When God Does Something New
Photo by Sushobhan Badhai on Unsplash
As finite creatures, we human beings often have a hard time accepting when God does something new. We want to make God manageable, predictable. We draw lines around what God is capable of so that we do not find ourselves surprised, challenged, and moved in uncomfortable new directions.
On the other hand, Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever (Heb. 13:8). The Holy Spirit inspired the writing of the Scriptures so that the people of God could remain faithful to received revelation and protect against the fickle sway of culture. Throughout the history of Israel, the Jews found themselves in trouble when they failed to uphold the standards that the living God had commanded them to obey. Change was problematic because it often led to apostasy.
Stability and flexibility. Predictability and novelty. Accountability and innovation. When God does something new, how can the church recognize and affirm the movement of God without wandering into disobedience?
The book of Acts provides an important blueprint in this regard. The early church struggled with understanding how God was expanding the people of God to include more than the Jews. The history of Israel was defined by its designation as the special, elect people of God. God’s covenants with Abraham and Moses entailed God blessing the Israelites while they, in response to God’s covenant provision, remained holy unto God—that is, separate from other peoples of the world. They demonstrated their loyalty to God in the ways that they followed the commandments of Torah, such as food laws, sabbath observance, and the rituals regarding sacrifices in the Jerusalem Temple. Circumcision was required of all males; this was an eternal covenant (Gen. 17:13).
Thus, it is hard to underestimate the theological whiplash experienced by Jewish believers in the fledgling Christian church when Gentiles began accepting Christ as their savior. This is why “certain individuals came down from Judea and were teaching the brothers, ‘Unless you are circumcised according to the custom of Moses, you cannot be saved.’” (Acts 15:1). In other words, you must become a Jew to receive the salvation promised to the Jews through the Jewish messiah. This is also why Jewish believers criticized Peter for going to the house of the gentile Cornelius and having table fellowship with him (Acts 11:1-3). The prophets of the Hebrew Scriptures had condemned the Israelites for intermingling with outsiders and adopting their customs—this abandonment of the covenant had led to the Babylonian exile. How could God be doing something new, something that seemed so contradictory to God’s own word?
The response of Peter is instructive. In Acts 11, Peter explains to his concerned Jewish colleagues how God had directed his steps toward the Gentiles. In multiple ways the Spirit was at work: Peter had experienced a vision convicting him that he must not consider unclean that which God has declared clean (which Peter realizes refers to the Gentiles); the Spirit told Peter to go with the Gentiles and not to make a distinction between them and the Jews; an angel had directed Cornelius to send for Peter; and while Peter was preaching, the Holy Spirit fell upon the Gentiles, just as the Spirit had fallen upon the Jews. God clearly was doing something new.
In Wesleyan terms, we might be tempted to say that experience was the determining factor in this new direction. In fact, some Christians today argue that our experiences should be the determinative factor in drawing new conclusions about what God is doing in the world. This approach, however, relies on an incomplete assessment of how God changed the minds of early Jewish believers. If we look closely at Acts 11, we discover that Peter weighed these new experiences against the teaching he had received from Jesus himself: “And I remembered the word of the Lord, how he had said, ‘John baptized with water, but you will be baptized with the Holy Spirit’” (v. 16). Peter’s recollection not only points to the words of Jesus just prior to his ascension (Acts 1:5), but also alludes to the statement of John the Baptist in Luke 3:16. These words confirmed to Peter what he had witnessed the Holy Spirit do among the Gentiles. In other words, Peter did not allow his experience blindly to guide his theology. Rather, he compared his experience to what he knew of Jesus, and he found alignment between the two.
The early church followed this same procedure in Acts 15. We need to keep in mind that Luke’s report of this meeting is truncated. He tells us “there had been much debate” (v. 7), but he does not detail all the arguments. Surely the believers from the Pharisees quoted the Torah regulations that required Jews to be separate from Gentiles, whether through rituals like circumcision (Lev. 12:3), food laws (Leviticus 11), or marriage restrictions (Deut. 7:3). Lev. 20:26 makes the principle clear: “You shall be holy to me; for I the Lord am holy, and I have separated you from the other peoples to be mine.” For these believers, God’s word was clear, regardless of any new experiences.
Nonetheless, the church was convinced that God was doing something new. They discussed what they had witnessed: the Spirit had fallen upon the Gentiles in the same manner as the Jews, cleansing their hearts without making a distinction (15:8-9). They considered the tradition of their leaders: Peter and Paul both interpreted God as affirming the inclusion of the Gentiles. They also used reason: Peter made the case that the Gentiles should not be required to follow the Torah, since the Jews, who were the original Torah-followers and should have been experts at it, nonetheless had never been able to keep fully all of God’s commandments. How could the Gentiles do any better if they began Torah observance now? Peter further argued that the Jews would be saved not by law but by grace, just as the Gentiles would (v. 11). But the final argument in this debate came from Scripture itself: James quoted Amos 9:11-12, a passage that describes God rebuilding the fallen tent of David so that all the nations may seek God. James saw a trajectory in Scripture that had always pointed to the inclusion of the Gentiles.
In other words, the Jerusalem Council did not abandon Scripture and prioritize experience. Rather, they looked to Scripture and reconsidered the tensions that had always existed between the descriptions of the peculiarity of God’s people and the descriptions of God’s plan for all nations to worship him. When Luke summarized the debate, he likely also left out additional passages that had been used to support the Gentiles, passages describing God’s plan for Israel to be a “light to the nations so that my salvation may reach to the ends of the earth” (Isa. 49:6) and God’s desire to bless all the nations of the earth (Gen. 22:18). Those supporting the inclusion of the Gentiles likely reminded the Pharisees that faithful Gentiles like Rahab and Ruth had always been welcomed into the people of God. The church leaders looked to Scripture, and they found ample evidence to confirm God’s current movement among the Gentiles. They concluded that Gentiles did not need to follow all of the Torah. Nonetheless, the Jerusalem Council required four basic laws for the Gentiles to follow, derived from Leviticus 17-18, the requirements for foreigners living among the Israelites. In this way the Gentiles could commune with their Jewish brothers and sisters in Christ while simultaneously honoring the Jewish way of life. As Bill Arnold notes, the church was not overturning Torah, but looking to it for guidance (“Lessons of the Jerusalem Council for the Church’s Debate Over Sexuality,” Asbury Journal 69/2, 2014, p. 76).
Acts 11 and Acts 15 help us to derive important principles for discerning whether God is doing something new. First, when God appears to be moving in a new direction, multiple confirmations will be present. Between an angel, a trance, and the movement of the Holy Spirit, Peter began to see God’s new direction. A one-off spiritual insight that does not receive confirmation elsewhere likely is not a movement of God. Second, faithful people might resist what God is doing. The Jews who challenged Peter, and the Pharisees who challenged Paul, were believers who were trying to demonstrate their loyalty to God. It takes time to help other believers recognize what God has already begun to accomplish. Opposition does not necessarily mean inaccuracy. Third, our experiences must be confirmed by specific testimony within Scripture. The Jerusalem Council came to understand the new movement of God because it wasn’t a fresh idea. Although tensions were present in the testimony of Scripture regarding the Gentiles, numerous passages confirmed God’s history of blessing faithful Gentiles and affirmed God’s desire to bring salvation to all people. The disciples needed to remember that indeed these emphases were present in Scripture. God had been moving in this direction all along.
This last lesson is perhaps the most difficult to follow. It is all too easy to take a general instruction and twist it to fit a specific situation so that we justify our own desires. The arguments from many American churches in the 1800s supporting slavery demonstrate this problem. One can look at passages about slavery in Scripture, passages that describe how to live in a world where slavery was a common and accepted practice, and misconstrue the description of the culture as a prescription for morality. Instead, the fuller testimony of Scripture makes it clear that slavery is inconsistent with God’s will for humankind. God’s deliverance of the Hebrews out of slavery in Egypt emphatically makes this point. Even passages that might appear to support slavery (“Slaves, obey your earthly masters with fear and trembling…,” Eph. 6:5) must be read in full literary context. When the same letter addresses slave owners a few verses later, these owners are told to imitate the behavior of their slaves (“And masters, do the same to them,” 6:9)! A stern warning is also given in the same verse: “Stop threatening them, for you know that both of you have the same Master in heaven, and with him there is no partiality.” It is hard for us in the 21st century to understand just how radical this flattening of social hierarchy would have appeared to the ancient reader, who considered slaves to be nothing more than chattel. But now, in the Kingdom, slaves had as much status as their masters! Thus, a careful reading of Scripture led the abolitionists to recognize how God was encouraging them to move their culture in a more Kingdom-aligned direction.
The same is true concerning women in ministry. Although some passages on the surface appear to limit the roles of women in ministry, the church experienced God moving in a direction that affirmed the leadership of women. When the church sought wisdom from Scripture regarding this issue, they were confronted with the leadership of Deborah, Ruth, Esther, Huldah the prophetess, Priscilla, Phoebe, Junia, and many other women who led the people of God. What believers experienced as a “new” direction of the Spirit was actually a movement to realign their culture with the already revealed plan and promises of God.
When the church today considers whether God is doing something new, it must be careful to weigh the experience of its people against the specific testimony of Scripture. In the current debate about human sexuality, for example, many Christians have proclaimed an experience affirming their LGBTQ+ sexual practice. This experience must be weighed against the specific testimony of Scripture. When held up to this scrutiny, however, no passages affirming same-sex sexual practice can be found.
One could also ask whether the desire of many traditionalists in The United Methodist Church to form a new denomination aligns with Scripture. Many would say that their experience of the Holy Spirit has led them in this direction. Testing this experience against Scripture is complicated because tensions arise between the call for unity (e.g., John 17:20-23, Eph. 4:1-6, 1 Cor. 12:12-26) and the call to separate from believers who are not living according to the faith (e.g., Matt. 18:17, Eph. 5:6-7, 2 Tim. 3:2-5). The repeated calls for holiness among believers and the call in Jude 1:3 to hand on the faith once delivered—coupled with the lack of scriptural support for those who would affirm same-sex practice in the UMC, or weaken an understanding of Jesus’s full divinity, or deny Jesus’s bodily resurrection, to name but a few problematic theologies present in the UMC—suggest that God may indeed be moving the church toward a renewed emphasis on scriptural holiness and doctrinal faithfulness.
As our current post-Christian culture continues to challenge Christian ideals, believers must take care to weigh their experiences against the testimony of Scripture. When God does something new, God is actually calling us to realign our lives with the Kingdom trajectories already revealed in Scripture.
Dr. Suzanne Nicholson is Professor of New Testament at Asbury University in Wilmore, Kentucky. She is a Deacon in the United Methodist Church and serves as Assistant Lead Editor of Firebrand.