NT Doctrine — Romans 14-15:13

That First Church Council back in Acts 15 should have buried the issue, but Jews kept trying to drag Gentiles back under their customs. And it was not just Moses, but several centuries of customary legalism.

No one should be surprised when Jews who come to Christ carry a lot of baggage, but so do Gentiles, just a very different kind of baggage. I noted previously: Paul first makes the subtle point that he agrees with the Gentile Christians regarding freedom from Laws through the higher principle of faith — a direct and personal commitment to God. But that commitment should lead back into community. By grace we surrender some of that freedom back to the Father whence it came, so that we may keep the door open to those still bound by scruples from their old life under the Law.

When kosher was hard to get, Jews typically avoided eating meat. This was how Daniel and his friends handled the pagan Babylonian court diet. But for Gentiles, kosher was just a single cuisine among others that never challenged their faith either way. Paul isn’t making law here for Christians. On the contrary, he appeals for peace between two very different backgrounds coming into one congregation.

There’s no secret here that Jews were strong on law and weak on faith. It was the same regarding various holy days. For Gentiles, it was easier to just forsake their pagan practices and decide that every day was holy in one way or another. It was a very hard pill to swallow for Jews to be told their customs were contrary to faith. It was all too easy for two different brands of arrogance to create tensions that complicated the mission of the Body of Christ. It all hinged on the previous chapter about loving your own faith family.

Paul admits that he had philosophically stepped back from the Jewish ways; he was convinced it was baggage that slowed him down in pursuit of his Savior. Nonetheless, he pleaded with Gentiles to go easy on the encumbered Jews, to be sensitive about how far along they were in faith. Bear with them; go back and help them catch up.

So, moving on to Chapter 15, Paul calls for Jews and Gentiles together to go back and reexamine what the Old Testament Scriptures actually say. If you are truly zealous for God’s reputation, you’ll be forced to confront people and shake them out of their comfort zone. That was the point of Paul’s quote from Psalm 69. It was the same passage quoted about Jesus when He cleansed the Temple. People who care more about power and wealth instead of God’s will end up insulting His name, and it makes a mess that we all have to clean up, even when it’s not our fault personally.

Jews and Gentiles inherited each other as family, the nation of Christ. Their sorrows are yours.

On the one hand, Jesus came strictly to the Jews. And Jews were notorious for their racist hatred of Gentiles. If there’s one thing that caused Jews to reject their Messiah, it was His insistence on the very thing God’s Word demanded: that the Jews reach out to Gentiles. That’s what the Cleansing of the Temple was all about. And not by dragging them into Judaism, Jews were to offer Gentiles a particularly Gentile path to Jehovah (the Law of Noah). Much of the resentment Jews held was the old Talmudic insistence that Gentiles could never be equal to them but could be accepted only as slaves. And here in Rome were Gentile Christians actually serving as leaders in the church.

The Roman Christians had a long way to go.