Week 42 Acts
The Cornelius story is one of the big stories in Acts. I didn’t run a word-count on it, but if it isn’t the longest it’s nearly.
And it’s one of the turning-point stories in the bible. The OT story is about the Abraham-Isaac-Jacob-Israel-Hebrew-Jewish people group. They score a ten on the OT-Priority-Rating.
Lots of other tribal-ethnic-cultural-national groups show up too. Egypt, Assyria, Babylon, Persia, Ethiopia, Libya, the Hittites, Philistines, Canaanites. But they’re only scoring ones or twos.
The Israel Group was super-important. Select. Unique. Special. Distinct. As if all the other nationalities were carrying a deadly virus that Israel didn’t want to catch, so Keep Your Distance!
The Cornelius story is a step on the road to revising that sense of Us vs. Them.
Cornelius was: a devout man who feared the God of Israel…He gave generously to charity and was a man who prayed regularly to God. In spite of that, Cornelius was a Them.
So under normal circumstances Peter would never, ever, ever have fraternized with non-Jewish Cornelius. It took a miraculous vision-driven intervention to push Peter through his ethnic quicksand.
Peter had already seen the Lord show an international open-mindedness – there was the Roman centurion, the Samaritan women, the Syro-Phoenecian woman. But it’s only now that Peter is latching onto the fact that ethic and racial differences aren’t as important as he thought.
Note: quote from Acts 10:2 (NLT)