This post is available on YouTube here: https://youtu.be/0Zhv1B_EWtU
Acts 15:36-16:10 If you haven’t read it yet, here’s a link – this is the most important part! https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Acts%2015%3A36-16%3A10&version=NLT
First of all, I know, I’m tossing three separate stories all in here together. A good theologian would probably make a book out of each one of these. We’ve been over this. I’m not a good theologian. I’m just a girl who loves the God she has found in the Bible, so I spend as much time as I can reading the Bible to find more of him.
The book of Acts is really about the Holy Spirit and the church and how we learned to live together when it was just getting started. Many of the characters in this book are people who actually personally knew Jesus and heard him teach. So it’s worth understanding how they worshipped and followed Jesus because they probably got a lot right. But they weren’t perfect either. Misunderstandings and disagreements happened. People had to make tough calls and didn’t necessarily get them right. Sometimes people even really wanted to do something for God that just wasn’t on God’s agenda so they had to be rerouted. And that’s what I see here. The gospel is moving forward. It’s going well, but not perfectly. Is there even a perfect scenario? I don’t think there is in this life. So let’s take a quick look.
First of all, I really don’t like this disagreement between Paul and Barnabus. Why? Because Paul is the most prolific New Testament writer. He is an actual hero of the faith. He followed God passionately and with self-sacrificial devotion. He was an incredibly admirable follower of Jesus from the day he met him on the road to Damascus. And he had a pretty sharp falling out with Barnabus who is one of my personal favourite characters. Barnabus was an encourager through and through. He didn’t give up on people as evidenced here. He was the one who encouraged the church to give Paul a chance. He was such a faithful friend. Almost from the point of Paul’s conversion, Paul got the limelight. He was the main preacher. When they arrived at a new town, Paul’s education and rhetorical prowess just captivated people. Barnabus stood in the shadows for the most part. He was always with Paul on that first journey, supporting him, likely having private conversations with people who had questions about Paul’s teaching, but you don’t hear his sermons. Paul was gifted as a teacher and had an incredible intellectual pedigree so it was right for him to be the one talking. That could have been hard on a lot of people. Barnabus had been a believer well before Paul. As I said, he was the one who encouraged the church to give him a chance. Barnabus was a respected member of the church before Paul ever showed up. But the minute Paul came preaching and teaching with such obvious gifting, Barnabus took the supporting role with grace and joy. He was there for Paul. He was excited about what God was doing through him. We have zero indication that he ever gave a thought to who was getting the recognition. So we have these two remarkable, well-respected Jesus followers and they are NOT on the same page. If I had it my way everyone who loves Jesus would just agree and love one another and get along and hold hands and sing campfire songs. I’m a peace maker so I stress when people aren’t getting along. But it happened all the way back at the start of the church. It’s nothing new. And, apparently, it’s even kind of okay. They split and headed off in two different directions. Now there were two missionary teams sent off by the church. Verse 40 says Paul and Silas went off commended by the brothers but honestly, I think Luke says that because it was obvious that Barnabus had the church’s approval, and he wanted us to know that Paul was also going with their blessing. I can tell you this was not an irreparable fracture because, in letters written later in Paul’s life, he mentions both Barnabus and John Mark warmly as co-workers in the faith. So stuff happens. Even within the family of believers in Jesus, people disagree. Somehow God’s plan survives our petty disagreements.
Then we have this thing about Timothy and honestly, this one bugs me too. Did Paul, Barnabus and a delegation from Jerusalem not recently come to Antioch with a letter from the church leaders declaring that Gentiles did not need to be circumcised? Will Paul not, at various times and in future letters, rail against those he called Judaisers who insisted that to become a Christian you first had to become a Jew? Yes!
So what? Why? I was pretty determined that scholars should agree with me that Paul made a mistake here. I even searched a couple commentaries and asked Google. Apparently I am not well-supported in my opinion. I guess Timothy was half-Jewish and people around knew that so it was a bit of a mental hurdle for them that he wasn’t circumcised. The commentators I read said Paul was just trying to keep the peace and make things simpler for his Jewish audience. I don’t know. Tell that to Timothy.
I think my takeaway is that on matters of practise there is room for grace. Timothy was a believer when Paul met him. Paul didn’t have him circumcised in order to save his soul. This wasn’t about salvation. It was about making him welcome in places of worship and within the Jewish community to whom they sometimes ministered. Was it sketchy? Well, later we find out Paul refuses to have a guy named Titus circumcised under similar circumstances (though I don’t think Titus had any Jewish heritage). This was a tough call. The church had said, not necessary. Paul said, ya, in this situation it is necessary. That’s pretty bold.
My takeaway here is this: When we are talking about actually becoming a Christian, the standards are set in stone and there is no fence on which to sit. We are saved through faith when we confess with our mouths that Jesus is Lord. And when we believe in our hearts that God raised Jesus from the dead.
There is no action, no sacrifice, no behaviour, no pilgrimage or penance that can earn our salvation. It is a gift given from the loving heart of God the Father, made possible by the grace of Jesus. This is NONnegotiable stuff. But sometimes matters of practise can vary. Some believers can’t go out for a beer after work with a clean conscience and some can. Some behaviours are cultural matters and some behaviours are moral matters. And frankly, sometimes it is hard to know which is which. Fellow believer in Jesus, we are all on a learning curve. So if you see another believer who looks to you like they are behind you on the curve, pray for them. Offer wisdom if asked. Search the scriptures to understand God’s best. But approach it with humility, because even the apostle Paul did things one way in some contexts and another way in others. I’m not saying there are no moral absolutes. There are. Frankly, the scriptures are full of them. But if you understand scripture differently than someone else who claims to believe in and follow Jesus… proceed with caution. Unless you are Jesus himself, and you’re not, you might get something wrong. I sure have. Grace and humility! Enough said!
In the last story in this little trilogy, Paul and his companions are choosing their itinerary and they add Mysia. Jesus says, Nope. He gives Paul a dream or vision that changes their itinerary half way through the trip. Even godly people set off on a course that isn’t exactly the one God has planned for them. It doesn’t mean they have done something wrong. I personally can testify to the fact that God often sends us towards destinations that he doesn’t intend for us to reach. He just knows how to get us moving in the right direction. If he puts something in front of us and says, “This is what you need to head for.” It doesn’t mean we are going to get to it. It just means that is the direction we need to go so that when he suddenly turns us 90 degrees to our intended course, we will unexpectedly find ourselves exactly where we need to be in order to get somewhere else that God wants us.
I suspect that Luke deliberately squished these three short stories together to help us see that from the start, following Jesus, being a part of the church, knowing God’s will…was messy. Really godly people did things that didn’t seem 100% consistent. Things genuinely seemed to go very wrong at times. Yet, the early church didn’t derail God or his mission on earth, and so this mess that we call the modern day church isn’t going to defeat him either. In fact, WE are the vehicle by which he will accomplish his purpose, no matter how messy, misguided or mistaken we can sometimes be.
