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The New Covenant

The apostles and elders, your brothers,
To the Gentile believers in Antioch, Syria and Cilicia:
Greetings.
                We have heard that some went out from us without our authorization and disturbed you, troubling your minds by what they said. So we all agreed to choose some men and send them to you with our dear friends Barnabas and Paul— men who have risked their lives for the name of our Lord Jesus Christ.  Therefore we are sending Judas and Silas to confirm by word of mouth what we are writing. It seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us not to burden you with anything beyond the following requirements:  You are to abstain from food sacrificed to idols, from blood, from the meat of strangled animals and from sexual immorality. You will do well to avoid these things.
Farewell. (Acts 15:23-29)

          Yesterday’s passage was about the New Covenant. Sometime before 70 AD, questions were raised about Gentiles participating in “The Way” (as it was then called.) Some maintained that in order to be a believer, one had first to become a Jew. The letter above is the response of those who led the Church in Jerusalem to the Gentile believers in Antioch, Syria and Cilicia. There were four rules they decided to give the Gentiles:
1)    Don’t eat what has been sacrificed to idols
2)    Don’t eat blood
3)    Don’t eat the me of strangled animals
4)    Don’t be sexually immoral.
        Gentiles aren’t Jews. This passage makes it abundantly clear that they are not under the with respect to the foods that they eat. Jesus had this to say on the subject: “Are you so dull?” he asked. “Don’t you see that nothing that enters a person from the outside can defile them? For it doesn’t go into their heart but into their stomach, and then out of the body.” (In saying this, Jesus declared all foods clean.) Mark 7:18-19  
       It seems safe to suggest that one of the aspects of the New Covenant is that it does not restrict the diet of believers to the extent that the Old Covenant did.

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