For Gentiles day1

 ACTS 10–11

 

Let’s review. It all started with an idea God had to create a group of people who would live in harmony with Him and with each other. Their very presence would be a blessing to the world.

But it went bad very early on, when sin entered the world through the terrible choice of the first man and his wife.

Still, God has proven to be unrelenting in His pursuit of this idea. He promised then and there that He would send a Deliverer who would set things straight again. A few hundred years later, He spoke to Abraham and said, “I’m going to bless you, and through you I’ll bless everyone on the whole planet.”

The first part of the Bible tells the story of what God did in, among and through Abraham’s descendants, the Jewish people. He gave them a place. He gave them a Law to live by. He gave them His presence. He made them the envy of all the surrounding nations.

And they blew it. In the grand tradition of Adam and Eve, these people just had to have it their own way. So God gave them over to others, disciplining them for their rebellion but never forgetting the promise He had made to them.

When the time was just right, Jesus appeared. He was Jewish, by the way — extremely Jewish. And the books that talk about Him are also very Jewish. He was circumcised like a good Jewish boy. He studied the Torah like a good Jewish boy. His ministry began in a synagogue, where He read a passage out of the Jewish Bible. He even said that He had come to gather up all the lost sheep of Israel (Mt 10.6).

His closest followers, the ones He handpicked, were all Jewish, and after His death and resurrection and ascension, on the Day of Pentecost, there was a great crowd of Jewish people gathered in Jerusalem. These are the ones who heard that first sermon by Peter, and more than 3,000 of them responded by placing their faith in Jesus. When they went home, they didn’t stop being Jewish. They kept meeting in synagogues and all that.

We’re about 90 percent of the way through the Bible’s Story, and so far there’s not much in there that’s not really, really Jewish. There’s been quite a bit about YHWH blessing the descendants of Abraham, but there hasn’t been that much about Him blessing the rest of us through them.

There have been a few previews, the story of Ruth from Moab, the story of Jonah going to Nineveh, Jesus talking to the Samaritan woman. Other than that, though, there hasn’t been much indication that God has been aiming outside of Israel.

But with this story, the larger Story takes a dramatic turn. Saul has just been knocked off his high horse and converted for one primary purpose, to carry the good news about God to non-Jewish people (Ac 9.15).

Saul’s conversion is just the first of many dominoes that will fall in rapid succession. First Saul becomes a Christian, then comes the first high-profile Gentile convert, a military officer named Cornelius. The next thing you know, the whole thing is out there running wild. The Christians in Antioch (which is where the word “Christian” was first used) start intentionally targeting Gentiles with their message, building a truly cross-cultural missional outpost, raising money and sending out missionaries who always go first to Jewish people and then talk to anyone who will listen.

God had this idea way back when, He made this promise.

And He meant what He said.

 

Prayer 

 

Lord God, You called Your servant Abram to take the risk of leaving everything he knew in his country, including his relatives, to go to a land he did not know. You called him to a far higher purpose than he could have pursued on his own, because You invited him to be a part of Your great Story rather than his own comfortable existence. And You promised to make this man who had no children into a great nation, and to bless him and make his name great so that he would become a blessing not only to his own people, but ultimately to all the families of the earth. Your fulfilment of this covenant promise came about in completely unexpected and unpredictable ways — in ways that demonstrate Your divine creativity and sovereign authority over history. For Abram became Abraham, and his seed led to the Lord Jesus Christ, who blessed both Jews and Gentiles.

In Jesus’s name, Amen