Bible Guys Classics: Acts 10 Part 1

Well, today we're going to talk about somebody who may or may not have been the first gentile convert. I think he was, but we're not gonna argue about it today. I'm Jeff, He's Chris, and we're the Daily Babble guys. Okay, Chris, Yep, we're gonna We're gonna this for this segment, we're gonna read this. It's one of my favorite segments. By the way. We did this before and I just enjoyed it, but it felt like I came unprepared this time. You're going down. Okay, okay, So what is this segment? Dead jokes? Dead jokes? Okay? And the goal is to do what make the other person laugh? Okay, So we're going to dial in and not laugh. We're gonna do our best not to laugh. Yes, okay, do you want to start it? Do you want me to start? You start? Oh, you want me to start? Okay. I read that by law you must turn on your headlights when it's raining in Sweden. But how am I supposed to know when it's raining in Sweden? Okay, go ahead. I think that's a funny one. It is funny. You know it's funny. You're trying hard not to laugh. A skeleton walks into a bar and says, hey, bartender, I'll have one beer and a mop. Okay, a root beer. I'm sure it was a root beer. Isn't that what all of our kid listeners? Oh yes, it's definitely okay. How many telemarketers does it take to change the light bulb? How many? Only one? But he has to do it while you're eating dinner. Wow, you're really enjoying these. That's a funny one. Okay, what do you call a poor Santa Claus? I don't know, Saint nicol Less. I'm not laughing at that one. Okay. So my dog ate a whole bag of scrabble tiles yesterday. We had to take them to a vet. We just got a call this morning and the vet said, no word yet. It was actually good. I think that's a I think that's a good place to end. Is that no good? I think I laughed at everyone except your your root beer joke? No, no, no, no, the Nicholas yea, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah that one. Yeah, that's funny. Okay. So hey, here's the man. We're going to ask people to go to the Bible guys dot com and subscribe. So we've asked you to do a like on Facebook, subscribe on YouTube. This is a little different the Bible Guys dot com subscribe and uh and again, all all it does is it just connects you to us, helps our metrics and uh, and it enables us to you know, just stay connected. Yeah, all the magic stuff behind the scenes that Google does. The every time you subscribe, or every time you share, or every time you make a comment, Google notices, YouTube notices. They all notice those things and it helps position the Bible Guy's website and all of our stuff in a stronger way. So if you love what's happening here and if you love this program, then help us in one of the best ways in your dead is just subscribe on Bible Guys dot com. Yeah. Yeah, cool, Well, good son, I've got the giggles. Now I have to be careful about not laughing too much. Well, listen, we're going to jump into acts chapter ten. And so this is the first recorded gentile convert, which means the person who is non Jewish who actually you know, becomes a Christian. It's recorded that he is not only just a Christian, but a strong Christian. Yeah, and has major influence because he happens to be a Roman army officer and a captain of the Italian regiment. Yeah, so this is a big deal. So we're going to start in Acts, chapter ten, verse one. We're going to read the first sixty verses or so, and then we're going to jump a little ways and finish up the story. So here's what it says. In cesarea there lived a Roman army officer named Cornelius, who was a captain of the Italian Regiment. He was a devout, god fearing man, as was everyone in his household. He gave generously to the poor and prayed regularly to God. On one afternoon, about three o'clock, he had a vision in which he saw an Angel of God coming toward him Cornelius. The angel said, and Cornelius stared at him in terror. What is it, sir, he asked the angel. The angel replied, your prayers and gifts to the poor have been received by God as an offering. Now send sa Menda Jappa and some of a man named Simon Peter. He's staying with Simon, a tanner who lives near the seashore. As soon as the angel was gone, Cornelius called two of his household servants and a devout soldier, one of his personal attendants. He told them what had happened and sent them off to Joppa. The next day, is Cornelius's messengers were nearing the town, Peter went up on the flat roof to pray. It was about noon and he was hungry. But while a I was being prepared, he fell into a trance. He saw the sky open, and something like a large sheet was let down by its four corners. In the sheet were all sorts of animals, reptiles and birds, And then a voice said to him, get up, Peter, kill and eat them. No, Lord, Peter declared, I've never eaten anything that our Jewish laws have declared to impure and unclean. But the voice spoke again, do not call something unclean if God has made it clean. The same vision was repeated three times, and then the sheet was suddenly pulled up to heaven. So then it kind of goes through a little bit more of that, and then picks up in verse twenty eight and says Peter told them, you know, it is against our loss for a Jewish man to enter a gentile home like this or to associate with you. So those men that Cornelis had sent finally come up to Peter. And then Peter's like, you know, Jews aren't allowed to go in Roman homes. But he says, but God has shown me that I should no longer think of anyone as impure or unclean. So I came without objection as soon as I was sent for. Now tell me why you sent for me, And Cornelius replied, four days ago. I was praying in my house about this time, three o'clock in the afternoon. Suddenly a man in dazzling clothes was standing in front of me, and he told me, Cornelius, your prayer has been heard and your gifts to the poor have been noticed by God. Now send messengers to Jappa some and a man named Simon. Peter. He's staying in the home of Simon, a tanner who lives near the seashore. So I sent for you at once, and it was good of you to come. Now we are all here waiting before God to hear the message of the Lord that the Lord has given you. So we're going to pause there because tomorrow we're going to finish up the story of Cornelius. But on the front end. Let's deal with the issues that Peter was struggling with and that, you know, and let's deal with who Cornelius is. Tomorrow we'll talk about the salvation and the Holy Spirit and all those kinds of things. But here Peter really has to overcome a hurdle. And I think it would be easy for our listeners to not understand how great of a hurdle this was. Yeah, without a miraculous intervention. Yeah, So we sort of talked about that just a little bit yesterday, and we talked about how the fact that you know, Peter's ability or inability, whatever he chose to do to get over his issue, has a direct connection to you and I sitting right here. The fact that Peter had a lesson to be learned and God knew it, and so God sends him a vision. Now, a lot of us, you know, we may not get a vision directly from God. But again, these are pretty supernatural times in the early days of the church, and Peter was the guy. He was God's, you know, Jesus's number one messenger moving forward, performing miracles and making a difference. And so God sends him this unbelievable vision that had to untrain his thing that he had believed his whole life, and his whole life, the Jewish custom says, you know, hey, these animals are unclean. You cannot touch them. And by the way, that's still true today, isn't it. So people already know that Jewish people, I mean, it's pretty commonly well known. People think pigs are an unclean animal and they won't eat. Pork because of this, because of Moses' law, right, So you. Know this this tradition. You know, that's another reason why we realized the Bible is real. It connects us directly back two thousand years ago where they were still talking about the same things. And so Peter hears from God. And by the way, I think that God's statement is actually pretty telling for a lot of Christians who believe certain things, because think about this. If you're a Jewish person and your religious leaders and your church of the Synagogue has told you your entire life, God has declared these things unclean, and all of a sudden, God's sort of making this announcement, and He's sort of admitting those things didn't come from me, they came from your religious leaders. Because don't you dare call anything unclean that I have called clean. Now, think about what was in front of Peter. Just normal animals, right, animals, reptiles, words, all sorts of them. And Peter's like, no, those are in clean. God's like, who told you they were in clean? Don't call anything unclean that I have called clean. And so there's so many lessons to be learned there. Here's the first one. Number one, It's okay to question your religious leaders, right, so just just stack it up to the Bible. Don't ever believe something that I say, or Jeff says, or a person on television says, or something that you google and just take it at its word. You have to question and say, I wonder if this is true. I wonder if it's true. And you have to be able to, you know, find out whether or not it's true from either a trusted friend that you believe, researched it, from God's word especially, But don't take it as at face value just because a religious leader says itself. Yeah, So to be clear, he's saying God is using the food to teach Peter a lesson about people. Yes, yes, so the food. Had been declared unclean in the Book of Leviticus, and in the Book of Deuteronomy, God had listed don't eat these reptiles, don't eat these kind of birds, don't eat the heat. There's a whole list of stuff they're not allowed to eat, and so they would view that as unclean. Well, then what had happened was they had built up these rules about, you know, the gentiles. Then all the gentiles would be unclean as well, and so they wouldn't fellowship with them, they wouldn't go into their homes, they wouldn't do any of that kind of stuff. Well, God had just said, be careful, don't intermingle in marriage with the people from other lands or other nations. But the religious rules had gone from you know, man, we don't touch these kinds of foods. We don't do these kinds of behaviors too, we don't even go around these kind of people. We won't even let them touch us or be near them. And they had taken a rule for purity, and they had pushed it all the way into how they were dealing with other human beings. And God says, no, you know, let me do this. So God is suspended the rules about these foods with Peter that they had been previous rules, but suspending them now, in my mind, I was just of the human connection. Yes, in my mind, I was referring to all the rules that the Pharisees had made up to not come close to breaking the rules. That's right. They made rules in order to keep the rules, in order to keep the rules. That's right. That's right. So and so I remember one of my favorite speakers, Annie Stanley, talked exactly about this, and he talked about guardrails, and he said, if you think about it, you're driving along, you know, the shoulder of the road, there's like a there's a yellow line, then there's the shoulder, he says, and then there's a guard rail, right that was supposed to keep you from going over the cliff. Right. And he was talking about how it's okay to have healthy guardrails. But the Pharisees were the ones who put like three guardrails up, right, And they're the ones that said, you know, there's all these different rules. And so by the time it had you know, been passed down from Deuteronomy and gotten too Peter, you know, Peter had been you know, taught was under the culture of rules upon rules upon rules upon rules, is what I was thinking when I send that. And it would be an agonizing experience for a Jewish Man to be considered unclean, because he's lived his whole life clean, right, and so for him to be unclean would be a devastating social and emotional experience for him that he'd never experienced. Before, which we don't ever think about. Yeah, I don't know that there's any there, there's I don't think there's hardly an equivalent for us right now, you know, in our in our culture to deal with on this level. But just understand, this is an agonizing moment for Peter, and he's trying to honor God, and God goes, you're dishonoring me by not reaching out to you know, by by by dismissing other people groups, and then God choose to use a guy like Cornelius. Cornelius is unique. He's a he's a Roman. Is he a centurion? Is that that he's a Roman office? It's just this captain of the guard, well the Greek the Greek word there in the note as the centurion. So so this would have meant that he was in charge of a hundred soldiers, give or take right, That's what centurion century. That's that's what it would mean, is that he was the head of a hundred soldiers. He probably was getting ready to you know, these leaders would be on rotation and maybe he was heading home or at some point he's going to go back to Rome. Probably, So it's very strategic that we get the gospel. We see the Gospel going to him. But the Bible says that he was he was the leader of an occupying army. But the people loved him. This is this is a unique thing. He was a devout man. He lived a good life, he was generous, he prayed, he feared God, and so even though he was an occupying leader that the people had a lot of respect for this guy. He was an upstanding kind of a guy, and the Jewish people would, uh would respect him. I think what's really cool is he got conquered by Jesus here in just a just another couple of minutes, but uh, another couple verses. But he is praying, and the fact that he's a good guy, the fact that he's being generous, the fact that he prays does not automatically mean he's right with God. It just means he has an open heart. He's a spiritual seeker, and so God says, Okay, I'm going to send Peter to you. You're open to the gospel. Maybe he's one of the very first significant gentiles that's open to Jesus in this moment, or open to the gospel. And so he sends Peter. But at the same time that Peter has this vision three o'clock in the afternoon, Cornelius is having a vision at three o'clock in the afternoon saying, you guys need to meet. That's what this was. That's only Peter didn't know that he was supposed to go meet Cornelius. Peter just is having the walls torn down in his life about things that he thinks is unclean, and God is saying, hey, Cornelie sends some people to go get Peter. And it's at the same time God is making these two things happen, and neither one of them know that God's doing it. In the other it's pretty cool. Yeah, it's very cool, and uh, you know, it's it's also interesting how Peter immediately responds to Cornelius, and because I'm sure it was strange. Another thing that we can't wrap our minds around is that when somebody liked Peter, especially he's the guy in the Jewish faith walks in through the home of Cornelius. The verses that we skipped says that for Cornelius actually fell down to worship Peter. So so Carnaius doesn't have a lot of education as to how to respond. Right, and then and so Peter, Peter immediately addresses the fact that this. Is odd for a Roman to bow down to a Jew. Oh, my goodness, extraordinary, culture, extraordinary. And then and so Peter says, stand up, I'm just a man like you. And then he says, hey, let's address the elephant. Which I say most of the time to you, right, Hey, don't worry about it. I'm just a man like you, to which I would say I already know that. But but the. But but then Peter then and says, hey, let's address the elephant in the room. Is it is not normal for me to for any Jewish person to step into a gentile's home. He was clearly still uncomfortable about it. Yes, I think that everybody was, which is something again we can't wrap our minds around. But he's saying, but God has taught me, you know, because just this idea that, like the Gospel is for everybody. And so again I think that's why it has a direct connection to you and me and our listeners listening, because Peter's ability to you know, just get over that. So here's another thing I was thinking as well. I was thinking, like, you know, God has made something pretty clear to Peter. You know, he did it three times, right, and yet Peter's going to continue to struggle. He gets challenged by Paul later on, and and it's just really hard for him to you know, just untrain his mind. So what things in our lives has God made clear that we still want to argue about. There are things in our lives that God has just made clear. And I remember, for instance, I remember when I was young and I just became a Christian, and you know, everybody in my town at my age, you know, being fifteen, sixteen years old, when they went out with a girl, boys wanted one thing, and that was my goal too. That's what I was trying to do until I realized that God's words said that that's not what you should do. And I remember thinking to myself, I heard it, and here's how I heard it. My girlfriend broke up with me, and she started dating a kid from that youth group, and we were pretty new to this youth group. Then we got back together and my question to her was, so did you guys kiss? What did you guys do? And she says, oh, he doesn't believe in any of that stuff. He believes that all that stuff's reserved for marriage, and that God's word says you know, X. Y and Z. And I remember laughing and going, what a loser haha, And then it hit me, I go, wait, does the Bible say that? And I was angry. And I remember going to my youth pastor. We were on a bus on the way to Cedar Point, and I remember walking up to the front of the bus and his name was Jim Wolfke. We called him Wolf and I said, Wolf, does the Bible say those things are reserved for marriage? And he said yeah. And I was like, I am so angry. I am so angry. But once I heard it, I couldn't unhear it right right and and then and I believed it. And I found out later that that's what it says, sure, And that's very uncommon thought. By the way, that's a very uncommon thing for people to accept today, and they just they want to customize and. Ignore that, right, Right, So. What are some of the things and it's a perfect example. What are some things that you know are really clear from God that you want to argue about. Yeah, I think that that's fair. Whatever, our favorite thing is that we don't want God to be messing with That's what we want to argue with him about. Right. So he loved his tradition, he loved his rules, and it kind of gave him some comfortability because he's living inside this box that he's come with and he doesn't wanted to mess with it. The other part of it is it becomes so ingrained. These biases, these racial biases are so deeply ingrained because of their religious system. Right. And so I think that where we all all humanity naturally moves towards certain biases. And you know, there's a big conversation right now about racism and things in our culture, and I think it's important for us to have these conversations. I just think that Christians need to be very careful about getting sucked into the world's words and trying to figure out how to use the world's definitions of things as opposed to just looking at scripture, God says, hey, listen, everybody, that the ground is level at the cross. You're all equal in my eyes, treat each other in equal ways. Right, So he had to overcome his normal biases. As a matter of fact, The Notes and the Life Application Bible for verses fifteen sixteen says steeped in Jewish tradition and filled with certain biases, Peter was convinced his views on gentiles were correct. It took a three part vision from God that change Peter's mind. One of the most basic and practical lessons from this encounter is that when God speaks, we must not challenge what he says. Doubting God is the rebellion of Eden. When God says something is so, we must not debate with him. The right response is humble submission to his revealed truth. Are you trying to argue with God over some point that He's already made clear which goes along with what you were saying? Yeah, And I think it's when it comes to racial issues like this, it's so important for us to go God, if you love them, I have to love them. It's not about race now, it's about human dignity. The fact that God is the one who has loved them, and God loves us, and God wants us to be brothers and sisters in Christ. And so we should extend the same value to those other peoples and those other cultures that God does. And this is what Peter does, even though it's uncomfortable for him. He steps out of his comfort zone. He's in a cultural environment that is totally foreign to him, and he's willing to do it. And if Peter's willing to do it, it changed the world. Shouldn't we also be willing to step out of our comfort zone, out of our normal cultural environments and norms, and be willing to make friends with and engage with people that are socially and racially and economically different from us, because if we will, as Christians, we have potentially changing their world, changing the world around us. Yeah, and that's a that's a very fair application. Because Gentiles were viewed as like like a different. Race sometimes depending on what group of gentiles you're talking about. The Jews didn't have another word for them other than dog, right right right? Yeah? And you know we know that Samaritans, you know, they would walk around Samaria. Gentiles were dogs. I mean they were unclean, and so yeah, for for that application to come out of that is a very fair application because you know, to cross the boundaries and to realize, you know, everything you just said is pretty important. Well listen, it's it's we're right at time. So I would just say, you know, all those things that we that we've talked about today comes down to Peter's response, which is his willingness to hear from God and say, you know what, maybe it's time to unlearn so many things that I've held to be true because God says this. Up to this point, Peter heard from God and he was willing to walk through the door. Right, So maybe that's all guys, asking you to do, is what is to be willing to walk through the door. Tomorrow, we're going to finish up the story and talk about the result and what really happens, and this is going to be really powerful and Cornelius's life and thank god it happened because I mean you're Italian, that's right. Yeah, So hey, they spice, they. Meet the ball. We'll see you next time on the Daily Bible. Guys,