And after there had been much debate,
Peter stood up and said to them, “Brethren, you know that in the early days God
made a choice among you, that by my mouth the Gentiles should hear the word of
the gospel and believe. And God, who knows the heart, bore witness to them,
giving them the Holy Spirit, just as He also did to us; and He made no
distinction between us and them, cleansing their hearts by faith. Now therefore
why do you put God to the test by placing upon the neck of the disciples a yoke
which neither our fathers nor we have been able to bear? But we believe that we
are saved through the grace of the Lord Jesus, in the same way as they also
are.” (Acts 15:7-11)
The occasion of the above reading involved a strong disagreement among Jewish
Christians about the need for gentile converts to accept Jewish practices. Many
Christian Jews thought that if a gentile converted first to Judaism, then the
gentile was “qualified” to convert also to Jesus Christ. After all, most
gentiles knew only idolatry, not the living God the Jewish people knew. Many
gentiles had terrible concepts about divinity—the Jews thought they could
destroy those terrible concepts and prepare gentiles for having the lives they
should live.
Interestingly, the disagreement 2000 years ago is very similar to our
disagreement today: What is the foundation of salvation? Is the foundation our
acts or God’s acts? The primary difference in their discussion and ours was (is)
this: their discussion focused on background and our discussion usually focuses
on the necessity of obedience.
Peter said to them and would say to us, “Your concerns miss the point!”
Salvation is able to exist because of what God did in Jesus’ death and
resurrection. Any human response to what God did is just that—a response, not a
foundation. Faithless salvation does not exist: the person must place total
confidence in what God did in Jesus’ death and resurrection. That is the
foundation of salvation: the foundation of forgiveness, of sanctification, of
redemption, of righteousness. That is God propitiating for our failures.
Every act of obedience is merely a response to what God did in Jesus. Obedience
is a huge, believing, “thank you” to God that declares appreciation to God for
what He did for us. Obedience is not a “question mark” or an unbelieving
manipulation (“I did the right acts so You, God, have to save me!”) Human acts
can never manipulate God!
“Thank you, God, for not making our salvation dependent on a human’s or group of
humans’ approval. Our hope is in what You did for us, not in what we do.”
David Chadwell
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