Act III: The Drawback.
The Background. The Breakthrough. The Drawback. When Peter came to Antioch, Paul says, “I opposed him to his face because he was clearly in the wrong.” Before certain men came from James, Peter used to eat with the Gentile believers in Antioch. Why would he do that? Because he had had that vision in Acts 10. He knew that what God had called clean, he should not call unclean. And those who had been baptized in the one Christ could share the same supper at the same table. So he would eat with Gentiles. Why, of course he would.
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But then the drawback. When men came from James — who was James? James was the pastor of the church of Jerusalem. Jerusalem was the center of the most rigid kind of Christianity which declared, “Okay, maybe it is alright for Gentiles to become Christians but first of all they have to become Jews. They have to be circumcised. We have the days. We have the diet. We have a distinct form of body piercing. All of these are a gateway into the family of God.” That is what they taught.
When certain men came from James, Peter — who used to eat with the Gentiles — drew back. He would not do it anymore, and he separated himself from the Gentiles. The church that had been united was split down the middle into the kosher crowd and the non-kosher crowd, the Jew crowd and the Gentile crowd, this crowd and that crowd. And Peter was the cause of this division because he drew back.
This event happened in Antioch. Where was Antioch? Antioch was in Syria and it was the third largest city in the Roman Empire. It was to Antioch that those early Christians who were persecuted in Jerusalem came and began to preach the Gospel. Antioch was a city with a large Jewish population. Sixty-five thousand Jews lived in Antioch at the time that Peter and Paul had this confrontation there. There was a large Jewish population, but there were also many, many Gentiles. When the Gospel of Jesus Christ came to Antioch from Jerusalem, both Jews and Gentiles heard the message of Christ. They were saved. They were baptized. They were brought into the same fellowship and, of course, they ate at the same table. They were one body in Christ until…until some prejudice came in, and they drew back.