A Matter of Worship

Acts 18:12-15

But when Gallio was proconsul of Achaia, the Jews made a united attack on Paul and brought him before the tribunal, saying, “This man is persuading people to worship God contrary to the law.” But when Paul was about to open his mouth, Gallio said to the Jews, “If it were a matter of wrongdoing or vicious crime, O Jews, I would have reason to accept your complaint. But since it is a matter of questions about words and names and your own law, see to it yourselves. I refuse to be a judge of these things.”

Aaron Orendorff

One of the most insightful features of Acts is that we are given (through the eyes of Luke) a window into both the actual content of Paul’s preaching as well as how those who heard it perceived it. Here, in Corinth, the gospel (in the understanding of its opponents) was conceived as a matter of worship; namely, worship “contrary to the law [nomos, or Torah].”

Contrary how? N. T. Wright calls attention to at least three points of contention: “[1] The Christians didn’t insist on circumcision for non-Jewish converts; [2] they did insist on believing Jews and Gentiles sharing table-fellowship; and [3] they had expressed, early on, a strong repudiation of the Temple in Jerusalem” (102).

I would add to these objections two more points of contention that actually provide for and undergird the first three. One, the central feature of Paul’s preaching was, as 18:5 itself reads, “that the Christ was Jesus.” The Messiah, Israel’s anointed king, had come and he had come in the person of Jesus to both suffer and rise. Two, faith in this Jesus—placing your personal trust in him and him alone—is God’s means of justifying all people without ethnic distinction so that in Jesus one, new, grace-dependent people have now been created. As Paul writes in Philippians 3:3, “We are the circumcision, who worship by the Spirit of God and glory in Christ Jesus and put no confidence in the flesh . . . .”