We Must Not Make it Hard for Those Turning to God

James looked out at the crowd. The conference was coming to an end and everyone knew it. Peter had just finished giving a fiery keynote about his own personal experience years ago in Joppa when the first Gentiles believed and received the Holy Spirit. “Nobody had to be circumcised that day to be saved,” Peter said. Instead, he said that God had cleansed their hearts by faith.

“Seems like somebody had been hanging out with Paul again,” James thought.

But now, as the leader of the church, James knew that the final decision would come down to him. Up until this point the whole “did the new Gentile believers need to be circumcised” or “did they not need to be circumcised” debate had the entire church in a frenzy, for some obvious reasons on both sides!

James had always viewed God’s Law with great reverence. And circumcision? That rite went back even further that the Law with Abraham and marked all the promises of God to His people.

“Should we be so quick to abandon something that was so important to our history,” he thought. I mean even his older brother Jesus had said that He didn’t come to abolish the law but fulfill it.

“But…” James thought for a minute, “Maybe that’s what Peter meant when he said that God had cleansed the Gentiles hearts by faith? Didn’t I hear Paul talking about the same thing — that true circumcision is not something visible in the flesh now…and that circumcision is of the heart—by the Spirit, not the letter. Paul should write that down one day.”

James then stood up and began to speak to the crowd and after a few minutes came to his point. He announced to the crowd, “My judgement is that we should not make it difficult for the Gentiles who are turning to God.”

And with that statement, the Jerusalem Council in Acts 15 determined once and for all that salvation was by the grace of the Lord Jesus through faith alone. Circumcision did not have any part in turning to God and was thus not a requirement for Gentile Christians who were not circumcised.

Bad Theology Meant No Growth Then

By most historical accounts, in the first three centuries after the Jerusalem Council, Christianity grew steadily and rapidly at a rate of 40% per decade. Incredibly, by the year 350, those who claimed the name of Christ accounted for 56.5% of the Roman Empire’s population!

A combination of Christian conversion and fertility with pagan attrition due to pandemic, shifting social dynamics, and of course the supernatural work of the Holy Spirit saw Christianity grow from a scrappy band of believers huddled together in an upper room to the largest people group in the Roman Empire in just 300 years! (If you want to read about some of the reasons why Christianity grew so fast in the early years, check out this post. Not even kidding, it will blow your mind.)

It is truly an incredible rise to prominence and yet the proverbial elephant in the room is that none of this amazing growth would be possible had Peter and James at the Jerusalem Council decided that circumcision was necessary in order to be saved. Straight up, very few grown men in their right state of mind would willingly convert to a religion that required such pain for entry.

Realistically, if the Jerusalem Council determined that circumcision was required for salvation, the population of Christians in the Roman Empire would overwhelming consist of women and children.  This makes those fateful words of James at the Jerusalem Council all the more important because what was at stake was nothing less than the growth, and potentially existence, of Christianity itself.

Bad Theology Means No Growth Now

I’m terrible with directions. Just ask my wife. Terrible with directions. In fact awhile ago, someone in our church asked if I lived on the West or the East side of Grand Parkway. I was like, “I have no idea. What does this look like the Oregon Trail? We live on the left side of Grand Parkway. There’s an HEB on the right side.”

So back in the day when we live in Dallas, we lived close to downtown and I loved to run there. It was just something about the buildings, the hustle, and the energy of the city. But I kid you not, without fail, I would often get lost and have to use Google Maps to get back home.

I wonder if sometimes as a church we can make people who are turning to God feel lost like that.

Because if we present the essence of Christianity as a bunch of rules to maintain or a bunch of behaviors to adhere to — at best they’ll be confused and worst completely lost.