BREAKING DOWN OUR PREJUDICES

Peter was staying at Joppa on the Mediterranean coast. It was the city where the prophet Jonah had fled to board a ship to Tarshish. He was trying to run from the Lord’s command to go and preach at Ninevah, the capital city of Israel’s arch-enemy, Assyria. About 30 miles north of Joppa and some 65 miles northwest of Jerusalem, was the Roman provincial capital, Caesarea, where the governor lived. Under his authority were some 3,000 troops, including the Italian cohort. Serving with this unit was Cornelius, a centurion who commanded 100 soldiers. The Jews despised the Roman occupation of Palestine; they hoped that Messiah would come and deliver them from the Roman oppression.

And so the stage is set: you have a Gentile Roman soldier, representing the despised occupation of Israel, residing in the main city of the Roman occupation. Thirty miles south you have a Jewish apostle, temporarily residing at the spot where Jonah had taken off in disobedience to his commission to preach to Israel’s enemy. And behind the scenes, God is orchestrating the events to bring these two men together in a way that shocked both of them by breaking down the wall of prejudice between them. The result of the story is that today you and I who are Gentiles are fellow heirs and fellow members of the church with the Jews, and fellow partakers of the promise in Christ Jesus through the gospel (Eph. 3:6).

Saint Peter had a vision of a vessel (Greek: skeuos; "a certain vessel descending upon him, as it had been a great sheet knit at the four corners") full of animals being lowered from heaven (Acts 10:11). A voice from heaven told Peter to kill and eat, but since the vessel (or sheet) contained unclean animals, Peter declined. The command was repeated two more times, along with the voice saying, "What God hath made clean, that call not thou common" (verse 15) and then the vessel was taken back to heaven (verse 16).

In Acts 10:1-8, a man called Cornelius, a Roman — so somebody who was a gentile, not a Jew — was spoken to by an angel who told him to make contact with Peter. Peter was a Jew, and Jews saw gentiles (i.e. non-Jews) as unclean people, people they couldn’t associate with [Acts 10:28]; so, if a gentile was to come to Peter then Peter would probably have not allowed him to join the Christian community, which was, at this point, made up only of Jews (Cornelius was soon to become the first non-Jewish convert to Christianity: Acts 10:48).

In the vision in Acts 10:11-15, God was preparing Peter for the arrival of the gentile, Cornelius. The “unclean animals” in the vision represented the gentiles, and God was saying that he counted them as “clean” [Acts 10:15]. God was inviting the gentiles into the communityof believers, and he wanted Peter (and the other Christians) to welcome them in, too.

"Peter said to those gathered, 'You yourselves know that it is thought unlawful for a Jewish man to visit or associate with one of another nation. But God has shown me that I shouldn't call any person unholy or unclean.

Therefore I came without objection when I was sent for. I ask therefore, why did you send for me?' ” (Acts 10:28-29).

It is thought unlawful - what is forbidden by the law of Moses, Deuteronomy 7:2 and by the traditions of the elders, which carry the matter further than the law did, and made it very criminal. The design was to keep them a separate people. To do this, Moses forbade alliances by contract, or marriage, with the surrounding nations, which were idolatrous. See Leviticus 18:24-30; Deuteronomy 7:3-12; compare Ezra 9:11-12. This command the Jews perverted, and explained it as referring to contact of all kinds, even to the exercise of friendly offices and commercial transactions. Compare John 4:9.