In our last lesson from Acts 14 we noted in verse 23 that Paul and Barnabas appointed elders in the churches they had previously established. The Holy Spirit had revealed to Paul and Barnabas that this was God’s designed form of church government. They did not choose this on their own. The elders were older men in the faith whose task was to oversee the local church of which they were members. We can see in this God’s wisdom to protect each individual local church from being unduly influenced by any one man in the church or those in other churches.

In the last sixteen lessons concerning Satan, sin and the church, we saw that Satan had failed to prevent the growth of the church by attacking the apostles and evangelists such as Stephen (Acts 6, 7). When Satan saw God’s plan for the protection of each local church he undoubtedly began planning how to offset that.

However, the Omniscient God knew of this and warned of it as was noted briefly in a comment concerning Acts 20:29, 30. More will be said of that later as we get to Acts 20. For the time being though, as we see from Acts 15, Satan was still able to use certain Jews who though accepting Christ did not understand the Way of Christ.

It may be that they considered Christianity to be just another sect of the Jews, not understanding that God had given a New Covenant for all humanity, both Jew and Gentile. These were those who were previously from the sect of the Pharisees as we see from verse 5. As we see from Acts 24:5, the High Priest of the Jews and those who spoke for him considered them to be the sect of the Nazarenes. As we see in Acts 28:22, when the apostle Paul got to Rome in Italy, the Jewish leaders there considered the Christians to be a sect of the Jews also.

Satan used their lack of understanding to hinder greatly Paul’s work among the Gentiles and disrupt the church in general. The matter was first brought up in the great church at Antioch in Syria, in that great city ranking only under Rome in Italy and Alexandria in Egypt. This was the church from which Paul and Barnabas had been sent out on their mission to the Gentiles. What was their misunderstanding? They taught, “Unless you are circumcised according to the custom of Moses, you cannot be saved.” They did not deny salvation to the Gentiles as the unbelieving Jews did, but thought that they must first become a Jew. The church in Antioch determined to send Paul and Barnabas with others to confer with the apostles and elders of the church in Jerusalem about this question.

Upon arriving at Jerusalem, “some of the sect of the Pharisees who believed rose up, saying, ‘It is necessary to circumcise them, and to command them to keep the law of Moses’” (Acts 15:5). The story will continue in the next lesson. In the meantime, read the scriptures given, as always, with their context.