Clough Acts Lesson 38

Amillennial vs. Premillennial – Acts 15:6-18

Acts 15 is the first ecumenical council of the Christian church and therefore is a graphic illustration of how the Church solved a very severe doctrinal problem. This doctrinal problem, as we said last week, has to do with the gradual revelation of the body of the Church. Up to the point of Acts 15 it still was not officially acknowledged that something new was happening. Obviously experientially something was happening but no one really got it together doctrinally and said this is, in fact, what is happening: the kingdom of God that has been so highly emphasized in the Old Testament, highly emphasized in the Gospels and highly emphasized in the early days in the book of Acts is now being de-emphasized and gradually you’re having a situation develop where the Church is emerging.

There are lots of lessons to learn; as we said last week, a lesson about what dispensations are, how important they are to understand, but now we have another lesson to learn from Acts 16 and that’s the lesson of watching how Christian groups solve problems, and there’s a tremendous contrast in how Christians solve their problems, or ought to, and how the world system solves its problems. I had the occasion this week to talk to a career government bureaucrat, a man whose career has been working in the system in the middle of governmental machinery and he was telling me about the informal structures of how groups operate, and it’s kind of interesting for many, many years he’s watched this go on and he pointed out something that a lot of people probably don’t really understand and that is that in any group, regardless of your constitution and regardless of your official structure there is a group of leaders who are going to run that group, period. It can be a dictatorship, it can be a democracy and we may go through all the motions of having an election and running candidates and so on but ultimately there are a group of leaders. Some of whom may be the elected ones, many of whom are just the entrenched bureaucrats that run the situation. You can take the city of Lubbock, there’s a continuity in the city government and it doesn’t matter what whoever elected mayor or whoever gets on the city council, they can make some changes but if there’s not the support of the men who are operating the bureaucracy you’re just spinning your wheels because any skilled bureaucrat can weave his way around any regulation that elected body wants to impose upon him.

And this is not necessarily bad; every group has to have its group of what we’ll call “elders,” and these elders are going to operate. It doesn’t matter if it’s a college campus, it doesn’t matter whether it’s a city government, it doesn’t matter whether it’s a local church, you’re still going to have a core of people that are leaders. And the reason this always happens is because most of us aren’t leaders and there are only a very few people who, in fact, are leaders, and those people will automatically surface and influence. Now oftentimes the right wing sees what they call the insiders at work, or the people who they feel are the ones that really make the decisions, that are so to speak in the shadows, behind the elected officials. And the right wing will point to this as inherently wrong. Well, in ways they’re right and in ways they’re not right. The existence of an informal leadership group is not in itself wrong. There has got to be a continuity of wisdom in every group. You see this in certain groups; you can see it, for example, in the Presidency. Any man who is elected President of the United States, regardless of his background, is not qualified to run the helm of the United States government. A President is an elected official who is there for a short time only. What about the people that are there for 20 and 30 years, they’re basically the ones that are running the government and it has to be that way; you can’t have a constant shifting of gears every four years; there’s got to be come continuity to government, and this continuity are the bureaucrats, the people who are behind the scenes unelected who operate day in, day out, administration to administration.

Now it’s nothing inherently wrong with this; we’ve got to recognize it just happens in every group. This is one reason, for example in our congregation, why we’re as weak as we are because of the tremendous geographical motion, the moving, the physical moving of families in and outside of the city of Lubbock, so therefore we have a very small core of men here who are leaders and who are here long enough to affect changes. The issue in the informal group is an issue that comes forth in Acts 15 and that’s the issue of what standards are used by the elders; it’s not the existence of the insiders or the existence of the bureaucrats themselves; the issue is whether they’re making their decisions by man or by God’s law. There are only two solutions, either man or God, is the standard of decision making.

We can illustrate this many ways; today there are two extremes in man solving his problem; there’s one extreme which we’ll call the ultra right which would degenerate into anarchism. This is where each individual man makes his own decisions; that obviously can’t work. No modern society can function anarchistically. If law and order were to break down through food riots, through some other national disaster, the American pubic is basically going to go one way and it’s going to be anarchistic way; they’ll go like all other civilizations have gone, like Rome went. When Rome started getting shaky Rome didn’t go to anarchism; Rome went to totalitarianism, which is the extreme left. That’s why you have Augustus Caesar become the Kaiser that he was. He was Caesar because in spite of the constitution he was the total control over the system; people would gladly vote away their freedoms when faced with anarchy. This is always the role of terrorism; violate the social factor, tear it in half, rip it up, get everyone upset, misappropriate property, destroy people, terrorize until you agitate, agitate, agitate and agitate enough and sooner or later people get fed up with the whole situation, vote away their freedoms and go with the marshal law. That’s always the way it will go; that’s the way it’s going to go in this country. You will always have it, it’s a law of history that has to go this way, that is, on an autonomous base.

But there’s a third option; both of these two views involve man starting from himself and being his own standard. We see illustrations of this, this shift toward totalitarianism in India. In the last couple of years India has lost what could have been a democratic government. Ceylon has lost what could have been a democratic government. And Italy and France and the southern half of Europe where, by the way, the Reformation never was strong, in the southern half of Europe you’re having the rise of the old guard communist party; if you notice in the recent elections, how communism is gradually taking over more and more of the electorate of Italy, more and more of the electorate of France. Why is this? It’s got to be that way, this is the way history works on an autonomous base. This is the way it’s going to work on an autonomous base; the only solution and the only way out is when the elders, the men who are the real leaders, regardless of the formal structure, the men who are the real leaders, when they say I look up and I see God’s absolute standards, this is the third way, the Biblical way. When the leaders of the core group, these men, are consciously aware of God’s absolute laws over and above them. In other words, on the Biblical basis man is cut down to size.

We have various illustrations of man operating out from himself in our own generation; we could go on and cite these but the basic illustrations you’ve heard; one is the issue of abortion. The issue of abortion law, the legislation in our day, is basically hinged up with the issue of what is life. Or, if the fetus isn’t total life, then how valuable is the fetus. In American history in the past we had a problem with slavery. The problem with slavery was, in spite of the United States Federal Constitution guaranteeing freedoms, the problem of slavery was that the slave, the black slave was simply viewed as a non-person, and that was how white people could get along with it fine. The Constitution was there but the Constitution just simply didn’t apply to black slaves because black slaves weren’t fully people. And this went on and on until the 14^th amendment made the slave a person legally and now the slave was a person legally now the full force of the constitution comes in on his side. That was a long discussion in our history.

But what has happened in pro-abortion legislation is that now the fetus has also been declared a non-person. The fetus, under liberalized abortion laws is in precisely the same place as the black man was before the civil war; he is a non-person. The fetus is something to which law no longer applies. And this decision has been made strictly sociologically; there’s been no discussion theologically. What court in the land has decided the theological definition of life? Has it ever considered what theologically life is? No. It’s been considered basically on sociological norms and standards and thus it is more and more in the areas of the judiciary and the legislative too. The decisions are made on statistics, whatever 51% of the people want. Or what does the group feel is socially good. It’s always man evaluating it, not by a higher standard but by his own standards. You take the last Presidential campaign, wasn’t it interesting that millions of dollars were involved in polling for one result, to find out what the American people wanted to hear, and therefore the smart candidate would tell the people what they wanted to hear, not what was true but what slid over better, and the way to measure this was hire a good pollster.

So decisions on the part of the group are made by internal standards, not external absolute standards. There’s the big difference and if you’re a Christian involved with any group, and you are, you’re a member of the city, you’re a member of the state of Texas, you’re a member of the United States, since you are involved in a group you are going to have to fight off like you have never fought off in the history of this country the tyranny of man. It is always going to be man deciding what is good; corporate man, and this will go into decision after decision after decision on the part of the group; whether it’s the city deciding it, Austin deciding it or Washington deciding it. The decisions will be made in terms of man’s standards. And the Christian evangelical is fast approaching a position where we’re going to wind up as the lone few people that say it is not man’s standards, it is God’s standard overall that counts.

Now Acts 15 and this first ecumenical council is a graphic illustration of a Christian group functioning, the elders at work, the “insiders” if you will, controlling the policy of the group, but what saves the group is not democracy, it’s not the form of the government that saves the group, what saves the group is the fact that the people leading the group look to God’s law; that’s what saves the group, not the form of the organization but the orientation of the leadership. You can get a bad organization and still be all right if in fact the leadership of the organization looks to God and His Word. In Acts 15:6 we have the meeting of the council, remember the issue is over Gentiles being saved and their position in the local church.

Follow while I read Acts 15:6-17. “And the apostles and elders came together for to consider of this matter. [7] And when there had been much disputing, Peter rose up, and said unto them, Men and brethren, ye know how that a good while ago God made choice among us, that the Gentiles by my mouth should hear the word of the gospel, and believe. [8] And God, which knows the hearts, bare them witness, giving them the Holy Spirit, even as He did unto us; [9] And put no difference between us and them, purifying their hearts by faith. [10] Now therefore why tempt ye God, to put a yoke upon the neck of the disciples, which neither our fathers nor we were able to bear? [11] But we believe that through the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ we shall be saved, even as they. [12] Then all the multitude kept silence, and gave audience to Barnabas and Paul, declaring what miracles and wonders God had wrought among the Gentiles by them. [13] And after they had held their peace, James answered, saying, Men and brethren, hearken unto me; [14] Simeon hath declared how God at the first did visit the Gentiles, to take out of them a people for his name. [15] And to this agree the words of the prophets; as it is written, [16] After this I will return, and will build again the tabernacle of David, which is fallen down; and I will build again the ruins thereof, and I will set it up; [17] That the residue of men might seek after the Lord, and all the Gentiles, upon whom my name is called, saith the Lord, who doeth all these things. [18] Known unto God are all his works from the beginning of the world.”

Now this is a section that provides us with a model of how a group ought to decide issues. Here is a critical issue facing the group and if you’ve noticed, as we’ve read this text, it terminates, though the discussion doesn’t terminate we will terminate with verses 16 and 17. And if you’re coloring in passages from the New Testament that are quotations from the Old Testament, just so you can get a feel for how much of the New Testament is the Old Testament, verses 16-17 is an extended citation of the Old Testament. Now here you’ve got the elders and the apostles and you do not read somewhere between verses 6 and 16 oh, let us go fetch Rabbi Gallop to take a poll to see whether or not it is the cultural thing to do in our generation in this day of relativism, whether we ought to change truth now and let Gentiles in, in full status. Or let’s go get Rabbi Lou Harris and let him conduct a poll of the citizens of the city of Jerusalem and see whether they like this or not, and then depending on the result of the rabbinic polls we will decide. You have no horizontal link with what men do in this discussion; it’s wholly absent. The discussion starts and ends with the Word of God and on the basis of the Word of God alone is the decision made. So let’s watch the development of Christian decision making in a group.

Acts 15:6, “And the apostles and elders came together for to consider of this matter.” Notice it is not every Christian, this is not democracy at work; people are not equal, as the saying goes, free men are not equal and equal men are not free, and the point holds in the Church. The apostles and elders are superior to the average believers and that’s why they’re in leadership position. There are clods and then there are leaders, and you have to let the leaders lead and not let the clods lead. So this is why everyone is not a leader and you need not apologize for this; this is going to be true, regardless of what people say it is going to be true. You can think of the chaos of the French Revolution finally emerging with Napoleon; Napoleon was the leader and Napoleon finally led and the French gladly accepted a dictator, in spite of their jazz about liberty, equality, and fraternity; it just went down the sewer with Napoleon, for the reason that no one will tolerate anarchy, they will always prefer totalitarianism in its place. So the apostles and elders come together; this is the real core of Christian leaders. All believers and all members are not consulted.

Acts 15:7, “And when there had been much disputing,” another little principle, all viewpoints are aired in the decision making. Real decision making must entail all viewpoints surfacing; they may be put down but there’s a mission to having all viewpoints aired, and this is where we fundamentalists oftentimes, many of us who are insecure in our confidence in Scripture, we don’t like to hear opposing viewpoints because somehow we feel threatened by that. That ought not to be; the unbeliever ought to be the one who feels threatened, I don’t feel threatened because I know Christianity is right and non-Christians are wrong; it’s that simple. God has spoken and I prefer God’s authority to man’s. So a man’s opinion is not threatening to me personally. And every believer ought to get in this position where you don’t feel threatened because somebody says “I don’t believe that.” So what, is God going to faint because you don’t believe that; what’s that go to do with it? It has nothing to do except it’s just a passing of hot air, that’s all, but it’s nothing really threatening. And so it is that we ought to allow opposing viewpoints and Peter does and the men and the apostles and elders do at this point. It was done here within the Church but within but within a Christian framework that all viewpoints were exposed.

Then, “Peter rose up,” and here we have another interesting principle; we’ll tie all these principles together at the end but we have another principle here and that is the principle of the credible spokesman. A few years back a university with a good communications department was working on a project and they took a message, just a one cassette message, and they let certain groups of people hear this message that had been randomly selected. Then they told one group that the man who is speaking this is… say a member of the department of defense, a high authority. Then they’d go to another group with the same content and they’d say this is a junior on college. And then they’d go to another one, this is an outstanding man in the community, and another one, this is a man on the street. And in all the groups that heard exactly the same message but each group was told that it was a different spokesman saying the message, and guess what, as you might expect, the findings of the study, people believed the message in direct proportion to the authority of the spokesman, not the content of the message. Reversed to what it ought to be; actually it ought not to be the messenger but the message that counts. But in practice, particularly in fallen society with our no standards it is not the message but the messenger that counts.

Now the Holy Spirit accommodates this social principle in the middle of this ecumenical council for the first man forward to start solving the problem is not Paul. Paul is not a credible spokesman. You have a Hebraist party involved in this group; you actually have two groups of people here: (1) the Hebraists which we’ll call the strict Jews and then (2) the Hellenist party and these are the more liberal Jews on this matter of accepting Gentiles; two completely different groups of people. The problem is getting these two groups of people to agree to a common solution. And so how did the Holy Spirit work? The Holy Spirit recognizes that as fallen people we inevitably think in terms of spokesmen or messengers rather than messages. So instead of bringing Paul who would immediately offend these people, because Paul is unacceptable to those, Paul is the guy that’s been involved in the whole missionary program so he can’t be brought forward at this point in the conference. Who is brought forward at this point in the conference but one of their own, a man who had lived in Galilee, who had lived in Jerusalem, who had not traveled outside of Palestine, a man of their own party, Peter. And that’s why Peter steps forward, the principle of the credible messenger. He is the one who is able to be used by the Holy Spirit to keep the crowd tuned in long enough to get the message, because if they brought the wrong man in, the crowd would turn off and they’d never get the message.

So there is a need for credible spokesmen. I think this has to do a lot to do with our Christian witnessing on the job. Think of this, how you might apply this to wherever you might be, on the campus or so on, the campus is a good illustration of it. Very rarely will Christian students ever be successful in evangelizing college faculty members for the reason that the student is not a credible spokesman. What he says may be true, but to a faculty member a student is not credible and therefore will not be listened to. And that’s why I’ve long contended that the method of reaching the university is not by witnessing to students, it is by working with the faculty. But I can’t seem to get any Christian organization to agree with me at that point. It is the faculty through which… because only faculty members have credibility with other faculty members. And even that sometimes doesn’t work. So every structure has a credible scale to it and we have to recognize that credible scale.

Let’s look now at Peter; Peter gets up and he “said unto them, Men and brethren, ye know how that a good while ago God made choice among us,” …a good while ago? I thought that “good while ago” referred to Acts 10, that was only five chapters ago. Ah, but ten years have passed since Acts 10 and so it has been “a good while ago.” Now we have the answer to a problem that I wondered about when we studied Acts 10 and 11: why is it that you have in the book of Acts all the work with the Jewish people in Jerusalem, then you have the work of the Jewish people in Samaria and Judea and then you have Peter, of all people, the one who’s picked to go down and open the door to the Gentiles, Peter goes down to Caesarea, witnesses to Cornelius, leads Cornelius to Christ, comes back to Jerusalem and doesn’t do anything. He kind of just drops out of the picture, and then along comes Paul and Paul is the one who goes out and does all the witnessing to Gentiles, it almost looks like a false start with Peter, and then it dies and then Paul rises. The wisdom of the Holy Spirit—the Holy Spirit starts the system through Peter because of the principle of the credible spokesman. That’s why the Holy Spirit doesn’t start the work through Paul. Peter is the one who announces first to the world that Gentiles are to be saved. If Peter can do it then Paul can do it, and that’s going to be the argument.

Peter says God elected me, that’s what it means, He made a choice among us, “that the Gentiles by my mouth should hear the word of the gospel, and believe.” That’s talking all about Acts 10. [8] “And God, which knows the hearts, bare them witness, giving them the Holy Spirit, even as He did unto us;” that refers to that scene back in Acts 10, what happened? Peter walked into the home of Cornelius, Cornelius had assembled his household and they all stood there and they listened to the message. And what happened as they were listening to the message? Suddenly there was a spectacular manifestation of the Spirit as it happened on the day of Pentecost, Peter looked back to his disciples, can we forbid that these people be ritually water baptized? Now there’s a certain final detail about this quotation and this quotation shows us something about the baptism of the Spirit. Verse 8 is actually referring to Acts 11:15 where Peter describes this incident. He goes back through justifying why it was he could lead a Gentile to Christ. When he does so, in verse 15, he says something about that manifestation of the Spirit.

The only reason we’re taking time here to go into this is because there are people today who argue that there must be, after you’re saved, there must be a spectacular ministry of the Holy Spirit, they call it the baptism of the Holy Ghost, they don’t know their theology very well because every person who has trusted Christ is baptized the instant he trusted in Christ. But they say there’s this extra thing and they get it from passages like this. Ah, but they don’t read too carefully because in Acts 11:15 when Peter talks about this spectacular baptism of the Spirit, what does he say? “As I began to speak, the Holy Spirit fell on them, as on us at the beginning.” In other words, this manifestation of the Spirit was not a constant thing; it did not happen every time, this was not experienced by everybody. In other words, what he’s saying here is this hadn’t happened since Pentecost. Now how he follows the argument out further in Acts 15:8-9 when he discusses this baptism of the Holy Spirit, all that he would have had to have said was one simple thing. And if he had said this one simple thing it would have cleaned up the argument, ended the council, there wouldn’t have been any problem. What was the one simple thing he could have said that would have flushed all this discussion, all this rigmarole? All he would have to have said was when Paul and Barnabas went into these areas the Holy Spirit fell on them as on us at the beginning. But he never says that, and do you know why he never says that? Because it never happened, the Holy Spirit did not come upon the people at Lystra, at Derbe, at Antioch, like He came in Acts 2 and in Acts 10 for if He had, that fact alone, since was acceptable in Acts 10, would be acceptable in Acts 15. The very method of the argument, in other words, in this first ecumenical council is proof that the baptism of the Spirit as it occurs in Acts 2 is not a normal occurrence, and therefore is an argument against those people who say that after you’re saved you have to experience “the baptism.”

Let’s look further at the argument; Peter goes on in verse 9 to settle another controversy, that God “put no difference between us and them, purifying their hearts by faith.” Now in the sequence of events that actually happened in Cornelius’ house, you have the situation where Peter talks, Cornelius and his house respond, positive volition, and then you have ritual baptism. Now ritual baptism was administered after this positive response, after there was a sign of the Holy Spirit, after in fact they had been saved. Ritual baptism followed salvation, it did not cause salvation. And that’s shown by the clear text of Acts 10. But Peter goes back and at this point he says God “purified their hearts,” how, by baptism? No, “by faith.” When did they express faith in Acts 10? While Peter was preaching the Word of God. So once again we have Peter the apostle teaching the proper view of salvation.

Turn to 1 Peter 3:20-21. This passage is often cited as proof text for saying oh no, water baptism saves, but that’s not what 1 Peter 2:20-21 is teaching. The same man speaking here is the one who spoke in Acts 15. Verse 20, half way through it, we won’t get into the spirits in prison, that’s the harrowing of hell thing and that’s another story in itself, “…Noah, while the ark was preparing, in which few, that is, eight souls, were saved by water,” now let’s draw a comparison between the situation in Noah’s day and the situation in the New Testament. Peter is comparing the two. First of all, Noah had an ark and it was in the ark that people were saved, and by the way, all the people who got wet were dead, so baptism doesn’t necessarily mean immerse in water, it means identify. We have the ark of Noah; the ark saved, it says the means was “by water.” And of course they had to have faith to step aboard the ark.

How did water save? Water drowned people and killed them, that’s how it saved; you say but that’s judgment, that’s not salvation. It saved because it destroyed the old world and it saved by acting as a thermal insulator for the ark so that it wouldn’t get incinerated going over the volcanic flows and the geophysical phenomenon; water is at least some viscous fluid and therefore it acted as a kinetic insulator against the shrapnel that was flying around, again from geophysical phenomenon; water saved, in other words, many ways, as well as destroy.

Now if you read verse 21 there’s an exact parallel, but you have to read the whole verse and kind of skip the parenthesis. “The like figure whereunto even baptism does now save us … by the resurrection of Jesus Christ.” Now in that passage what is the agent of salvation/judgment that corresponds with the water of verse 20? It is resurrection; notice the grammar, at the end of verse 20, “saved by water,” verse 21, “saved by the resurrection.” So the parallelism is not between water and water but between water and resurrection. Now in place of the ark, of course, we have Christ and we have faith. Now how are we to understand, then, the word “baptize” in verse 21. Verse 21 is a problem in the Greek because it’s an elliptic sentence, that is, there are things left out of it. The worst grammar in the New Testament is written by Peter, I don’t know whether he was made when he wrote but he just really isn’t too sound when it comes to the good principles of Greek grammar. And in verse 21 the way we would translate it is: “while the ark was preparing, many souls, eight souls, were saved by water, [21] A baptism, the like figure of which saves you through the resurrection of Christ.”

In other words, the word “baptism” doesn’t refer to New Testament baptism, it’s exactly opposite, the other side of the analogy. Peter is calling Noah’s flood a baptism. And he’s saying the like figure of that, not “whereunto baptism” but “a baptism, the like figure,” in other words, a figure that corresponds on the other side of the chart, and what is it that corresponds but Christ and His resurrection. This is what saves us. Now, he put the parenthesis in here to underscore that he does not mean that water baptism saves. What does it say, “(not the putting away of the filth of the flesh, but the answer of a good conscience toward God),” now the ritual of baptism temporally, chronologically in time, was administered very early in the early church. And so he does have to clarify, people would say do you believe in Jesus Christ as Messiah, and they would, they’d go down to the river and get baptized, so what Peter is trying to do is separate the two so you see the ritual and then you see the reality, in common ordinary experience these would be meshed together. So he puts the parenthesis in here and he says I’m not talking about the putting away of dirt, that’s the literal water of water baptism, the ritual; I’m not talking about that, I’m talking about “the answer of a good conscience God,” in other words, it’s the faith that is involved, not the mechanical ritual itself.

People see this and they often misread the parenthesis. Here’s the way the parenthesis is often misread: not only the putting away of the filth of the flesh, but also the answer of a good conscience toward God. See what they’ve done? By reading it this way what he’s talking about still is water baptism but he’s adding to water baptism the ritual faith and he’s saying the ritual and faith saves. But that’s not what the grammar says; the grammar doesn’t say not only the putting away of dirt, but also faith. What it says is not the ritual but the faith. So you couldn’t have it clearer that Peter is teaching that it’s not the ritual that saves you; it is the faith that saves you and the ritual simply is an external monument or a picture of the internal faith.

Let’s go back to Acts; Peter gets up and he opens the door, he puts his foot in the door and gradually opens the Hebraic side of the controversy. That group opts to hearing a solution.

Acts 15:11 he’s arduous; finally amount to this, “But we believe that through the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ we shall be saved, even as they.” That’s talking about salvation in phase 3, salvation at the Second Advent of Christ. Now he uses the argument of common salvation… common salvation. That means that Peter’s arguing that Old Testament saints, including us—referring to the group there, “saved by faith,” with this Peter is at one with Paul. Do you know what Paul’s proof is for how an Old Testament person was saved, how it goes in the book of Romans? Very, very simple, easy to grasp. Paul had people telling him that you had to be saved by keeping the Torah. And he said well now that’s very interesting; wouldn’t you agree that Abraham was saved? Yes. When did Abraham live, before or after the Torah was given? He lived before the Torah was given; then if he was saved how could he be saved by the Torah. A devastatingly simple truth which shows that people in the Old Testament always were saved by faith, never by keeping the Torah. And Peter’s doing the same thing here; he’s simply affirming we believe, that’s “we,” even you Hebraists, even you converted Pharisees, we believe that we are saved by grace. Now, he says, if we are saved by grace, if the Old Testament people are saved by grace, then what about the Gentiles who are now being saved by grace. So what’s his point? Commonality of salvation. He’s saying they’re being saved in exactly the same way we’re being saved. So how and in what right do you people have of coming in here and saying that they can’t have fellowship with us for communion, or we’ve got to have a little canopy outside that all the Gentile Christians can be out there and we Jews can be inside. Is that the way we run the unity of the body of Christ? No, says Peter, the body of Christ comes back to a theological principle and here the theme from the very beginning of the message this morning: how does the world usually solve these problems? A statistic, a sociological reference, a poll taken. How did they solve the problem here? With doctrine. The question is not answered with reference to Rabbi Gallop; it is answered with reference to how men are saved doctrinally and that becomes the group decision.

Now the group goes to Paul and Barnabas in verse 12 and they obtain field data, can’t decide something without data, so they once again hear all the evidence. [“Then all the multitude kept silence, and gave audience to Barnabas and Paul, declaring what miracles and wonders God had wrought among the Gentiles by them.”]

And in Acts 15:13-18 James gets up and summarizes the result of the conference. We’re not going to finish with James’ summary today because there’s actually two parts to it. I’m going to deal now with verses 13-18, the first part of James’ summary of the conference, and in this first part we have more than enough problems to keep us occupied for a few more moments. This is one of the most debated passages in the entire book of Acts. A great argument, even today, is being, fought over verses 15 and 17. So to properly interpret the text we have to introduce you to what the big argument is all about, the sides of the controversy and then we’ll show you how the controversy ought to be resolved.

First, look at James, James stands up under the principle of the credible spokesman again because who’s James but Jew of the Jews; he’s the Lord’s own physical brother. James here is not the one that lost his head; this is the James who wrote the epistle of James in the New Testament, the half-brother of Jesus Christ. He is not an apostle but he is chosen to chair the meeting. Notice that the apostles here are not chairing the meeting; a non-apostle is chairing the meeting. James shares the meeting and at this points James renders a decision. Now it looks from the text as though James, the chairman, arrives at the decision independently of everyone else. That’s not true. What he’s doing is summarizing the consensus of the meeting, and the consensus of the council. So James, the chairman emphasizes the results of the discussion. [13, “And after they had held their peace, James answered, saying, Men and brethren, hearken unto me;”]

Acts 15:15, “Simeon hath declared how God at the first did visit the Gentiles, to take out of them a people for His name.” Now notice what James has done as a diplomatic chairman; he understands and he’s got a problem of binding these two parties who are each other’s throats together or he’s going to fracture the group right away. So what do you notice he does first? Right off the bat he gets up and what does he call Peter? By his Greek name or his Hebrew name? He calls him by his Jewish name, Simeon, and there shows again how the Holy Spirit deliberately issues in diplomacy, there’s a time to use it and here’s the time to use it and James is using it. He’s staying over backwards to this group; he says look, your credible Jewish spokesman, Peter, or Simeon. “Simeon has declared hot God at first,” that’s Acts 10, in other words, before Paul and Barnabas, in fact, ten years before Paul and Barnabas, so the word “first” in verse 14 is what we would call established precedent. God has already established a precedent of leading Gentiles to Himself, not with Paul that you guys can’t buy, but with Peter your friend, the guy that’s lived with us.

And He’s taking a people out them, out of the Gentiles, “a people for His name.” Now the expression “people for His name” ought to be underlined because it is a technical expression which we will now explore because it comes out of a Scripture reference, “a people for His name,” the principle obviously being that the meeting here has been decided by Scripture. Let’s look at the problem.

He says, verse 15, “And to this agree,” to what? To the fact that God is saving Gentiles, so we know what the word “this” refers to. “This” refers to the new group that’s coming into the Church as saved people, this movement, this new thing. “To this agree the words of the prophets, as it has been written.” Now we cite Amos 9:11-12 and now we’re in the thick of a very great controversy. Turn back to Amos; here’s the problem; here’s the controversy. When you look at Amos 9 you say how under the sun does Amos 9 have anything whatsoever to do with the Church. For example, Amos 9:1, “I saw the Lord standing upon the altar; and He said, Smite the lintel of the door, that the posts may shake, and cut them in the head, all of them; and I will slay the last of them with the sword; he that flees of them shall not flee away and he that escapes of them shall not be delivered.” It’s a message of doom. And who was Amos? Amos was the prophet in the northern kingdom that was saying there’s going to come judgment in 721 BC and this nation is going to go down, and Amos is prophesying ahead of the fact that God is going to lower the boom on the northern kingdom for the rebellion against the Word of God.

So it’s a message of doom in Amos 9, and it goes on and you can see in Amos 9:9-10, “For, lo, I will command, and I will sift the house of Israel among all nations,” what’s that mean? The sifting of the house of Israel among all nations? That’s talking about the dispersion, the exile. So we have the exile predicted, God lowers the boom and He kicks the Jewish people out of their land and sends them among all the nations of the world. “[I will sift them as grain is sifted in a sieve;] yet shall not the least grain [kernel] fall upon the earth. [10] All the sinners of My people shall die by the sword, who say, The evil shall not overtake nor prevent us.” Well, up to verse 10 everything reads in terms of judgment and exile; then lo and behold, you read in verses 11 and 12 that passage which James cites.

Amos 9:11, “In that day,” in what day? In the day of the exile, in the day of the Diaspora, “In that day will I raise up the tabernacle of David that is fallen, and close up the breaches of it; and I will raise up his ruins, and I will build it as in the days of old. [12] That they may possess the remnant of Edom, and of all the heathen [nations], which are called by My name, saith the LORD who doeth this.” And then it goes on and describes the garden in verse 15, “I will plant them upon their land, and they shall no more be pulled up out of their land which I have given them, saith the LORD, thy God.” Now any normal straightforward interpretation of that passage has got to be very simple, and it’s talking about the restoration of Israel to their land, isn’t it. It’s talking about the establishment of the millennial kingdom, “in their land.” Note the use of the word “land” in verse 15. Land, land, land… it’s talking about a literal physical nation in a literal physical land. That had not yet happened by the time of the New Testament, for the Jews were still in dispersion at the time of Christ, there were many, many, many who lived outside of Palestine, and today the Jewish dispersion still exists.

So we would say Amos 9:11-15, has not yet been fulfilled. The Jewish people have not yet wholly returned to the land, the millennial kingdom has not yet come about. Ah, say the amillennialist friends, here in Acts 15 is proof that these passages were spiritualized, that these passages were never taken literally and were never intended to be taken literally. The amillennialist, those are the people who believe that history goes this way: here you have the cross of Christ, the resurrection, the Church Age the Second Advent of Christ and that’s the end of history. So that if you have any prophecies about glorious kingdoms in the future, since there’s not going to be a glorious kingdom, amill, meaning no millennium, since there’s not going to be any millennium out here, to what do the prophecies refer? The prophecies have to refer to the Church, then. But the prophecies literally don’t fit the Church. Well then, they’re spiritualized if they don’t fit the Church. So the amillennialist argues for a spiritualization of Old Testament prophecy to make it fit what we know as the Church; the idea about a literal land, the Church doesn’t have any real estate anywhere, so that’s just going to have to be allegorized as the Church in their place or something. So that’s allegorical or spiritualized interpretation that the amillennialist does.

Now the premillennialist, he looks at history this way: here’s the cross of Christ, the resurrection of Christ, the Second Advent of Christ, and out here we have a thousand years of the millennial kingdom. And the premillennialist says hey, these prophecies like Amos 9 will literally come to pass in that future millennial kingdom, with a literal land and a literal nation. So therefore the prophecies do not apply to the Church. Well, the amillennialist turns to a passage like this and he says look, what more could you ask, you premill, what more could you ask; here you’ve got Amos 9 that is obviously literal, obviously physical and it’s unambiguously referring to the conversion of the Gentiles because what does it say? “To this agree the words of the prophets.” So therefore, they would argue, amillennialism is proved by Acts 15 and the citation of Amos, plus a lot of other things but this would show what’s meant.

Well, what does the premill do with this? He’s got to be honest with the text; he’s got to admit and not force the text, it’s obviously applying Amos 9 to the Church. You can’t deny that, but here’s the problem. Come back to Acts 13:41 and let’s see how Paul applies the Old Testament. What is necessary to solve this controversy is a study of what we call hermeneutics. What’s that? That’s not another name for the flu; hermeneutics is the word that refers to the rules of interpreting literature. Everyone uses hermeneutics; you may be bad, you may be good but you’re using hermeneutics all the time. And the study of hermeneutics just makes you sharper, makes you more attune to how people use words, and so we’re studying the hermeneutics of the early Christian leaders. What hermeneutic did they use when they kept using these Old Testament Scriptures and seemingly kept applying them to the Church all the time. This is a good illustration of it in Acts 13:41. In Acts 13:41 Paul warns the synagogue against rejecting Christ. He says, “Behold, ye despisers, and wonder, and perish; for I work in your days, a work which ye shall in no way believe, though a man declare it unto you.” Now that’s a quotation from Habakkuk, only one very small problem. That particular quotation was fulfilled in 586 BC, literally, with the invasion of the land. That one’s easy to interpret, so we’ve got control of that one and here Paul is citing a prophecy that literally applies to something completely different than what he’s talking about, and yet he uses this and refers to the situation.

We could do this with Acts 2, we could do it with Acts 8; we haven’t got time to go through but you just have to study it yourself or take my word for it as we go through Acts and just watch how it works out. The apostles’ hermeneutics, their system for quoting the Old Testament is not to quote the Old Testament to prove the Church fulfills it; they are quoting the Old Testament to show that the spiritual principles that operate in the Church Age ought to be familiar and therefore are not to be challenged as something unheard of. It’s a plea for the continuity of God’s plan rather than a complete fulfillment of God’s plan. The amillennialist wants in his scheme of things, he wants to see all the Old Testament fulfilled in the Church; that’s what he wants to see. He’s a reductionist, in other words he says the only way all the Old Testament can be fulfilled is when the Old Testament is fulfilled spiritually. But the premillennialist argues that the Old Testament prophecies can have a spiritual application to the Church, fine, no sweat; but that spiritual application ought not to be confused with the final literal fulfillment. Instead of either or, the premill position is both and. There is a spiritual application in the Old Testament to the Church, even though the ultimate total fulfillment is yet to come.

You say can you give me a clearer picture of this? Sure: Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ came and He’s going to come two times; the first time He fulfills the spiritual requirements of the Messiah, doesn’t He? Isn’t He sinless, doesn’t He present the Word of God so people respond one way or the other to Him, on a purely spiritual way, they’re not compelled by any physical forces are they, Jesus doesn’t go around like the Moslem people do, having the Koran in one hand and the sword in the other and say you’d better believe bud, or you’re going to lose something vital. That’s not the way Christ converted the world; He presented the Word of God and people spiritually responded at the First Advent. Are we to say then that all the prophesies about Christ were fulfilled in His first advent? Not at all. You’ll say well, there’s a residue of prophecies that aren’t ultimately going to be fulfilled until the literal physical Second Advent when Christ comes physically and reigns physically and not just spiritually. All right, it’s the same principle in premillennialism.

The premillennial/amillennial controversy is exactly the same, we’re simply talking about the fact that the Old Testament passages do have spiritual application to the Church but they don’t have complete fulfillment in the Church any more than the Old Testament prophecies of Christ have complete fulfillment in His First Advent.

To show that we’re on the right tract, in fact, hold both passages, Amos 9 and Acts 15 and look carefully at Acts 15:16, make sure you read it carefully, [“After this I will return, and will build again the tabernacle of David, which is fallen down; and I will build again its ruins, and I will set it up,”] and then look over at Amos 9:11 and read that one and see what James left out. [“In that day will I raise up the tabernacle of David that is fallen, and close up the breaches of it; and I will raise up his ruins, and I will build it as in the days of old.”] This is a little sign textual study but it shows you very clearly James knew what he was doing and he’s very careful how he quoted this. In Acts 15:16 it ends with “I will build again the ruins thereof, and I will set it up.” Now flip back to Amos 9:11 and it ends, “I will close up the breaches thereof; I will raise up his ruins, and I will build it as in the days of old.” Now isn’t that interesting that James drops that last part of the verse out. Why do you suppose James drops the last part of the verse out? Because if he put it in there it wouldn’t have applied to the Church, that’s why. James is sensitive to the literal fulfillment of Amos 9 and he proves his sensitivity by failing to quote the verse in whole because he’s only talking about the spiritual principle of the verse. And what is the spiritual principle of James 1? That God’s plan has got to reach out to the Gentiles; that’s the spiritual principle.

In other words James says you Jews are getting to narrow, to nationalistic, you’re thinking of your election before God is only for Jewish people and you’re wrong; the original plan of God calls for Israel to be a light to the nation. Your consummation to the end is to be a light to the nations; you’re going to rule all the nations, all the nations will be integrated. So therefore he is saying to the Jews of the first ecumenical council, people, why do you consider evangelization to the Gentiles to be out of keeping with the whole trust of the program of God as we know it in the Scripture. There is no reason for doing this.

So what have we learned from this council? Let’s summarize some of the principles; we’ll learn more later but these are some of the principles that Christians use in their groups to problem solve, principles that ought to be used in groups you’re in, and I warned you that you are going to find as this generation goes on, you are going to be in pressure situations that you can’t even believe, where the entire society will be against us, and we’re going to stand at the one in 10,000 people that are holding the flag of an absolute standard over and above the sociologist. Everybody else is going to be dealing in terms of sociology, what is convenient, (quote) “for the common good,” rather than God’s good. Common good or God’s good, and everybody is going to be for common good; it’s going to be in the name of common good that you will be forced to give up your children to federal child care centers, because after all, certain people engender prejudices in their children. After all, women have a right to have jobs outside the home and a right to be free of childrearing in their divinely ordained tasks; and therefore we are going to have childcare centers, and not only will we have childcare but it will be required that your children be submitted to this; we haven’t got any proof that public education is private education but we’re going to extend it anyway; we haven’t see the SAT scores decline so our answer is to have more, not less. But nevertheless this will be the system, and I believe if this goes on unchecked by the evangelicals politically and other ways and God doesn’t intervene that some of you couples who are just beginning to have your children, you’ll live to see the day when they’ll be knocking on your door, asking for your children and if it comes to that point it’ll simply be because we have permitted the sociological relativistic standards to control the decision making rather than Scripture.

What are the principles; we see it operating decently and in order. We don’t find the early Christians trying to lone range through their problems as in verse 1 with the characters that came up from Judea, trying to be lone reformers; there’s no power in an individual. There is before God but generally speaking as a group, no. It is done decently and in order. This is why groups have internal structures, constitutions, officers and so on to handle this problem.

The second principle that we find in this; we find in verse 2-3 that the early church sought a standard of reference in the apostles. They did not employ statistical norms; if we have, say, 51% of the people divorcing, that makes it the norm and standard, and then marriages, because they are only held by 49% of the people become abnormal. Is that the kind of statistical reference we have or do we have a standard? So the Church had a standard. So the second principle is they sought their standard in the law of God, not in the law of men.

The third thing they did, which sounds like the opposite of the second thing but it isn’t; in verse 3 they sought a consensus among believers. Why this? Isn’t this statistical? No. The Scriptures are infallible but we aren’t, and therefore we have to test our inferences and our deductions from Scripture and the only way we can test our deductions is to have Christian men and women get together and discuss the issues to make sure we’re correct in our inferences and deductions from the infallible Scripture, so consensus is part of the solution also. That’s why we have congregational government in a local church.

The fourth principle, verse 7, all viewpoints were aired; there was a wide-ranging discussion of the issues, there wasn’t a suppression, a wide-ranging healthy discussion of the issues.

Principle number 5 that we’ve seen, in verse 7, is they used the principle of the credible spokesman, when it was necessary to have men step out and say something they picked the best man who had the highest credibility, with the least friendly group of people.

A sixth thing, verses 16-17, they developed a detailed reasoned position from Scripture, not the same as the second one; the second one is they looked to the Scriptures, the sixth principle is they actually developed their position and stated it, as we’re going to shortly see, in writing, on the basis of Scripture; they formed a creed. A creed that would control the group, not man but God, not opinion but law. So therefore let’s stand and sing hymn 325….