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NASB | Galatians 2:11 ¶ But when Cephas came to Antioch, I opposed him to his face, because he stood condemned. |
AMPLIFIED 2015 | Galatians 2:11 ¶ Now when Cephas (Peter) came to Antioch, I opposed him face to face [about his conduct there], because he stood condemned [by his own actions]. |
Subject: Arguing Among Apostles?? |
Bible Note: Lionheart, Doc and 108cious, I sincerely appreciate all of your responses; they're all very good points to this rather interesting story. I was trying to go for something much bigger, at least in my humble opinion. Let me explain. I like to use my imagination to try and make these kinds of scenes in the Bible come alive. Now imagine in the Christian world at that time, the big and famous Peter, so called leader of the church in Jerusalem coming to Antioch. Then Paul approaches Peter (hopefully like it's been mentioned), and begins talking about this subject in subdued tones or maybe they talked about it previously. Anyway, it's obvious that Peter has a real problem switching over to this whole new idea of ALL of the full benefits of Christianity being extended to everyone, including Gentiles. And this is true in spite of God's Personal Revelation to Peter in Acts 10. Now we all know that both Peter and Paul are endowed with miraculous knowledge and powers of self control from the Holy Spirit. But it seems the HS is allowing the whole world to find out about this problem. In other words, the HS wanted Peter to find out on his own as he is famously a little bit stubborn about learning things. We know this from his past. Well where else could we could go for a Bible based commentary on this most unusual strategy from the Holy Spirit? Where else does He let the Apostles experience this kind of "learning on their own" and walk on their own? The biggest scene of which I can think is that of the famous letter issued in Acts 15. All of us know the scene pretty well. Paul has brought the situation to the elders in Jerusalem for resolution as he should. Judiazers (sp?) are messing up everything by insisting on Christians being circumcized in order to be truly pleasing to God. This is the first major crisis for these christian leaders to deal with on nation-wide scale. They know what they decide will set a precendent and will be followed for all time. What a powerful opportunity to come up with a gradiose creed, something what they experienced with the famous Law of Moses. And what do these great and noble leaders do? Well first they pray to God for guidance and then after much discussion, they issued a very humble letter with merely four restrictions. You know what they are or you can re-read Acts 15 for a reminder. But my point is, they humbled themselves and minimized this guidance, taking special pains to avoid ALL the business about circumcision. This point I'm making includes the fact the HS allowed us mankind (christians really) to make up our minds about how the church was to proceed and handle these kinds of problems. In other words, they held up these gentlemen (Apostles) with miraculous powers like we hold up our children and then let them learn to walk on their own. God, Jesus and HS were all in this together and let us mankind do our own thing and thanks be to God, these Apostles were humble enough to minimize their spirit and chose solid Godly guidance from centuries past. That's the wonderful point I'm trying to showcase. What a wonderful development: God wants all of us to graduate from His Micro-management as in the OT and see ourselves as mature children of God. He wants us to keep trying our best to imitate His Son and His Lifestyle, His Way of Thinking with "What would Jesus do." Now back to Galatians. Yes indeed Doc and 108cious make a good point. 108cious, I think I finally get the point of your name: It's tenicious...correct? Yes, in Gal 6:1, we are to follow Paul's instruction in correcting our fellow man or christian. We have to assume Paul did follow this procedure with Peter; it's just not recorded as we didn't need to know, according to God. So Peter and most probably ALL the Jewish christians had a very difficult time with this business of allowing Gentiles into the Family of God with ALL the benefits. Much like our country is having difficulties with prejudices in many different quandrants of our nation. Mankind has always had this problem but we're working on it, right? To the best of our ability. AND let's not forget that Paul and Peter are reconciled as brothers. Peter even acknowledges Paul's superior handling of God's Word. 2 Pet 3:14 Therefore, beloved, looking forward to these things, be diligent to be found by Him in peace, without spot and blameless; 15 and consider that the longsuffering of our Lord is salvation—as also our beloved brother Paul, according to the wisdom given to him, has written to you, 16 as also in all his epistles, speaking in them of these things, in which are some things hard to understand, which untaught and unstable people twist to their own destruction, as they do also the rest of the Scriptures. Well, I appreciate your allowing me to share. God bless, Inquisitor |