Hi, Nathan W. Bingham here. Before we get to today's episode, I wanted to make you aware of an upcoming travel opportunity with other listeners of Renewing Your Mind and Friends of Ligonier, a Caribbean study cruise that sets sail next February. I'll be there and Dr. Derek Thomas and Pastor Ken Jones will be our teachers as they lead us through the rich theological truths of Galatians 3. Enjoy eight days of teaching, refreshment, and fellowship when you travel with us on this Caribbean study cruise.
You can learn more and register at LigonierTours.com. I hope to see you there. Now onto today's episode. Let's turn in obedience to the Lord Jesus Christ. Among other things, we are reminded of the necessity of repentance. This is the Wednesday edition of Renewing Your Mind.
I'm your host, Nathan W. Bingham. Yes, Peter was an apostle. He penned inspired books of the Bible, but he was also a man.
He had experiences like us, and he, like all Christians, repented of sin. As Derek Thomas walks us through the life of Peter, we often see ourselves in his weakness, and we can find encouragement when Peter makes bold stands and is obedient. So I do encourage you to take the time to work through this 19-message series and the companion hardcover book when you give a donation of any amount at renewingyourmind.org.
Or when you call us at 800 435 4343. Perhaps this will be your book of choice over the upcoming holiday season. Well, to continue our study, Dr. Thomas is in Acts chapter 11. We're going to camp out for a couple of lessons on Acts 11, and the next lesson we'll take the second half of chapter 11, but also add a significant section in Galatians chapter 2, but for this lesson, Acts 11 and verses 1 through 18. Now the apostles and the brothers who were throughout Judea heard that the Gentiles also had received the word of God. So when Peter went up to Jerusalem, the circumcision party criticized him, saying, You went to uncircumcised men and ate with them. But Peter began and explained it to them in order. I was in the city of Joppa, praying, and in a trance I saw a vision, something like a great sheet descending, being let down from heaven by its four corners. And it came down to me, looking at it closely, I observed animals and beasts of prey and reptiles and birds of the air. And I heard a voice saying to me, Rise, Peter, kill and eat.
But I said, By no means, Lord, for nothing common or unclean has ever entered my mouth. But the voice answered a second time from heaven, What God has made clean, do not call common. This happened three times, and all was drawn up again into heaven. And behold, at that very moment three men arrived at the house in which we were sent to me from Caesarea, and the Spirit told me to go with them, making no distinction.
These six brothers also accompanied me, and we entered the man's house. And he told us how he had seen the angel stand in his house and say, Send to Joppa and bring Simon, who is called Peter. He will declare to you a message by which you will be saved, you and all your household. As I began to speak, the Holy Spirit fell on them, just as on us at the beginning. And I remembered the word of the Lord, how he said, John baptized with water, but you will be baptized with the Holy Spirit. If then God gave the same gift to them as he gave to us when we believed in the Lord Jesus Christ, who was I that I could stand in God's way? When they heard these things, they fell silent, and they glorified God, saying, Then to the Gentiles also God has granted repentance that leads to life. Well, in the last chapter, chapter 10, Peter was in Cornelius' home.
He traveled up from Joppa to Caesarea. Both Peter and the centurion, Cornelius, had received a vision. And when they finally met up, something extraordinary happens. Cornelius repeats his dream.
Peter repeats his dream. He announces that the gospel now is for Gentiles also. That's the interpretation of the vision that he had seen with the clean and unclean animals that the distinction, the kosher law distinction between Jew and Gentile was no more.
It was over. And as a consequence, Cornelius and his household believed, and they were baptized. And we suggested last time that this would bring Peter into trouble, and indeed it does. He has now made his way back to Jerusalem.
Now, there's an element of risk in this. The last time Peter was in Jerusalem, he was imprisoned. That was the second imprisonment, and there will be a third in Jerusalem.
And I think he understood that. They were still angry with him. They were still hostile to him. By them, I mean the elders and the scribes and the household of the high priest and so on. Now, in verse 2 of chapter 11, we read that when Peter went up to Jerusalem, the circumcision party criticized him.
Who are these people? And these are not just Jews, but these are Jews who have now become Christians. They're Christian Jews in Jerusalem. But the issue of what has been called recently boundary markers, those things that distinguish Jews from Gentiles, things like food loss, things like the Sabbath versus the Lord's Day, and especially circumcision. Should Gentile Christians be circumcised before they could be given assurance of their newfound relationship with Jesus Christ?
You understand that this was an enormously difficult issue. It will remain an issue until Acts chapter 15 at the Jerusalem Council, and all of that will be sorted out, the food laws and so on, and especially circumcision, that these are not required now for the Gentiles to come to saving faith in Jesus Christ. And Peter will be the one who will make a very important speech in the Jerusalem Council in Acts 15.
So, this is, if you like, these are conservative Christians versus those who want to take the gospel to all the world. So, you've got a circumcision party. They're not yet convinced that there's no need to circumcise the Gentiles.
And they include James, the Lord's brother, who will rise to a position of prominence in Jerusalem. The circumcision party had a doctrinal problem with the food laws and with circumcision, and it's more than just a doctrinal problem. For all of their lives, they have obeyed these laws. It was part of what obeying the Pentateuch, obeying the Torah, obeying Leviticus and Deuteronomy was all about. But it was more than just a doctrinal problem. It was a cultural problem. It was part of their culture. It was part of their identity. It was part of their makeup. It was how they had identified themselves. We are those who don't eat non-kosher food. We are those who are circumcised as opposed to the uncircumcised. And the uncircumcised Gentiles were dogs. They were unclean.
It's an enormous barrier that they have to get over. And the fact that Peter had baptized Cornelius and his household without requiring circumcision and had eaten with them, and presumably, therefore, eaten non-kosher food. And Peter has to explain himself, and he tells the whole story all over again. And this story is told four times. That's the significance of this event, that Luke repeats the story four times in the Acts of the Apostles. Now, in the course of arguing for the correctness, the rightness of what Peter had done, he once again in verses 17 and 18, he tells us what the gospel is. If then God gave the same gift to them as he gave to us when we believed in the Lord Jesus Christ, who was I that I could stand in God's way?
And when they heard these things, they fell silent. What is a Christian? This is the issue. It's not really about kosher food.
It's not really about circumcision. The real question, the fundamental question is, what is a Christian? Who has the right to be called a Christian? And he tells us here in verse 17, they are those who believe in the Lord Jesus Christ. They believed in him. They exercised faith in Jesus Christ. They took Christ as their Lord and Savior.
They took him as their master. They lived for him. They saw in him the answer to the problem of their sin and guilt. They saw in him a Savior. They saw in him the fulfillment of all of the messianic promises of the Old Testament. They saw Jesus as their substitute, as their sin bearer, as the one who provided satisfaction to satisfy the demands of divine justice.
But then also, then to the Gentiles also God has granted repentance that leads to life. Again, this emphasis, we've seen it before in Peter, the emphasis on repentance. I wonder if Peter has this emphasis on repentance because he had to repent. He knew what repentance was.
He knew the shape of it. He knew the pain of it. The turning away from that pride that led to his denial of Jesus. That pride that had said on more than one occasion that he thought his master was mistaken. And he needed to repent of that. He needed to be brought low.
The balloon of pride needed to be pricked. He needed to turn away from sin and turn in obedience to the Lord Jesus Christ. This emphasis on repentance. Peter's gospel is not an easy believism gospel.
That was popular fifty years ago at the time when John MacArthur, for example, in the 1970s wrote a very, very important and influential book arguing against easy believism. That you could walk down the aisle, you could take Jesus, you could make a decision for Jesus and then you could live like the devil for the rest of your life. But you would still get into heaven by the skin of your teeth. And that's not Peter's gospel. Peter's gospel says you need to believe and you need to repent.
You need a repenting faith and you need a faith that leads to repentance. And then he talks about receiving the Holy Spirit. He talks here about the fact he records the fact that these folk, these household members of Cornelius, verse 15, As I began to speak, the Holy Spirit fell on them, just as on us at the beginning. He's talking about Pentecost and speaking in tongues, the foreign languages, and as a sign, a sign gift, a sign of the apostles and of the apostolic era, as Paul says in 2 Corinthians 12.
That's what they are. They are signs of the apostles. And they were signs indicating that the gospel was now spreading to the Gentiles.
It was the beginning of the fulfillment of the Great Commission in Matthew 28 to go into all the world. So, what is a Christian? Somebody who believes in Jesus. Somebody who repents of his old lifestyle.
Somebody who receives the Holy Spirit, not now with tongues, but we still receive the Spirit, the Spirit to renew us, the Spirit to quicken us, the Spirit to engage and pursue us in acts of righteousness and sanctification. Well then, secondly, I want us to see the obedience of Peter. The obedience of Peter. Now, God had given to him his word in a dream, in Joppa.
And as he makes his way with this entourage to Caesarea, and he's recounting this now to the folks in Jerusalem, he had obeyed that word. If it was difficult for those of the circumcision party in Jerusalem to understand what Peter had done, and to be critical of it, to be deeply suspicious of it because of their culture, because of their understanding of what the Old Testament demanded, well, it would have been equally difficult for Peter. Peter was a Jew. Peter had been raised in obedience to the Torah.
Peter, as he says, had never eaten anything unclean in all of his life. But all of a sudden, in obedience to the Word of God, he does something. He does something that he has never done before. He's a man in his early thirties at this point.
Mid thirties, perhaps. And all of a sudden, he changes his behavior. He does something that he's never done before. Something that ten years ago, five years ago, he would have regarded as a sin, as something entirely wrong. And all of a sudden, he changes his behavior, and he starts eating what he would have once regarded as unclean food. Now, that may not be a big deal for you.
You may not care if you never ate a crustacean ever again. But for him, for Peter, as a Jew, and a loyal Jew at that, this would have been quite staggering. And the fact that he obeys, and that he obeys in good conscience, because who is he to say back to God that what he is demanding is wrong and incorrect?
He has the help of the Holy Spirit to do exactly what God wanted him to do. And he didn't flinch. Now, Peter can flinch.
Peter can fumble. We've seen it before. But on this occasion, he didn't sort of raise the objection, you know, some people are going to get upset. If I do this, some people are going to get upset. We find this in church life, that there are things that God asks in Scripture, but our churches are not doing them. And if we try to bring the church into conformity with what God is asking us in Scripture, people are going to be upset.
And there are those who live their entire lives trying to make sure that people never get upset. You see it sometimes in the area of worship, where things are happening and there is absolutely no biblical warrant for it whatsoever. And you want to change it, and you know that if you do, people are going to get upset. You see it in the area of church government, how the church is ruled, how decisions are made.
And they're not in conformity to the pattern that Scripture has laid down, and you want to reform the church. But you know that people are going to get upset. And so, you submit to that stranglehold that they have over you, that they're going to be upset. Well, Peter didn't think about people getting upset. He probably knew that people would get upset. He knew what the people in Jerusalem would say, and he knows he's going to have to answer for it. But he did it anyway, and he did it because God asked him to do it. It's one of the wonderful things, I think, about Peter. We'll see in the next session. We'll move to Antioch in the next session, because the second half of Acts 11 moves to Antioch, and we'll see just how difficult a decision this actually was for Peter.
The whole business of food, the whole business of kosher food, the whole business of circumcision. And he fumbles in Antioch. I mean, he dramatically fumbles in Antioch, but here, he is absolutely resolute. This is so like Peter.
He's just super on some occasions, and then on other occasions, he can just so dramatically fall. Then there's a third thing they want us to see, something about the church in Jerusalem and something that they have to learn. When Peter is called to explain himself, and remember, James is there. James is, well, he's the Lord's brother. Protestants believe that there were brothers and sisters, so at least two brothers and at least two sisters. And therefore, Joseph and Mary had a family of seven at minimum. Now, Roman Catholics, because of the perpetual virginity of Mary that they espouse, these were just cousins and not brothers or half-brothers and half-sisters.
But Protestants have no difficulty whatsoever in affirming that James was the Lord's brother, and he was part of that circumcision party. And we'll see in our next session. He will make a visit up to Antioch. He has an enormously powerful influence, I think.
You know, it's quite a card to carry. You know, I'm Jesus' brother. I grew up with him. I played with him. I slept in the same room as him. I could tell you things that no one knows about Jesus.
I can tell you about what he was like when he was ten or when he was twelve, when he became a teenager, when he entered into manhood. The problem in Jerusalem was that their vision was too small. It was too restrictive.
It was too confined. You've got to get the whole world into your sights. That's what Jesus said in the Great Commission. You've got to get the whole world into your sights. You've got to have an interest and a passion for spreading the gospel around the world to all the peoples and nations and languages and tribes. Take the gospel to the ends of the earth.
That's what this visit by Peter was about. It was to try to unshackle them from seeing the confines of the church. They had moved from Judaism into a form now of Christianity. It's still developing, I think, in their minds and in their thinking. They are now followers of Jesus, but it's confined to Jerusalem.
There are churches like that. They just want to be themselves. They're just concerned about themselves.
Maybe they might be concerned about what's across the road or down the street, but do they have a vision for the whole world? Do they have a vision for taking the gospel to every tribe and tongue and nation? And this breaking down of the barrier between Jew and Gentile, that the gospel is for all the people groups of the world, this is what Jerusalem was now grappling with and what they really had to come to terms with and understand. It was more than just preserving the status quo.
Maybe a part of it was that they feared that they would lose their influence. Do you know how powerful Jerusalem was? Every pilgrim came to Jerusalem, and if you lived in Jerusalem, and if you had authority in Jerusalem, if you had status in Jerusalem, if the gospel was to spread far and wide, you'd lose your influence, you'd lose your power, and that is precisely what happened in Jerusalem. By the time you come to the Apostle Paul, it's not Jerusalem anymore.
It's places like Corinth and Ephesus and Rome and Galatia. Well, that is a lesson, I think, that is perpetually before us to open our eyes to see the worldwide extent that Jesus has in mind for the gospel. And that worldwide focus continued, and you and I are the beneficiaries of that faithful global preaching of the gospel.
That was Derek Thomas, a Ligonier Ministries teaching fellow on this Wednesday edition of Renewing Your Mind, teaching on the life of the Apostle Peter. You can add this 19-message series to your digital library, along with the digital study guide, when you make a donation of any amount to Renewing Your Mind and Ligonier Ministries in support of our global outreach. You can give your gift by calling us at 800 435 4343 or at renewingyourmind.org. And to say thank you, we'll unlock the series in the free Ligonier app, plus we'll send you the newly released companion hardcover book by Dr. Thomas, also on the life of Peter. So that's a teaching series, a study guide, and a hardcover book when you make a donation of any amount by clicking the link in the podcast show notes or by visiting renewingyourmind.org.
Thank you for your generosity. You are helping fuel the global outreach of Ligonier Ministries, and Renewing Your Mind wouldn't be possible without that support. How should we respond when someone compromises the Gospel, or at least gives the appearance of compromising the Gospel? The Apostle Paul faced that situation, and he confronted the Apostle Peter. It's this confrontation that Derek Thomas will examine tomorrow, here on Renewing Your Mind. .
