Pastor Jeremy M. Thomas
Fredericksburg Bible Church
107 East Austin
Fredericksburg, Texas 78624
830-997-8834      jthomas@fbgbible.org
A0910 – March 8, 2009 – Acts 15:12-13 – The Judgment Of James

All right, we’re in Acts 15, and last week we got into the first church council, the Council of Jerusalem, AD49. What we’re learning here is how the church solved doctrinal differences and the great thing about it is they did not slay truth in the streets, they hashed it out. This seemed to be the procedure in the early centuries of the church and Jerusalem becomes the model for how to resolve issues. To get back into the council let’s review the principles we’ve seen so far. The first thing we saw was the principle of leadership, v 6. There is a small group of leaders who solve the dispute, it’s not a democratic procedure, there are elected officials who take the lead. The second principle of church leadership is they solve the problem on the basis of God’s word and not as the world solves problems on the basis of autonomous man. The third principle is that the leadership considers all the views; this is not one person running the show and he pushes his view through and no one else gets considered. They get all the options out on the table and then dissect them based on the word of God. They’re not afraid of doing that because they have truth in the Scriptures and these things can be accepted or rejected on that basis. The fourth principle to solving doctrinal disputes is evidenced by Peter’s recognition of divine precedence.  Look guys, this is what God has already done in history, it happened 10 years ago so what right do we have to reject it? And what we concluded in divine precedence was that Jews and Gentiles are saved on the basis of God’s grace through faith.  Salvation has never been by circumcision and therefore there’s a commonality in salvation between Jew and Gentile. Salvation by grace alone through faith alone in Christ alone. Today we want to follow through with the council events of vv 13-18 and we get to the judgment of James the elder. His argument supports Peter but is based on the OT canon, the authoritative document of the Jewish people, so what better source, and in our day there is some controversy over how James uses the OT so we have to delve into something called hermeneutics to resolve that.

Let’s read to get the flow starting in v 12, All the people kept silent, and they were listening to Barnabas and Paul as they were relating what signs and wonders God had done through them among the Gentiles. 13After they had stopped speaking, James answered, saying, “Brethren, listen to me. 14“Simeon has related how God first concerned Himself about taking from among the Gentiles a people for His name. 15“With this the words of the Prophets agree, just as it is written, 16‘After these things I will return, And I will rebuild the tabernacle of David which has fallen, And I will rebuild its ruins, And I will restore it, 17So that the rest of mankind may seek the Lord, And all the Gentiles who are called by My name,’ 18Says the Lord, who makes these things known from long ago.
 
Having heard the credible witness of Peter a brief opportunity is given in v 12 for Barnabas and Paul to relate the signs accompanying their ministry, All the people kept silent, and they were listening to Barnabas and Paul.  Notice it reverses the usual order. Originally it was Barnabas and Paul because Barnabas took the pre-eminence but on the 1st missionary journey Paul took the pre-eminence, that’s when Mark left and he may have been upset by his uncle falling back in the order but what’s Paul to do, he didn’t exalt himself, God exalted him and so the usual order of Paul and Barnabas began on that journey.  But when they come up to Jerusalem for the first church council it shifts back, now Barnabas is in the fore. Why is that? Because Barnabas had more authority in Jerusalem, and therefore the Holy Spirit presents him as taking the lead in this crucial attempt to maintain unity in the early church. And in addition to their descriptions of Gentile salvation apart from circumcision, apart from the Law of Moses, they relate the signs and wonders that took place among the Gentiles, obviously to authenticate their ministry; great and stupendous works of power that could not be duplicated by those artists of occultic divination. 

Now we turn to the judgment of James in vv 13-18 and in this section we have more than enough problems to keep us occupied for the rest of our time. This is one of the most debated passages in the entire book of Acts. A great argument, even today, is fought over verses 16-18. So to properly interpret that text we have to introduce you to what the big argument is all about, the sides of the controversy and then we’ll show you how the controversy ought to be resolved. 

Verse 13, After they had stopped speaking, James answered, now this James is obviously not the one that was killed in chapter 12. That was James the apostle; this is James the half-brother of Jesus Christ. This is the man who wrote the epistle of James, probably around AD40-44, which is the earliest date any NT book was written. James was a problem solver, he solved the problem of facing trials in his epistle and here he solves the problem of doctrinal dispute. He actually came into the story in chapter 12, in a brief note, when the apostle Peter was captured by Herod Agrippa and imprisoned in the Antonia Fortress.  On the day he was to be executed an angel busted him out of prison, it was about 4 in the morning, and the angel led him down the street until Peter got his bearings and then he went over to where the disciples were praying and, you recall, he was out on the street knocking on the door. Rhoda came and she was so excited she left him out on the street. Here’s the guy trying to evade being arrested, it’s 4am and the whole house comes out on the street, “Peter! Peter! We were just praying for you.” And Peter said, “Could you please just calm down guys, I’m an escaped convict on the streets of Jerusalem and I’m going to have to go underground, so report these things to James.” What he was doing there was passing on the mantle of leadership. I’m out of Jerusalem, James, you’re in, take charge and James did take charge, he becomes the pastoring elder at the Church of Jerusalem. So he’s a well-respected man in Jerusalem, again, as we said, the half-brother of the Lord Jesus Christ. Interestingly he didn’t believe Jesus was the Messiah until after the resurrection. That’s an encouragement to those of you who think so and so in your family will never believe in the Lord Jesus Christ.  He must have lived a Christ-like life and yet not one of his own brothers and sisters believed His claims of Messiahship. Only after He rose from the dead, and then James got a sight of that, 1 Cor 15, and he believed. Now he’s advanced spiritually and he’s in charge in Jerusalem. 

And he answered v 14, “Simeon has related how God first concerned Himself about taking from among the Gentiles a people for His name. Now look, he did not go back to Paul and Barnabas, he goes back to Peter, but he doesn’t call him Peter. What does he call Peter? By his Greek name or his Hebrew name? He calls him by his Hebrew name. Simon Peter, well, Simeon, that extra letter thrown in there is the Jewish of all Jewish spellings. This is a very diplomatic approach by James. There again showing you how the Holy Spirit uses diplomacy. There’s a time to use diplomacy and this is such a time. A Jew of Jews, Simeon has related to us the argument for Gentile salvation. And you’ll notice James adds nothing to Peter’s argument in terms of the argument, what he’s doing is coming in to confirm the argument. He’s sort of summarizing the proceedings and this is his conclusion having listened to all the discussion. 

Now it’s possible the Pharisaic believers hoped James would contradict Peter, but he does just the opposite. Peter gave you his testimony, I confirm that testimony. In fact, I confirm it in the most powerful way, I cite Scripture. The bottom line in Jewish thought is that you better have some OT Scripture to back up what you’re saying because if you don’t we’ll throw your argument out. I don’t care how many times you experienced it, I don’t care how many people saw it, if you don’t have Scripture to back it up, forget it. At least they had their authority orientation correct. Today, it's exactly the reverse, you can read it all day in Scripture but unless you experience it’s not true. Not for these men, you could experience whatever, but unless some Scripture actually predicted that experience it was not accepted. 

So your credible Jewish spokesman, Peter, or Simeon, has related how God first, that’s Acts 10, was at Cornelius’ house, in other words, before Barnabas and Paul, in fact, ten years before they lifted a finger, this happened, so he’s referring back to what we would call established precedent. God has already established a precedent of leading Gentiles to Himself and He did that with Peter, your friend, the guy that’s lived with us. And then he comes along with something powerful in v 15, “With this the words of the Prophets agree, with what do the Prophets agree? With Gentile salvation, they agree with Peter. just as it is written, and that’s the word for Scripture. He’s saying, I’ve got Scripture that predicted Peter’s experience. And notice James does not say, “I’ve got one prophet who agrees with Peter,” he says " I’ve got Prophets" (plural) who agree and he quotes one of them in the main, who is it? Check your margin if you have a study Bible. Amos, one of the twelve prophets at the end of your OT. Turn there, and if you don’t know where it is there should be a Table of Contents in the front of your Bible, that will give you the page number, nothing to be ashamed of, we have to get familiar with our Bible. James’ quote comes from Amos 9, verses 11-12. And this gets us in the thick of the controversy. This is a very controversial citation by James because what in the world does Amos 9 have to do with the church.
 
For example, Amos 9:1, “I saw the Lord standing beside the altar, and He said, “Smite the capitals so that the thresholds will shake, And break them on the heads of them all! Then I will slay the rest of them with the sword; They will not have a fugitive who will flee, Or a refugee who will escape.” It’s a message of judgment by military defeat. And who was Amos? Amos was a prophet to the northern kingdom that was saying there’s going to come judgment by military defeat; a judgment which came in 721BC.  And this nation is going down, they are going into exile and so he prophecies in advance of the fact that God is indeed going to judge the northern kingdom for her rebellion against the word of God. 

So it’s a message of judgment in Amos 9, and it goes on and you can see in Amos 9:8-10, “Behold, the eyes of the Lord God are on the sinful kingdom,” that’s the northern kingdom, “And I will destroy it from the face of the earth; Nevertheless, I will not totally destroy the house of Jacob,” Declares the Lord. 9“For behold, I am commanding, And I will shake the house of Israel among all nations As grain is shaken in a sieve, But not a kernel will fall to the ground. 10“All the sinners of My people will die by the sword, Those who say, ‘The calamity will not overtake or confront us.’” All that up to verse 10 is a prophecy of judgment and exile, then you read vv 11-12, the passage which James cites. 

Amos 9:11, “In that day,” in what day? In the day of the exile when God is judging intensely the nation Israel, we call it the Tribulation, “In that day I will raise up the fallen booth of David, And wall up its breaches; I will also raise up its ruins And rebuild it as in the days of old; 12That they may possess the remnant of Edom And all the nations who are called by My name,” Declares the Lord who does this.” And then it goes on to describe the agriculture, the infrastructure and security of Israel, verse 15, “I will also plant them on their land, And they will not again be rooted out from their land Which I have given them,” Says the Lord your God.” Now any straightforward way of reading that gives a picture of the restoration of Israel to their land. Note the word land in verse 15, “I will plant them on their land…they will not again be rooted out from their land.” It’s talking about a literal, physical land promised to Israel. They never had the land and in 721BC the northern kingdom went into Exile, they never returned, the southern kingdom went into Exile in 586, they partially returned.  They never had all the land, Most Jews today are still in Exile; a mass wave of Jews returning over the last 100 years, but still fighting over the land. 

So we would say Amos 9:11-15, has not yet been fulfilled. The Jewish people have not yet wholly returned to the land, the millennial kingdom has not yet come about. But the a-millennialist says, “Aha, here in Acts 15 is proof that these OT passages were spiritualized, that these passages were never to be taken literally as a physical restoration of Israel to the physical land of Israel. The Amillennial position says history looks like this: you have the cross, the resurrection, Jesus’ sits on David’s throne in heaven, then the Second Coming and that’s the end of history. And so if you have any ideas about a glorious kingdom coming in the future to earth for a thousand years, there is not going to be any glorious kingdom out there. That’s why they're a-millennial, which means “no-millennium.” Well, if there’s no millennium, then to what do these prophecies refer? They refer to the Church. But they don’t literally fit the Church. Well, that’s why they have to be spiritualized to fit the Church. So the raising of the tabernacle of David is describing the Church and the land there, that’s heaven, it’s not really physical land because the Church isn’t promised any land. So that’s allegorical or spiritualized interpretation that the amillennialist does.

Now the Premillennialist views history this way: you have the cross, the resurrection, the Church Age, Jesus’ Second Coming where He sits on David’s throne on earth and establishes the glorious Millennial Kingdom. And the premillennialist says, “Prophecies like Amos 9 will literally come to pass in that future millennial kingdom, with a literal land and a literal nation. So therefore the prophecies do not apply to the Church, they apply to Israel. Well, the amillennialist turns to a passage like Acts 15 and says, “Hey, look, what more could you ask for, you premill, here James, a Jew, cites Amos 9 and applies it to Gentiles of the Church, because what does it say, With this the words of the Prophets agree. What more could you ask for to show that James and these early NT apostles spiritualized these passages. They looked to no future fulfillment. 

Well, what does the premill do with this? He’s got to be honest with the text; he can’t ram, cram and jam the Scriptures to fit his view, that’s not right; he’s got to admit that James is applying Amos 9:11-12 to Gentile salvation. That can’t be denied, but here’s the problem. Just how is it that the NT authors are quoting the OT? What’s James’ point of doing this? Is he saying Amos 9:11-12 is fulfilled in the Church? Because if he is then we all need to convert to amillennialism. Well, the fact is James never says Amos is fulfilled, and that’s one of the problems with the amillennial approach. But the more important thing and the thing necessary to solve this controversy is a study of what we call hermeneutics. What’s that? Hermeneutics isn’t a brand of deodorant. It’s the word that refers to the rules of interpreting literature. There are rules for interpreting language. Everyone uses hermeneutics, you may be bad at it, you may be good at it, but you’re using rules all the time. The thing you want to be self-conscious of is that you are indeed using hermeneutics. And if you study hermeneutics then it will make you a better interpreter of literature, you’ll be sharper on what people are saying. So what we want to do is step aside for a minute into a discussion of hermeneutics. 

Take for a moment the Constitution of the United States of America, forget the Bible, forget religion, you have to divorce hermeneutics from religion, it’s not religion, so to do that think of the Constitution, a document written over 200 years ago. When you read the Constitution how should it be read? Say you’re reading the 2nd Amendment, the Right to Bear Arms which says, “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” When you read that what does that mean? I didn’t say what does that mean to you, I said what does that mean. Because it matters very little what it means to you or me, what matters is what the author meant. We call that authorial intent. In hermeneutics finding the authorial intent is what we’re all about. That’s point one to hermeneutics. A second thing, something that falls out of the principle of authorial intent, is that there is one and only one meaning to the text. There are not multiple meanings to the text. I don’t mean vagueness, someone can be unclear in their writing, we’re not talking about that. We’re talking about very formal documents like the Bible, the Constitution. There’s only one intended meaning to those sentences. When you write a letter to someone do you write one sentence to be taken twenty different ways or do you write it to be taken one way. See, it’s a law of language that unless it’s obvious from the remark that it’s meant to be taken more than one way there is only one way to take it. In hermeneutics we say “Interpretation is one.” That goes for the sports page, that goes for the Constitution and that goes for the Bible. All right, two things then; authorial intent and single meaning. That’s what we’re interested in, we’re not interested in what you think, I think or Joe Blow down the block thinks, we’re interested in what the author said. Now in the 21st century postmodern milieu we have to keep coming back to this because we’re inundated with people who approach literature from a totally different framework, they have a very different way of approaching literature. For them the question is “What does this mean to me?” That’s the first question and the most important question, and really it’s the only question for these kinds of people because me is the only important thing in a postmodern society. We’re saying, no, the first question is not “What does it mean to me? but What does it mean period? What did the author intend?” And after that we can ask, “How does it apply to me?” 

Now watch, because here’s how we unravel what James is doing citing Amos 9 and applying it to Gentiles. If we want to know what the founding fathers meant when they wrote the Constitution don’t we have to go back and study how they wrote, what the words meant?  Do you think it might be important to decipher what they meant by “well regulated Militia,” how about a “free State,” what did they mean by “State,” vs what someone may think of “State” today, or “the right of the people,” who are the people? Is that everyone? Is that everyone over 18 years of age, who are the “people?” Or here’s a good one, “keep and bear arms.” What’s the difference between keeping arms and bearing arms? And what are arms anyway? Are we talking skin and bones here or firearms, what kind of firearms? Do you see now how important it is to find out what they meant in 1776? 

In the same way if we want to know how James, a 1st century Jew, is citing Amos 9 do we just make up some rules? “Oh, I think James is saying this.” Why don’t we do that? Because it would be arbitrary, it would be arbitrary to treat our Constitution that way and it would be arbitrary to treat Scripture that way. That arbitrariness is the Amillennial approach to Acts 15, because he comes with his theological system and he says, “Oh, look, James is citing Amos 9 as fulfilled in the church, sure it doesn’t fit literally, therefore to get it to fit I understand it spiritually!” And the $5,000 question is, “Well, is that what the Jews did?” Remember authorial intent. So we go back and look for criteria. How did these Jews write? How did they quote the OT? If we can find that out then we have an objective criteria. And this has been done. It’s in the literature; you can pick up Emil Shurer’s definitive work The History of the Jewish People in the Time of Jesus Christ where he shows that the rabbi’s of Jesus’ day quoted the OT in four different ways and that the NT authors were using these same four methods. The first is simple, literal prophecy + literal fulfillment. That doesn’t fit because Amos says the Jewish people are being restored to their land, James isn’t discussing that, he’s discussing this text with respect to Gentile salvation. The second way they quoted was literal + typological. We saw some of that in Stephen’s speech where he sees parallels between Abraham and Jesus, Joseph and Jesus, Moses and Jesus, similarities, patterns in their histories. What would be the pattern between the Jews being restored to the land and these Gentiles? No link, no pattern, that’s not what he’s doing. The third way was summary, where you don’t quote any one OT prophet, you just summarize what the prophets said, and that’s not the case because James quotes directly from the prophet Amos. The last category is literal prophecy + application which says the OT prophecy is going to be fulfilled literally in history, but there is one point of similarity between that OT prophecy and something else that’s happening. Turn for example to Acts 2, the Day of Pentecost. We’ve been through this, v 2 you have strange phenomena: the sound of wind, no wind, just the sound of wind, tongues of fire distributing themselves like a ball of electricity over these guy's heads and of course, they spoke in tongues, foreign languages they’d never trained in. The question is, how do you interpret that phenomena? Everybody sees and hears the phenomena, what does it mean? Some were confused verse 12 and others verse 13 thought they had it all worked out, they’re drunk! But Peter, verse 14 stands up to address, and verse 16 he says, “this is what was spoken of through the prophet Joel and he quotes Joel 2:28-3:2. Now, for the life of me if you read that quote you will say, but Peter, none of what Joel said happened, what are you talking about?” Well, in fact you would be about 99% correct. Nobody dreamed dreams, nobody saw visions, there were no earthquakes or volcanoes or cosmic blackouts, instead people spoke in tongues. So why do you cite Joel? Because there is one point of similarity between what Joel said and what happened on Pentecost. v 16, “I will pour forth of My Spirit,” v 17, “I will in those days pour forth My Spirit.” Peter’s explanation of tongues is that there has been an outpouring of the Spirit. Verse 33 gives the inspired interpretation by Peter as to why he cited Joel, “the promise of the Holy Spirit, He has poured forth this which you both see and hear.” So because of that one point of similarity between what Joel predicted and what Peter saw, he quoted Joel. Joel wasn’t fulfilled, none of the rest of Joel even occurred. But the one point of similarity with Joel is why he quotes him. 

And James is doing the same thing in Acts 15. He quotes a literal prophecy of Amos that will be fulfilled in the future but there is one point of similarity, Gentile salvation. Let’s read his quote to see the Gentile salvation bit, 16‘After these things, after what things, the Tribulation, I will return, that’s the Second Coming of Jesus Christ, And I will rebuild the tabernacle of David which has fallen, And I will rebuild its ruins, And I will restore it, that’s the restoration of Israel in the Millennial Kingdom, verse 17.  Why ? So that the rest of mankind may seek the Lord, And all the Gentiles who are called by My name,’ Now, has any of that happened? Has the tabernacle of David been restored in the Book of Acts? Were its ruins rebuilt? None of that happened. What had happened? Gentiles had called on His name. So the point is that James says, I read Amos and I read about Gentile salvation. Now Peter and Paul and Barnabas go out there and Gentiles are saved. So what’s happening is in line with Amos. So let’s think through what James has said. This is not rocket science. Remember I said earlier on, James is not adding anything new to what Peter has said or Paul and Barnabas have said; he’s summarizing the council. If James were saying this is fulfilled spiritually today in the Church he would be adding something new, he’d be saying the Church is prophesied in the OT, but he’s not, he’s simply saying, “You know guys, when I read my OT I find prophets that talk about Gentiles seeking the Lord in the restored Jewish kingdom, for example I read Amos 9:11-12. I don’t deny Israel’s future glorious kingdom. What I do is I see Gentile salvation in that kingdom. And logically, if there are Gentiles in that kingdom how did they get there? You have to be saved to get into the kingdom. So if I read about Gentiles in the kingdom then the only way they could have gotten there is if Gentiles are being saved before that kingdom arrives, which is precisely where they are in history. And so what Peter explained as happening and Barnabas and Paul explained as happening was spoke of long ago in the OT prophets. And therefore you Pharisaic types are against the OT prophets who spoke of a free Gentile salvation apart from circumcision before the kingdom.

Verse 18 is actually not from Amos 9, it’s from Isa 45:21.  What this expression is getting at, the Lord, who makes these things known from long ago, is simply that the Lord is sovereign over history. Who can say what will happen in the future? The Lord can and He has, He’s foretold Gentile salvation, He’s sovereign over history. 

All right, now come to the judgment of James and we want to read to verse 21 to get the conclusion. 19“Therefore it is my judgment that we do not trouble those who are turning to God from among the Gentiles, 20but that we write to them that they abstain from things contaminated by idols and from fornication and from what is strangled and from blood. 21“For Moses from ancient generations has in every city those who preach him, since he is read in the synagogues every Sabbath.”

In verse 19 a titanic concession is made. Think of what is said when he remarks that we do not trouble those who are turning to God from among the Gentiles. Trouble them with what? This concession in verse 19 is a concession that the Jewish side makes toward the Gentiles. The concession is, at this point, whether they really knew what they were doing because this concession is radical. What he’s just said is that we will not impose the Mosaic Law upon Gentile believers; we’re not going to trouble them with that. Now this is a major concession… a major concession. Moses, you might hear the early believers saying to themselves, “Moses doesn’t apply to saved Gentiles?” We’re not going to trouble them with the 613 Laws of Moses? Is that what you’re saying James? Precisely says James, I refuse to trouble them, so it looks tiny on the surface but at this point the Church officially makes a titanic decision; Gentile Christians are not under the Mosaic Law, a theme which Paul then brings out in Galatians, Romans and so forth.

But, verse 20, the Gentiles are called upon to make concessions to the Jews, concession is a two way street. Now, keep in mind we’re in a transitional period and so what’s given here isn’t the norm for all time, but for this time of transition this is mightily important. There’s a debate about verse 20 that’s been pretty heated. The issue concerns the nature of these concessions? Are these moral in nature? In other words, it’s popular for people to say idolatry, fornication and blood, which stands for murder, are three sins that the Gentiles need to avoid and therefore this is the basis of the new Christian ethic and these people draw on the fact that the three cardinal sins of Judaism are idolatry, fornication and murder. However, verse 29 shoots that interpretation down because v 29 is when these concessions are put down in oral form and sent out in a letter to the Gentiles and when you read that verse you can clearly see the first three are dietary in nature and not moral, the last thing you have, fornication, is a special abstention. 

So what’s going on here? Well, think of the flow of vv 20-21, what is it about v 21 that logically flows out of v 20? What is this bit about Moses being preached every Sabbath? What it is is the fact that these four things had built up as Jewish sensitivities, they were the subject every Sabbath in the synagogues when Moses was read and they’d been burned upon the conscience of the Jewish people so let’s look briefly at each of them.

The first in v 20 is dietary in nature, that they abstain from things contaminated by idols. Which means meat. Now the best meat was the meat prepared in the pagan temples, it was sacrificed to the gods and goddesses. For a Jew he couldn’t separate the meat from the idols, that was in severable,  but for a Gentile, not a problem at all.  I don’t buy into all that idolatry, I worship the one true God, but this is the best meat in town, so I go down and get the best steak, no problem, for the Jew, big problem. So how are you ever going to get the Jewish and Gentile believers to sit down and have communion together, because communion wasn’t just grape juice and crackers, they also had a meal. Now suppose a Jew shows up at the potluck with his kosher meat and a Gentile shows up with a slab of ham. Do you think we’re going to have unity in the Church, forget it, not a chance! It’s not that anything was wrong with the meat.  Later on in 1 Cor 8 and Rom 14 this issue comes up and what it really is is a weaker brother issue. There was nothing wrong with meat sacrificed to idols, meat was meat, the Gentile believers didn’t worship the idols, they just ate the meat. The problem was if a brother who couldn’t make that separation saw you eating it defiled his conscience. And so for the sake of the weaker brother they were to abstain from eating it.

The second thing is fornication, this is not what we normally think of as fornication, the Greek word porneia by which we usually think of sexual immorality outside of marriage.  Obviously that is sin and that is wrong, but this is not talking about sex outside of marriage, it’s talking about sex within marriage, the issue is who you’re married to and having sex with. Turn to Lev 18:6. There’s a whole series of prohibitions against marrying someone too closely related and there are other illegitimate marriages for some reason or another listed here, we’ll try to explain why. Now, it was not this way from the beginning. Every once in a while you get someone asking, “Who was Cain’s wife?” Well obviously he married one of his sisters. There was nothing wrong with that, obviously to get the human race started you have to have siblings marrying one another and reproducing. But keep in mind a special genetic factor early on in history. When God created the human race there weren’t any genetic problems, the DNA, the chromosomes, it was perfect. Mutations were introduced after the Fall and it took some time for the degradation to reach a point that you get in trouble with close marriages. Today many of you took a genetics class and learned about the blood disease hemophilia among royal lines in Europe and the dangers of marrying too close today. That wasn’t a problem originally; only after sin corrupted the human genome did that become a problem. Let’s look at some of the forbidden marriages, “‘None of you shall approach any blood relative of his to uncover nakedness;” that's the expression for a forbidden marriage. “I am the Lord. 7‘You shall not uncover the nakedness of your father, that is, the nakedness of your mother. She is your mother; you are not to uncover her nakedness. 8‘You shall not uncover the nakedness of your father’s wife; it is your father’s nakedness.” All these have in some way to do with being of the same flesh with these people, it goes back to Gen 2, the two shall become one flesh. These are outworkings of that original divine institution of marriage and God put limits on this. 9‘The nakedness of your sister, either your father’s daughter or your mother’s daughter, whether born at home or born outside, their nakedness you shall not uncover. 10‘The nakedness of your son’s daughter or your daughter’s daughter, their nakedness you shall not uncover; for their nakedness is yours. 11‘The nakedness of your father’s wife’s daughter, born to your father, she is your sister, you shall not uncover her nakedness. 12‘You shall not uncover the nakedness of your father’s sister; she is your father’s blood relative.” When you get into these it’s interesting for family relationships.  For example, Robin married me and you say, yeah, she’s your mother's daughter-in-law.  Well not biblically.  Biblically she becomes my mother’s daughter, you’ve heard the saying, gaining a daughter, biblically that’s true. And since she’s my mother and father’s daughter that excludes my father from marrying her, because she’s his daughter, otherwise you don’t get that exclusion. So, the first century rabbi’s had a word for these close marriages that were forbidden, porneia, and this is what James concluded Gentiles should abstain from. 

The third and fourth concessions are both dietary in nature. Abstain from what is strangled and from blood. The third abstention here, what is strangled has to do with the way something is killed, the significance of which is when you strangle something the blood stays in the meat. The next thing, blood has to do with not eating meat that had not had the blood drained from it. So provisions three and four kind of go together. The question is why? Now, from the time of Gen 9, after the Flood, God added meat to man’s diet. Before the Flood man was vegetarian, the world was so different before the Flood that vegetable protein content was so high man didn’t need to eat meat. After the Flood, with the major environmental changes meat is necessary to compensate for losses in vegetable protein. But the condition for eating meat was draining it of the blood, that was revelation for every human race that was to be respected, there was something honorable about an animal dying and that something was that the life was in the blood and so when the blood was spilled out, you took time to go through that ceremony so to speak, it was a time to reflect on the fact that that animal died so you could go on living, so you could feed on it’s life. And of course that looked forward to the cross of Christ, that for you to live spiritually someone has to die for you and that someone is Jesus Christ. So when you go hunting this is not to be a mindless activity, it’s a divine pedagogy of the life for life substitution taking place every time you kill and eat an animal. And according to Lev 17:10 this was forbidden to drink the blood, you had to drain it, the pagan cultures that surrounded Israel, for example Egypt, the Pharaoh’s thought of blood as a delicacy, they sought it for life-giving powers. Not God’s people, He said, spill it out, don’t drink it. 

And so concluding, v 21, we’ve already said, the preaching of Moses kept these Jewish sensitivities high and therefore to maintain unity the council concluded with some concessions on each side; the law is not made to apply to the Gentile Christians, the Gentile Christians, however, are to at least have some concern for their Jewish brethren in the matter of diet and marriage. A very diplomatic decision that will be elaborated on in later NT epistles.