Good News...for All People! Δείγμα

It wasn’t until messengers from Cornelius’s house came to find him and take him to see Cornelius that Peter began to see the vision for true biblical reconciliation opening up before his very eyes. He found himself in the home of a Gentile. Some of his first words to Cornelius were, “You yourselves know how unlawful it is for a man who is a Jew to associate with a foreigner or to visit him; and yet God has shown me that I should not call any man unholy or unclean” (Acts 10:28). Remember these words. We will revisit them later.

Yes, Peter was finally beginning to understand that loving God meant loving even our enemies—loving those we have previously hated. Can you hear the passion in his voice when he proclaimed, “I most certainly understand now that God is not one to show partiality, but in every nation the man who fears Him and does what is right is welcome to Him” (vv. 34–35)?

I imagine that not even Peter had any idea of just how far God was going to go to demonstrate that He is not a respecter of persons. He was not going to have a Jewish church and a separate Gentile church of second-class believers. Because when Peter preached the good news to Cornelius and his family, the Holy Spirit fell on all of them. The Gentiles began speaking in tongues and praising God! It was a repeat of Pentecost!

This was the vision! All people, all kindred, all nations, all tongues. One blood. But it was the vision realized when Peter accepted the mandate to love those he had been taught to hate. This was true biblical reconciliation and the demonstration of this biblical truth:

For He Himself is our peace, who made both groups into one and broke down the barrier of the dividing wall, by abolishing in His flesh the enmity, which is the Law of commandments contained in ordinances, so that in Himself He might make the two into one new man, thus establishing peace, and might reconcile them both in one body to God through the cross, by it having put to death the enmity. (Eph. 2:14–16)

The first church in Acts got it right too. They learned that God’s love required them to widen the net and embrace those who were considered outsiders before. How could they not? When the fire of Pentecost ushered in the abiding presence of the Holy Spirit, they all heard the gospel in their own tongue: “Parthians and Medes and Elamites, and residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the districts of Libya around Cyrene, and visitors from Rome, both Jews and proselytes, Cretans and Arabs” (Acts 2:9–11a). It was clear that God intended for His church to be made up of many different people groups, not just those of the Jewish faith.