Tag Archives: Torah

THE BOOK OF ACTS – CORNELIUS WADES IN

Bible Study, ,

CORNELIUS WADES IN

“Cornelius said, ‘Four days ago at about this time, mid-afternoon, I was home praying. Suddenly there was a man in front of me, flooding the room with light. He said, ‘Cornelius, your daily prayers and neighbourly acts have brought you to God’s attention. I want you to send to Joppa to get Simon, the one they call Peter. He’s staying with Simon the Tanner down by the sea.’

“‘So I did it — I sent for you. And you’ve been good enough to come. And now we’re all here in God’s presence, ready to listen to whatever the Master put in your heart to tell us.'” Acts 10:30-33 (The Message).

Finally! Cornelius’ explanation put the last piece of the puzzle in place. Peter had his story and Cornelius had his; the two stories blended into one, and the whole thing began to make sense. God was at it again, moving on people to reveal Himself to a hungry heart.

Cornelius made no reference to Peter’s scruples. He did not apologise for overriding Peter’s inhibitions. It was not an issue to him and he would not make Peter’s issues his own.

What was it that had drawn God’s attention to this ex-pagan Roman soldier? Was God really interested in non-Jews? Idolatry was abhorrent to Him and this man had been born and brought up to worship idols, but at some stage in his adult life he had become disillusioned with his religion and attracted to the Jewish faith.

The Jews worshiped only one God, an unseen spirit being whom they said was the Creator of heaven and earth. Their Holy Book told stories of His power and His interaction with people, including accounts of miracles that showed His love for His people.

Cornelius had never known the love of a god. The Roman and Greek gods were evil, vengeful and capricious. Their worshipers had their time cut out either trying to get their attention or appeasing their anger. They were always demanding and never giving; so unlike the God of Israel who was constantly doing things for His people.

Cornelius had been drawn towards this religion, and the outcome was that he had absorbed its lifestyle and requirements — prayer and generosity had become his way of life. Prayer meant reciting psalms and set passages of Scripture at specific times of the day. Consequently he was laying down a foundation of God’s word in his heart.

Recognising and meeting the needs of people around him, as required by the teachings of the Torah, the five books of Moses, had fostered the kind of generosity that pleased God, breaking his natural human bent towards selfishness and greed and moving him beyond the confines of his own needs and the needs of his family. These were the things that indicated his seriousness towards God.

God responded by setting up a meeting with him through the human agency of His servant Peter. Where supernatural visions and angelic visits were necessary, they happened, to bring the two parties together, Peter with his knowledge and experience of Jesus and Cornelius with his hunger to know the truth.

What an example of God’s personal and intimate involvement with us. He is not indifferent to our unspoken longings. He will never ignore even the faintest cry for Him or the slightest move towards Him. It is His will that everyone should be saved and come to the knowledge of the truth. Unless He intervenes and draws us, we cannot know Him but He intervenes to move heaven and earth so that we will encounter Him and experience the truth.

Peter had every reason, having heard Cornelius’ side of the story, to believe that this meeting was of God and to launch into an explanation of the meaning of Jesus’ life and death so that Cornelius and his household and friends could have an opportunity to believe and receive the truth. He was free to fellowship with Cornelius in his home because God said it was okay.

Who Do You Say That I Am?

Christian Life, , , ,

WHO DO YOU SAY THAT I AM?

Hello to all my faithful readers. We have come to the end of yet another Bible study series, this time on Ephesians. “Where now?” I asked. What can I share with you that will be of practical value for you in your walk with Jesus?

Let’s talk about being disciples of Jesus.

The church, in the main, has not understood what it means to be a disciple or, if it has, it has slowly, over the centuries, veered off course until today we have, in the main, an institutionalised kind of religion that stands alongside and tries to complete with other world religions. It has missed what Jesus intended when He came from the Father – to reveal the true nature of the Father to His people, to take us to the Father and to teach us to follow Him so that we can also be true sons of the Father.

To do this, He chose the rabbi/disciple model which was the way of passing on the knowledge and way of life of one generation to the next among the people of God.

Jesus called twelve men to be His disciples. In His day, being the disciple of a rabbi was an honoured calling. Rabbis in Israel were essentially roaming (called “peripatetic”) teachers who moved about from place to place engaging people in debates about the meaning and application of the Torah.

Those who were recognised to have authority, called sh’mikah, developed their own “yoke”, their way of understanding and applying the Torah according to what they believed was God’s intention. They gathered around them a group of men whom they chose from the Beth Talmid, the school of young men who aspired to become rabbis. They chose those whom they believed would become like them and would do even more than they did.

Jesus did not choose His disciples from those who aspired to be recognised teachers. He went to the lake and chose fishermen, a tax collector, and other ordinary men who had no designs on becoming rabbis. In fact, it was not His intention to train them to be rabbis but rather messengers – men who would replicate Him so accurately that they would carry Him and His yoke to the rest of the world.

On one occasion a ‘teacher of the law’ came to Jesus with the request to follow Him (Mat. 8:20). Jesus’ response seems almost like a rebuff.

Foxes have holes and the birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay His head.

Commentators have invented some ‘weird and wonderful’ interpretations of Jesus’ words, simply because they have not understood the way Hebrews think. We would take Jesus’ words literally, thinking that He meant that He was poor; He had nowhere to lay His head. Not so Jesus. Those who heard Him would ask the question, “What do foxes do in dens; what do bird do in nests?” The answer, of course, is that they don’t sleep in dens and nests; they reproduce.

What did Jesus mean? At that moment, He was the head but He did not yet have a body on which to ‘lay’ His head to reproduce Himself in the world. On the Day of Pentecost, when the Holy Spirit fell on the assembled believers, the church was born, which is His body. From that time on, He as the head, worked through His body, the church, to reveal Himself to the world. Those who wanted to be His disciples at that moment needed to wait until His work on the cross was complete and the Holy Spirit had come to indwell His body to replicate Him in them and fill them with His life.

Jesus took His disciples to Israel’s “red light” district in the region of Caesarea Philippi where pagans worshipped the goat-god Pan by having intercourse with goats. It was in this disgusting environment that He asked His disciples, “Who do you say that I am?”

The first step for anyone who would be a disciple of Jesus is to be convinced of His identity. Who is He? Who did He claim to be? How did He authenticate His claims? Is He who He said He is?

Peter answered for the rest, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.” He may not have understood all of the implications of his confession but one thing is sure. Jesus accepted his testimony as the truth and a revelation from God. It would take many more experiences for Peter to understand the full implication of what he had just said, including the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus and culminating in the baptism of the Holy Spirit on the Day of Pentecost.

Until the would-be disciple comes to that unshakeable conviction that Jesus is the Son of God. it is impossible to be His disciple.