Would God ever instruct us to do something wrong? The answer is always no. All his ways are just and he can do no wrong, as Deuteronomy 32:4 says. But sometimes he instructs us to do things that may feel wrong, if we’ve convinced ourselves we perfectly know what’s right. Peter was so grounded in his observance of the Law of God that he couldn’t bring himself to obey God himself. His lawfulness at least was admirable, but God was introducing a gospel bigger than Peter realized, and it cost him some growing pains to grow to understand it.
Since the days of Moses, God had separated Israel from everyone else to make them a holy nation. So they were also commanded to separate themselves from foreign practices like eating certain animals. But now, after the savior of the world had accomplished his mission, God was blowing the doors open. From then on, holy union with God no longer belonged only to the Jews, but was offered also to the surrounding Gentile world. Naturally, this freaked Peter out. We often take for granted how enormous of a shift this was. The Gentiles being welcomed in meant that the old normal was gone, and an entirely new covenant was in place.
Immediately after Peter’s vision of unclean animals, the Spirit sent him to baptize Cornelius, an unclean person. A Gentile. A non-Jew. God gave Peter this vision to convey this enormous shift to him, so that he would know that the Holy Spirit was coming even for outsiders like Cornelius. In fact, the book of Acts as a whole is essentially the story of the gospel exploding out to the Gentiles, and the community of God’s people exploding out across the world.
Today, most if not all of us reading this are Gentiles. We are the outside world that God has grafted in to his holy people. What an undeserved grace! Out of the countless ethnicities and cultures found across the human race, there is not one that God declares unclean. Sometimes we tend to think that Christianity belongs only to people like ourselves (which is ridiculous, since we’re not even Jews). But it’s always been a global faith. Scripture has no allowance for shunning anyone for their ethnicity. The gospel is for everyone—even, miraculously, us.
