The Salvation of the Gentiles, Part 1

Acts 10:1-20

     This morning in our study of the Book of Acts in which we are continuing to study week by week, we come to chapter 10; and chapter 10 of the Book of Acts would certainly be a primary consideration in a missions emphasis; because Acts chapter 10 deals with a great missionary principle and a great missionary historical fact.  The Gospel had been committed, first of all, to the people in Jerusalem; and then the Gospel had been taken to Judea and Samaria; and, finally, the design of God was to take the Gospel to the uttermost part of the earth.  And our Lord Christ had laid out this master plan of evangelism in Acts chapter 1 and verse 8. 

     You'll remember the...the end of the Book of Matthew is recorded the great commission, "Go into all the world and preach the Gospel."  And they were to start where they were in Jerusalem and then go to Judea and Samaria.  Then go to the Gentiles.  And, initially, the church was Jewish.  Those who came to Christ at first in Jerusalem, obviously, were Jews; and it was a great stretching of them to be able to reach Samaritans, whom they despised; and it would even be a greater step to reach Gentiles, whom, if they despised Samaritans, they doubly despised; and so as we come to chapter 10 of Acts, we find that most monumental account in the record of the Word of God which tells us how God began to open the church to the Gentiles; and He did it through Jewish vehicles, which is a great, great truth.

     Now, the key to these days in the early church is Peter.  The church had been founded on the Day of Pentecost.  It had exploded in Jerusalem, and then it exploded all throughout Judea and Samaria, and people were being saved everywhere along the way.  Great revivals were breaking out, particularly in Samaria under the ministry of Philip and, as well, Peter and John and the other apostles.  Peter was moving around.  He was the preacher to the unsaved.  He was also the teacher to the saints.  He was the dominant figure in the early church, and he was available to God, and he moved about from place to place.  In the course of his journey, as we saw in chapter 9, preaching and teaching, he came across a little town called Lydda, going from Jerusalem to the coast, to the Mediterranean Sea.  And there he met a man named Aeneas who eight years had been a paralytic, and he healed him.  And in response to that healing, verse 35 of 9 says, "And all that dwelt at Lydda and Sharon saw him, and turned to the Lord."  So great results occurred there.

     He stayed there for some time until he heard word from some disciples that there was an individual by the name of Dorcas, a beloved Christian lady in Joppa some ten miles away, and Dorcas had died, and the folks there, knowing Peter was near, had not buried her, but only set her in an upper chamber, and they went to fetch Peter to see if Peter might not heal her, raising her from the dead.  He arrived in Joppa and did precisely that; and in response to that marvelous miracle of God, verse 42 says, "It was known throughout all Joppa, and many believed in the Lord."

     So Peter is this most dominant individual.  He is most effective in the service of the Lord.  He is busy turning people to Jesus Christ.  He is God's catalyst in the explosion of the church.  He is the...he is the real reactor in what's going on.  But more than that, Peter had a very special commission.  More than just his general ministry and general availability, he had a very specific calling.  For in the Gospel of Matthew, our Lord Christ had said to him, "I give unto you the keys to the Kingdom of Heaven."  And what He meant by that is that, "Peter, you will be the guy who will unlock the next door in the expansion of the church.  You're the one who is the point of contact between the Spirit of God and the church." 

     And, on the Day of Pentecost, you remember, he was in Jerusalem; and the church began there, and it was he who preached, and it was he who they...who was there when the Spirit came.  It was he who was there when they were baptized and added to the body.  And then the Gospel went to Samaria as they were scattered under the persecution led by Saul of Tarsus; and as they went into Samaria, they began to preach, and people were saved.  But they had not yet been added to the body by the baptizing work of the Spirit until Peter and John arrived, and Peter laid his hands on them, and they received the Spirit.  And, again, Peter was the point of contact for the opening of the church to the half-breed Samaritans.

     And there was one other dimension.  There's one key left in Peter's hand that hasn't yet been put in a door and turned, and that's the...the key that opens the church to include the Gentiles.  And so Peter is about to unlock that last door, and that's gonna be a tough key for Peter to turn, because he has been raised a whole lifetime engrained with Jewish traditions, engrained with legalism, and super-nationalism.  And it's an almost intolerant kind of engraining, so that there isn't any room for Samaritans, and there isn't any room for Gentiles, who were considered to be unclean.

     But it's beautiful to see, even as we are just kind of getting into chapter 10, that already the Spirit of God has begun to do some preparation.  Peter has accepted the Samaritans, and that's a monumental step for him.  The Samaritans were a despised people.  They were really, from the very time of the separation of the kingdom, disliked by the...by the southern kingdom; and then when they were taken into captivity and intermarried and when...when nations like Assyria sent people into the northern kingdom, and they intermarried with them, they became despised to Jews who maintained that their national existence was a...was a gift of God and should never be polluted.  And so they were a hated people because they were half-breeds.

     The Assyrians had planted some people in the land called the Cuthites, or the Cuthians, and the Jews had intermarried with those people, and the rabbis even went so far as to say, "Let no man, no Jew, eat of the bread of the Cuthians, the Samaritans, for he who eats their bread is as if he was eating swine's flesh."  So they were despised, to put it mildly. 

     But Peter had been able to let that kind of go by, and he had been able to accept them, and he'd been there, and he'd seen what Philip had accomplished through the Spirit of God, and he laid his hands and the Spirit had come upon them, and he was shocked, but it happened, and they received the same gift that the Jews had received at Pentecost.  They were in one body together, and Peter was beginning to accept that. 

     Then in addition, another tradition that was breaking down is apparent because he stayed, it says in verse 43, in the house of Simon, the tanner; and a tanner was a despised trade to a Jew, because he dealt with the flesh of dead animals; and no self-respecting Jew would have anything to do with such a man.  But Peter stayed in his house maybe as a long as a couple of years and, consequently, he shows that his prejudices are being melted down by our Lord.  But there's a still a tough, tough barrier to knock over, and that's the barrier between the Jew and the Gentile, but it has to come, because, you see, in the new covenant, the design of God is to take of two and make, as Paul says, "one new man."  And this is Paul's great message when he defines the church in Ephesians 2.  I read you from verse 11 these words.  "Wherefore, remember that ye, being in time past Gentiles in the flesh," and then he goes on to discuss what that means.  "You were without Christ, aliens from the commonwealth of Israel, strangers from the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world."  He says, "You were a mess.  You were cut off from everything God was involved in."

     And he says in verse 13 of Ephesians 2, "But now in Christ Jesus, ye who once were far off are made near.  You who were separated are brought together in Christ.  For He is our peace, who hath made both one, and hath broken down the middle wall of partition between us."  Then he goes on to say, "He made one new man, reconciling both into one body."  In chapter 3, he says, "This is the mystery, that the Jews and the Gentiles would be one body."  Well, this was just a difficult thing for the Jew to understand.  Extremely hard, after centuries and centuries of exclusiveness, and especially from the Gentiles, to be then thrown together as equals like Paul says in Galatians 3:8, 3:28, "From now on there's neither bond nor free, male nor female, Jew or Gentile.  You're all one in Christ."  That's a whole new concept for the Jew.

     And so Peter is gonna have to have a little bit of preparation before he's gonna be able to stick this key in and turn it.  A strict Jew wouldn't have anything to do with a Gentile.  In fact, a strict Jew wouldn't even be the guest in a Gentile's house, nor would he have a guest in his house, since Gentiles were unclean.  The scribal law said, "The dwelling places of Gentiles are unclean."  And, in fact, here's an interesting footnote just to kinda...to get a thought on this that is perhaps specific.  It was considered that the dust or the dirt from a Gentile country was defiled and, if anybody happened to have some Gentile country dirt on their feet and tracked it into Israel, it remained defiled.  It never mingled with Israel soil.  It just stayed there continuously defiling the land.  Consequently, whenever they left the Gentile country, they would always do what became a very famous phrase in the Bible.  They would always shake off the dust off their feet so as not to track any Gentile pollution back into Israel; and I think it's interesting, too, that in Matthew 10:14, you remember that Jesus sent out the 70; and He said, "You go two by two, and if anybody doesn't hear your Gospel, shake off the dust from off your feet."  In other words, treat them as though they were Gentile, unclean.  That's what he meant.

     And this is exactly how the Jews felt, that the Gentiles were unclean.  In fact, milk that was drawn out of a cow by Gentile hands was not allowed to be consumed by Jews, so you had to make sure you checked on who provided your milk.  Bread and oil, for example, prepared by a Gentile, could be sold to a stranger, but could never be used by a Jew...No Jew would eat with a Gentile at all; and, in fact, if a Gentile was invited to a Jewish house, you couldn't leave him in the room unless...lest he would defile all the food in the room.  If cooking utensils, for example, were bought from a Gentile, they had to be purified by fire and water.  Any article that was in the hands of a Gentile at any time was unclean.  If you had, for example, a weaving shuttle, and that weaving shuttle was made out of wood that was grown in a grove where Gentiles worshipped false God, you had to burn up the shuttle.  Not only that, you had to find every piece of cloth ever produced on it, burn it, too.  There was a true separation, believe me. 

     Now, the Gentiles retaliated.  They had their own thing going, too, believe me.  The Jews were a...were a scorn to them.  They were a constant theater of laughter for them.  The circumcision, the Sabbath day rest, the worship of an invisible God, the...the abstinence from certain foods, the dietary laws and all of the things the Jews went through, that was a mockery...a point of mockery for the Gentile.  So for centuries, they had been butting heads, you see; and all of a sudden, Christ came along and said, "Now, I'm gonna take Jews and Gentile.  I'm gonna make one new man."  And, in theory, it was great; and in theology, it was great; and by His power He could do it; but it was a tough thing for the Jew to swallow and to practically really make it happen.  And Peter, even though he got going here in chapter 10, had a few relapses in his life...

     Well, in order for God to get this...this dichotomous situation into unity, He's gonna have to do a little preparation.  So in this chapter, chapter 10 verses 1 to 20, which is all we'll have time to consider this morning, in these verses that introduce to us this confrontation that finally results in the Gentiles being brought into the church.  We find that God prepares two people.  First He prepares the Gentile, and then He prepares the Jew.  The Gentile is Cornelius, and the Jew is Peter.  It has to start somewhere, so it starts with two guys.  It's gotta be more than theory.  It's gotta happen, so He picks out two people, Cornelius and Peter, and He gives each one a special vision, which is like sort of training in preparation.  Before they'll ever come together, there's gonna have to be a lot of soil tilled up, and so He begins with a vision here in the first eight verse or so to Cornelius, and then from verse 9 on, He gives a vision to Peter; and this, then, is the beginning of the Gentile inclusion in the church.  By the time you hit chapter 11, the Gospel's gone to Antioch and Gentiles are getting saved.  By the time you come from there and you start moving ahead, you hit chapter 13, and all of a sudden Paul's going full blast to the Gentiles, and the problem is...is moving out, and it's becoming sublimated.  The thing is really going, and Jews and Gentiles are coming together in Christ.  Peter runs back to Jerusalem.  Says, "You'll never believe it.  People, you'll never believe it.  They got the same gift we got."  See.  And then the report comes, and the Jerusalem Council in Acts 15, which finally comes to the conclusion that they will accept them fully as those who belong to Jesus Christ.  So it all begins here in chapter 10, and I'm glad it did, aren't you?  I'm a Gentile...so this is a great chapter.  I love this one. 

     Now, to begin with, let's look at the vision that Cornelius got; and he got a really interesting one, believe me.  God, and I wanna give you some footnotes here.  I always study narrative passages, and principles keep jumping out of 'em at me; and I think they're principles that can just be really meaningful today in the 20th century, and this is what I want you to see.

     As we watch what God does with Cornelius, and as we watch what God does with Peter, you're gonna see principles of what God does with everybody in this situation, because you have here a receiver, Cornelius, and you have a messenger, Peter; and you're gonna see how God prepares the receiver who is gonna get the Gospel and how God prepares the messenger who's gonna give it.  And then in God's absolute, perfect moment of time, He brings the two together.  I want you to catch these principles, because they're fantastically important principles for our own understanding of how God's gonna use us as Christians to be prepared messengers, to hit the prepared receiver at the...at the divine moment; and this is important.

     All right, let's look at the vision of Cornelius.  Now it says in verse 1, "There was a certain man in Caesarea called Cornelius."  We'll stop there.  The first thing we learn about God's preparation of the receiver - Cornelius is the guy who's gonna hear about Christ and get saved.  He's gonna be the Gentile convert.  The first thing we learn is God chooses the receiver.  "There was a man in Caesarea named Cornelius."  God singled this guy out.  There were a lotta Gentiles around.  There were a lotta possible guys that coulda been saved.  There were a lotta them who could possibly h