The Vision Thing

Peter was not big on writing letters. He certainly couldn’t hold a candle to Paul, whose pen never seemed to stop, sending letters all over Asia, explaining, encouraging, correcting. But of course being under house arrest made letter writing the best way to keep in touch with all the churches Paul had planted, or at least visited. Peter had been really impressed, too, by the way Paul had explained the implications of what Jesus had taught and done, and how it was supposed to work out in practice. No one would have thought, back in the early days when they were still arguing over whether or not Gentile Christians had to be circumcised, that Paul would be the greatest teacher of them all. Peter had been content to leave that side of things to Paul, while he traveled around to the different churches in person, preaching, witnessing, telling of his own personal experience traveling with Jesus, and what had happened when Jesus was crucified and then rose again. There was really nothing better, after all, than eye-witness accounts.

But Peter had been hearing some disturbing news from his own correspondents, and he certainly couldn’t leave Rome now, not with the imminent threat from the Emperor Nero. It was pretty certain that there was going to be some sort of crackdown on the Roman church any day now. So even though he knew he’d be one of the first ones the authorities would come for when the time came, he had run from danger once too often already. There was only one thing to do, and that was to write a letter.

He dipped his quill in the ink and paused to organize his thoughts.

“Why did the same issues keep cropping up?” he wondered. It was easier in some ways back in Jerusalem where the big problem was to get the Jewish brothers to eat with Gentiles. Well, all right, Peter admitted that even with the vision the Lord had sent him, showing that God had made all foods clean, he had backslid a few times himself. It was hard to break the attitudes of a lifetime, and when almost all of the brothers were Jewish it hadn’t seemed like all that big a deal.

But here in Rome - and throughout most of Asia and Greece and North Africa most of Jesus’ followers had come out of a Gentile background, and the problems were completely different.

They weren’t under law, but under grace, some were teaching. If they didn’t have to obey the Jewish teaching about clean and unclean foods, why did they have to follow Jewish moral standards? And since it was obvious that Jesus wasn’t coming back as soon as everybody had expected, why should they have to worry about judgment day, anyway? That was probably just another invention to keep the people in line. If following Jesus meant love and freedom, then surely they were free to love whomever they liked!

Peter sighed and picked up his pen again. Maybe freedom from the law was the right way to preach to the Jews, but it had certainly left the leadership with a problem about how to deal with the pagans. It looked like he was going to have to go back to the basics. OK, so the high moral standards looked difficult to people accustomed to the “anything goes” that the pagans were used to. Peter could see how they might think so at the beginning, when they were first learning about the gospel. But now they had no excuse! Peter began to write:

“Jesus has miraculously given us all the power we could possibly need in order to live a life pleasing to God. He called us to reflect his own glory, his own goodness. His promises are for people who want to escape from corruption, not just to escape from punishment! If you don’t take advantage of his gifts, and go on letting yourselves become corrupted by lust like the people around you, you won’t be able to participate in his divine nature! You won’t even begin to experience the power he has waiting for you unless you build goodness and knowledge and self-control on top of your faith. Don’t throw away the potential you have to do great things for Jesus! If you keep on doing the same old things you had to be forgiven for and cleansed of at the beginning, you’ll never get anywhere, and particularly you won’t make it into the kingdom of God.”

“Am I being too harsh?” Peter wondered. After all, everyone sinned and needed forgiveness, even after they met Jesus. No one knew that better than he did. But still, if people didn’t really want to be free from sin, if all they wanted was to be free from the consequences of their sin, he didn’t think they’d really understood what salvation was all about.