Ep 407 – Acts 10:1-16

Everybody has an opinion. It's human nature. Even when it comes to spiritual matters. And Peter was no different. In today episode, based on Acts 10:1-16, we have an interesting tale of two visions. One is given to a Roman names Cornelius. The other is given to Peter. And they both came from God Himself. The purpose of these two visions was to prepare Peter and the other apostles for a major shift in outreach that God was about to bring about. Until this point in the story, the furthest the gospel had spread outside the environs of Jerusalem and beyond the ethnic borders of Judaism, had been to Samaria. The people there were actually part-Jewish and worshipers of Yahweh. But other than Hellenistic or Greek-speaking Jews who had come to faith in Jesus, there were really no purely Gentile members of the newly founded church of Jesus Christ. But all that was about to change. God was preparing to open up the door to let the gospel out and the Gentiles in. But first he had to prepare one of the leading apostles in the church for what was about to happen. And God chose to do it through the means of a vision. A very strange and disturbing vision ­– at least, from Peter's perspective.  This feisty, opinionated fisherman was going to have his world rocked and his paradigm shifted in a major way. Any preconceived notion he had as to how things should be was about to get turned on its head. The unclean was going to become clean. The uncommon was about to be declared common by God. The outsiders were going to suddenly find themselves included. Much to Peter's surprise.