The Apostles’ Council: Was The Law of Moses necessary
Apostles’ Council
The main topic of the Apostles’ Council was whether circumcision and keeping the Law of Moses were necessary for believers.
When they arrived in Jerusalem, the church, the apostles, and the elders welcomed them. They reported all that God had done with them. However, some believers from the sect of the Pharisees stood up and said,
“It is necessary for them to be circumcised and ordered to keep the law of Moses” (Acts 15:4–5).
Peter addressed the assembly, stating that God made no distinction between Jews and Gentiles, cleansing their hearts by faith. He asked, “Why are you testing God by putting a yoke on the disciples’ necks that neither our ancestors nor we have been able to bear? On the contrary, we believe that we are saved through the grace of the Lord Jesus in the same way they are” (Acts 15:9–11).
James did not refer to the testimony of Paul and Barnabas, perhaps because their mission policy was on trial. Instead, he moved directly from apostolic evidence to the prophetic word, stating, “The words of the prophets are in agreement with this.”
Councils have no authority in the church unless their conclusions align with Scripture.
To support his claim, James quoted Amos 9:11–12.
Simeon has reported how God first intervened to take from the Gentiles a people for his name. And the words of
the prophets agree with this, as it is written:
After these things I will return
and rebuild David’s fallen tent.
I will rebuild its ruins
and set it up again,
so that the rest of humanity
may seek the Lord—
even all the Gentiles
who are called by my name—
declares the Lord
who makes these things known from long ago (Acts 15:14–18)
Peter also used Old Testament Scripture, emphasizing that nothing in Scripture is done without it:
All the prophets testify about him that through his name everyone who believes in him receives forgiveness of
sins (Acts 10:43).
Moses said: The Lord your God will raise up for you a prophet like me from among your brothers. You must listen
to everything he tells you. And everyone who does not listen to that prophet will be completely cut off from the
people. In addition, all the prophets who have spoken, from Samuel and those after him, have also foretold these
days (Acts 3:18–24).
Paul went to Jerusalem again after this council (Acts 21:20–24).
Interestingly, Luke’s record of the gates being shut is the last mention of the temple in Acts. This marks the final major spiritual and geographical turning point in Acts. Paul would never again return to Jerusalem for worship or witness. By rejecting the messenger and the message of salvation, Paul’s opponents sealed the city’s fate (Luke 13:34–35; 21:6, 20). By allowing ethnic pride to prevent them from fulfilling their mission as “a light to the Gentiles” (Isaiah 49:6), the Jews not only rejected their place in the true people of God but also deprived the Temple of the universal glory God intended for it as “a house of prayer for all nations” (Isaiah 56:7; cf. Luke 19:46).
Allison A. Trites, William J. Larkin, Cornerstone Biblical Commentary, Vol 12: The Gospel of Luke and Acts (Carol Stream, IL: Tyndale House Publishers, 2006), 588.When the Jerusalem mob, in their effort to defend the temple, seized Paul, dragged him out of the inner court, slammed the gates shut behind him, and tried to kill him (Acts 21:30–31), they passed the point of no return. The actions of the high priest and his colleagues (Acts 23:12–15; 25:2–3) eventually forced Paul to appeal to Caesar, sealing their fate as a priestly order and that of the temple.
...who killed both the Lord Jesus and the prophets and drove us out; they displease God and oppose everyone by hindering us from speaking to the Gentiles so that they may be saved. Thus they have constantly been filling up the measure of their sins, but wrath has overtaken them at last (1 Thessalonians 2:15–16).In AD 64 (or earlier, according to some), God had the Epistle to the Hebrews written and circulated, calling on Christian Jews everywhere to abandon the temple system of worship, which had become the center and expression of determined rejection of the Lord Jesus. Six years later, the temple was destroyed, and the Sadducean priestly class faded away, but not before their guilt was established beyond excuse.
David Gooding, True to the Faith: The Acts of the Apostles: Defining and Defending the Gospel, Myrtlefield Expositions (Coleraine, Northern Ireland: Myrtlefield House, 2013), 443.In Acts 21:24, James says that if Paul performs the vow, everyone will know that the accusations against him (that he teaches Jews to abandon Moses, etc., as in Acts 21:21) are false, and “that you too are behaving as a law-observant Jew should.” What should have been the response from someone who believed the gospel was “for the Jew first”?
“Do this and we will know you are loyal to Torah; don’t do it and everyone will believe you have torn up the scriptures!”
Faced with that loaded and dangerous alternative, Paul would unhesitatingly choose the former, since everything he believed was based on the assumption that the law and the prophets were fulfilled in the Messiah. Those who have never faced tricky and potentially life-threatening political or religious situations, full of distorted questions and false alternatives, should refrain from casting the first stone.
N. T. Wright, Paul and the Faithfulness of God, vol. 4, Christian Origins and the Question of God (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2013).God had not yet fully shown that the law was abolished. He tolerated it until the iniquity of the Jews was complete; then, by the destruction of Jerusalem, He swept away every rite and ceremony of the Jewish law with the broom of destruction.
Adam Clarke, The Holy Bible with a Commentary and Critical Notes, New Edition, vol. 5 (Bellingham, WA: Faithlife Corporation, 2014), 860.Sadly, in the end, the strategy failed. In the events that followed, nothing indicates that Paul’s Jerusalem relief fund was accepted, and no one in the Jerusalem Christian community came to his rescue during the confrontation that continued to unfold. The Jerusalem church, so prominent in the early chapters of Acts and now grown to “many thousands,” disappears from view during the final seven chapters.
Dennis Hamm, “The Acts of the Apostles,” in New Testament, ed. Daniel Durken, The New Collegeville Bible Commentary (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2009), 422.
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