Week 42 Acts
When does a commitment turn into a dilemma?
Maybe lots of times but the one I was thinking about was reading through the bible in a year.
A bible-reader’s Commitment is: keep turning the pages day-after-day.
A bible-reader’s Dilemma is: there’s no time to stop and think.
I thought about that after I read the story of the council meeting in Jerusalem. There was one big agenda item. Pretty much all the people who followed the Lord in the gospels were ethnic and religious Jews. Suddenly a bunch of people who weren’t Jewish want to follow the Lord too. So ethnic-religious Jews who followed the Lord told the guys who weren’t Jews ethnically, religiously or any other way that following the Lord included: a) repenting and believing in the Lord, and b) following a list of legal-cultural Jewish-isms.
The council’s question was: do they really have to?
The council’s resolution was basically, no, but there was a short list: you must abstain from eating food offered to idols, from consuming blood or eating the meat of strangled animals, and from sexual immorality.
So…the Dilemma. I look at the list and ask myself is-that-it?
It seems like such a weird list and I wonder what to make of it.
But I’m reading-through, so I guess for now the question goes in the What-Do-I-Do-With-It? bin.
And I move on to chapter sixteen.
Note: quote from Acts 15:29 (NLT)