Scripture Daily

Context No. 500 of 4322 · Acts

Context · Reflection

Acts 15:12-17: in context

12All the multitude kept silence, and they listened to Barnabas and Paul reporting what signs and wonders God had done among the nations through them. 13After they were silent, James answered, “Brothers, listen to me. 14Simeon has reported how God first visited the nations to take out of them a people for his name. 15This agrees with the words of the prophets. As it is written, 16‘After these things I will return. I will again build the tabernacle of David, which has fallen. I will again build its ruins. I will set it up 17that the rest of men may seek after the Lord: all the Gentiles who are called by my name, says the Lord, who does all these things.’

The Jerusalem council is deciding whether Gentiles can be included in the church without first becoming Jews, and this is the moment it turns. The assembly falls silent to hear Barnabas and Paul report the signs and wonders God had done among the Gentiles. Then James, the leader of the Jerusalem church, stands to give judgment, and watch his method carefully, because it is a model of how to discern what God is doing. He first takes seriously the reported experience: Simeon, that is Peter, has told how God visited the Gentiles to take from them a people for his name. But he does not stop at the experience. He says, and this agrees with the words of the prophets, and quotes Amos, that God would rebuild David's fallen tent so that the rest of humanity, all the Gentiles, might seek the Lord.

That is the whole art of it. Something new and surprising was happening, God pouring his Spirit on outsiders, and the temptation would have been to decide purely on the strength of the exciting testimony, or, from the other side, to reject it purely on the strength of tradition. James does neither. He holds the reported work of God up against the written word of God, and finds that they agree. The new thing turns out not to be new at all; it was written into the prophets all along, that the outsider would be gathered in. Experience and Scripture confirm each other, and only then does James act.

That is a discipline I need whenever I sense God might be doing something, in my life or around me. It is easy to run on experience alone, on what feels strongly like God, and it is easy to hide behind tradition and reject anything unfamiliar. James tests the one by the other: does this reported work of God actually agree with what God has said in his word? When I think God is leading me somewhere, do I test the leading against Scripture the way James did, or do I trust my own sense of it without ever holding it up to the word?

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