The voice spoke to him a second time, “Do not call anything impure that God has made clean.” – Acts 10:15

Today’s Scripture Reading (November 6, 2014): Acts 10

What do your dreams tell you? I recently consulted a dream database just wondering what kind of things might be in there and one thing became readily apparent – what you dream of depends on your own experiences. For instance, if you dream of an abacus it means that your methods are outdated. Really? To be brutally honest, I had to look up abacus to make sure that I knew what one was, and the closest I have ever been to one – well, I have never been close to one. To dream of an abbey means that you are at peace with your life, unless the abbey is in ruins and then it means something different – and opposite. Yet that would seem to have something to do with how you view an abbey in real life. It seems to me that if I dream of an abbey, it might mean that my methods are outdated.

So Peter has a dream. And I have to admit that I am glad it was him and not someone else. I am pretty sure that if I was the one that had Peter’s dream, the meaning of the dream would have more to do with my rebellious spirit than anything else. But Peter has a dream and he is told to get up and kill and eat. The problem is that what it is that he is being told to eat is unclean – the animals are unfit for consumption according to the religious law that Peter grew up with. Yet the dream is thought to have meaning that is sent from God. As much as Peter did not want to eat what was unclean, God’s instruction is that he has declared what was unclean to be clean.

As someone who is a believer in the Bible, this is a very tough passage. Everything that Peter is saying is exactly what I would have said – and I may have gone one step further. If it was me who had the dream I might have been likely to say that if it didn’t line up with scripture, then it wasn’t God that was doing the speaking. The tough reality of this scripture passage is that the dream doesn’t line up with the Scripture that Peter had at the time – and yet it seems to be definitely God who was speaking.

This incident opens up the possibility that Christianity could become something more than just a minor Jewish sect. It was because of this dream that it became possible for non-Jews to become full members of the faith – and it was all because of a dream. With the declaration by God that certain animals were no longer unclean, it opened the door for the Jerusalem Council to declare that the Gentiles (non-Jews) could also be clean – and totally acceptable to God.

Tomorrow’s Scripture Reading: Acts 11