In this post awhile back I had been working my way through the Old Testament law and was struggling with trying to determine how much of it really applies to me (a non-Jewish Christian).
I wasn’t very happy with where I ended up, which was to do some studying of the Levitical laws and ceremonies and what they really meant to see how they should apply to me today. Well, thank God for Beth Moore (and her daughter Melissa) for shedding some light on this area for me. They point out that this is also an area that the early church had to traverse as they formed a new religion out of the traditional Jews AND the Gentiles. “This new thing God did meant Gentiles no longer needed to convert to Judaism to be included among god’s people. In Peter’s words, God has purified or cleansed the Gentiles’ hearts by faith.” (Melissa)
In Acts 15, commonly referred to as the Jerusalem Council, we find Paul and Barnabas appointed to attend a meeting with the elders in Jerusalem to once again discuss the issue of circumcision and whether it applied to Gentiles, and to come to an agreement that would affect the direction Christianity was going. Their was ‘much discussion’, Peter made his statement referenced above, and when everyone had had their say James finally ‘spoke up’. We are studying James currently and are discovering that he was very influential in the early church in Jerusalem. He was a Jewish Christian leading the most Jewish of the converts out there (even some of the Pharisees). He recognized the need to have a diplomatic solution that would meet the desires of both sides of the issue (the Jews and the Gentiles). And this is what he decided: Acts 15:19,20 “It is my judgment, therefore, that we should not make it difficult for the Gentiles who are turning to God. Instead we should write to them, telling them to abstain from food polluted by idols, from sexual immorality, from the meat of strangled animals and from blood.”
Why did he pick those four things? Because he KNEW the law. In Leviticus 17 and 18, these are the sections of the law that say “to the Jew and the alien among you”. He basically gave all the Gentile believers a free visa to Christianity, while restraining the Jewish converts from making them follow all of the 600+ laws that they had been trying to keep and hadn’t done a very good job at.
So, now I have a better bearing on the rules I should live by from this side of the cross, Mark 12:30 which points to the 10 commandments and Acts 15 which points to the Levitical laws for the Jewish aliens. 🙂 I’m much more excited about that than trying to wade through all of the law to determine what applies to me. If I could just get that love thing down, I think everything else would fall into place.
Mark 12:30 And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’ 31 The second is this: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no other commandment greater than these.”