Acts 10:1-8 | It's for Everyone. Everyone!Намуна

There’s been a long-embedded hope that God’s salvation would come to the Gentiles. First, a definition. A Gentile is anybody who is not a Jew. In the Hebrew Bible, they’re often called “nations” or “people.”

It goes back to Abraham in Genesis 12. God had just disinherited the nations after the incident with the tower at Babel. Now, God chooses a man named Abram (later to be renamed Abraham) through whom all nations would be blessed. Since Genesis 3, humanity has been spiraling deeper and deeper into sin and farther and farther from God. Now, God is enacting his rescue operation through a man and through his family, which will become a nation through whom he would bring salvation to the world.

The Old Testament continues to build on this storyline, with prophets looking to a day when Gentiles would come streaming to Israel. It seems, though, that the expectation would be that Gentiles would either come under Jewish authority or that Gentiles would become Jews. (Today’s passages will give you a taste.)

Which makes Acts 10 fascinating. God appears to a Gentile, and what we’ll see later in Acts 10 is that he’ll pour his Spirit on him and the other Gentiles present, without first becoming Jews.

The early Christians will later have to wrestle with this question, and we’ll come to it in Acts 15. For now, let’s just underscore that God’s salvation is bursting the borders of his chosen people. God’s salvation is for everyone.