This is John Collins' Bible Project. We have a few episodes left in this ongoing series

exploring the theme of the family of God in the Bible, how God created all of humanity

as His children, how we are all one human family and all of our wonderful diversity.

However, we don't trust each other. We don't fully value each other's unique contributions

of being God's image and we find ourselves in violent opposition to each other, yet the

vision of the Bible is that every tribe tongue a nation will unite to bring their unique

gifts together as the image of God. It's easy to lose track of this theme in the Bible,

and one reason is because a large part of the story of the Bible is how God shows one

family, the family of Israel, to be called apart from the nations. Now their calling is

to bring blessing to the nations, but their given practices to help them be set apart

from the nations. Practices like circumcision, kosher food laws, and Sabbath observance.

Now, after Jesus came and fulfilled the covenant of God in Israel, He asks His disciples to

go out and make disciples of all the nations. And so the question on the table is, do the

nations need to follow these Jewish practices to be in God's family? And this wasn't an

easy answer to figure out.

Let's try and sympathetically imagine ourselves into this scenario. We're a part of a, over

a millennium old, religious, ethnic, cultural group whose identity has been shaped by a certain

set of markers. And now I'm being told by the leaders of this new subgroup of our Messianic

movement, that those markers are not necessary for all of these new people who want to join

the family. Today we're going to look at the dream Peter has and the debate that sprung

up amongst the disciples of Jesus about how the nations get folded into the family

of God. Thanks for joining us. Here we go.

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