Christ Church (Moscow, ID)

The number of rival stories to the Gospel are legion. You are confronted with a host of competing salvation stories. All of these rival stories are powerless to save. Their allure is found in their escapist fantasy. Escape from responsibility. Escape from consequences. Escape from accountability. Christ’s Resurrection is the true story of restoration, true salvation, and life.

The philosopher Leibniz put the problem into a nutshell when he asked “why is there something rather than nothing at all?” That is one of the fundamental questions, is it not? But for the believer, because God is the eternal I AM, the idea that there could ever be nothing is nonsensical. It could have been the case that there was no created thing, but an absolute vacuity is absurd. God is the living God, and He is the answer to all our questions.

Culturally we have a relatively strong liturgy for Christmas but a weak liturgy for Easter. This is an area where recovery and reformation are needed. That reformation must start in the church. One way to begin this is to become very familiar with the story itself. Just as you should read and re-read the Christmas story, read and re-read the account of Christ’s final days on earth. Scripture spends significantly more time on the final week of Christ’s life, leading to his death and resurrection, than on his birth and life as a child. So naturally we should do the same with our time spent reading this story.

In the triumphal entry of Christ into Jerusalem, we see that the cross is very much in view. At the same time, it is still appropriate to call it a triumphal entry because the resurrection is equally central. We might even say that the death of Christ is surrounded by resurrection.

As we continue to work our way through the book of Acts, we are not going to spend very much time on the retelling in verses 4-14. But we are not setting this repetition aside as unimportant because Luke obviously intends to emphasize it. He wants us to note it. He tells the story in chapter 10, and then repeats it in detail in chapter 11. Then there is a strong reference to this episode at the Jerusalem Council later (Acts 15:7-11). This incident was a significant event.We can note a few additional details we learn in this recounting. We learn that six Jews accompanied Peter from Joppa (v. 12). We learn that the angel told Cornelius that the message that Peter would bring would be words of salvation (v. 14). And Peter tells us here that the Spirit fell on them near the beginning of his talk (v. 15). So we will begin our exposition at verse 16.

So we need to begin where we left off, which was at the house of Simon the tanner. Simon Peter was somewhat settled there, and it was there that God spoke to him about how he should not consider Gentiles unclean when God had declared them clean. This was hard for Peter because he had never eaten anything common or unclean, and God’s instruction to him about the Gentiles came in the form of telling him to eat unclean food.But tanning was an unclean occupation. A tanner has to handle the carcasses of dead animals, as that is his profession. Simon the tanner lived by the sea because he required salt water for his work, and because the sea breezes would help with the smell, which was bad. We know that handling dead animals made one unclean from Scripture (Num. 19:9-10), and this was the case even if the animal was a clean animal.