Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to Acts · About this commentary
Peter's evidence: God gave them the Spirit
Acts 15:6-11
6 The apostles and the elders were gathered together to see about this matter. · WEB
Peter settles the salvation question from something God did, and ends by putting Jews and Gentiles on the same footing in the same sentence.
When there had been much discussion, Peter rose up. The debate is long and real, and nobody rules it out of order. A church deciding its most contested question lets the question be argued first.
Peter's case is entirely from precedent, and the precedent is Cornelius, ten years earlier. A good while ago God made a choice among you that by my mouth the nations should hear the word of the Good News and believe. He does not present it as his own initiative. He was chosen for it, and the whole assembly knows the story.
The evidence itself is stated in a single sentence that does all the work: God, who knows the heart, testified about them, giving them the Holy Spirit, just like he did to us. Two things make it decisive. First, God is described as the one who reads hearts — the very thing no council can do, and the very thing the question requires. Second, what he gave was the same gift, in the same form, and six Jewish witnesses had seen it.
Then the conclusion drawn from it: He made no distinction between us and them, cleansing their hearts by faith. The cleansing is inward and its instrument is faith. If God cleansed uncircumcised hearts by faith before any of the requirements now being demanded had been met, the requirements cannot be what cleansing depends on.
The rebuke that follows is the sharpest thing Peter says in the book, and it is aimed at brothers rather than opponents. Why do you tempt God, that you should put a yoke on the neck of the disciples which neither our fathers nor we were able to bear?
That sentence has to be read against what was actually proposed, which is on the record two verses earlier: circumcision and law-keeping as the condition of being saved. The yoke Peter refuses is a system of requirement offered as the ground of acceptance with God — and his evidence that it cannot bear the weight is that no generation of Israel ever carried it successfully. He is not describing the law as a bad thing. He is describing what happens when a good thing is asked to do a job it was never given: it becomes a burden that breaks the people under it.
The closing sentence is the finest turn in the debate, and it reverses the direction everyone expected. We believe that we are saved through the grace of the Lord Jesus, just as they are. The question on the table was whether Gentiles could be saved on the same terms as Jews. Peter answers that Jews are saved on the same terms as Gentiles.
That is the whole argument in one clause. There are not two doors. The circumcised are not being asked to make room for others in a house that is theirs by right; every person in the room got in by grace, and nobody has anything to be generous with.
settled What this mark means