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Waylaid by God
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Deborah P. Brunt
What do you do when you're seeking the Lord - learning to know him and to move in sync with him - and he waylays you? He reveals what you had not sought. He answers what you had not asked.
Maybe you hadn't sought this revelation because you thought you knew God's mind on the matter.
Maybe you didn't ask because you already knew the accepted answers in your particular church culture - and you did not want to risk excommunication. Maybe watchdogs in your culture make very little distinction between heresy and mystery.
Still, God shows up - to answer what you had not asked, to give what you had not sought. He tells you something entirely different from the cultural norm - and expects you to act on it.
What do you do? Stick your fingers in your ears? Assume, "This cannot be God"?
Or do you humble your soul, quiet your fears and press in to know the Lord?
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| The man |
When Jesus called, Peter followed. For three years, he trained as a disciple. Then, on the eve of Jesus' crucifixion, Peter failed his first test of faith. Forgiven and commissioned anew, Peter stood among the disciples when the risen Christ "opened their minds so they could understand the Scriptures" (Luke 24:45).
Filled with the Spirit on Pentecost, Peter preached to thousands and saw multitudes respond in faith. He confronted the lie of Ananias and Sapphira when they sold a piece of land and kept back some of the proceeds. He confounded religious leaders who commanded him not to teach in Jesus' name, telling them, "We must obey God, rather than men!" He rebuked a Samaritan named Simon for trying to buy spiritual authority.
Peter had such power and authority that people were healed and delivered when his shadow passed over them. Shortly after he healed a paralytic named Aeneas, Peter raised a woman named Tabitha from the dead.
Peter knew the Lord and sought to move in sync with him. Indeed, Peter the respected apostle might have assumed that he clearly understood God's mind on all important matters. Yet shortly after Peter performed the most amazing miracle of his life, he went to a rooftop to pray - and God waylaid him.
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| The means |
On that rooftop, Peter "fell into a trance" (Acts 10:10). If the word trance sounds like something you'd connect more with a séance than a divine encounter, consider the Greek word it translates. Ekstasis, according to Strong's Greek-Hebrew Dictionary, means "a displacement of the mind, ecstasy."
Whoa. That sounds scary. Definitely suspect. Would God communicate in such a way?
While in ekstasis, Peter "saw heaven opened and something like a large sheet being let down to earth by its four corners. It contained all kinds of four-footed animals, as well as reptiles of the earth and birds of the air. Then a voice told him, 'Get up, Peter. Kill and eat.'
"'Surely not, Lord!' Peter replied. 'I have never eaten anything impure or unclean'" (Acts 10:11-14).
Obey a vision and a voice that contradicted the clear commands of Scripture? Even in a trance, Peter knew better than that! "Absolutely not!" he cried. "I obey the Word!" Yet, in the same breath, Peter acknowledged who had spoken - not the devil, not his own hungry stomach, but the Lord himself.
"The voice spoke to him a second time, 'Do not call anything impure that God has made clean.' This happened three times, and immediately the sheet was taken back to heaven" (vv. 15-16).
Taught by Jesus, filled with the Spirit, Peter knew exactly what this vision meant, right? Wrong. He "was wondering about the meaning of the vision" (v. 17) when God spoke again, this time through the arrival of three men and through the Holy Spirit.
The Spirit told Peter to go with the men, "for I have sent them." The men told Peter, "We have come from Cornelius the centurion. He is a righteous and God-fearing man, who is respected by all the Jewish people. A holy angel told him to have you come to his house so that he could hear what you have to say" (vv. 20, 22).
Red flags! Red flags! Red flags! After entering an ecstatic state, seeing a vision and hearing a voice, Peter must choose whether to believe that his God - the God with whom he personally walked for three years, the God he now represents as an apostle - has sent him a message by this unlikely route: An angel spoke (in a vision, no less) to a man who (1) wasn't a Jew, and (2) knew nothing of Jesus, who in turn sent his servants to tell Peter to come.
Hadn't the God Peter served told the Jews to stay separate from other nations? (Peter could quote Scripture proving that, too.) Didn't every tradition of Peter's culture forbid him to enter the house of a non-Jew?
Ah, but because Peter did know his Lord and did recognize his voice, Peter humbled his soul, summoned his courage and went with the men. By the time Peter reached Cornelius' house, he understood what God was saying.
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| The message |
"Peter went inside and found a large gathering of people. He said to them: 'You are well aware that it is against our law for a Jew to associate with a Gentile or visit him. But God has shown me that I should not call any man impure or unclean" (vv. 27-28).
He continued, "I now realize how true it is that God does not show favoritism but accepts men from every nation who fear him and do what is right. You know the message God sent to the people of Israel, telling the good news of peace through Jesus Christ, who is Lord of all" (vv. 34-36).
While Peter proclaimed, "Jesus is Lord of ALL," God confirmed it: "the Holy Spirit came on all who heard the message" (v. 44).
Peter recognized the voice of God and received the word of God, even when the Lord revealed himself in startling ways, even when he challenged Peter's previous understanding of Scripture. Thus, Peter saw what he otherwise would not have seen. He saw the value of all people in God's eyes. He saw that the blood of Jesus cleanses everyone who believes in him and promotes all to the status of sons.
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| The muddying | |
Like Peter, the early church understood this astounding truth and acted on it. But before long, Greek men of influence who came into the kingdom tilted their teachings toward their own cultural bias. Being Gentiles themselves, they agreed that we "should not call any man impure or unclean."
Ah, but they did not agree that the same applies to women.
Brace yourselves. Tertullian (A.D. 155-220), early church leader and prolific author, told women: "Do you not know that you are [each] an Eve? The sentence of God on this sex of yours lives in this age; the guilt must of necessity live too. You are the Devil's gateway: You are the unsealer of that [forbidden] tree: you are the first deserter of the divine law: you are she who persuaded him whom the devil was not valiant enough to attack. On account of your desert - that is, death - even the Son of God had to die."
Origen (A.D. 185-254), "one of the most distinguished of the early fathers of the Christian Church," said, "Men should not sit and listen to a woman . . . even if she says admirable things, or even saintly things, that is of little consequence, since they came from the mouth of a woman."
Augustine (A.D. 354-430), "one of the most important figures in the development of Western Christianity," wrote, "By herself woman is not of the image of God. The man, on the other hand, alone, is the image of God."
Another early church father, Jerome (A.D. 342-419) said, "Woman is a temple built over a sewer. It is contrary to the order of nature and of the law for women to speak in a gathering."
A temple built over a sewer? Jerome's thinking regarding women's immutable impurity carried incredible weight, for his Latin translation of the Bible, the Vulgate, was the official translation used by the church for 1,000 years. It was the translation read by Martin Luther and other fathers of the reformation, who in turn still influence us today.
Martin Luther taught, "Women are ashamed to admit this, but Scripture and life reveal that only one woman in thousands has been endowed with the God-given aptitude to live in chastity and virginity. A woman is not fully the master of herself."
King James (who commissioned the King James Version) said, "To make women learned and to make a fox tame work out to the same end. Educating a woman or a fox simply makes them more cunning."
Has this gender bias, grafted into the church so long ago, influenced English Scripture translations? Yes - and to a stunning degree.
Look again at what Peter taught at Cornelius' house. According to the New International Version quoted above, Peter said: "God has shown me that I should not call any man impure or unclean" (Acts 10:28, italics mine).
"I now realize how true it is that God does not show favoritism but accepts men from every nation who fear him and do what is right" (Acts 10:34-35, italics mine).
Yet this, the most popular of English translations, does not accurately convey Peter's words. Two Greek nouns are most often translated "man" in English New Testaments. One word, aner, denotes a man, as distinguished from a woman; a male, as opposed to a female. The other word, anthropos, denotes a human being of either gender. Aner (man/male) is used eight times in Acts 10, but it is not used in either of the two quotes above.
What Peter announced in verse 28, but what many English translations - including New International Version, New American Standard, King James and New King James - fail to clearly communicate is this: "God has shown me that I should not call any person [anthropos] impure or unclean."
In verse 35, neither the Greek word for "man" nor the Greek word for "human" appears, but rather a gender-inclusive pronoun. As the New Living Translation correctly indicates, Peter announced: "In every nation he [God] accepts those who fear him and do what is right" (italics mine).
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| The mandate | |
What do you do when you're seeking the Lord - learning to know him and to move in sync with him - and he waylays you? He reveals what you weren't seeking. He answers what you weren't asking.
Peter humbled his soul, quieted his fears - and saw the truth! The failure of Peter and the other apostles to understand the new covenant's impact threatened to deny whole nations the full redemption God intended for them.
Many sincere God-seekers today think they know God's mind on the matter of women. They can quote Scriptures to support their stance. Yet, they do not see how much the teachings of Greek church fathers have influenced both Bible translation and the beliefs of the Western church. Some of the most influential of those early church fathers did exactly what God told Peter not to do. They labeled all women both "unclean" and "unable to be cleansed" even by Jesus Christ, the Lord of all.
And so God waylays us. He shows us highly contemptuous statements about women made by truly devout men. He charges us: "Do not call anything impure that God has made clean."
He confronts us with a question many Christians really want to ignore: Has a failure to understand the new covenant's impact denied a whole gender, for centuries, the full redemption God intended?
Frightened by the risks of probing such a question, we can stick our fingers in our ears. Convinced our view of Scripture is the correct one, we can assume any voice challenging our beliefs cannot be God's. Or, like Peter on that rooftop, we can humble our souls, quiet our fears - and give our Lord permission to reveal whatever he wants to reveal, in whatever ways he chooses to reveal it.
(c) 2007, 2012 Deborah P. Brunt. All rights reserved.
Scripture quotations are from the New International Version. To read about the episodes involving Peter, see Acts 1-5,9. Tertullian - J. Lee Grady, 10 Lies the Church Tells Women (Lake Mary, FL: Charisma House, 2000), p. 118. Origen - "Origen," Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origen. Grady, p. 50. Augustine - "Augustine of Hippo," Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augustine_of_Hippo. Gene Edwards, The Christian Woman . . . Set Free (Jacksonville, FL: SeedSowers Publishing, 2005), introductory quotes. Jerome - Edwards, introductory quotes. Martin Luther - Grady, p. 136. King James - Edwards, introductory quotes.
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