Here is the crux of Peter’s failing: he acted hypocritically. Of all sin this ranks near the top in severity of judgment. Did not Jesus save his harshest condemnations for the Pharisees on this very point? What led Paul to level this accusation against Peter?

The number of Gentile believers in Antioch had grown exponentially and word had gotten down to Jerusalem. The Jewish believers knew that Gentiles would benefit from the gospel message of Jesus Christ, but they had expected the Gentiles would be enfolded into the Jewishness of the faith. This was not happening in Antioch. Peter himself was not initially deterred by this, as he enjoyed delightful fellowship with them (“eating with Gentiles” would normally have been taboo for a Jew). He did not come by this freedom easily, for in Acts 10 when he was confronted with Cornelius, the Gentile centurion, God needed to convince Peter through a vision that Gentiles were indeed acceptable to God. Peter concluded, “If then God gave the same gift to them as he gave to us when we believed in the Lord Jesus Christ, who was I that I could stand in God’s way?” (Acts 11:17).

Some others went from Jerusalem to Antioch “to spy out our liberty which we have in Christ Jesus” (2:4). Ostensibly these “came from James.” Some scholars suggest that James tended more toward legalism, in contrast to Paul’s message of grace. In this line of thinking, they pit the teaching of James with his emphasis on “faith without works is dead” thinking against Paul and his central teaching of “justification apart from works of the law.” This tension is superficial, however, as a correct understanding of the book of James shows. A more probably interpretation of our passage here is that as the early church was working through the transition from law to grace, those men overstepped their commissioning “from James.”

Their arrival had a pronounced effect on Peter—he began to avoid the Gentiles, just like unbelieving Jews did. He fell to the pressure of what the men from Jerusalem thought. Even Barnabas, Paul’s companion in ministry of the gospel of grace was caught up in the obvious duplicity. Oh, that Christians would make a priority of walking in integrity of our beliefs and our actions.