While Paul and Barnabas were at Antioch of Syria, some men from Judea arrived and began to teach the believers: “Unless you are circumcised as required by the law of Moses, you cannot be saved.” Paul and Barnabas disagreed with them, arguing vehemently. Finally, the church decided to send Paul and Barnabas to Jerusalem, accompanied by some local believers, to talk to the apostles and elders about this question.
Almost from the start, the church was obliged to define its beliefs, its doctrines – what its correct practice should be. And right at the heart of the authentic church that is from where the beliefs should come from, right at the heart of the authentic church is of course the Bible.
Amongst Christians then, as now, the Bible is seen as the word of God the word of God as set down in the old and new testaments written by men inspired by God.
The Bible has a complicated history, but once the Christian church started to gather together its own scriptural writings – particularly those books of the New Testament, there had to be agreement about what was to be included and what was not. What books to keep and what books to leave out.
If this hadn’t been done through the underpinning authority of the Church, you could imagine how confusion and disputation could and would arise through constant challenges to orthodoxy. Although dogma is not a popular word these days, both dogma and orthodoxy were in fact essential to maintain unity and to keep the church on the straight and narrow and away from division and away from heresy. That’s the blunt but simple truth.
So, to protect the scriptures of the Christian church, two great gatherings were held in the 4th century – the Council of Hippo in 393 and the Council of Carthage in 397. The final decisions about which texts should be included in the New Testament were made there, and as the scholars say “the canon was closed.” To be quite honest, that is a slight simplification, and there have been constant developments about the meaning and translation of the texts, and the books included and left out, but the overall point still stands.
So, as we know, throughout history the church has been faced with internal conflicts about which beliefs and behaviors are considered ‘correct’ or ‘orthodox. To resolve these dilemmas and theological conflicts the church authorities took to holding these high-level meeting known as councils. Many of you will have heard of the Council of Nicaea which met in 325 and ruled on the divinity of Christ – the Council declaring that Christ was co-eternal with the Father as it says in the Gospel of John, he was with God in the beginning. And at a further council, the Council of Chalcedon, further distinctions were made and it became dogma that Christ’s nature was at once fully human and fully divine.
You might wonder where all this history is actually leading to!
Well, we’re going to focus on yet another council, one that met much earlier in the story of the church - in fact almost to the beginning of the Church, in Jerusalem sometime around AD 48.
It was there, in Jerusalem, that the first Church Council took place, and there’s no prizes for guessing that it’s the one known as the Council of Jerusalem. Decisions made there paved the way for the expansion of the Christian Church to become a church where both Jews and the gentile converts were treated equally. The account of the Council of Jerusalem begins in chapter 15 of the Acts of the Apostles. But before we go there, we need to give the story a bit of context, of how it came about in the first place.
In the previous chapter, Acts 14, we have that story of Paul and Barnabas returning to the church in Antioch, Syria, after their epic journey of evangelism and church-planting throughout Cyprus and the region of Galatia. Travelling between 46 and 48 AD, these men covered a distance of around 1400 miles.
A successful mission indeed it was, but it had also been a journey fraught with violence and much hardship. A journey which finally brought Paul and Barnabas back to Antioch in Syria, where they were joyfully received. They brought such good news – of the successful recruitment of new converts, former pagans and Jews who were joining the infant Christian church at those cities of Pisidian Antioch, Iconium, Lystra and Derbe and in Cyprus.
Of that return to Antioch, Syria, we have in the Acts of the Apostles, this report:
And when they were come and gathered to the church together, they rehearsed all that God had done with them, and how he had opened the door of faith unto the gentiles. And there they bode long time with the disciples [14: 27-28]
One can imagine such a return for Paul and Barnabas, the achievements, a sense of success, of optimism; perhaps a quiet satisfaction. No doubt also a certain fatigue and travel weariness.
In the very next verse though, we discover that such moments of elevation and hopefulness became tinged also with another reality, a hard reality.
And this was that the setting up of the Christian Church and the growing conversion and integration of the gentiles into its ranks amongst the Jews was not going to be straightforward. Paul and Barnabas had already met great opposition from the Jews in the synagogues of Pisidian Antioch and in Iconium and in Lystra - where Paul had been stoned and left for dead.
But here they are now, back in that church of Antioch Syria, back to the same place, with the same congregation that had fasted and prayed and laid hands on them before sending them out on that first missionary journey. Good news, but also news of a disturbing message seemingly coming out from the Jerusalem church: We read in Acts 15: 1
And certain men which came down from Judea taught the brethren and said except ye be circumscribed after the manner of Moses, you cannot be saved.
So certainly, joy and hope from the successful missionary work, but now these teachers from Judea obviously men of some influence, were now demanding that if the new converts want to accept God and be saved, they must effectively become Jews. Clearly such teaching had a great effect on the Church in Antioch.
I would say this message, this teaching, brought about a devastating and demoralising effect. I think it is important at this stage to remember that Paul had a very clear and sharp position on this question of circumcision and Judaism. In his letter to the Romans (11:13) Paul had written:
I am saying all this especially for you gentiles, God has appointed me as the apostle to the gentiles – I stress this now.
In the NLT translation, we have Paul saying ‘I stress this now;’ in the KJV the translation reads ‘I magnify my office’ – it means the same thing.
Paul, amongst other things, was saying that it was perfectly legitimate to remain a gentile and to not become a Jew in order to be saved by faith in Christ. And remember that not only was Paul a Jew but throughout his life he remained a Jew.
But we are to be left in no doubt of the felt anger and upheaval that the Antioch church was going through when this unwelcome message was received. Thus, in the Acts of the Apostles 15:2 we read.
When therefore Paul and Barnabas had no small discussion and disputation with them, they determined that Paul and Barnabas and certain other of them should go up to Jerusalem unto the apostles and elders about this question [Acts 15:2]
You may recall a few minutes ago how I spoke about the first Church Council; it took place between the years AD 48-50 and of course as we finish at the second verse of chapter 15, that describes the event that begins to unfold as we move further along in to the chapter. But for now, I’ll close with a couple of important points.
Firstly, a church is usually corrupted from the inside, by false teachers and false doctrines. Such teachers are the wolves that get into the sheep pen that Jesus talks about in the Gospel of John. In Paul and Barnabas, we see the strength of their leadership, their stewarding, their shepherding of the flock, their readiness to take on those who had no real authority and yet managed to sow disquiet and dissension at the church in Antioch.
The second and final point I’d like to make is that it was probably because of Paul’s success in recruiting gentiles into what had been a mainly Jewish community, the early Christian Church, that brought things to boiling point. The matter must have been simmering for a while, because we read back in chapter 10 of the Acts of the Apostles of Peter’s visit to the house of the centurion Cornelius at Caesarea. In the company of Cornelius and his household, Peter preached powerfully and the Holy Spirit fell upon those present, fell upon those of the house hold of Cornelius. On hearing this account from Peter, the apostles and the disciples said:
Then hath God also to the gentiles granted repentance unto life. [Acts 11:18]
But as John MacArthur wrote in his commentary on the Acts of the Apostles
They (that is, many Jews) could not conceive that pagans could simply enter the church and immediately be on an equal basis with Jewish believers. That seemed unfair to those who had devoted their lives to keeping God’s law. They feared too, that in an increasingly gentile church, Jewish culture, traditions, and influence would be lost.
There we must leave the Council of Jerusalem. In my next sermon we see the resolution of the claim that the Gentile converts should be circumcised and made to follow the Law of Moses.
