Bare Minimum

Acts 15:29 You are to abstain from food sacrificed to idols, from blood, from the meat of strangled animals and from sexual immorality. You will do well to avoid these things.

Some people believe that keeping rules makes all the difference in life. If we just have the right set of rules, then we can live a productive and fruitful life. This is a belief that has existed for thousands of years.

But we see in our current day and age that rule keeping is impossible to do. The ‘cancel’ culture has created a whole new set of rules to help us ‘not offend’ anyone. But instead of not offending people, we just shift the offense from one protected group to a non-protected group. Offense still happens. Rules don’t correct the problem.

The early church faced a rule problem. Those who had grown up and believed in a set of rules all their life wanted to impose their rules on the newcomers to their community. The Jewish believers wanted the non-Jewish believers to live like they themselves were Jewish believers.

This might seem like a reasonable demand. After all, the LORD had given the Jewish people a special place in His economy. They had been the custodians of the Word down through their history. And the LORD had given them the rules. If the LORD gave them, then it makes sense to begin to keep them.

But this stance didn’t coincide with what the LORD himself was doing among the non-Jewish believers in Jesus. They were coming and growing independent of rule keeping. Their lives were changing without a prescribed list of do’s and don’ts. What should we do?

So as the leaders, both ethnically Jewish and ethnically non-Jewish, had to come up with a solution. If they didn’t solve this theological problem, it could split the Church into two very different and distinct groups. Not the plan!

Their conclusion was that there were only a very small set of rules that non-Jewish believers should follow. My belief is that these were given so as not to offend the Jewish believers. These things were so embedded in their beliefs, that they couldn’t get past them. So a compromise was reached.

And when the non-Jewish believers heard this list, they were overjoyed. Their faith in Christ’s work on the Cross was sufficient to ensure their salvation. Both groups of people obtained their relationship with God through the work of Jesus on the Cross. Both were made right through the righteousness of Jesus, not their own rule keeping.