Acts 10:9-33 | When God Has a New Wayનમૂનો

Leviticus is chock-full of distinctions ancient Israelites were required to keep. Don’t eat an animal that doesn’t have a split hoof. Don’t eat an animal that does not chew the cud (Leviticus 11). Stay away from lizards, owls, and spiders, too. Don’t mate different kinds of animals. Don’t wear clothing woven of two kinds of material. Don’t sow your field with two kinds of seed (Leviticus 19). It’s just a taste of a whole series of regulations couched in terms of clean and unclean.

To clarify, clean and unclean do not refer to actions that are righteous and sinful. It’s something else. It’s one giant object lesson. Israel was to be holy. Holy meant separate. Separate for a special purpose by God. This special purpose was to bring the knowledge of God and his salvation to the rest of the world – the world which had by and far abandoned him and now groped in darkness without knowledge of his character, will, or way.

This separation had a two-fold purpose. One was to keep Israelites from going the way of the nations around them. It’s easy to take on the cultural assumptions of people around you, and often, it leads to spiritual compromise. So make yourself distinct and remember to stay that way. But the other purpose was to be noticeable. When people dress differently, talk differently, eat differently, and pattern their lives differently in all kinds of ways, you notice. Here’s a people that’s different! (Think of people like the Amish. It’s not so much their beliefs, but their daily practices that catch attention.) Of course, the main difference isn’t strange customs or dress or dietary habits. These were meant to signal a greater reality. These were meant to distinguish the people of Israel as a people special to God. God has called us to a different way of life. (And through us, wants to mediate that different way of life to everyone else who’s gone astray.) Every Israelite’s life was to be an object lesson to everyone else around. There’s something different about us. And there’s something different about God, our god, too.

Which leads to Acts 10. Here’s Peter, brought up in these differences, and prizing these differences. They marked and identified him in a special way. He knew Israel’s history and his people’s constant fall into spiritual compromise and idolatry with the nations around them. He knew God’s judgement on Israel too, not so much for a failure to remain separate in what they ate, but for a failure to remain separate in the god they served and other morally defining ways.

So maybe we can understand why Peter argued with God and the vision he was being shown. How can this be?!? After all that God has taught us, how can God disrupt the whole clean/unclean thing?

What Peter and most of Israel missed, was that the purpose of their cultural separation was not to keep others out. It was to attract others to want to come in. Sometimes it takes a vision to get us to see otherwise.