Part of me wants God to finish his work right now, with all of us on board to help. I’m a good, energetic American Adventist; patience is not one of my natural virtues.

A selective reading of Scripture could easily give someone the impression that God isn’t very patient either: Sinai, the two she-bears, Uzzah, the Damascus-road lightning strike. That’s a good start to a rather impatient list. Adventists know about a delayed Second Coming, to be sure, but we’re inclined to blame ourselves for that anyway. So let’s get on with our impatience.

In recent months, however, God has “patiently” been opening my eyes to the significance of a series of events recorded in the book of Acts. I could even use words like “astounded” or “astonished” to describe my reaction. Even more surprising is the fact that this sequence of events includes Acts 15, the story of the Jerusalem conference, a passage I have been using for years to illustrate how the church deals with change.

My astonishment has to be seen against the backdrop of my Adventist upbringing. Somehow, I grew up thinking that God always deals in clear-cut categories. He rattled Mount Sinai when he announced his commandments to Israel. Then he wrote them on stone tablets with his own finger and directed that they be kept inside the sacred ark. What could be clearer?

I believed that the additional laws given to Moses extended up to the cross. After that, only the Ten Commandments and the health laws remained valid for us. Simple. Straightforward.

No. Far too simple and not at all straightforward.

The part about the Ten Commandments is clear enough, it seems to me. But even there, a thoughtful reading of Scripture reveals the need for careful nuancing. God prohibited murder, but mandated the death penalty for a host of crimes. He even commanded Moses to stone a man for picking up sticks on the Sabbath (Num. 15:32-36). God also ordered Israel to wipe out their enemies: “men, women, children, and even their babies” (1 Sam. 15:4. CEV1).

Then there are those laws which seem to come and go, even within the Old Testament itself. Moabites and Ammonites, for example, were excluded from the community of faith (Deut. 23:3-6). But Ruth the Moabitess is a striking exception, as is Naamah the Ammonite, wife of Solomon and mother of Rehoboam (1 Kings 14:21). Indeed, this Ammonite Naamah is the only one of Solomon’s 700 wives and 300 concubines mentioned by name in Scripture. And both Ruth and Naamah are part of Jesus’ royal genealogy.

Similarly, Deuteronomy 23:2 excludes illegitimate children from the assembly of the Lord. Not surprisingly then, Judges 11 tells how Jephthah’s brothers drove him away from home because his mother was a prostitute. His brothers knew the rules. But that same chapter goes on to describe how Jephthah became a divinely appointed judge (Judges 11:29), one of the faithful heroes named in Hebrews 11.

All that should help us understand what happened after the resurrection as God patiently nudged his people toward new truths, broadened horizons, and God’s great ideal.

Must Gentiles Become Jews in Order to Follow Jesus?

According to Acts, the early Christian community tussled mightily over the question of how non-Jewish converts were to relate to Jesus’ Jewish heritage. In the New Testament era, Gentiles who were attracted to Jewish theology and ethics, but not to Jewish ritual, were known as “God-fearers.” Apparently, when Paul was sharing the gospel in the Jewish synagogues of Asia Minor—and far enough away from church headquarters to feel a certain freedom—he decided that the “God-fearers” could accept Jesus directly without first becoming Jews. The practical implication? Gentiles could become Christians without being circumcised.

The tumultuous upshot of that decision is described in Acts 14 and 15. The enthusiasm of Paul and Barnabas was countered by opposition from Jewish colleagues in Judea. But Acts 15 describes how the Jerusalem conference confirmed Paul’s decision, working through the issues until the delegates could say that their decision “seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us” (Acts 15:28).

The intricacies and implications of Acts 15 deserve attention in their own right, but my point here focuses on time. The Jerusalem conference itself is typically dated around AD 49, some 15 years or more after the resurrection. But a key event which fed into the Jerusalem decision happened some eight years earlier. That’s when God sent Peter the threefold vision of all the creatures that he had declared clean (Acts 10).

Peter himself caught the point of the vision: Don’t call anyone profane or unclean (Acts 10:28). But what has astounded me recently is the realization that even some eight years after the resurrection, Peter was still traumatized by the prospect of actually being with Gentile believers. As recorded in Acts 10, when Peter entered Cornelius’s home, the first words he blurted out focused on his inhibitions, not on the joy of the gospel: “You yourselves know,” he exclaimed, “that it is unlawful for a Jew to associate with or to visit a Gentile” (Acts 10:28). I can almost hear Peter hyperventilating!

Sure enough, trouble loomed. The very next chapter tells how Peter ran into opposition on his next visit to Jerusalem. “Why did you go to uncircumcised men and eat with them?” asked the brethren (Acts 11:3). These were followers of Jesus, the Jesus who told the story of the good Samaritan, who visited with the Samaritan woman at Jacob’s well, who took his disciples to the region of Tyre and Sidon so they could see him heal the daughter of the Syro-Phoenician woman.

But none of that had soaked in. Not yet, not until God sent Peter his threefold vision. Peter took that vision seriously, apparently sharing the story wherever he went, for at the Jerusalem conference he said, “You know...God made a choice...that I should be the one through whom the Gentiles would hear the message of the good news” (Acts 15:7).

But bold, brave Peter could also backslide. In Galatians 2:11-14, Paul tells how he confronted Peter to his face for slipping back to his old Jewish separatism “for fear of the circumcision faction” (Gal. 2:12). In short, change comes hard, even when you’ve had a threefold vision and have shared the story with everyone in sight.

Jew and Greek, Slave and Free, Male and Female

Now let’s lay this remarkable record of foot-dragging alongside that great manifesto of equality in Galatians 3:28: “There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.” Those three pairs represent the great inequalities which Jesus came to put right: race, economy, and gender.

But of those three inequalities, the only one effectively addressed in the New Testament was the Jew/Gentile relationship, and that one came about very slowly, with much pain and agony. Slavery? Not addressed effectively until the nineteenth century. Gender? As we speak.

Is God patient, or what?

One more point is notable in this connection, namely, that in the history of the human family as described in Scripture, gender and economic inequalities have a long antiquity, but the last inequality (Jew/Gentile) was the first to go, however slowly and painfully it may have happened. But it is also sobering to realize that the first one (male/female) has been the one most deeply rooted and the one most difficult to dislodge. Satan did his work well.

In short, the cross and the resurrection were world-transforming events. But in his incredible patience, God has allowed the implications of those events to unfold gradually. He’s not done yet, nor are we.

On the Eve of the 2005 General Conference

I write these words on the eve of the 2005 General Conference. I will be praying that good things, the right things, will happen at this General Conference. And only God knows what those things really are. Still, like the Jerusalem Conference, we must work through the issues until what we are to do “seems good to the Holy Spirit and to us,” even if that ‘good’ falls short of God’s great ideal for his children.

And if we do fall short of the ideal, I want to remember God’s great patience. I want to remember that through the flow of history, God’s people have never had their act together for more than a few minutes at a time. I want the gift of patience so that I might keep praying for God’s will to be done on earth as it is in heaven. And I will keep praying that my church will patiently move as fast as possible towards God’s ideal.