The Holy Spirit and the gift of tongues (pt. 9)

As promised, we'll start to explore the context of Acts 10:44-48 in greater detail in this blog. The passage starts in Acts 10:1 (though it does have more backward connections that I won’t explore in this blog) with the introduction of the gentile centurion, Cornelius, a God-fearing man who is visited by an angel of the Lord. The reader knows what Cornelius doesn’t at that time; by sending for Simon Peter, he is asking for the Gospel story.
Meanwhile, Peter is being prepared for this adventure. We need to detour into the Old Testament to fully understand what’s going on in this part of the passage.
Peter is almost quoting Ezekiel when he responds to the command to kill and eat. In Ezekiel 4, God had told the prophet to cook siege food over a fire of human dung. This was to be a sign for the people that they would eat “defiled food among the nations where I will drive them” (v. 13). Ezekiel’s response was, "Not so, Sovereign LORD! I have never defiled myself. From my youth until now I have never eaten anything found dead or torn by wild animals. No unclean meat has ever entered my mouth" (v. 14).
Here in Acts 10, when God tells Peter to “kill and eat” (v. 13), Peter’s response is: "Surely not, Lord! I have never eaten anything impure or unclean" (v. 14). Like Ezekiel, Peter finds it absolutely appalling that he would ever violate the Jewish dietary laws. (See Leviticus 11 and Deuteronomy 14 for more about clean and unclean animals.) While God backpedaled a little with Ezekiel and said, “Very well, I will let you bake your bread over cow manure instead of human excrement" (Ezekiel 4:15), to Peter he said: "Do not call anything impure that God has made clean" (Acts 10:15). In fact with Peter, God was so adamant about abolishing the dietary laws that he repeated this three times. Luke reports that Peter was perplexed at this, but the reader knows that this is an unequivocal restatement of Jesus’ comment about unclean foods: "'Don't you see that nothing that enters a man from the outside can make him "unclean"? For it doesn't go into his heart but into his stomach, and then out of his body." (In saying this, Jesus declared all foods 'clean.')" (Mark 7:18-19).
(To be continued of course! Don't you love the way a bible study can get so complex?)