunch of followers of rules who would have to go and tell one another the rules and admonish one another to follow them. He would have a people who had chosen to be his people and in whom he had placed his own transforming Spirit. These people would know the Lord through intimacy and experience and would learn to think there way through situations.

It is for this very reason that the New Testament has precious few examples of actual rules. Instead we find mostly guidelines, principles, and suggestions which forced God’s people to think, to love, and to work out what it meant to be devoted to God and live together with other believers as his family. As the early church began to take on the difficult task of being the unified family that Jesus had called them to be, we find at the most difficult moments like these, that the directions given were not rules but were all about teaching the church how to think through the ongoing task of loving one another.

As the Council in Jerusalem convened, they knew that getting word back to the other churches was vital, especially to the center of the Gentile mission, the church in Antioch. But they also knew that if they simply sent Paul and Barnabas back to carry the decision of the leaders in Jerusalem that it could put them in an awkward situation which would leave them open to questions of whether they had faithfully communicated what had really been decided. To ensure that something like that didn’t happen, the brothers chose Judas and Silas, who were already well-respected brothers, to represent the church in Jerusalem and carry out this momentous decision to the larger Christian family.

There was obviously much confusion as men had come not that along ago and created havoc in Antioch by taking it upon themselves to drive a wedge between Jewish and Gentile table fellowship amongst the brothers. They had evidently either believed that they had some measure of authority from James and the Jerusalem church to do this or attempted to give the impression that they did. But the letter makes it clear from the beginning that these conservatives had stepped beyond their rightful authority. They were not speaking on behalf of James and the church in Jerusalem (a fact of which Paul was quite probably unaware when he wrote the letter to the Galatians but a matter which was now cleared up once-for-all).

The opening of the letter gives a further clue as to where it is heading when it says that they chose some men to verify the truth of the letter and to accompany their dear friends or more literally the “beloved” Barnabas and Paul. That must have put the brothers and sisters in Antioch at ease right away and allowed them a big sigh of relief. Paul and Barnabas were beloved Christians who were not leading them astray but guiding them into the truth of God’s family in the Messiah.

What is not certain is whether Luke has given us a word-by-word rendering of the original letter or an abridged version but he does include a phrase that has always been one of my favorites. The letter says that what they decided upon “seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us.” Christianity is a life that is the constant struggles of people of all different types learning to live together as one family. That simply cannot be defined by rules. But that also means the challenge of listening to the guidance of the Holy Spirit, working together to find solutions to thorny issues for which there is no rule or easy answer, and then making a decision as best you can. The council made no attempt to present themselves as infallible or even that they had the incontrovertibly correct answer. They were simply doing the best they could and making decisions based on what seemed right to them as they attempted to discern God’s will through the guidance of the Holy Spirit.

As we saw in the previous passage, the agreement contained three specific areas in which they were asking Gentile Christians to be especially observant as they sought to live the holy lives of God’s family and avoid anything that might needlessly offend their Jewish Christian brothers and even non-Christian Jews with whom they might be living closely. There is much in the way of freedoms in Christ but where freedom and unity clashed, unity should always win. That is why Paul declared in his letter to the Galatians that they should “not use your freedom to indulge the flesh; rather, serve one another humbly in love. For the entire law is fulfilled in keeping this one command: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself’” (Gal. 5:13-14). All three categories discussed by Paul had to do with the way that Gentiles normally lived (the prohibition on sexual immorality probably referred more to aberrant marriage practices that were abhorrent to Jews) and as 1 Corinthians 6-10 demonstrates these weren’t simple straightforward rules. To carry out even these simple suggestions would take love, wisdom, discernment, and of course, the guidance of the Holy Spirit. These three guidelines are not comprehensive Leviticus-style rules. They are guidelines that would involve a great deal of thinking and love for one another.

The letter was obviously encouraging to the church in Antioch and Gentile believers around the world. God’s promise of having one family of all nations had overcome a stiff early challenge and would take a little time to enjoy the gifts that God had given to one another as Judas and Silas stayed for a bit to encourage the believers in Antioch.

There are two other important things that shouldn’t be missed with the sending out of this letter. The first was that the issue of the family of God as far as it concerned Gentiles being recognized was settled. The conservatives had lost and it had been recognized once-and-for-all that the Gentiles would need nothing more than entering into Christ to be part of God’s family. It would still take a long time to work out all of the details of how to do that on a day-to-day basis but the important part was now decided. The other thing to note is that the Jerusalem church calls the Gentiles to live lovingly towards their brothers but never binds these as rules. They would “do well” to follow them and of course if they really loved God and his family then they would have no problem with these things but it never binds these things as rules. It was about the heart and not rules. They were learning to live for a lifetime not for a day.


Devotional Thought
Do you really embrace the hard work of thinking through and living out the call for Christians to love one another and put the interests of others ahead of our own or do you tend to seek the easy way out by falling back on fulfilling the obligations of a few things that you have turned into rules? For instance, do you have time with God every morning or meet with other believers because you have truly thought through the implications of what those things mean to do or not do or do you just muddle through them as an obligation? Take some time today to truly think about what you do and why you do it.