Friday 5 October 2007

What God has cleansed

And a voice spoke to him again the second time, ‘What God has cleansed you must not call common.’” - Acts 10v15

I often feel sorry for Peter. I can’t imagine his shock when God gave him a vision of unclean animals and told him to eat them. As a devout Jew I would imagine that he even felt a physical aversion to the though of eating “unclean” or “common” foods that only the Gentiles would eat.

God made it clear though that because of Christ that which had been seen as unclean was now clean. Obviously, the primary meaning was that the dietary restrictions had been lifted. It spread further than that in that the Gentiles were also no longer unclean.

I think it goes a step farther than that. It seems like some of us have a practice of declaring things unclean that God never calls unclean. We too often refuse to do some things or go some places, not because they are sin, but we have somehow set up human standards of behaviour that have no basis in the scriptures.

Lets be careful that we make sure to follow God’s standards of cleanness, not our own.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Roger, I enjoyed your entries. Thanks for sharing them.

God bless.