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Pastor Thom Keller: From the beginning to the end, and every point in between, with just little vignettes of obedience, they were continually breaking God's law. So for them to say these Gentiles need to keep the law, they're not looking at history realistically. They're not looking at their own life honestly. Peter was right; it's a yoke that neither we nor our ancestors were able to bear.

Every time in the New Testament, somebody came to Jesus with a list of "what must I do's," he sent them back for more law. He sent them back saying, "Well, have you done this? Have you done this? No? Well, go do that." And so people get all mixed up. He says, "Well, Jesus sent them back for more law." No, he was trying to get them to the end of themselves where they said, "I can't do this." Now you're ready. Now you're ready for grace.

When you know you can't keep the law, the law is designed to do that. To understand how demanding his requirements are. And I think of this example. You travel to an island and you rent a car. And it's a big kind of deserted island. You drive around all day, you're driving 55-60 miles an hour all day around this deserted island. In the middle of the afternoon, you're driving on the road and you hit this groundhog. And it's a sad thing, but this little groundhog flies off the side of the road and you know you killed it.

So you go back, you go back to your hotel and you're at your hotel and the waiter comes up and says, "How was your day?" and you say, "Well, I drove around the island. We got around the whole island." "How'd you do that?" "Well, I was going about 60 miles an hour." "60 miles an hour? Don't you know the speed limit on this island's 15?" "15? I was going 60 all day." "And if you break it, it's six months in jail." "Oh my word, I had no idea."

"And we hit this groundhog." "You hit a groundhog? That's a protected species. That's five years in jail. Did anybody see you hit it?" "Five years in jail? How do you feel about your day now?" Not so good. See, because now you know the law, and the law is convicting you of what you did that day. That's what the law is to do. You know what? There are a lot of people that have never read the Bible and are unsaved. If they read the Bible and saw everything, just start with the Ten Commandments would get their attention.

You know, they'd flip. They'd gulp, gulp, gulp. "That's me. Man, I didn't know that's in there. I'm not supposed to..." Wow, I got a problem. That's the point of the law. We all have a problem. It's a sin problem. And what's the number one thing you run into, I can almost guarantee you, if you've talked to enough people about Christ, the number one thing people say to you when you talk to them about the claims of Christ, what do they say?

"Yes, I'm not that bad a person. I'm a pretty good person." Did you drive over 15? Did you ever hit a groundhog? Look at what the law says. We all have a problem. It's designed for that purpose. The Bible also says that the other thing the law does is it actually compels us towards sinning. Because when we know the law, it actually... we find ourselves breaking the law. I think of that with my brother.

When my brother was born, my mom said he has a soft spot in the top of his head. And she said, "Don't press that." I was seven years old. Do you think I would have ever taken time to look at the top of my brother's head? Never. But now I was intrigued by this soft spot. And that thing goes up and down. Did you ever notice that? I still remember, before there's any hair up there, that little spot goes up and down. I was pressing that sucker all the time.

Because I thought, "Why did she say don't press it? What would it do?" So when there's law, it actually at times makes us fall into, and Paul goes into that in great detail in Romans. Is the law evil? Of course not. Well, these Pharisees made a critical mistake in saying they need to keep the law in order to be saved. They viewed Israel's history through rose-colored glasses, not by the light of the truth of God's word.

Because if they just read Genesis and Exodus all the way up through Joshua, all the way up through Malachi, take it to the end, they'd see that the Jews never obeyed God. Never. As Israel is birthed at Mount Sinai, what are they doing at the base of the mountain? They're worshipping a golden calf, right? And at the end of the Bible in Nehemiah, they're still breaking the law and they're marrying heathen women.

From the beginning to the end, and every point in between, with just little vignettes of obedience, they are continually breaking God's law. So for them to say these Gentiles need to keep the law, they're not looking at history realistically. They're not looking at their own life honestly. Peter was right; it's a yoke that neither we nor our ancestors were able to bear. They have that discussion.

Verse 12: that kind of brings everybody to a silence. And verse 12, it says, "There was no further discussion, and everyone listened as Barnabas and Paul told about the miraculous signs and wonders God had done through them among the Gentiles." When they had finished, James stood and said... and again, this is not the Apostle James. You know, there are 12 apostles, and again you hear James and John throughout the gospel accounts.

This was not the Apostle James because he was martyred; he was killed by Herod. Instead, this James is called James the Just. It's the brother of Jesus. Everyone in the commentaries calls him the half-brother of Jesus. And a brother of Jude, the Jude who wrote the book of Jude, the book right in front of the book of Revelation, was also a brother of Jesus. But they call him a half-brother because they had the same mother.

Once they got converted, wouldn't they have been full brothers? You know, they both would have had the same father, right? Three quarters? I don't know, I just don't like that half-brother. It removes too much the father's side, and I don't think that's true anyway. When they had finished, James stood, James the Just, the brother of Jesus, who's really the leader of the church. And again, the Catholic Church who places Peter in that position really misses the mark especially here and some other places.

James stood and said, "Brothers, listen to me. Peter has told you about the time God first visited the Gentiles to take them from a people for himself. And this conversion of Gentiles agrees with what the prophets predicted. For instance, it is written..." and now he quotes from Amos, the book of Amos: "Afterward I will return, and I will restore the fallen kingdom of David. From the ruins I will rebuild it and I will restore it, so that the rest of humanity might find the Lord, including the Gentiles, all those I have called to be mine. This is what the Lord says, he who made these things known long ago."

So my judgment is... and it's interesting, like we said, he acts as moderator as leader, brings all of these thoughts and comments together. And he says, "So my judgment is that we should stop troubling the Gentiles who turn to God, except to write to them and tell them to abstain..." now he gives a list of four things that they must continue to do. Only four things. They must abstain from eating meat sacrificed to idols, from sexual immorality, from consuming blood, or from eating the meat of strangled animals.

For these laws of Moses have been preached in Jewish synagogues in every city on every Sabbath for many generations. So now they go into a list. First of all, James uses scriptures. Notice how his answer is based on scriptures. John Stott says this: "Church councils have no authority in the church unless it can be shown that their conclusions are in accordance to scripture." Scripture is the test for everything we do.

If something doesn't pass scripture, it can't be God, it cannot be. And again, I've said this many times before, but if you ever have a decision to make and it involves compromise in any way, 99 percent of it the Bible would sign off on it, but one percent involves compromise, it can't be God's way, can't be. It's not a majority. It's not 51 percent clears the scriptures and the 49 percent goes away.

God's way involves no compromise, ever. Not ever. It can't. How could it? It can't be his way. And he says, "So it is my judgment." Again, he is acting and seen as the senior elder in Jerusalem. The Greek here where he says, "And so my judgment is," the Greek is really much stronger than that. What he really says is, "I determine," or "I resolve." And it's pretty clearly seen that James had that authority to make that decision.

He says there are four issues, four points of law that need to be held: abstain from eating meat that was sacrificed to idols, sexual immorality, drinking blood, and eating strangled animals. Why these four items? Why these four specific? Well, let's look at these four individually. The first is eating meat sacrificed to idols. What is probably meant here is that they're not to eat meat in a setting where within the setting the meat was sacrificed to idols.

Are you with me? In other words, if you're at some banquet, and at the banquet there's meat and they sacrificed to an idol and then passed it out to the people to eat, you're not to eat meat that was sacrificed to idols. And the reason we can come to that conclusion is Paul, and when he talks in 1st Corinthians 10, he gives the "don't ask" rule. And the "don't ask" rule is if you go to the market and there's meat there and it was sacrificed to idols, don't ask.

Just buy it, eat it. If you go to somebody's house to eat and they had meat that was sacrificed to idols and you don't know that and they didn't tell you that, just eat it. Don't ask. Now, if you weren't ever to eat meat that was sacrificed to idols, Paul couldn't have said that. But that in all probability wasn't the point. The point was if you're in a setting and they're offering sacrifices to their idols, to their gods, and in the course of that banquet they give you a piece of meat that you saw was just offered to idols, don't eat it. That's the first rule.

The second rule is sexual immorality. Now, this is porneia, which the word fornication is used, and again on this word porneia there is a lot of discussion. And I've said before I have a good friend, John Drescher, who did a long study in this, and others have come to the same conclusion, that porneia really means any sexual activity other than sexual intercourse between a husband and a wife. Any sexual activity outside of a sexual relationship between a husband and a wife in marriage.

So they're saying sexual immorality. Now, it's interesting in looking at these four that this is the only one that really is drawn out from the moral law. In other words, nobody would say that when you become a Christian, you disregard the Ten Commandments, right? "Thou shalt not kill." They don't say here that you shouldn't kill. The Ten Commandments, "don't covet," "don't steal," it's all an assumed because that's God's moral code. It would be assumed that they would keep that.

But why is the sexual immorality pulled out by itself? The others are for the most part dietary law, but this one is not. This one goes to the moral code. Why? Why was this one? In all probability, it was because the Gentile culture of its day was so caught up in sexual immorality that in the Gentile eyes... and again, remember as we study this, we have a tendency to look at all of what we study in Acts through the eyes of the Jews because that's where we've been in our study of the Bible and we tend to look at that.

But if you can just get away from that and view this new-found Christianity through the eyes of Gentiles, they saw absolutely nothing wrong with sexual immorality. Nothing. In their eyes, there was absolutely nothing wrong with fornication. Women would devote themselves to the service at a temple and indiscriminate prostitution in the service of their god. There were male prostitutes as well who were serving their gods.

This practice was almost universal in the then-known world except to the Jews and to the Christians. It was also very common for them to have sexual relations among close family relatives, which again was strictly forbidden by Jewish law. So why was this one point highlighted among all the others? Because it was so rampant, it was so accepted, it was so widespread that it almost took a special mention because people, we would say, "Well, of course, of course, that's how it ought to be."

They would have said, "What? Really? We're not supposed to do that? Really?" They would have been that surprised. It's why it was included. The third one is drinking blood. A commentator said this, and it's just good to read it: "This refers to a practice among heathens who believed that blood was the food of demons to whom they sacrificed. And therefore, when they sacrificed to them, they took the blood of the animal, put it into a vessel, sat down by it and around about it, and they ate the flesh of the animal, imagining that while they ate the flesh, the demons ate the blood."

"And by this means, friendship and familiarity were contracted between them, between the humans and the demons, so that they hoped to receive some advantage from them and to be informed of things to come." That it was a way really of getting into that realm, tying into that, tapping into that power, buying favor of demons. And I don't want to look... if you ever invite me to a wedding and you do a toast, I'm fine with it. I mean, it's not that big a deal.

But what you ought to really know is what the root of a toast is. It would be a water toast that I would participate in, I want to make you understand that. But the root of a toast is that when you lift that up, you're lifting it up to the demons. That's what they did with their glasses. They would actually invite the demons to come into that drink, then they would drink it. That's the root of a toast. Look it up.

Be like the Bereans, check it out. You'll find that's the root of a toast. Now, what does that mean? It may not mean anything to anybody. It means something to me. I don't like toasts. I don't like the symbolism behind that. So, for what it's worth, I won't charge you anything extra for that little bonus. Also, God said that the life is in the blood. And the Jewish law said that if anyone willfully took any amount of blood more than the amount of an olive, they would be cut off from the Jewish faith.

So it was a very strict law among the Jews. Also on a practical matter, Dr. Russell says this: "Blood carries both infections and toxins that might circulate in the animal's body. Therefore, by eating an animal's blood, one exposes himself needlessly to potential toxins and infections. The harmful effect of eating blood can be illustrated by tribes in Africa who consume large amounts of blood in their pagan culture. These people have developed chronic diseases; their lifespan is approximately 30 years."

Again, God's law is practical. The fourth issue is eating meat of strangled animals. An animal that would be killed by beast, an animal that would have been found killed by beast in that kind of a way. And again, as a result, the blood would stagnate and would congeal in the veins of the animal and that you'd be eating the blood in that manner. It's interesting that all four of these issues are practiced in satanic rituals today.

All four: fornication, drinking blood, eating meat sacrificed to demons, and eating animals who were killed in an improper way. All four. That shouldn't be a shocker to us, but it just is how it works. John Stott goes on and makes a practical point about these issues. He says this: "All four of the requested abstentions related to ceremonial law laid down in Leviticus 17 and 18, and three of them concern dietary matters which could inhibit Jewish-Gentile common meals."

So he's saying that when a Jew who kept the law would sit down with a Gentile who did not keep the law, both Christians now, that if they ate a meal together, these three of these dietary laws could have been a huge offense to a Jew. Huge. And it may have actually been part of the logic, part of God's reasoning in singling these out, was not to cause these groups to fracture when they met for meals.

Verse 22: "Then the apostles and elders and the whole church in Jerusalem chose delegates, and they sent them to Antioch of Syria with Paul and Barnabas to report on this decision." The men chosen were two of the church leaders, Judas (also called Barsabbas) and Silas. This is the letter they took with them: "This letter is from the apostles and elders, your brothers in Jerusalem. It is written to the Gentile believers in Antioch, Syria, and Cilicia. Greetings. We understand that some men from here have troubled you and upset you with their teaching. But they have had no such instructions from us."

"So it seemed good to us, having unanimously agreed in our decision, to send you these official representatives along with our beloved Barnabas and Paul, who have risked their lives for the sake of our Lord Jesus Christ. So we are sending Judas and Silas to tell you what we have decided concerning your question." They very wisely did not just send Paul and Barnabas back by themselves. Because you know the Judaizers would have said, "Well, how do we know that's what they said? It isn't exactly the way you said it. We're sure they wanted to keep some of the law."

So wisely they send two others along to be witnesses of that. Verse 28: "For it seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us to lay no greater burden on you than these requirements. You must abstain from eating food offered to idols, from consuming blood or eating the meat of strangled animals, and from sexual immorality (that porneia, that fornication). If you do this, you will do well. Farewell." The four messengers went at once to Antioch where they called a general meeting of the Christians and delivered the letter.

And there was great joy throughout the church that day as they read this encouraging message. Then Judas and Silas, both being prophets, spoke extensively to the Christians, encouraging and strengthening their faith. They stayed for a while and then Judas and Silas were sent back to Jerusalem with the blessings of the Christians to those who had sent them. Paul and Barnabas stayed in Antioch to assist many others who were teaching and preaching the word of the Lord here.

Now, imagine how the Gentile Christians felt back in Antioch waiting for this answer. Do you realize what a huge issue this would have been to them? To have to keep all of the Jewish law, to be thrown under the truck in that deal? How ugly that would have been. And they're anticipating this response, and when they came back and heard only these four things, the amount of joy that there would have been. There's another piece of this that is unspoken, but it says volumes of the character of the Judaizers.

It doesn't say that they said a word in response. They didn't argue back. They just accepted it. Again, it goes to speak the position that authority had within the life of the church, but also speaks of the character of these Judaizers that when that decision was made, they agreed with that decision. You know, I have a friend who was a part of a large, very large church and they had a multi-million dollar capital fund campaign to build a new church.

And he was on the finance committee. And he really wasn't in agreement with the building of this church. He wasn't in agreement with the borrowing of the money to build this church. He thought it was a big mistake. And he spoke up in the committee meeting and everybody kind of knew where he was and where everyone else was. Well, the church voted and the church voted to build the building. And he said, "What do you think I should do?"

I said, "Well, there's only one thing to do." I said, "You join ranks." I said, "You join ranks." If somebody does something in a church that's unscriptural, something you can't live with because it's a point of God's word, you have a decision to make and it may involve leaving the church. But if it comes down to a position that is somewhat questionable and the vote goes against you, you join ranks. You stop trying to make your position... what's the point?

You jump in with both feet and have a heart so turned toward everyone else in their position that no one would even have an idea that you ever took a different position. That's really the heart of God, and that's obviously what these men did. They jumped in.

Guest (Male): That reminds me of the famous saying, perhaps you're familiar with: "On essentials, unity; on non-essentials, liberty; but in all things, charity." We're going through Acts right now on Study the Word with our pastor and teacher Tom Keller. You can hear this message again by going online to ccleb.com. Again, we're at ccleb.com. There are many other messages for your growth and edification there too. Or call and request a CD copy at 717-507-7862.

That's 717-507-7862. Here in the month of November, we're pleased to offer you a book by D.L. Moody we think you'll benefit from. It's called "Your Victory in Jesus." If you're a Christian, you have victory. And that victory was secured by Christ at the cross. But the question that remains is, are you living in victory? Join D.L. Moody as he explores true victory and start to experience the overcoming life ruled by Christ instead of fear.

For a gift of any amount, we'll send this your way with our thanks. So call today, 717-507-7862. Or you can write to Study the Word, 740 Willow Street, Lebanon, Pennsylvania 17046. You're invited to worship with us here at Calvary Chapel Lebanon, where Tom serves as pastor. Visit ccleb.com for our service times and see what's coming up at the church there too. When you get a chance, download our free Android app.

Search Calvary Chapel Lebanon in the Google Play Store. Thanks for studying the word with Pastor Tom Keller. We'll dig deeper into the book of Acts with Tom next time. We hope you can join us.