Speaking of love as a new commandment, Jesus first of all requires every Christian to be ready to “lay down his life for his friends.” Usually this is understood as readiness to give up one’s life for friends. Yet the corresponding Greek verb means not...
Speaking of love as a new commandment, Jesus first of all requires every Christian to be ready to “lay down his life for his friends.” Usually this is understood as readiness to give up one’s life for friends. Yet the corresponding Greek verb means not “give up,” but precisely “lay down,” “place” — and not “instead of,” but precisely “for the sake of,” “on behalf of” friends. Obviously, this is not about self-sacrifice, or at least not only about it; rather, we should speak of the relationships that bind together people who live by the love with which Jesus loved each person. But what is this love of His, the love of the Kingdom? How does it differ from the love that people knew long before His coming into the world?
First of all, in this: human love has never been complete. It remained only an intention, a relationship, and in this sense it was a spiritual reality. But the environment within which relationships of love existed was natural, psychic: in the fallen state, after all, the human being remained primarily a natural being, and the psyche too is nature, only of a special kind.
Jesus, however, speaks of the love of the Kingdom, that Kingdom where the very environment of communion is not natural but spiritual. There love can be manifested in absolute fullness: in the Kingdom, the relationships and the environment fully correspond to one another. But a person’s life in the Kingdom cannot belong to that person alone.
Jesus Himself explains this simply: whoever wants to keep his life for himself loses it, but whoever gives it to Him and makes it part of the life of His Kingdom preserves it. And preserves it in a fullness that cannot be found in the fallen world. But if this is true of the life of the Kingdom as a whole, it is just as true when the matter concerns the relationship of the inhabitants of the Kingdom to one another: they too never belong only to themselves; their life never is and never can be something isolated, as the life of a person in the untransfigured world can be.
Of course, in the Kingdom too each person lives his own life, not someone else’s. But if the boundaries of this life in the fallen world are often closed to any interaction, in the Kingdom they are always open. There this is safe: since the life of each person is determined by God’s breath, no one abuses this openness as sometimes happens in the fallen world.
And with such openness the possibilities become immense: if necessary, each person can at any moment even completely yield his own living space to another, should the need arise. No unsolvable tasks remain for the inhabitants of the Kingdom, for there are no barriers between them either. And therefore there are no barriers for God’s breath, which unites them. Each person lives a full life, belonging at the same time both to himself and to everyone who wants to share in that fullness and take part in it.
This is the kind of life the Savior commands His disciples to live. In essence, it is Christianity itself.
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15:7 After much debate - It does not appear that this was among the apostles themselves. But if it had, if they themselves had debated at first, yet might their final decision be from an unerring direction. For how really soever they were inspired, we need not suppose their inspiration was always so instantaneous and express, as to supersede any deliberation in their own minds, or any consultation with each other. Peter rose up - This is the last time he is mentioned in the Acts.
15:8 God bare them witness - That he had accepted them, by giving them the Holy Ghost.
15:9 Purifying - This word is repeated from Act 10:15;their hearts - The heart is the proper seat of purity; by faith - Without concerning themselves with the Mosaic law.
15:10 Now therefore - Seeing these things are so: why tempt ye God? - Why do ye provoke him to anger, by putting so heavy a yoke ontheir neck?
15:11 The Lord Jesus - He does not here say our Lord; because in this solemn place he means the Lord of all, we - Jews, shall be saved even as they - Gentiles, namely, through the grace of the Lord Jesus, not by our observance of the ceremonial law.
15:12 Miracles and wonders - By which also what St. Peter had said was confirmed.
15:14 Simon hath declared - James, the apostle of the Hebrews, calls Peter by his Hebrew name. To take out of them a people for his name - That is to believe in him, to be called by his name.
15:15 To this agree - St. Peter had urged the plain fact, which St. James confirms by Scripture prophecy. The words of the prophets - One of whom is immediately cited.
15:16 After this - After the Jewish dispensation expires. I will build again the fallen tabernacle of David - By raising from his seed the Christ, who shall build on the ruins of his fallen tabernacle a spiritual and eternal kingdom. Amo 9:11.
15:17 The Gentiles on whom my name is called - That is, who are called by my name; who are my people.
15:18 Known unto God are all his works from eternity - Which the apostle infers from the prophecy itself, and the accomplishment of it. And this conversion of the Gentiles being known to him from eternity, we ought not to think a new or strange thing. It is observable, he does not speak of God's works in thenatural world, (which had been nothing to his present purpose,) but of his dealing with the children of men. Now he could not know these, without knowing the characters and actions of particular persons, on a correspondence with which the wisdom and goodness of his providential dispensations is founded. For instance, he could not know how he would deal with heathen idolaters (whom he was now calling into his Church) without knowing there would be heathen idolaters: and yet this was a thing purely contingent, a thing as dependent on the freedom of the human mind, as any we can imagine. This text, therefore, among a thousand more, is an unanswerable proof, that God foreknows future contingencies, though there are difficulties relating hereto which men cannot solve.
15:20 To abstain from fornication - Which even the philosophers among the heathens did not account any fault. It was particularly frequent in the worship of their idols, on which account they are here named together. And from things strangled - That is, from whatever had been killed, without pouring out theblood. When God first permitted man to eat flesh, he commanded Noah, and in him all his posterity, whenever they killed any creature for food, to abstain from the blood thereof. It was to be poured upon the ground as water: doubtless in honour of that blood which was in due time poured out for the sin of the world.
15:21 Perhaps the connection is, To the Jews we need write nothing on these heads; for they hear the law continually.