You pick up your Bible and wonder, is there more here than meets the eye?
Is there anything here for me? I mean, it's just words printed on paper, right? Well, it may look like just print on a page, but it's more than ink. Join us for the next half hour as we explore God's Word together, as we learn how to explore it on our own, as we ask God to meet us there in its pages. Welcome to More Than Ink. Well, we continue our reading about the early church as we read the book of Acts, and unbelievably, we're going to have two conflicts today. Well, and one of them is doctrinal and very important, but the other one is personal.
And the wonderful thing is that both conflicts will be used for God's glory. We'll see it today on More Than Ink. Well, hello and good morning, and this is More Than Ink, and I'm Dorothy.
And I'm Jim. And we are sitting here at the table having a great discussion. We're right in the middle of Acts 15, where actually the whole church had essentially gathered at the table to talk about this. Yeah, this was a very big deal. Major issue that was in danger of dividing this new church right down the middle, Jews and Gentiles against one another over the issue of circumcision. Yeah, and this is not kind of a side issue. This is the very heart of what the new covenant was about.
And I'd mentioned that last time. This is where in a rubber meets the road kind of high traction way, the old covenant and the new covenant meet one another. And in the sense of the old covenant, so full of the laws, many of them centered around the people, but the law system that God brought to Israel and the Jews. And now that Jews are becoming Christians and by faith and through the means of grace from God, it's a radical shift in terms of people who will have God's name on them. And that's what we're seeing here, is the Gentiles are included and they're coming on alongside the Jews. The Jews are saying, wait a second, this doesn't match our history.
Well, and it wasn't just a quiet, wait a second. It was a quite vociferous discussion. They were arguing pointedly with one another. And the question on the table really was, these new Gentiles must become Jews before they can be saved.
That was the point. And they had to go through circumcision and commit to keep the law. And that was the discussion. And they settled it finally by James saying, the prophets have said, God will take a people for his own name from among the Gentiles. That together with Peter's testimony about, hey, by my hand, God first took the gospel to the Gentiles. And he saw it.
He saw it. And he saw God give the gift of the Holy Spirit to this Gentile household before Peter even got to his salvation message. You can read that back in Acts 10. So between Peter's testimony and James's carefully delivered thought and quotation from the prophets. Well, and Paul and Barnabas's witness testimony. And Paul and Barnabas also. Yeah, that they arrived at this conclusion that they could find a way for the church to live peacefully together by respecting one another.
And so they arrived at a conclusion and they decided to write a letter to Antioch, to the church in Antioch. Right, right. Because it was that church that actually raised the issue.
Right, right. And well, they raised the issue because Jews had come from Jerusalem saying, Christians have got to become Jews first. Because that's where Paul and Barnabas were celebrating this massive turning to Christ from the Gentiles. That was where the tidal wave of the Gentile conversions was happening. So the things they decide to put in the letter are interesting.
And we'll revisit those because we'll read the letter after they wrote it. But it's for the sake of unity in this new body of Christ between Gentile and Jewish believers. Right.
And so the question at hand, do Christians, do believers who are Gentiles have to become Jews to be a follower of Jesus? And the answer is no. No. Decisively no.
And that rocks the world. And so today we get to the point where we actually write a letter on paper. We're going to take it up there and so we can tell them what we decided. Last week we looked in the beginning of chapter 15 of Acts about the discussion. Today we're going to put it on paper. So they had such a discussion that they decided they needed to send some guys with it, right, to interpret the letter. Some guys who were there and were part of the conversation. So we'll see how that unfolds as we read the second half of chapter 15.
Why don't I start us out. We're in chapter 15 at 22. Then it seemed good to the apostles and the elders with the whole church to choose men from among them and send them to Antioch with Paul and Barnabas. So they sent Judas, called Barsabbas, and Silas, leading men among the brothers, with the following letter. And so let me read the letter and we'll come back to that. Okay. Here's the letter. This is what they wrote in quotation marks here in the Bible.
The brothers, both the apostles and the elders, to the brothers who are of the Gentiles in Antioch and Syria and Cilicia. Okay. I've got to just interrupt you there. Isn't that glorious? It is. So here, to the brothers there, there's this ground kind of foundational understanding. We are all brothers. We are members of the same family.
Can you see the unity on the page there? I know it's good. Yeah, I know. It's really, really great. Go ahead.
No, it's really, really great. So greetings. That's how he starts off. Greetings. Well, since we have heard that some persons, this is still the letter, since we have heard that some persons have gone out from us and troubled you with words unsettling your minds, although we gave them no instructions, it has seemed good to us, having come to one accord, to choose men and send them to you with our beloved Barnabas and Paul, men who have risked lives, risked their lives for the name of our Lord Jesus Christ. We have therefore sent Judas and Silas, who themselves will tell you the same things by word of mouth. For it has seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us to lay on you no greater burden than these requirements, that you abstain from what has been sacrificed to idols and from blood and from what has been strangled and from sexual immorality.
And if you keep yourselves from these, you will do well. Farewell. That's the letter. Wow, what a great letter. That's the letter, yeah. Introducing also these guys who are both being more witnesses on the basis of two or more witnesses, including Paul and Barnabas, this is what happened. Isn't it great, the bottom line is that we're not saying here's the 10, 15, 25 law things you have to keep, we're just saying here's the essentials, here's the important things.
Right, right. And this is not an exhaustive list of righteousness, but it does hit straight on about the fact that the Jews would be most easily offended, most easily antagonized, the ones who are struggling with this transition, especially if you overtly violate the food laws in an egregious way. And so three of those things he mentioned are food law things that would easily offend a Jew, easily offend a Jew. But let's back up for a minute, because I love the fact that brothers occurs so many times in this letter. But look at the soft way James says what he says about, or the letter writer says what he says about, you know, these guys, we didn't send them, they've unsettled you, it's very loving and very careful.
And it's not really condemning. No. But it was kind of, they went up sort of as troublemakers. They kind of came on their own and the result has been trouble for you. And it's funny that word unsettling your minds, that is an interesting word. It's a word that you would use if you were packing up to move stuff elsewhere. Like they came in and they moved stuff around and said it doesn't work this way, we're moving this over here.
And you thought you had finally gotten your head together and they decided not to. So it scrambled things. But look at how gently it says, three times this passage says it seemed good. It seemed good. Right? That's just there's room for everybody to weigh in here, but it seemed good to all of us.
And then the third time he says it seemed good to the Holy Spirit. Yep, yep. Yeah, so here's these guys who on their own initiative and by the tone of this, you know, well intentioned, I would think well intentioned as believers who come from a very Jewish background, went up and did that. So these guys came on their own initiative come up to you and cause you to be unsettled. Now we're going to send you some other guys.
Right. We're going to speak to you and we're talking about not just Paul and Barnabas going back, but two other guys from us. We're going to send you more and this is deliberate.
I mean this isn't just a one off like those guys. We're doing this on purpose, because we want you to understand. They're going to help you understand how we came to this conclusion, right?
Because we couldn't write it all in the letter. Right. And I'm sure they had extended conversations about what were the discussions about and what's this and that. Yeah.
It's not documented here, but I'm sure they came not only as just personal witnesses to what had happened when they all got together in Jerusalem, but also just explain the details in more detail. In more detail. But you know there's something else here that I just love before we press on to the content of the letter and that is in verse 25 he says, It has seemed good to us having come to one accord to choose men with them to send to you. So by that word to come to one accord, I looked at that and it's a really interesting word. It's a combination of two words meaning to rush along in unison. So it's almost a musical word. A lot of notes sounding all at once and then they coalesce into harmony. Oh, that's nice.
Yeah, it's and now all of that is just in the definition of the word. And I'm thinking what a good description of all of this active discussion until the Spirit kind of brings them all into one way of thinking. Unison.
One view. Yeah, a unison. A beautifully united sound. Yeah. And it's important to understand kind of the mechanism of how this unison came. It started by a cacophony. Right.
If you want to keep with the music. And they were struggling to understand one another and to grapple for the truth. No small amount of dissent with one another. Right.
It was really tough. And so the unison, the unity did not come because of a strong personality who came in kind of like a tyrant and said, This is my opinion. This is what we're going to do. That's not how it happened at all.
I mean read the first half of the chapter because but he mentions it here about all this. It seemed good to us. That is something happened to all of us. Right. It seemed good.
It seemed good. Right. And we came to this one unison note about things. And as you go back and look at that passage the role of the word is central to it.
Central. I mean James quotes Amos as the closing argument. So when the word is brought in that happened. But then here he also mentions the fact that this was a work of the Holy Spirit. Verse 28.
It seemed good. It has seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us. And so he attributes the fact that how did we come from a descent and a disagreement and a sharp difference to where we are now where we have one voice. The word of God and the influence of the Holy Spirit.
Yeah. And I might add another ingredient to that recipe is on every person's part humility. So no one in typical secular fashion today you look for a strong domineering person who can actually force a single outcome almost by threat and by power.
Here that is not what happened. Here we have a collection of humble people who are strongly influenced by God's Spirit and by God's Word. Listening to one another and reasoning together. Yeah, yeah.
It is a very different kind of process than what we do today. But I just want to mention the humility a second time because in conflicts that I have been in in Christian churches humility is the lacking ingredient. It really is. Sure, because it is every man thinking he is right. Because every man does think he is right.
Yeah. But are you humble enough to say maybe God's Word can overrule what I think, what my opinion is. Can God's Spirit overrule what I am thinking.
Maybe I am wrong. You know so that humility is just a big deal. It is a very big deal.
The willingness even to consider that maybe your viewpoint is limited or not. Yeah. Not completely in alignment with the word of God. Yeah.
So I love how he makes connections to all of that and how he has written this. You are right. It is very respectful.
It is very gentle. It is not condemning. But he is saying but this is where we got to on your behalf with one voice. So it is interesting that what they ask the Gentile church to do and they recognize that they are asking them to modify their behavior. They are asking them to limit their freedom in some ways.
But out of respect for their brothers, fellow believers, the Jews among them. So shall we read the actual content of the letter now? Right. Where did we stop? Well we stopped at 29.
29. We did read the letter. Oh I guess we did. Yeah. So I mean it is a weird list of stuff.
It is not a list that we would make much of today except for the inclusion of sexual immorality. Yeah. The first half of the letter if I just stay on it. The first half of the letter is explaining why Judas and Silas came along with Paul and Barnabas. Right. And that is an important thing in terms of a witness. Another set of witnesses.
Well and a personal we love you enough to come and tell you this face to face. Exactly. And then the second half of it starting at 28 is about the content and it is remarkably small.
I mean it seemed good to the Holy Spirit and us to lay on you. No greater burden than just these. Right.
One, two, three, four. Right. You know abstaining from meat sacrificed to idols, from blood, from what has been strangled from sexual immorality. And that is it. You know and if you keep yourselves from these you will do well.
You will do well. Yeah. So it is extraordinarily brief.
Extraordinarily brief. So look at the response of the Antioch church in verse 30. So when they were sent off they went down to Antioch and having gathered the congregation together they delivered the letter. And when they had read it they rejoiced because of its encouragement. Yeah.
Encouraging. And Judas and Silas who were themselves prophets encouraged and strengthened the brothers with many words. And after they had spent some time they were sent off in peace by the brothers to those who had sent them.
But Paul and Barnabas remained in Antioch teaching and preaching the word of the Lord with many others also. Brothers, brothers, brothers, brothers, brothers. Everywhere. Is all over this letter. The emphasis is on unity. Yep. Yep. That is exactly it because division threatened the church. And the division was not over a trivial issue like we said.
No. It is big. This is a gigantic issue. And it is an issue that Paul will keep writing about for the next two decades.
Well maybe one decade actually at this point. So because it shows up principally in his letters. You see echoes of it through all of his letters. And it is pretty much what Galatians is all about. Well yeah but there is big chunks in Romans and there is some in 1 Corinthians. There is lots of places. You too can discover that if you take your concordance and look up partiality or look up circumcision, track that in your concordance and see where you find that in the letters of Paul. Yeah, yeah. And I might add too as you approach the letters of Paul, come back to this section.
I have done this a lot. Come back to Acts 15 because this is really the historical context that flows almost all of Paul's comments about this conflict. How do you make the people of God who obey the laws of God mesh with those who come to God, who God has put His name on, Gentiles. And yet there are no temple requirements on these people. And so much more.
How do you merge the whole idea about righteousness through the law with righteousness through faith. And that is just for them at the time. For the Jewish believers that was just like a tidal wave. It was just hard to get your arms around. And in fact it was hard for Peter too until he had his rooftop experience in Joppa. And then God said look you can't call people common or unclean that I call clean. So get ready.
Get ready for big stuff. So I just think this is just a gigantic issue. There is no bigger issue it seems like in the entire New Testament. Well and we probably shouldn't move on from this without talking just briefly about the process that took place within the church. Because the issue arose then representatives on both sides engaged in discussion and then they appealed to the larger church. They went to Jerusalem. But it's very careful to say in every place the leaders and the elders and the whole church were present.
Everyone was in on this conversation because it was edifying for all of them. Yeah yeah that's exactly right. And I might mention there is more going on here too with the two extra guys that came with Judas and Silas. Because if you are a student of Acts.
Right. Well I'll follow Paul's letters. You'll see Silas' name come up many many times.
Sometimes he is called by his Roman equivalent Silvanus. But it's really interesting because we just mentioned that Paul has finished his first missionary journey. We have three missionary journeys documented in Acts.
But at the end of his first missionary journey and now pretty soon they are going to go off again. Now Paul is going to actually be accompanied by Silas. And so Silas shows up like everywhere. In fact it looks like by the language of Peter's letters 1 Peter that Silas is his scribe. But he is also the traveling companion. What a great testimony it would be for all these outlying Gentile lands that Paul is going to go to in the second and third missionary journeys to have Silas standing next to him.
And for the Gentiles in disbelief to say you mean we can have a part in God's plan for his promised people. And then Paul can turn to Silas and say listen to Silas. Because Silas was there too. He was an eyewitness listening to these discussions.
It's just not me. Here is Silas representing you know the Jewish center of the world in Jerusalem. And he can along with me join his voice to me and say yes the invitation to be God's people is now being extended to the Gentiles. And this is coming from not only Paul but Silas who was there at the same time.
So now we have two eyewitnesses to this gigantic event going out and reaffirming to the new Gentile believers in the second and third missionary journeys yes the invitation is open to the Gentiles. I just think that's great. That's amazing.
That's great. And a conflict is going to show up in just a second here. And I think in large measure it's in order to get Silas on the road with Paul. Well that certainly was the outcome. That was the outcome.
And God clearly used it. We'll talk about that in a minute after we read it. Let's pick it up at verse 36.
Okay here we go. And after some days Paul and Barnabas said let us return and visit the brothers in every city where we proclaimed the word of the Lord and see how they are. Actually that was Paul that said that to Barnabas.
Yeah Paul says that right. Now Barnabas wanted to take with them John called Mark. But Paul thought best not to take with them one who had withdrawn from them in Penphilia and had not gone with them to the work.
And there arose a sharp disagreement so that they separated from each other. Barnabas took Mark with him and sailed away to Cyprus. But Paul chose Silas and departed having been commended by the brothers to the grace of the Lord. And he went through Syria and Cilicia strengthening the churches.
Yeah change in personnel. So remember back in chapter 13 John Mark when the going got rough John Mark just split and went home. He had been with them as they crossed Cyprus on the first missionary journey. And home for him was Jerusalem. Home for him was Jerusalem.
Went back to Jerusalem. And so it says he back in chapter 13 it just says he departed which is a pretty neutral statement. But here Paul characterizes it as he deserted. That word is the same one that's used in Hebrews 3 12 about unbelieving people stepping away, standing away, departing, deserting from the Lord.
Which is why in 39 it was a sharp disagreement. But you know the sharp disagreement too is because Barnabas and Paul have two different natures too. Barnabas means son of encouragement.
So I can see why Barnabas would take the softer approach toward Mark. He's a relative. He's a cousin. He's a relative yeah. So in fact it says in Colossians 4 he's a cousin.
He's very young. So yeah so Barnabas is a man who encourages and he's encouraging Mark. I pointed out before that Mark's hometown is Jerusalem. That's where he went back to when he abandoned them in Pamphylia. So how is it that he's here back in Antioch? That's a good question. Maybe he went up with Barnabas.
I think that he decided to go back into the ministry and so he went and came back to Antioch. Because clearly he can't. Well we don't know that for sure. You're making that up.
We don't. But the last we saw him he went back home to Jerusalem. Right. And now he's back in Antioch. But I'm sure when they got home Barnabas wanted to find out what was up with Mark or man because they were related. I think so too. Barnabas had gone to Jerusalem and came back up to Antioch and he perhaps brought Mark with him.
We don't know. But here it's a big deal. Mark is back in Antioch and it's a way of him saying you know I want to be back in doing ministry. I want to be available. Well I haven't deserted the Lord. I deserted you.
Right. And so I think Barnabas might have looked at that just his return presence in Antioch as an intention on his part to get back engaged in what he did before was a mistake. Paul says over my dead body and Barnabas says no I think his heart's right so I'm going to take him with me.
Now you know when it comes to disputes among believers many times, no always, God uses those disputes in order to do greater good. And so it establishes two missions. One with Barnabas and Mark and the other one with Paul and Silas.
And that's okay. And it turns out that they both aim toward the same places they went to in the first missionary journey because you remember the beginning of the first missionary journey went to Cyprus. Well Barnabas was from Cyprus initially. So he goes back and he checks out what's going on in Cyprus with John Mark and then Paul and Silas go back up into what is the bottom Asia Minor which they also were at. I mean there were churches there. So it says they went through Syria and Cilicia strengthening the churches.
So yeah it's really kind of cool. God uses this to his advantage and I don't think there is really bad blood between them because we find textual evidence later on in Paul's letters that this thing he had against Mark was fixed later on. Well it was forgiven, cured, relieved, yeah. Yeah, right. Because he says, I forget at the end of which letter, do you have it, he says bring John Mark, tell him to bring the cloak. That's second Timothy.
Second Timothy. Yeah. Paul says in his closing comments, Luke alone is with me so get Mark and bring him with you for he's very useful to me in ministry. So yeah.
That's so lovely. And he says this in some years under personal training and discipling by Barnabas, Mark has grown into a man who can serve alongside Paul. Well with Paul's very own testimony he's very useful to me in ministry whereas before he was saying nope he's not going with me on the second journey. So God has clearly changed, I think he's changed both of them.
He's changed them both. Yeah. So I think it's just a remarkable thing.
It's a remarkable thing. So God again, God heals this brokenness, he amplifies the use for the gospel, he establishes two separate missionary groups and it wasn't going to happen unless this disagreement had happened. Isn't it interesting that the Lord raises in Paul a desire to go back to those places where he was stoned and less for dead to go and check on the believers there. Yeah and that's actually a good intro to next time we get together we're going to turn the page into chapter 16. And where do we find Paul? Well he says let's go back out and check on people. Let's see how it's going. And where does he end up?
Derby and Lystra. Where things just went so bad it seems like. But here's the pastor's heart in Paul kind of showing up. He says he's not just someone who just drops in and starts churches like some kind of unconcerned evangelist. A traveling evangelist who just comes in and moves on. He's a guy who these people have been on his heart this entire time and so even though the specter of violence might still be there that doesn't seem to slow him down.
He says let's go back to the hotbed and just see how people are doing in those places. Well and you know Paul formed a real heart connection with the people in every place where he founded a church because he writes in 2 Corinthians 12 about the pressure on him of the churches. He just carried with him the burden of these baby believers in every place where he had begun. Yeah and the violence that he himself experienced is another reason why it should cause concern for him because he's wondering about these young believers that were there. If they receive me with such violence I wonder how the young believers are doing there in such a hotbed of opposition.
Good thing. So next time we come back we'll see that not only are they going to go to Derby and Lystra and look at the people who became believers but this is where they're going to pick up another prominent name in Paul's travels, this young man named Timothy as they go back to Lystra. So you're going to want to see that because he does something with Timothy that seems like it's in conflict with what we just did today regarding circumcision. So come back with us next time and we'll see that here on More Than Ink. There are many more episodes of this broadcast to be found at our website morethanink.org and while you are there take a moment to drop us a note.
Remember the Bible is God's love letter to you. Pick it up and read it for yourself and you will discover that the words printed there are indeed more than ink. There we go. We just got to practice. Pound our way through it. This has been a production of Main Street Church of Brigham City.
