⁴But Peter began speaking and proceeded to explain to them in orderly sequence, saying, ⁵”I was in the city of Joppa praying; and in a trance I saw a vision, an object coming down like a great sheet lowered by four corners from the sky; and it came right down to me, ⁶and when I had fixed my gaze on it and was observing it I saw the four-footed animals of the earth and the wild beasts and the crawling creatures and the birds of the air. ⁷I also heard a voice saying to me, ‘Get up, Peter; kill and eat.’ ⁸But I said, ‘By no means, Lord, for nothing unholy or unclean has ever entered my mouth.’ ⁹But a voice from heaven answered a second time, ‘What God has cleansed, no longer consider unholy.’ ¹⁰This happened three times, and everything was drawn back up into the sky.”

Taking great pains to convey the details accurately and carefully, Peter reports the remarkable vision he received. There is no sense in which he felt it necessary to prove the vision was from God; he simply presents it as fact, astounding as it was. The sense is that he is laying out the map of his journey to understanding that the Gentiles were accepted by God just as the Jews are. For readers of the book of Acts, we are reading the story a second time, now in the form of Peter’s testimony. Unless we believe inspired Scripture is unnecessary redundancy, we conclude that it is important for us to know that this issue was so significant in the early church that Scripture records not only the event itself (in chapter 10), but also how the church in Jerusalem reacted to Peter’s summary of the story. And we can see how carefully Peter crafts his report. The fact that God inspired Luke to write one and a half chapters to deal with this, tells us how important it is for us to understand that all people are acceptable to God through the gospel message of grace; keeping legalistic requirements is not a part of it.

So Peter speaks first of God’s message, shocking as it was to him. He had been resistant, initially responding, “By no means, Lord; for I have never eaten anything that is common or unclean” (Acts 10:14), and then “perplexed” (Acts 10:17). He doesn’t include that reaction in his report, probably because his fellow apostles would have known him well enough to take that as a given. As well, they were perhaps having their own reaction to the vision.

To any Jew, such a vision from God would shake them to their core because of its implication, as Peter is about to show. How could God possibly treat everyone the same, as sinners in need of a salvation that is not tied to good behavior? The “religious” people of the world see their good deeds as a ticket to a privileged status with God. It seems completely natural that people should be required to prove themselves worthy of God. To think otherwise is repulsive to many people. But to those who believe the message of grace, this is terrific.

Lord, thank You for leveling the field; we are all sinners in need of Your grace.