Rise, Peter; kill, and eat

The prospect of Gentiles being blessed by God was a fact with which Peter, and all the apostles, would have been very familiar for reference is made to it throughout the Old Testament. Even at the time Jehovah promised to make of Abram a great nation He said, ‘I will bless those who bless you, and I will curse him who curses you; and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.’ Gen. 12. 3 NKJV. However, although Peter would have been aware of these things there was a vital issue he had not appreciated, and it is in this chapter that his education relative to this matter is completed.

Cornelius, a Roman soldier of distinction in charge of a hundred fighting men, is one of four centurions favourably referred to in the New Testament. Despite his military background he was a devout man who feared God with all his house, which gave much alms to the people, and who prayed to God always, Acts 10. 2. By means of a vision he was instructed by an angel of God to send men to Joppa to request Simon Peter to come to him.

Two days later, Peter, unaware of God’s intervention in the life of this Gentile centurion, and the impending arrival of three of his men, fell into a trance. He saw something that resembled a great sheet containing a menagerie of beasts, fowls, and creeping things, and was instructed, ‘Rise, Peter; kill, and eat’, v. 13. Being a thoroughbred Jew, Peter recoiled at the prospect of eating animals that were specifically forbidden under the law and responded, ‘Not so, Lord’, thus demonstrating that his Jewish orthodoxy outweighed his spiritual discernment.

In verse 15 Peter has to be instructed, ‘What God has cleansed . . . ’, and corrected, ‘You must not call common’. However, although this was repeated three times the apostle did not grasp immediately the significance of what was happening. His initial reaction was to doubt ‘in himself what this vision which he had seen should mean’. It would be a further two days, when he arrived at the home of Cornelius, that the spiritual significance of his trance would become apparent to him.