FACING THE PREJUDICE SINDROME
ACTS 10:1-23
NASB
1 Now there was a man at Caesarea named Cornelius, a centurion of what was called the Italian [a]cohort, 2 a devout man and one who feared God with all his household, and gave many [a]alms to the Jewish people and prayed to God continually. 3 About the [a]ninth hour of the day he clearly saw in a vision an angel of God who had just come in and said to him, “Cornelius!” 4 And fixing his gaze on him and being much alarmed, he said, “What is it, Lord?” And he said to him, “Your prayers and [a]alms have ascended as a memorial before God. 5 Now dispatch some men to Joppa and send for a man named Simon, who is also called Peter; 6 he is staying with a tanner named Simon, whose house is by the sea.” 7 When the angel who was speaking to him had left, he summoned two of his [a]servants and a devout soldier of those who were his personal attendants, 8 and after he had explained everything to them, he sent them to Joppa.
9 On the next day, as they were on their way and approaching the city, Peter went up on the housetop about the [a]sixth hour to pray. 10 But he became hungry and was desiring to eat; but while they were making preparations, he fell into a trance; 11 and he saw the [a]sky opened up, and an [b]object like a great sheet coming down, lowered by four corners to the ground, 12 and there were in it all kinds of four-footed animals and [a]crawling creatures of the earth and birds of the [b]air. 13 A voice came to him, “Get up, Peter, [a]kill and eat!” 14 But Peter said, “By no means, Lord, for I have never eaten anything [a]unholy and unclean.” 15 Again a voice came to him a second time, “What God has cleansed, no longer consider [a]unholy.” 16 This happened three times, and immediately the [a]object was taken up into the [b]sky.
17 Now while Peter was greatly perplexed in [a]mind as to what the vision which he had seen might be, behold, the men who had been sent by Cornelius, having asked directions for Simon’s house, appeared at the gate; 18 and calling out, they were asking whether Simon, who was also called Peter, was staying there. 19 While Peter was reflecting on the vision, the Spirit said to him, “Behold, [a]three men are looking for you. 20 But get up, go downstairs and accompany them [a]without misgivings, for I have sent them Myself.” 21 Peter went down to the men and said, “Behold, I am the one you are looking for; what is the reason for which you have come?” 22 They said, “Cornelius, a centurion, a righteous and God-fearing man well spoken of by the entire nation of the Jews, was divinely directed by a holy angel to send for you to come to his house and hear [a]a message from you.” 23 So he invited them in and gave them lodging.
And on the next day he got up and went away with them, and some of the brethren from Joppa accompanied him.
10:1 [a]Or battalion 10:2 [a]Or gifts of charity 10:3 [a]I.e. 3 p.m. 10:4 [a]Or deeds of charity 10:7 [a]Or household slaves 10:9 [a]I.e. noon 10:11 [a]Or heaven [b]Or vessel 10:12 [a]Or reptiles [b]Or heaven 10:13 [a]Or sacrifice 10:14 [a]Or profane; lit common 10:15 [a]Lit make common 10:16 [a]Or vessel [b]Or heaven 10:17 [a]Lit himself 10:19 [a]One early ms reads two 10:20 [a]Lit doubting nothing 10:22 [a]Lit words
NLT
1 In Caesarea there lived a Roman army officer[*] named Cornelius, who was a captain of the Italian Regiment. 2 He was a devout, God-fearing man, as was everyone in his household. He gave generously to the poor and prayed regularly to God. 3 One afternoon about three o’clock, he had a vision in which he saw an angel of God coming toward him. “Cornelius!” the angel said.
4 Cornelius stared at him in terror. “What is it, sir?” he asked the angel.
And the angel replied, “Your prayers and gifts to the poor have been received by God as an offering! 5 Now send some men to Joppa, and summon a man named Simon Peter. 6 He is staying with Simon, a tanner who lives near the seashore.”
7 As soon as the angel was gone, Cornelius called two of his household servants and a devout soldier, one of his personal attendants. 8 He told them what had happened and sent them off to Joppa.
9 The next day as Cornelius’s messengers were nearing the town, Peter went up on the flat roof to pray. It was about noon, 10 and he was hungry. But while a meal was being prepared, he fell into a trance. 11 He saw the sky open, and something like a large sheet was let down by its four corners. 12 In the sheet were all sorts of animals, reptiles, and birds. 13 Then a voice said to him, “Get up, Peter; kill and eat them.”
14 “No, Lord,” Peter declared. “I have never eaten anything that our Jewish laws have declared impure and unclean.[*]”
15 But the voice spoke again: “Do not call something unclean if God has made it clean.” 16 The same vision was repeated three times. Then the sheet was suddenly pulled up to heaven.
17 Peter was very perplexed. What could the vision mean? Just then the men sent by Cornelius found Simon’s house. Standing outside the gate, 18 they asked if a man named Simon Peter was staying there.
19 Meanwhile, as Peter was puzzling over the vision, the Holy Spirit said to him, “Three men have come looking for you. 20 Get up, go downstairs, and go with them without hesitation. Don’t worry, for I have sent them.”
21 So Peter went down and said, “I’m the man you are looking for. Why have you come?”
22 They said, “We were sent by Cornelius, a Roman officer. He is a devout and God-fearing man, well respected by all the Jews. A holy angel instructed him to summon you to his house so that he can hear your message.” 23 So Peter invited the men to stay for the night. The next day he went with them, accompanied by some of the brothers from Joppa.
[10:1] Greek a centurion; similarly in 10:22. [10:14] Greek anything common and unclean.
For all our many differences, such as race, creed, culture, gender, and nationality, people all over the world have at least one thing in common: prejudice. It’s a stubborn, thorny weed that grows in every heart and draws nourishment from the rotting compost of our fallen, sinful nature. Cut it to the ground, poison its leaves, or pull it out by the roots . . . and it’ll be back before you know it.
The creeping infestation of prejudice can happen so gradually it goes unnoticed. And it takes hold in unexpected ways. We’re familiar with the most common variety, racial prejudice. Some nurture a secret bigotry against people with certain colors of skin, specific nationalities, different cultures, or even particular accents. Other types of prejudice take more subtle forms: political affiliation, economic stratum, marital status, religious background, the presence of tattoos, style of clothes or hair, or even the use of cosmetics. It’s a universal problem. Your prejudice might not be my prejudice, but some form of it tries to grow in every heart. Even so, some people do a better job of weeding than others.
Peter, the hero of the Jerusalem congregation and arguably the most courageous Christian in the first two decades of the church, struggled with prejudice. Fortunately for Peter and the church, the Lord would not let that sinful attitude remain; He would soon uproot it.
— 10:1-2 —
As Acts 10 opens, the church is perhaps five or six years old. The gospel had swept through Judea, drawing many Jewish converts into the church. Philip had conducted an extremely effective ministry among the Samaritans, and —to his credit —Peter had embraced as brothers and sisters people that he and his fellow Jews considered half-breed religious compromisers. Having traveled to the seaport town of Joppa, he had accepted the hospitality of a tanner named Simon (9:43). This is also to Peter’s credit —Jews considered tanners unclean because their trade required them to handle the skins of dead animals. Even so, despite Peter’s impressively open-minded attitude concerning Samaritans and “unclean” Jews, he never would have considered a visit to Caesarea Maritima, about 30 miles north. The reader’s curiosity is therefore piqued as Luke now introduces Cornelius, a Roman officer living in Caesarea.
Every faithful Jew regarded Caesarea with religious and national disdain. Herod the Great had rebuilt this dilapidated trading outpost into a new, thoroughly modern seaport and named it in honor of Caesar Augustus. It was an engineering marvel and quickly became the preferred harbor for merchant and military vessels.[78] Gentiles loved Caesarea for the same reasons Jews hated it. Herod had built it to rival Greek cities, complete with elaborate palaces, public buildings, a large amphitheater, a temple dedicated to Caesar and Rome, and statues of the emperor surrounding the harbor entrance. Consequently, Caesarea Maritima became the capital of the Roman occupation in Israel, where procurators and governors maintained their year-round residence and where Gentiles congregated.
To a faithful Jew, the city represented everything that was wrong with Israel —Roman domination and Gentile occupation aided by compromising Hellenistic Jews.
Barry Beitzel
The Ruins of the Harbor Built by Herod the Great. The ancient city of Caesarea Maritima surrounded the harbor. The ruins of the amphitheater and the hippodrome still stand.
Cornelius was a very common Roman name. This man is described as a centurion of the Italian cohort. A Roman cohort was a military unit consisting of at least six hundred fighting men, plus support personnel. Auxiliary cohorts sometimes added 240 cavalry. A centurion commanded one hundred of these men.[79] The name “Italian cohort” likely indicated that the original soldiers of this auxiliary were Roman-born troops, not conscripts from occupied territories.[80] Putting all of Luke’s clues together, it becomes clear that Cornelius was about as Roman as a man could be outside of Rome. Even so, this Roman commander worshiped God and gave generously to the Jewish people. During the Lord’s ministry in Galilee, Peter had probably met a man very much like him (Luke 7:1-10).
Luke’s term for the centurion’s “praying” (deomai [1189]) is an uncommon word that means “to beg,” “to plead earnestly,” or “to request.” The man “continually” sought something specific from God, but we’re not told what (Acts 10:2).
— 10:3-8 —
The “ninth hour” (10:3), or 3:00 p.m., was the designated time for afternoon prayer in the temple (cf. 3:1). Luke is thus suggesting that Cornelius was following this observance in the privacy of his quarters when an angel interrupted his prayers. The commander addressed the heavenly messenger as “lord,” but he was using this in the same sense as one would say “sir” —as a term showing respect. The angel assured the soldier that his actions had been received by God with the same regard as the sacrifices of Hebrew worshipers; the image created by “ascended” hints at smoke rising from an altar (10:4; cf. Gen. 8:21; Exod. 29:18, 25; Lev. 8:28).
The angel gave the centurion orders with military precision, telling him the name and location of the man he should request (Acts 10:5-6). And Cornelius immediately obeyed the command to the letter, sending two household servants and a trusted, God-fearing member of his staff (10:7-8).
— 10:9 —
Cornelius’s messengers made good time, completing the 30-mile journey in considerably less than the normal day and a half; they had left the evening before and were approaching Joppa around the “sixth hour,” noon by our reckoning of time. Either Cornelius provided them with horses or they left immediately and pressed on through the night. Either way, it was an urgent matter for the Roman commander.
Meanwhile, the Lord prepared Peter for an unexpected visit. A twenty-first-century, Western Gentile can hardly appreciate the difficulty of the Lord’s task in preparing Peter, a devout Jew. When God chose Abraham, and through him his Hebrew descendants, He set His heart on the nation of Israel. Not because they were greater in number than any other nation, not because they were more righteous, not because they deserved His heart of love, but —again —because of His grace. In an act of sovereign choice, He decided to make the Hebrew people His unique instrument in bringing the world into a relationship with Himself.
In this way, the nation of Israel became God’s chosen race. By the first century, however, pride had convinced many Jews that because they were a chosen nation, they were superior to all other nations. Perhaps they began to believe that they had been chosen because no other people group could have carried the burden of following God’s Law. As time passed and tradition built upon tradition, prejudice took root in the Jewish heart. Jews had begun to think of the Gentiles as unclean dogs, and pious Jews avoided all contact with Gentiles, much as we would keep our distance from a pack of stray dogs in the street. Keep all this in mind as the Lord does a work in Peter’s heart.
At noon —“the sixth hour” —the day after Cornelius’s vision, Peter retreated from everyone else to pray in solitude.
— 10:10-14 —
Peter was hungry, and the Lord used it as an opportunity to change his theological perspective. While praying, he drifted into an altered state of mind (ekstasis [1611]), which the Lord used as a canvas for a vivid illustration. In a trance, Peter saw a “vessel like a giant linen cloth” (literally rendered) descend from beyond the sky. In terms of imagery, he understood the source to be heaven and that God had sent the object to earth. This object appeared to be a microcosm of the animal world, containing representatives of many species, including reptiles and birds (10:10-12).
A voice of heavenly origin —either God’s or that of an angel —invited Peter to do something completely repulsive to a devout Jew: “kill and eat” these unclean animals (10:13). God had forbidden the Israelites to eat such animals under the old covenant (Lev. 11). But during Jesus’ earthly ministry, He had declared all food “clean.” The Old Testament ban on certain foods had served its ceremonial and educational purpose and was no longer needed (Mark 7:14-19; Luke 11:39-41; cf. Rom. 14:14). Still, as a matter of preference deeply rooted in his Jewish upbringing, Peter resisted in the strongest terms.
Though grace abounds, prejudice dies hard.
To be fair, this would be like asking a sincere, lifelong teetotaler to have a beer. Unsurprisingly, Peter’s objection goes beyond personal preference to imply that his choice had moral value. He said, in effect, “No sir! I continue to maintain the high moral standard set for all Hebrews by Moses! I won’t touch anything ‘unholy and unclean’” (Acts 10:14, koinos [2839] and akathartos [169]). Legalists always seem to take pride in negatives, the things they would never do. Alexander Whyte offers a penetrating analysis of Peter’s prejudice —and our own.
All mankind, indeed, except Peter and a few of his friends, were bound up together in one abominable bundle. And Peter was standing above them, scouting at and spitting on them all. All so like ourselves. For, how we also bundle up whole nations of men and throw them into that same unclean sheet. Whole churches that we know nothing about but their bad names that we have given them, are in our sheet of excommunication also. All the other denominations of Christians in our land are common and unclean to us. Every party outside of our own party in the political state also. We have no language contemptuous enough wherewith to describe their wicked ways and their self-seeking schemes. They are four-footed beasts and creeping things. Indeed, there are very few men alive, and especially those who live near us, who are not sometimes in the sheet of our scorn; unless it is one here and one there of our own family, or school, or party. And they also come under our scorn and our contempt the moment they have a mind of their own, and interests of their own, and affections and ambitions of their own.[81]
— 10:15-16 —
The heavenly voice instructed Peter that the opinions or preferences of people can never supersede the declaration of God (10:15).[82] The voice commanded him, “What God has cleansed” —katharizō [2511] —“no longer consider unholy” —koinos [2839]. The latter is an adjective for things that are common, profane, or defiled. In the ceremonial sense, this word describes something that is the opposite of pure, sacred, and holy. In time, the church would come to love the related noun koinōnia [2842], which described their unique bond in Christ in terms of fellowship, close association, communion, and mutual sharing. This would be the beginning of fellowship between Jewish and Gentile believers. In the words of one expositor, “It would be a short step from recognizing that Gentile food was clean to realizing that Gentiles themselves were ‘clean’ also.”[83]
The lesson didn’t come easily, however. The voice had to command Peter three times! Notably, Peter never did “kill and eat” in the dream —though he responded obediently to the dream’s purpose (10:23).
— 10:17-20 —
Peter understood the words spoken by the voice, but he didn’t comprehend their meaning or application. So what if he preferred kosher food? As he pondered the meaning, the answer to his question arrived at the gate (10:17-18). The Holy Spirit spoke to Peter, either audibly or from within, to help him make the connection between the vision and the messengers from Caesarea. He commanded the apostle to follow these Gentile men without second-guessing or wavering. He should do as they asked, with confident resolve and without hesitations related to becoming ceremonially unclean (10:19-20).
— 10:21-22 —
Everything about the messengers communicates humility and respect. They knew Jews considered Gentiles unclean, so they called out from the gate. Clearly, Simon the tanner didn’t invite them in. The three men didn’t know that the Lord had prepared Peter for their arrival, so they prefaced their request with a long introduction praising the Gentile centurion’s worthiness (10:22). The phrase “righteous and God-fearing” set him apart from most Romans. This let Peter know he would not be disparaged by his Jewish peers for accepting the invitation. And they made it clear that the invitation to preach came not simply from Cornelius, but at the direction of God.
— 10:23 —
The journey would require two days of walking. The messengers were undoubtedly tired, and it was late in the afternoon, so Peter determined to set out the next morning. Normally, Jews didn’t feed and lodge Gentiles, but the Lord’s vivid illustration and direct command had its effect on the apostle. He extended the same hospitality he would have offered a fellow Jew. But one can only wonder how hard it was for him. A lifetime of prejudice doesn’t go away in a single afternoon.
By the end of writing this segment, Luke had accomplished several objectives. First, he had acknowledged the difficult cultural adjustments made by the first Christians as they began to accept Gentile believers. Second, he had established the Lord’s divine purpose as the cause of Gentile conversion, so that the church could not regard Gentiles as an inferior brand of Christian. Third, he shows that even before Paul had begun to evangelize the Gentile world, the church had already embraced Gentile evangelism as the will of God.
APPLICATION: ACTS 10:1-23
Pulling Weeds
Just as every garden has weeds, so every heart harbors prejudice of one kind or another. So, it’s not a matter of whether you struggle with prejudice, but how you choose to deal with it. Like a gardener must diligently pull weeds to stay ahead of infestation, we must seek out and eliminate every form of bigotry and chauvinism.
To eliminate prejudice, we must first know what we’re looking for. I define “prejudice” as any preconceived judgment or irrational attitude of hostility directed against any individual or group. Prejudice is simply making judgments about someone in advance, forming opinions strictly on the basis of preconceived ideas and assumptions. So, as I observe Peter’s struggle with prejudice and periodically search my own heart, I observe three principles at work.
Principle 1: The root of prejudice is pride. Pride can’t be satisfied with an honest assessment of oneself; pride thrives on comparisons. It’s deeply ingrained in human nature to find a scapegoat rather than accept responsibility for our own failures. We also delight to find someone more pathetic than ourselves when we become uncomfortable with our own shortcomings. When those two strategies fail, we can feed our pride by associating with one group —literally or through the power of imagination —while disparaging another as inferior.
Pride is called a “deadly sin” because it spawns so many others. Prejudice grows out of pride.
Principle 2: The rationalization for prejudice is tradition. Prejudice thrives on tradition. In fact, most people inherit their bigoted attitudes from generations of institutionalized pride. People behave certain ways and harbor certain attitudes because “it has always been that way.”
When I was a young boy growing up in rural Texas in the 1930s, I remember that my maternal grandfather, Judge Lundy, didn’t much care for “the way it’s always been.” At a time when unemployment for white men topped 25 percent, my granddad hired a black man named Mr. Coats and kept him employed for many years. When it came time for the man’s wife to deliver a child, my granddad used his influence to make sure that it was in the hospital —probably the first black patients in that maternity ward and undoubtedly the last for quite some time. I learned from his example to honor authority but to question tradition. As it turned out, most of the hospital staff didn’t have a problem with black people; they had just never thought to change what had always been.
Even when people want to set aside prejudice, they often have to battle their own culture and the inertia of tradition. It’s a tough battle. Nothing will make it easier. So, we simply have to do what’s difficult in order to accomplish what’s right.
Principle 3: The rehabilitation from prejudice is painful. Honest self-examination is an uncomfortable process. There’s no way to get around it. Acknowledging sin is painful because there’s no one to blame but ourselves. Facing the sin of prejudice, therefore, can feel downright agonizing. By the time you discover prejudice in your own life, you realize it’s been a part of your thinking for as long as you can remember. The feelings of shame can be overwhelming as you trace your own history of chauvinism and find its tentacles wrapped around many decisions and actions.
The truth hurts, but Jesus promised that truth leads to freedom. Every change I’ve had to face in my life has been painful. No exaggeration —every single one. And the older I get, the more difficult change becomes. Still, I wouldn’t trade anything for the freedom I enjoy when I choose to fight through the pain and do what is right.