Invitation to Struggle

If you like your Christianity easy, this is probably not the blog for you. If your idea of a difficult challenge is "Starbucks or Blenz", this is not the blog for you. On the other hand, if your idea of the truth is whatever most people believe, or what you heard from your most respected leader, this is likely not for you either.  This blog is written with the questioning Christian in mind. It is written to help the author wrestle with some of the complexities of the stories and people familiar (for the most part) to those who have read the Bible, or who grew up hearing Sunday School stories. Maybe you were raised in a Christian home, but the simple truisms of your younger years are no longer sufficient.
The impetus for this blog came on a Sunday morning, while attending my usual church. It was a typical Sunday morning in church. The greeters were greeting, the ushers were ushering, the worship team was leading the congregation in worship, the prayer team was praying, and the pastor was preaching. Just another normal Sunday morning in Anytown, North America.
The pastor preached one of the best sermons I had heard him preach. So many things he said spoke to me. So much of what he said was bang-on, and God convicted me in some areas of my life, illustrating the need for some changes. One of the Biblical illustrations he used that morning was the story from Acts 16, where Peter has the vision of the sheet coming down from heaven and he is commanded to kill and eat. Peter says,"No", which the pastor used to illustrate our disobedience to God. As he spoke, and without taking any of the good things he said away from him, he commented that Peter should have known it was OK to kill and eat the forbidden animals because of Jesus' comment to the Pharisees regarding hand washing. I paused and thought about the story, and about how little we grasp the struggle faced by Peter. In Acts 16, we read the story of Peter and the vision of the sheet. If you do not remember this story, go ahead and read Acts 16. Peter is hungry, visiting Simon the tanner, goes to the roof to pray while he waits for lunch, and has a vision. In the vision, a sheet is let down from heaven. On the sheet are all kinds of unclean animals, and Peter is told to kill and eat of these animals.
We get to read the end of the story, so we know that the vision came from God, that Peter was being brought to understand that God wanted to include gentiles in the message of the Gospel, and that Peter was to go with the soon-to-arrive gentiles and tell Cornelius about Jesus. What I have not heard or read anywhere is someone dealing with the very real struggle Peter faced. His struggle was not a struggle based on cultural prejudice, though that might have added emotional weight to the conflict. Rather, his struggle was based on the discrepancy between the very clear teaching of Scripture and the command he was being given in this (possibly) hunger-induced dream sequence. The law of Moses, the Torah on which the faith of Israel was based, clearly forbids the eating of unclean animals (the ones on the sheet) under any and all circumstances. The basis for the command is the holiness of God. Violating the command breaks the relationship with God. Even touching these animals was forbidden, carrying the same penalty as eating them would. This sounds like something God takes seriously.
Let's try and put ourselves in Peter's place. Imagine with me for a moment a purely fictitious event. You and your spouse are called as missionaries to a previously-unreached people. While praying and asking God for the key to reaching them with the life-changing message of the love of God through faith in Christ, you have a vision. You dream of a room filled with people from this group. There are young people and old, male and female, with plain features or comely features, a wide variety of people. In your vision, a voice from above instructs you to have conjugal relations with one of these people. Faithful to the Word of God, you (of course), say, "No. I cannot commit adultery." This happens three times and then the vision ends.
Before you read any further, stop and think. How are you feeling after this experience of a vision? How are you feeling about your decision to not commit adultery even though the vision commanded you to? How will you resolve the tension between what God's Word says about adultery and the clear command of God to you regarding reaching this group of people for Christ? Let me change the scenario once more. Instead of the vision coming to you, imagine that it came to someone you know, someone you trust and respect, and who has come to you with this story asking for advice. How will you respond?
I realize that there are many dissimilarities between my fictitious illustration and the truth of Peter's encounter. But the truth of the struggle Peter faced should not be lightly dismissed as we read the story of his vision. In the same way that Peter's struggle was a real struggle faced by a real person in real relationship with God, the people I would like to look at in the entries in this blog were real people (or represent real people, if you hold a slightly different view of the historicity of the Old and New Testaments), living real lives in real places with real opportunities, challenges, strengths, and weaknesses. My prayer is that, as you read these stories again, God will speak fresh truth to your real life as you face your own opportunities and challenges, with your own strengths and weaknesses.